Mixed Race Studies

New NAACP Leader Looks Ahead

National Public Radio
Tell Me More
2008-05-20

Michel Martin, Host

Benjamin Jealous is the new president of the NAACP. Jealous, a former news executive and lifelong human rights activist, discusses his new post and the ever-changing role of the NAACP in the civil rights movement.

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I’m Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. In a moment, the Mocha Moms on going green as a family. They’ll talk about ways to get started. And things never to say to Asian-American colleagues. We start our series on how to be mindful of the sensibilities of others in our increasingly diverse workplaces.

But first, one of the country’s oldest civil rights organizations gets a new leader. The NAACP chose a new president on Saturday, 35-year-old human rights activists Benjamin Todd Jealous. He will be the youngest president ever in the history of the 99-year-old civil rights organization. His election comes after the organization tries to recover from a period of internal strife to engage a new generation of members and to refocus its mission. Ben Jealous joins us now to talk about his new post and hopefully a little bit about himself. Welcome to the program. Congratulations.

Mr. BEN JEALOUS (President, NAACP): Thank you. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

MARTIN: You’ve had a couple of days to take it all in. Can you describe what it means to lead this historic organization founded by giants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells Barnett.

Mr. JEALOUS: Those two are a big deal to me. I come out of the black press, that’s how I learned how to do what I did for Amnesty [International], and so it’s extremely humbling. You know, at the same time, as a parent of a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl, I’m extremely impatient and want to focus on the now, you know, want to focus on the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline and on making sure that this great association is as important in the 21st century as it was in the last century…

…MARTIN: Your profile is a bit different from past leaders in a number of respects—I mean, the fact that you are not a minister or a politician. One other interesting thing about you is that you are also biracial, as is Barak Obama, as is the lieutenant Governor [Anthony G. Brown] of Maryland, as is the mayor [Adrian Fenty] of Washington.

Mr. JEALOUS: Can I, can I make a small correction there?

MARTIN: Of course.

Mr. JEALOUS: I’m black. You know, the only thing that we have, you know, the only definition that’s out there on the books, if you will, are state laws, and my family is from Virginia. When I was born it said, the law said that you had to be 1/32nd, excuse me, if you were at least 1/32nd of African descent, you were black, end of story. White was an exclusive definition, black was an inclusive definition. I do have biracial parentage but quite frankly…

MARTIN: You don’t consider yourself biracial.

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean, I don’t understand it, I mean the… my grandmother’s much fairer than I am, has straight hair. You know, the reality is that, you know, our family, like most families were sort of created in the Jeffersonian model. You know, we were raped on Virginia plantations, and you know, all of those kids were black.

MARTIN: But your parents weren’t? I mean, that’s not your parents.

Mr. JEALOUS: Yeah, right but what I’m saying is that…

MARTIN: What I’m curious about though is that, is there something, is there an important cultural moment here, or not?

Mr. JEALOUS: No, I mean you know, yeah it is significant, I think the most significant thing about my parents is that you know, a year after their marriage was illegal, it was made legal because of the work of the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund.

You know, my parents—when they were married in Washington, D.C., in 1966, they had to be married there because they couldn’t get married where they lived in Baltimore. When they drove back for the party in Baltimore, people pulled off the side of the road, took off their hat because they thought it was a funeral procession passing, because there was a Cadillac in front of a bunch of cars with their lights on.

So, you know, and my father was disowned not by his two brothers or his mom, but by the entire rest of his family. And his family was in Salem in 1636, and they’re a big family. And they disowned him, not because they didn’t believe that he loved my mom. You know, his great uncle, I mean my great uncle drove out, sat down with them, said we believe that you love this woman, but you know I’m a man, I know a man can love many women, and you need to fall out of love quick or you’re going to be out of this family.

So, you know, the notion biracial I just think is blunt and crude and ahistorical, and to say biracial parentage, of course. I completely, you know, I’ve done more research on my father’s history, I think, on all the white cousins that I’m in touch with, and the ones who didn’t disown us were much in touch with, I love very much, if you know somebody named Jealous it’s probably one of them…

Read the entire transcript here.  Listen to the episode here (00:17:13).

A New Look At The Life Of Jean Toomer

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2010-12-30

Robert Siegel, Host

Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
Emory University

Jean Toomer received much acclaim for his portrait of African-American life in the early 20th century in his 1923 book Cane. The Harlem Renaissance author wrote vivid vignettes in a series of poems and short stories in the book. Next week, the book will be re-released with a new introduction written by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Emory University scholar Rudolph Byrd. In the 70-page introduction, the two scholars write that Toomer, a light-skinned black man of mixed heritage, chose to live much of his life as a black man passing as white. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Byrd about the life of Toomer.

Jean Toomer was a writer whose 1923 book “Cane” wove poetry, prose and drama into its glimpses of African-American life in the early 20th century. “Cane” earned him a place among the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and a new edition of the book has a different take on Toomer’s life.

Toomer was a light-skinned man who spoke of himself as being neither white nor black. Well, two scholars of African-American literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard and Professor Rudolph Byrd of Emory University contribute an introduction to the new book, which is to be published next week.

And they conclude that Toomer – his writings notwithstanding – lived much of his life as a black man passing for white. Their investigation is one of both textual criticism and genealogical research.

Professor Byrd joins us now. Professor Gates is not with us because his father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., passed away this week, and we send our condolences.

Professor Byrd, welcome to the program.

Professor RUDOLPH BYRD (African-American Studies, Emory University): Mr. Siegel, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

SIEGEL: And your conclusions are based on both facts and a reading of those facts. First, what did you find out?

Prof. BYRD: Oh, the newly unearthed facts are in census records. There’s a draft registration and his marriage license. The census records list Toomer as white. The draft registrations record Toomer as Negro. And then, the marriage license lists both the bride and groom as white.

What is fascinating about these findings is that, first of all, this is information that has been overlooked, and so it adds an important dimension to the long speculation about Toomer’s racial ancestry, which really began with the publication of “Cane” in 1923.

SIEGEL: Now, Toomer, in writings, distanced himself from the label Negro.

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: But he did speak of lots of different blood that flowed in his veins.

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: And he described himself as someone who had spent some years of his life – as they said in the day – in colored schools…

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: …and many years living as white.

Is that accurate? Is his description of how he grew up accurate?

Prof. BYRD: It is and it isn’t. He did attend Henry Highland Garnet School, which was a black school. He did attend Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, which was a black school…

Read the article here.  Listen to the interview (00:05:44) here.

How Multi-Ethnic People Identify Themselves

Talk of The Nation
National Public Radio
2010-12-20
00:30:17

Neal Conan, Host

Guests

Nikki Khanna, Assistant Professor of Sociology (and lead author, “Passing As Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans”)
University of Vermont

Casey Gane-McCalla, Lead Blogger
NewsOne

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Art (and author of Mixed: Portraits Of Multiracial Kids)
University of California, Santa Barbara

A new study shows that most people who are biracial self-identify as “biracial.” But in many instances, multi-ethnic Americans change the way they self-identify depending on who they’re talking with. The study was published in the December 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I’m Neal Conan, in Washington.

What are you? People of mixed race hear that question throughout their lives. The question comes in parts: half-black, half-white, part Asian, a quarter Native American. Sometimes the answer may vary depending on the situation. Sometimes it may change for good.

During the era of Jim Crow segregation, a percentage of those with lighter skin chose to pass as white. Now, it looks as if that’s reversed. In a study published earlier this month, in Social Psychology Quarterly, sociologists found that among black-white biracial adults, more and more self-identify as black…

…Ms. NIKKI KHANNA (Lead Author, “Passing As Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans”): Hi, Neal, thank you so much.

CONAN: And I think one of the things we should make clear is your study finds most people who are biracial identify as biracial.

Ms. KHANNA: Absolutely, absolutely. So this study looks at black-white biracial Americans and how they racially identify themselves, and that was the first thing we found, that most identify themselves to others as biracial or multiracial or mixed-race. These terms are certainly becoming much more common today. But in some situations, they identify themselves mono-racially, as black of white.

CONAN: In some situations. For example?

Ms. KHANNA: So for example, so we found individuals would present themselves as black or white. As white, you know, not uncommon were people presenting themselves as white in the workplace, for example, to, you know, they perceived it was advantageous for them to do so to move up in the workplace and move ahead, climb that ladder.

So we see some of that still happening today, although less so than individuals who are presenting themselves as black. And there were a number of situations where that seemed to come in handy. So, for example, during adolescence to fit in with black peers, you know, in adolescence, we all want to fit in.

So it’s not surprising. So in these situations, they oftentimes conceal their white ancestry, the fact that they had a white parent, to present themselves as black.

In other situations, they presented themselves as black when they found whiteness to be somehow stigmatized and negatively stereotyped, and they didn’t want to be associated with it. So they might have perceived whiteness as somehow bad.

Or one individual talked about perceiving whites as oppressive or the oppressor and not wanting to have basically anything to do with that. So in those situations, they would present themselves exclusively as black.

And in the last situation, respondents presented themselves as black oftentimes in filling out race questions commonly found on applications. So they would check the black box basically when they found it beneficial to do so. And this most often occurred on financial aid forms or college university application forms, scholarship application forms.

CONAN: Was there any inclination as to – or any finding that the more biracial people they knew, the more they might just stay with biracial?

Ms. KHANNA: Yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting. For many people that I interviewed in this study that they didn’t know other people who were biracial. So while, you know, it’s becoming increasingly common that there are more and more biracial Americans, oftentimes they didn’t even know other biracial people other than their siblings or another family member…

…CONAN: Joining us now is Casey Gane-McCalla. He’s the lead blogger for NewsOne.com, and he joins us from NPR’s bureau in New York. Nice to have you on the program with us today.

Mr. CASEY GANE-McCALLA (Assistant Editor, NewsOne): Yeah, thanks a lot, Neal.

CONAN: And you are half-black and half-white. How do you identify yourself?

Mr. GANE-McCALLA: I identify myself as both black and biracial. Obviously, I’m biracial, which is two races, but biracial is a very large term. You can be biracial and Mexican and Chinese. You could be biracial, and you could be Indian an Aborigine.

So biracial is a kind of broad term, and I believe that throughout history, black has kind of encompassed biracial. Like, biracial has had a little spot in the Venn Diagram of blackness. If you look from slavery to Jim Crow, if you were mixed, you were a slave. You might have been able to work in the house, but you were still a slave.

Or if it was during Jim Crow, and you tried to – there was no mixed water fountain. There was the two because – due to mostly because of social constructs, I identify as black, and I feel I’m part of the black struggle. I work for a black news website.

But I’m also – I’m definitely not ashamed of my mother’s family, and my mother fought against apartheid in South Africa. And again like the previous caller said, like, I knew a lot of my family, my father’s family from Jamaica, but all my mother’s family is in South Africa. So I didn’t know them that much.

CONAN: Just to clarify again on Nikki Khanna’s study, I think it was you were just studying black-white biracial.

Ms. KHANNA: Absolutely, yes, black-white biracial Americans…

…And let’s see if we can get another caller on the line. Let’s go to Shirley, Shirley with us from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

SHIRLEY (Caller): Yeah, I’m 71 years old and born of a white mother and black father. And this is something really, really puzzling to me because in my neighborhood, which was black, there were five white, mixed families, I’ll say that, and nobody even thought about it.

We didn’t realize, in my neighborhood, St. Louis, Missouri, that there was this type of thing. We knew plenty of people that were passing because they wanted good jobs. They wanted to go to the movies. But my mother just always went where she wanted to go. My sisters did, too, because they looked white.

But to me, this is just a new thing. This is not something that’s new. This is something that’s new that’s being studied.

CONAN: Well, new that people self-identify as biracial. I think when you were growing up…

SHIRLEY: Right.

CONAN: …as Casey Gane-McCalla pointed out, there was no choice. If you…

SHIRLEY: Well, you would just – I just lived in a black neighborhood. But you had a choice if you wanted to be called biracial because in most states except three, I think, if you have any white blood in you, you can claim white and only three states where you have to say you’re black.

But I’m just – you know, I’m just astonished by all this, that people are so amazed at this because I’m 71 years old, and this is old to me. I mean, this has been around so long…

…CONAN: You mentioned earlier, obviously this affects more than black and white. Joining us now is Kip Fulbeck, professor of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with us from member station KCLU in Thousand Oaks. And nice to have you with us today.

Professor KIP FULBECK (Art, University of California, Santa Barbara; Author, “Mixed: Portraits Of Multiracial Kids”): Thank you, Neal.

CONAN: You’re also of mixed ethnicity, one parent Asian, the other white, and you call yourself hapa?

Mr. FULBECK: I do. Hapa is a Hawaiian word for half, and it refers to people who, like myself, are part Asian Pacific Islander and something else.

CONAN: So that is, in its own way, saying biracial?

Mr. FULBECK: Exactly.

CONAN: You’ve embraced this third racial category exclusive to people of white – Asian and white parents. Why? Why not just say biracial?

Mr. FULBECK: Well, Neal, the whole thing about being biracial, it’s such a huge, giant nebula because race, if we really want to talk openly, everyone listening to the show right now is African. It doesn’t even exist, biologically, in terms of DNA. We’re all African…

…CONAN: Here’s – we’re talking about biracial identity and self-identity. You’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

I should just reintroduce our guests. Casey Gane-McCalla, you just heard, a lead blogger at newsone.com. And also with us, Kip Fulbeck, a professor of art at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

This email from Darrel(ph) in Portland. I’m a 30-year-old black male with a white mother. I have never felt comfortable with the term biracial. Race is a social construct, one which often exposes ideological bias. I often have my blackness called into question, being treated by white people as being more acceptable than typical black people. It disgusts me when people assume my speaking pattern or intelligence are the result of my having a white parent rather than coming from an educated family or growing up on a university campus, especially considering the first thing people would use to describe me if I, say, stole their car would be my race.

I’m proud of my Scottish, Irish and German heritage just as I am of my West African heritage. However, my social experience in this country is that of a black man…

Read the entire transcript here.  Download the audio here.

Casta Paintings: Inventing Race Through Art

The Tavis Smiley Show
National Public Radio
2004-06-30

Mexican Art Genre Reveals 18th-Century Attitudes on Racial Mixing

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hosting the first-ever major exhibition paintings that reflect what many upper-class Spaniards thought about race, class and skin color during the 1700s, when Mexico was a colony of Spain. NPR producer Nova Safo reports on the controversial exhibit.

The genre of art, called casta, reveals more about prejudices in Spain at the time than the reality in Mexico. One portrait of a family, used as the centerpiece of the LACMA exhibit, is typical of the genre: A mother with snow-white skin, a dark-skinned father and a daughter with skin tone in between the two appear as prosperous and well-dressed.

But the title of the portrait is curious: “De Espaniol y Albina, Torna Atras”—literally, “From a Spaniard and Albino, return backwards.” The prevailing theory at the time was that albinos were thought to be part African. So the union of an albino with a Spaniard was actually seen as a step backward, towards African heritage…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the story (00:05:26) here in Real Media or Windows format.

American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King

National Public Radio
2010-08-18

Steve Inskeep, Host
Morning Edition

U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library

Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time — a Pullman porter.

They hit it off, and eventually married. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true.

“James Todd was really not black, he was not a Pullman porter, and he was not even James Todd,” author Martha Sandweiss tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “He was in fact Clarence King, a very well-educated white explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America.”…

…Sandweiss’ book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, examines why King chose to live a double life — and how his experience reflects and represents how Americans, both past and present, have thought about race. In the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly, the U.S. had to recast some of the ways it thought about questions of race and identity…

Read and/or listen to the story here.

Biracial Children Learn To Self-Identify

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2010-04-20

Michel Martin, Host

Interview with:

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara
Author of: Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids

Peggy Orenstein
Author of: Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Fertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother

Heidi W. Durrow
Author of: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Co-Host of: Mixed Chicks Chat

An installment of Tell Me More‘s weekly parenting segment focuses on the new book Mixed. It’s a collection of photographs of multiracial children that includes stories celebrating their heritage. Host Michel Martin is joined by the book’s author, Kip Fulbeck, as well as authors Peggy Orenstein and Heidi Durrow, who discuss their own experiences living in multiracial families.

Read the transcript of the interview here.  Listen to the interview here.

Note by Steven F. Riley: The term “Hapa” is incorrectly spelled as “Hoppa” in the transcript.

‘Passing’ Across The Color Line In The Jazz Age

National Public Radio
All Things Considered: You Must Read This
2010-04-07

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. Her debut novel is “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky.”

There are novels that are enjoyable to read and others that say something about the world.  And sometimes there are novels that are both.  Passing by Nella Larsen is one of those books…

Read the entire essay here.
Listen to the essay here.

Mixed Race Americans Picture A ‘Blended Nation’

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2009-11-08

Liane Hansen, Host

The 2000 U.S. census was the first to give Americans the option to check more than one box for race. Nearly 7 million people declared themselves to be multiracial that year, a number that’s expected to shoot up in the 2010 count. As more of the nation’s population identifies itself as being of mixed race, the authors of a new book say Americans’ traditional ideas of racial identity are in for a challenge.

In the book Blended Nation, photographer Mike Tauber and producer Pamela Singh combine portraits of mixed-race Americans with stories of living beyond the sometimes rigid notions of race. The husband-and-wife team tell host Liane Hansen they wanted to highlight the personal experiences of life between categories.

“We really wanted to know what it was like for somebody who checks more than one box to exist in that realm,” Tauber says…

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

Reimagining The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ [Interview with Author Heidi W. Durrow]

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2010-03-02

Michele Norris, Host
All Things Considered

Like so many children of mixed marriages, the author Heidi Durrow has often felt like she’s had to straddle two worlds.

She is the daughter of a black serviceman and a white Danish mother.

Her own personal search for identity inspired her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky. The story revolves around a girl who moves across the country to live with her grandmother after surviving a family tragedy.

The book has received breathless critical acclaim, and it was awarded the Bellwether Prize for fiction that addresses issues of social justice…

Read the entire story and an excerpt from the book here.  Listen to the interview here.

NPR’s All Things Considered Interview with Heidi W. Durrow

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2010-03-02, 21:00 to 23:00Z

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow, author of the new Bellwether Prize winning novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, is scheduled to be interviewed on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered today (Tuesday, March 2, 2010 between 16:00 and 18:00 EST).  Please check your local NPR affiliate for actual broadcast times.