Mixed Race Studies

Dating in the Time of #BlackLivesMatter

Racism Review: shcolarship and activism toward racial justice
2016-02-24

Shantel Buggs, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin

When I started my dissertation research a year ago, I had not considered what impact the widespread media coverage of #BlackLivesMatter as a movement and rallying cry might have on my respondents. With my research, I intended to explore the online dating experiences of women who identify as multiracial here in Texas; what I have found has been a complex mobilization of Black Lives Matter as a metric of racial progressiveness. In 2016, it has become clear that the increased media attention being paid to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is shaping a particular orientation toward, and conversation around, race and racism in the United States. As scholar Khury Petersen-Smith notes, the movement has “shattered what remained of the notion of a ‘post-racial’ America.” More specifically, my work has found that BLM has impacted individual-level relationships, creating a framework within which people are able to evaluate and “vet” their dating partners, especially amidst claims that society is more “progressive” and that the atrocities we have witnessed are “not about race.”

As every good social scientist knows, words mean things. The language around, and produced by, movements like BLM – particularly in regards to discourses of race, racial inequality, state-sanctioned violence, and racism – has influenced the ways in which the multiracial women in my study discuss race, racism, and inequality in the context of their intimate relationships. Several women have described using their own stances on the issues BLM addresses as a means of selecting potential dating partners. This finding suggests that BLM and other widespread social justice movements are having significant impacts on how people are navigating racial politics on an interpersonal level. This is particularly pertinent during a time where U.S. media and popular culture is especially focused on issues of racism and state-sanctioned violence…

Read the entire article here.

What does it mean to be “black enough?” Three women explore their racial identities

The Washington Post
2016-12-11

On “Historically Black,” our podcast about black history, narrator Roxane Gay introduces three new voices.

“What are you?”

“Are you adopted?”

“What are you mixed with?”

Many photos and stories submitted to “Historically Black,” The Washington Post Tumblr project, have touched on what it means to identify as a particular race and ethnic background. Throughout this project, multiple stories surfaced a theme that pointed to an ongoing internal and external conflict based on the societal criteria that deemed a person “black.” These stories identified the struggle to understand the judgment — by both black and non-black communities — based on the way one dresses, speaks and acts.

This has led to a hard, and conflicting, question: What does it mean to be “black enough” in modern America?

That’s the question Marcelle Hutchins faced ever since she, her twin sister and their mother emigrated from Cameroon to Portland, Maine. Hutchins’s mother married a white man, and together they settled in as a family. But as early as the third grade, Hutchins faced the harsh reality of integrating into American society.

“Growing up, I really struggled with my identity in America. For a long time, I often questioned, you know, who I was in this world. And I was told by a variety of different people that I didn’t fit my birthright, that I didn’t act the way I should act or the way black people should act, and because of my mannerisms I was too white,” Hutchins said.

According to Jelani Cobb, a historian and writer at the New Yorker, defining “blackness” is inherently complicated — because race is an invented category dating back to slavery, and the category can encompass a range of identities and cultures. People identify as black, African American, African, Muslim, Native American, biracial and sometimes more.

“The most kind of basic understanding is the one-drop rule, wherein people said if a person had any drop of blood, black blood, they were black. And the purposes of that were to present whiteness as a category of purity and that any tincture of African ancestry would irrevocably taint a person and remove them from the, you know, pure category of whiteness,” Cobb said. “There’s a wide range of ancestries that are included within the category of black, and so the category itself is amorphous.”…

Read the entire article here.

Even today, being biracial in America is not always easy

Observer-Reporter
Washington County News
Washington, Pennsylvania
2016-12-17

Karen Mansfield, Staff Writer

Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Dontae Monday, a student at Washington & Jefferson College, stands in front of Old Main recently.

Koron Harris is used to strangers sneaking glances at her, and she knows why.

“They’re trying to figure out if I’m black or I’m white.”

The daughter of a black father and white mother, Harris has encountered curiosity and fascination about her biracial heritage since she was in elementary school.

“I don’t really think about it at this point, but everybody else does. I’ve had people ask me whether I think I’m black or I’m white, and I honestly don’t see it that way,” said Harris, 19, of Washington. “I just think of me as being Koron.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Monoracial Millennium (a parody): Rethinking Mixed Race in the Age of Obama

Medium
2016-12-18

Gino M. Pellegrini

“The Four Races” from Le Tour de la France par duex enfants (1877) by G. Bruno

It sucks to wake up and realize that you’re back out of style — viewed as a promising development in one decade, viewed as an impediment to racial justice in the next.

It was the 1990s. Racial pure breeds were fading to beige, and ethnic ambiguity was starting to matter. The public was interested in topics like the biracial baby boom, the browning of America, and Tiger “Cablinasian” Woods. Time magazine issued its “New Face of America.” Maria Root published her “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” And multiracial grassroots activists were lobbying the state to account for the growing multiracial population via a new multiracial identifier for Census 2000.

Many in the old vanguard of the US Civil Rights Movement were troubled by this development. They responded by propagating new sayings about the new mixed people: “I’m mixed is another way of saying that you want to be white” and “the multiracial movement is anti-black.”…

Read the entire parody here or here.

Book Reviews: Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist [Geiger Review]

Comparative Civilizations Review
Volume 75, Number 75, Fall 2016
Article 11
pages 125-126

Pedro Geiger

G. Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2012

The long and excellent book by Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis, of 338 pages, focuses on two related issues. One deals with racial questions in the USA and in Brazil, detailing their historical development.

Racial problems were established in both countries by the encounter of the European colonization with the prior Colombian population and by the colonial introducing of African slaves in the American continent. The book deals with the behavior and the perceptions of the racial issue by the different social sectors of the American and of the Brazilian societies, and with the evolution of the legal policy measures taken by both states in regard to it. Brazil has earned the reputation of being a racial democracy for the reason of not having had legalized social barriers based in race. However, discrimination among sectors of the population existed and still exists there.

The opportunity of dealing with racial questions was taken by the author to cover with accurate studies the full Brazilian history. Based on a large and good bibliography, he discusses a wide variety of themes, comparing interpretations of known Brazilian historians, like the ones made by the Marxian Caio Prado Júnior with the ones made by the Weberian Raymundo Faoro, or describing cultural traits brought by the slaves (like their religions), how they influenced Brazilian culture, and how they were treated by the government institutions.

The second theme of the book deals with the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839- 1908) an icon of Brazil’s literature and the founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The linkage between the two themes treated in the book is the fact that, like Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis had an African ancestry…

Read the entire review here.

The One They’ve Been Waiting for: White Fear and the Rise of Donald Trump

Politics of Color: commentary & reflections on race, ethnicity, and politics
2016-11-27

Linda Alvarez, Assistant Professor
California State University, Northridge

Ivy A. Melgar Cargile, Assistant Professor
California State University, Bakersfield

Natasha Altema McNeely, Assistant Professor
University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley

Lisa Pringle, Ph.D. Candidate
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Patricia Posey, Ph.D. Candidate
University of Pennsylvania

Andrea Silva, Assistant Professor
University of North Texas

Carrie Skulley, Assistant Professor
Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania

On November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. Many, including members of the Republican party were shocked that a man openly propagating racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia would now be the leader of the most powerful country in the world. How did this happen? While several factors contributed to Donald Trump’s alarming success, there is no doubt that tapping into American racism and sexism were integral to his victory. However, Trump’s election rhetoric alone was not enough to ignite an entire sector of the U.S. population. Instead, Trump built his campaign on a historical culture of white fear of “the other.” Through this rhetoric, The Trump campaign united white America in particular, under a banner of fear. Trump’s campaign was based on igniting a “moral panic—an upwelling of intense emotion and feeling over conditions that challenge people’s deep seated values and threatens the established social order.” Yet, this panic was not created by the Trump campaign. Instead, his campaign was able to capitalize on an already salient white fear in the United States- a white fear present since the founding, that resurfaced in a post 9/11 context, and was fed by the rhetoric of “uncontrollable other,” set on destroying the “American” way of life. The extreme nationalism, fear, and xenophobia ignited by 9/11, the challenge to entrenched white privilege posed by the election of Barak Obama, the adoption of relatively liberal immigration policy, and the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement all threatened the status quo that white Americans have enjoyed in this country since its founding. Trump’s rallying cry to “Make America Great Again,” was about more than an economic policy, it was a literal call to regain and reinstate white supremacy. Here, we argue against suggestions that the Trump campaign and subsequent win has created backlash and erased our post-racial America. We argue that this backlash was decades in the making and that a “post-racial America” has never existed. Further, our policymakers and institutions have been continuously changed and challenged to preserve white supremacy structures in America   Fear and hatred of the “other” has been codified since the founding of this country like the Pogroms against First Nations, slavery and later Jim Crow laws, Women as Property, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japanese internment camps. These are examples of white supremacy systemized into law, and entrenched in our culture to create and maintain a status quo that upholds white power. This article delves deeper into the continuous effort by white nationalist to marginalize vulnerable groups and the Trumps campaign’s ability to exploit these institutional changes into a victory. The façade of a “post-racial” society was created and reified after the election of the first mixed race president and congealed among sectors of white America. we begin this discussion with the break in our “post-racial” façade after the attacks on September 11, 2001…

Read the entire article here.

Where Has All the Loving Gone? A Review of the New Film, ‘Loving’

African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS)
2016-11-27

Peter Cole, Professor of History
Western Illinois University

A new film about the Southern working class couple whose love and dedication broke the back of anti-miscegenation laws across the nation arrives just in time. Released days prior to Donald Trump’s election, viewers of Loving might be shocked to discover that anti-racist, blue-collared, white men—like Richard Loving—walked Southern soil. He was brave (or ignorant) enough to think he could get away with marrying a black woman; wise enough to know she was smarter than him. His deferral to her effort to seek legal counsel ultimately overturned laws banning interracial marriage in the landmark Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia (1967).

Beneath the film, the Lovings’ story also speaks to the centuries-long effort by white supremacists to create a “white race” and defend it from “race-mixing”(also called miscegenation). In 1958, Richard Loving, 23, and Mildred Jeter, 17, married in the District of Columbia. They did so because Virginia outlawed interracial marriages, one of twenty-four states with similar laws at the time. Richard was “white,” Mildred “black” though actually a mixture of African American and Rappahannock Indian.

So began their nine-year odyssey that ended with the Court unanimously ruling that states could not prevent a man and a woman from marrying, regardless of their racial identities. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, critics at Cannes hailed the motion picture and Oscar buzz has begun. The film deserves high praise and wide viewership, anchored by incredible performances from Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the two principal actors…

Read the entire review here.

Beacon Goes to the Movies: “Loving” and the History of White Supremacy

Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press
2016-12-15

Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, Editorial Assistant

When publicity assistant Perpetua Charles and senior editor Joanna Green first began planning a staff trip to see the film Loving in celebration of Beacon’s forthcoming book on the same topic five months ago, they couldn’t have known for sure what our political environment would be as they and fellow members of the Beacon Press staff walked through a rainy November night to the theater. Exactly a week after the country watched the electoral votes tally in favor of a divisive Republican presidential candidate, we came together to view a retelling of how Mildred and Richard Loving, a young interracial couple from Virginia, helped end the ban on interracial marriage in the United States.

“Biopics like this leave you with an overwhelming sense of hope, right? Making you think that as soon as the anti-miscegenation laws were overturned, every interracial couple was getting married left and right and naysayers kept their mouths shut. But that’s surely not what happened,” Perpetua said, going into the film.

From reading an early copy of Sheryll Cashin’s upcoming book, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy, I gradually came to the understanding that the story this film set out to tell feels big because it is big. Not only is it the story of Richard and Mildred Loving—their love, their decision to formally wed, their beloved hometown of Central Point, Virginia turning against them, their exile to Washington D.C., and the ten years they spent mired in the legal battle that would culminate in the seminal Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. It is also a four hundred-year-old story of people defying a deeply entrenched and fiercely protected color line to love or marry in America. It is a story that has gone on for as long as this country has existed, and as this election has confirmed, is nowhere near over…

Read the entire review here.

My fear killer will get pension, by daughter of train IRA bomb victim

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-17

David Young

Jayne Olorunda

The daughter of a man killed in an IRA blast on a train has claimed her elderly mother would be excluded from a proposed victims’ pension scheme while the IRA terrorist whose bomb killed her father would be eligible – because he was injured but survived.

Read the entire article here.

The only people who qualify as non-racist are those who defy and denounce the false logic of race altogether.

Carlos Hoyt, “Mean, Kind Or Non: Which Type Of Racist Are You?” Cognoscenti, WBUR 90.9 FM, December 15, 2016. http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/12/15/race-and-racism-carlos-hoyt.