Mixed Race Studies

What Obama’s visit means for Cuba’s national conversation about race

The Los Angeles Times
2016-03-21

Kate Linthicum, Contact Reporter

In recent years, Afro-Cuban intellectuals have started gathering in a cramped Havana apartment to discuss a topic long considered off-limits in Cuba: race.

Fidel Castro’s communist revolution 60 years ago promised to wipe out racial divisions and level the playing field for all Cubans, regardless of color or wealth. Yet racism persists in Cuba, and many say recent economic changes here have overwhelmingly favored the light-skinned elite.

The historic visit this week of an American president who happens to be black is of special significance to Afro-Cubans, who, like many minorities around the world, view President Obama as a symbol of what is possible. It’s of particular importance for the small but growing movement of black activists on the island, who have struggled for years under government pressure, and who hope that warming U.S.-Cuba relations will push Cubans toward greater race consciousness.

“Maybe without an enemy, everyone here can begin to look more closely at things inside our own country,” said activist Manuel Cuesta Morua, who said he is one of several Cuban dissidents, most of whom are not black, invited to meet with Obama on Tuesday. “We hope it will help people see the racism here with more clarity, and see that there is diversity, and diverse ways of thinking.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons [Twentieth Anniversary Edition]

Duke University Press
2016
184 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6147-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6166-4

Jane Lazarre

“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” In this moving memoir, Jane Lazarre, the white Jewish mother of now adult Black sons, offers a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America as she tells the story of how she came to understand the experiences of her African American husband, their growing sons, and their extended family. Recounting her education, as a wife, mother, and scholar-teacher, into the realities of African American life, Lazarre shows how although racism and white privilege lie at the heart of American history and culture, any of us can comprehend the experience of another through empathy and learning.

This Twentieth Anniversary Edition features a new preface, in which Lazarre’s elegy for Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others, reminds us of the continued resonance of race in American life. As #BlackLivesMatter gains momentum, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is more urgent and essential than ever.

Screening and Discussion of Race: The Power of an Illusion, Episode 1

Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201
Monday, 2016-03-28, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Join us for the first in a series of screenings and discussions of the thought-provoking PBS series Race: The Power of An Illusion, which uses science, history, and more to dispel the many myths and misconceptions surrounding the concept of race. Post-screening discussion led by Erica Chito-Childs, author, CUNY sociology professor, and leading researcher on issues of race.

For more information and to reserve tickets, click here.