Mixed Race Studies

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

Broadview Press
2016-05-04 (Originally Published in 1894)
304 pages
5½” x 8½”
Paperback ISBN: 9781554812660

Mark Twain

Edited by:

Hsuan L. Hsu, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Davis

The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd’head Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed race and the other white, exchanged in their cradles, while Those Extraordinary Twins is a farcical tale of conjoined twins. Although the stories were long viewed as flawed narratives, their very incongruities offer a fascinating portrait of key issues—race, disability, and immigration—facing the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Hsuan Hsu’s introduction traces the history of literary critics’ response to these works, from the confusion of Twain’s contemporaries to the keen interest of current scholars. Extensive historical appendices provide contemporary materials on race discourse, legal contexts, and the composition and initial reception of the texts.

How psychologists used these doctored Obama photos to get white people to support conservative politics

The Washington Post
2016-05-13

Max Ehrenfreund

American politics always has surprises, but things have been especially unpredictable since President Obama took office. First, few observers were prepared for the tea party movement, which ousted several veteran GOP lawmakers, replaced them with more radically conservative newcomers, and helped the Republican Party win control of the House of Representatives in 2010.

“That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University.

Then, of course, there was Donald Trump.

Willer speculates that one thing connecting these two political earthquakes might be white voters’ unconscious racial biases. In a series of psychological experiments between 2011 and 2015, he showed how hostility toward people with darker skin and perceived racial threats can influence white support for the tea party. He and his colleagues published a draft of a paper on their findings online last week — some of the most direct evidence of the importance of race to the conservative resurgence during Obama’s presidency.

First, the researchers randomly sorted subjects into two groups and showed them a series of pictures of celebrities, including digitally altered images of the commander in chief. One group saw a version in which Obama’s skin had been lightened, while in the other version, his skin had been darkened…

Read the entire article here.

Artist Turns Racist Flirtations on Tinder Into Compelling Look at Race and Sex

The Root
2016-05-13

Demetria Lucas D’Oyley

Phoebe Boswell Source: phoebeboswell.com

She Matters: Inspired by James Baldwin’s “Stranger in a Village,” Phoebe Boswell was interested in exploring the perceptions of black women in predominantly white spaces.

Over the weekend I swung by the 156 Art Fair, an annual exhibition of African art at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, N.Y. Among the many strong presentations on display, Phoebe Boswell’s Stranger in the Village stood out.

In April 2015 Boswell, a biracial Kenyan woman currently living in London, was temporarily situated in Gothenburg, Sweden, in a predominantly white area. Boswell set out to explore perceptions of race and sex during her stay by turning to dating app Tinder.

“I thought I might want to explore what my body might feel like living in a space that might not be very welcoming,” Boswell says.

Any black woman who has ever ventured online to look for love—a particularly painful place for black women—should be able to predict the worst of what happened to Boswell next. Reactions to Boswell ranged from microaggressions to flat-out racism. But Boswell turned her lemons into artistic lemonade. For her installation, she sketched portraits of her online suitors with a mechanical pencil and included quotes from her exchanges.

“In the space of day, I go back through microaggressions for a month,” Boswell explained. “It’s like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I’m frightened from the things that I see.” Here, she talks about the experiences on Tinder that inspired the project…

Read the entire interview here.

Marlene Daut

New Books Network
2016-04-18

Dan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California

Marlene Daut tackles the complicated intersection of history and literary legacy in her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). She not only describes the immediate political reaction to the Haitian Revolution, but traces how writers, novelists, playwrights, and scholars imposed particular racial assumptions onto that event for decades afterward. Specifically, she identifies a number of recurring tropes that sought to assign intense racial divisions to the Haitian people. Individuals of joint African and European heritage, she contends, received the blunt of these attacks, as they were portrayed as monstrous, vengeful, mendacious, and yet also destined for tragedy. Moreover, observers and chroniclers of the Revolution maintained that these supposed characteristics produced ever-lasting discord with black Haitians. Daut analyzes hundreds of fictional and non-fictional accounts to argue that portrayals of the Haitian Revolution, and of the country itself, have long suffered under these false assumptions of exceptional racial problems. She has also produced a compendium of Haitian fiction during this period, in conjunction with the book. You can find it here.

Listen to the interview (00:49:33) here. Download the interview here.

Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority

The New Press
January 2016
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-62097-115-4

Steve Phillips

A New York Times bestseller, Brown Is the New White takes an unvarnished look at the history of whites and people of color in America and reveals how the past has created current conditions that have revolutionary implications for U.S. politics in 2016 and beyond

Despite the abundant evidence from Obama’s victories proving that the U.S. population has fundamentally changed, many progressives and Democrats continue to waste millions of dollars chasing white swing voters. Explosive population growth of people of color in America over the past fifty years has laid the foundation for a New American Majority consisting of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters in America right now, and that majority is growing larger every day. Failing to properly appreciate this reality, progressives are at risk of missing this moment in history—and losing.

A leader in national politics for thirty years, Steve Phillips has had a front-row seat to these extraordinary political changes. A civil rights lawyer and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Phillips draws on his extensive political experience to unveil exactly how people of color and progressive whites add up to a new majority, and what this means for U.S. politics and policy. A book brimming with urgency and hope, Brown Is the New White exposes how far behind the curve Democrats are in investing in communities of color—while illuminating a path forward to seize the opportunity created by the demographic revolution.

Marvin Rees Becomes UK’s First Elected Black Mayor

The Voice
2016-05-14

Marc Wadsworth

‘I’m the descendant of Jamaican slaves. Now I’m mayor of Bristol,’ Rees tells The Voice

BRISTOL’S NEW mayor has not only changed the face of the city after winning a huge victory but is also promising a new and inclusive way of doing politics.

Marvin Rees, 44, told The Voice in an exclusive interview: “I’m really honoured and feel the weight of the challenge I’m taking on. It’s also very exciting. I’m pleased so many good people are coming forward, wanting to work collectively, which I think this job requires. It’s not messianic leadership. It’s about fostering collective leadership around shared priorities such as poverty eradication, building homes for people and tackling inequality.”

Rees, who grew up poor in the St Paul’s area of the city, has pledged to appoint an all-party cabinet that reflects how people voted and the city’s diversity.

In 2012 Rees unsuccessfully ran for mayor when the post was first created. He amassed a whopping 31,259 votes, losing to independent George Ferguson, a wealthy architect, by less than seven per cent.

This time Rees notched up just under 70,000 votes, almost 30,000 more than Ferguson…

Read the entire article here.

Passing

Next Wave Festival 2016
Northcote Town Hall
189 High Street
Northcote, Victoria 3070
2016-05-12 Through 2016-05-18, Tuesday-Friday 18:30 AEST, Saturday 15:15 and 18:30 AEST (Local Time)

Presented in association with Darebin Arts’ Speakeasy

Choreographers/Performers: Amrita Hepi (Bundjalung NSW/Ngāpuhi NZ) and Jahra Wasasala (NZ)

Using the notion of racial passing as a catalyst for a series of movement monologues, spoken word passages and physical conversations, PASSING maps two bodies under pressure from the responsibility that comes from being of mixed cultural background.

A trans-pacific partnership of physical force, PASSING combines Amrita Hepi’s hip-hop prowess and background in contemporary dance with Jahra Wasasala’s grounded and ritualistic choreographic style to create a provocative, complex and deeply magnetic work—a physical dialogue that exists between two daughters of diaspora.

Bringing together some of Australia’s most talented creatives including an original score by Lavern Lee (Guerre, Cassius Select, Black Vanilla) and styling by installation artist Honey Long, PASSING is an evocative portrait of the ‘exotic’, and the exhausting effects the title can bear.

Italy Must Confront Its Past to Stave Off the Far-Right

Diplomatic Courier: A Global Affairs Media Network
2016-04-13

Fasil Amdetsion, Senior Policy and International Legal Adviser
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia

This year’s seasonal springtime rise in temperatures is expected to deepen Europe’s refugee crisis by bringing about a significant rise in the number of harried migrants approaching its shores. Italy, with its long and porous coastline, remains among the most severely affected countries; 15,000 people have sought refuge in the country in the past three months— a year-upon-year increase of 43%.

As is the case throughout Europe, increased migration has spurred a resurgence of anti-migrant and racist sentiment. In northern Italy, militant right-wingers have torched Muslim prayer rooms in refugee camps and frequently agitate against foreigners…

…Despite their best efforts, amorous liaisons between Ethiopians and Italians did not cease. By some estimates, between 1936 and 1940, 10,000 mixed children were born in Italian East Africa. This befuddled Fascist lawmakers who were unclear about how to treat such “illegitimate” offspring— were they to be considered locals or Italians? The solution to the legal limbo in which mixed race children found themselves was found towards the end of the Italian occupation. A law passed in 1940 definitively categorized mixed race children as “black.”…

Read the entire article here.

Dreams of my father’s dreams of Obama

Ventura County Star
Camarillo, California
2008-11-02

Steven William Thrasher

Fifty years ago, when my father, Bill Thrasher, (who was black) and my mother Margaret (who was white) decided to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to do so there. They had to go to the “progressive” state next door, (Iowa!) to be allowed to wed. Growing up in Ventura County, I’d laugh with my parents about how our family wouldn’t exist without Iowa, which didn’t seem so progressive compared to our Southern California surroundings.

And yet, 50 years later, on a cold January night, good old progressive Iowa shocked me once again as it vaulted Barack Obama onto the path to the White House. What would my parents, who once feared raising their children in the Midwest (after all, they had relatives who tried to convince them, in all seriousness, that their children would be striped like zebras), have made of the fact that the child of a union like theirs could have won the Iowa caucuses or, more implausibly, that in less than one week, that man stands to become the 44th president of the United States?…

Read the entire article here.

“Race” and Science

The Common Reader: A Journal of The Essay
2016-04-19

Garland Allen, Professor Emeritus of Biology
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

A new book traces the complicated legacy of race’s biological conceptions.

Michael Yudell; J. Craig Venter (fore.), Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)

Some years ago, at an elementary school where I was involved in writing and testing a new science curriculum, I was on the playground when a small white boy ran up to the teacher with whom I was talking and said that another boy just hit him. “Which one?” the teacher asked. Pointing to a black boy on the other side of the yard, he said “The one with the red hat.” Brief as it was, that incident had a profound effect on me, leading to the realization that racism—the recognition of race, especially skin color, as a significant, defining difference between people—has to be taught—it is not inborn. Michael Yudell’s new book, Race Unmasked is the story of how race differences have been fashioned and taught, especially with the aid of science, in 20th century America. The book provides an interesting and relevant historical perspective on an issue that recent events in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore and elsewhere have demonstrated is still very much a part of American cultural baggage.

As the author tells us in the Introduction, “in the 21st century, understanding the way race was constructed within the biological sciences, particularly within genetics and evolutionary biology, is essential to understanding its broader meanings.” Yudell shows how scientists, even with the best intentions of modernizing or modifying the concept to keep up with current evidence, often wound up reinforcing the standard, popular view, helping to insure its survival. Thus, this book is about the paradoxical way in which changing biological conceptions of race, changed between 1700 and 1950 from a fixed and significant taxonomic to an arbitrary and socially-constructed category, nonetheless left a confusing legacy that did not substantially change the common perception of the existence of sharply-defined racial groups. The author’s attempt to trace the history of this paradox and its evolution in the 20th century forms the central thread of the narrative…

Read the entire review here.