Mixed Race Studies

White on Paper

Those People
2015-08-20

John Metta

My sister opening presents while I try to steal the show. Just ordinary Black children having a birthday party, unconscionably ignoring dominant stereotypes.

In June, Rachel Dolezal, an activist and former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, was outed by her parents as being a white woman. She later left the organization. And just yesterday, Shaun King, an activist affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, was “outed” by Vicki Pate as being white on Re-NewsIt!, her blog.

Now, let me be clear: This essay is not about Rachel Dolezal pretending to be Black, nor is it about whether Shaun King is Black. This essay is about being Black, in a white world, under a white media lens.

So there are questions about Shaun King’s race based on a police report that lists him as white. This has little to do with his race, and everything to do with institutionalized racism. It’s most likely that an officer was filling out a form, and decided he was white because it wasn’t worth it to actually ask the question.

I know that can happen because it has happened to me many times…

Read the entire article here.

Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie?

Al Jazeera Magazine
2015-08-21

John Metta

“There are no qualifiers to my blackness, and I will never again be Not Black Enough. I am a black man, and I am angry.”

My father’s anger was a storm.

Like many other boys, I was carefree and careless with a thoughtlessness that bordered on stupidity. The world revolved around my desire to laugh and run in a bubble of fun and I rarely noticed the wake of catastrophe that cast out behind me. But I was always aware of my father watching me, and I was aware of the storm.

He was a giant of a man, with a voice like thunder in the distance. I was a butterfly, small and frightened, observing the horizon of his brow, watching to see if the storm clouds were coming near, waiting for the winds to blow in my direction.

Surprisingly, despite my raucous behaviour, they very rarely did.

There was a deep anger in my father, but that storm ravaged other lands. Most often, my delicate wings felt only his whisper. But the whisper of my father was still a very powerful thing.

Each of my siblings have their stories about these whispers, about the times my father sat them down to have A Talk – a proper noun that is capitalised in our childhood memories the way A Beating is for some children. A Talk was a gruelling ordeal of mental torture where your mind felt like a balloon filled with too much water.

I, the only son of his six children (and his least intelligent child by far), was often caught off guard by A Talk…

Read the entire article here.

“Race” is man-made, and much of the scientific enterprise has traditionally supported the myth that racial differences accurately represent real, biological differences among humans. These beliefs limit how scientists, policymakers, and everyday citizens can work together to tackle the real racial inequality of today. By increasing the dialogue of how we can tackle racial inequality regardless of whether we work in a laboratory or not, we can continue to deconstruct the myth that race is found in our genes, and begin to search in earnest for the legal, policy, economic, political, and social forces that make the effects of race all too real.

Matthew W. Hughey, “The Risks of Turning Races Into Genes,” The Huffington Post, August 20, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-w-hughey/the-risks-of-turning-race_b_8010956.html.

Outside of my mother’s home, as a kid I lived a deeply black experience. Black families invited me to attend vacation Bible school. I attended black family reunions where old people would come up and pinch my cheeks and tell me who I looked like in their family. I went to black skate parties, black block parties/festivals, and did so not as a white intruder, but as a Karl Kani wearing, widely welcomed, light-skinned black kid. I soaked up every moment I had as I was fully, unabashedly loved, even doted upon, by black families throughout central Kentucky. It was a refuge for me and also a rite of passage of sorts. In high school I joined exclusively black achievers groups. With scholars I love and respect to this day at the University of Kentucky, I attended and helped plan King Day events, and just lived my life.

Shaun King, “Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story,” Daily Kos, August 20, 2015. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/20/1413881/-Race-love-hate-and-me-A-distinctly-American-story.

Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 661, Number 1, September 2015
pages 8-22
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215591476

W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

In August 2012, nine months after being artificially inseminated using a sperm donation from the Midwest Sperm Bank of Downers Grove, Illinois, a white Ohio woman named Jennifer Cramblett gave birth to a racially “mixed” and healthy baby girl named Payton. Despite the triumph, the woman soon filed a “wrongful birth” suit in Cook County Circuit Court, alleging that the sperm bank gave her sperm vials from an African American donor instead of a white donor, which in turn caused “personal injuries . . . pain, suffering, emotional distress and other economic and non-economic losses” (Circuit Court 2014, 8). The lawsuit states “that they now live each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton’s future” (Circuit Court 2014, 6).

The supposed racial mismatch between parent and child in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank reveals the presence of two powerful belief systems that haunt both the popular imagination and stalk the scientific landscape: the notions of “biological determinism” (that race is genetically inherited) and “racial essentialism” (that group-based biology maps to basic social behaviors). Together, biological determinism and racial essentialism form the “ideological double helix” that intertwines to shape beliefs about race and inequality and influence the theoretical approaches, analytic strategies, and interpretations taken by scholars conducting biomedical and social scientific research. The suit turns on the assumption that varied racial groups have bounded and characteristically unique arrangements of genetic material: as the complaint contends, “Their desire was to find a donor with genetic traits similar to both of them” (Circuit Court 2014, 2–3). Such devotion to racial essentialism motivates a belief that the two white parents in this case are more similar to each other (because of their shared “whiteness”) than they are to their child (because of an unknown “black” father), even though the…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Risks of Turning Races Into Genes

The Huffington Post
2015-08-20

Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

From 22-25 August, sociologists from around the nation and world will descend upon the Windy City of Chicago to discuss sundry issues as they participate in the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. One issue, however, is quite controversial: do genes or the social environment determine our behavior and health? Precisely, does nature or nurture determine the outcome of racial differences and racial inequality found throughout society?

Many readily acknowledge scientific advances are a necessary part of an improving society. From making cars more efficient on the road and beaming pictures from Pluto across the solar system to Earth, to developing new medical procedures to help us live better and making a longer lasting light bulb. Despite the many improvements science affords, cultural bias and normative assumptions can undergird the scientific methods and lead us down a dangerous path that has plagued American society for centuries. This path relies on a logic about race and difference that was and continues to be shared by many: from Thomas Jefferson to Dylan Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine African American churchgoers in Charleston this summer. What may be even more surprising is that a variation of this same logic can infiltrate science and influences how we understand who achieves better jobs and even who succeeds at professional sports.

In the just released issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science we edited, I have gathered (with Professor W. Carson Byrd) an array of experts on race, science, technology, and society to explain how the fiction of “race” can have very real consequences. By exploring both biological determinism and racial essentialism together–what I and Professor Byrd call the “ideological double helix”–we explain how misunderstandings of race, genes, and inequality frequently creep into supposedly an objective science…

Read the entire article here.

On Martha’s Vineyard, black elites ponder the past year

Politico
2015-08-22

Sara Wheaton, White House Reporter

As Obama vacations on the island, an upper-class gathering grapples with a year of unrest.

EDGARTOWN, Mass. – For America’s black elite, this year’s seasonal sojourn to Martha’s Vineyard turned into a soul-searching retreat.

The shooting of a young, unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo., last year did little to disrupt the annual idyll of upper-class blacks on this island 1,200 miles away. Photos showed President Barack Obama dancing at a soiree for political power couple Vernon and Ann Jordan as Ferguson burned. The next afternoon he delivered an anodyne statement urging calm without mentioning race.

Obama returned this year for his sixth summer in office on Martha’s Vineyard, the island off the Massachusetts coast that has been a vacation destination for upwardly mobile African Americans for more than a century. But this year, many of the black doctors, lawyers, executives, professors and politicians who gather here to enjoy the sunshine, surf and cultural events are grappling with the realization that there may not be quite as much to celebrate as they once hoped.

Yes, the country has been led by a black president for nearly seven years. But images from body cameras and smart phones that have splashed police killings of unarmed black men across televisions and the Internet over the past year have forced the black elite to recognize — along with the rest of America — that their highest tide has left some boats sinking faster than ever…

Read the entire article here.

Tony Gleaton: Photographing The African Story Across The Americas

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-08-23

Karen Grigsby Bates

Photographer Tony Gleaton died last Friday after struggling with a particularly aggressive cancer for 18 months. He was working, signing prints, talking to museums (several have his work in their collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem) and checking in with his friends right up to the last day. I admired his work, but also treasured his friendship.

For many years, Tony often showed up on my Los Angeles doorstep with a huge sack of dirty laundry slung over his shoulder and a box of contact sheets under one arm.

“Here,” he’d say, placing the box in my hands, and walking through the door. “Look at these. I’m gonna do some laundry, okay?”…

…In the beginning, he got a lot of pushback. “Why do you want to take our picture?” the villagers would ask, warily. “We have no money to pay you.”

When Tony would explain that he was documenting the African Diaspora around the world, and that they and he were both part of it, the conversation often became even harder.

“You want to take pictures of black people?” they’d ask.

“Yes, like you and me … ” he’d begin

“Well,” they’d respond, looking at his fair skin, light hair and blue-green eyes. “You’re not black. And we’re certainly not black. So you need to do that somewhere else.”

Eventually he learned to refine his approach and tell the villagers he wanted people in the States to see how beautiful people in the villages were. “I just gave up on the black connection. It was important to me, but not to them. They see race differently than we do. And it’s only a social construct anyway.”

There is still stigma to acknowledging blackness in many parts of Mexico, and Tony’s work raised the profile of Latinos with what is sometimes called “the Third Root” — Spanish, Indian, African — in Latino culture. His work eventually expanded across the Americas to form an exhibit called Tengo Casi 500 Anos (I Have Almost 500 Years) — Africa’s Legacy in Mexico that explores the African presence in the Americas. He’s also chronicled black, Indian and Mexican cowboy culture, as well as life in American Samoa and the Mississippi Delta…

Read the entire article here.

Voodoo Chile-Jimi Hendrix / Gayageum ver. by Luna

Ourstorian: Until Lions write their own history, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the Hunter
2015-08-23

From wiki: “The gayageum or kayagum is a traditional Korean zither-like string instrument, with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 21 or other numbers of strings. It is probably the best known traditional Korean musical instrument. It is related to other Asian instruments, including the Chinese guzheng, the Japanese koto, the Mongolian yatga, and the Vietnamese đàn tranh.”

Performed by Luna.

Exhibition: Zun Lee, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
Contemporary Gallery
233 4th Street, NW
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
2015-06-09 through 2015-08-29

Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12:00-18:00; Saturday, 10:00-15:00

Through intimate black-and-white frames, the viewer gains access to often-overlooked moments in the lives of African American men whom Lee has worked with since 2011. Lee brings into focus what pervasive father absence stereotypes have distorted – black men who define parental presence on their own terms and whose masculinity is humanized, not viewed with suspicion. Using his struggle with father absence as inspiration, Lee examines a complex subject matter with profound vulnerability, resulting in a richly woven narrative that is deceptively simple yet multidimensional.

For Father Figure, Zun Lee used his personal journey of discovery and identity formation to examine manifestations of black fatherhood largely ignored by mainstream media. The book has been shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and named a winner in the Photo Books category of the 2015 PDN Photo Annual competition.

Zun Lee is an award-winning photographer from Toronto, Canada who was named onto PDN’s 30 List in 2014. His visual storytelling has been widely featured in The New York Times and other publications..

Zun Lee, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood is presented in partnership with the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph and is made possible through the generous support of the Blue Moon Fund, and Hampton Inn and Suites.

For more information, click here.