Mixed Race Studies

NASA Mathematician Receives Medal of Freedom

NBC News
2015-11-25

Katherine G. Johnson calculated the flight path for the first American mission to space. The 97-year-old was one of 17 Americans who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom Tuesday.

President Obama Names Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Office of the Press Secretary
The White House
Washington, D.C.

2015-11-16

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, President Barack Obama named seventeen recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors. The awards will be presented at the White House on November 24th.

President Obama said, “I look forward to presenting these 17 distinguished Americans with our nation’s highest civilian honor. From public servants who helped us meet defining challenges of our time to artists who expanded our imaginations, from leaders who have made our union more perfect to athletes who have inspired millions of fans, these men and women have enriched our lives and helped define our shared experience as Americans.”

The following individuals will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom:…

Katherine G. Johnson

Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson’s computations have influenced every major space program from Mercury through the Shuttle program. Johnson was hired as a research mathematician at the Langley Research Center with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that preceded NASA, after they opened hiring to African-Americans and women. Johnson exhibited exceptional technical leadership and is known especially for her calculations of the 1961 trajectory for Alan Shepard’s flight (first American in space), the 1962 verification of the first flight calculation made by an electronic computer for John Glenn’s orbit (first American to orbit the earth), and the 1969 Apollo 11 trajectory to the moon. In her later NASA career, Johnson worked on the Space Shuttle program and the Earth Resources Satellite and encouraged students to pursue careers in science and technology fields…

Image of Katherine Johnson at NASA Langley Research Center in 1980. (Source: NASA)

Read the entire press release here.

Nobody Discussed It: Lacey Schwartz and “Little White Lie”

Radio Curious
Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
2015-05-11

Barry Vogel, Producer
Ukiah, California

The secret revealed in the life of Lacey Schwartz, born in 1987 to a white Jewish family in rural upstate New York, where she grew up, is that her biological father was black. The few who knew her truth remained silent until after her first year of college when she asked her mother why she looked the way she did. Lacey Schwartz is the producer and director of the film “Little White Lie,” with a website at http://www.littlewhiteliethefilm.com.

“Little White Lie” will be shown at the Mendocino Film Festival on May 29, 2015, in the village of Mendocino, California.

Lacey Schwartz and I visited by phone from her home near New York City, on May 11, 2015. First we hear a clip of Lacey’s voice taken from the introduction of the film “Little White Lie,” and later intersperse our conversation with clips from the film.

The book Lacey Schwartz recommends is “How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement,” by Ruth Feldstein.

Listen to the story (00:29:01) here.

You may not know it — but if you speak Spanish, you speak some Arabic too

PRI’s The World
Public Radio International
2015-10-15

Joy Diaz, Reporter

Rihab Massif, originally from Lebanon, was my daughter’s preschool teacher in Austin. As a little girl, Camila, my daughter, spoke mostly in Spanish. And Massif remembers a day when Camila was frustrated because she couldn’t remember a word in English.

“She was telling me about her camis,” Massif says.

Camisa is the word in Spanish for “shirt,” and Massif understood it perfectly because camis means the same thing in Arabic.

“And I was like ‘Oh! There are some words related to Arabic,’” she says.

To see just how many, Massif and I did an exercise. I’d say a word in Spanish, and she’d say it back in Arabic.

“Aceite?”

“We say ceit,” Massif says.

“Guitarra?”

“We say guitar.”

Now that I am aware, it seems like I hear Arabic words everywhere…

…Linguist Victor Solis Parejo from the University of Barcelona in Spain says part of the language Spanish speakers use comes from a legacy of the Moorish influence. “Moors” was the name used to refer to the Arabic-speaking group from North Africa that invaded what would become Spain back in the eighth century. Their influence lasted about 700 years and is still visible today.

“Especially if you travel [in the] south of Spain­. For example in Merida, in the city where I was born, we have the Alcazaba Arabe, an Arabic fortification,” Parejo says. “So, you can see that in the cities nowadays, but you can also see that Islamic presence, that Arabic presence in the language.”…

Read the story here. Listen to the story here. Download the story here.

What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather

The New York Times
2015-11-25

Gordon J. Davis, Partner
Venable, LLP,  New York, New York

John Abraham Davis, center, and his family at their farm in the early 1900s. Credit Courtesy of the Davis Family

OVER the last week, a growing number of students at Princeton have demanded that the university confront the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as its president before becoming New Jersey’s governor and the 28th president of the United States. Among other things, the students are demanding that Wilson’s name be removed from university facilities.

Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, is mostly remembered as a progressive, internationalist statesman, a benign and wise leader, a father of modern American political science and one of our nation’s great presidents.

But he was also an avowed racist. And unlike many of his predecessors and successors in the White House, he put that racism into action through public policy. Most notably, his administration oversaw the segregation of the federal government, destroying the careers of thousands of talented and accomplished black civil servants — including John Abraham Davis, my paternal grandfather.

An African-American born in 1862 to a prominent white Washington lawyer and his black “housekeeper,” my grandfather was a smart, ambitious and handsome young black man. He emulated his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, in style and dress. He walked away from whatever assistance his father might have offered to his unacknowledged black offspring and graduated at the top of his class from Washington’s M Street High School (later the renowned all-black Dunbar High School)…

Read the entire article here.

When society sees my mixed race children as merely “a lighter shade of black”, it does them a disservice

The Independent
2015-11-24

Dawn Jarvis

My daughter says to me, “Nobody has ever said to me ‘Do you feel white?”

I am a divorced black woman with two mixed race children. Do I want my mixed race children to identify with me as a black woman, or their white father – or both?

The actor Taye Diggs caused a media storm in an interview last week on the website Grio by saying that he teaching his mixed race son to identify with the races of both his parents and he would like him to be identified as mixed and not black. He has been accused of self-hate and being ashamed of being black, which he has refuted in a recent Instagram post.

I shared an article about this on my Twitter feed and got a mixed response which surprised me. Most were positive but, one gave me cause to pause it: “I reckon he should identify with the human race given that’s what he is part of.”

While agreeing that race is a social construct and we are all indeed part of the human race, I didn’t think that response showed any understanding of where Taye was coming from…

Read the entire article here.

Translation Tuesday: from The Atlantic Grows by Julie Sten-Knudsen

The Guardian
2015-11-24

Julie Sten-Knudsen

‘Welcome to the skin-coloured land…’ Photograph: Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images

The fourth in a series on translated work features a poetic investigation of the relationship between two sisters who share the same mother and yet are divided – by their different fathers, their skin colour, and the Atlantic Ocean. Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

By Julie Sten-Knudsen and Martin Aitken for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

In the light of the desk lamp

that is yellower than the daylight

the skin of my hand looks almost green,

almost red, with a golden wash.

It is not white.

The wall is white.

The used tissues

and the unpaid bills are white.

My hand has a different colour. The colour has a name.

I learned it when I was small. I used it

in the kindergarten, in the recreation club after school

when I needed a felt tip

in that indeterminable shade of pink

to draw a fleshy arm or a face:

I need the skin-coloured one.

There was no other use for that felt tip…

Read the entire poem here.

On Taye Diggs and Reckoning with the Changing Realities of Race in America

For Harriet
2015-11-24

Shannon Luders-Manuel

My father was a proud paralegal for the NAACP back in the 80s and 90s. He marched in rallies for race equality and was actively involved in uplifting the Black community. When I was growing up, he often had me watch the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize,” which documented the events of the Civil Rights Movement. Nestled inside my baby book is an autograph from Black Panther leader Huey Newton.

When I was a little girl, my dad said, “People will want to label you as only black, but you’re biracial.” My dad wasn’t ashamed of his blackness. Just like many fathers, he loved that I resembled both of my parents. My dad knew the world would see me as more black than white, but he wanted me to identify in a way that honored both sides of my genealogy. This was true even after my parents split up when I was three-years-old…

Read the entire article here.

The History of Race in America Is Not Black and White

History News Network
2015-11-21

Dianne Guenin-Lelle

Dr. Dianne Guenin-Lelle teaches French at Albion College. A specialist in Seventeenth Century French Narrative, Francophone Louisiana and Multicultural Pedagogies, she has published numerous articles and two books, Jeanne Guyon, Selected Writings in the Classics in Western Spirituality Series (2012, co-authored with Ronney Mourad) and The Prison Narratives of Jeanne Guyon (2012, co-authored by Ronney Mourad). Her latest book The Story of French New Orleans: History of a Creole City (University Press of Mississippi) will appear in January.

Despite the racial divide in this country, exemplified by the #blacklivesmatter movement, history shows it does not have to be this way. If we are going to fill this chasm, we should look to the past. A past that we have forgotten too often. Our accepted version of US history is basically that African Americans came to this land to become enslaved by whites and were liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation. While there existed Free People of Color before the Civil War, in this version of history, they managed to escape slavery and move north. This narrative sets up race relations along a “black-white” color line of racial separation, and accompanying opposition around questions of privilege, power and dignity. In the US today many feel a sense of despair that the situation has changed so little over so long, and a kind of hopeless fear that things might never be different…

Read the entire article here.

‘Evoking The Mulatto’ In Mixed-Race America

On Point with Tom Ashbrook
WBUR 90.9 FM
Boston, Massachusetts
2015-11-23

Tom Ashbrook, Host

Guests:

• Lindsay Catherine Harris, multimedia artist and creator of “Evoking the Mulatto.”
• Ko Smith, painter based in New York City. Featured in “Evoking the Mulatto.”
• Kaliya Warren, filmmaker based in New York City. Featured in “Evoking the Mulatto.”

(Clockwise From Top Left) Filmmaker Lindsay Catherine Harris, Ko Smith, Kailya Warren and Bryant Koger in still images from Harris’ “Evoking the Mulatto” multimedia project. (Courtesy the Filmmaker)

Mixed-race America in the time of Black Lives Matter and demographic change. We’ll talk race, identity and the film project “Evoking the Mulatto”.

Mixed race America is a fast-growing piece of the American pie. Ten percent of American births now, and growing. Until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in many states. Today, relationships regularly cross all the old racial lines. What is it like to be that American? A new film project with the provocative title “Evoking the Mulatto” talks with lots of mixed race Americans about their everyday experience and their most intimate thoughts on love, beauty, justice, racial identity, and the American future. This hour, On Point, we’re listening to mixed race Americans.

Listen to the story (00:47:49) here. Download the story here.