Mixed Race Studies

Julian Bond, Former N.A.A.C.P. Chairman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 75

The New York Times
2015-08-16

Roy Reed

Julian Bond, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights for minorities, notably as chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., died on Saturday night in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. He was 75.

He died after a brief illness, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a statement Sunday morning.

Mr. Bond was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was the committee’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination as the committee challenged legal segregation in the South’s public facilities.

He gradually moved from the militancy of the student group to the top leadership of the establishmentarian N.A.A.C.P. Along the way, Mr. Bond was a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer and college teacher, and a persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy…

…Horace Julian Bond was born Jan. 14, 1940, in Nashville, to Horace Mann Bond and the former Julia Washington. The family moved to Pennsylvania five years later, when Mr. Bond’s father became the first African-American president of his alma mater, Lincoln University.

Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer. Julian’s grandfather James Bond, one of Jane Bond’s sons, was educated at Berea and Oberlin Colleges and became a clergyman. His son Horace Mann Bond expected his own son Julian to follow in his footsteps as an educator, but the young man was attracted instead to journalism and political activism…

Read the entire obituary here.

‘Key & Peele’ Ends While Nation Could Still Use a Laugh

The New York Times
2015-08-15

Dave Itzkoff, Culture Reporter

Jordan Peele, left, and Keegan-Michael Key in a scene from the final season of “Key & Peele.” Credit Comedy Central

The scene is a hauntingly familiar one: A white police officer stalks an unarmed black man in a dark alley and slams the man’s head into the open door of his patrol car.

But then, rather than being taken into police custody, the man is led through a magical door to the sunlit, upbeat streets of a utopia called Negrotown, whose black populace serenades the visitor about its city, where “you can walk the street without getting stopped, harassed or beat” and “you can wear your hoodie and not get shot.”

This comic sketch is one of many that have made “Key & Peele,” the Comedy Central series created by and starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, a television program that is uniquely calibrated to the current American moment, when real-life examples of racial polarization and conflict are ubiquitous, but opportunities in pop culture to process these divisions are rare.

It will be a bittersweet moment when this sketch comedy series concludes its final season on Sept. 9, after three years of fixing its satirical lens on stereotypes and social injustices. In its absence, there may be no alternative that so frankly addresses these enduring prejudices and disparities, especially at a moment when America’s racial divide has taken center stage in the national discourse…

…Mr. Key, 44, and Mr. Peele, 36, who are biracial, say they are ending the show by mutual agreement for the least complicated of reasons: They want to pursue other projects…

…“When Obama was elected, there was this mythology that, O.K., we’re over the racist thing — this is a postracial world,” Mr. Peele said. “And now, obviously, we’ve uncovered why that’s not true.”…

Read the entire article here.

DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life

The New York Times
2015-08-12

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.

Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding.

Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books.

The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated…

…The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood.”…

Read the entire article here.

I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves.

President Barack Obama, “President Obama’s Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/president-obamas-letter-to-the-editor.html.

President Obama’s Letter to the Editor

The New York Times Magazine
2015-08-12

Barack Obama, President of the United States
Washington, D.C.

Illustration by Ben Wiseman

For the cover story of our Aug. 2 issue, Jim Rutenberg wrote about efforts over the last 50 years to dismantle the protections in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark piece of legislation that cleared barriers between black voters and the ballot. The story surveyed a broad sweep of history and characters, from United States Chief Justice John Roberts to ordinary citizens like 94-year-old Rosanell Eaton, a plaintiff in the current North Carolina case arguing to repeal voting restrictions enacted in 2013. The magazine received an unusual volume of responses to this article, most notably from President Barack Obama.

I was inspired to read about unsung American heroes like Rosanell Eaton in Jim Rutenberg’s “A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act.”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union. …” It’s a cruel irony that the words that set our democracy in motion were used as part of the so-called literacy test designed to deny Rosanell and so many other African-Americans the right to vote. Yet more than 70 years ago, as she defiantly delivered the Preamble to our Constitution, Rosanell also reaffirmed its fundamental truth. What makes our country great is not that we are perfect, but that with time, courage and effort, we can become more perfect. What makes America special is our capacity to change…

…I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves…

Read the entire article here.

President Obama’s Racial Renaissance

The New York Times
2015-08-01

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Toyin Odutola

We finally have the president we thought we elected: one who talks directly and forcefully about race and human rights.

When President Obama took the podium at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P. in Philadelphia last month, he sounded like the leader I’ve been waiting to hear since his first inauguration in 2009. It was almost as if Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” and the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. had hacked his computer and collaborated on his speech.

Many of Mr. Obama’s admirers and critics have hungered for straight talk on race since he his election. But since taking office, the president had been skittish on the subject and had mostly let it lapse into disturbing silence.

As we prepare to mark the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this country continues to grapple with what feels like an onslaught of black death.

But now we are doing it with a president — our first African-American president — who has found a confident voice on race…

Read the entire article here.

Walter White, 61, Dies in Home Here

The New York Times
1955-03-22

Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died last night of a heart attack at his home at his home, 242 East Sixty-eighth Street. He was 61 years old.

Last October he twice entered the New York Hospital for treatment for a heart ailment that had caused him to take a leave of absence from his duties.

Recently he had returned from a month’s leisurely visit in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Yesterday he spent two hours at his office.

Mr. White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice.

Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian. He could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color-line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country.

But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people…

Read the entire obituary here.

Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?

A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?

Jonathan Wolfe, “Jose Antonio Vargas on Donald Trump, Rachel Dolezal and His MTV Documentary, ‘White People’,” The New York Times, July 22, 2015. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/jose-antonio-vargas-white-people-interview.

Jose Antonio Vargas on Donald Trump, Rachel Dolezal and His MTV Documentary, ‘White People’

The New York Times
2015-07-22

Jonathan Wolfe

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigration activist. His new documentary “White People,” which airs tonight on MTV, follows Mr. Vargas as he travels the country speaking to young people about issues of race, particularly what it means to be white and experience white privilege. Because, Mr. Vargas said, “You cannot have a conversation about race in this country and not include white people in it.”

The documentary is part of MTV’s Look Different campaign, which aims to erase hidden gender, racial and anti-LGBT bias and uses data from a 2014 MTV survey of 14- to 24-year-olds that found that people in this age group are more tolerant and diverse than previous generations but are uncomfortable talking about race and adhere to the ideal of color blindness.

Mr. Vargas spoke about the controversy surrounding the documentary, Donald Trump’s comments about immigration and Rachel Dolezal. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:…

…Q. What is your definition of white privilege?

A. I think people get tripped up by the word “privilege.” I’m talking about systematic institutionalized differences. I had a lot of people writing me emails saying, I’m not privileged. For example, this weekend I was with Martin O’Malley in front of progressive liberal activists. Responding to the “Black Lives Matter” protest at the conference, he said: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” And the audience, which was diverse, gasped. They actually booed him. Because institutionally, if you look at incarceration rates, if you look at the criminal justice system, black people are at a disadvantage. So the moment he said that, he took it back and apologized. And some people took offense to that. Why did Martin O’Malley have to apologize for saying white lives matter? And this woman on Twitter was genuinely hurt; her tweet to me was, “My white life matters.” And I tweeted back at her and I was like, “Of course it does.” Of course it does, but your life mattering has been a given…

…Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?

A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?

Q. What do you think about Rachel Dolezal?

A. For me, that’s an example of what white privilege is. She can pass. There are many black people who can say that they are white as much as they can but who will never look physically white…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Key & Peele’ to End After Its Fifth Season

The New York Times
2015-07-25

Jonah Bromwich

The Comedy Central show “Key & Peele,” an absurdist sketch comedy that has become known for recurring skits like one in which an “anger translator” expresses emotions on President Obama’s behalf, will end after its current season.

Speaking to the online entertainment journal TheWrap, one of the show’s stars Keegan-Michael Key said that it was time for him and his co-star, Jordan Peele, “to explore other things, together and apart.”

“It’s not because of Comedy Central, it’s us,” Mr. Key said.

“Key & Peele” premiered on the network in 2012 and won a Peabody Award in 2013 for its “inspired satirical riffs on our racially divided and racially conjoined culture.” The show, currently in its fifth season, received seven Emmy nominations this year, including a nod for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series…

…Both comedians are biracial and much of their comedy is given to exploring, mocking and confounding racial stereotypes. In accepting the show’s Peabody Award, Mr. Key expressly thanked the network for allowing “Key & Peele” to tell a diverse set of stories.

“We’d like to thank Comedy Central for giving us the opportunity to show the African-American experience as not a monolith, because it’s not,” he said. “It’s so many different stories and the danger of the world sometimes is trying to assign a single story to an entire group of people.”…

Read the entire article here.