Mixed Race Studies

‘Pinky’ and the Origins of Interracial Oscar-Bait

Bitch Flicks
2016-02-26

Hannah Graves
Department of History
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

This guest post by Hannah Graves appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Twentieth Century-Fox’s Pinky is far from the first Hollywood feature film that depicts an interracial relationship. Despite the evolution of various censorship codes that forbid depicting “miscegenation,” Hollywood has a rich history of mining the salacious or elicit potential from interracial pairing on screen, from Broken Blossoms to Duel in the Sun, Showboat to Imitation of Life. Yet, Pinky was quite distinct in tone from the films that came before it.

Produced by Fox’s studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, Pinky was part of a spate of post-war social problem films that earnestly sought to address topical issues. Studios promoted these films as evidence that their medium was maturing, littering their advertising with exaggerated claims about the power of their pictures. As one of Pinky’s screenwriters, Phil Dunne, wrote in a New York Times article, “What we say and do on the screen in productions of this sort can affect the happiness, the living conditions, even the physical safety of millions of our fellow citizens.” Pinky is best understood at the starting point for a new Hollywood trajectory for interracial relationships onscreen: the worthy Oscar-bait drama that claims to enlighten as it entertains and serves as a conduit for fostering tolerance in the presumed white audience. It is a tradition that informs films from A Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to Monster’s Ball and the forthcoming Loving…

Read the entire article here.

“Look, a [picture]!”: Visuality, race, and what we do not see

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Volume 102, Issue 1, 2016
pages 62-78
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2015.1136074

Elizabeth Kaszynski
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University

This article argues that understanding vision and visuality as associated but distinct terms has significant implications for the ways in which we engage with racial constructions of identity. Expanding the ways in which we visualize race beyond simply the visual offers us a more comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of and response to race in the twenty-first-century United States. This article moves from theoretical implications of non-visual visualizations like tactile visuality and audial visuality through photographs taken by blind photographers to ask how race and racial identity are implicated in conversations about both vision and visuality.

Read or purchase the article here.

EMERGING FEMINISMS, (F)Act of Blackness: The Politics of Mixed Race Identity

The Feminist Wire
2016-02-25

Jazlyn Andrews, Guest Contributor
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado

Jazlyn Andrews

That girl doesn’t have an ass.” The words hurled through the thick, humid air as if lobbed by a knife-thrower and struck me for reasons I couldn’t quite place at the time, reasons deeply rooted in my struggle to navigate my identity and subjectivity. My journey of self-definition has been a long and painful one that is nowhere near finished, fraught with fear of not belonging and comments made by peers negating my existence, dissecting me by claiming that I “don’t count,” their focus on my parts rather than my whole.

I was never “Black enough” to sing, “Asian enough” to get As in math classes, or “White enough” to be shielded from accusations of acceptance based on affirmative action. Hence, I find myself challenging controlling images but relying on them to validate my identity. My story is not unique considering the many mixed race women who have asked themselves time and time again: “Am I __________ enough?” or who have been on the receiving end of “What are you?” too many times to count. In fact, these experiences are so common—yet so under-analyzed—that Justin Simien created the Twitter hashtag #DearWhitePeople in order to examine the intricacies of being Black in predominantly White spaces.

Through an examination of the 2014 film Dear White People based loosely on Simien’s experiences at Chapman University, I examine how the Tragic Mulatta construction makes it acceptable for mixed race women to become sites for White men to explore their fears of, and fascinations with, an eroticized Other. Such a practice perpetuates an investment in a black-white binary that essentializes mixed race people to “either/or” rather than “both/and,” which maintains the property value of, and investment in, Whiteness. Importantly, the construction of, and reliance upon, a black-white binary erases mixed-race identities and functions to mitigate the threat we pose to blending the color line…

Read the entire article here.

Thank You, Melissa Harris-Perry

The Nation
2016-02-29

Dave Zirin

Melissa Harris-Perry (You Tube)

The most diverse, intellectually bracing show on network news was treated as expendable, and its host would not have it. She and her show will be sorely missed.

This weekend, a show that mattered to its audience as few programs on the vanilla ice-milk buffet that passes for news do, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, was canceled, and it’s a tragic as well as angering turn of events. “Ties were severed,” as an MSNBC executive put it, after Melissa, who I am proud to count as a colleague, sent an email to her staff explaining why she would not be hosting her show this past weekend after several weeks of having the program pre-empted for election coverage. The “scorching” email, now public, is being cherry-picked in articles, particularly the part where Melissa wrote, “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head.”…

Read the entire article here.

MSNBC severs ties with Melissa Harris-Perry after host’s critical email

The Washington Post
2016-02-28

Paul Farhi, Media Reporter

MSNBC has parted ways with host Melissa Harris-Perry after she complained about preemptions of her weekend program and implied that there was a racial aspect to the cable-news network’s treatment, insiders at MSNBC said.

Harris-Perry refused to appear on her program Saturday morning, telling her co-workers in an email that she felt “worthless” to the NBC-owned network. “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” wrote Harris-Perry, who is African American. “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by [NBC executives] or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”

The rebuke, which became public when it was obtained by the New York Times, has triggered discussions involving the network, Harris-Perry and her representatives about the terms of her departure, said people at MSNBC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Harris-Perry’s departure has not been formally announced…

..All of the changes carry a potential perception risk that MSNBC — known as the most liberal among the three leading cable-news networks — is diminishing the contributions of its minority personalities, network officials acknowledge. In addition to the issues with Harris-Perry and Diaz-Balart, the network’s new emphasis on news during the day has led to the demotion of two African American hosts: the Rev. Al Sharpton and Joy Reid, both of whom have been moved from daily shows to lower-profile weekend slots. (Reid assumed Harris-Perry’s hosting duties on Saturday.)…

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Lupita Nyong’o and Trevor Noah, and Their Meaningful Roles

Table for Three
The New York Times
2016-02-27

Philip Galanes

Lupita Nyong’o, an Oscar-winning actress, and Trevor Noah, the host of “The Daily Show,” at the Dutch in SoHo. Credit Malin Fezehai for The New York Times

The most intriguing stars seem to appear from out of nowhere.

Take Lupita Nyong’o, the Mexican-Kenyan actress who had not even graduated from Yale School of Drama before landing her star-making role as Patsey in “12 Years a Slave,” for which she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2014.

Or Trevor Noah, the comedian from Johannesburg, who had appeared on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central a scant three times before being named Jon Stewart’s successor last March.

Ms. Nyong’o, 32, has since appeared in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and lent her voice to “The Jungle Book,” which will open in April. She has also acted on stage in an Off Broadway production of “Eclipsed,” about the struggles of a group of women during the Liberian Civil War. (“Eclipsed” will open on Broadway next month.) Ms. Nyong’o quickly became a fashion darling, too, as the first black face of Lancôme. She has appeared on the cover of Vogue twice…

Read the entire interview here.

America Is Obsessed With Identity. Thanks, Obama?

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2016-02-17

Alicia Montgomery

Annette Elizabeth Allen for NPR

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, there was a lot of talk about “The Obama Effect”: how the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of racial harmony and understanding.

That didn’t happen. But what did? The Obama family’s tenure in the White House has overlapped a revolution in the way Americans deal with identity. From race to religion, from gender to sexual orientation and beyond, marginalized groups that historically worked and waited for “a seat at the table” increasingly demanded their share of cultural power.

And people who once assumed that they could define what it means to be American were called on to defend their ideas and “check their privilege…

Read the entire article here.

ASA 115: Mixed Race Expeiences

University of California, Davis
2012-2016

Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies

“Even after our first ‘black’ president ushered in a so-called ‘post racial America,’ we understood that there is much more to the race issue than what has been presented.”

Using the theme of Race Traitors, this quarter’s Mixed Race Experiences course serves to complicate and even question the meaning, importance, and value of race constructions. Why have those in interracial unions and their offsprings been targets of oppression, cooptation, and even veneration in the Americas and globally? How have these same groups also threatened and challenged race categorizations? There will be no midterm or final but instead students will participate in the process of curating and creating an art exhibit.

For more information, click here.

Soledad O’Brien on #OscarsSoWhite: Why Did It Take So Long to Have This Discussion?

The Hollywood Reporter
2016-01-28

Soledad O’Brien, Founder and CEO
Starfish Media Group

Soledad O’Brien
Getty Images

In my experience, diversity doesn’t just “happen.” It has to be very intentional. People have to have a genuine desire to make a change.

It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen this time around. There are some bright signs, including the fledgling efforts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And, most importantly, there is an active, honest conversation going on…

…I was raised by a white dad and black mom for whom dating and marriage were legally impossible in Baltimore in 1958 — so they drove to D.C. to get married, then lived in a fairly hostile environment toward mixed-race couples. That sense of isolation never stopped them, and it’s certainly helped me to deal with some very typical racism in my career: being dismissed as the “affirmative action” hire, being left out of opportunities. I’m not complaining. It’s the way it is and it was up to me to try to excel anyway. And, later, as a reporter I found it interesting to interview people who felt that way and try to understand their perspective. But that doesn’t mean the frustration didn’t build, and in my case, as that of many others, it eventually forces you to speak out. It also encourages you to do what you can to make it better.

In my case, I now run a production company called Starfish Media Group that strives to tell the untold stories of people of diverse backgrounds….

Read the entire article here.

A call for end of the “Globeleza Mulata”: A Manifesto

Black Women of Brazil: The site dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent
2016-02-08

Stephanie Ribeiro and Djamila Ribeiro

Originally, “A Mulata Globeleza: Um Manifesto” from Agora é que são elas (2016-01-29).

The Globeleza Mulata is not a natural cultural event, but a performance that invades the imaginary and the Brazilian televisions during Carnival. A spectacular created by art director Hans Donner to be the symbol of the popular party, which exhibited for 13 years his companion Valéria Valenssa in the super-expositional function of “mulata”. We’re talking about a character that appeared in the nineties and still strictly follows the same script: it is always a black woman that dances the samba as a passista (Carnaval dancer), naked with her body painted with glitter, to the sound of the vignette displayed throughout the daily programming of Rede Globo (TV).

To start the debate on this character, we need to identify the problem contained in the term “mulata”. Besides being a word naturalized by Brazilian society, it is a captive presence in the vocabulary of the hosts, journalists and reporters from the Globo broadcasting. The word of is of Spanish origin comes from “mula” or “mulo” (the masculine and feminine of ‘mule’): that that is a hybrid originating from a cross between species. Mules are animals born crossing donkeys with mares or horses with donkeys. In another sense, they are the result of the mating of the animal considered noble (equus caballus) with the animal deemed second class (donkey). Therefore, it is a derogatory word indicating mestiçagem (racial mixture or crossbreeding), impurity; an improper mixing that should not exist.

Employed since the colonial period, the term was used to designate lighter skinned blacks, fruits of the rape of slaves by masters. Such a nomenclature has sexist and racist nature and was transferred to the Globeleza character, naturalized. The adjective “mulata” is a sad memory of the 354 years (1534-1888) of escravidão negra (black slavery) in Brazil…

Read the entire article here.