Mixed Race Studies

Dolezal, Jenner raise fundamental questions about identity

The Boston Globe
2015-06-16

Farrah Stockman, Globe Staff

Finally, Rachel Dolezal — the self-identified black daughter of two Caucasian parents — has spoken. And finally, she was asked a question I’ve been wondering for days: When did it start?

“At a very young age,” she replied. “About 5 years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon.”

It’s impossible not to be reminded of how Bruce — now Caitlyn — Jenner answered a similar question: When did you know? Jenner talked about sneaking into her mother’s closet as an 8-year-old boy to dress up in her clothes.

Comparisons between Jenner, who recently appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair as a woman, and Dolezal, who just resigned as a local leader of the NAACP after her parents outed her as white, have spawned a cottage industry of jokes and memes.

But I have yet to read a real answer to the underlying challenge these two people pose to identity in America today: If we accept that gender is fluid — a reflection of some inexplicable spiritual thing inside of us — why not race? Why do we police the boundaries of blackness more rigorously than we police womanhood?

The general consensus seems to be that as much as we want to do away with racial differences and as deeply as we believe in race as a social construct, we can’t accept Dolezal as a black woman trapped in a spray-tanned blonde’s body…

Read the entire article here.

‘One Drop’ at Cambridge Rindge & Latin

The Boston Globe
2015-02-03

Meredith Goldstein, Entertainment Reporter

From left: Junot Díaz, Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, and Kate Ellis. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)

Actor-producer Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni brought her one-woman show, “One Drop of Love,” to the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School on Friday night. The play, co-produced by famous Rindge alums Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, is about family, race, class, and reconciliation. DiGiovanni stuck around to talk about the big themes with a panel that included Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and MIT professor Junot Díaz and educator Donald Burroughs. The evening benefited the school’s Kimbrough Scholars Program.

‘Dear White People’ or ‘Dear Bougie Black People’?

The Boston Globe
2014-11-04

Farah Stockman

THIS WEEKEND, I saw the new satirical film “Dear White People.” I was curious what it would tell me about how young people view race today.

Each generation plays out the drama of race in the movies. Baby boomers flocked to“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which raised the question: Could a well-educated black man ever be good enough for a white family’s daughter? The jury was still out in 1967, the year my mom, who is black, saw that movie several times. Two years later, she married my dad, who is white.

Then came my generation. Born in the ’70s, we grew up glued to depictions of black slavery and impoverishment, with the television miniseries “Roots” and the sitcom “Good Times.” We came of age with Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” released in 1991, which asked the question: Will the gulf between black and white ever be bridged? Lee’s answer seemed to be: Don’t hold your breath. In 1992, I left my predominantly white high school for a predominantly white Ivy League college.

Now we have the millennial generation, the most ethnically diverse, socially liberal cohort America has ever seen; kids who never wondered whether America could elect a black president. About 90 percent report being “fine” with a family member marrying outside the race. Yet, for much of this generation, the civil rights movement is ancient history, and systemic black poverty and incarceration take place on a separate planet. Millennials feel deeply ambivalent about acknowledging race, even for the purpose of righting wrongs: According to one poll, 70 percent feel it’s “never fair to give preferential treatment to one race over another, regardless of historical inequalities.” Nearly half of white young people today believe that discrimination against whites has become “as big a problem as discrimination against racial minority groups.” By comparison, only 27 percent of people of color share that belief…

…W. E. B. Du Bois famously defined a black man as anybody “who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia,’ ” writes Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs in her new book, “A Chosen Exile.” That “raises the question, What would a black man be without Jim Crow in Georgia?”…

Read the entire article here.

Laylah Ali’s show both confounds and mesmerizes

The Boston Globe
2012-02-19

Sebastian Smee,  Art Critic

Laylah Ali is an artist to reckon with. Any opportunity to see her work should not be missed, and for the next two weeks, the Jaffe-Friede Gallery, a small college gallery a short walk from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, is offering just such an opportunity.

Born in 1968, Ali grew up in Buffalo and lives in Williamstown. She has been an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College this winter. But the current show of drawings in pencil and black ink is the fruit of an earlier period. All were made between 2005 and 2007.

They show Ali’s inimitable cast of two-dimensional characters, many of them missing arms and other anatomical parts, some of them solo, others in groups of two or three. They are of indeterminate sex and indeterminate race. But all have extra features – strange encumbrances that resemble humps, hoods, headdresses, horns, turbans, goggles, burkas, and beards…

Read the entire review here.

The Myth of Native American Blood

The Hyphenated Life
The Boston Globe
2012-06-01

Francie Latour

The African-American grandmother of a friend of mine once summed up the laws that govern black identity in this country. “If you ever want to know if someone’s black or not,” she would say, “go ask their white neighbor.”

That succinct, small-town Georgia wisdom essentially outlines the rule of hypodescent, also known as the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule emerged during slavery and hardened in Reconstruction, automatically classifying as black anyone with any trace of African ancestry. It is the reason why, in the 1800s, the extremely light-skinned offspring of white fathers and black mothers were deemed slaves. It’s also the reason why, in 2011, the actress Halle Berry, who is biracial but identifies as black, became a lightning rod of controversy for maintaining that her own daughter, with white Canadian actor Gabriel Aubry, is also black.

The fact that Americans with vastly different complexions know they are black by the number of cab drivers who don’t stop for them as much as by any internal measure is a dilemma on many levels. But for Kim Tallbear, an enrolled member of South Dakota’s Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a UC Berkeley professor who studies race, genomics and Native American identity, the tyranny of the one-drop rule poses a specific problem in the ongoing controversy surrounding US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her shifting, dubious claims of Native American identity…

…“If you want to understand Native American identity,” Tallbear said, “you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework. Native Americans do not fit in that binary. We have been racialized very differently in relationship to whites.”

How do we know Native Americans are racialized differently, Tallbear said? Because a white person—say, Elizabeth Warren, for example—can absorb a Native American ancestor and still maintain an identity as white. If Warren had a black ancestor, that fact would threaten her white identity…

Read the entire essay here.

Are you ‘diverse’?

The Boston Globe
2012-05-05

Dante Ramos, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

In the mid-’90s, around the time Elizabeth Warren’s name was appearing on a list of minority law professors, I was applying for entry-level reporting jobs at dozens of newspapers. In a few cases — one of which involved a summer job at a paper tartly critical of affirmative action — something odd happened. First came the nibble of interest; later, the bashful questions: What, exactly, was my ethnic background? Perhaps I’d like to be considered for a minority internship?

At the time, I was in my early 20s, underemployed, and eager to please. But did I qualify? It was hard to say. One of my parents is Filipino; the other is white; my surname is Spanish. Still, I disliked the implication that my dull, dutiful stories, which I’d clipped to my resume, were suddenly fascinating if their author were less ambiguously ethnic. What grated most — what steered me away from these strange, unbidden opportunities — was that no one asked: Are you actually disadvantaged in some way? Does your ethnicity relate in any way to what you’ve written?

Which brings us back to Elizabeth Warren. We may never know whether she played up her scant Native American ancestry to advance her academic career. But whatever the flap says about the Harvard law professor’s US Senate campaign, it also reflects badly on the ham-fisted, box-checking approach that many employers once took toward diversity — and that some still use today…

…Yet if Warren handled this subject badly, let’s admit that it’s impossible to handle well. The question still lurks: Are you “diverse” or not? For mixed-race Americans who mean neither to exploit their ancestry nor minimize it, politely brushing aside the issue is harder than it seems.

Meanwhile, the usual ethnic categories keep blurring at the edges; the 2010 census counted over 9 million Americans as multiracial. Yet as The New York Times reported last summer, many elite colleges still can’t say how multiracial applicants fit in with their diversity goals. So applicants are left to fret: Check every box that applies, or hope that skipping the question entirely won’t keep you from getting in?…

Read the entire article here.

St. Patrick’s Day holds mixed emotions for some

The Boston Globe
2012-03-17

Martine Powers, Globe Staff

Ryan McCollum knows that on St. Patrick’s Day, he cuts an unusual figure.

All in green, a traditional Irish Claddagh ring on his finger and a houndstooth flat cap on his head, everything about his attire screams “Irish and proud.’’

But McCollum, 33, is also black. His father, a Navy man from Springfield, married an Irish-American girl from Downeast Maine.

He knows his appearance does not fit the bill of a stereotypical Irishman—most assume he’s black, or maybe Latino—but since childhood, his mother mandated that his Irish pride run fierce.

Ryan McCollum, a political consultant and owner of RMC Strategies, is part Irish.

“Growing up, I knew I was Irish,: said McCollum, of Springfield, “even if the rest of the world didn’t know I was Irish.”

As the American population has grown increasingly mixed-race in recent decades, some descendants of Irish immigrants are claiming a multiracial heritage, though they may differ in appearance from their red-haired, freckled ancestors. For them, the joys of embracing Irish roots are complicated by the challenges of being multiracial.

“I always feel this deep kinship with Irish people in Boston,” said Kelly Bates, a mixed-race Irish-American who lives in Roslindale. “But I don’t always feel like they have this kinship with me.”…

…Paul J. McNamara, president of the 275-year-old Charitable Irish Society, said he does not believe that any of the organization’s 400 current members are multiracial, but the group welcomes membership applications from anyone interested in promoting Irish history and culture…

…While Irish and African-American communities worked and lived in close proximity in the decades after America’s founding—both groups were stigmatized by English landowners—they grew antagonistic toward one another at the end of the 19th century, said Marie E. Daly, library director at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. In the last century, the communities have butted heads over labor rights, housing, and public school desegregation.

Bates said she is just as proud to be African-American as she is proud to be Irish. After all, she said, the sound of bagpipes and African drums both give her chills. But she sometimes worries about expressing pride in her Irish roots. As much as Irish is a national origin, she said, it also identifies her as white. She does not want others to think she has distanced herself from her black identity…

Read the entire article here.

Defining multiracial citizens

The Boston Globe
2011-06-12

Brittany Danielson, Globe Correspondent

Evolving ideas about identity mean mixed-race people don’t have to settle for ‘other’

n a suburban Massachusetts classroom in 1985, a 7-year-old Chris Olds raised his hand to grab his teacher’s attention; he wasn’t sure which bubble to fill in for race on a standardized test.

“I don’t know what I am,’’ he told the teacher, while other students in the class laughed in the background.

Olds — who has white, black, and Native American roots — wanted to fill in more than one bubble, but was told to pick one. “The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what I am,’’ said Olds, who is now a 33-year-old Cambridge resident. “The problem was that I knew exactly what I am, but that I wasn’t presented with an option for it.’’

Today, millions of multiracial US citizens like Olds have an option when defining their race through the census, which has helped to paint a clearer picture of one of the country’s fastest growing demographic groups. Since 2000, when people were first allowed to check more than one box when describing their races on census forms, the multiracial population has increased by about 35 percent to 9 million in 2010, representing 2.9 percent of the overall population.

How the nation defines and counts the multiracial population has evolved. Between 1850 and 1920, the census included a range of categories for individuals of black and white parentage — which included terms like “mulatto,’’ “quadroon,’’ and “octoroon’’ to describe percentages of black ancestry. That ended by 1930, when those classifications gave way to the “one drop rule,’’ which stated that any traceable minority heritage — even one drop of blood — made that person, by default, a minority…

…John Tawa, a doctoral student at University of Massachusetts Boston who teaches a course about the multiracial experience and is himself of Japanese and European heritage, said multiracial people do have some positive experiences. For example, he said they have an ability to relate in a variety of racial contexts. But multiracial US citizens also can feel marginalized by the racial groups in which they are members, can be constantly questioned about their racial identity, and can sometimes be misidentified by others, he said.

“Multiracial people get used as a marker of being in a postracial society. People say soon everyone will be the same, so we don’t need to pay attention to racism anymore,’’ Tawa said. “That kind of ideology can obscure the reality of racism today, and the challenges that multiracial people face.’’…

Read the entire article here.

Scratching the surface: Artist Laylah Ali explores the social dynamics that lie beyond appearances

Boston Globe
2008-08-29

Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

WILLIAMSTOWN – Laylah Ali doesn’t let many people into her studio.

“It’s a private space,” the artist says, welcoming a visitor. “It’s like being in my brain. I’m inviting you into my private brain space – the chaos and the mess.”

As far as chaos goes, this isn’t bad. In the basement of a building on the outskirts of the Williams College campus, where Ali teaches art, an airy studio is filled with white illustrator’s tables. Colored pencils and squat bottles of ink clutter the tables. But what catches the eye are the drawings Ali has tacked to the white walls with pushpins: Portraits, made in her signature cartoon style, of haunted figures with garish headdresses, scarification, and false beards, and smaller drawings that feature ruminative lists with oddly adorned figures drawn over them…

…Growing up in Buffalo as the daughter of an African-American father and a white mother, Ali attuned herself early to social dynamics and covert aggression. The family lived in an all-white neighborhood.

“I was the only black kid in my school,” Ali says. “I’ve been able to negotiate different social places because of that. . . . More people are seeing this now because of Barack Obama, but there have always been biracial people in the US, with the ability to move between these worlds and notice what’s different and what’s not different.

“I developed heightened powers of observation not just from curiosity,” she adds, “but for survival.”

As a child, the artist saw implicit judgment many places, and it wasn’t always black and white.

“It’s not just race. It’s also class,” Ali points out. “My mom’s family had come from some money. It was gone, but they still had the idea of what it’s like to have nice silver, a nice oriental rug. They had an aspiration from what they had lost.

“Dad’s family was from the farming Mississippi South. He grew up working the land. I keep asking him questions and finding out more things. He walked five miles to school and had no electricity at home.”

“My family is very American,” she sums up…

Read the entire article here.