Mixed Race Studies

The PBS NewsHour Launches Year Long Conversation on Race, Diversity and Intolerance

PBS NewsHour
2015-08-31

Media Relations Contacts:

Nick Massella, Director of Audience Engagement and Communications
James Blue, Senior Content and Special Projects Producer

WASHINGTON, DC (August 31, 2015) – Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Eric Garner. These are just three names that have dominated news coverage in the past year. Different stories and different circumstances, provoking similar conversations about race on a national and international level. They underscore the reality that America’s deepest wound is far from healed.

Meanwhile, debates about immigration and citizenship have left many feeling alienated and angry on all sides of the issues. A recent New York Times / CBS News poll shows that the majority of Americans think race relations are bad.

With all of that in mind, the PBS NewsHour with Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff has launched a yearlong series focusing on diversity, divisions and various efforts and ideas to bridge and heal these issues. This series includes a deep look at the enduring and painful issues we will call Race Matters. On broadcast and online, NewsHour will host conversations on finding solutions to the painful divides that continue to plague our communities.

Returning to the NewsHour to take a leading role in this project is special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault. The series will take viewers throughout the United States to the Americans having tough conversations on these important issues and will feature experts on race relations and their proposals for how to address race-fueled issues. This is a periodic series that will air on the program frequently throughout the year…

Read the entire press release here.

“We assigned [Allyson] Hobbs’s book [A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life] because we thought it was a model for writing cultural history – it is beautifully crafted and draws on sources in very clear ways to tell its story. We hoped to inspire our history students to commit themselves in similar ways to telling the stories of people who are often lost to history,” —Colgate University Assistant Professor of History Daniel Bouk

Megan Leo, “Uncovering Hidden Histories: Hobbs Discusses Her Award-Winning Book,” The Colgate Maroon-News, March 31, 2016. http://www.thecolgatemaroonnews.com/news/article_f2fab440-f757-11e5-9c94-cb38fb52fc0d.html.

String of Pearls: Exploring the Melungeon mystery

SWVa Today
Wytheville, Virginia
2016-03-29

Margaret Linford, President
Smyth County Genealogical Society, Marion, Virginia

Judge Isaac Freeman spoke to the Smyth County Genealogical Society on Tuesday, March 22, regarding the Melungeon people. He has been intrigued by this topic for many years. His father was best friends with local historian Goodridge Wilson, who often spoke of the Melungeons. Judge Freeman said he can remember him talking about which local families were part of this unique group.

“Where have all the purebred Melungeons gone?” This question was posed in an article many years ago. Judge Freeman laughed as he shared this question with our group. “Of course,” he said, “the answer to this question is that there is no such thing as a ‘purebred’ Melungeon.”

Who are the Melungeons? There is no simple answer to this question. In N. Brent Kennedy’s book, “The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America,” he proposes that Turkish slaves were brought to America by Portuguese sailors. Once they arrived in America, they joined with female Cherokee Indians and other local tribes. This was the beginning of the “Melungeons.”

Most definitions of the Melungeons simply state that they are a “mixed race people.”…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal 1 year later: ‘I don’t have any regrets about how I identify’

The Today Show
2016-04-12

Eun Kyung Kim

Rachel Dolezal said she remains puzzled about why people have questioned her racial identity but is “ready to move on” from the controversy that made her a household name last spring.

“I don’t have any regrets about how I identify. I’m still me and nothing about that has changed,” the former NAACP chapter president told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday.

Dolezal, who was born to white parents, created a national debate about racial identity after she told the world in a TODAY interview last June, “I identify as black.”…

Read the story and watch the interview here.

Lumbee Indians seek end to a century of questions about identity

The Baltimore Sun
Baltimore, Maryland
1993-10-12

Richard O’Mara, Staff Writer

Proud people from North Carolina find a home in Baltimore

Shirley Jeffrey, an East Baltimore resident, remembers the painful moment five years ago when two Sioux Indians told her that “Lumbees aren’t really Indians.”

Jimmy Hunt recalls a similar experience as an Army recruit when a sergeant asked the American Indians in the group to stand up. “There were two others besides myself,” he says. “Later they said I wasn’t an Indian because I was a Lumbee.”

Not really Indians? How could this be said of the largest American Indian group east of the Mississippi? The ninth-largest in the United States, with nearly 50,000 members, according to the Bureau of the Census. About 4,300 of them are in Maryland.

The question of identity has troubled the Lumbees for more than a century, but it may be resolved this year if Congress approves a bill introduced by Rep. Charles Rose III, D-N.C., to extend full recognition to the tribe.

It’s not that Mrs. Jeffrey is uncertain about who she is. Nor is Mr. Hunt…

Read the entire article here.

Hybrid Details: Honoring Fred Wah: with Fred Wah, Wo Chan, Mark Nowak and Jeff Derksen

Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, 6th Floor
New York, New York 11366
Wednesday, 2016-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Poet Fred Wah is a living legend in Canada, but he remains woefully under-read in this country. To remedy that, we’re celebrating Fred’s oeuvre–a jazzy, radical exploration of place and racial hybridity–and the publication of Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991 (Talonbooks 2016). We’ll have Fred himself, on a rare visit from Canada, and acclaimed poets Wo Chan, Mark Nowak, and Jeff Derksen.

A hapa poet who grew up in his father’s Chinese restaurant, Fred is the winner of the Governor General’s Award (Canada’s highest literary award), served as the country’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2013. He has been compared to the American experimental poets–like the Language Poets and Objectivists Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, with whom he studied–but Fred’s work is informed by his identity growing up in a Chinese-Irish-Scots and Swedish household and his relationship to the countryside of British Columbia. A self-described “Kootenay boy,” Wah has said, “My writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local, the landscape of the Kootenays in southeastern BC; it mountains, lakes, and forests.” The editor of several important Canadian literary journals (TISH, Open Letter, West Coast Line), Fred is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Waiting For Saskatchewan (Turnstone 1985) (this Governor’s General award-winner explores Saskatchewan, “a place that held, for me,” Fred states, “the complications of a mixed-race family history and the geographical site for an Asian-European intersection”) and Diamond Grill (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1996), a coming-of-age collection based on childhood memories working at his father’s Chinese restaurant. Scree collects almost a half century of work, ranging from visual poetry and jazzy riffs to Black Mountain-style open poems about the Canadian landscape to new narrative prose poems and Haibun. As the poet Rob McLennan writes, “The dialogue between Fred Wah’s earlier works tests the possibilities of a poetics of place, of a syntactic dynamism opened by the North American postwar experiments in form and a push against the Western box of knowledge (a push that is threaded through 1960s counterculture up to the globalization of the early 1990s).”

Three award-winning poets will read and comment on Fred’s poems: Wo Chan and Mark Nowak. A queer Fujianese poet and drag performer, Wo Chan was a 2015 AAWW Margins Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, and Lambda Literary; read Wo’s poems Such as and Chopped in The Margins. Guggenheim Fellow and former labor organizer Mark Nowak is the author of Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press 2004, afterword by Amiri Baraka), named a The New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and the acclaimed book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press 2009), which Howard Zinn called “a stunning educational tool.”

Moderated by Simon Fraser University Professors Jeff Derksen. A poet and theorist at the nexus of geography, cultural production, and globalization, Jeff co-founded Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing. He has written several books including The Vestiges (2013), Transnational Muscle Cars (2010) and Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (2010), all from Talonbooks.

Co-sponsored by the Manhattanville MFA program

For more information, click here.

Seeing Baltimore’s Native Americans Clearly

BmoreArt
Baltimore, Maryland
2015-05-26

Cara Ober, Founding Editor

An Inverview with Ashley Minner about her Exquisite Lumbee Project, currently on display at Trickster Gallery

Ashley Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds a BFA in Fine Art, an MA and an MFA in Community Art, which she earned at MICA. A member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she has been active in the Baltimore Lumbee community for many years. Her involvement in her community informs and inspires her studio practice. Ashley is currently a PhD in American Studies student at University of Maryland College Park, where she is studying vernacular art as resistance in tri-racial isolate communities of the U.S. South and Global South…

Read the entire interview here.

By all accounts, [Thomas] Jefferson’s sexual relationship with [Sally] Hemings spanned several decades, beginning when Hemings was a teenager and Jefferson was in his 40s. It was not, in any sense of the word, consensual: Hemings was a child, and Jefferson literally owned her; she was not in any position to give or withhold consent. What Jefferson did to Hemings was rape.

Constance Grady, “Thomas Jefferson spent years raping his slave Sally Hemings. A new novel treats their relationship as a love story.” Vox, April 8, 2016. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11389556/thomas-jefferson-sally-hemings-book.

Raising mixed-race kids who feel secure in their identity

NewsWorks
WHYY
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2016-04-11

Lori L. Tharps, Assistant Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I’m black American. My husband is from Spain. Before we started a family, the race of my future children never gave me cause for concern or worry. I guess I just assumed that since we lived in the United States, they’d be black like me. I did spend a lot of time researching the most successful ways to raise bilingual children. I actually thought the fact that my children were going to speak two different languages was going to be the biggest difference between us. I was wrong.

My children aren’t just black. They have a Spanish father. So that makes them biracial. And while finding the perfect label or identity box to check off on government forms is hardly a critical issue in my parenting routine, raising children who are secure in their ethnic identity often feels like a struggle.

Living in a country as race obsessed as the United States makes identity politics a necessary evil to explore when family members in the same household are different races. Please note, I firmly believe there is only one human race and that the false construct of race that was invented in the 18th century with intentions of creating a hierarchy of man, is complete and utter hogwash. Unfortunately, because as a nation we subscribe to said hogwash, I would be a bad parent if I did not address these issues with my children who will face questions and challenges about their racial identity. But the questions they face will be and are different from mine. These aren’t the kind of things they teach you how to deal with in a Parenting 101 class…

Read the entire article here.

Uncovering Hidden Histories: Hobbs Discusses Her Award-Winning Book

The Colgate Maroon-News
Hamilton, New York
2016-03-31

Megan Leo, Section Editor

On Monday, March 21, Colgate students and faculty gathered in the Persson Auditorium to listen to Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University Allyson Hobbs, who gave a lecture about her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

Racial passing occurs when a member of a certain racial group is also accepted as a member of another racial group. In the context of her book and lecture, Hobbs specifically examined the phenomenon of African Americans passing as Caucasian to escape systematic racism in the United States.

“[Passing is fundamentally] a social act, with enormous social consequences,” Hobbs said…

…Assistant Professor of History Daniel Bouk was instrumental in bringing Hobbs to speak at Colgate.

“Professor Heather Roller and I dreamed up a plan of inviting Professor Hobbs out to campus after we decided to assign her book to both our introductory history workshop classes and our senior honors seminar. We were thrilled when Hobbs said yes and when we won the support of the History Department, the Africana and Latin American Studies Program and the Sio Chair in Diversity in Community, which made the visit possible,” Bouk said.

Bouk provided some background as to why he made the decision to assign A Chosen Exile to Colgate students.

“We assigned Hobbs’s book because we thought it was a model for writing cultural history – it is beautifully crafted and draws on sources in very clear ways to tell its story. We hoped to inspire our history students to commit themselves in similar ways to telling the stories of people who are often lost to history,” Bouk said…

Read the entire article here.