Mixed Race Studies

Woman rides in Rose Bowl parade almost 60 years after being snubbed because of her race

The Washington Post
2015-01-01

Diana Reese
Overland Park, Kansas

Racism “was a fact of life,” Joan Williams says about 1958, the year she was supposed to ride on a city-sponsored float in the Rose Parade of Pasadena. The 27-year-old account clerk had been named “Miss Crown City,” with all the attendant duties of ribbon-cuttings and appearances at official functions. The city even paid for Williams’ portrait to be painted while she was wearing a tiara, gown and corsage.

“It wasn’t anything I sought,” Williams told me Wednesday. “My name was submitted unbeknownst to me by someone I worked with.”

She was chosen by the judges to represent the city employees. For someone who’d grown up watching the world-famous parade, it was “a joyous occasion.” But she was so light-skinned no one suspected her African-American heritage until a reporter met her dark-skinned husband and children. That was a game-changer in the late 1950s.

As Jet magazine reported, “Mrs. Williams did not ride on a float, because the City of Pasadena neglected to include one in its own parade. Too many others were already entered, explained an official.”

“Once they learned I was African American, I wasn’t the person they wanted representing the city,” Williams said. “I sure didn’t dwell on it because I had a life to live. That was their problem, not my problem.”…

Read the entire article here.

Joan Williams in Rose Parade after nearly 60 years, but some wonder why she wasn’t in broadcast

Pasadena Star-News
Pasadena, California
2015-01-01

Christina Gullickson, Reporter

Joan Williams, 82, right, rides the theme banner float Inspiring Stories, along Colorado Blvd. during the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California on January 1, 2015. (Photo by Leo Jarzomb/ Pasadena Star-News)

Joan Williams, the 82-year-old Pasadena, Calif., woman who was named “Miss Crown City” in 1957 and didn’t get to ride in the 1958 Rose Parade after word spread of her African-American ancestry, finally had her chance and was on the lead float in the Rose Parade on Thursday, Jan. 1, 2015. Some viewers were left wondering why Williams didn’t make it onto their TVs…

Read the entire article here.

Census Bureau’s Plan to Cut Marriage and Divorce Questions Has Academics Up in Arms

The New York Times
2014-12-31

Justin Wolfers, Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C.

also: Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Michigan

If the Census Bureau proceeds with a recently released plan, then in a few years’ time, we will know very little about how the contours of family life are changing.

We will not even know whether marriage and divorce rates are rising or falling. For all the talk of evidence-based policy, the result will be that important debates on issues including family law, welfare reform, same-sex marriage and the rise of nontraditional families will proceed in a statistical void.

Much of what I, an economist who has studied family issues, and my colleagues in this field have learned about recent trends in marriage and divorce has come from questions in the American Community Survey. It asks people whether they have given birth, married, divorced or been widowed in the past year. Their answers allow demographers to track marriage and divorce rates by age, gender, race and education.

These data have revealed many important social trends, including the rise of sharply different marriage and divorce patterns between rich and poor, and the increase in divorce among older Americans, even as it has fallen for younger people. And they have provided the only statistical window into the adoption of same-sex marriage.

The Census Bureau is proposing to eliminate these questions. It would follow a series of steps taken over recent decades that have collectively devastated our ability to track family change. This isn’t being done as a strategic policy choice but rather is the result of a series of isolated decisions made across several decades by statisticians scattered across various government agencies who have failed to understand the cumulative effect of their actions…

Read the entire article here.

I Don’t See Race; I Only See Grayish-Brown, Vaguely Humanoid Shapes

The Onion
Issue 50•49, 2014-12-12

Janice Ketchum

I don’t understand why everyone seems to be so angry lately. Everywhere you look, there are marches, protests, riots—and all of it over so-called racism in our great country. I just don’t get it. I really don’t. But maybe that’s because, when I look at my fellow Americans, I don’t see a particular race or color. In fact, all I see is just a series of muted, roughly person-shaped silhouettes.

And this world would be a much better place if everyone else did, too.

If we want to go forward as a country, we have to move beyond race once and for all. It’s 2014! Why is it so hard for people to look past each other’s race, like I do, and see everyone as vaporous, beige-ish forms with limbs? All those blurry, vaguely human-shaped troublemakers shouting in the streets and the translucent bleeding-heart blobs moralizing on TV may feel the need to categorize everyone they see by their skin color, but I don’t give it a second thought. I wouldn’t even know how!

Take, for example, the recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which sparked widespread outrage over “institutional racism.” These protesters are stuck in the past. They haven’t progressed enough to see that we’re all just grayish-brown smudges between approximately 4 and 6 and a half feet tall. They are part of the problem! Whereas they see “black” victims and “white” police, I just see amorphous clouds of the same basic hue, some of which have guns…

Read (with tongue-in-cheek) the entire article here.

Is NYPD’s War on Mayor Bill de Blasio Partly War on His Black Family?

AlterNet
2014-12-30

Terrell Jermaine Starr, Senior Editor

The cops’ fight with the city’s progressive mayor smacks of white supremacy.

In September 1992, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association organized thousands of New York City cops to storm City Hall to protest then-mayor David Dinkins’ proposal for an independent civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. The officers trampled on cars, jumped barricades and took over Brooklyn Bridge. Among their grievances was Dinkins’ refusal to give them semiautomatic weapons.

One of their slogans was “The Mayor’s on Crack.” The former mayor has also said many rank and file officers called him “nigger.” He blamed Rudy Giuliani for being in the middle of the rowdy cops and for nearly causing them to riot.

“Would the cops have acted in this manner toward a white mayor?” he asked in his 2013 memoir, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic. “No way in hell. If they’d done it to Ed Koch, he would have had them all locked up.”

Ironically, the NYPD has come close to similarly disrespecting our current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is white. While police have not quite reached the same level of violent rage toward de Blasio, their fight against him is no less vitriolic. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani, NYPD union president Patrick Lynch and many of the white power elite in the New York Police Department see in de Blasio what they saw in Dinkins: a non-white politician who dares to challenge its good ol’ boy system of policing with impunity.

While de Blasio is not black, his family is. His wife, Chirlane McCray, their daughter, Chiara, and son, Dante, reflect the same population the NYPD has brutalized for decades. De Blasio campaigned on police reform and featured Dante in a campaign ad where the teen declared that his dad would end stop-and-frisk, if elected. Once he became mayor, de Blasio ended the city’s defense of the policing tactic. The rank and file of the NYPD took that personally. He was NYPD Public Enemy #1 from that point on…

Read the entire article here.

Pasadena, Calif., Negro Queen Snubbed At Rose Bowl Festivities

Jet
1959-01-15
pages 50-51

Mayor J. Miller gifted Mrs. Williams at August ceremonies

For 26-year-old Mrs. Joan R. Williams, first Negro ever crowned queen in the Tournament of Roses’ 12-year history, Pasadena, California’s biggest event was anything but a bowl of roses. Although picked last August from a field of 15 to reign over Pasadena and ride on the city’s official float New Year’s Day, the petite mother of two was in fact a queen without a domain.

For when word spread that light-complexioned Mrs. Williams was a Negro, fellow employees in the municipal office where she works as an accountant-clerk suddenly stopped speaking to her. Mayor Jeth Miller, who crowned her at the city employees annual picnic, neither participated with her in later civic events nor rode with her in the Tournament of Roses parade.

And Mrs. Williams did not ride on a float, because the City of Pasadena neglected to include one in its own parade. Too many others were already entered, explained an official. She did not extend the city’s traditional welcome to the visiting Rose Bowl Queen because officials failed to introduce her. She did not occupy a special place of honor at the Rose Bowl football game, because there was none.

In fact, the only recognition Mrs. Williams received as queen were six free tickets—two for the reviewing stands along the parade route, two for the Coronation Ball and two for the game, where she and hubby, Robert, sat in the end zone as anonymously as other fans. Queenship had been an embarrassing affair both for her and her family, lamented Mrs. Williams. Said she at week’s end: “If I had to do it all over again, I would refuse the title.”