Mixed Race Studies

Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

The New York Times
2013-09-01

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

“I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”…

…The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Let’s Learn From the Past: Cumberland Posey Jr.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2013-08-29

Michele Sneddon, History Center Communications Assistant

As a standout player, manager and owner, Cumberland Willis Posey Jr. built the Homestead Grays into one of the most successful franchises in Negro League baseball history.

Born on June 20, 1890, Posey grew up in a wealthy African-American household in Homestead. His father, Cumberland “Cap” Posey Sr., was general manager for the Delta Coal Co., president of Diamond Coal and Coke, and president of the Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co., which became one of the nation’s most influential African-American newspapers.

At Homestead High School, Posey starred as a power-hitting right fielder on the baseball diamond, a fullback on the football field and a dominant guard on the basketball court. Posey attended Penn State University and then the University of Pittsburgh before landing at the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost, now Duquesne University. He played basketball there and led his team in scoring for three years as “Charles Cumbert,” a fake name used to gain eligibility as a “white” player. While Posey never graduated from college, he established a reputation as one of the region’s top athletes…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed People: “Natural Bridges” to Racial Healing & Utopia?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-09-04, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Rainier Spencer, Senior Advisor to the President; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies; Founder and Director of the Afro-American Studies Program
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Rainier Spencer, Professor of Afro-American Studies in the Interdisciplinary Degrees Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He has authored three books: 1) Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Lynne Rienner, 2011; 2) Challenging Multiracial Identity, Lynne Rienner, 2006 and; 3) Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Westview, 1999.  All this and he currently serves as Senior Advisor to the UNLV President.

Dr. Spencer is the founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at UNLV and is considered one of the founders of the field of critical mixed-race theory. While his research interest is in multiracial identity from the perspective of racial skepticism, including the ways that multiracial identity is implicated in the reification of biological race his interdisciplinary teaching interests include Afro-American history and popular culture as well as American slavery. In addition to writing numerous anthology chapters in this field of study, Rainier Spencer has been interviewed by and has provided commentary for the New York Times, has appeared on both American & Canadian television to discuss mixed-race identity, and is a featured speaker in the documentary film Multiracial Identity (Abacus Productions, 2010).

Using his book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix as the foundation for today’s episode, we will discuss the long held view that mixed race people are somehow supposed to serve as a bridge to unite all people,

“But what of the notion that black/white persons are in themselves natural bridges for the facilitation of racial healing and reconciliation? It should come as no surprise that this is a biological argument dressed up in sociological attire.” —Rainier Spencer

For more information, click here.

Being Mixed Race: Am I A Human Rorschach Test?

Media Diversity UK: Tackling the lack of diversity in UK media and the ubiquity of whiteness
2013-09-03

Glen Chisholm

Just last week I was standing at a bus stop when a gentleman; a complete stranger came and joined me. Nothing unusual about that, we then politely nodded at each other and a conversation started up.

Me: “Evening”

Stranger: “Evening”

Me: “it’s still quite warm isn’t it”

Stranger: “yes it is”; pause; “excuse me mate, but were do you come from?”

Me: “Ipswich”

Stranger: “no, you know, were do you originate from”

Me: “I originate from Ipswich, my mum is English and my dad is Jamaican”

Stranger, sounding surprised: “Really I wouldn’t have thought you were Black, I’d have thought you were Italian or Spanish or something”

Me, politely smiles: “yeah, I sometimes get that”

Now I wasn’t offended by this and this wasn’t the first time or probably won’t be the last time that I’ll have this conversation. I am a light skinned mixed race person with loose curly hair. I have spent most of my life with people questioning my racial identity and for a while I was left questioning it myself…

Read the entire article here.

The Social Evolution of the Term “Half-Caste” in Britain: The Paradox of its Use as Both Derogatory Racial Category and Self-Descriptor

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 26, Issue 4 (December 2013)
pages 503–526
DOI: 10.1111/johs.12033

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

The term “half-caste” had its origins in nineteenth century British colonial administrations, emerging in the twentieth century as the quotidian label for those whose ancestry comprised multiple ethnic/racial groups, usually encompassing “White”. From the 1920s–1960s the term was used in Britain as a derogatory racial category associated with the moral condemnation of “miscegenation”. Yet today the label continues to be used as a self-descriptor and even survives in some official contexts. This paradox – of both derogatory racial category and self descriptor – is explored in the context of the term’s social evolution, drawing upon the theoretical constructs of the internal-external dialectic of identification and labelling theory.

Read or purchase the article here.

Dublin has problems. But I am proud to be part of a growing Irish mixed-race grouping, and to be able to see mixed-race people representing Ireland on the world stage whether it’s the new Rose of Tralee Clare Kambamettu, actresses Ruth Negga and Samantha Mumba, TV presenters Baz Ashmawy and Seán Musanje, or sportsmen such as Stephen Reid, Clinton Morrison, the Ó hAilpín brothers, or the late Darren Sutherland.

Zélie Asava, “the truth about dublin — an unfair city,” The Evening Herald, October 2, 2010. http://www.herald.ie/lifestyle/the-truth-about-dublin-an-unfair-city-27963389.html.

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands [DeLeón Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (March 2013)
page 1284
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas678

Arnoldo DeLeón, Professor of History
Angelo State University, San Angelo Texas

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By Grace Peña Delgado. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xvi, 304 pp.

Several theses drive this book’s narrative, among them are three that the author develops scrupulously. First, international and national influences shaped the histories of the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora. Migration—created in the nineteenth century by civil war in China and global demands for labor—brought the Chinese to the United States and Mexico. Chinese communities sprouted in both countries by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though they were more successful in Mexico where the Chinese established themselves as merchants. Commerce among these businessmen involved crossing borders and…

Read or purchase the review here.

Hapa-Palooza: A Celebration of Mixed Roots, Arts and Ideas

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2013-09-18, 2013-09-19, and 2013-09-21

Hapa-Palooza: A Vancouver Celebration of Mixed-Roots Arts and Ideas is a new cultural festival that celebrates the city’s identity as a place of hybridity, synergy and acceptance. A vibrant fusion of music, dance, literary, artistic and film performances, Hapa-Palooza places prominence on celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed-roots identity, especially amongst youth.

For more information, click here.

Return to the rainforest: A son’s search for his Amazonian mother

BBC News Magazine
2013-08-28

William Kremer
BBC World Service

David Good’s parents come from different countries – hardly unusual in the US where he was raised. But the 25-year-old’s family is far from ordinary – while his father is American, his mother is a tribeswoman living in a remote part of the Amazon. Two decades after she left, David realised he had to find her.

After three days on the Orinoco River, David Good felt sick.

He had been eaten alive by the relentless biting gnats, he was tired and thirsty. The air was dank and humid. Fierce rays of sunlight bounced off the surface of the piranha-filled river as the 40-horsepower motor puttered and the launch pushed further upriver, deeper into the Amazon.

His stomach was a knot of apprehension – he had not slept the previous night at all.

He was not a natural traveller or explorer. The lawns and parks of eastern Pennsylvania were his habitat and this trip to the Venezuelan Amazon – in July 2011 – was his first outside the US since early childhood…

…In 1968, the US anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his bestseller Yanomamo: The Fierce People. He described the tribe as being prone to petty disputes – usually over women – which escalate into wars between villages. He painted a picture of a world where chronic warfare, gang rape and murder were all facts of life.

It was as a graduate student of Chagnon’s that David Good’s father, Kenneth Good, first travelled to the Amazon in 1975. He travelled up the Orinoco past the Guajaribo Rapids, just as his son did 36 years later. He made his home in a little hut a short distance from the Hasupuweteri.

The plan was to stay for 15 months of fieldwork, measuring the animal protein intake of all the village members. This was to give Chagnon the data he needed to show his many critics that inter-village warfare was not related to the scarcity of food but stemmed from the drive to maximise reproductive success…

Read the entire article here.

Too Close for Comfort: Master and Slave Relations in the Colonial Cape

The World Is Robert: An assortment of posts related to an unquenchable thirst for knowledge
2013-04-03

Robert Figueroa

The effects of propinquity on the nature and development of slavery in colonial Cape society were profound. Unlike the large plantations that evolved in parts of the Americas, where enslaved Africans could develop slave cultures without the incessant supervision of whites, close contact between white masters and slaves in the Cape led to constant supervision that created intimately oppressive conditions. Therefore, slavery developed into an institution of extreme regulation and monitoring of slaves for social control with the appearances of benign paternalism, which was weaker in Cape Town than in the countryside.  These aforementioned intimately oppressive conditions entailed a form of slavery mixing physical and psychological forms of domination, domestic affection and the threat of violence, and paternalism and overseers to ensure slave subordination while also creating conditions for more cultural and racial mixing…

Read the entire article here.