Mixed Race Studies

Why You Can’t Ever Call an Enslaved Woman a “Mistress”

Teen Vogue
2017-02-27

Lincoln Blades

This is an important Black History Month PSA.

In the black community, many different opinions abound regarding the usefulness of Black History Month. For some, it is viewed as a necessary and critical tool for cultural celebration and propagating the importance of our collective historical achievements, which otherwise would go unnoticed. For others, it feels like a reductive display of forced lip service conducted during the shortest and coldest month of the year, in lieu of providing us with a more sustained and inclusive role in the everyday curriculum. But what we all can agree on is that presenting our history in a wholly accurate and factual manner delivered with the correct context is of the utmost importance, which is why we react so strongly to inaccurate and/or misrepresentative claims.

That irritation was inflamed this past weekend when The Washington Post published an article about a restoration that would be occurring at Monticello, the plantation of America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, which is operated as a museum. The restoration to be completed will involve unmasking a bathroom installed in 1941 just steps from Jefferson’s bedroom to reveal what the room really was: Sally Hemings’s bedroom…

Read the entire article here.

For decades they hid Jefferson’s relationship with her. Now Monticello is making room for Sally Hemings.

The Washington Post
2017-02-19

Krissah Thompson

By excavating and restoring areas where the slave community lived and worked, Monticello is trying to more fully integrate their stories at the historic plantation. A special focus will be placed on Sally Hemings, whose room in the house will soon be on display for the first time.

CHARLOTTESVILLE — The room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom.

The floor tiles and bathroom stalls covered over the story of the enslaved woman, who was owned by Jefferson and had a long-term relationship with him. Their involvement was a scandal during his life and was denied for decades by his descendants. But many historians now believe the third president of the United States was the father of her six children.

Time, and perhaps shame, erased all physical evidence of her presence at Jefferson’s home here, a building so famous that it is depicted on the back of the nickel.

Now the floor tiles have been pulled up and the room is under restoration — and Hemings’s life is poised to become a larger part of the story told at Monticello…

Read the entire article here.

Like many mixed race kids I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere, but I wasn’t really an outsider: I was full of the invisible tensions of inside, hyper-aware of the contradictions and tensions my friends and peers ignored or never saw in the first place. I couldn’t put a name to any of it then, it was just this intuitive sense of the anger and hatred that pulse through modern life, how America in all of its contradictions hates itself and how that hatred is everywhere and nowhere to see, layered over with sanctioned forms of like and dislike, but never love, that spiritual love Mimi was drawing always closer to — never love because love is too close to hate for America to allow it into daylight.

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, “Dispatch from the Floor of the Model Minority Factory,” The Offing, September 8, 2015. https://theoffingmag.com/essay/dispatch-from-the-floor-of-the-model-minority-factory/.

Nearly all African-Americans carry within them white blood, usually the result of white rape. White slaveholders routinely sold mixed-race children—their own children—into slavery. [James] Baldwin knew the failure to acknowledge the melding of the black and white races that can be seen in nearly every African-American face, a melding that makes African-Americans literally the brothers and sisters of whites. African-Americans, Baldwin wrote, are the “bastard” children of white America. They constitute a peculiarly and uniquely American race.

Chris Hedges, “James Baldwin and the Meaning of Whiteness,” Common Dreams: Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community, February 20, 2017. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/02/20/james-baldwin-and-meaning-whiteness.

I cannot tell you how many times in the past few years I have been asked, “Why are you here? You are not Black.” “Why are you here? You are a non-Black person of color.” What many movement people, leaders, foot soldiers and woke folks fail to understand is that, in America, the binary of Black and white has always excluded “Latinx” people. One need only look at the media to see that, even in 2017, Blackness in America means African-American. Never are we as Black Latinx people represented in the media, and you will rarely find Africans and Black Caribbean people in dialogues and discussions about race.

Rosa Clemente, “Rosa Clemente: How I Came to Know and Appreciate My Blackness As An Afro-Latina,” Atlanta Black Star, February 23, 2017. http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/02/23/rosa-clemente-how-came-know-appreciate-blackness-afro-latina.

Dispatch from the Floor of the Model Minority Factory

The Offing
2015-09-08

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Founder
The Asian American Literary Review

for Mimi

Hard work is a glue, and he worked longer hours than anybody I’d ever known, from doors opening to doors closing, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every summer day the Center was open, six and sometimes seven days a week, year after year after year. I liked him immediately. I used to call him the best boss I’d ever had. He was, for a long time. Frequently I’d close with him, and we’d sit around on top of those little kid-sized desks like two off-duty cops, exhausted and a little punchy, drinking cheap canned coffees he’d brought back from Taiwan for the staff. For reasons I wouldn’t figure out until much later, I saw in him someone I needed badly to be a good boss, a good person, someone I could be friends with, someone who could see a friend in me. I guess he saw a friend in me because I was always there, because he prized hard work over all else, because he prized my PhD-in-progress, and maybe too because he was lonely, even with his wife working beside him all those long hours. The immigrant work ethic fundamentally renders you lonely, even in the midst of fellow immigrants.

The work was private education, primarily prep classes for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, commonly known as the SAT, still the standard ticket for high school students of every race and region and class to gain access to American college education. The business was called Straight A Learning Center — owned and operated by Danny and his wife Ellen, who’d emigrated together from Taiwan in the early ‘90s. Straight A first opened its doors in 1998; I joined the Center in 2007, teaching a few classes that first summer, going full-time the next few summers, eventually going part-time bordering on full-time year-round.

Straight A came to offer a real future for me, money, security, and possibility of growth, as well as the opportunity to help young people from Asian American communities throughout Maryland’s Montgomery County and nearby northern Virginia. The Center promised a new kind of educational culture, and perhaps most importantly to me, because I’m Asian American myself, a way to support and give back to my communities.

But it all went wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Lewis Hamilton

60 Minutes
CBS News
2015-12-13

Lewis Hamilton shows off Formula One car to Charlie Rose

The following is a script from “Lewis Hamilton” which aired on Dec. 13, 2015. Charlie Rose is the correspondent. Keith Sharman, producer.

There is nothing like Formula One in terms of global popularity, glamour and speed. The racing series is considered the pinnacle of motor sports. Most Americans haven’t heard of its biggest star — his name is Lewis Hamilton. Even if car races aren’t your thing, there’s still much to admire in Hamilton’s inspiring story of beating the odds and breaking through barriers. But if you do like speed…buckle up…because you’re about to experience the indescribable rush of driving one of the fastest race cars on the planet.

Lewis Hamilton: Nothing can really prepare you for when you get in the Formula One car. Knowing that you’re driving a multimillion-dollar car, and if you crash it it’s going to cost a lot of money, and they might not give you another chance, is scary…

…Worldwide, Formula One generated more than two billion dollars last season but remains a niche sport in the United States.

F1 executives hope Hamilton can change that.

They have never seen a star like him before.

Charlie Rose: How many black drivers in Formula One?

Lewis Hamilton: One.

Charlie Rose: Why is that?

Lewis Hamilton: Well, I don’t know. I think in the future there’ll be more.

Charlie Rose: You’re a role model?

Lewis Hamilton: I hope so….

Read the entire transcript here. Watch the interview here.

Mixed Race Conference reflects on identity

The Daily Trojan
Los Angeles, California
2017-02-26

Erum Jaffrey

Julia Erickson | Daily Trojan Roundtable · Panelists spoke with Maria Root (second from left) to discuss her 25 years of experience in multiracial studies at the fourth annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference. The event was hosted by the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

When Rudy Guevarra Jr. filled out identification forms in elementary school, he remembers never checking the provided boxes for race. Instead, he drew his own box, and wrote “Mexican-Filipino,” unable to choose one parent’s culture over the other.

Guevarra delivered the keynote address for the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference on Sunday, a speech titled “Borderlands of Multiplicity: Reflections on Intimacies and Fluidity in Critical Mixed Race Studies”. The three-day conference held at USC featured a series of workshops, lectures, panels, movie-screenings and concerts on the topic of “Trans,” coinciding with the Hapa Japan Festival. It was hosted by USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

An associate professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University, Guevarra spoke about his mixed race heritage as a “Mexipino,” or Mexican-Filipino, growing up in the borderland city of San Diego and how that influenced his doctoral research in borderlands, labor history and multiethnic identities…

…The conference fell on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that declared anti-interracial marriage laws unconstitutional.

“It’s not just celebrating who we are, but also reflecting on how our multiplicity can enhance the greater good of the communities we work in,” said Chandra Crudup, co-coordinator of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference…

Read the entire article here.

30 Books #9: Colette Bancroft on Michael Tisserand’s ‘Krazy’

critical mass: The blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors
2017-02-23

Colette Bancroft

In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Colette Bancroft offers an appreciation of biography finalist Michael Tisserand’s Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (Harper Collins).

In a surreal desert landscape, a tiny white mouse throws a brick at the head of a black cat. On impact, the cat lifts lightly off the ground, hearts floating in the air above its lovestruck head.

That image, and the story it suggests, might sound slight. But it was the heart and soul of Krazy Kat, a tremendously influential comic strip that ran for more than 30 years at a time when newspaper comic strips were among the most popular American art forms.

Its creator is the subject of Michael Tisserand’s engaging, revealing biography, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White…

…In exploring the artist’s life story, Tisserand reveals something that adds even more depth and complexity to the strip: Herriman came from a mixed-race New Orleans family that moved to California during his childhood and ever after passed as white…

Read the entire review here.

With role in ‘The King and I,’ a mixed-race actress tries to finds her way

The Star Tribune
2017-02-23

Rebecca Ritzel, Theater critic

Matthew Murphy Manna Nichols and Kavin Panmeechao in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I.

Manna Nichols was still a student at Oklahoma City University when she was cast by a major American theater in a major musical- theater role.

That was four years ago, at Washington’s Arena Stage, and Nichols was playing Eliza Doolittle opposite the great Canadian actor Benedict Campbell, son of former Guthrie Theatre artistic director Douglas Campbell.

As a mixed-race actor of Chinese, Caucasian and American Indian descent, Nichols was thrilled to land a role that would typically go to a white woman. For better or worse, she’s since become a go-to actor for Asian-specific roles. In 2013, she played Kim in a touring “Miss Saigon” that drew protests at Ordway Center, and last summer she took on the part of Liat in the Guthrie staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.”

Next week, Nichols returns to the Twin Cities in another canonical Asian role: She’s Tuptim, the King of Siam’s reluctant junior wife in the Lincoln Center touring production of “The King and I.” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical about a spunky 19th-century English teacher who disrupts the Siamese court opens Tuesday at the Orpheum in Minneapolis.

Nichols talked about what she has faced when it comes to race and casting, why she tried out for this show, which won a 2015 Tony for best revival, and what was special about the Guthrie’s “South Pacific.”…

Read the entire interview here.