Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Teens Talk About Their Identity Rip Tides

Women’s eNews
2015-10-27

Stephanie Geier, Teen Voices for Women’s eNews

The pressures and rejections come from within, from peers, from different sides of their families. “No matter how hard I tried I was always too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids,” says one girl. The second in a three-part series on multiracial teens.

WOODSIDE, N.Y. (WOMENSENEWS)–In middle school, Allyson Gonzalez thought befriending white girls would stop the other Brooklyn public school students from teasing her about her thick eyebrows and hairy arms.

However, her new friends acted outright, “horribly” racist to certain students. Gonzalez went along with them, but would be nice to the other students in private. After witnessing this behavior, she then decided “if anything was bad, it was being white.”

Now a college freshman at Hunter College, Gonzalez, who is German, Irish and Puerto Rican, identifies as a “multiracial white-Hispanic woman.” She blames “social pressure” for the delayed acceptance of her mixed background, she said in an email interview.

Young people who are multiracial are four times more likely to switch their racial identity than to consistently report one identity, sociologists Steven Hitlin, J.Scott Brown and Glen H. Elder found in their 2006 research, cited by sociologists Kerry Ann Rockquemore, David Brunsma and Daniel J. Delgado in their 2009 piece published in the Journal of Social Issues.

This is part of the multiracial “journey,” according to freelance writer Hannah Gomez, who also works with the advocacy organization We Need Diverse Books. In her 2013 paper “This, That, Both, Neither: The Badging Of Biracial Identity In Young Adult Realism,” she combined evidence from modern fiction and scientific research to identify a three-step process in multiracial identity development. First, individuals are confronted with a situation causing them to reject one side of their race. They then seek a community that does not pressure them to disconnect with one of their sides. Finally, they achieve a sense of empowerment that successfully leads to identifying with a mixed label.

“Structural, systemic racism says that people must be easily defined and sorted into groups, and race is an easy way to do that,” said Gomez in an email interview.

While she added that no one needs to embrace all of her background, individuals are often told to embrace just one, resulting in “a lot of undue stress.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brilliant Ideas: Artist Ellen Gallagher

Bloomberg Business
2015-09-14

“Brilliant Ideas” looks at the most exciting and acclaimed artists at work in the world today. On this episode, Ellen Gallagher talks to Bloomberg. (Source: Bloomberg)

Alumna and author Danzy Senna visits high school

The Sagamore: Brookline High School’s student newspaper
Brookline High School, Brookline, Massachusetts
2015-09-29

Sam Klein, Valentina Rojas-Posada and Sofia Tong

Danzy Senna, alumna and author of junior and senior summer reading book Caucasia, came to the high school today for a day of discussions with students and faculty.

Senna, who went to Stanford University and has published two novels, a memoir and a short-story collection said she was very fond of her experiences at the high school.

“I had a very wonderful time here, I was just saying that a lot of the identity that led me that to write this book was formed here,” Senna said.

She had a discussion with the students in A-block classes African American Studies and African American and Latino scholars. She also spoke at an assembly with juniors and seniors during T-block, held a writing workshop and discussion for seniors in Craft of Writing classes during C-block and had a discussion with English teachers during first lunch.

Exclusive Q&A with Senna

What was it like coming back to the school?…

…A-block:

The A-block meeting was held in the MLK room. Senna created an informal environment, joking back and forth with Associate Dean Melanee Alexander and social studies teacher Malcolm Cawthorne while students laughed. Both Alexander and Cawthorne went to the high school with her, and they talked about how their experiences differed from current students. Senna also talked about how inclusive her group of friends at the high school was.

“I had a group where I did not have to choose, where my blackness and mixedness was welcomed and I thrived,” she said.

Senna asked questions about the community at the high school, and whether there were cliques, gangs, or fights. She told a story about a fight she was in while at the high school, going into detail about a black fraternity that had started and how she was involved…

Read the entire article and interview here.

Rescuing Discarded Images of Everyday Black Life

The New York Times
2015-10-20

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist

Who throws away family photos? How do faded, blurry squares that chronicled weddings, ballgames and goofy moments at home end up abandoned, tossed to the curb or in boxes bought sight unseen at storage auctions?

Zun Lee has been wondering about this ever since he stumbled upon a dozen Polaroids scattered on a Detroit sidewalk. He had gone to Motown as part of his work on “Father Figure,” his book about African-American fatherhood. The sight of those images — children playing in a yard — stopped him. He asked around, but no one knew who was in the pictures. And while someone didn’t want these images, Mr. Lee did: They showed an ordinary beauty. Their fate hinted at hard times. Yet, in a frozen moment, they showed their subjects with love.

Mr. Lee was hooked. He started to haunt flea markets, yard sales and eBay in search of more of these images, to the point that he now has some 3,500 of them, ranging from the 1970s through the 2000s. Taken in a time before Instagram or Everyday Black America, they accomplish the same thing: to show African-American life as it was lived…

…The idea itself is also, for him, a response to how African-American communities have been depicted, something he cares about as the son of a Korean mother and an African-American father. Tired of the conventional wisdom that African-American fathers were absent, he set out to show a contrary reality. Similarly, his interest in collecting family pictures and turning them into a project was a response to “Found Pictures in Detroit,” a project and book by two Italian photographers who also showcased discarded images, with many of them showing crime scenes, suspects and victims…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Defying the Stereotype of the Broken Black Family

The New Yorker
2015-10-12

Lucy McKeon

For his series “Father Figure,” begun in 2011, the photographer Zun Lee created quiet and tender portraits of black fathers with their children: one kisses the tiny hand of his baby while riding the subway; another goofs around at bedtime, his daughter’s feet pressed up against his cheek. The project was, in part, a response to Lee’s own personal history: he grew up, in Frankfurt, Germany, nurtured by African-American military families who were stationed there; in his thirties, he discovered that his biological father was not the Korean dad he’d grown up with but a black man he’d never met. “Father Figure” is an homage to the surrogate black father figures he’d found growing up, and an exploration of alternatives to the stereotype of the black absentee father.

Lee’s latest project, the found-photo series “Fade Resistance,” continues to challenge racist assumptions of black family dysfunction, this time with Lee acting not as a photographer but as a curator…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Photo Gallery Highlights Multiracial Student Experiences

The Havard Crimson
2015-10-26

Aafreen Azmi, Contributing Writer

Brandon J. Dixon, Contributing Writer

Students study the portraits on display at “OTHER: A Multiracial Student Photo Gallery” at the exhibition’s opening on Sunday afternoon. Eliza R. Pugh

Students expressed their desire to define their racial identities on their own terms at “OTHER: A Multiracial Student Photo Gallery,” which opened in the Student Organization Center at Hilles on Sunday.

Amanda Mozea ’17, who organized the exhibit, described it as an attempt to highlight the struggles that many multiracial students at Harvard face.

The exhibit features more than 50 models who identify as multiracial, each of whom posed for a portrait and answered a series of questions displayed in a written transcript. The questions included, “How does the government define your race? How do others define your race? How do you define yourself?”…

Read the entire article here.

Race In R.I.: The Invisible Natives

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
2015-10-24

G. Wayne Miller, Journal Staff Writer

Their ancestors were the state’s original settlers, but today’s Indians say whites ‘don’t even see us’

First of two parts

EXETER – On this fine autumn morning, Paulla Dove Jennings welcomes a visitor into her home at the edge of woods with a handshake and a smile. She pours tea, sits at her kitchen table, and begins relating some of her life’s story, which in its essential elements mirrors that of her relatives and ancestors, Rhode Island’s Narragansett and Niantic peoples.

A tribal elder now at 75, Jennings has been a waitress, chef, clerk, author, historian, educator, museum curator, state Indian Affairs Commissioner, Narragansett leader and more. Gifted with words and possessing a keen memory, she is a celebrated storyteller — a woman who laughs easily, and who also feels anger and pain at how some whites have treated her people since the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 nearly obliterated them. The Narragansett and Niantic are among the state’s original inhabitants, here for 30,000 or more years.

“Oppression” is one word Jennings sometimes uses to describe that centuries-long treatment.

“Racism” is another.

“Rhode Island has close to the same racism as in Mississippi, and I’ve lived in both places,” says Jennings, a direct descendant of the great 17th-century Niantic sachem Ninigret…

Read the entire article here.

Faculty Panel: Multiracialism Informing Academic Work

University of Michigan Hatcher Graduate Library
Gallery (Room 100)
913 S University Ave
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
2015-10-26, 16:00-18:00 CDT (Local Time)

Series: What Does it Mean to be Multiracial in a Monoracial World?

Join us for the first in a year-long series of events that explore what it means to be multiracial in a monoracial world. This faculty panel will include:

Martha Jones, Prof. of History and Afroamerican & African Studies, co-director of the Michigan Law Program in Race, Law & History. Dr. Jones’ scholarly interests include the history of race, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women in the United States and the Atlantic world.

Edward West, Thurnau Prof. of Art and Design. Professor West’s photographs and writing examine the lives and experiences of multiracial people around the world. His recent exhibit and publication, So Called, drew from his travels around the world photographing multiracial people.

Mark Kamimura-Jimenez, Director, Graduate Student Success, Rackham Graduate School, Lecturer, Oakland University. Dr. Kamimura-Jimenez’s research examines the college experience for multiracial students.

For more information, click here.

The myth of race

The Cripplegate
2015-10-22

Jesse Johnson, Teaching Pastor
Immanuel Bible Church, Springfield, Virginia

One of the most harmful effects of evolutionary theory is the concept of race. Despite having zero scientific validity to it, the idea that human beings can be categorized into general “races” that are supposedly connected to their biology has wormed its way into our world views. It needs to make a quick exit—stage left.

Thabiti Anwaybwile (pastor of Anacostia River Church in [Washington] DC) said it this way: “Believing in race is like believing in unicorns, because neither exist.”

Certainly cultures exist. Certainly ethnicities exist. And certainly racism exists (largely fueled by the whole notion of race to begin with).

But unicorns do not, and neither does race…

Read the entire article here.

Why Germany’s latest Nazi satire ‘Heil’ isn’t brave enough

Deutsche Welle
2015-07-16

Sarah Hofmann

An unlikely spokesman Neo-Nazi boss Sven (left, played by Beno Fürmann) celebrates a victory. He kidnapped Afro-German author Sebastian Klein (played by Jerry Hoffmann), who suffers from amnesia after behind hit on the head. Klein starts mimicking everything the neo-Nazis say.

An Afro-German starts talking like a neo-Nazi after the right-wingers beat him up in the new film satire, “Heil.” If Germany is going to laugh about Nazis, it should have a better reason to, says DW’s Sarah Hofmann.

It starts with a shock and the text “Deutschland 1945” on a black board. Cut. Historic footage of a Hitler speech. Cut. Piles of corpses in Bergen-Belsen. Cut. “Deutschland 1945” on a black board. Cut. One of the main characters in the film, a neo-Nazi, spraying “Wheit Pauer” – presumably intended to read “White Power” – and a swastika on a wall.

The first sequence in the film “Heil” lasts only five seconds. But the scenes are powerful. The audience stops laughing when the images jump from 1945 to 2015.

As a German in the audience, I find myself asking: Is that ok? Can images of Nazi crimes be used to evoke laughter without offending the victims? I decide that, yes, it can. But with one caveat: It has to hurt.

If the humor is black, then it should be bad.

How far can clichés be taken?

Nevertheless, even in 2015, Nazi jokes shouldn’t be turned into slapstick in Germany – and that’s the problem with “Heil.” The plot cannot be summed up in a few lines. It opens in Prittwitz, a fictional East German village that fulfills every cliché and is controlled by neo-Nazis. Afro-German author Sebastian Klein has a reading scheduled in this very town. Shortly after he arrives, he is beaten up and kidnapped by a bunch of neo-Nazis. The slapstick element comes when Klein suffers from amnesia after being hit on the head and mimics everything the neo-Nazis say for the rest of the film.

In talk shows, Klein rants xenophobic slogans. It’s a victory for neo-Nazi boss, Sven, who is competing with other neo-Nazi groups: the new Nazis in the West and the Nipsters. The latter dress like hipsters and know their way around social media, which gives them an advantage over the backward twits from Prittwitz. Then there are the local gangs that are just waiting for an opportunity to march into Poland again.

And Sebastian? His pregnant girlfriend – the epitome of the well-situated, hip Berlin mom – comes looking for him…

Read the entire article here.