Mixed Race Studies

A Russian-Chinese woman witnesses the ups and downs of the two nations’ ties

Global Times: Discover China, Discover The World
2015-10-30

Zhou Yu

Li Yingnan stands in her home. Her home is filled with Chinese and Russian books and decorations. Photo: Li Hao/GT

It was a sunny August day in Moscow when three shuttle buses stopped at Red Square. A group of women were the first of the dozens of tourists to step off the buses. Though their appearances were barely different from those of ordinary Russians, they were, in fact, Chinese citizens, aged between 50 to 80.

“I was born in Moscow,” said one 80-year-old lady tearfully.

The ladies belonged to a tour group called Russian Mothers Seeking Roots in Russia, and all were the descendants of Russians. It was the first time since the end of World War II that a group of people seeking their roots had been organized by Chinese citizens.

For the next seven days, they would tour major sites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These old ladies were so excited to see their ancestors’ hometowns, some even dancing on Red Square. Russian WWII veterans told them about the joint military operations between the two countries during the war.

Most of the group members’ mothers were Russians who came to China during the 1930s. In the 1920s, there were around 200,000 Chinese laborers who lived and worked in Russia doing construction work or running shops. Some Chinese workers participated in the Russian Revolution in 1917, and others even joined Russia’s Red Army.

At the end of the 1920s, when the Soviet Union’s strict economic planning system was implemented, the Soviet government closed down all private shops and forced Chinese shop owners to leave the country. Many of these Chinese businessmen had married Russian women, who followed their husbands back to China. Due to Russia’s geographical proximity of Xinjiang, most of these Russian-Chinese couples settled in Xinjiang and the women became Chinese citizens. There are around 15,000 such descendants of Russians still in China…

Read the entire article here.

Too Black to be Arab, too Arab to be Black

Media Diversified
2016-01-16

Leena Habiballa, Co-Editor
Qahwa Project

Edited by: Mend Mariwany, Middle East & North Africa Editor

Within every Sudanese diasporan is an unceasing internal dialogue about where we fit in the dominant racial order. Sudan is one of the most ethnically, culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse places on the African continent. It was also home to some of the most ancient civilisations in African memory. But today it suffers from the brutal legacy of Arab slavery, Ottoman imperialism and British colonialism.

My early childhood was spent living in various Arab countries, where I learnt from a young age that my darker skin tone threatened my claim to Arabness. To be authentically Arab, it wasn’t enough to speak Arabic or have facets of Arab culture syncretised into my own. My Blackness needed to be invisible. My identity as an Arab was, therefore, always contested and fraught, though nevertheless an important part of my being and, ultimately, self-evident. When others denied my Arabness I felt its existence affirmed, for how could something be stripped off if it didn’t exist?

It wasn’t until my mid to late teens that I was forced to see Blackness and Arabness as ontologically separate. This was the result of being introduced to the Western concept of race. Being racialised within this schema gave me a new sense of self, one which was innately linked to my skin colour and its difference to others. I had previously equated ‘Arab’ with Arab culture, and ‘Black’ with skin tone, not an identity. The concept of race, however, meant not only that I now saw Black and Arab as representing very different racial identities but also as invariably competing and mutually exclusive. I came to embody these two irreconcilable racial categories, and my body had become the site of a visceral and daily contradiction.

Too Black to be Arab, too Arab to be Black. This is the daily discourse that I grappled with. I was racially perplexed and traumatised…

Read the entire article here.

Color Lines: Racial Passing in America

BackStory with the American History Guys (A program of the Virginia Foundation of the Humanities)
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-01-15

M. H. Kimball portrait of Isaac White and Rosina Downs, two New Orleans slave children, c. 1863. (Library of Congress).

On this episode of BackStory, the Guys will consider how and why Americans throughout the centuries have crossed the lines of racial identity, and find out what the history of passing has to say about race, identity, and privilege in America. We’ll look at stories of African-Americans who passed as white to escape slavery or Jim Crow and find out how the “one-drop rule” enabled one blonde-haired, blue-eyed American to live a double life without ever arousing suspicion. We’ll also explore the story of an African-American musician who pioneered a genre of exotic music with a bejeweled turban and an invented biography, and examine the hidden costs of crossing over.

Guests Include:

• Carol Wilson, Washington College
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University
• Martha Sandweiss, Princeton University
• Johanna Lanner-Cusin, high school history teacher
• Eva Garroutte, Boston College
• Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University
• Vasanth Subramanian, business consultant
• R. J. Smith, former senior editor, Los Angeles Magazine
• Adrienne Hernandez, great niece of Korla Pandit
• Maya Hernandez, great niece of Korla Pandit

Segments

• The Spark of Recognition
  • Historian Carol Wilson tells the story of a New Orleans slave named Sally Miller, who sued for her freedom after a German woman became convinced that Sally was really a long-lost German girl named Salomé Müller.
• Double Image
  • Historian Martha Sandweiss explains how the one-drop rule enabled a blue-eyed, blonde-haired geologist named Clarence King to lead a second life as a Black Pullman porter, without ever drawing suspicion.
• “Code-Switching”
  • Listener Johanna Lanner-Cusin, who identifies as black, talks about people’s assumptions about her race, not having experiences similar to darker African Americans, and “qualifying her blackness.”
• Blood Brothers
  • Historian Annette Gordon-Reed illustrates the fluidity of race with the stories of two sons of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, one of whom passed into white society while the other lived his life as an African-American.
• High Stakes
  • Sociologist Eva Garroutte tells the story of Sylvester Long, a multiracial man who rose to silent film stardom in the 1920s after adopting the persona of an “authentic” Native American—until it all came crashing down.
• Passing In, Passing Out
  • Brian Balogh talks with historian Allyson Hobbs about an enormous but overlooked cost of racial passing: leaving one’s family, community, and heritage behind.
• “Guess Your Ethnicity”
  • Listener Vasanth Subramanian wishes society allowed him to choose his identity. He talks in detail about the prejudices children of immigrants face.
• Drawing the Line
  • The Guys explain how American slavery practices created racial boundaries, and, at the same time, complicated them.
• Playing Indian
  • Producer Nina Earnest explores the boundary between passing and performance with the story of John Roland Redd, an African-American organist who donned a bejeweled turban and rewrote his life story to become “Godfather of Exotica” Korla Pandit.

CORRECTION: This show includes a story about Sylvester Long, a man of mixed descent who styled himself as a pure-blooded Native American named Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. We refer to him as a movie star who published a famous autobiography. In fact, Long Lance published his autobiography first—the popularity of the book catapulted him into movie stardom.

Listen to the podcast (01:05:14) here. Download the podcast here.

#MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley

National Public Radio
2016-01-16

Sam Sanders, Reporter, Washington Desk

Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C. at Charleston, S.C., Republican presidential debate Thursday. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Depending on whom you ask, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s State of the Union response this week was either going to save the modern Republican Party or kill conservatism.

This week, those differing responses evoked two different hashtags. Both, in some ways, were about Haley’s heritage, and they bring to light the tricky way she’ll have to navigate race should she take on a more prominent role in the 2016 election.

#DeportNikkiHaley

After Haley gave the Republican response to President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address this week, some conservatives were not impressed. Haley said in her speech that fixing immigration “means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.” She offered a tacit rebuke of Donald Trump when she said, “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation.”

(She confirmed on NBC’s Today show the next day that she was, in fact, referring to Trump.).

The response to those lines, and other conciliatory notes in Haley’s speech, was swift. And some of it was brutal. Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter probably went the farthest, writing, “Donald Trump should deport Nikki Haley.”….

….In some ways, Haley seems to face the same conundrum former Louisiana Gov. and failed Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal did — not seeming “brown enough” for some voters of color, while being “too brown” for others. (We won’t bore you with the details, or subject you to some of the graphic tweets, but just take a look at the #JindalSoWhite hashtag to see what we’re talking about.)

Of course, Twitter is not exactly or entirely representative of the real world, and even thousands of tweets for or against Nikki Haley might not accurately depict actual support or disapproval of her…

Read the entire article here.

Bendición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera

Arte Público Press
2014-11-30
346 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55885-800-8

Tato Laviera (1950-2013)

Introduction by: Laura Lomas
Preface by: Nicolás Kanellos

“i think in spanish / i write in english / i want to go back to puerto rico / but I wonder if my kink could live / in ponce, mayaguez and carolina.” Born in Puerto Rico but raised in New York City, Tato Laviera’s poetry reflects his bilingual, bicultural Nuyorican existence while celebrating the universality of the human condition and his European, indigenous and African roots.

Tato Laviera explores identity, community, urban life, oppression and much more in these multi-layered pieces that spanned his too-short life. Many deal with themes specific to the immigrant experience, such as the sense of alienation many feel when they are not accepted in their native or adopted land. In “nuyorican,” he writes about returning to his native island, only to be looked down upon for his way of speaking: “ahora regreso, con un corazón boricua, y tú / me desprecias, me miras mal, me atacas mi hablar.”

Music and dance, an integral part of Puerto Rican life, permeate Laviera’s verse and pay homage to the Caribbean’s African roots. “i hear merengue in french haiti / and in dominican blood, / and the guaracha in yoruba, / and the mambo sounds inside the plena.”

Including all of his previously published poems and some that have never been published, these are bold expressions of hybridity in which people of mixed races speak a combination of languages. He skillfully weaves English and Spanish, and frequently writes in Spanglish. The importance of language and its impact on his identity is evident in poems entitled “Español,” “Bilingue” and “Spanglish.” Known for his lively, energetic poetry readings, Bendición represents an internationally recognized poet’s life work and will serve to keep Tato Laviera’s words and the issues he wrote about alive long after his death.

“Crossing from Guangdong:” A Poem | Sarah Howe | TEDxHarvardCollege

TEDx Talks
2015-12-02

The poet is always in a foreign country. Poet Sarah Howe shares a beautiful, melodic poem about crossing borders to find the China her mother left behind during the Communist Revolution.

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her chapbook, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism.

Obama: A Nation Divided

Medium
2016-01-14

Delonte Harrod

I was at grad school during the time President Obama campaigned for and eventually was elected to the highest office in this country. I remember listening to people talk about the potential of him becoming president. Some of my white friends complained, and were genuinely confused, about some black people’s fidelity to a biracial man, who is part African, running for president. I remember sitting across a table listening to some of my black friends talk about how some of their relationships with their white friends had become strained because of Obama’s popularity and the possibility of him becoming president. The obvious is clear, for various reasons, some of their white friends did not like it — and they let their blacks friends know it.

I listened and thought…

Read the entire article here.

Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora

Arte Público Press
2012-04-30
248 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55885-746-9

Edited by: Marta Moreno Vega, Alba Marinieves and Yvette Modestin

Afro-Latina women relate their personal stories and advocacy for racial equality

“My housewife mother turned into a raging warrior woman when the principal of my elementary school questioned whether her daughter and the children of my public school had the intelligence to pass a citywide test,” Marta Moreno Vega writes in her essay. She knew then she was loved and valued, and she learned that to be an Afro-Puerto Rican woman meant activism was her birth right.

Hers is one of eleven essays and four poems included in this volume in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America—Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela—and they write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement. Diva Moreira, a black Brazilian, writes that she experienced racism and humiliation at a very young age. The worst experience, she remembers, was when her mother’s bosses told her she didn’t need to go to school after the fourth grade, “because blacks don’t need to study more than that.”

The contributors span a range of professions, from artists to grass-roots activists, scholars and elected officials. Each is deeply engaged in her community, and they all use their positions to advocate for justice, racial equality and cultural equity. In their introduction, the editors write that these stories provide insight into the conditions that have led Afro-Latinas to challenge systems of inequality, including the machismo that is still prominent in Spanish-speaking cultures.

A fascinating look at the legacy of more than 400 years of African enslavement in the Americas, this collection of personal stories is a must-read for anyone interested in the African diaspora and issues of inequality and racism.

Remembering Julian Bond (1940-2015)

Politico
2015-12-29

Josh Zeitz

Getty

For many Americans, Julian Bond, who died in August at age 75, was quite literally the voice of the modern civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, when he served as communications director for the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and in later years, as a prominent author, university lecturer and narrator of the acclaimed PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, he embodied the dignity and righteousness of the black freedom struggle. “Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life,” President Obama said in the wake of his passing. “Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”

The son of Horace Mann Bond, an acclaimed black educator who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Julian grew up in middle-class comfort and respectability in southeast Pennsylvania, where his father served for more than a decade as president of Lincoln University, a historically black college. A virtual who’s-who of American intelligentsia passed through the door of his childhood home. As a young boy, he sat in Paul Robeson’s lap as the famed activist and baritone sang a Russian folk song for the family. He met W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Einstein. As an adult, he still recalled the excitement of a visit from Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP. “When he pulled up to our house, he was in a big, black shiny car escorted by two Pennsylvania state troopers on motorcycles with big leather boots,” Bond later told an interviewer, “I thought, boy, this is an important guy. This guy’s really something.”

Bond, who attended high school at an integrated Quaker institution in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, knew little of segregation growing up. He was only four or five years old the first time he learned there was “some category of people I belonged to,” as he recalled in an oral history many decades after the fact. Walking with his parents through the train station in Nashville, where they had arrived for a visit with extended family, “a policeman came up to my mother and said, ‘Niggers aren’t allowed here.’ She said, ‘Are you calling me a nigger?’ I don’t know if it was because she was very fair skinned and might have been white, although she didn’t appear white to me, or if it was her manner with the policeman. He was just taken aback. He didn’t say anything else, and we just kept on going.”…

Read the entire article here.

Meet The 63rd Black Woman In American History With A Physics Ph.D.

The Huffington Post
2015-06-24

Nico Pitney

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a 32-year-old theoretical astrophysicist. Her academic home is arguably the nation’s most elite physics department, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In one sense, she is among a dying breed. Prescod-Weinstein is a pen-and-paper theorist. “Basically I do calculus all day, on paper,” she told HuffPost. “I’m a little bit of a hold-out. There are things I could be doing by computer that I just like to do by hand.”

But she is also part of a vanguard, a small but growing number of African-American women with doctorates in physics.

Just 83 Black women have received a Ph.D. in physics-related fields in American history, according to a database maintained by physicists Dr. Jami Valentine and Jessica Tucker that was updated last week…

…I think making sure that I remain engaged with my Jewish identity, and particularly the rituals of lighting the Shabbat candles and so forth. I think understanding that all things can’t be sacrificed on the altar of academic career and physics has been really important, and understanding that that balance is not just for my own sake, but is in fact really in some sense in service of doing the physics. I can’t just sit around feeling angry about the number of Black women, or worrying a lot about dark matter. I also have to allow myself to do these other things…

Read the entire interview here.