Mixed Race Studies

Zendaya to produce, star in thriller on Anita Hemmings, first black woman Vassar grad, passing as white to attend

Shadow And Act
2017-11-14

Zendaya (left) and Anita Hemmings (right).

Zendaya has booked what Deadline calls a hot pitch package on the street right now.

The film is called ‘A White Lie’ and it is a film adaptation of the Karin Tanabe novel, The Gilded Years.

The novel, a psychological thriller, “built around the true story of Anita Hemmings, a light-skinned African American woman. She is the daughter of a janitor, who passed as white so she could attend Vassar at the turn of the century.” She is treated as a wealthy and educated white woman and sparks a romance with a rich Harvard student.

Zendaya will play Hemmings…

Read the entire article here.

Zendaya To Star In ‘A White Lie,’ Pitch Package From Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine

Deadline
2017-11-13

Mike Fleming Jr

REX/Shutterstock

The hot pitch package on the street is A White Lie, an adaptation of the Karin Tanabe novel The Gilded Years. The book is a psychological thriller built around the true story of Anita Hemmings, a light-skinned African-American woman. The daughter of a janitor, she passed as white so she could attend Vassar at the turn of the 20th century. Spider-Man: Homecoming star co-star Zendaya will play Hemmings. Monica Beletsky is writing the script, and Hello Sunshine’s Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter are producing along with Zendaya…

Read the entire article here.

Canada’s Métis population on the rise: why some Métis leaders find this ‘very concerning’

The Current With Anna Maria Tremonti
CBC Radio
2017-11-01

Ana Maria Tremonti, Host

David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Metis Federation, says there are far fewer Métis than reported by Statistics Canada. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

New data released in October by Statistics Canada reveals a surprising spike in Canadians identifying as Métis.

The 2016 census shows exponential growth, especially in the eastern part of the country.

In Quebec, over the last decade the number of people identifying themselves as Métis is up 149 per cent. In Nova Scotia, it’s up 124 per cent.

But for some Métis leaders, this isn’t necessarily a good news story.

“It was very concerning for us to see such a change in the identifying of where the Métis are and who they are,” said Dave Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Métis Federation…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story here. Read the story transcript here.

As intermarriage spreads, fault lines are exposed

The San Francisco Chronicle
2017-05-19

Jill Tucker, K-12 Education Reporter

Jered Snyder and Jen Zhao of Oakland got married in 2015. Asian American women are among the groups that are more likely to marry outside their race. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

The growth of interracial marriage in the 50 years since the Supreme Court legalized it across the nation has been steady, but stark disparities remain that influence who is getting hitched and who supports the nuptials, according to a major study released Thursday.

People who are younger, urban and college-educated are more likely to cross racial or ethnic lines on their trip to the altar, and those with liberal leanings are more apt to approve of the unions — trends that are playing out in the Bay Area, where about 1 in 4 newlyweds entered into such marriages in the first half of this decade.

Among the most striking findings was that black men are twice as likely to intermarry as black women — a gender split that reversed for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans and, to researchers, underscores the grip of deeply rooted societal stereotypes…

Read the entire article here.

Black Tudors: The Untold Story

Oneworld Publications
2017-11-14
352 pages
2.8 x 2.8 cm
ISBN-13: 978-1786071842

Miranda Kaufmann, Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study
University of London

A black porter publicly whips a white English gentleman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A heavily pregnant African woman is abandoned on an Indonesian island by Sir Francis Drake. A Mauritanian diver is despatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose… Miranda Kaufmann reveals the absorbing stories of some of the Africans who lived free in Tudor England. From long-forgotten records, remarkable characters emerge. They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. Their stories, brought viscerally to life by Kaufmann, provide unprecedented insights into how Africans came to be in Tudor England, what they did there and how they were treated. A ground-breaking, seminal work, Black Tudors challenges the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and forces us to re-examine the seventeenth century to determine what caused perceptions to change so radically.

The Empire Comes Home: Thomas Law’s Mixed-Race Family in the Early American Republic

Chapter in: India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s
Palgrave Macmillan
pages 75-108
Published online 2017-11-11
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62334-4
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62333-7
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4_3

Rosemarie Zagarri, Professor of History
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Thomas Law was a high-ranking administrator with the British East India Company. In 1791, he left India, bringing with him his three illegitimate sons, born of his native concubine, or bibi. After a brief stay in London, he sought a more congenial environment in which to raise his mixed-raise children, In 1794, he, along with his sons, moved to the young United States where he became a key figure in early Washington, DC society. This essay examines the fate of Law’s mixed race sons. Although their high social class tended to mitigate racial prejudice, racial animosity surfaced at key moments in their lives. Like British India, the early American republic was experiencing a hardening of racial boundaries during the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Well-meaning mixed people can also perpetuate the ideology of White supremacy. In 2007, I co-created a podcast exploring mixed identity. Each week, we discussed our and our guests’ responses to the ‘what are you’ question, and other common experiences of mixedness. We had a decent following and published episodes weekly. Then, a dear friend told me that a loyal fan had stopped listening. When I asked why, my friend’s response floored me: “You don’t address Whiteness.” My immediate reaction was defensive: What do you mean!? I acknowledge my mother is White and I’m half White all the time!

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, “Love, Alone, Will Not Dismantle Racism,” Girl Mob, November 13, 2017. http://thegirlmob.com/culture/dismantleracism.

‘Always remember: You’re a Madison’

The Washington Post
2017-11-14

Krissah Thompson, Feature Writer

At Montpelier, four women with ties to the estate pose with the saliva vials they used to test their DNA. From left, Mary Alexander, descended from Madison’s slave Paul Jennings; Bettye Kearse; Conny Graft, descended from Madison’s sister; and Leontyne Peck. (Eduardo Montes-Bradley/Montpelier Foundation)

Oral history said she was descended from a president and an enslaved woman. But what would her DNA say?

ORANGE, Va. — In her mind’s eye, Bettye Kearse could see her ancestor walking the worn path that led from the big house to the slave quarters.

She thought of that path each time she pulled up the long, winding driveway leading to Montpelier, the rural Virginia plantation that was once home to President James Madison.

“The first time I came here was in 1992, and the moment I actually got on the grounds I felt I belonged,” said Kearse, a retired pediatrician who lives in the Boston area.

As an African American descendant of slaves, her feelings about the Founding Father, as a man and a historical figure, are decidedly ambivalent. But she has come to love his home. From the time she was a child, her mother had told her the family’s known history began on Madison’s property — and that they were, in fact, descendants of the president and an enslaved cook named Coreen. During each of her visits to Montpelier, Kearse felt the weight of her mother’s daunting request that she carry their story through oral history, following in the West African tradition of griots, or storytellers…

James Madison, 4th president of the United States created 1835. (Library of Congress)

…In 1834, two years before James Madison died, Betsey was purchased in Tennessee as a “companion” for Emanuel — the first documented reference to Kearse’s fore­father and foremother. In 1848, a slave owner named Jeptha Billingsley brought Emanuel and Betsey to Central Texas. They apparently had the last name Madison before emancipation.

All that Kearse’s generation knows about the couple comes from the bill of sale and details in Billingsley’s will. Betsey was a “light mulatto complexion Negro woman,” born around 1815. Emanuel was “a Negro man of dark complexion,” somewhere between six and 10 years Betsey’s senior. They had at least 11 children. Nine lived to adulthood…

Read the entire article here.