Mixed Race Studies

Colorism And Privilege: An Afro-Cuban American In Havana

FEM: UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973
2016-04-28

Graciela Barada

My father, born in Cuba at the end of Castro’s Revolution, migrated to the United States in 1980. He was a young, black, Spanish-speaking political refugee who left his wife and months-old daughter behind in hopes of building a better life for himself. A “Marielito,” my father braved the 115-mile stretch of the Caribbean sea to Florida under President Carter’s pardon of Cuban refugees. My mother is a white Spaniard who moved to Washington, D.C. in 1989 for graduate school at Georgetown University. An unlikely couple, my parents met at my father’s Cuban nightclub, a hub for Latino culture, music, and dance. Although my siblings and I were born and raised in the U.S., we have been fortunate enough to travel to our parents’ birth countries in order to familiarize ourselves with their respective cultures…

..In Cuba, the Communist Revolution is often portrayed as the “great equalizer,” not just economically but also in respect to race relations. In many ways, this has been true: people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have access to education, jobs, transportation, healthcare, and other social services. Regardless, there are traces of racial hierarchy and a colonialist mentality which are deeply entrenched in Cuban society. As far as I know, all of my Cuban relatives are black. The majority of them are dark-skinned; when asked, two of my male cousins expressed that they do not feel hated because of their African ancestry and darker pigmentation. Still, they are well-aware that their roles within society are informed by Cuba’s history of racial hierarchy and discrimination…

Read the entire article here.

Gendered (Mixed) Race

FEM: UCLA’s Feminist Newsmagazine Since 1973
2016-05-26

Laura Jue

“You’re so exotic.”

That’s a phrase that many mixed race people like me have heard at least a few times in their lives. That sentiment is usually accompanied by other similarly dehumanizing compliments such as “mixed people are so beautiful,” “mixed babies are so cute,” or citing some article from National Geographic about how mixed people are the people of the future.

When conversations about multiraciality come up, a common theme is how it is exoticized by comments like those, in a similar way to how people of color in general are exoticized.

But there is another aspect of these microaggressions that is not brought up as often: assumptions of gender…

Read the entire article here.

[Tanya K.] Hernandez’s close examination of many multiracial discrimination legal cases in a variety of equality law contexts demonstrates the fallacy and danger of that presumption. The cases frequently describe acts of discrimination accompanied by pointed, derogatory comments about non-whiteness—and blackness in particular. The overarching commonality is the exceptionalism of blackness and non-whiteness, rather than multiraciality, as problematic. Although the complainants may personally identify as multiracial, they present allegations of public discrimination rooted in a specific non-white and black bias that is not novel or particular to mixed-race persons.

Shane Danaher, “Multiracialism and Civil Rights,” Fordham Law News, November 21, 2016. http://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/2016/11/21/multiracialism-and-civil-rights/.

Zadie Smith on Male Critics, Appropriation, and What Interests Her Novelistically About Trump

The Slate Book Review
Slate
2016-11-16

Isaac Chotiner

A wide-ranging conversation.

In an interview in 2000, Zadie Smith told the Guardian about the pressure she felt after the astonishing success of her debut novel, White Teeth. “I was expected to be some expert on multicultural affairs, as if multiculturalism is a genre of fiction or something,” she said. “Whereas it’s just a fact of life—like there are people of different races on the planet.” Whether it’s indeed a fact of life or, we now fear, a feature of American life that is at risk of erasure, multiculturalism in all its complexity is at the center of Smith’s books. From White Teeth to NW, which was published in 2012, Smith’s characters inhabit mixed urban communities, often in London. Her latest novel, Swing Time, is out this week; set in England and West Africa, the story concerns the friendship of two young girls who meet in a dance class (“our shade of brown was exactly the same”) and traces the paths of their lives over a quarter-century.

Smith, who grew up in London with a Jamaican mother and English father, has also established herself as one of her generation’s prolific essayists, weighing in energetically on such topics as Middlemarch and Brexit and E.M. Forster. (Her third novel, On Beauty, was an “homage” to Howards End.) She now lives with her husband and children in New York City. I had been trying to interview her for years, to no avail. When the chance finally presented itself, the date and time kept changing, usually a sign of a reluctant subject. But when we did eventually speak over the phone, the day before the election, Smith, now 41, seemed surprisingly at ease. (Weren’t we all in those innocent days?)

Over the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the vulnerability one feels writing fiction, the arrogance of male critics, and why she doesn’t have a smartphone…

…Since your new book spans continents, from Europe to Africa, did you think about the target audience? Who are you writing for?

This time I was thinking very particularly about black girls. I’m very happy if other people read the book, but that’s who the book is for explicitly, and that’s who I wanted to write to…

Read the entire interview here.

19 Black UK Actresses Who Are Killing The Game Across The Pond

Essence
2016-11-17

Sydney Scott

There’s tons of talent coming out of the UK, with many actresses crossing the pond and appearing in some of our favorite television shows and movies. There are too many talented actresses to name, but we had to share some of our favorites with you. From well-known names and recognizable faces to those just bursting onto the scene, here are 19 of our favorite UK actresses…

Read the entire article here.

Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom

gal-dem
2016-11-18

Grace Barber-Plentie

Image via Telegraph

The characters and scenarios in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom are like ghosts – they’re long gone, long dead, and yet there is still a resonance and urgency to them that keeps pushing through to our subconscious, never letting us quite forget. Regardless of the merits of her films themselves, Asante is a clever filmmaker, a filmmaker with a plan. At the BFI’s recent Black Star symposium, she told the audience that she deliberately makes period films about old issues in order to show how they reflect on our own contemporary problems with race, gender, love and money. Gone is the period dress of Belle, but there are still hoards of mixed race girls out there trying to find their place in society. And while in 2016 one would hope that an interracial couple could walk down the street holding hands without a second glance, Asante’s true story of the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and his white wife still makes us think about those of us that must fight for what we want and who we love.

The love worth fighting for, in the case of A United Kingdom, is that of white shopkeeper’s daughter Ruth, in a modest turn by Rosamund Pike and African heir Seretze Khama, played by David Oyelowo; another strong performance to add to his list. Their love, as seen in the opening scenes of the film, is not a fierce, passionate one, but one where each are equal and share love deeply in their own restrained way….

Read the entire review here.

Multiracialism and Civil Rights

Fordham Law News
Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York
2016-11-21

Shane Danaher

Tanya K. Hernández

Fordham Law Professor Tanya Hernandez shared excerpts from her upcoming book on multiracialism and civil rights in talk sponsored by the Center on Race, Law & Justice’s Colloquium on Race and Ethnicity on November 17, not quite seven months shy of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage and the legal stigma against mixed-race children.

Hernandez outlined the argument presented in her work-in-progress study of multiracial identity in discrimination lawsuits, tentatively titled Multiracials and Civil Rights. In the book, Hernandez challenges conventional wisdom about multiracial discrimination.

“The growing view that discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people poses a distinctive challenge to racial equality law is incorrect,” she said. “This misperception is based on the false presumption that multiracials experience racial discrimination in a unique manner that makes it necessary to reconsider civil rights law.”…

Read the entire article here.

Loop of Jade: Sarah Howe visits Manchester Literature Festival

Humanity Hallows
2016-11-04

Leigh Jones

2015 T.S. Eliot prize winner and author of A Certain Chinese Encyclopaedia, Sarah Howe made an appearance at the Manchester Literature Festival recently to discuss her novel Loop of Jade. Within her work, Howe takes her audience on a personal journey through her English-Chinese background, exploring, as the book’s blurb describes, both ‘migration and inheritance’. The novel contains many forms of writing, including poetry, narrative, free verse and short prose, all providing an insight into cultural upbringing and the journey to discover one’s place within society.

At the event, Howe read from her work. Opening with ‘Sirens’, inspired by Theodore Roethke’s ‘Elegy for Jane’, Howe showed how she became fascinated with the key word ‘pickerel’ from which she created a poem illustrating the true meaning of literature and how the perceptions of words continuously develop overtime. Howe emphasised the differences human beings share through literature and how it has encouraged us to think. She described her piece as, “very real and determinative”, as it does not seek to provide an answer but, more so, to enhance ideas…

Read the entire article here.

Watch The Trailer For Barry, Netflix’s Barack Obama Biopic

TIME
2016-11-22

Nash Jenkins

There are just under two months until Donald Trump is inaugurated, but a sentimental nostalgia for Barack Obama’s presidency has been building for quite some time. The new trailer for Barry, a biographical film about Obama’s days as a student at Columbia University in the early 1980s, might help stoke it.

Newcomer Devon Terrell will play the 44th President as a 20-year-old undergraduate, grappling with his identity as a mixed-race kid from Honolulu in a largely white scene. “You a whole different type of brother,” a peer tells him at one point. “You do realize that, don’t you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Black U.K. beauty magazine accidentally put a white model on its cover. Apologies followed.

The Washington Post
2016-11-22

Travis M. Andrews, Staff Writer

Emily Bador is a white woman. She is not, therefore, a black woman. Normally, that wouldn’t be news worth reporting, mostly because it isn’t news.

But her race came into play recently due to the new cover of Blackhair magazine, a British glossy that bills itself as “an international bi-monthly magazine for the style conscious black woman. Packed with 100’s of hair inspirations, fashion, lifestyle and celebrity interviews, we are one of the leading publications for women of colour in Europe.”

The magazine, which generally if not always features black or mixed-race models, used her photograph for the cover of its December/January issue. The editors have admitted they didn’t know she was white…

…According to Blackhair’s editor, Keysha Davis, who wrote a note on the magazine’s Facebook page, the publication runs photographs they receive from PR companies and salons. They specifically request that these photographs be of black or mixed-race women…

Read the entire article here.