Mixed Race Studies

Family Portrait in Black and White: Documentary by Julia Ivanova

Interfilm Productions
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2011
Institutional Use: Double DVD (includes 85 and 52 minute versions)
Private Use: 85 minute DVD

Julia Ivanova, Director

Olga Nenya has 27 children. Four of them, now adults, are her biological children; the other 23 are adopted or foster children. Of those 23, 16 are biracial.

She calls them “my chocolates,” and is raising them to be patriotic Ukrainians. Some residents of Sumy, Ukraine, consider Olga a saint, but many believe she is simply crazy. An inheritance from the Soviet era, a stigma persists here against interracial relationships, and against children born as the result of romantic encounters between Ukrainian girls and exchange students from Africa. For more than a decade, Olga has been picking up the black babies left in Ukrainian orphanages and raising them together so that they may support and protect one another.

The filmmakers interview Neo-Nazis in Ukraine reveals the real dangers for a dark-skinned individual in the street. These white supremacist youth joke about their evening raids and how police seem to let them do it. Prosecutors are not particularly determined to give strict sentences to racially motivated crimes, and young thugs can get away with probation for beating someone nearly to death.

Olga sends her foster children to stay with host families in France and Italy in the summers and over Christmas, where they are cared for by charitable families who have committed to helping disadvantaged Ukrainian youth since the Chernobyl disaster. Olga’s kids now speak different languages, and the older girls chat in fluent Italian with each other even while cooking a vat of borscht. But Olga doesn’t believe in international adoption and has refused to sign adoption papers from host families that wanted to adopt her kids.

“At least when the kids grow up, they’ll have a mother to blame for all the failures that will happen in their lives,” she says.

AWARDS:

• 32nd GENIE AWARDS (Canada) (aka Canadian Oscars) “NOMINEE: Best Feature Documentary”
• 18th HOT DOCS FILM FESTIVAL (Canada) “Grand Prize: Best Canadian Film Award”
• 56TH VALLADOLID INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Spain) “Cultural Diversity Award” and “Time of History Third Prize”
• 6TH MIRADASDOC –DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL (Spain) “Audience Award”
• 6TH ADDIS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Ethiopia) “Jury Award – Best Documentary”

SCREENINGS:

• Sundance Film Festival (USA)
• International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam)
• Los Angeles Film Festival (USA)
• Mumbai Film Festival (India)
• Haifa International Film Festival (Israel)
• Hamptons International Film Festival (USA)
• Cleveland International Film Festival (USA)
• Glasgow International Film Festival (UK)
• Thessaloniki Film Festival (Greece)
• Message To Man Documentary Festival (Russia)
• Bergen International Film Festival (Norway)
• Vancouver International Film Festival (Canada)
• New Zealand International Film Festival
• Seattle International Film Festival (USA)
• One World Film Festival (Romania, Czechoslovakia)
• Human Watch Film Festival (UK)
• Watchdocs (Poland)

What are the areas of interest? The major areas of interest covered by the film include:

• human rights
• critical mixed-race studies
• ideology
• institutionalization
• identity politics
• transitional economy
• international adoption
• foster homes

Who can benefit from the film? Family Portrait in Black and White is valuable for anyone with research interest in the following:

• African Studies
• Slavic Studies
• Child and Family Studies
• Sociology
• Women’s Studies
• Film and Media Studies
• Mixed-Race Studies

Three Winton Triangle Presentations at Greensboro conference.

Chowan Discovery Group
2012-10-15

Marvin T. Jones

The Chowan Discovery presentations about the Winton Triangle, its Civil War history and Chowan Discovery historical markers attracted many enthusiastic attendees at the annual conference of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society (AAGHS) in Greensboro. Included in the audiences were history professionals and authors.
 
One of the joys of having three presentations at the conference was that the reputation of each lecture fed the attendance of the next.  This also gave more people the opportunity to hear about our work.  And then there are those increased sales of Carolina Genesis and the CDG mugs.  Hawking those mugs are fun, whether they sell or not – and they sold.  I enjoyed all of questions and comments.

Among the participants, I saw growing awareness about tri-racial people and free people of color in North Carolina at the conference.  This is an important trend for our mission…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Samba

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Volume 2, Number 2 (Summer/Fall 2001)

Bruce Gilman

Samba, which was created in its present form in the 1910s, yet whose roots reach back much farther and tie Brazil to the African continent, has played an integral part in Brazil’s conceptualization as a nation. Originally despised by Brazil’s elite, samba’s message of racial integration was eventually used by both progressive reformers and authoritarian dictators. Despite samba’s image abroad as a catalyst for racial miscegenation, its political message never took hold in Brazilian society. Today, samba continues to be as much a source of social integration as a prism of Brazil’s racial fractures.

Historical Roots.

It is probable that the word “samba” originated in Angola, where the Kimbundu word semba designated a circle dance similar in choreography to the west African batuque that Bantu slaves brought to Brazil. While the exact number of blacks entering Brazil during its period of slavery is unknown, it is commonly estimated that at least eigh- teen million Africans were “imported” between 1538 and 1828. The primary center from which the Portuguese disseminated slaves into the Brazilian interior was Salvador, Bahia. It was the second largest city in the Portuguese Empire after Lisbon, and famous for its sensuality and decadence expressed in its beautiful colonial mansions and gold-filled churches. In Bahia, African culture took root to such an extent that today many African traditions are better preserved there than any-where else in the New World. Sambas rhythm is rooted in the rich musical heritage that Africans took with them in their forced migration to Brazil.

Although sambas rhythm is of African origin, its melody, harmony, form, and instrumentation are influenced by European traditions. The licentious lundu dance, derived from the rhythm of the batuque, became increasingly popular in Brazil in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, the flute, guitar, and cavaquinho, which initially accompanied the modinha the Brazilian way of playing the lyric song style of the Portuguese elite, would come to play an important role in samba. Brazilian poet and priest Domingo Caldas Barbosa (1740-1800), whose mother was a slave from Angola and whose father was a Portuguese businessman, broke with the tradition of the court style by substituting guitar for the harpsichord and introducing risqué lyrics in the most aristocratic salons of Lisbon. While Barbosa was indignantly criticized for his sensuous poetry, erudite Portuguese composers soon began producing their own modinhas. Both the lundu and the modinha crossed the boundaries between popular and elite, yet gained acceptance at the Lisbon royal court in an early instance of the fusion of African and Iberian styles. Brazil’s African-inspired musical traditions also merged with other non-Portuguese, European styles. In the mid-1840s, French traveling musical theater companies introduced the polka to Brazil. As the lundu fused with the polka, it turned into the maxixe, a Brazilianized version of the polka. The maxixe became the first genuinely Brazilian dance and decisively influenced the creation of samba as a specific genre, eventually finding acceptance among the elite of Rio de Janeiro.

…Racial marginalization was also fostered by the growing conviction among nineteenth-century intellectuals that true Brazilian nationhood required ethnic homogeneity. Influential scientists regarded people of mixed race as indolent , undisciplined, and shortsighted. They argued that Brazil’s racial composition did not exemplify cultural richness or vitality, but rather constituted a singular case of extreme miscegenation; consequently, the person of mixed race evolved into a symbol of Brazilian backwardness. Blacks were seen as a major factor contributing to Brazil’s inferiority because they would never be able to absorb, and could only imitate, “Aryan” culture. Racial mixing thus furnished an explanation for the defects and weaknesses of Brazilian society and became a central issue in Brazil’s conceptualization as a nation.

Most Brazilians believed that national homogeneity could be achieved through assimilation and miscegenation, but only if this guaranteed evolutionary superiority through a general “whitening” of the population. Thus, the most welcomed immigrants were southwestern Europeans who mixed readily with the rest of the Brazilian population; Africans were never considered among” possible candidates for immigration…

Read the entire article here.

In the future, we will be…: Priyank Shah at TEDx Columbus

TEDx Columbus
2012-10-14

Priyank Shah, Demographer, Futurist, Teacher

Dr. Shah is a demographer and a very enthusiastic one. He’ll begin our day with baseline picture of where we are headed as a population so we will better understand ourselves as a society. But no worries, you’ll be entertained with his take on these trends, as he himself is a living example of one of the most prolific ones.

Census Bureau Establishes National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations

United States Census Bureau
News Release
CB12-195
2012-10-12

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the establishment of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations. The Census Bureau has also named the committee’s members and leadership.

The National Advisory Committee will advise the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau’s programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, will advise the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race and ethnicity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other populations.

“We expect that the expertise of this committee will help us meet emerging challenges the Census Bureau faces in producing statistics about our diverse nation,” said Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau’s acting director. “By helping us better understand a variety of issues that affect statistical measurement, this committee will help ensure that the Census Bureau continues to provide relevant and timely statistics used by federal, state and local governments as well as business and industry in an increasingly technologically oriented society.”

The [32] members are:…

Read the entire press release here.