Mixed Race Studies

The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover [Silkey Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 103, Issue 3, December 2016
pages 822-823
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaw452

Sarah L. Silkey, Associate Professor of History
Lycoming College, Williamsport, Pennsylvania

The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover By Nico Slate. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xviii, 246 pp. $90.00.)

Nico Slate explores the evolution of twentieth-century “colored cosmopolitanism,” an intellectual movement to unify the “colored world” around shared experiences of exploitation and oppression, through the lens of Cedric Dover’s transnational intellectual and artistic circles (pp. 17, 19). Observing how African Americans represented “a racial minority within the United States but a racial majority within the colored world,” Dover (1904–1961), a scholar and Indian nationalist of mixed-race ancestry from Calcutta, advocated “colored solidarity” as a tool for antiracist, anti-imperialist activism to achieve social justice on a global scale (p. 141). Seeking inspiration and friendship from African American intellectuals, Dover taught at Fisk…

Read or purchase the review here.

Good riddance to RU’s Powell Hall

The Roanoke Times
Roanoke, Virginia
2010-09-21

Christina Nuckols, Editorial Page Editor

One can, if optimistically predisposed to believe in the inherent honesty and good-natured character of people, accept the story of why Radford University’s arts and music building still bore the name of John Powell until last week.

One might, just barely, trust that university leaders in 1967 chose the name ignorant of Powell’s past, even though the U.S. Supreme Court that same year struck down the Virginia anti-miscegenation law that he had championed.

It’s easier to believe Interim Provost Joe Scartelli when he says he intended to change the name of the building in 2005 after he learned about Powell’s racism, but forgot amid renovation and construction plans…

Read the entire article here.

That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia [Smithers Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 103, Issue 3, December 2016
pages 742-743
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaw364

That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia By Arica L. Coleman. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. xxiv, 300 pp. $45.00.)

Gregory D. Smithers, Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Few Virginians have negatively affected the Old Dominion more than Walter Ashby Plecker. In his role as registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, a position he held from 1912 to 1946, Plecker oversaw a campaign to preserve the racial “purity” of Virginia’s white population and divide African Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians along a black-white binary. To that end, Plecker was not only evangelical in his calls for the separation of the races but was also one of the founding members of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America and, with John Powell and Earnest Sevier Cox, played a pivotal role…

Read or purchase the review here.

The Intercept Brasil Welcomes Ana Maria Gonçalves As A Columnist On Race, Politics, And Culture

The Intercept
2016-12-02

Glenn Greenwald, Co-founding Editor

THE CREATION OF The Intercept, and then the Intercept Brasil, was motivated by a core purpose: to provide crucial journalism and commentary that, for whatever reasons, is not being adequately provided to the public. We are especially thrilled to announce the arrival of Ana Maria Gonçalves as our new columnist because her work so powerfully advances that objective.

By virtue of “Um Defeito de Cor” (A Color Defect), her 952-page 2006 novel about the life of an African woman enslaved and brought to Brazil who buys her freedom and sets out in search of her lost son, Gonçalves has become an important voice in global debates on race and culture. The book, which spans eight decades, powerfully connects modern Brazil with its long history of slavery, and — like the main character herself — confronts some of the most difficult, entrenched, and complex interactions between politics, race, culture, and power. The book is now being made into a Roots-like miniseries, to be broadcast next year…

…The role of race in Brazil is fascinating and relevant both in the ways it is unique to Brazil and the ways it is universal. Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery (1888), and — just as in the U.S. — that historic sin continues to shape institutions and identities in ways society would rather not acknowledge…

Read the entire article here.

Look: Co-Parenting Mixed-Race Kids Requires More Than Racial Tolerance

Black Entertainment Television (BET)
2016-12-15

Ashley Simpo

What happens when fetishizing Black bodies results in having to raise one? An interview with Nick Harris.

It’s far from unique to see an interracial couple these days. The millennial generation is the most racially mixed to date and the U.S. Census predicts that, by the year 2044, there won’t even be a white majority. But within the larger construct of interracial love are several smaller, equally vital conversations — one of which is interracial co-parenting. What happens when an interracial couple has a child and then splits up? What issues arise?

These are questions single father Nick Harris had to come to terms with recently in a text exchange between himself and his daughter’s white mother. Nick posted a text conversation with his ex concerning his daughter’s hairstyle, which was the pretty common style of cornrows done by the child’s aunt, and the screen shots went viral. When his daughter’s mother saw a picture of the braids, she berated Harris, saying the style looked “too Black.” Harris defended his choice by reminding her that their daughter is, in fact, half Black. The exchanged escalated and went on for three pages. Once the internet caught wind of the epic text battle, the outrage sparked a heated reaction…

Read the entire interview here.

While Trump Won York County, Pa., Republican Cal Weary Backed Clinton

Morning Edition
National Public Radio
2016-12-15

Steve Inskeep catches up with Cal Weary, an ex-art teacher from York, who spoke about race and politics as part of the York Project in 2008. Weary, an African-American, is a registered Republican.

Download the story (00:05:34) here.

Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White

HarperCollins
2016-12-06
560 pages
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 1.679 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780061732997
E-book ISBN: 9780062098054

Michael Tisserand

In the tradition of Schulz and Peanuts, an epic and revelatory biography of Krazy Kat creator George Herriman that explores the turbulent time and place from which he emerged—and the deep secret he explored through his art.

The creator of the greatest comic strip in history finally gets his due—in an eye-opening biography that lays bare the truth about his art, his heritage, and his life on America’s color line. A native of nineteenth-century New Orleans, George Herriman came of age as an illustrator, journalist, and cartoonist in the boomtown of Los Angeles and the wild metropolis of New York. Appearing in the biggest newspapers of the early twentieth century—including those owned by William Randolph Hearst—Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoons quickly propelled him to fame. Although fitfully popular with readers of the period, his work has been widely credited with elevating cartoons from daily amusements to anarchic art.

Herriman used his work to explore the human condition, creating a modernist fantasia that was inspired by the landscapes he discovered in his travels—from chaotic urban life to the Beckett-like desert vistas of the Southwest. Yet underlying his own life—and often emerging from the contours of his very public art—was a very private secret: known as “the Greek” for his swarthy complexion and curly hair, Herriman was actually African American, born to a prominent Creole family that hid its racial identity in the dangerous days of Reconstruction.

Drawing on exhaustive original research into Herriman’s family history, interviews with surviving friends and family, and deep analysis of the artist’s work and surviving written records, Michael Tisserand brings this little-understood figure to vivid life, paying homage to a visionary artist who helped shape modern culture.

When Labels Don’t Matter: George Herriman and Krazy Kat

The Beat
2016-12-14

Heidi MacDonald, Editor-In-Chief

We’ve been writing a bit about Michael Tisserand’s comprehensive new biography of George Herriman, Krazy: A Life in Black and White, but last night I got to hear him talk about it at one of the stops on his mini tour. Tisserand presented a slideshow on the book for the first time, and it will be presented again on Thursday at Princeton’s Labyrinth Books with Patrick “Mutts” McDonnell along for the ride – an event I highly recommend if you are into Herriman, Krazy Kat or comic strip history. Or really, just history…

…Tissarand has done a ton of research on the book, but the key element is defining Herriman’s own heritage as a Creole man from New Orleans whose family moved to Los Angeles when he was only 10 so that they could pass for white in a world of Jim Crow laws and blatant racism. Tisserand suggests that Krazy Kat’s gender fluid subtext was his own commentary on race, and in the talk he quoted several strips that allude to Krazy’s never pinned down gender and color swapping – “inferiority complexion” Krazy says in one strip…

Read the entire article here.

The people running the media are the problem

Nieman Lab
2016-12-13

Matt Waite, Founder, Drone Journalism Lab; Professor of Journalism
University of Nebraska

This month, I spent a week surrounded by bright, well-meaning journalism and tech thinkers. Session after session, day after day, conversations kept coming back to these questions: How do we restore trust in media? How do we reach Middle America? What do we do about fake news?

Here’s my prediction for 2017. It’s the safest prediction I could make beyond the sun coming up in the morning. It’s aimed right at the people who run news organizations.

You won’t fix this. Any of this. Not in 2017. Not soon…

Read the entire article here.

Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration

Aeon
2016-12-13

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law
Yale Law School

Edited by Marina Benjamin

‘At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina.’ May 1940. Photo by Jack Delano/FSA/Library of Congress.

James Q Whitman is the Ford Foundation professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale Law School. His subjects are comparative law, criminal law, and legal history. His latest book is Hitler’s American Model (2017).

On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.

That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America. At its very opening, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on US race law and, as the meeting progressed, the participants turned to the US example repeatedly. They debated whether they should bring Jim Crow segregation to the Third Reich. They engaged in detailed discussion of the statutes from the 30 US states that criminalised racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how the various US states determined who counted as a ‘Negro’ or a ‘Mongol’, and weighed whether they should adopt US techniques in their own approach to determining who counted as a Jew. Throughout the meeting the most ardent supporters of the US model were the most radical Nazis in the room…

Read the entire article here.