Mixed Race Studies

The Rise and Rise of Misty Copeland

The Year in Style 2015
The New York Times
2015-12-18

Ruth La Ferla

This year, Misty Copeland’s fame rose from her performances in ballet, on Broadway and in commercials. Credit Bon Duke for The New York Times, taken at Steps on Broadway in New York City.

Captivating a general audience, the prima ballerina is a crossover star: from ballet to Broadway to commercial fame.

Cherry Peace stood, feet firmly planted, at the stage door of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in October. She was waiting for Misty Copeland, who had just wrapped up a matinee performance of Paul Taylor’s “Company B” at the American Ballet Theater, to kick off her toe shoes and exit.

There was no sign of Ms. Copeland, but Ms. Peace, 52, a writer who had traveled from Reno, Nev., expressly to see her, stayed rooted to the spot, hoping, if not for an autograph, at least for a glimpse of her idol.

“When you get older,” she said, “there are certain things you want to do. Seeing Misty Copeland was on my bucket list.”

Ms. Peace was among legions of fans — schoolgirls and seniors, New Yorkers and visitors, balletomanes and oddly assorted thrill seekers — who had thronged to Lincoln Center to see Ms. Copeland perform, in the Taylor ballet, and as Odile/Odette in “Swan Lake,” a crowning role for many dancers, and the first in the company for a black ballerina…

Red the entire article here.

Choose Your Own Identity

The New York Times Magazine
2015-12-14

Bonnie Tsui

A series of portraits from “The Hapa Project” by the artist Kip Fulbeck. Kip Fulbeck/The Hapa Project

I never realized how little I understood race until I tried to explain it to my 5-year-old son. Our family story doesn’t seem too complicated: I’m Chinese-American and my husband is white, an American of English-Dutch-Irish descent; we have two children. My 5-year-old knows my parents were born in China, and that I speak Cantonese sometimes. He has been to Hong Kong and Guangzhou to visit his gung-gung, my father. But when I asked him the other day if he was Chinese, he said no.

“You’re Chinese, but I’m not,” he told me, with certainty. “But I eat Chinese food.” This gave me pause. How could I tell him that I wasn’t talking about food or cultural heritage or where we were born? (Me, I’m from Queens.) I had no basis to describe race to him other than the one I’d taken pains to avoid: how we look and how other people treat us as a result.

My son probably doesn’t need me to tell him we look different. He’s a whir-in-a-blender mix of my husband and me; he has been called Croatian and Italian. More than once in his life, he will be asked, “What are you?” But in that moment when he confidently asserted himself as “not Chinese,” I felt a selfish urge for him to claim a way of describing himself that included my side of his genetic code. And yet I knew that I had no business telling him what his racial identity was. Today, he might feel white; tomorrow he might feel more Chinese. The next day, more, well, both. Who’s to say but him?

Racial identity can be fluid. More and more, it will have to be: Multiracial Americans are on the rise, growing at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population as a whole, according to a new Pew Research Center study released in June. Nearly half of mixed-race Americans today are younger than 18, and about 7 percent of the U.S. adult population could be considered multiracial, though they might not call themselves that. The need to categorize people into specific race groups will never feel entirely relevant to this population, whose perceptions of who they are can change by the day, depending on the people they’re with…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. “There is, in fact, no white community,” as [James] Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.

Eula Biss, “White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege,” The New York Times, December 2, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white-debt.html.

White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege.

The New York Times
2015-12-02

Eula Biss. Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one quality of debt that I’ve been pondering lately — how easy it can be.

I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house and no money left to buy any. But then I took out a loan against my down payment, and now I have a dining-room table, six chairs and a piano. While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn’t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy’s skit in which he goes undercover as a white person and discovers that white people at banks give away money to other white people free. It’s true, I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood — and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded — that the money was not being given to me free. I was, and am, paying for it. But that detail, like my debt, is easily forgotten.

“Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,” Nietzsche observes in “On the Genealogy of Morality.” My student-loan debt doesn’t hurt, though it hasn’t seemed to have gotten any smaller over the past decade, and I’ve managed to forget it so thoroughly that I recently told someone that I’d never been in debt until I bought a house. Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor’s memory by taking as collateral his freedom, wife, life or even, as in Egypt, his afterlife. Legal documents outlined exactly how much of the body of the debtor that the creditor could cut off for unpaid debts. Consider the odd logic, Nietzsche suggests, of a system in which a creditor is repaid not with money or goods but with the pleasure of seeing the debtor’s body punished. “The pleasure,” he writes, “of having the right to exercise power over the powerless.”…

…Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. “There is, in fact, no white community,” as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself…

Read the entire article here.

‘Black-ish’ Star Yara Shahidi Is a Role Model Off-Screen

The New York Times
2015-11-27

Hannah Seligson

Ms. Shahidi, 15, won the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series this year. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times

“Life as a teenager can be down right chaotic,” the actress Yara Shahidi, 15, told an audience last month at Cipriani 42nd Street, where she was being honored by the Young Women’s Leadership Network. “We must also realize that it is up to us whether these years will feel like a melancholy struggle or an opportunity for growth or experiences of a lifetime.”

For Ms. Shahidi, it’s certainly the latter.

As the actress who plays Zoey, the smart but entitled daughter on ABC’s “Black-ish,” a situation comedy about a prosperous black family wrestling with racial issues, Ms. Shahidi certainly has a platform to be heard. But she has not stopped there.

When she’s not taping “Black-ish,” she is a full-time social activist, inspiring young women to excel academically, volunteering at medical clinics and starting her own mentoring club…

There are few African-American actresses her age who are having the kind of cultural and social impact that Ms. Shahidi is, both on and off screen. This year, she was nominated for a Teen Choice Award for best breakout star. She won a N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series…

…Activism runs in her family. “I was raised by a bunch of humanitarians,” she said, referring to her African-American mother, Keri-Salter Shahidi, a commercial actress, and her Iranian father, Afshin Shahidi, a cinematographer. Her maternal grandfather was involved in the civil rights movement…

Read the entire article here.

What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather

The New York Times
2015-11-25

Gordon J. Davis, Partner
Venable, LLP,  New York, New York

John Abraham Davis, center, and his family at their farm in the early 1900s. Credit Courtesy of the Davis Family

OVER the last week, a growing number of students at Princeton have demanded that the university confront the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as its president before becoming New Jersey’s governor and the 28th president of the United States. Among other things, the students are demanding that Wilson’s name be removed from university facilities.

Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, is mostly remembered as a progressive, internationalist statesman, a benign and wise leader, a father of modern American political science and one of our nation’s great presidents.

But he was also an avowed racist. And unlike many of his predecessors and successors in the White House, he put that racism into action through public policy. Most notably, his administration oversaw the segregation of the federal government, destroying the careers of thousands of talented and accomplished black civil servants — including John Abraham Davis, my paternal grandfather.

An African-American born in 1862 to a prominent white Washington lawyer and his black “housekeeper,” my grandfather was a smart, ambitious and handsome young black man. He emulated his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, in style and dress. He walked away from whatever assistance his father might have offered to his unacknowledged black offspring and graduated at the top of his class from Washington’s M Street High School (later the renowned all-black Dunbar High School)…

Read the entire article here.

Agriculture Linked to DNA Changes in Ancient Europe

The New York Times
2015-11-23

Carl Zimmer

The agricultural revolution was one of the most profound events in human history, leading to the rise of modern civilization. Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago, people’s DNA underwent widespread changes, altering their height, digestion, immune system and skin color.

Researchers had found indirect clues of some of these alterations by studying the genomes of living Europeans. But the new study, they said, makes it possible to see the changes as they occurred over thousands of years.

“For decades we’ve been trying to figure out what happened in the past,” said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. “And now we have a time machine.”

…Dr. Reich and his colleagues also tracked changes in the color of European skin.

The original hunter-gatherers, descendants of people who had come from Africa, had dark skin as recently as 9,000 years ago. Farmers arriving from Anatolia were lighter, and this trait spread through Europe. Later, a new gene variant emerged that lightened European skin even more.

Why? Scientists have long thought that light skin helped capture more vitamin D in sunlight at high latitudes. But early hunter-gatherers managed well with dark skin. Dr. Reich suggests that they got enough vitamin D in the meat they caught.

He hypothesizes that it was the shift to agriculture, which reduced the intake of vitamin D, that may have triggered a change in skin color…

Read the entire article here.

THINK TANK; Uncovering an Interracial Literature of Love . . . and Racism

The New York Times
2004-04-17

Emily Eakin

The word miscegenation entered America’s bitter racial politics and the national lexicon by way of an ambitious hoax. On Christmas Day in 1863, an anonymous 72-page pamphlet appeared on newsstands around New York City. Titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro,” it had all the earmarks of a tract by radical abolitionists.

Arguing that “science has demonstrated that the intermarriage of diverse races is indispensable to a progressive humanity,” it triumphantly unveiled a new vocabulary to accompany America’s noble, interracial future. In addition to “miscegenation” (derived, the text explained, from the Latin words miscere, to mix, and genus, race), the neologisms included: “miscegen” (“an offspring of persons of different races”), “miscegenate” (“to mingle persons of different races”) and “melaleukation” (from the Greek words melas and leukos, for black and white, and used to mean the mingling of those races).

“We must become a yellow-skinned, black-haired people — in fine, we must become miscegens if we would attain the fullest results of civilization,” the pamphlet exhorted, pointing to the number of European nations composed “of many diverse bloods” that could claim extraordinary cultural achievements. Just consider the French, it suggested by way of example: “The two most brilliant writers it can boast of are the melaleukon, Dumas, and his son, a quadroon.”

Applauded by prominent abolitionists and denounced in Congress, the pamphlet made miscegenation a household word. But the work turned out to be a fraud, an ultimately unsuccessful scheme by two journalists at a pro-Democratic newspaper to turn voters against Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who freed the slaves and was up for re-election in 1864.

”You have to imagine that an 1863 audience would take this as the worst possible thing,” said Werner Sollors, a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard. ”If you read it from a 21st-century point of view, a lot of it seems common sensical.”

The pamphlet is just one of many startling textual artifacts Mr. Sollors included in a new book he edited, ”An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New.” Published in February by New York University Press, the $28 anthology is the first in English devoted to work that Mr. Sollors says has typically been overlooked, an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition…

Read the entire review here.

An African King in Bolivia

The New York Times
2015-11-17

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist; Lens Blog Co-Editor

King Don Julio Pinedo being helped by his son, Rolando Pinedo, the prince, into a royal cloak. Queen Angelica oversees the details of her husband’s royal dress. Don Julio is shy and does not feel comfortable dressing as a king. (Susana Giron)

Tucked away in an isolated part of Bolivia, there is a royal family whose existence is as surprising as it is humble. Despite his title, King Don Julio I and his wife live in a small apartment atop a small store in Mururata, Bolivia, where he farms coca leaves and other crops.

Yet this modest monarch can trace his lineage to West Africa, where his ancestor Prince Uchicho was enslaved in 1820 and taken by the Spaniards to work in the silver mines of the region. That era gave rise to the country’s Afro-Bolivian population, which sustained the tradition, which was largely ceremonial, said Susana Giron, a Spanish photographer who was intrigued by the life of the current king, who was born 73 years ago as Julio Pinedo…

…Ms. Giron said that a historian who purchased the old hacienda — where the Pinedos had taken the names of the slave owners — learned about the royal connection to Africa and set about to find an heir. His efforts, she said, led him to Julio Pinedo, who was named king in 1992.

“He is a symbolic figure,” she said. “For the Afro-Bolivians, he is important because he gives them a cultural identity. It shows they are a people descended from Africa. It is about their history and culture.”

The history of Africans in Latin America has been coming more and more to the fore in recent years. In Bolivia, it was not until recently that they were even counted in the national census, with their 2012 population pegged at some 23,000 in a country of 10 million. They still face discrimination and socioeconomic obstacles…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Mayor de Blasio Has Lost Support of White New Yorkers, Poll Finds

The New York Times
2015-11-18

Michael M. Grynbaum, City Hall Bureau Chief

Alexander Burns, Political Correspondent

Dalia Sussman, Polling Editor

Nearing the midpoint of his term, Mayor Bill de Blasio is confronting a city that is deeply divided about his ability to lead, with his efforts to create a more liberal New York overshadowed by growing worries about homelessness and crime, a new poll finds.

Nowhere is that concern more visible than among a group, long cool to Mr. de Blasio, that he has now decisively lost: whites.

Just 28 percent of white New Yorkers approve of the Democratic mayor’s performance, and 59 percent now disapprove, up sharply from the start of his term, according to a citywide poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. Nearly half say that the city is a worse place to live under his watch — only 9 percent say it is better — and 51 percent say New York is now less safe, even as crime statistics reach historic lows.

Over all, 52 percent of New Yorkers say the city is on the wrong track, including 62 percent of whites and 51 percent of Hispanics. Black residents are evenly split…

…Mr. de Blasio, whose black wife and biracial children are central to his image as a champion of multiethnic New York, secured his mayoralty with substantial black support. But he also won in white liberal enclaves like brownstone Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, places where his stock has since fallen…

Read the entire article here.