Mixed Race Studies

Amber Guild of Collins: Call Out the Elephant in the Room

The New York Times
2015-11-14

Adam Bryant, Corner Office Columnist and Deputy Science Editor

This interview with Amber Guild, president of Collins, a brand consultancy, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What were some early influences for you?

A. I grew up in two different homes. I had my father’s home in New Jersey and my mother’s home in New York City.

Tell me more about your parents.

They never married. They became good friends, had me and then they separated. My dad later moved out to New Jersey with my stepmom, and my mother was in New York. Both were very politically active. I probably went to my first demonstration before I could walk. We were always protesting something or other at a rally.

And I grew up in these two different cultural households. My dad’s household was all white, and my mother and my two older sisters are black. I’m the only one who’s biracial. So I found myself always being a bridge in terms of culture and different classes.

In my home in the city, we were poor. My dad’s household was working-class, but there was always food on the table. Growing up with those two very distinct experiences started to form my relationship with the world and with people in different communities, and seeing both differences and similarities.

Then, to top it all off, I ended up getting a scholarship to boarding school in Connecticut when I was 14, which was another radically different culture and experience…

Read the entire interview here.

Rescuing Discarded Images of Everyday Black Life

The New York Times
2015-10-20

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist

Who throws away family photos? How do faded, blurry squares that chronicled weddings, ballgames and goofy moments at home end up abandoned, tossed to the curb or in boxes bought sight unseen at storage auctions?

Zun Lee has been wondering about this ever since he stumbled upon a dozen Polaroids scattered on a Detroit sidewalk. He had gone to Motown as part of his work on “Father Figure,” his book about African-American fatherhood. The sight of those images — children playing in a yard — stopped him. He asked around, but no one knew who was in the pictures. And while someone didn’t want these images, Mr. Lee did: They showed an ordinary beauty. Their fate hinted at hard times. Yet, in a frozen moment, they showed their subjects with love.

Mr. Lee was hooked. He started to haunt flea markets, yard sales and eBay in search of more of these images, to the point that he now has some 3,500 of them, ranging from the 1970s through the 2000s. Taken in a time before Instagram or Everyday Black America, they accomplish the same thing: to show African-American life as it was lived…

…The idea itself is also, for him, a response to how African-American communities have been depicted, something he cares about as the son of a Korean mother and an African-American father. Tired of the conventional wisdom that African-American fathers were absent, he set out to show a contrary reality. Similarly, his interest in collecting family pictures and turning them into a project was a response to “Found Pictures in Detroit,” a project and book by two Italian photographers who also showcased discarded images, with many of them showing crime scenes, suspects and victims…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Before Obama ran for president, when we tended to talk about racial identity, we did so as the defense of a settlement. Black was understood to be black, nontransferably. Negro intellectuals — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and James Baldwin, for starters — debated strategies for equality and tolerance. Some of them asserted that to be black was also to be American, even if America begged to differ. For most of those many decades, blackness stood in opposition to whiteness, which folded its arms and said that was black people’s problem. But Obama became everybody’s problem. He was black. He was white. He was hope. He was apocalypse. And he brought a lot of anxiety into weird relief. We had never really had a white president until we had a black one.

Wesley Morris, “The Year We Obsessed Over Identity,” The New York Times, October 6, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/the-year-we-obsessed-over-identity.html.

The Year We Obsessed Over Identity

The New York Times
2015-10-06

Wesley Morris, Critic at Large

2015’s headlines and cultural events have confronted us with the malleability of racial, gender, sexual and reputational lines. Who do we think we are?

A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies.

But what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway. After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie Larson. It’s not Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon. It’s someone not far from the last person who comes to mind when you think ‘‘soul-baring bestie.’’ It’s Robert freaking De Niro, portrayer of psychos, savages and grouches no more.

On that bed with Hathaway, as her 70-year-old intern, he’s not Travis Bickle or the human wall of intolerance from those Focker movies. He’s Lena Dunham. The attentiveness and stern feminism coming out of his mouth are where the comedy is. And while it’s perfectly obvious what Meyers is doing to De Niro — girlfriending him — that doesn’t make the overhaul any less effective. The whole movie is about the subtle and obvious ways in which men have been overly sensitized and women made self-estranged through breadwinning. It’s both a plaint against the present and a pining for the past, but also an acceptance that we are where we are…

…In June, the story of a woman named Rachel Dolezal began its viral spread through the news. She had recently been appointed president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. She had been married to a black man, had two black sons and was, by most accounts, a black woman. Her white biological parents begged to differ. The ensuing scandal resurrected questions about the nature of identity — what compelled Dolezal to darken her skin, perm her hair and pass in reverse? She might not have been biologically black, but she seemed well past feeling spiritually white.

Some people called her ‘‘transracial.’’ Others found insult in her masquerade, particularly when the country’s attention was being drawn, day after day, to how dangerous it can be to have black skin. The identities of the black men and women killed by white police officers and civilians, under an assortment of violent circumstances, remain fixed.

But there was something oddly compelling about Dolezal, too. She represented — dementedly but also earnestly — a longing to transcend our historical past and racialized present. This is a country founded on independence and yet comfortable with racial domination, a country that has forever been trying to legislate the lines between whiteness and nonwhiteness, between borrowing and genocidal theft. We’ve wanted to think we’re better than a history we can’t seem to stop repeating. Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Asian

The New York Times
2015-10-07

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

David Haekwon Kim, Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of San Francisco

This is the latest in a series of interviews about philosophy of race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with David Haekwon Kim, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Global Humanities initiative at the University of San Francisco and the author of several essays on Asian-American identity. — George Yancy

George Yancy: A great deal of philosophical work on race begins with the white/black binary. As a Korean-American, in what ways does race mediate or impact your philosophical identity?

David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency. I think these sensibilities are due in large part to my experience of growing up bicultural, raced, and gendered in the U.S., a country that has never really faced up to its exclusionary and often violent anti-Asian practices. In fact, I am sometimes amazed that I have left so many tense racialized encounters with both my life and all my teeth. In other contexts, life and limb were not at issue, but I did not emerge with my self-respect intact.

These sensibilities have also been formed by learning a history of Asian-Americans that is more complex than the conventional watered-down immigrant narrative. This more discerning, haunting, and occasionally beautiful history includes reference to institutional anti-Asian racism, a cultural legacy of sexualized racism, a colonial U.S. presence in East Asia and the Pacific Islands, and some truly inspiring social struggles by Asians, Asian-Americans, and other communities of color…

Read the entire interview here.

Grace Lee Boggs, Human Rights Advocate for 7 Decades, Dies at 100

The New York Times
2015-10-05

Robert D. McFadden

Ms. Boggs and her husband, James. Credit LeeLee Films, Inc.

Grace Lee Boggs, one of the nation’s oldest human rights activists, who waged a war of inspiration for civil rights, labor, feminism, the environment and other causes for seven decades with an unflagging faith that revolutionary justice was just around the corner, died on Monday at her home in Detroit. She was 100.

Her death was confirmed by Alice Jennings, her friend and legal trustee.

Born to Chinese immigrants, Ms. Boggs was an author and philosopher who planted gardens on vacant lots, founded community organizations and political movements, marched against racism, lectured widely on human rights and wrote books on her evolving vision of a revolution in America.

Her odyssey took her from the streets of Chicago as a tenant organizer in the 1940s to arcane academic debates about the nature of communism, from the confrontational tactics of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement to the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to her own manifesto for change — based not on political and economic upheavals but on community organizing and resurgent moral values…

…In 1953, she moved to Detroit and married James Boggs, a black autoworker, writer and radical activist. The city, with its large black population, racial inequalities and auto industry in its postwar heyday, seemed poised for changes, and the couple focused on African-Americans, women and young people as vanguards of a social movement…

Read the entire obituary here.

Review: Trevor Noah Keeps ‘Daily Show’ DNA in Debut

The New York Times
2015-09-29

James Poniewozik, Television Critic

The post-Jon Stewart version of “The Daily Show” that Trevor Noah and Comedy Central unveiled on Monday night was a bit like a new iPhone. It was sleeker, fresher and redesigned. There were tweaks here and there — look, even a new font!

But it still does essentially the same thing.

Sure, the 31-year-old, South African-born Mr. Noah is a new face and voice. Likening Mr. Stewart to a comedic father, he joked: “Now it feels like the family has a new stepdad. And he’s black.” Assured, handsome and with a crisp delivery, Mr. Noah was a smoother presenter than Mr. Stewart, who made an art form of sputtering and exasperated facepalming.

But if Mr. Noah’s debut was largely successful, it was also because of the operating system — the show’s writing — running under the surface. That algorithm, capable of processing a day’s media inputs into a satirically argued package, is what makes “The Daily Show” “The Daily Show.” This first outing was about proving that he could run the software without crashing…

Read the entire article here.

The Fabulous World of Harumi Klossowska de Rola

The New York Times Magazine
2015-09-22

Hilary Moss

“Benoît, my partner, took this photo in 2013 in front of the Grand Chalet, which was a hotel until my father bought it. It is still loaded with thousands of books and even old skis from English clients. My mom has her studio there, Benoît has his studio, I have my own studio. It’s almost like apartments in a city — you can hear everyone’s muffled footsteps.” Credit: Benoît Peverelli

Balthus’s jewelry-designing daughter reflects on her ethereal life in a historic Swiss chalet — and on memories of a singular childhood.

HARUMI KLOSSOWSKA DE ROLA’S first home was the massive Renaissance Villa Medici at the edge of the Borghese gardens, residence of the French Academy in Rome, which was run throughout the 1960s and much of the 1970s by her father, the painter Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus. Klossowska, now in her 40s, scoured the grounds for treasures such as pale pink stones and bits of blue-green glass from mosaics to show him. Later, she found that he had kept them all, close, in his bedside top drawer.

Such moments shaped the playful, Zen, otherworldly aesthetic of the designer, who conceives high jewelry pieces for Chopard and Boucheron and for her own line. After Balthus’s stint at the Academy ended when she was 5, the family home became the Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland, built in the mid-1700s, one of the largest wooden residential structures in Europe. She lives and works there still, with her partner, the photographer Benoît Peverelli, and their two children, as well as her mother, the Japanese-born painter Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, who was 34 years Balthus’s junior. They spend time as well at Castello de Montecalvello, a medieval Italian castle that her father bought in 1967, where a half-brother, Stanislas, lives…

Read the entire article here.

The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’

The New York Times
2015-09-20

Rachel L. Swarns

The outcry was immediate and ferocious when a white New York City police officer tackled James Blake, the retired biracial tennis star, while arresting him this month in a case of mistaken identity. The officer mistook Mr. Blake for a black man suspected of credit card fraud, according to the police.

Racism, pure and simple, some said.

But was it?

Scientists, pointing to decades of research, believe something else was at work. They call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.

It is not bias or bigotry, the researchers say, that makes it difficult for people to distinguish between people of another race. It is the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other groups that often makes it easier for us to quickly identify and remember people of our own ethnicity or race while we often struggle to do the same for others.

That racially loaded phrase “they all look alike to me,” turns out to be largely scientifically accurate, according to Roy S. Malpass, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the subject since the 1960s. “It has a lot of validity,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Three Very Rare Generations

The New York Times
1992-12-13

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University

Soul To Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. By Yelena Khanga with Susan Jacoby. Illustrated. 318 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $22.95.

AMONG its other consequences, the demise of the Soviet Union has released an emigration of foreign-born leftists and their descendants. Along with Spanish Loyalists and exiled third-world socialists now returning to their countries of origin, this little-noticed diaspora includes Yelena Khanga, the granddaughter of a black American who had moved to the Soviet Union in 1931, along with his Polish-Jewish-American wife. “Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992” tells the remarkable story of Ms. Khanga’s family, shedding light into unfamiliar corners of both the Soviet and American pasts. Its title derives from a Russian expression for close friendship. In an American context, it also suggests encounters among blacks, and the book’s most interesting chapters recount the story of the black side of Ms. Khanga’s family tree.

Her great-grandfather, Hilliard Golden, born a slave, served on the board of supervisors in Yazoo County, Miss., during Reconstruction, and managed to become one of the areas’s largest black landowners (Ms. Khanga is not sure how). The restoration of white supremacy abruptly ended his political career, but Golden clung tenaciously to his property until 1909, when, like many other farmers in the New South, he succumbed to debt and lost his land…

…In 1931, with 15 other Americans — black agricultural specialists and their families — Ms. Khanga’s grandparents sailed for the Soviet Union to help develop cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan. The poverty and backwardness of the region, where polygamy still flourished, reinforced the Goldens’ sense of socialist mission. When their daughter, Lily, was born, they decided to remain in the Soviet Union “because they did not want to raise a racially mixed child in America.” The agricultural experiments succeeded, and Stalin then decreed that Uzbekistan should concentrate exclusively on cotton, transforming the area, ironically, into a one-crop economy bearing some resemblance to the South of Golden’s youth…

Read the entire review here.