Mixed Race Studies

It doesn’t matter how dark or fair someone’s skin is or if they grew up in a family that struggled or one of privilege. There is no such thing as being Indigenous enough.

Charla Huber, “Charla Huber: Every Indigenous person is Indigenous enough,” The Times Colonist, December 30, 2018. https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/columnists/charla-huber-every-indigenous-person-is-indigenous-enough-1.23566435.

“Historically, in the United States, if you had one drop of black blood, you were defined as black. You had various names for people who looked as white as their master, but they were defined as black. I didn’t grow up identifying as black because of that — for me it was more about pride, culture and my parents’ politics. But Maria, like me, walks into a room and people don’t see that she’s black. She deals with that as a conflict more than just the fact of being mixed. If you pass as white in the world but know yourself not to be white, you’re privy to all those uncensored comments about black people that other black people sort of in liberal circles are shielded from. You’re constantly aware of this kind of mask falling away.” —Danzy Senna

Eleanor Wachtel, “Danzy Senna’s darkly comic take on racial identity,” Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel, CBC Radio, June 15, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/danzy-senna-s-darkly-comic-take-on-racial-identity-1.4707804.

Danzy Senna’s darkly comic take on racial identity

Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel
CBC Radio
2018-06-15

Eleanor Wachtel, Host

Danzy Senna’s novel New People follows graduate student Maria through bohemian Brooklyn in the 1990s as she wrestles with her identity and her future. (Mara Casey)

American novelist Danzy Senna draws on her experience growing up in an interracial family in her edgy, prize-winning fiction. In her latest novel, New People, she writes with insight and subversive humour about what it means to be half-black and half-white.

Senna was born in Boston in 1970 to parents from very different worlds, who wed a year after interracial marriage became legal. Her mother, the poet and novelist Fanny Howe, came from a privileged background, with English/Irish family roots going back to the Mayflower. Her father, the African-American editor and academic Carl Senna, grew up in poverty in the South, the son of an orphaned black mother and absent Mexican father. In her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, Senna traces her father’s family story and her own complicated upbringing following her parents’ breakup when she was five years old. Raised with an acute black consciousness, during a time when, as Senna describes it, “‘mixed’ wasn’t an option; you were either black or white,” she brings to all her writing an awareness — and astute analysis — of class, race and identity…

Read the entire story here. Listen to the full episode (00:54:47) here.

Charla Huber: Every Indigenous person is Indigenous enough

The Times Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
2018-12-30

Charla Huber, Communications and Indigenous Relations
M’akola Group of Societies

Devan Cronshaw, left, Riley McKenzie and Alita Tocher are all urban Indigenous people in the capital region. Photograph By Charla Huber, Times Colonist

So often, we hear the words reconciliation and decolonization, and lately I have been wondering if people really understand their meanings. The more I read, learn and listen, the more important these words become to me.

I am a product of the Sixties Scoop and was adopted and raised by a non-Indigenous family. Being adopted and having no knowledge of or connection to my birth family growing up, I really held onto being Indigenous. It was the only thing that I ever knew about myself for sure.

Because I wasn’t raised in Indigenous culture, I have often wondered if I am Indigenous enough. This is especially heightened because I am half. I am very open about my heritage and my adoption, but I do struggle saying: “My family is from Fort Chipewyan and I have Inuit roots.” I’ve never set foot on my ancestors’ traditional territory…

Read the entire article here.

Shirley Segree Cuffee (July 16, 1932 – November 10, 2018)

Beyond The Dash
2018-12-28

Shirley G. Segree Cuffee was born on Saturday, July 16, 1932 in the woodlands of Varina, in Henrico county, Virginia. She was born in her grandmother’s house on her 140 acre farm, to Native American (Powhatan/ Arrohateck, Cherokee) and African-American parents.

Her mother, Inez Selena Baugh was indigenous to that land and her father, James Bethea, was born in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Shirley was her mothers second eldest daughter (first daughter, Thelma “Nuni” Baugh [deceased]); and the eldest of her parents three children together. Before turning 2 years old, she moved to New York City with her parents where her younger brothers James Bethea, Jr., and Cleave Bethea where born.

In 1937, she and her family moved into the first, then “experimental” project in New York City, the ‘Harlem River Houses‘ located along the Harlem River Drive between 151st and 153rd streets in Harlem, New York…

Read the entire obituary here.

Alice Walker’s Terrible Anti-Semitic Poem Felt Personal — to Her and to Me

Intelligencer
New York Magazine
2018-12-28

Nylah Burton

Photo: Peter Earl McCollough/The New York Times/Redux

When I first read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, I leaned into every word, inhaling Celie’s tragic and triumphant story. In Celie, I felt the presence and pain of my female family members brought up in rural Alabama. In Walker’s unflinching descriptions of misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia, and incest, I saw an open accounting of issues buried deep within the larger southern black community — and within my own family.

Above all, I was drawn into The Color Purple because it was haunted by ghosts — the ghosts of Alice Walker’s past. Eloquently and bravely, she was able to confront generational trauma by telling a universal tale that still felt faithful to her own story. And it was Walker’s ability to throw open the shutters and allow her ghosts — our ghosts — into her writing that made it so revelatory. It cemented her standing as an acclaimed novelist, a civil-rights icon, and a formidable thought leader in the field of black feminism.

That changed abruptly two weeks ago, after the New York Times invited Walker to list her favorite books in its weekly “By the Book” column. She took the opportunity to promote David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which contains some of the most hateful anti-Semitic lies ever to be printed between covers. As excerpted in the Washington Post, Icke’s book alleged that a “small Jewish clique” had created the Russian Revolution and both World Wars, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust to boot. Icke has also accused Jews (among others) of being alien lizard people. After a week of criticism, Walker doubled down in her assessment of Icke’s indefensible work, calling him “brave” and dismissing charges of anti-Semitism as an attack on the pro-Palestinian cause…

From left: Mel Leventhal, Rebecca Walker, and Alice Walker, 1970. Photo: CSU Archives/Everett Collection

…In 1967, Alice Walker married a young Jewish civil-rights lawyer named Mel Leventhal. Their interracial marriage — the first such legal union in the state of Mississippi — was still illegal in Walker’s home state of Georgia at the time. Leventhal’s mother was also deeply opposed to the union, and his other family members didn’t allow Alice to attend family events. “Leaving no question about how she felt about her son’s marriage to a shvartse (a pejorative Yiddish term for a black person), Miriam Leventhal sat shiva for her son, mourning him as dead,” Evelyn White writes in Alice Walker: A Life. A source who knows the family told me that Mel preferred to ignore rather than confront his family’s bigotry. This caused Walker to feel increasingly isolated and resentful. The marriage ended in 1976, after the pair had one daughter together, named Rebecca…

Read the entire article here.

Together for Four Decades, Married for Four Years

The New York Times
2018-12-26

Alix Strauss

Paula Martiesian and Ken Carpenter in the yard of their home in Providence, R.I. The couple met in college at Rhode Island School of Design. She’s a painter, he’s a musician. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

Because marriage is an ever-evolving experience, we constantly shift, change and, in some cases, start over. In It’s No Secret, couples share thoughts about commitment and tell us what they have learned along the way.

Who Paula Martiesian, 64, and Ken Carpenter, 65.

Occupations She is a painter, he is a musician (mostly jazz) and composer.

Their Marriage 4 years, 2 months and counting.

Through the Years

The couple quietly married Oct. 20, 2014, in an unplanned ceremony in the living room of their house in Providence, R.I. A friend officiated. “Since 1975, we were considered married by common law in Rhode Island,” Mr. Carpenter said. “When same-sex law passed a few years ago, common law wouldn’t be accepted and we wouldn’t be considered married anymore. The government needed a certificate; we didn’t.” No photos were taken, and the wedding was a surprise to all.

They met in 1972 as students at the Rhode Island School of Design, from which both graduated. Ms. Martiesian was 18 at the time and Mr. Carpenter was 20. “He was really talented, hard working and so secure,” she said. “He was skinny and cute. We didn’t really date; we fell into each other. He was a musician and I drove him to a gig he was playing at. I consider that our first date.”

And that’s how it started. “A black man from Harlem and a white girl from Pawtucket; a painter and a musician,” Ms. Martiesian said. “Racism swirled around us everywhere we went.”…

Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Volume 22, Number 2 (56)
2018-07-01
pages 35-56
DOI: 10.1215/07990537-6985666

Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor/ Faculty Fellow, Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

This essay focuses on artwork that centers family photographs and home movies as a point of departure to trouble the conventional family album in order to narrate a story about Caribbean Chinese kinship. In the art examined, personal visual archives are used to respond to the lacuna of Caribbean Chinese familial intimacies from the colonial archive. Engaging shared themes of migration and racialized ideas of reproduction, three contemporary diasporic visual artists—Albert Chong, Richard Fung, and Tomie Arai—mine oral histories and family archives to blend aural and visual narratives. These artists rupture the surface of family images to trouble the bourgeois, heteronormative, and colorist scripts that often police the formation of family. The family album is rearranged and marked up; thus it becomes rendered as flesh inscribed with silent narratives. Through different forms of remixing, they engage with the affect and entanglements of family photography to form a visual vocabulary of diasporic kinship. In doing so, the artwork—collages, documentaries, installations—interrogates the afterlife of the nineteenth-century European colonial experiment of Chinese indenture, designed to install a discreet “buffer race” between the white minority and the black majority in the Caribbean after abolition. The experiment, which depended on the capacity for the Chinese to develop bourgeois domesticity in the Caribbean after abolition, failed because of sexual intimacies between people of African descent and people of Asian descent, beyond the imperial order’s imagining. Another future of familial intimacies in the diaspora is present in the artists’ aesthetic of fragmentation and collage.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sono Osato, Japanese-American Ballet Star, Is Dead at 99

The New York Times
2018-12-26

Richard Goldstein

Sono Osato rehearsing a number from the Broadway musical “On the Town” with the show’s choreographer, Jerome Robbins, in 1944. It was one of two hit musicals in which Ms. Osato appeared in the 1940s. Eileen Darby/Graphic House

Sono Osato, a Japanese-American dancer who toured the world with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, performed with the Ballet Theater in New York and then gained acclaim on Broadway in the World War II-era musicals “One Touch of Venus” and “On the Town,” was found dead early Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.

Her death was confirmed by her sons, Niko and Antonio Elmaleh.

In the 1930s, Ms. Osato was a groundbreaking presence in Col. Wassily de Basil’s Ballets Russes, the world’s most widely known ballet company. She was the company’s youngest dancer when she joined, at 14; she was also its first performer of Japanese descent…

…Although she was born and raised in the Midwest, Ms. Osato seemed an incongruous choice to play Ivy Smith, billed as the “all-American girl,” in “On the Town.” Her father, Shoji, was a native of Japan, and her mother, Frances, was of French-Irish background…

Read the entire obituary here.

Mixed-race couples, residential mobility, and neighborhood poverty

Social Science Research
Volume 73, July 2018
pages 146-162
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.03.007

Ryan Gabriel, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

Despite substantial growth in mixed-race coupling, we know little about their association with neighborhood poverty. To address this gap, I utilize data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics linked to information from four censuses. With these data, I assess the extent to which mixed-race couples are more likely than monoracial couples to migrate in response to higher percentages of neighborhood poverty; and, once they move, I examine the percentage poverty in their destination neighborhoods. I find that most mixed-race couples are similar to white couples in their out-mobility responses to neighborhood poverty. However, when mixed-race couples with black partners migrate they tend to move to neighborhoods with higher poverty concentrations than couples without a black partner. Mixed-race couples without black partners experience similar percentages of poverty in their destination neighborhoods as whites, providing further evidence of the profound impact of black race on residential stratification.

Read or purchase the article here.