Mixed Race Studies

Actor Guilt

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-06-07

Khanisha Foster

Coming up on two years ago I moved to L.A., and since that time I have been writing. Writing creative non-fiction for 2nd Story, an organization that has stolen my heart, and writing my memoir—I’m the kid of a former Black Panther career criminal and heroin-addicted parents, one black and one white (so there’s lots to write about there), and with the help of UCLA’s professional program I’m in screenplay Heaven. All of this is work, commitment, and time well spent FO SHO, but here I am feeling like I’m cheating on acting.

Acting was the first and only thing I ever wanted to do. It taught me about my brain, my heart, my sexuality. I felt alive on stage before I ever felt it in real life. I was ready for the business you hear about when you grow up wanting to be an actor. I was going to be rejected. No problem. I was going to be poor. Since I had never been anything else, that was fine by me. I was going to have to work my butt off. This, to me, seemed to be the easiest part. My childhood was more than challenging, and my father always taught me I’d have to work twice as hard to get half as far, so hard work seemed habitual. What I wasn’t ready for was the complete challenge of identity I was about to undergo.

I’m mixed; the list, which changes in specifics based on my audience and how they wish to receive it (everybody thinks they know more about being mixed than you do), goes like this: black and white, which then breaks down into Creole, which then breaks down into African, French, Spanish (Spain), plus Native American (I prefer this to American Indian), Scottish, Irish, and German. Are you trying to picture what I look like? If you don’t know me or haven’t seen a picture, my skin is honey-colored (or so every base makeup I ever bought tells me), while my hair is almost black like both of my parents’; its waves fall into curls and it is shiny soft, and even though it looks full, quite thin. Everyone thinks I’m Latina…

Read the entire article here.

2nd Story’s “Cruel Summer” Ends Up Sweet

Gapers Block
Chicago, Illinois
2013-08-01

Ines Bellina

The night’s theme may have been “Cruel Summer: Stories of Learning the Hard Way,” but 2nd Story‘s first-ever appearance at City Winery last Monday gave audience members the giddy feeling of a summer fling. Combining storytelling and live music against the backdrop of the gorgeous City Winery stage, the event was perhaps one of the most carefully crafted storytelling soirees of the season. Director and curator Jess Kadish turned a mundane Monday evening into one hell of a summer bash…

…Take the second storyteller, Khanisha Foster. Her heartbreaking (and often laugh-out-loud funny) account of trying to make it as an actor despite her ethnically ambiguous looks showcased her chameleon-like ability to imitate everyone from a shady theater director to Gilda Radner. Foster’s performance was easily the most bittersweet of the night. Her vulnerability was palpable as she described the struggles of wanting to be seen as a talented thespian while being obscured by her “Latina” looks. (Foster’s mother is white and her father is black.) Her versatility as an actor allowed her to easily transition from one character to another, making the piece even more poignant…

Read the entire article here.

Colleges Help Ithaca Thrive In a Region Of Struggles

The New York Times
2013-08-04

Jesse McKinley

ITHACA, N.Y. — In many ways, this city is not so special. It has a nice lake, some attractive houses with lawns, and a couple of colleges. But many places in upstate New York have lakes and lawns and places of high learning.

What most sets this city of 30,000 apart from many of its neighbors these days is what is absent: fear for its future.

Led by a young mayor with an inspiring back story and an idealist’s approach — he talks about sidewalks in philosophical terms — Ithaca is the upstate exception: a successful liberal enclave in a largely conservative region troubled by unemployment woes, declining or stagnant population, and post-Detroit talk of bankruptcy.

“It’s like a little San Francisco,” Nicole Roulstin, 32, an Ithaca resident, said recently, “or the Berkeley of the East.”

Much of that optimism comes from a reciprocal relationship with two institutions — Cornell University and, to a lesser degree, Ithaca College — which have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy and created thousands of jobs for everyone from professors to landscapers, and also fostered new companies. Ithaca and its home county, Tompkins, regularly post the lowest unemployment rate in the state. In June, Ithaca’s was 5.7 percent, tied with another college city, Saratoga Springs, where a racetrack drives an annual summer boom.

Ithaca’s model of education as an economic engine is one that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has made a priority this year as a strategy for all of upstate, where there are dozens of universities. In June, he signed into law a bill that would allow State University of New York branches and some private schools to offer tax-free zones for new businesses that open on or adjacent to campuses.

Ithaca’s mayor, Svante L. Myrick, who was invited to speak alongside the governor when he promoted the plan in May, playfully challenged other leaders of Ivy League cities in the Northeast to come to his. “And I’ll show you how we built in Ithaca the lowest unemployment rate in the state,” he said, adding that the city had been successful “because our universities have partnered with our private industries,” and did not just rely on businesses selling “sandwiches and beds” to visitors and students…

…Soft-spoken and slyly funny, Mr. Myrick is a striking success story. Living in the tiny town of Earlville, N.Y., he overcame a childhood that included stints living in shelters and sometimes sleeping in a family car. His father struggled with drug abuse, and his mother raised him and his three siblings on minimum-wage jobs, with help from his grandparents.

Mr. Myrick, whose mother is white and whose father is African-American, said he vividly remembers reading about Barack Obama as a teenager. “I thought, ‘Holy moly,’” Mr. Myrick said. “Here’s this guy, he’s mixed race, he’s got a funny name, he’s just like me. And it made me think I could go to a good school. I could do something.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway: A History of Four U.S. Army Regiments in the North, 1942-1943

McFarland
2013
228 pages
39 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Softcover (7 x 10)
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7117-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-0039-0

John Virtue, Director
International Media Center at Florida International University

This is the first detailed account of the 5,000 black troops who were reluctantly sent north by the United States Army during World War II to help build the Alaska Highway and install the companion Canol pipeline. Theirs were the first black regiments deployed outside the lower 48 states during the war. The enlisted men, most of them from the South, faced racial discrimination from white officers, were barred from entering any towns for fear they would procreate a “mongrel” race with local women, and endured winter conditions they had never experienced before. Despite this, they won praise for their dedication and their work. Congress in 2005 said that the wartime service of the four regiments covered here contributed to the eventual desegregation of the Armed Forces.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Monte Irvin
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Pondering a Pathway to Alaska
• 2. Highway and Pipeline Approved
• 3. The Second Emancipation Order
• 4. Blacks Rush to Enlist
• 5. Black Soldiers Voice Their Complaints
• 6. Army Reluctantly Assigns Black Regiments
• 7. Heading North
• 8. Japanese Attack Justifies the Alcan Highway
• 9. The 93rd and the 95th Start Off with Picks and Shovels
• 10. The 97th Completes the Highway
• 11. The 388th Does the Heavy Lifting
• 12. An Unexpectedly Severe Winter
• 13. Surviving Isolation
• 14. The Highway Is Praised, the Pipeline Criticized
• 15. Identifying Problems
• 16. News Coverage of Black Troops Suppressed
• Epilogue
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Mixed races, mixed messages

UWM News
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
2013-08-02

A recent Cheerios commercial featuring a white mother, black father and their daughter attracted a few nasty comments, followed by a huge outpouring of support, with 95 percent of viewers “liking” the commercial.

The recent advertisement is just one reflection of America’s long history of strong feelings about interracial relationships.

Greg Carter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, traces the history of how such relationships have been both demonized and praised in “The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing.”  The book looks at the ways Americans have thought about racial mixing from Colonial times to the present.

“There has been a lot of attention, and an increase in visibility of people of mixed racial heritage,” says Carter. President Barack Obama and golf champion Tiger Woods, in particular, have raised the profile of people of mixed race in recent years. In addition, the Census Bureau and other government agencies have broadened the number of choices people have in filling out the “race” box on federal forms…

Read the entire article here.

Her Mammy’s Daughter: Symbolic Matricide and Racial Constructions of Motherhood in Charles W. Chesnutt’s “Her Virginia Mammy”

49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies
Issue 16: Autumn 2005
ISSN: 1753-5794

Laura Dawkins, Professor of English
Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky

The black mother in slavery and beyond has inspired a growing body of contemporary literature by African-American women.  Following Margaret Walker’s lead in her 1942 poem “Lineage,” and—more famously—Alice Walker’s example in her landmark essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983), a significant number of black women writers have honored their foremothers in poetry, fiction, and memoir. Indeed, the celebratory strain in African-American women’s writings about maternal influence upon their lives and work has been so pronounced that Marianne Hirsch, discussing the pervasiveness of daughterly “matrophobia” in twentieth-century literature, admits that she cannot comfortably include works by black women in her parade of examples, since so many of these writers—in contrast to their white contemporaries—seem determined to avoid any hint of “mother-blame” in both fictional and non-fictional works.  Pointing out the “tremendously powerful need [for black women writers] to present to the public a positive image of black womanhood,” Hirsch quotes E. Frances White’s declaration of the African-American woman’s singular obligation to suppress less-than-ideal portrayals of black maternal figures: “How dare we admit the psychological battles that need to be fought with the very women who taught us to survive in this racist and sexist world?  We would feel like ungrateful traitors” (177).

Yet according to Mary Helen Washington, the absence of “matrophobia” in works by contemporary black women writers reflects not a suppression of the issue of mother-daughter conflict (as Hirsch and White suggest), and an impossible idealization of maternal influence (such as critic Dianne Sadoff finds in Walker’s essay), but the actual healthy state of affairs between black mothers and daughters.  Washington affirms the “generational continuity between [black daughters] and their mothers,” an enduring bond that inspires many African-American women writers to “name their mothers as models,” and to “challenge the fiction of mother-daughter hostility” (160).  In Washington’s view, black mothers and daughters, both because of and in spite of the painful historical legacy they share, do not succumb to the anger and upheaval associated with the traditional mother-daughter relationship…

Read the entire article here.

Blurring the “Color-Line”?: Reflections on Interracial and Multiracial America

49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies
Issue 6: Special Issue – Race and Ethnicity (Fall 2000)
ISSN: 1753-5794

Yasuhiro Katagiri, Ph.D., Associate Professor of American History and Government,
Tokai University, Kanagawa, Japan

“[N]o matter how we articulate this [case] [and] no matter which theory of the due process clause . . . we attach to it, no one can articulate it better than Richard Loving, when he said to me: ‘Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.’” —Bernard S. Cohen, Counsel for Appellants, Oral Argument, Loving v. Virginia, United States Supreme Court, April 10, 1967

“We basically accept that there are three races–Caucasians, Negroes and Orientals.  Caucasians can’t date Orientals, Orientals can’t date Caucasians, and neither of them can date Negroes.” —Bob Jones III, President, Bob Jones University

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., eloquently delivered his “dream” to the American people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  “I have a dream,” King’s voice reverberated to “let freedom ring” from the nation’s capital, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  However, in the years since one of America’s foremost civil rights crusaders spoke these noble words during the March on Washington, divisions between races have refused to go away, and the American society, as if to punctuate the words “E Pluribus” rather than the word “Unum,” still splinters into “disparate factions” divided by race and ethnicity.

Almost four decades after his father challenged the conscience of America, Martin Luther King III stood before the Lincoln Memorial on a hot and steamy day in August 2000.  Speaking before several thousand people at a rally billed as  “Redeem the Dream,” which was organized to protest police brutality and its racial profiling, King—one of those “four little children”—told the gathered crowd: “I dare you to fulfill the dream.”  Though race of course has something to do with “biological makeup,” as Jon M. Spencer argues in his book on what he terms America’s “mixed-race movement,” it also is “a sociopolitical construct,”  which “was created and has been maintained and modified by the powerful” to perpetuate themselves as a privileged group.  And the United States, in this regard, has been no stranger.

But on the verge of a new millennium, while the underpinnings of the nation’s affirmative action seem to be somewhat crumbling, an accelerating social trend—the increase of interracial marriages and the growing number of multiracial citizens—is beginning to engulf American society, which might well contribute to bringing about a long-hoped-for “color-blind” society.  And this  important, but heretofore imperceptible, social and demographic trend has been in evidence during the 2000 presidential election year, which is also a decennial census-taking year in the United States.  As an illustration, the embracement of, or at least the recognition of, the nation’s multiracial citizens could be manifestly observed during the national convention of the Republican Party, which has been recognized for some time as the party of, by, and for “the powerful.”  One of the keynote speakers on the final day of the Philadelphia convention was Republican Nominee George W. Bush’s nephew—George P. Bush.  He is not only the son of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and a descendant of a new political dynasty, but also the son of Columba, his Mexican-born mother.  “I am an American, but like many, I come from a diverse background,”  the youth chairman of the Republican National Convention proudly proclaimed, “[a]nd I respect leaders who respect my [multiracial and multicultural] heritage.”…

Read the entire article here.

We biracials can claim a unique role in race dialogue

The Roanoke Times
Roanoke, Virginia
2013-07-28

Lucinda Roy, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Following a keynote on diversity I delivered recently, a woman approached me and commented on the fact that I had referred to myself as biracial. She said she was reluctant to use the term “biracial” when referring to herself because people accused her of betrayal.

“They make you choose sides,” she said.

I thought for a moment and then replied, “No one has the right to tell you who you are. You’re you. You’re free to be whoever you choose to be.”

When President Obama spoke to the nation on July 19 in his surprise address in the White House briefing room, I was reminded of the many ways in which those of us who are biracial are told we have to pick sides…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Obama as Wounded Healer

Psychology Today
Ideals in Question: Exploring values in psychotherapeutic culture
2013-08-02

Stephen Salter, Psy.D.

Validating the context of racial trauma

On July 19th, Barack Obama honored the life of Trayvon Martin by giving voice to the history of racial trauma in the African American community.  “It could have been me,” Obama states in reference to Trayvon.  The remark reminds me of the old proverb, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  Obama’s kinship with Trayvon relates of course to their identities as African Americans.

He delivered a 17 minute off the cuff speech with unprecedented candor, provoking powerful reactions that diverged along racial, political, and personal lines.

For Barack Obama, Trayvon Martin’s death was a trauma.  It set off a chain of recollections that were outside of the flow of day to day experience, revealing additional dimension of his character.  His recollections pointed toward his personal past, his identity as a black man, and his connectedness to the history of African American trauma…

Read the entire article here.

‘Koreans are not racist’

The Korea Times
2013-08-02

Jonathan Breen

Koreans can be close-minded to issues of race and culture, but they know it and they want to learn, says the head of a foundation that helps multiethnic children here.

Yang Chan-wook, chairman of the Movement for the Advancement of the Cultural Diversity of Koreans (MACK) — told The Korea Times that Korea is not a racist or prejudiced country, but a country going through change.

“Racism is usually based on hate — Korea is nothing like that,” he said…

…“We focus on the diversity of Koreans — anyone with a mixed heritage. And we help Koreans accept them,” he said.

Like many MACK members, Yang is mixed-race — part Korean from his mother and part African-American from his father. He prefers to go by his Korean name rather than his Western name, Gregory Diggs…

…The segregation of school children in Korea is what first led the recently appointed MACK president Frank Brannen to work with multiethnic Koreans.

“I thought all multicultural children attended Korean schools, but then I learnt that wasn’t the case, so that is when I got involved,” said the 32-year-old, adding, “In some aspects for student’s futures, I don’t think going to multicultural schools is the way forward.”…

Read the entire article here.