Mixed Race Studies

The day my daughter realized she isn’t white

The Washington Post
2015-11-03

Lisa Papademetriou

“Mama,” my 4-year-old daughter said. “Did you know that darks and lights didn’t used to be able to go to the same places?”

“What?” I asked. It was bedtime, and I was tired. I wondered vaguely how Zara knew so much about laundry.

“There are some people who have dark skin color,” she said. “Lights would go one place, and darks would go another,” Zara went on, indignant. “There were signs saying the darks couldn’t go into where the lights were!”

“Who told you about that?” I asked, and she explained that a special visitor had come to her classroom to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She very earnestly explained the Civil Rights movement and Dr. King’s message to me. “He said that everyone should be able to go into the same places. He said people should take down the signs that kept the darks out.” Growing more passionate, Zara cried, “Kylie and I agreed that we wouldn’t go anywhere if there was a sign that said, ‘Lights Only!’ We would rip up that sign and say, ‘Everyone can go here!’” Kylie has blue eyes and curly blond hair.

“Zara, honey, I’m so glad you feel that way,” I told her. “But do you realize that you’re not white?”

Stunned silence.

And then: rage. “I am white!” she shouted. “You’re white!”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m white, so you are part white. But Daddy is from Pakistan. He’s brown. And that means that, in those times, you would have been considered brown, not white.”

“I am white!” Zara wailed. “I’m everything!” And she burst into tears…

Read the entire article here.

Obama has vastly changed the face of the federal bureaucracy

The Washington Post
2015-09-20

Juliet Eilperin, White House Bureau Chief

Friday afternoon announcements in Washington are usually aimed at attracting as little attention as possible, but last Friday was different. President Obama’s decision to nominate Eric Fanning — an openly gay man — to head a branch of the military which only four years ago did not allow gays and lesbians to serve openly, was both historic and attention-grabbing.

And it underscored an often-overlooked feature of the Obama presidency: Obama has presided over the most demographically diverse administration in history, according to a new analysis of his top appointments. The majority of top policy appointments within the executive branch are held by women and minorities for the first time in history.

The transformation partly reflects a broader trend in U.S. society, but it also reflects the results of a calculated strategy by the nation’s first African American president. The shifts are significant enough, experts say, that they may have forever transformed the face of government…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and hip-hop: a breakup song

The Washington Post
2015-09-25

Erik Nielson, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts
University of Richmond

Travis L. Gosa, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Erik Nielson is an assistant professor of liberal arts at the University of Richmond. Travis L. Gosa is an assistant professor of Africana studies at Cornell University. Their book, “The Hip Hop & Obama Reader,” will be published in October.

In 2008, Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip-hop — a genre typically viewed as politically radioactive because of its frequently controversial themes and anti-establishment ethos — in his campaign. Equally remarkable was the extent to which hip-hop artists and activists, often highly skeptical of national politicians, embraced him in return. As a result, for the first time it appeared we were witnessing a burgeoning relationship between hip-hop and national politics.

As we approach the 2016 election, however, this relationship is all but gone. Ironically, Obama — often called the first “hip-hop president” — largely is to blame.

This is especially disappointing in light of Obama’s 2008 run for office, when he encouraged artists such as Jay Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs to campaign for him, referenced rap music in his interviews and speeches, played rap at his events and openly contemplated a space for hip-hop in an Obama White House. In one of the lasting images of the campaign, Obama stood in front of an audience in Raleigh, N.C., and referenced Jay Z’s 2003 track “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” to raucous applause. In that moment, voters had every reason to believe that hip-hop indeed would have a seat at the table in an Obama administration…

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Born that way? ‘Scientific’ racism is creeping back into our thinking. Here’s what to watch out for.

The Washington Post
2015-09-28

W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

This month, Jennifer Cramblett lost her “wrongful birth” lawsuit, which centered on a troubling ideology that has been creeping into mainstream discussions in ways not seen in decades. Cramblett claimed that the sperm used to inseminate her came from the wrong donor, leading to a biracial child, which she had not wanted. Her lawsuit claimed that this mix-up in the lab caused her and her family personal injuries of various kinds.

This lawsuit was shadowed by a troubling logic: the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices. In doing so, Cramblett’s claims echoed arguments made in a darker era of global history of “scientific” racism.

Here’s how the argument goes. Some people are born with outstanding talents, easily mastering basketball, mathematics, languages or piano, if given the right environment in which to grow. What biologist or social scientist could argue with that? But alongside that genetic understanding, an old and pernicious assumption has crept back into the American conversation, in which aptitudes are supposedly inherited by race: certain peoples are thought to have rhythm, or intellect, or speed or charm. That’s a fast track toward the old 19th- and early 20th-century problem of “scientific” racism…

…Sociological data suggest that the social behavior of both slaves and slaveholders better explains mortality rates than do physiological qualities of health, speed or strength. In particular, groups of rebellious young men were were most likely to die than those who passively acquiesced, while the economically well-off slaveholders were more likely to kill slaves than those who could not afford to lose property. In sum, the social forces of organized rebellion and the political economy of slavery are better explanations for mortality rates than abstract appeals to “genes” or “natural selection.”

Hughey’s and Goss’s work finds that such explanations have actually proliferated in an era that many argue is “colorblind” or “post-racial,” from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews who proudly said that he forgot, for a moment, that Obama was black, to a 2011 New York Times article that referred to interracial marriage as “a step toward transcending race,” to the claim that “all”— not “black” — lives matter, as presidential candidate Rand Paul recently insisted…

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An Ohio town where races have mixed freely for more than 200 years

The Washington Post
2015-09-26

Kevin Williams

Connor Keiser, 22, left, shows his album of historic photos of Longtown to James Jett, 90 at Bethel Long Wesleyan Church. (Maddie McGarvey/For The Washington Post)

Amid the corn and soybean fields of western Ohio lies a progressive crossroads where black and white isn’t black and white, where the concept of race has been turned upside down, where interracial marriages have been the norm for nearly two centuries. The heavy boots of Jim Crow have never walked here.

Founded by James Clemens, a freed slave from Virginia who became a prosperous farmer, Longtown was a community far ahead of its time, a bold experiment in integration.

Now that history is in danger of being lost. Longtime Longtown residents are dying, and whites are moving in and buying property. Many historically black-owned buildings have already been torn down or remodeled.

But Clemens’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson is working to save his family’s heritage. Though his eyes are blue and his skin is pale, Connor Keiser, 22, said that his childhood is filled with memories of “cousins of all colors” playing in the pastures at the family farm.

“We were a typical Longtown family. We all looked different, and we were taught that color didn’t matter,” Keiser said. “As long as I have anything to do with it, Longtown won’t die.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Place in Between

The Washington Post
2008-08-25

Kevin Merida, Managing Editor

Will Jawando sat on a Capitol Hill park bench admiring an unseasonably breezy August afternoon as he told his story of being half black and half white, “kind of a double outsider” in a nation still struggling with difference.

His story could easily be titled “Barack and Me,” for Jawando, who grew up in Montgomery County, also is the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black African father (his from Nigeria). Oh, and he just happened to marry a woman named Michele.

Now a legislative assistant to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Jawando, 26, sees in Obama a politician who not only shares his personal story but speaks to the sensibilities of his generation. “Barack’s whole message is: ‘I can stand in everyone’s shoes.’ ”

Obama’s unique biography has been central both to his success as a presidential contender and to his opponents’ efforts to portray him as strange, elitist, untrustworthy. Over these next four days, as Democrats host their national convention in Denver, that biography will be on display for Americans to get a closer look.

It is commonly said and written that Obama would become the first black president, not the first biracial president. In part, that is because the nation’s history of racism and inequality continues to make racial milestones so significant, and none more significant than winning the presidency. One could argue that Obama is less the product of the Kenyan father who abandoned him at age 2 and more a reflection of his white mother, who traveled the world as an anthropologist, raising her son in Hawaii and Indonesia with help from Barack’s white grandparents…

Read the entire article here.

If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example. As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word “Hispanic” to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group. “The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “If you go to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won’t necessarily hear people say they are ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ ”

Carlos Lozada, “Who is Latino?,” The Washington Post, June 21, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-is-latino/2013/06/21/bcd6f71a-d6a4-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story_1.html.

Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism.

The Washington Post
2015-09-22

Gil Steinlauf, Senior Rabbi
Adas Israel Congregation, Washington, D.C.

Let’s teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.

Adapted from a Rosh Hashanah sermon delivered at Adas Israel Congregation.

This summer, I had a conversation with a young woman about her Jewish identity. She told me how she grew up in a family that was very involved in her synagogue. She went to Jewish day school. She had been to Israel multiple times. But she felt very far from her Jewishness. She simply couldn’t find the relevance of Judaism as she was making her way on her own in the world. I asked her what she did feel passionate about. She told me she has been reading and thinking a lot about racial justice. What moved her was the #BlackLivesMatter movement — how, in light of Ferguson, Charleston and seemingly endless incidents of injustice against black people in our society, she felt a need to grapple with the racism that is so pervasive in this country and how it affects her identity.

“As a white woman,” she said, “as the product of so much white privilege, it makes me all the more angry to see how other white people so blindly and carelessly feed into the racial climate of our society.” “So the fact that you are white makes this issue all the more painful, all the more personal for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.

I certainly identified with her angst. I find the reality of American racism unbearable: the legacy of slavery; the institutional discrimination that is so pervasive; the scourge of mass incarceration of black Americans, with its collateral damage on families; the ongoing blight of housing segregation; the role of law enforcement in furthering racist systems and hierarchies; all this, and so much more. My answer to her, and my answer for all American Jews during these Days of Awe, is that finding our true Jewish identity can begin by questioning our whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Here’s why Equal Protection may not protect everyone equally

The Washington Post
2015-09-23

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Assistant Professor of Law
Georgia State University

Intersectionality is the acknowledgment that different forms of identity-based discrimination can combine to give rise to unique brands of injustice. For example, although women may generally face certain challenges in the workplace — unequal pay and the “motherhood penalty” are common — women of color may face different obstacles, including a bigger wage gap and the perception that they are too aggressive.

The Equal Protection Clause is the primary constitutional tool for addressing claims of identity-based discrimination. Finding out whether an incident of discrimination is legal typically begins with identifying the identity category — such as race or gender — on which the alleged discrimination is based. Depending on the category invoked, courts will apply varying levels of analysis to the claim, making it easier or harder for those accused of discrimination to defend their policies.

But for those who face discrimination at the intersection of multiple identity categories, it is not immediately clear how a court should respond. If someone claims that she has been denied the equal protection of the law because she is a black woman, should the alleged discrimination be examined with strict scrutiny, the most stringent standard of review in the court system, which is applied to classifications based on race? Or should it be treated with intermediate scrutiny, the lesser standard typically applied to gender classifications?…

Read the entire article here.

Why some Muslims don’t want Ahmed Mohamed’s blackness to be ignored

The Washington Post
2015-09-17

Abby Phillip, General Assignment Reporter

Ahmed Mohamed is now a 14-year-old with a national following and a long list of powerful people on his calling card.

After he was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school to impress his teachers, the ninth-grader has become symbolic of the worst skeletons in America’s closet: growing hysteria and over-criminalization in American schools, Islamophobia and racism.

As the news of Mohamed’s plight spread, some of the earliest accounts associated the teen, who is of Sudanese descent, with the word “brown,” a fuzzy bit of racial jargon that typically refers to non-black people of South Asian or sometimes Latin American descent.

And others openly wondered how the world might have reacted to Mohamed’s story if he had been black.

But Mohamed’s racial identity is as complex as the country of his descent. The African nation of Sudan is predominantly Muslim and is comprised of some 600 ethnicities. Arabs and indigenous Africans have intermarried and mixed there for centuries and most speak Arabic…

Read the entire article here.