Mixed Race Studies

How Obama became black

The Washington Post
2011-06-14

David Maraniss

He was too dark in Indonesia. A hapa child — half and half — in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An “Invisible Man” in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss’s biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” to be published June 19. These excerpts trace the young Obama’s arc toward black identity, through his words and experiences, and through the eyes of those who knew him best.

“How come his mother’s skin is bright while her son’s is way darker?”

Everything about Barry seemed different to his classmates and first-grade teacher, Israela Pareira, at S.D. Katolik Santo Fransiskus in Jakarta, Indonesia. He came in wearing shoes and socks, with long pants, a black belt and a white shirt neatly tucked in. The other boys wore short pants above the knee, and they often left their flip-flops or sandals outside the classroom and studied in bare feet. Barry was the only one who could not speak Bahasa Indonesia that first year. Ms. Pareira was the only one who understood his English. He was a fast learner, but in the meantime some boys communicated with him in a sign language they jokingly called “Bahasa tarzan.”…

Read the entire article here.

American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama

HarperCollins
2012-06-19
400 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 9780061999864; ISBN10: 0061999865

Rachel L. Swarns, Correspondent
New York Times

A remarkable history of First Lady Michelle Obama’s mixed ancestry, American Tapestry by Rachel L. Swarns is nothing less than a breathtaking and expansive portrait of America itself. In this extraordinary feat of genealogical research—in the tradition of “The Hemmingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family”—author Swarns, a respected Washington-based reporter for the New York Times, tells the fascinating and hitherto untold story of Ms. Obama’s black, white, and multiracial ancestors; a history that the First Lady herself did not know. At once epic, provocative, and inspiring, American Tapestry is more than a true family saga; it is an illuminating mirror in which we may all see ourselves.

Michelle Obama’s family saga is a remarkable, quintessentially American story—a journey from slavery to the White House in five generations. Yet, until now, little has been reported on the First Lady’s roots. Prodigiously researched, American Tapestry traces the complex and fascinating tale of Michelle Obama’s ancestors, a history that the First Lady did not even know herself. Rachel L. Swarns, a correspondent for the New York Times, brings into focus the First Lady’s black, white, and multiracial forebears, and reveals for the first time the identity of Mrs. Obama’s white great-great-great-grandfather—a man who remained hidden in her lineage for more than a century.

American Tapestry illuminates the lives of the ordinary people in Mrs. Obama’s family tree who fought for freedom in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; who endured the agonies of slavery, the disappointment of Reconstruction, the displacement of the Great Migration, and the horrors of Jim Crow to build a better future for their children. Swarns even found a possible link to the Jewish Reform movement.

Though it is an intimate family history, American Tapestry is also the collective chronicle of our changing nation, a nation in which racial intermingling lingers in the bloodlines of countless citizens and slavery was the crucible through which many family lines—black, white, and Native American—were forged.

Epic in scope and beautifully rendered, this is a singularly inspiring story with resonance for us all.

Meet Your Cousin, the First Lady: A Family Story, Long Hidden

The New York Times
2012-06-16

Rachel L. Swarns

This article is adapted from “American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama” by Rachel L. Swarns, to be published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, on Tuesday.

REX, Ga. — Joan Tribble held tightly to her cane as she ventured into the overgrown cemetery where her people were buried. There lay the pioneers who once populated north Georgia’s rugged frontier, where striving white men planted corn and cotton, fought for the Confederacy and owned slaves.

The settlers interred here were mostly forgotten over the decades as their progeny scattered across the South, embracing unassuming lives. But one line of her family took another path, heading north on a tumultuous, winding journey that ultimately led to the White House.

The white men and women buried here are the forebears of Mrs. Tribble, a retired bookkeeper who delights in her two grandchildren and her Sunday church mornings. They are also ancestors of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

The discovery of this unexpected family tie between the nation’s most prominent black woman and a white, silver-haired grandmother from the Atlanta suburbs underscores the entangled histories and racial intermingling that continue to bind countless American families more than 140 years after the Civil War.

The link was established through more than two years of research into Mrs. Obama’s roots, which included DNA tests of white and black relatives. Like many African-Americans, Mrs. Obama was aware that she had white ancestry, but knew little more.

Now, for the first time, the white forebears who have remained hidden in the first lady’s family tree can be identified. And her blood ties are not only to the dead. She has an entire constellation of white distant cousins who live in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas and beyond, who in turn are only now learning of their kinship to her…

…DNA Testing

The discovery comes as an increasing number of Americans, black and white, confront their own family histories, taking advantage of widespread access to DNA testing and online genealogical records. Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard who has studied the impact of DNA testing on racial identity, said this was uncharted territory.

“This is a whole new social arena,” Professor Hochschild said. “We don’t have an etiquette for this. We don’t have social norms.”

“More or less every white person knows that slave owners raped slaves,” she continued. “But my great-grandfather? People don’t know what they feel. They don’t know what they’re supposed to feel. I think it’s really hard.”

Read the entire article here.  Watch the video here.

“Passing” and the American dream

Salon Magazine
2003-11-03

Baz Dreisinger

These days we’re supposed to think race doesn’t matter. But as “The Human Stain” and a raft of recent writing makes clear, we’re just as fascinated by its slippery boundaries as ever.

Every now and then, cultural and social critics fashion an axiom that’s flippant, succinct and thus darling enough to render its truth value irrelevant. Such is the case with a phrase coined by culture-mongers in the 1960s that’s finding new currency today: “Passing is passé.”

“Passing” is shorthand for “racial passing,” and “racial passing” means people of one race (generally African-American) passing for another (usually white). Anybody who’s surprised that there’s a shorthand terminology for what might seem a pretty unlikely scenario will be more surprised that the phenomenon, with its lengthy history in American culture, isn’t all that unusual. Some of the earliest stories about passing reach back to the 19th century, when slaves — like Ellen Craft, who penned a mesmerizing slave narrative — used their light skin to escape, and novelists from Mark Twain to Charles Chesnutt mined the subject for their oeuvre.

Passing was a much-hyped subject during the Harlem Renaissance, which produced a plethora of rich fiction about it: Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Jessie Fauset’s “Plum Bun,” Walter White’s “Flight.” The subject had its Hollywood heyday; melodramatic passing flicks from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s include “Pinky,” “Lost Boundaries” and two big-screen versions of “Imitation of Life” (the latter version, directed by Douglas Sirk, probably still delights the Kleenex industry).

But along came the ’60s. And with it, Black Power and other ideologies that made the saga of passing — and the act of passing itself — soppy, weak-kneed and thus unhip. Passing was passé, critics said, because racial pride was where it’s at. Whether prophecy or prescription, their words proved accurate, for a while, at least: The subject never vanished from public or private sectors, but it did step aside for a hot minute or two.

That hot minute is over. Passing, these days, is anything but passé. This week Anthony Hopkins, neither a black man nor a Jew, saunters onto the big screen to play a black man passing as a Jew in the long-awaited screen version of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain.” Last month, journalist Brooke Kroeger’s collection of case studies, “Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are,” earned solid reviews and prompted a National Public Radio program on passing. Brent Staples recently penned a series of New York Times editorials on the subject…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama: The Story

Simon & Schuster
June 2012
672 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1439160406; ISBN-13: 9781439160404

David Maraniss

From one of our preeminent journalists and modern historians comes the epic story of Barack Obama and the world that created him.

In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.

The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future.

Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

Bodies with Histories: The New Search for the Biology of Race

Boston Review
May/June 2012

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W. W. Norton, $25.95 (cloth)

Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. University of California Press, $26.95 (paper)

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. New Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Have you heard this one? A sociologist, a lawyer, and a biologist walk into a bar, scoot their stools up to the counter, order drinks, and begin to chat. Suddenly, a booming voice (God, the bartender?) envelops them. “What is the meaning of race?” the voice asks.

While the question may seem straightforward on its face, it quickly spawns further questions, often vexing. Is race purely a political construct, or is it biologically encoded? Certainly there are aspects of human biology—skin color, hair color, the presence or absence of epicanthic folds, etc.—that are commonly associated with racial differences, but is race just the sum of these physical features, with all of the overlaps, exceptions, and ambiguities they involve? How do genes factor into the story? And what connection—if any—is there between biological markers of race and the social experiences of racial groups?

Each of the three drinking buddies has a lot to say to God or Sam Malone, and, by the way, their responses don’t end in laugh lines. The biologist, Richard Francis, engages other issues, though his concerns directly affect how we answer the loud voice. But the sociologist, Ann Morning, and the lawyer, Dorothy Roberts, are narrowly focused on the science of race and how medicine mediates racial experience. And with good reason: in the United States people of a darker hue (on average) die sooner than pink-skinned people. They are afflicted with higher rates of particular diseases, such as high blood pressure, strokes, and kidney failure. So the race you’re born with, or, rather, which race you are born into, might mean a healthier, longer life—or not.

These days large numbers of medical research dollars are devoted to finding genetic differences between races that might explain health disparities. But many students of biology and race, and at least some of our bar mates, think that is a bad idea. They are not against medical research per se but against bad research. Instead of looking for genes that cause race and attending health outcomes (the standard approach) they point to evidence strongly suggesting that everyday events alter our bodies, making them sicker or more resistant to disease—events that the political economy ensures are more or less common depending on which racial categories one is assigned to. Indeed, it may be that biology doesn’t create race but that racial marking creates new biological states via processes that all three of these thinkers discuss in new books…

Read the entire review here.

Passing free

Boston College Magazine
Summer 2003

Black in the South, Irish in the North, The Healys Slipped the Bonds of Race in Civil War America

James M. O’Toole, Associate Professor of History
Boston College

When Michael Morris Healy and Eliza Clark entered into a common-law union in 1829, they violated perhaps the most powerful taboo of 19th-century America: marriage between persons of different races. Healy was a white planter in Jones County, Georgia; Clark was an African-American slave. American society was horrified by a union such as theirs, and by the attendant prospect of offspring, because of clear, even scientific definition: Race depended, literally, on blood. What came to be called the “one-drop rule” specified that a single drop of ancestral African blood was sufficient to define a Negro. Blood might be diluted over time, but its essence could not be altered.

Under this rule, the children of Michael and Eliza Healy, no matter how fair their skin or European their features, could expect to lead hobbled lives, consigned to the most menial work and subjected to discrimination and violence. But that is not what happened…

Read the entire article here.

ENGL 773 (or) ENGL 873: Topics in Minority Literature: (W)Rites of Passing: Narratives of Shifting African American Identities

Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania
Fall 2012

Veronica Watson, Associate Professor of English

“Passing” is a term that has, until quite recently, been used to refer almost exclusively to a person classified by society as a member of one racial group choosing to live as a member of a different racial/ethnic group. In the U.S. it was borne out of an oppressive racial classification system that placed African American at the bottom of a hierarchy that denied them basic human, social, and political rights. Passing, as narrative content and form, has traditionally been understood as a response to those conditions, a critique of American social systems, and a revealing argument about the ambiguity of “race.” This almost sociological approach to reading the phenomenon of passing in literature accounts for the canonization of a fairly narrow list of titles within African American literature.
 
In this class we will engage a broader mix of 19th-21st century texts as passing narratives than is typically considered. We will also expand our understanding of the passing narrative by examining contemporary scholarship on the topic, like Mary Balkun’s The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, Steven Belluscio’s To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing, Juda Bennett’s The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature, and Laura Browder’s Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.

By the end of the class you are sure to have a new appreciation of the complexities and richness of these works and to have thought about new research trajectories that could lead to cutting-edge scholarship and publication opportunities.

The tentative literary reading list is as follows:
 
Charles Chesnutt: House Behind the Cedars
Willam and Ellen Craft: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Grace Halsell, Soul Sister
Jessie Redmond Fauset: Plum Bun
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood
James Weldon Johnson: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Nella Larsen, Passing
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
George Schuyler, Black No More
Danzy Senna, Caucasia
Walter White, Flight

5th Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival

Japanese American National Museum
Los Angeles, California
2012-06-15 through 2012-06-17

Co-producers: Fanshen Cox, Heidi Durrow, and Jennifer Frappier of the award-winning podcast Mixed Chicks Chat

The Festival is a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit organization, celebrating stories of the Mixed experience. Each year the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial families and individuals for two days of workshops, readings, film screenings and live performance including music, comedy and spoken word.

Note from Steven F. Riley: Please visit my “vendor” table where I will be giving away books (referenced on this site) to lucky winners!

For more information, click here.  For the press release, click here.

Multiracial Jews Moving Beyond Isolation

The Jewish Week
2012-06-12

Julie Wiener, Associate Editor

Now 12 percent of the community, racially diverse Jewish households making their way into mainstream — but still less ‘engaged’ than others.

When Rabbi/Cantor Angela Buchdahl was growing up — the daughter of a white Jewish father and a Korean-American mother — she and her sister “always felt like the ‘only ones’” that were non-white in Jewish settings.

Today, her three children attend the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, and each is in a class with at least one other mixed-race Asian. “And there are other races as well,” she noted.

Meanwhile at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, where Buchdahl is a member of the clergy, there are at least 20 families with Jews of color, not counting Sephardic or Mizrachi Jews…

…Rabbi/Cantor Buchdahl’s observations are reflected in the comprehensive UJA-Federation of New York population study released this week. The first Jewish population study to ask about race, it finds that approximately 12 percent — or 87,000 — of New York Jewish households are “multiracial or nonwhite.”

This category includes households in which survey respondents were both Jewish and black, Hispanic, Asian or biracial, or in which white Jewish respondents reported that their household is bi- or multiracial. “As a group they are divided almost equally among four groups: Hispanic respondents, Black respondents, white respondents with biracial households, and biracial respondents, with small numbers of others (for example, Asian-American respondents),” the study reports.

In short, the category encompasses a wide range of profiles — among them interracial couples and their children, adult children of interracial couples, white couples with non-white adopted children and non-whites who were either born Jewish or converted to Judaism. And it is not clear how many families fit each profile…

…But there is no typical multiracial Jewish family: the category represents a mix of races and ethnicities, as well as a wide range of family and national backgrounds everywhere on the spectrum of Jewish observance.

“To call everyone ‘Jews of color’ is really a disservice because there’s so much variation,” said Diane Tobin, director of Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based group that conducts research and offers various programs throughout the United States, including an overnight summer camp for multiracial Jewish children. “Between intermarriage, conversion and adoption, there’s so many different paths and ways people are identifying as being Jews.”…

Read the entire article here.