Mixed Race Studies

Irish and Italian Americans came to be considered members of the white race as their assimilation provided them with the material resources that allowed them to move away from the menial labor that was seen as synonymous with being black. Occupational and class mobility along with the loss of ethnic identity allowed these groups to assert what they were; phenotypically white immigrants from Europe who had been denied the ability to claim that identity because of racialized ethnocentrism. Today, Asian and Latino Americans who are light-skinned and have high economic status, particularly those who have white partners, may also gain entry into the white race. Those who marry whites are almost assured that their offspring will be accepted as white.

Charles A. Gallagher, “In-Between Racial Status, Mobility and Promise of Assimilation: Irish, Italians Yesterday, Latinos and Asians Today,” in Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity, edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen, 20. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

Four years later, Barack Obama still a mystery in some ways

The Dallas Morning News
2012-09-01

From staff and wire reports

File: The welcome in Austin in 2007 was warm and Texan for presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Still somewhat unknown

Even after four years as president, Barack Hussein Obama remains unknown in some ways. He seemed to come out of nowhere. He had served seven years in the Illinois Senate — and less than four years in the U.S. Senate a meager political resume, augmented by a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Just four years later, he won the presidency over John McCain by almost 9.5 million votes. Now, at age 51, he appears to face a much closer battle for re-election.

Roots in Africa, America, Asia

Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu. His story was like no president before him — son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. Obama was just months old when his father, a brilliant but troubled economist, left to study at Harvard. He would never return. Obama spent his youth alternately in the care of his grandparents in Hawaii and his mother, who moved to Indonesia and a short-lived marriage to a geologist there. He studied at Occidental College in California, Columbia University and Harvard Law, and along the way struggled to come to terms with his identity as a black man of mixed heritage in a white society. He went to Chicago, where he learned to identify with the black community as a social activist.

Calm manner

A supporter dubbed him “No-Drama Obama” in the 2008 campaign, and it stuck because it reflects his personality. “The president is an intellectually ambitious man who is temperamentally cautious,” says Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton. His measured approach has not always worked in his favor; he has frustrated supporters who say he does not express righteous anger when he should…

Read the entire article here.

Latin America and mixed heritage

The Prisma: The Multicultural Newspaper
Westwood Hill, London, United Kingdom
2012-08-27

Claudio Chipana (Translated by Viv Griffiths)

“…we are neither Indian, nor European, but a species lying somewhere in between the legitimate owners of the land and the Spanish usurpers…” Simon Bolivar (Letter from Jamaica).

People of mixed heritage, mestizos, are a challenge to racial purity and the idea of a monolithic nation. The mixing of race is a cultural as well as racial process that began from the moment the Conquistadors arrived in the Americas in the 16th Century. The historian, Inca Garcilazo de la Vega, is considered to be the first Peruvian of mestizo. But, why Garcilazo and not the Indian historian Guaman Poma?
 
Mestizos are neither Hispanic nor indigenous and have been viewed both negatively and positively depending on their social class and ideology. Over time, being mestizo has developed into a form of identity for those living on the Latin American continent, and a way of staking a claim for themselves and forging ahead in the process of transculturation…

…It is still common for Latin Americans to identify themselves as being mestizo. This raises the question, if a person considers themselves mestizo, does this exclude them from identifying themselves as Latin American? At the same time, it should be acknowledged that there is a significant indigenous population resistant to any kind of homogenisation…

Read the entire article here.

Roots: Saint Lucia’s Hindu Legacy

Hinduism Today
October/November/December 2012

Gajanan Nataraj
Saint Lucia

I am a Saint Lucian citizen. I was born in the US Virgin Islands and lived briefly on the mainland (USA), but for the better part of 23 years I was raised on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I am roughly two-quarters Indian and two-quarters Negro–meaning both my parents were themselves of mixed heritage. This is common in Saint Lucia. We are called dougla–which comes from doogala (“two necks”), a demeaning label meaning mixed race or half-caste in Bhojpuri and Hindi. In Saint Lucia, the term is sometimes used affectionately, sometimes not so affectionately.

Though many on the island are of Indian heritage, I am one of the very few Hindus. I have a Hindu name, perform daily puja to Lord Ganesha and consider the cow a sacred creature. I believe in karma, dharma, reincarnation, the divinity of the Vedas and in the need for a satguru to guide my spiritual journey. Of all the Indian families who came to Saint Lucia from Kolkata as indentured workers in the 19th century, mine is one of the few to reclaim our Hindu heritage. In being Hindu, I am almost unique among the fifth generation of Indian immigrants. Even among my close relatives, almost all are Christians.

How did I come to be a Hindu in a land where Christianity reigns supreme, even among Indians? I attribute my discovery of this beautiful religion to the interplay of my soul’s natural calling and God’s blessing of being born to parents who are ardent seekers of spiritual truth. Indeed, my growth from non-religious, Christian-influenced spiritual confusion can only be credited to the marvelous journey of my parents…

Read the entire article here.

Latinos may get own race category on census form

The Seattle Times
2012-08-30

Lornet Turnbull, Staff Reporter

Under proposed changes under consideration by the Census Bureau in its once-a-decade census forms, Latino and Hispanic would be added to the list of government-defined races, rather than being listed separately as an ethnicity. And people from the Middle East and North Africa, now counted as white, would be allowed to write in their country of origin.

U.S. residents of Spanish origin typically have no trouble checking the box on their census form that asks whether they are Latino, Hispanic or Spanish.

It’s a different question — the one that asks their race — that apparently gives some of them pause.

In the 2010 census, well over one-third — perhaps unsure how to answer that question — either checked “some other race” or skipped the question entirely.

Now, in advance of the 2020 count and as part of its ongoing effort to allow Americans to better reflect how they see themselves, the U.S. Census Bureau is researching ways to clear up the confusion by adding Latino or Hispanic to a list of government-defined race categories that includes White, Asian, Pacific Islander, Black and American Indian, along with a “two or more races” option…

…Luis Fraga, a political-science professor at the University of Washington who directs its Diversity Research Institute, said, “identifying ourselves by racial grouping is at the very core of who we are as a nation and how we understand political power.”

Results from the decennial survey not only help direct more than $400 billion in federal funds are distributed each year, but they also help evaluate how well government policies are responding to historical disparities among various racial and ethnic groups.

“As much as we hope we become a country where these racial distinctions don’t matter — and that’s a worthy goal — it is central to how we understand ourselves as a people and how we decide who has opportunity, rights, privileges and protection under the law,” Fraga said…

Read the entire article here.

Passing for Black: The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kidd

University Press of Kentucky
1997
208 pages
On Demand paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0948-0

Wade Hall

In 1976, Kentucky state legislator Mae Street Kidd successfully sponsored a resolution ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was fitting that a black woman should initiate the state’s formal repudiation of slavery; that it was Mrs. Kidd was all the more appropriate. Born in Millersburg, Kentucky, in 1904 to a black mother and a white father, Kidd grew up to be a striking woman with fair skin and light hair. Sometimes accused of trying to pass for white in a segregated society, Kidd felt that she was doing the opposite—choosing to assert her black identity. Passing for Black is her story, in her own words, of how she lived in this racial limbo and the obstacles it presented. As a Kentucky woman of color during a pioneering period of minority and women’s rights, Kidd seized every opportunity to get ahead. She attended a black boarding academy after high school and went on to become a successful businesswoman in the insurance and cosmetic industries in a time when few women, black or white, were able to compete in a male-dominated society. She also served with the American Red Cross in England during World War II. It was not until she was in her sixties that she turned to politics, sitting for seventeen years in the Kentucky General Assembly—one of the few black women ever to do so—where she crusaded vigorously for housing rights. Her story—presented as oral history elicited and edited by Wade Hall—provides an important benchmark in African American and women’s studies and endures as a vital document in Kentucky history.

Neville’s and Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called ‘breeding out the colour’. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption promised to resolve the supposed problems resulting from racial intermixture by encouraging still more intermixing. It aimed to uphold the ideal of white Australia but flew in the face of popular notions of white Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. While racist in many ways, absorption simultaneously defied prevalent racist assumptions of hybrid inferiority. It parallelled eugenicism in certain respects, but also clashed with eugenic principles. It was inspired partly by humanitarian welfarism, but evinced profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions.

Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian Nation, (Canberra, Australian Capital Territory: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), 1-2.

Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance

University of Toronto Press
October 2010
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9781442641402
eBook ISBN: ISBN 9781442660083

Jean E. Feerick, Assistant Professor of English
Brown University

Strangers in Blood explores, in a range of early modern literature, the association between migration to foreign lands and the moral and physical degeneration of individuals. Arguing that, in early modern discourse, the concept of race was primarily linked with notions of bloodline, lineage, and genealogy rather than with skin colour and ethnicity, Jean E. Feerick establishes that the characterization of settler communities as subject to degenerative decline constituted a massive challenge to the fixed system of blood that had hitherto underpinned the English social hierarchy.

Considering contexts as diverse as Ireland, Virginia, and the West Indies, Strangers in Blood tracks the widespread cultural concern that moving out of England would adversely affect the temper and complexion of the displaced individual, changes that could be fought only through willed acts of self-discipline. In emphasizing the decline of blood as found at the centre of colonial narratives, Feerick illustrates the unwitting disassembling of one racial system and the creation of another.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Bloodwork
• 1. Blemished Bloodlines and The Faerie Queene, Book 2
• 2. Uncouth Milk and the Irish Wet Nurse
• 3. Cymbeline and Virginia’s British Climate
• 4. Passion and Degeneracy in Tragicomic Island Plays
• 5. High Spirits, Nature’s Ranks, and Ligon’s Ladies
• Coda: Beyond the Renaissance

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (review)

Shakespeare Quarterly
Volume 63, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 244-246
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0017

Virginia Mason Vaughan, Professor of English
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

If you teach Shakespeare’s plays at an American university, college, or secondary school (as I do), and if you’ve ever felt a disconnect between what you do in the classroom and the real lives of your students, this book is the antidote you need. With unfailing honesty, clarity, and courage, Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America confronts the elephant in the room we so seldom admit to seeing—race—particularly in regard to Shakespeare’s cultural authority. Thompson casts her questioning gaze on the ways Shakespeare is studied, taught, and performed in twenty-first-century America; less traditionally, she examines the plays’ appropriation in film, novels, prison and reform programs, and new media such as YouTube. Her wide-ranging inquiry compels the reader to question all sorts of assumptions—about Shakespeare, race, and (most often) the ways both of these are entwined in American thought and practice.

Thompson explains her title’s significance in her introduction. In his address to the Venetian Senate, Othello describes Desdemona’s fascination with his adventures; she found his stories “‘passing strange’” and listened to them “with a greedy ear.” The phrase conveys the unusual wonder Desdemona felt, but Thompson connects the words to the American trope of “passing,” often used in narratives about individuals who pretend to be a member of a racial category other than their own; passing implies the creation of an alternative identity and reflects the desire to “rewrite a story from a different point of view” (11). Finally, “passing” also connotes the changes that take place through time. She stresses that Shakespeare “was / is always defined through the recreation of his identity, image, texts, and performances. . . . [He] needs to be rendered as contingent—as in process and as passing—as the creative moment in which his name, image, text, and performance are invoked” (17).

In the next chapter, Thompson tackles assumptions about Shakespeare’s universalism as reflected in two contemporary films: the small-budget, independent Suture (1993) and the Hollywood comedy Bringing Down the House (2003). Although neither film is about Shakespeare, Thompson shows how the concept of Shakespeare as a universal figure can be appropriated to stand for white, Western culture. Thompson next interrogates the implications of Maya Angelou’s often-repeated claim that Shakespeare was black. She frames Farrukh Dhondy’s Black Swan, a young adult novel whose Afro-Caribbean hero tries to seize Shakespeare’s cultural capital for himself, as a kind of “strategic essentialism”—“the practice of promoting racial differences as inherent, fundamentally different, and therefore fixed in order to create affiliation, cohesion, and unity within a racialized group” (13, 49). Even though most readers will not be familiar with these texts, they will find Thompson’s detailed analysis intriguing.

Chapter 4 moves to multicultural theater, a topic in which Thompson, who edited the collection Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006), has particular expertise. Here, she probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will “enhance the play’s social resonance” (76); and cross-cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location and culture. Yet, Thompson argues, theater practitioners seldom interrogate their own practices or face up to those practices’ messy contradictions. Using the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as her primary example, Thompson calls for theater practitioners to recognize and discuss the semiotics of race in their productions.

Thompson’s next topic is even more nervous making: whether a role originally intended for a white actor in blackface (Othello, for example) should ever be performed according to “original-staging” practices. As someone who has written on this controversial topic, I appreciated…

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America

Oxford University Press
April 2011
240 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195385854; ISBN10: 0195385853

Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English
Arizona State University

Notions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including America’s relationship to Shakespeare. In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson explores the myriad ways U.S. culture draws on the works and the mythology of the Bard to redefine the boundaries of the color line.

Drawing on an extensive—frequently unconventional—range of examples, Thompson examines the contact zones between constructions of Shakespeare and constructions of race. Among the questions she addresses are: Do Shakespeare’s plays need to be edited, appropriated, updated, or rewritten to affirm racial equality and retain relevance? Can discussions of Shakespeare’s universalism tell us anything beneficial about race? What advantages, if any, can a knowledge of Shakespeare provide to disadvantaged people of color, including those in prison? Do the answers to these questions impact our understandings of authorship, authority, and authenticity? In investigating this under-explored territory, Passing Strange examines a wide variety of contemporary texts, including films, novels, theatrical productions, YouTube videos, performances, and arts education programs.

Scholars, teachers, and performers will find a wealth of insights into the staging and performance of familiar plays, but they will also encounter new ways of viewing Shakespeare and American racial identity, enriching their understanding of each.

Features

• Productively engages a topic of perennial debate: race and Shakespeare
• Offers first sustained examination of the relationship between contemporary American constructions of Shakespeare and race
• Explores the seldom considered ways Shakespeare has infiltrated American popular culture, from films like the screwball comedy Bringing Down the House to DIY performances on YouTube

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Passing Strangeness of Shakespeare in America
• 2. Universalism: Two Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the House
• 3. Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dondy’s novel Black Swan
• 4. Multiculturalism: The Classics, Casting, and Confusion
• 5. Original(ity): Othello and Blackface
• 6. Reform: Redefining Authenticity in Shakespeare Reform Programs
• 7. Archives: Classroom-Inspired Performance Videos on YouTube
• 8. Conclusion: Passing Race and Passing Shakespeare in Peter Sellars’s Othello
• Works Cited
• Index