Mixed Race Studies

Belgian church apologizes for role in mistreating mixed-race people

National Catholic Reporter
2017-04-28

Jonathan Luxmoore, Catholic News Service

Oxford, England—Belgium’s Catholic Church has apologized for its role in mistreating mixed-race people, who were born in colonial times to European fathers and African mothers and later taken away for adoption.

“The history of many metis, born of a Congolese, Rwandan or Burundian mother and a white father (serving) in one of these countries, is an obscure episode of Belgian colonization,” the bishops’ conference said in an April 26 statement.

“These children were long designated pejoratively as ‘mulattoes,’ while the colonial authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, considered them a real problem. … We express regret for the part played in this by the Catholic Church.”

The statement was published after an official church apology was delivered by Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp during an April 25 symposium in the Belgian Senate…

Read the entire article here.

Art Presentation and Discussion on Creative Practices

University of Maine Museum of Art
40 Harlow Street
Bangor, Maine 04401
Wednesday, 2017-04-26 @13:00-14:00 EDT (Local Time)

On Wednesday, April 26 at 1 p.m., University of Maine Intermedia MFA students Alicia Champlin and Eleanor Kipping will present their work and discuss creative practices at University of Maine Museum of Art.

Admission is free. Audiences are welcome to bring their own lunch.

Alicia Champlin will discuss her recent performance installation, “MOTIVE,” in the context of a research-based experimental practice. The performance, which took place in December 2016, was intended to spark questions about the relationships between media and maker, between language and listener, and between truth and metaphor. Instead, like many experiments, the work led to some unexpected outcomes, but rather than discounting the effort as a failure, Alicia will share some of the resulting insights that continue to move her practice forward into the unknown.

Eleanor Kipping is a second year MFA student. Her work explores the contemporary black female experience as ‘other’ in America in light of identity, hair politics, colorism and racial passing. She draws heavily on popular culture, and personal, historical and political narratives to drive her investigations. In her talk Coming of Race, Eleanor will share her experiences as a mixed-race female growing up in the predominantly Caucasian state of Maine. While sharing how she has come to terms with her own identity as a black and white woman, she will discuss how her creative practice and use of photography, video, performance, and installation is used as a way to continue her own explorations as well as educate and facilitate discussion surrounding topics of identity…

The Intermedia MFA program is a creative studio-centered degree on the hybrid nature of contemporary art. The MFA focuses on the intersection of creative practice arts with other disciplines and areas of interest, technology, and social praxis to model a new direction and approach to teaching and learning in the creative fields. For more information, visit www.intermediamfa.org.

For more information, click here.

Race is more than just black and white. This new podcast explores some of that middle ground.

The Washington Post
201-04-24

Alex Laughlin

(Illustration by Chris Kindred)

There’s this literary theory called the “mulatto canary in the coal mine.”

It holds that the treatment and depictions of mixed-race people in art and culture is a reflection of the broader state of race relations in America at that moment. The theory has been applied to works throughout American history, from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” to Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia” in 1999.

These multiracial characters, their very bodies providing evidence of racial lines crossed, are marked by confusion and betrayal, jealousy and cowardice, and most frequently, a tragic ending.

Well, it’s 2017 — 50 years since the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision invalidated anti-miscegenation laws across the country. It’s been legal to cross these racial lines for five decades now, almost two full generations. What does it mean to be mixed race in America today?

I suppose I should tell you a little about myself and why I’m so interested in this topic…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latin America and the Black Pacific: An Interview with Sherwin K. Bryant

Black Perspectives
2017-04-22

Yesenia Barragan, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

This month I interviewed Sherwin K. Bryant about his work on the Black Pacific and Afro-Andes. Bryant is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University and serves as the Director of the Center for African American History. As an historian of colonial Afro-Latin America and the Atlantic/Pacific Worlds, Bryant works at the intersections of cultural, legal, social history and political economy, with an emphasis upon Black life in the Kingdoms of New Granada and Quito (what is now modern Colombia and Ecuador). Dr. Bryant’s book, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito offers the first serious treatment in English of slavery and slave life in colonial Quito and challenges the narrower conceptualization of slavery as primarily an economic demand. He is currently working on two new book-length projects. The first charts the history of Black subjectivities along Colombia and Ecuador’s Pacific littoral while the second develops a history of slave life within the contraband slave routes that ran through Panama and New Granada before the era of free trade. Follow him on Twitter @sherwinkbryant.

Yesenia Barragan: As you explain in Rivers of Gold, the Kingdom of Quito had a relatively small enslaved population in comparison to the more familiar cases in the Atlantic world and has thus been overlooked in the historiography of slavery in the Americas. What insights can we gain by examining the history of colonial Afro-Quito?

Sherwin K. Bryant: Until the last two decades, the African diaspora to Spanish America received scant attention compared to the US, Brazil, and the British and French Caribbean. This was due in part to a scholarly reading of slavery through labor, the plantation complex, and an emphasis on numbers. These approaches caused previous scholars to underestimate the socio-political impact of slavery and Black life throughout much of Latin America.

Another enduring challenge to the study of Blackness in Latin America is found in the national myths and master narratives that diminish the importance of Black life, and those that deny and devalue the scale of Black populations and the extent of their on-going persecution. Rather than account for the full scope of Black life, these nations have preferred narratives of mestizaje, or race mixture, marginalizing Blacks and their contributions to the nation. To some degree and for some time now, scholars colluded in this elision, privileging studies of slavery as an institution, or race mixture and social climbing. Consequently, the writing of Spanish America’s Black history was fraught, episodic, and belated relative to the flourishing studies on Indigenous populations and women since the advent of social history in the 1970s and 80s. Finally, a US-centric approach to African American history and the prominence of the Atlantic basin in diaspora studies contributed to these omissions…

Read the entire interview here.

A Young Latino Arab American Throws His Hat in Congressional Ring

NBC News
2017-04-20

Brian Latimer, Assistant Producer

Ammar Campa-Najjar, 28, of Latino and Palestinian descent hopes he can unseat a long-term Republican representative in California’s District 50. Courtsey of Ammar Campa-Najjar

A young, American-born man of Latino and Arab heritage decided to throw his hat in the political ring after working as a community activist and in the Obama administration.

Ammar Campa-Najjar, 28, announced his candidacy Thursday in the hopes of unseating a long-term Republican representative in California’s District 50 in 2018.

Campa-Najjar is the fifth Democrat entering a crowded battlefield that includes Josh Butner, Pierre “Pete” Beauregard, Patrick Malloy and Gloria Chadwick. He hopes his experience as a community organizer during former Pres. Barack Obama’s second presidential campaign will give him an advantage.

Campa-Najjar, whose mother is Mexican American and whose father is Palestinian American, says he spent a lot of time speaking to Hispanic voters in his district to get them to the polls. In 2012, the district voted for Obama, but four years later did not show support for Hillary Clinton…

Read the entire article here.

Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide, a Plea For Help From the Multiracial Community

Multiracial Media: The Voice of the Multiracial Community
2017-04-23

Sarah Ratliff

Bryony Sutherland

Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide

Eighten months ago I published my first non-ghostwritten book called Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide. Being Biracial is an anthology of essays written by parents of Mixed Race kids and/or Multiracial adults. (We have one essay written by an adult that was dictated by a 13-year-old girl.)

It is a co-author venture I did with a close friend of mine who’s White and married to a Black man. Together they’re raising three Biracial sons and they live in England. Bryony Sutherland is an editor, author and ghostwriter—for more information, please visit her website.

I am Black, Japanese and White and Being Biracial was my first non-ghostwritten book.

The 30-second Elevator Speech for Being Biracial

“Good, bad, ugly and illuminating—everyone has an opinion on race. As Biracial people continue trending, the discussion is no longer about a singular topic, but is more like playing a game of multi-level chess. The anthology, Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide, cites the experiences of twenty-four mixed-race authors and parents of multiracial children of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the world. It blends positivity, negativity, humor, pathos and realism in an enlightening exploration of what it means to be more than one ethnicity.”…

Read the entire article here.

“What are you trying to do to me? You have caused a lot of problems in my family. I know my nose is sharp and my skin is light, but my politics are as black as night. Today, I don’t identify as mixed. I reject my white privilege in a racist America. There is no way that I or my kids will identify as anything other than black” —Bernard

Anita Foeman, “DNA Tests, and Sometimes Surprising Results,” The New York Times, April 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/us/dna-ancestry-race-identity.html.

A multiracial actress, [Katie] Chang has considered changing her last name in an attempt to land more roles. But when her first film, “The Bling Ring” directed by Sofia Coppola, came out in 2013, she decided against it. While she noted that some casting directors aren’t looking to cast “Katie Chang as a lead actress” in teen-focused romantic comedies, she said her decision not to use a stage name has pushed her to work harder.

Tiffany Hu, “‘The Bling Ring’ Actress Katie Chang Finds Drive In Activism and Identity,” NBC News, April 20, 2017. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/bling-ring-actress-katie-chang-finds-drive-activism-identity-n745736.

Stealth sisterhood: I look white, but I’m also black. And I don’t hate Rachel Dolezal

Salon
2017-04-23

Alli Joseph

A photo of the author with her mother.

I am white, I am black, I am Native American. And I know what it’s like for people not to see all of who I am

On a hot, humid New York City morning in 1980, I stood with my mother in the checkout line of an A&P supermarket near our home. As she pushed our groceries along the cashier’s belt with me trailing behind, mom realized she had forgotten her wallet at home, but she had her checkbook. Leaving me standing alone in the line for a moment while she saw the manager to have her check approved, the clerk refused to bag our groceries and hand them to me. She was black, and I was white. “These groceries belong to that woman over there,” the woman nodded towards my mother. “They ain’t yours.” Confused, I said, “But that’s my mother. I’ll take them for her.” She looked me up and down. “No,” she said, her voice cold.

The clerk refused to believe that indeed I belonged to, and came from, my black mother, until mom returned to find me choking back tears. She gave the clerk a tongue lashing, which was not her style, and we left the market. Later, mixed Native American and black children threw stones at me near my home on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation as I rode my bike. They yelled, “Get off our land, white girl!” These painful and strange experiences gave me my first taste of racial prejudice, and they have stayed with me all these years.

I am a child of many nations. I am white, I am black, I am Native American. I am West Indian, German, Irish. Brown and light together — integrated, not inter-racial, because race means nothing when you come from everywhere…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Bling Ring’ Actress Katie Chang Finds Drive In Activism and Identity

NBC News
2017-04-20

Tiffany Hu

Katie Chang, is currently a senior at Northwestern. Her second movie is scheduled to debut on April 14. Mia Zanzucchi / Courtesy of Katie Chang

Katie Chang isn’t taking her last year of college easy.

The 21-year-old actress is spending her last semester at Northwestern University taking classes on making her own web series and curating film festivals. She’s also writing and producing a number of plays on campus. During her breaks, she auditions and films.

But while she plays one of the eponymous “outcasts,” Chang is quick to say her character isn’t a stereotype.

“I was up for a different role originally,” she told NBC News. “The girl they had playing the role that I ended up playing was white, tall, and blonde — so it was more of which actor fit best with which role.”…

…A multiracial actress, Chang has considered changing her last name in an attempt to land more roles. But when her first film, “The Bling Ring” directed by Sofia Coppola, came out in 2013, she decided against it. While she noted that some casting directors aren’t looking to cast “Katie Chang as a lead actress” in teen-focused romantic comedies, she said her decision not to use a stage name has pushed her to work harder…

Read the entire article here.