Mixed Race Studies

There Has To Be Space In Black History Month For Mixed Race People

Grazia
2019-10-09

Miranda Larbi

Black History Month is a sacred space for Black experience and political Blackness, says Miranda Larbi.

For some, October is a month of ghouls, pumpkins and spurious sexy cat outfits. For others, it’s something more significant. Black History Month – a four week window through which to examine Britain’s racial skeletons.

The period offers a brief hiatus from an overarching white narrative where we hear stories from our ancestors, and understandably, they’re not always that positive.

Colonial history is violent, unfair and badly taught. British school kids spend a few scattered hours across their schooling learning about PoC. Maybe they’ll hear a bit about slavery before going back to studying Elizabeth I for the fifth time, but very rarely will the syllabus mention how complicit the British government were in the crimes committed against black people…

If the UK really respected its BAME communities, Black History Month would be obsolete because our history would be seamlessly woven into the British curriculum. But as it is, BHM is an absolutely crucial space. For many of us, Black History Month represents that kind of chicken soup for the soul because it’s been the only opportunity for seeing any kind of representation. It’s just a shame that there isn’t more space in it Black-white biracial narratives during the month…

Read the entire article here.

Out of this world – Nasa data analyst Fionnghuala O’Reilly crowned Miss Universe Ireland 2019

The Independent
Dublin, Ireland

Gabija Gataveckaite

Miss Universe Dublin Fionnghuala O’Reilly. Picture: Brian McEvoy

Dubliner Fionnghuala O’Reilly (25) was crowned Miss Universe Ireland at tonight’s star-studded event in Dublin city centre.

The Nasa data analyst, who works remotely from Dublin, wowed judges when she spoke about her ambition to use her platform as an engineer and a bi-racial woman to promote diversity and equality.

Dazzling in a diamanté encrusted gown, the Swords woman told Independent.ie Style how special the night was for her and how it was a “dream come true”.

“I feel absolutely amazing,” she said.

“This is like a dream come true for me…

Read the entire article here.

18:Multiracials & Civil Rights + Colorism + Hair Wars with Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández

Radiant Mix
2019-10-10

Hope McGrath, Host

In this episode Hope McGrath has an insightful conversation with Tanya Katerí Hernández, an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and Fulbright Scholar who is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Not only do we learn about Tanya’s powerful personal story, but she shares her expertise in anti-discrimination law, race relations, and beyond as we discuss her new book “Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination.” This is one fascinating episode where we can learn new insights about the mixed-race experience and law, plus so much more. Learn something new everyday…Enjoy the show!

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

• Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández shares her personal story as an Afro-Puerto Rican woman which highlights the issue of colorism front and center within her family
• Hair Wars— the plight of multiracial hair and its importance in our lives is real!
• The growth of interracial relationships and the mixed-race children population does not alter how racism manifests in anti-discrimination law cases.
• An academic scholar of comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law discusses the new primetime sitcom Mixed•ish
• Is it acceptable to use the controversial term “mixed” for mixed-race individuals? Get Professor Tanya’s professional opinion.
• The importance of reinvigorating our communities to pursue equity. We must understand and push back from the systemic and structural racism that is the backbone of our society. Get some insights into how to take action.
• Learn about some shocking anti-discrimination cases cited in Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández’s new book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination.

Listen to the episode (00:048:58) here.

From Mississippi to Chicago to Belarus, ancestors guide her way

Berkeley News
Berekeley, California
2019-10-03

Gretchen Kell, Director of Special Projects and Outreach
Office of Communications and Public Affairs
University of California, Berkeley

“My ancestors give me a sense of profound empathy and also a sense that humans have dealt with racism, xenophobia, for so long. … It makes me both deeply sad and activated to try and do whatever I can to interrupt that,” says Tina Sacks, assistant professor of social welfare. (Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz)

During the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the English colonies, we’re highlighting members of the campus community whose personal stories, often marked by racism and discrimination, inform their life’s work. We begin with Tina Sacks, UC Berkeley assistant professor of social welfare, who tells of the struggles, self-determination and achievements of her African American and Jewish ancestors.

“Like many young people, when I was growing up I didn’t think much about my mother’s origins. I knew she was from Mississippi, and she had a strong Southern accent, but it washed over me. Most of the black people I knew in Chicago sounded like her, because the vast majority of them were Southerners who were part of the Great Migration.

My mom, Bette Parks Sacks, was born in 1939 and came of age at a difficult time. She was the middle child of 10 kids; one was stillborn, and her brother died when he was only 7 years old. When she was 13, her mother, Lucille, died. My grandfather, J.B. Parks, and his family were sharecroppers in the town of Walnut, about an hour south of the Mississippi/Tennessee border. My mom talked all the time about their deep, deep poverty, the hunger, the cold. She talked all the time about being hungry and cold. She didn’t have shoes — she may have had one pair of shoes a year, but often walked barefoot. By the time she was 6, she was picking cotton and could drag 100 pounds of it behind her. She described having a long burlap bag that she put cotton in. It hooked around her arm and trailed behind her. Sometimes, in the fields, it was so hot that she said she’d literally vomit, and then just keep going…

…The story of my dad, Stanley, is also one of movement. His people were Jewish and came from a different part of the world. They’re less known to me, because my father doesn’t know much about them. But I was very close to my dad’s mother, Dora. She did not read or write in English. Yiddish was her first language. Once I learned to drive, I would take her to the grocery store, and she had her list written in Yiddish. I heard bits and pieces about her life in the Old Country, now probably Belarus, in a shtetl outside of Minsk. As a teenager, she survived many programs [pogroms?]  before World War II that essentially were ethnic cleansing, and she once hid in a barn under hay for a week while soldiers looted and burned. She was 19 when she came to the U.S. on a ship with my paternal grandfather. They had met in Belarus, but got married here. Many of my grandmother’s relatives died in the camps during World War II. She never saw her parents again. But she would never talk about it. Only once she spoke about one of her cousins, whose infant was shot by an SS guard in front of her, and she is said to have died of a heart attack, right there…

Read the entire article here.

Archive Fever

Bookforum
2019-10-03

Tiana Reid, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University, New York, New York

Autobiography and archival research collide in Hazel Carby’s memoir

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby. Verso. 416 pages. $29.

“Are we going to burn it?” A question about the fate of the future concludes Hazel Carby’s Race Men (1998), a powerful academic book about suffocating representations of black American masculinities based on a lecture the author delivered at Harvard. In her newest book, Carby is already burnt, the result of a smoldered past. “Imperial Intimacies is a very British story,” she writes in the preface. It is also her story: about growing up after World War II, about her childhood in the area now known as South London, about the family histories of her white Welsh mother and black Jamaican father, about, in all, the public and private agonies of imperialism and colonialism.

Probing the auto-historical, Carby studies her parents’ experiences in Jamaica and the United Kingdom, the “two islands” of the book’s subtitle. Her parents’ islands are connected not only by biological reproduction or a chance romance but also by the entanglement of ideologies. Her familial research at the National Archives of Jamaica and the United Kingdom offers at the same time a glimpse into the machinery of colonialism: the vexing racial iconography of postwar Britain, the psychic drains of poverty, the endlessness of wartime…

Read the entire review here.

A Death in Harlem, A Novel

TriQuarterly Books (an imprint of Northwestern University Press)
2019-09-15
248 pages
Trim size 6 x 9
Trade Paper ISBN: 978-0-8101-4081-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-8101-4082-0

Karla FC Holloway, James. B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Law
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.

Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem.

A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.

Coloring Racial Fluidity: How Skin Tone Shapes Multiracial Adolescents’ Racial Identity Changes

Race and Social Problems
First Online: 2019-09-30
9 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-019-09269-w

Robert L. Reece, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin

Research on racial fluidity has become increasingly common as researchers seek to understand the ways and reasons people change their racial identifications and/or are perceived differently over time and across contexts. Concurrently, researchers have deepened their investigations of the attitudinal and identity aspects of “color,” that is the ways that people’s racial and political attitudes vary based on skin tone among members of the same racial group, particularly black Americans. This paper attempts to blend research on racial fluidity and color into an exploration of adolescent racial identity formation. I examine the effect skin tone on the likelihood and type of racial identity change among multiracial black adolescents as they transition into adulthood. My results reveal that lighter skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to a non-black single race, while darker skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to black only.

Read the entire article here.

Black Voices: This is Black: Macadie Amoroso

Shades of Noir
2019-09-02

Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark, Junior Editor

Macadie Amoroso

SHADES OF NOIR Q&A – ‘Blue Beneath My Skin’

Macadie Amoroso: I am the writer and performer of ‘Blue Beneath My Skin’, which I was inspired to write because I’d been wanting, for a while, to voice my personal experiences of being mixed-race. I rarely see or hear of any plays about it, but whenever I speak to other mixed-race people, they always have so much to say about their experiences.

What motivated me to put pen to paper was receiving an email about the festival, This Is Black. It was emphasised in the email that the festival was about celebrating black work and giving black artists a voice, and I immediately felt disheartened. Not because I felt like this wasn’t important (it very much is) but because I don’t identify as black, and therefore, I felt an element of fraud/guilt, thinking, ‘this isn’t for me. Maybe I’ll be taking up space of someone who does identify as black’. This spurred me to write about what it’s like being of mixed heritage, but only having exposure to one side of that. I chose to write it in spoken word because I’ve always been more of a poet than a writer and I think it’s a very effective way of storytelling…

…Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark: How did you go about building a varied depiction of Black stories and black characters?

MA: I could only build what I know, so I focused on the protagonist’s mixed-race experience, but making sure to highlight through other characters, like her best mate, Paul, that her experience is definitely not the only mixed-race experience out there. I hope what I’ve done through this play and the characters within it, is show that struggle is universal and feeling ‘blue’ is something that everyone experiences regardless of age, gender, sexuality, colour, ethnicity; it’s a part of the wider human experience…

Read the entire interview here.

Multiracial Cultural Attunement

NASW Press
October 2019
2018 pages
Item #5440
ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-87101-544-0

Kelly Faye Jackson, Associate Professor
School of Social Work
Arizona State University

Gina Miranda Samuels, Associate Professor
School of Social Service Administration
The University of Chicago

“What are you?” “But you don’t sound black!” “Aw, mixed-race babies are so cute!” These microaggressions can deeply affect an individual’s basic development, identity, sense of security, and belonging. Rather than having “the best of both worlds,” research suggests that multiracial people and families experience similar or higher rates of racism, bullying, separation, suicide, and divorce than their single-race-identified peers. Multiracial people and families don’t face these challenges because they are multiracial, but because dominant constructions of race, rooted in white supremacy, privilege single-race identities. It is this foundation of monocentrism that perpetuates the continued pathologizing and exotifying of people and families of mixed-race heritage. Furthermore, pervasive but misguided claims of colorblindness often distort the salience of race and racism in our society for all people of color. This reinforces and enables the kind of racism and discrimination that many multiracial families and people experience, often leaving them to battle their oppression and discrimination alone.

In this book, Jackson and Samuels draw from their own research and direct practice with multiracial individuals and families, and also a rich interdisciplinary science and theory base, to share their model of multiracial cultural attunement. Core to this model are the four foundational principles of critical multiraciality, multidimensionality and intersectionality, social constructivism, and social justice. Throughout, the authors demonstrate how to collaboratively nurture clients’ emerging identities, identify struggles and opportunities, and deeply engage clients’ strengths and resiliencies. Readers are challenged to embrace this model as a guide to go beyond the comfort zone of their own racialized experiences to disrupt the stigma and systems of racism and monoracism that can inhibit the well-being of multiracial people and families.

With case studies, skill-building resources, tool kits, and interactive exercises, this book can help you leverage the strengths and resilience of multiracial people and families and pave the way to your own personal growth and professional responsibility to enact socially just practices.

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916

University of Nebraska Press
October 2019
320 pages
7 photos, 3 drawings, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4962-0507-0

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Professor of History
University of La Verne, Point Mugu, California

In The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly examines generations of mixed-race African Americans after the Civil War and into the Progressive Era, skillfully tracking the rise of a leadership class in Black America made up largely of individuals who had complex racial ancestries, many of whom therefore enjoyed racial options to identity as either Black or White. Although these people might have chosen to pass as White to avoid the racial violence and exclusion associated with the dominant racial ideology of the time, they instead chose to identify as Black Americans, a decision which provided upward mobility in social, political, and economic terms.

Dineen-Wimberly highlights African American economic and political leaders and educators such as P. B. S. Pinchback, Theophile T. Allain, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass as well as women such as Josephine B. Willson Bruce and E. Azalia Hackley who were prominent clubwomen, lecturers, educators, and settlement house founders. In their quest for leadership within the African American community, these leaders drew on the concept of Blackness as a source of opportunities and power to transform their communities in the long struggle for Black equality.

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 confounds much of the conventional wisdom about racially complicated people and details the manner in which they chose their racial identity and ultimately overturns the “passing” trope that has dominated so much Americanist scholarship and social thought about the relationship between race and social and political transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “As a Negro I will be Powerful”: The Leadership of P.B.S. Pinchback
• Chapter 2. Post-Bellum Strategies to Retain Power and Status: From Political Appointments to Property Ownership
• Chapter 3. New Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership: From Domestic Immigration to “The Consul’s Burden”
• Chapter 4. “Lifting as We Climb”: The Other Side of Uplift
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index