Mixed Race Studies

EXCLUSIVE: White supremacist James Jackson reveals deranged desire to kill black men to save white women in jailhouse interview

The New York Daily News
2017-03-26

Ellen Moynihan and Steven Rex Brown

The racist who fatally drove a sword through 66-year-old Timothy Caughman said Sunday he hoped the attack would stop white women from entering relationships with black men.

In an exclusive Rikers Island interview with the Daily News, James Jackson, 28, offered a window into his deranged, hate-filled psyche.

He shared details about his upbringing with “typical liberal” parents, his wishes to have shed more African-American blood, and his fear of being killed in custody now that he is being held in a jail with a largely minority inmate population and staff.

During the disturbing sitdown, Johnson was at times self-aggrandizing, boasting of his white supremacy without shame. In other moments, he appeared dejected by society’s rejection of his violent, racist message — which echoed another notorious racist killer, South Carolina church gunman Dylann Roof.

Most chillingly, Jackson said he had traveled to New York from Baltimore intending to kill numerous black men, imagining that the bloodshed would deter white women from interracial relationships. “‘Well, if that guy feels so strongly about it, maybe I shouldn’t do it,’” he said, imagining how he wanted a white woman to think…

…In 2008, Jackson said, he voted for Barack Obama for President, one of the few people of mixed race he said he could respect. “I couldn’t let Palin get in there. She’s stupid,” he said, referencing then-Republican candidate for vice president Sarah Palin…

Read the entire article here.

The Signifyin(g) Saint: Encoding Homoerotic Intimacy in Black Harlem

Black Perspectives
2017-03-14

James Padilioni Jr, Ph.D Candidate and Teaching Fellow in American Studies (Africana-affiliated)
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

On June 25, 1942, Edward Atkinson arrived at 101 Central Park West to sit for a photo shoot in the home studio of Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten, author of the infamous 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, was a white patron of the Harlem Renaissance and amateur photographer who took hundreds of photographs of Black Harlem’s who’s who such as Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, and James Weldon Johnson. Atkinson, an off-Broadway actor no stranger to playing a role, transformed himself into Martin de Porres (1579-1639), a Peruvian friar who became the first Afro-American saint when the Vatican canonized him in 1962 as the patron of social justice. I trace Martin’s iconography and ritual performances across Black communities in Latin and Anglo America to reveal the historical relations of power that structure and materialize the networks harnessed by Black peoples to mobilize resources in their varied yet persistent efforts to create meaningful lives out of the fragments of the Middle Passage…

Read the entire article here.

A Good Fellow and a Wise Guy

The New York Sun
2006-08-09

William Bryk

Book Review
A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York
by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

George Washington Appo, the once notorious Asian-Irish-American petty criminal who flourished during the last quarter of the 19th century as a pickpocket and swindler, had pretty much faded into obscurity at his death in 1930, aged 73. Even the street where he lived, Donovan’s Lane (better known as Murderer’s Alley) is gone, buried with the infamous Five Points slum beneath the federal courthouses in Foley Square.

Appo resurfaced in Luc Sante’s 1991 best seller, “Low Life,” which briefly presents him as a buffoon, incompetent even as a crook. If Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s “A Pickpocket’s Tale” (W.W. Norton, 460 pages,$27.95) serves any purpose, it corrects this slur on Appo’s reputation. Appo practiced pick-pocketing as others practice dentistry or law: He was a thorough professional who picked thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pockets during his career, usually making as much money in a day as the average workingman then made in a year. He was imprisoned four times for pickpocketing, all while still relatively young. He apparently accepted jail as an inevitable cost of doing business…

Read the entire review here.

Patricia Park talks about her Korean American spin on Jane Eyre

The Los Angeles Times
2015-05-12

Steph Cha

Patricia Park, author of “Re Jane” (Allana Taranto/Viking)

What if Jane Eyre was a Korean American girl and Rochester was a English professor? Patricia Park on ‘Re Jane‘

Patricia Park’s debut novel, “Re Jane” (Pamela Dorman/Viking: 340 pp., $27.95), is a retelling of everyone’s favorite Gothic Victorian Brontë romance, “Jane Eyre,” transferred to New York and South Korea in the early 2000s. Her heroine, Jane Re, is a half-Korean orphan raised by her uncle’s family in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood that feels “all Korean, all the time.” When a prestigious post-college job offer falls through thanks to the dot-com crash, Jane takes a job as an au pair in Brooklyn in order to escape Queens and her uncle’s grocery store.

Her employers are Ed Farley and Beth Mazer, two Brooklyn English professors with an adopted Chinese daughter. Ed, as you may have guessed, is brooding and manly, with a strong jawline and a Brooklyn accent—pure Kryptonite for our wide-eyed, 22-year-old Jane. He lives in the shadow of his older, more accomplished wife, an eccentric feminist scholar with an attic office, who takes it upon herself to educate their sheltered au pair.

With her mixed blood and her torn loyalties, Jane embodies the confusion of both young adulthood and the hyphenated American experience. Impressionable and accommodating at the start of the novel, she struggles to find her own identity as the places and people in her life try to claim her. Her journey is a pleasure to follow, immensely rewarding and speckled with humor and romance…

Read the entire interview here.

Re Jane: A Novel

Pamela Dorman Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2015-05-05
352 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0525427407
Paperback ISBN: 978-0143107941

Patricia Park

For Jane Re, half-Korean, half-American orphan, Flushing, Queens, is the place she’s been trying to escape from her whole life. Sardonic yet vulnerable, Jane toils, unappreciated, in her strict uncle’s grocery store and politely observes the traditional principle of nunchi (a combination of good manners, hierarchy, and obligation). Desperate for a new life, she’s thrilled to become the au pair for the Mazer-Farleys, two Brooklyn English professors and their adopted Chinese daughter. Inducted into the world of organic food co-ops and nineteenth–century novels, Jane is the recipient of Beth Mazer’s feminist lectures and Ed Farley’s very male attention. But when a family death interrupts Jane and Ed’s blossoming affair, she flies off to Seoul, leaving New York far behind.

Reconnecting with family, and struggling to learn the ways of modern-day Korea, Jane begins to wonder if Ed Farley is really the man for her. Jane returns to Queens, where she must find a balance between two cultures and accept who she really is. Re Jane is a bright, comic story of falling in love, finding strength, and living not just out of obligation to others, but for one’s self.

Journeying from Queens to Brooklyn to Seoul, and back, this is a fresh, contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre and a poignant Korean American debut.

Collection of demographic data regarding multiracial identification.

The New York City Council
Melissa Mark-Viverito, Speaker
2014-11-25 (Passed 2016-11-13)

Int 0551-2014, Version A (2014-11-25)

A Local Law to amend the New York city charter, in relation to the collection of demographic data regarding multiracial identification

Proposed Int. No. 551-A would require the Department of Social Services, the Administration for Children’s Services, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the Department for the Aging, the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Department of Education, and any other agencies designated by the Mayor to provide to all persons served by the agency with a demographic information survey that contains an option for multiracial ancestry or ethnic origin. The bill would also require an annual review of all forms from the designated agencies, or any other agency designated by the Mayor, that collect demographic information, are completed by persons seeking services, and are within the administering agencies’ authority to amend. The bill would require all such forms to be amended to contain an option for multiracial ancestry or ethnic origin. Proposed Int. 551-A would also require reporting on the collected data.

Passed (50-0) on 2016-11-13. Enacted (Mayor’s Desk for Signature)

For more information, click here.

Gentleman Jigger: A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance

Da Capo Press
2008-01-23 (originally written in 1928)
352 pages
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
ISBN: 978-0786720637

Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987)

An important addition to the literature of the period, Gentleman Jigger is the story of two brothers. Aeon, who passes for white and becomes a famous poet, faces the conundrums of love across the color line. Stuartt, who is openly homosexual-as was the author-joins the younger intellectuals of Harlem in defying authority figures, both black and white, at the notorious “Niggeratti Manor.” After the group disperses, Stuartt moves to Greenwich Village and becomes sexually involved with a young hoodlum. Charming and audacious, Stuartt eventually seduces one of the gangster’s top bosses, Orini, before his friendships with Wayne, a young heiress, and Bebe, Orini’s “moll,” set them all spinning in a whirlwind of jazz-age glamour and celebrity…that ends in an ironic dénouement.

Justine Jane M. Bolin (First Negro woman judge in the U.S.A.)

The Crisis
Volume 49, Number 9 (September 1939)

THE COVER

Miss Jane M. Bolin became on July 22 the first colored woman Judge in the United States when Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia appointed her and swore her in as a justice of the Court of Domestic Relations of the City of New York. The appointment is for ten years and the salary is $12,000 a year.

Miss Bolin, who in private life is the wife of Ralph E. Mizelle, Washington, D.C., attorney, is a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale law school. She was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the daughter of Gaius C. Bolin, an attorney who for many years was president of the Poughkeepsie branch of the N.A.A.C.P. Following her graduation from Yale law school, Miss Bolin was admitted to practice in New York in 1932. In 1937 she was named an assistant corporate counsel and assigned to the Court of Domestic Relations. The retirement of another justice who had reached the age limit created an opening which Mayor LaGuardia filled by appointing Miss Bolin.

Mayor de Blasio says his ‘exemplary’ son Dante follows the law, but fears police brutality: ‘Black Lives Matter as an idea is so important’

The New York Daily News
2016-07-15

Jennifer Fermino, City Hall Bureau Chief

Mayor de Blasio said he finds it “intolerable” when protesters lodge “vile” insults at cops, but also defended the Black Lives Matter movement as “necessary.” (KEN MURRAY/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

Dante de Blasio is an “exemplary” teen who never gets in trouble – but even he is scared of being a victim of police violence, Mayor de Blasio said on Friday.

The mayor, speaking about race matters on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, spoke openly about his son after an African-American Queens grandmother called in to complain that she was afraid “racist” cops would hurt her teenaged grandsons.

His comments immediately touched a nerve with the Police Benevolent Association, who blasted him for not vigoriously defending the NYPD against the woman’s charges…

Read the entire article here.

PHOTOS: What It Means to Celebrate Afro-Latinidad in the Time of Black Lives Matter

Remezcla
2016-07-12

Isabelia Herrera, Music Editor

Photography by: Itzel Alejandra Martinez, Photo Editor

Itzel Alejandra Martinez

When Remezcla headed to the fourth edition of New York City’s Afro-Latino Festival this weekend, surrounded by colorful dashikis and bold #BlackLivesMatter t-shirts, we were reminded that the political utility of the Afro-Latino label is more urgent than ever. Speaking with festival attendees, families, and musicians, it became clear that celebrating Afro-Latinidad in times of black trauma isn’t about diverting the focus of anti-racist movements, but about highlighting the diversity of black experiences. As the nation reels from the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, and as police violence continues to rattle black and brown communities, Afro-Latinos are uniquely positioned to combat anti-blackness in Latino communities. To that end, we spoke to a group of festival attendees about their Afro-Latinidad in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Here’s what they had to say…

Red the entire photo-essay here.