Mixed Race Studies

6 News reporter learns Virginia town was named for her ancestor

WATE.com
Knoxville, Tennessee
2012-07-23

Erica Estep, 6 News Reporter

KNOXVILLE (WATE) – How much do you know about your family history? Where did your ancestors live? What were their daily lives like, and what do you have in common with them?

Whether it is physical features or an adventurous spirit you’ve inherited, have you ever wanted to know more? These were all questions I had about my own family history, so I went in search of answers and hoping to help others along the way.

My journey began with research online. Genealogy sites like ancestry.com and familysearch.org make it easy for anyone to begin filling in their family tree.

I quickly traced my father’s ancestors from the Carolinas back to England.

However, my mother’s line included the most stumbling blocks. I found that my third great grandmother married two brothers, and I still haven’t confirmed the father of my great, great grandfather.

Among unusual surnames like Lockhart, Honaker and Stump, I uncovered a few kissing cousins, illegitimate children, an abundance of preachers and even an outlaw or two. All of them originated from the same small mountain town in Virginia…

…Tracing your roots is easier than ever with online records available at the click of a mouse, but with traditional research, many people hit a brick wall. Sometimes there’s just one piece of a puzzle you can’t find, but DNA tests can help.

Science is offering a deeper understanding of where you come from. I traced my roots to a small town in Southwest Virginia, but still had a lot of un-answered questions.

I turned to DNA tests to help fill in the blanks…

…I’ve always been told that I have Native American ancestors, and found pictures of relatives with darker complexions, just like one Alma showed me of her great aunt.

When asked about what she knows of her heritage she said, “Spanish and German, I think. Yeah, and a possibility of Indian, there’s a little bit of Indian in there, somewhere.”

My fourth great grandfather was also listed as mulatto in the 1850 census. Researchers at the East Tennessee History Center told me that would not be surprising.

“It’s highly probable,” said Dr. George Sweitzer, a genealogist and professor at the University of Tennessee. “Mulatto meant that you had black blood.”…

Read the entire article here.

Summer in the Global Village: Trevor Noah, South Africa’s Comic Phenomenon

The World
Public Radio International
2013-07-16

Mirissa Neff

In South Africa, comedian Trevor Noah is a phenomenon.

A friend who recently came back from Johannesburg and Cape Town, remarked that the 28-year-old’s every utterance, whether on TV or Twitter (where he has nearly a million followers), “creates a ripple throughout the entire country.”

For six weeks in the early summer, New Yorkers got a taste of why.

Noah’s solo show, “Born a Crime,” (which ran at Culture Project in NoHo) references his mixed-race heritage: He was born during the apartheid era to a black South African mother and a white Swiss father.

Much of his sidesplitting routine is devoted to skewering the politics of race, both within and outside of his native South Africa, where his father, who was barred from walking in public with his brown-skinned son, instead watched Noah from across the street, “like a creepy pedophile.”…

Read the entire article here.

“One Drop of Love” is Fanshen’s Story & She’s Sticking To It

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-17, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Join us on today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio as we meet award-winning actor, producer and educator, Fanshen Cox. Fanshen is currently touring the one-woman show she wrote and performs in: One Drop of Love, which is produced by Ben Affleck, Chay Carter and Matt Damon.

One Drop follows Fanshen’s journey to reconciliation with her father, taking audiences from the 1700s to the present and through various locations near and far—all in search of how our belief in ‘race’ affects our most precious intimate relationships.

Fanshen is also the co-creator of the Mixed Chicks Chat podcast (named a top podcast by Ebony magazine and the Black Weblog Awards) and co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^®—a five-year festival celebrating its final event in 2012. She won a 2012 SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast (for the film Argo).

Fanshen served as a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in Cape Verde, West Africa as a teacher, and has taught in and designed curricula for over 15 years. She holds a BA in Spanish and Education, an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and just earned her MFA in Acting and Performance in Film, TV and Theater. Fanshen is dedicated to constantly questioning the notion of ‘race’ and fighting racism through storytelling.

For more information, click here.

Scottish people’s DNA study could ‘rewrite nation’s history’

The Guardian
2012-08-14

Charlotte Higgins, Chief Arts Writer

Evidence of African, Arabian, south-east Asian and Siberian ancestry in Scotland, says author of book tracing genetic journey

A large scale study of Scottish people’s DNA is threatening to “rewrite the nation’s history”, according to author Alistair Moffat.

Scotland, he told the Edinburgh international book festival, despite a long-held belief that its ethnic make-up was largely Scots, Celtic, Viking and Irish, was in fact “one of the most diverse nations on earth”…

Read the entire article here.

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art Opening Reception

Wing Luke Museum
719 South King Street
Seattle, Washington
Thursday, 2013-08-08, 18:00-20:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join us for the opening reception of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.

As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age, this multi-platform project looks at how mixed-heritage Asian American artists address hybrid identities in their artwork. The exhibit features work by an ethnically diverse set of artists, including Kip Fulbeck, Louie Gong, and Amanda Ross-Ho.

Curators Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis will be in attendance at the opening, as will several artists featured in the exhibit.

For more on the exhibit, visit http://www.warbabylovechild.com/

6-7pm: Preview for museum members and invited guests. RSVP to mmartinez@wingluke.org or 206.623.5124 ext 107.

7-8pm: Open to the public. Free admission, no RSVP required.

For more information, click here.

The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove

University Press of Florida
2012-10-21
296 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4221-3

Steven C. Hahn, Associate Professor of History
St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota

One of the most recognizable names of the colonial Deep South

The story of Mary Musgrove (1700-1764), a Creek Indian-English woman struggling for success in colonial society, is an improbable one.

As a literate Christian, entrepreneur, and wife of an Anglican clergyman, Mary was one of a small number of “mixed blood” Indians to achieve a position of prominence among English colonists. Born to a Creek mother and an English father, Mary’s bicultural heritage prepared her for an eventful adulthood spent in the rough and tumble world of Colonial Georgia Indian affairs.

Active in diplomacy, trade, and politics—affairs typically dominated by men—Mary worked as an interpreter between the Creek Indians and the colonists–although some argue that she did so for her own gains, altering translations to sway transactions in her favor. Widowed twice in the prime of her life, Mary and her successive husbands claimed vast tracts of land in Georgia (illegally, as British officials would have it) by virtue of her Indian heritage, thereby souring her relationship with the colony’s governing officials and severely straining the colony’s relationship with the Creek Indians.

Using Mary’s life as a narrative thread, Steven Hahn explores the connected histories of the Creek Indians and the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. He demonstrates how the fluidity of race and gender relations on the southern frontier eventually succumbed to more rigid hierarchies that supported the region’s emerging plantation system.

Notwithstanding the long-held belief that Machado sought to at best to camouflage and at worst deny being a mulatto, I contend that his primary motivation was to achieve a sense of racelessness. He endeavored to go beyond the physical limitations of being a mulatto to become a “meta-mulatto,” that is, a mulatto whose writing grappled with the universal questions of duality and ambiguity in all human existence—miscegenation in a higher sense. He displayed what has been termed “mestizo consciousness,” “radical mestizaje,” and “critical hybridity” (Anzaldúa 1987, 77; Ramirez 1983, 6; Sandoval 2000, 72; Daniel 2005, 264; Lund 2006, 55) by affirming a mulatto identity grounded in a more inclusive or universal self, beyond questions of racial, cultural, or any other specificity.  As a multiracial individual of African and European descent in a society that prized whiteness and stigmatized blackness, Machado viewed the challenge of achieving upward mobility and public success without also compromising his personal integrity as merely one of the myriad epiphenomena of universal duality and ambiguity.

G. Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012): 120-121.

Invitation to a Dialogue: The Myth of ‘Race’

The New York Times
2013-07-15

John L. Hodge, Retired lawyer, Former Professor of Philosophy and Author
Boston

To the Editor:

What should we do about “race”?

Over many decades, those who study genetics have found no biological evidence to support the idea that humans consist of different “races.” Based on such scientific data, Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race” in 1942. New discoveries have confirmed what he said then. So why, over seven decades after his book, do we keep talking and living as though biological “races” exist?

Not only are certain “racial” classifications flawed, as suggested in “Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?” (Sunday Review, July 7); all “racial” classifications are inherently flawed, because they are based on the false idea of “race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Gladys Zimmerman, Mother Of George Zimmerman, Says Her Family Is ‘Proudly Afro-Peruvian,’ But Do His Black Roots Matter In Trayvon Martin Case?

Latin Times
New York, New York
2013-07-15

David Iaconangelo

As protests mount against the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the question of how the public ought to see Zimmerman’s racial background continues to provoke. Many continue to view him as “white,” as he was described in initial reports. Others have turned to “white Hispanic.”  But in a September 2012 interview on Univision with Jorge Ramos, Zimmerman’s brother Robert spoke out against media characterizations of George as “white,” while George’s mother Gladys said she came from a family that was proud of its Afro-Peruvian roots…

…”In Peru we have a saying that goes, ‘If you don’t have the blood of the Incas, you’ve got the blood of the Mandingas,” which means that if you don’t have Indian blood, you’ve got black blood,” Gladys Zimmerman said on Univision. “In my family we proudly come from the Afro-Peruvian race. My sons know their uncles, they know their aunts, they know their roots and my roots are not white, my roots are Afro-Peruvian.  So they’ve been educated, not just at home as a family, at school.  My sons don’t look at color.”

According to Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist at the University of California and the author of “Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru,” Gladys Zimmerman’s description of herself as “Afro-Peruvian” is somewhat unusual.

“The word ‘Afro-Peruvian’ is kind of a new concept in Peru,” she told the Latin Times. “The idea that some people are African-descendent, some people are indigenous-descendent, some people are Hispanic-descendent has some currency in Peru, but it hasn’t really reached down to the level of popular sentiment. Instead, people tend to be identified as black if they have visible African ancestry. If people can look at them and make a guess that their ancestors probably came from Africa—very curly hair, darker skin.”…

Read the entire article here.

Genetic analysis strongly suggests that early humans first arose in Africa and emerged out of Africa only ~100,000 years ago, a fairly recent development, evolutionarily speaking, which explains why we are all closely related. Any classification of biological races within our species is arbitrary because there are no major discontinuities in our diversity across the globe. Importantly, genetic data show that currently populous groups are not necessarily reflected by their past abundance, and human history is one of repeated admixture, not maintenance of purity. It is this genetic admixture that has left an imprint on every human disease with a genetic component, including common chronic ones. Thus, it is quite unlikely that the genetic variations underlying our diseases, which represent only a small fraction of our genetic diversity, will vary markedly across humanity.

Aravinda Chakravarti, “Racial profiling in medicine,” Nature Medicine, Volume 19, Number 7 (July 2013), 808. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.3254