Mixed Race Studies

Participants Needed for Study on the Concept of Bi-Racial Ethnic Belongingness

Saint Mary’s University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
2016-02-23

Jasmine Moreash

The need to belong is a fundamental aspect of life. For bi-racial individuals, ethnic belongingness can be more complicated compared to a monoracial individual. Belongingness contributes to self-esteem and for bi-racial individuals their perceived lack of belonging can cause a problematic question; what am I?

Due to the one-drop rule that categorized any individual with a black ancestor as black, many bi racial individuals adapt a black ethnic identity. This one-drop rule continues to be implemented because of the justification that multi-racial children will be defined by society as black. With a growing population and increased awareness of multi-racial individuals some adapt an ambiguous identity. The purpose of this study is to find out if bi-racial (black and white) individuals who self-identify as bi-racial will have a different sense of belongingness compared to bi-racial individuals who self-identify as black or self-identify as white.

To participate in the study, click here.

DNA ancestry tests branded ‘meaningless’

The Telegraph
2013-03-07

Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

Customers are being charged up to £300 to learn whether they have links to famous people or societies despite the fact many of the tests are not backed up by scientific evidence, experts said.

The amount of DNA any individual inherits from relatives just a few steps up their family tree is negligible compared with the vast amount we all share from common ancestors.

It means any ancestral “history” identified by a simple genetic test is just one of dozens of possible interpretations, and to try to trace our lineage directly through our genes is “absurd”, they claimed…

… The warning was backed by a number of leading genetics experts. Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at UCL said: “On a long trudge through history – two parents, four great-grandparents, and so on – very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them.

“As a result, almost every Briton is a descendant of Viking hordes, Roman legions, African migrants, Indian Brahmins, or anyone else they fancy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Filmmakers Behind ‘Invisible Roots’ on Finding Afro-Mexicans Living in Southern California

Remezcla
2016-02-16

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

Photo: NOTIMEX/JAVIER LIRA OTERO

Almost a year before the Mexican government officially acknowledged Afro-Mexicans as a distinct racial and ethnic group, directors Tiffany Walton and Lizz Mullis first began working on their film, Invisible Roots: Afro-Mexicans of Southern California, as a film project while attending the University of Southern California (USC). For Walton, whose grandfather was Afro-Panamanian, the project was deeply connected to her family’s Afro-Latino story, while Mullis was motivated by her interests in broader societal questions about race and identity. But during the early stages of the project both struggled to find subjects for their film. After a number of failed attempts at connecting with Afro-Mexican families in the Los Angeles area, attempts they both called “extensive,” Walton and Mullis were fortuitously connected to a few Afro-Mexican families through academic and professional contacts. The film premiered at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival with which the directing duo hopes to shed light on the experiences of a group that continues to garner recognition both in Mexico and in the U.S…

Can you describe what inspired you to make this film?

TW: I’ve always been really interested in African-American history as well as the African diaspora. I remember first learning that my dad’s grandfather had moved from Panama to Alabama to attend college. I felt excited about having a personal connection to another place, an ancestral place, a place outside of the United States, that I could reference and say, “Hey, I have roots there.” With that, I became really curious about Black people who lived in Central America and other Latin American countries. I wanted to know how they identified culturally and racially, I wanted to know what they ate, and what things we would have in common. I was curious about learning how they navigated the world.

I first learned about Afro-Mexicans from a large poster my dad had hanging in his office. The poster was of a photograph called, “Tres Hermanas,” by Tony Gleaton. On this poster were the words, “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico.” That poster spoke volumes to me. So, the poster inspired me to make this film. It touched me in such an intangible, sublime way that made me want to take action. I wanted to know everything about those little girls. What would we have in common? Were they curious about Africa? Would they feel a connection to me? I really just wanted to know how they viewed the world and how the world viewed them and how they felt about what the world thought of them…

Read the entire interview here.

Bocafloja Confronts Anti-Blackness Across the Americas in New Documentary ‘Nana Dijo’

Remezcla
2016-02-17

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

When musicians and filmmakers Bocafloja and Cambiowashere first set out to create Nana Dijo, a gripping documentary about the African diaspora in the Americas, both wanted to stray away from traditional documentary approaches that have tended to sensationalize the Afro-descendant experience in the Americas. Nana Dijo instead provides viewers with a host of intimate accounts of people whose lives have been defined by their ability to negotiate a black racial consciousness in a series of disparate racial, social, and political contexts. But while the film’s directors sought to reconcile regional difference by not providing viewers with the names of locations throughout the film, Nana Dijo also highlights the complexity of identity as it centers blackness through a diasporic lens that moves beyond geo-politics and nationalism.

We sat down with Bocafloja to talk about the inspiration for his documentary and decolonizing our notions of race and identity…

…Your music tends to center on popular conceptions of the African Diaspora, de-colonialism, indigenous rights, and anti-black racism in the United States and throughout the Americas. Your new film Nana Dijo is doing the same thing, albeit through a visual medium. What was the inspiration for this film?

I understand this as a historical responsibility in which we reclaim our narratives from a perspective that is not subjugated to cultural hegemonies. Most of the visual work that has been done in regards to the African Diaspora in Mexico or Latin America happens to be inclusionist, politically safe and focused on a culturalist approach instead of other more transgressive elements that are inherent in the whole experience. Nowadays there is an “Afro-Latino” boom which under the liberal democracies framework becomes just the ideal experience to promote shallow forms of multi-culturalism that are not really promoting any type of process of empowerment or deep analysis about the effects on our psyche as colonial subjects today. I identify myself as a black and brown individual, so for me this project was definitively relevant in order to give voice to thousands and thousands of people that in the context of Mexico and Latin America never found an outlet to express or justify the true genesis of their identity…

Read the entire interview here.

Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide

William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2015-09-08
384 pages
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 1.21 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062305251
Paperback ISBN: 9780062305268
E-book ISBN: 9780062305275

Joy-Ann Reid

Barack Obama’s speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches should have represented the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial unity. Yet, in Fracture, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided—as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore.

With President Obama’s election, Americans expected an open dialogue about race but instead discovered the irony of an African American president who seemed hamstrung when addressing racial matters, leaving many of his supporters disillusioned and his political enemies sharpening their knives. To understand why that is so, Reid examines the complicated relationship between Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, and how their varied approaches to the race issue parallel the challenges facing the Democratic party itself: the disparate parts of its base and the whirl of shifting allegiances among its power players—and how this shapes the party and its hopes of retaining the White House.

Fracture traces the party’s makeup and character regarding race from the civil rights days to the Obama presidency. Filled with key political players such as Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Al Sharpton, it provides historical context while addressing questions arising as we head into the next national election: Will Hillary Clinton’s campaign represent an embrace of Obama’s legacy or a repudiation of it? How is Hillary Clinton’s stand on race both similar to and different from Obama’s, or from her husband’s? How do minorities view Mrs. Clinton, and will they line up in huge numbers to support her—and what will happen if they don’t?

Veteran reporter Joy-Ann Reid investigates these questions and more, offering breaking news, fresh insight, and experienced insider analysis, mixed with fascinating behind-the-scenes drama, to illuminate three of the most important figures in modern political history, and how race can affect the crucial 2016 election and the future of America itself.

This photo of Obama and a little visitor at a Black History Month celebration is remarkable

The Washington Post
2016-02-20

Janell Ross

Clark Reynolds, 3, is greeted by President Obama during a Black History Month Celebration held Feb.18, 2016, at the White House in Washington, D.C. (Pete Souza/White House)

For 3-year-old Clark Reynolds, Thursday began like most others.

Morning preparations gave way to hours at school and then a visit to his mother’s office to change into a suit and tie. Clark’s mother, Nichole Francis Reynolds, is a former congressional staffer who now works in the private sector. Friends had secured an invitation for Francis Reynolds and her son to the White House’s Black History Month celebration, the final gathering of its kind while the first black president remains in office. But Francis Reynolds had told Clark only that he had earned a special treat. He is, after all, only 3.

What Clark does know is the president’s name, his face when he sees Obama on TV and the sound of President Obama’s voice when it comes through the satellite radio in his dad’s car. Then, there’s Clark’s favorite book, the one that he almost always picks when it’s reading time. Clark has been through the “The White House Pop-Up Book” by Chuck Fischer so many times that, almost as soon as Clark and his mother walked onto the White House grounds Thursday, Clark knew where they were…

Read the entire article here.

Storytelling matters to Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs

Stanford News
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2016-02-19

Kate Chesley, Associate Director of University Communications

Allyson Hobbs and her award-winning book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

ALLYSON HOBBS, assistant professor of American history, finds much of the inspiration for her research in the stories of her own remarkable family. Telling those stories – and connecting them with larger themes in U.S. history – is one of the things that matters most to her.

Hobbs was the featured speaker recently at the popular “What Matters to Me and Why” noontime discussion series, sponsored by the Office for Religious Life. The series asks members of the Stanford community to reflect on matters of personal values and beliefs.

Hobbs is the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in 2014. The book, which won the 2015 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the 2015 Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history, was inspired by a story Hobbs’ beloved aunt told her about a distant cousin.

That cousin, Hobbs told the audience, was born on the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s. Light skinned, the cousin was forced by her mother to leave her home and pass for white in Los Angeles. Hobbs told the heartbreaking story of how the cousin, married to a white man and raising children who were unaware of their mother’s heritage, was unable to return to Chicago to see her dying father lest her secret be revealed…

Read the entire article here.

9 Benefits of Being in an Intercultural Marriage

Masala Mommas: An Online Magazine for Today’s Moms with a South Asian Connection
2016-02-17

Alexandra Madhavan

My husband is from South India and I am Canadian. We are the living, walking, breathing epitome of cultural differences – he is Hindu, I am Catholic; he is a strict vegetarian, I am not; he comes from a huge traditional Iyengar family, I come from a very small Canadian family. We met and fell in love 10 years ago in college, and it still stands that he’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I fell in love with him because he was perfect for me – and he just happened to be from a completely different culture than my own.

Sure, we have had our challenges. There were difficulties being accepted by his family, we still have frequent misunderstandings, we get stared at a lot in public, and we feel a bit isolated in our journey as an intercultural couple because our mix is such a rarity. But our journey getting to know each other’s cultures has been beautiful, mind-blowing and so interesting.

For Example:…

Read the entire article here.

ASA 115: Mixed Race Expeiences

University of California, Davis
2012-2016

Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies

“Even after our first ‘black’ president ushered in a so-called ‘post racial America,’ we understood that there is much more to the race issue than what has been presented.”

Using the theme of Race Traitors, this quarter’s Mixed Race Experiences course serves to complicate and even question the meaning, importance, and value of race constructions. Why have those in interracial unions and their offsprings been targets of oppression, cooptation, and even veneration in the Americas and globally? How have these same groups also threatened and challenged race categorizations? There will be no midterm or final but instead students will participate in the process of curating and creating an art exhibit.

For more information, click here.

I sat beside Obama at the Black Lives Matter meeting. This was no political show

The Guardian
2016-02-20

Brittany Packnett

The author sits beside Barack Obama’s in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on 18 February. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Some political meetings devolve into theater. Not this one: we all spoke direct truth to literal power

Black folks know political theater when we see it; we’ve lived through it for years. And as the 2016 presidential election ramps up, our feeds, and our lives, are inundated with grandstanding and pandering, much lofty rhetoric and often, too few solutions that actually prioritize the unique needs of people of color.

Any White House meeting, much like the one 15 of us had Thursday with President Obama to discuss civil rights, could have appeared as such.

I witnessed such theater just a week prior at the Ferguson city council meeting. A consent decree to help rid Ferguson of its now well-documented racist policing practices was due for a vote. The decree had been negotiated by city officials and the Department of Justice for many months, and both bodies had been dutifully engaged by a substantial number of Ferguson citizens in conversation, community meetings hosted by the Ferguson Collaborative and public comment at three city council meetings…

Read the entire article here.