Mixed Race Studies

Between the World and Me: Empathy Is a Privilege

The Atlantic
2015-09-28

John Paul Rollert, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates have made race and empathy central to their writing, but their conclusions point in radically different directions.

Don’t despair. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, that’s what President Obama told him at the end of a White House meeting in 2013. Coates had criticized the president on his blog for favoring the rhetoric of black self-help over an honest conversation about structural racism. Having written and reflected extensively on race, Obama made it plain to Coates that he took exception to the critique, ending what must have been a tense conversation with his brief words of encouragement. The president reportedly took along Coates’s new book on his recent trip to Martha’s Vineyard. If he found time to read it, he knows the younger man didn’t take his advice to heart.

Obama is not an acknowledged interlocutor of Between the World and Me, but the book may be read as a skeptical reply to the putative power of empathy to transcend racial divisions—a leitmotif of Obama’s two books and a guiding conceit of his presidency. In The Audacity of Hope, the book Obama wrote in 2006 to test enthusiasm for a possible White House run, he describes empathy as both the “heart of my moral code” and a “guidepost for my politics.” Defining it succinctly as a successful attempt to “stand in somebody’s else’s shoes and see through their eyes,” Obama regards empathy not as an exceptional gesture but an organizing principle for ethical behavior and even a preferred way of being. By cultivating our capacity for empathy, he says, we are forced beyond “our limited vision.” We unburden ourselves of the trivial rigidities that divide us, allowing us to “find common ground” even in the face of our sharpest disagreements…

…Trauma is an irremediable fact of Coates’s work. “I am wounded,” he tells his son. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” The sentiment hints at another book Coates might have written, one that sees him transcend the crises of his youth for a new understanding in adulthood. That story is more or less the one Obama tells in Dreams of My Father, his first book and, like Coates’s, a lyrical memoir that presents the author’s life as an allegory for race in America. That the two men draw such divergent conclusions—Coates detects a “specious hope” in the picture of a white cop embracing a black boy after a Ferguson protest, whereas Obama considers the interracial harmony of his own family hope at its most audacious—is not merely the consequence of two very different sets of lived experience, but the lessons drawn from them and their implications for empathic transcendence.

Especially when juxtaposed with Between the World and Me, the chapters of Dreams of My Father that profile Obama’s adolescence are striking for the studied dispassion that has marked the president’s decisions in office and seems essential to his character. When he describes the racist episodes of his youth, it is not merely that they lack the “visceral” menace of Coates’s experience—he revealingly calls them a “ledger of slights”—they seem only to scratch him, they never scar…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana

Ohio University Press
October 2015
364 pages
11 illus., 3 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-2179-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-2180-2
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4539-6

Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Gold Coasters—their social practices, interests, and anxieties—shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations across racial lines. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its racial and gendered hierarchies of power.

With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.

Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

Born that way? ‘Scientific’ racism is creeping back into our thinking. Here’s what to watch out for.

The Washington Post
2015-09-28

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

Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

This month, Jennifer Cramblett lost her “wrongful birth” lawsuit, which centered on a troubling ideology that has been creeping into mainstream discussions in ways not seen in decades. Cramblett claimed that the sperm used to inseminate her came from the wrong donor, leading to a biracial child, which she had not wanted. Her lawsuit claimed that this mix-up in the lab caused her and her family personal injuries of various kinds.

This lawsuit was shadowed by a troubling logic: the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices. In doing so, Cramblett’s claims echoed arguments made in a darker era of global history of “scientific” racism.

Here’s how the argument goes. Some people are born with outstanding talents, easily mastering basketball, mathematics, languages or piano, if given the right environment in which to grow. What biologist or social scientist could argue with that? But alongside that genetic understanding, an old and pernicious assumption has crept back into the American conversation, in which aptitudes are supposedly inherited by race: certain peoples are thought to have rhythm, or intellect, or speed or charm. That’s a fast track toward the old 19th- and early 20th-century problem of “scientific” racism…

…Sociological data suggest that the social behavior of both slaves and slaveholders better explains mortality rates than do physiological qualities of health, speed or strength. In particular, groups of rebellious young men were were most likely to die than those who passively acquiesced, while the economically well-off slaveholders were more likely to kill slaves than those who could not afford to lose property. In sum, the social forces of organized rebellion and the political economy of slavery are better explanations for mortality rates than abstract appeals to “genes” or “natural selection.”

Hughey’s and Goss’s work finds that such explanations have actually proliferated in an era that many argue is “colorblind” or “post-racial,” from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews who proudly said that he forgot, for a moment, that Obama was black, to a 2011 New York Times article that referred to interracial marriage as “a step toward transcending race,” to the claim that “all”— not “black” — lives matter, as presidential candidate Rand Paul recently insisted…

Read the entire article here.

An Ohio town where races have mixed freely for more than 200 years

The Washington Post
2015-09-26

Kevin Williams

Connor Keiser, 22, left, shows his album of historic photos of Longtown to James Jett, 90 at Bethel Long Wesleyan Church. (Maddie McGarvey/For The Washington Post)

Amid the corn and soybean fields of western Ohio lies a progressive crossroads where black and white isn’t black and white, where the concept of race has been turned upside down, where interracial marriages have been the norm for nearly two centuries. The heavy boots of Jim Crow have never walked here.

Founded by James Clemens, a freed slave from Virginia who became a prosperous farmer, Longtown was a community far ahead of its time, a bold experiment in integration.

Now that history is in danger of being lost. Longtime Longtown residents are dying, and whites are moving in and buying property. Many historically black-owned buildings have already been torn down or remodeled.

But Clemens’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson is working to save his family’s heritage. Though his eyes are blue and his skin is pale, Connor Keiser, 22, said that his childhood is filled with memories of “cousins of all colors” playing in the pastures at the family farm.

“We were a typical Longtown family. We all looked different, and we were taught that color didn’t matter,” Keiser said. “As long as I have anything to do with it, Longtown won’t die.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Fabulous World of Harumi Klossowska de Rola

The New York Times Magazine
2015-09-22

Hilary Moss

“Benoît, my partner, took this photo in 2013 in front of the Grand Chalet, which was a hotel until my father bought it. It is still loaded with thousands of books and even old skis from English clients. My mom has her studio there, Benoît has his studio, I have my own studio. It’s almost like apartments in a city — you can hear everyone’s muffled footsteps.” Credit: Benoît Peverelli

Balthus’s jewelry-designing daughter reflects on her ethereal life in a historic Swiss chalet — and on memories of a singular childhood.

HARUMI KLOSSOWSKA DE ROLA’S first home was the massive Renaissance Villa Medici at the edge of the Borghese gardens, residence of the French Academy in Rome, which was run throughout the 1960s and much of the 1970s by her father, the painter Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus. Klossowska, now in her 40s, scoured the grounds for treasures such as pale pink stones and bits of blue-green glass from mosaics to show him. Later, she found that he had kept them all, close, in his bedside top drawer.

Such moments shaped the playful, Zen, otherworldly aesthetic of the designer, who conceives high jewelry pieces for Chopard and Boucheron and for her own line. After Balthus’s stint at the Academy ended when she was 5, the family home became the Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland, built in the mid-1700s, one of the largest wooden residential structures in Europe. She lives and works there still, with her partner, the photographer Benoît Peverelli, and their two children, as well as her mother, the Japanese-born painter Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, who was 34 years Balthus’s junior. They spend time as well at Castello de Montecalvello, a medieval Italian castle that her father bought in 1967, where a half-brother, Stanislas, lives…

Read the entire article here.

Dr. Wanda Wyporska on Witchcraft Persecution

WandaWyporskaWitchcraft
2014-09-07

Dr. Wanda Wyporska

A show reel of Dr Wanda Wyporska talking about witchcraft for the BBC BAME expert days – 2014

Presents Race, Hip-Hop & The American Future: A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

The John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2204 Erwin Road
Durham, North Carolina 27708-0402
Monday, 2015-09-28, 18:30 EDT (Local Time)

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African & African American Studies

The Center for Arts + Digital Culture + Entrepreneurship (CADCE) Presents Race, Hip-Hop & The American Future: A Conversation with Adam Mansbach on Monday, September 28, 2015 at 6:30 pm at the John Hope Franklin Center for International & Interdisciplinary Studies (2204 Erwin Road).

Mansbach’s 2013 novel, Rage is Back, was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle and is currently being adapted for the stage; his previous novels include the California Book Award-winning The End of the Jews and the cult classic Angry Black White Boy, taught at more than eighty schools, including at Duke, this semester.

Mansbach is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, which has been translated into 40 languages, and was Time Magazine’s 2011 “Thing of the Year.” The sequel, You Have to Fucking Eat, was published in November of 2014 and is also a New York Times bestseller.

For more information, click here.

What Makes Black Men Run From the Police?

The Root
2015-08-27

Will Jawando

Your Take: A good, hard look at the statistics will tell you why African Americans have reason to fear an encounter with police.

t’s never much of a surprise when I hear it, but it stings all the same. Freddie Gray would be alive today if only he hadn’t inexplicably sprinted down his West Baltimore street. As would Walter Scott, the African-American man who was shot in the back in South Carolina fleeing a white police officer who then made an unsuccessful attempt to frame Scott for provoking his own destruction.

If only Sandra Bland hadn’t been so rude and had put out her cigarette when asked, no matter her constitutionally protected rights to both. If only Samuel DuBose had not tried to pull his car away from a Cincinnati university officer who then proceeded to empty a shell into his skull.

If only.

The question persists: Why do they run? Why do they run? Why don’t they just cooperate with the police? This is America, after all: a country where one is presumed innocent until proved guilty.

I know why. I am a black man, and I have been arrested. I am also a husband and father of three, a lawyer, a former White House aide and now a candidate for Congress…

Read the entire article here.

A Place in Between

The Washington Post
2008-08-25

Kevin Merida, Managing Editor

Will Jawando sat on a Capitol Hill park bench admiring an unseasonably breezy August afternoon as he told his story of being half black and half white, “kind of a double outsider” in a nation still struggling with difference.

His story could easily be titled “Barack and Me,” for Jawando, who grew up in Montgomery County, also is the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black African father (his from Nigeria). Oh, and he just happened to marry a woman named Michele.

Now a legislative assistant to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Jawando, 26, sees in Obama a politician who not only shares his personal story but speaks to the sensibilities of his generation. “Barack’s whole message is: ‘I can stand in everyone’s shoes.’ ”

Obama’s unique biography has been central both to his success as a presidential contender and to his opponents’ efforts to portray him as strange, elitist, untrustworthy. Over these next four days, as Democrats host their national convention in Denver, that biography will be on display for Americans to get a closer look.

It is commonly said and written that Obama would become the first black president, not the first biracial president. In part, that is because the nation’s history of racism and inequality continues to make racial milestones so significant, and none more significant than winning the presidency. One could argue that Obama is less the product of the Kenyan father who abandoned him at age 2 and more a reflection of his white mother, who traveled the world as an anthropologist, raising her son in Hawaii and Indonesia with help from Barack’s white grandparents…

Read the entire article here.

If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example. As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word “Hispanic” to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group. “The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “If you go to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won’t necessarily hear people say they are ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ ”

Carlos Lozada, “Who is Latino?,” The Washington Post, June 21, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-is-latino/2013/06/21/bcd6f71a-d6a4-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story_1.html.