Mixed Race Studies

When Cars Assume Ethnic Identities

The New York Times
2013-06-21

Glenn Collins

Coming to a showroom near you for 2014: the first sport utility vehicle in its class equipped with a 9-speed automatic transmission. It’s also the first to offer a parallel-parking feature. And, in 4-wheel-drive models, the rear axle disconnects automatically, for fuel efficiency.

Oh, yes: its name is the Jeep Cherokee.

Hold on — wasn’t that model name retired more than a decade ago? Wasn’t it replaced by the Jeep Liberty for 2002?

Yet now, in a time of heightened sensitivity over stereotypes, years after ethnic, racial and gender labeling has been largely erased from sports teams, products and services, Jeep is reviving an American Indian model name. Why?

“In the automobile business, you constantly have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes it’s best to go back to the future,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand and corporate identity consultancy.

Jeep, a division of the Chrysler Group, explained that its market research revealed a marked fondness for the name. The 2014 version, said Jim Morrison, director of Jeep marketing, “is a new, very capable vehicle that has the Cherokee name and Cherokee heritage. Our challenge was, as a brand, to link the past image to the present.”

The company says it respects changed attitudes toward stereotyping. “We want to be politically correct, and we don’t want to offend anybody,” Mr. Morrison said. Regarding the Cherokee name, he added: “We just haven’t gotten any feedback that was disparaging.”

Well, here’s some: “We are really opposed to stereotypes,” said Amanda Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. “It would have been nice for them to have consulted us in the very least.”

But, she added, the Cherokee name is not copyrighted, and the tribe has been offered no royalties for the use of the name. “We have encouraged and applauded schools and universities for dropping offensive mascots,” she said, but stopped short of condemning the revived Jeep Cherokee because, “institutionally, the tribe does not have a stance on this.”…

Read the entire article here.

Is Interracial Marriage Still Scandalous?

Room For Debate
The New York Times
2013-06-13

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Gary B. Nash, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Heidi W. Durrow, Author and Co-Founder
Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival

Diane Farr, Actress and Writer

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

This month marks almost 50 years since the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage legal nationwide. Marriages between people of different races have climbed since, to a high of 8.4 percent in 2010.

Does this mean that we have achieved a colorblind society, or just that the hate has moved to YouTube? In an age when white people are becoming a minority, is interracial marriage still scandalous?

Kevin Noble Maillard, a professor of law at Syracuse University, suggested this discussion.

Read the entire discussion here.

Prodigy and Prejudice

The New York Times
1995-12-10

Phyllis Rose

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. By Kathryn Talalay. Illustrated. 317 pp. New York: Oxford University Press

This enthralling, heartbreaking book restores to attention Philippa Schuyler, child prodigy of the 1930’s, pianist, composer, Harlem’s Mozart, “the Shirley Temple of American Negroes.” Her father was George Schuyler, a well-known black journalist. Her mother was Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, the white daughter of a Texas rancher. Insisting that her daughter was the normal product of “hybrid vigor” and good nutrition, Jody Schuyler dedicated her to the cause of integration: Philippa’s brilliance would break down racial barriers in America. Instead, as Kathryn Talalay tells this important story, racial barriers and a manipulative, demanding mother broke Philippa.

Based on fascinating family papers in New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler” begins by plunging us into a 1920’s world of race enthusiasm: “Nordics” go to Harlem for the night life and white girls date black men to rattle their families and prove to themselves they have interesting lives. Josephine Cogdell arrived in New York in 1927, wanting to write. She had contributed pieces to The Messenger, a left-wing black publication whose editor was George Schuyler. They met and were immediately attracted to each other.

A fanatic diarist, Jody even described their first kiss, revealing (or boasting) that she found George’s lips “softer and more sensuous than white lips.” Her primitivist ideas — the flip side of racism—glorified everything African and saw salvation in miscegenation. She encouraged herself to marry Schuyler with the thought that “the white race . . . is spiritually depleted and America must mate with the Negro to save herself.”…

…From the age of 8, Philippa concertized constantly, a darling of both the black and the white press, a role model in black communities throughout America. Her visibility was achieved through George’s press connections and Jody’s tireless management. At 15, she soloed with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium before an audience of 12,000, in a program that included one of her own compositions. (A symphony she wrote at 13 was, Virgil Thomson said, as interesting as the symphonies Mozart wrote at that age.)

But some thought her playing had been undermined by her relentless performance schedule, and the older she got the more it seems emotional turmoil prevented her from being a great artist. She made the transition from child prodigy to concert pianist, but by her mid-teens, whether because of her own inadequacies or racial barriers or both, she had gone as far as she would go as a performer in America—she was a success with black audiences, but of limited appeal to whites…

Read the entire review here.

Negro-White Marriages Here Show Rise Despite Problems of Prejudice

The New York Times
1963-10-18

Fred Powledge

Marriages between Negroes and whites have been increasing in New York and have become a poignant part of the life of the city.

The precise number of such marriages may never be known. Documents on file at the City License Bureau do not reveal clear figures because many couples refuse to state their color in the applications. But City Clerk Herman Katz, who issues licenses and performs marriages at the Municipal Building, said that on the basis of observations the number of mixed marriages had definitely risen in the last two years.

Civil rights organizations, other interested observers and interracial couples themselves said they were aware of an obvious increase in the number of marriages between Negroes and whites.

Some of them interpreted the increase as a logical extension of the desegregation movement, which has captured the emotions and attention of the country. “There’s more interracial everything these days,” said one observer.

The Negro-white couples lead special lives in New York—lifetimes of curious stares, of subtle expressions of prejudice, of occasional signs of outright hostility, and of the constant awareness that as couples they are set apart in the eyes of the city…

…”It is very often evidence of a sick revolt against society,” said a psychiatrist who studies the emotions of race relations.

But a clergyman who has married interracial couples said:

“Fundamentally, the mixed marriage is a demonstration of the tightness and justice of it all, the feeling that human: beings may marry whomever; they please.”…

…Staring Not Unusual

The experience in the Village was not unusual. Dr. Charles E. Smith, a New York psychotherapist who wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1960 on the subject of interracial marriage, found that being stared at was a part of the lives of 22 New York couples he interviewed. Dr. Smith is a Negro.

He wrote in his thesis that the couples “considered staring by far to be the most difficult reaction from others to which interracial couples must become accustomed. This was described as a tremendous phenomenon to which to adjust…

…There are two problems of interracial marriages that are not generally shared by Negro couples. The men and women who were interviewed agreed that these two problems—children and acceptance by friends, family and society—were perhaps their greatest concerns.

In his study of 22 interracial couples, Dr. Smith found that none had decided against having children. His respondents were aware that their children would be considered Negroes by society, and that society would show some hostility toward the offspring.

“Yet,” he wrote, “these factors did not act as deterrents, as the couples felt not to have children would be acquiescing to societal restrictions and would also represent an unfulfilled marriage. In some way a childless marriage would be seen as an actual threat to the marriage.” He added:

“The parents were actually getting the main brunt of societal reactions. Generally the couples felt that the true test for the children could be expected to come as they reached pubescence and adolescence and begin to expand their area of socialization.

“It is then that the restrictions from society are expected to be strongest and will probably have the greatest effect upon the children. For the most part,  the  experiences of the children are expected to be very much similar to those of other Negro  children  in the United States.” …

…Married 35 Years

George S. Schuyler, 68-year-old associate editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, a Negro newspaper with offices in New York, has been married to a white Texan since 1928.

He observed that other couples were “not worried about the children,” and explained: “They know that’s inevitable. They’re concerned, sure. They’re concerned about what effect it will have on the children’s future, and what degree of discrimination they’ll meet. But that doesn’t keep anybody from having children.”…

…Andrew D. Weinberger, New York attorney who has made studies of miscegenation statutes, used a projection to arrive at an estimate of one million couples in the nation, 70.000 of them in the New York metropolitan area.

His figures include a large number of light-skinned Negroes who pass for white. Mr. Weinberger used previously published scientific tables to calculate that one million American Negroes of marriage age are “passing.” He reduced the figure to 810,000 to allow for persons not married or not interracially married…

…High Jewish Percentage

Researchers, including Dr. Smith, have found in most cases that the Negro partner was the husband. They also re port that in New York the percentage of whites who also are Jews is high enough to attract notice…

Read or purchase the article here.

Louisiana Repeals Black Blood Law

The New York Times
1983-07-06

Frances Frank Marcus, Special to the New York Times

NEW ORLEANS, July 5—  Gov. David C. Treen today signed legislation repealing a Louisiana statute that established a mathematical formula to determine if a person was black.

The law establishing the formula, passed by state legislators in 1970, said that anyone having one thirty-second or less of “Negro blood” should not be designated as black by Louisiana state officials.

The legislator who wrote the law repealing the formula, Lee Frazier, a 34-year-old Democrat representing a racially mixed district in New Orleans, said recently that he had done so because of national attention focused on the law by a highly publicized court case here.

The case involves the vigorous but thus far unsuccessful efforts of Susie Guillory Phipps, the wife of a well-to-do white businessman in Sulphur, La., to change the racial description on her birth certificate from “col.,” an abbreviation for “colored,” to “white.”…

…Mr. Frazier said that in the future it would be possible for a person to change birth records by sworn statements from family members, doctors and others.

He said his research showed that the designation of race on official documents in this area from the late 1700’s and that its purpose was “to keep control over land ownership, to keep the landowner from having to share his land with his illegitimate children who were family members.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Ethnicity, Hidden Identity

The New York Times
2013-05-24

Kathryn Shattuck

With his long-lashed chocolate eyes and inviting lips, used to seductive effect in “Rescue Me,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” Daniel Sunjata has the kind of face not easily forgotten, or so you’d think

“If I’m exposed to crowds repeatedly, I could count on my hands the number of times people are going to say, ‘Hey, aren’t you Adam Rodriguez from “CSI: Miami”?’ ” he said, his laughter tinged with what might have been a touch of ruefulness. Especially since Mr. Sunjata, 41, a high school linebacker in Chicago who traded in dreams of business school for the stage, has supported himself by acting ever since he earned an M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1998. No waiting tables. No tending bar.

He might finally kiss Mr. Rodriguez’s ghost goodbye with “Graceland,” a new series that premieres on June 6 at 10 p.m. on the USA Network. Mr. Sunjata stars as Paul Briggs, a legendary undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation living in a Southern California beach palace with a motley crew from the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Then Mike Warren, a rookie played by Aaron Tveit, arrives from Quantico where, like Briggs, he graduated at the top of his class. Soon Mike discovers that his assignment — to infiltrate the local underworld with his housemates — is camouflage for a more important task: to investigate Briggs himself.

Recently Mr. Sunjata — his casual outfit in contrast to his elegant, thinking-man’s demeanor — spoke with Kathryn Shattuck about living large and letting it all hang out. These are excerpts from their conversation…

….With roles ranging from a Nuyorican firefighter on “Rescue Me” to a fashion designer in “The Devil Wears Prada,” you seem to have defied stereotyping.

When I was coming out of graduate school, I wasn’t really sure if my ethnic ambiguity [Irish, German and African-American] was going to be a help or a hindrance, but I think that ultimately it has helped me. It’s set me apart from other guys who might be considered leading-man types in the sense that I don’t necessarily look like everybody else. But a lot of it depends on the open-mindedness of the casting director…

Read the entire interview here.

The Forgotten Amerasians

The New York Times
2013-05-27

Christopher M. Lapinig
Yale University

NEW HAVEN — THE Senate Judiciary Committee approved an immigration reform bill last week that would gradually make citizenship possible for as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants. The bill is widely described as sweeping in scope. In fact, it is not quite sweeping enough, as it leaves the plight of another group of would-be Americans unaddressed.

Take Pinky. In 1974, her father, Jimmy Edwards, was a 22-year-old sailor aboard a United States Navy ship visiting the Philippines, 9,000 miles away from his hometown, Kinston, N.C. He fell in love with a Filipina named Merlie Daet, who gave birth to their daughter, Pinky. Mr. Edwards had hoped to marry Merlie, but as a sailor, he could not marry a foreigner without his captain’s consent. The captain refused. Despite his best efforts over the years, Mr. Edwards was unable to find Pinky (or Merlie).

Until 2005, that is. USA Bound, a now defunct nonprofit organization that reconnected Filipino children with their American fathers, told Mr. Edwards that it had found Pinky. He flew to the Philippines, only to find her living in poverty in a cinder-block hut in the mountains with her husband and five children. Determined to give her a better life, he sought United States citizenship for her.

To his surprise, it was too late. Although by birthright, children born out of wedlock to an American father and a foreign mother are entitled to United States citizenship, they must file paternity certifications no later than their 18th birthday to get it. But since the military bases in the Philippines have been closed for over 20 years, virtually all Filipino “Amerasians” — a term coined by the author and activist Pearl S. Buck to describe children of American servicemen and Asian mothers — have passed that age…

…In a Catholic society that stigmatizes illegitimate children, Filipinos deploy an arsenal of slurs against Amerasians: iniwan ng barko (“left by the ship”) and babay sa daddy (“goodbye to Daddy”) among them. Black Amerasians are often called “charcoal,” or worse…

Read the entire article here.

At Peace With Many Tribes

The New York Times
2013-05-19

Carol Kino

HUDSON, N.Y. — One sunny afternoon early this month Jeffrey Gibson paced around his studio, trying to keep track of which of his artworks was going where.

Luminous geometric abstractions, meticulously painted on deer hide, that hung in one room were about to be picked up for an art fair. In another sat Mr. Gibson’s outsize rendition of a parfleche trunk, a traditional American Indian rawhide carrying case, covered with Malevich-like shapes, which would be shipped to New York for a solo exhibition at the National Academy Museum. Two Delaunay-esque abstractions made with acrylic on unstretched elk hides had already been sent to a museum in Ottawa, but the air was still suffused with the incense-like fragrance of the smoke used to color the skins.

“If you’d told me five years ago that this was where my work was going to lead,” said Mr. Gibson, gesturing to other pieces, including two beaded punching bags and a cluster of painted drums, “I never would have believed it.” Now 41, he is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee. But for years, he said, he resisted the impulse to quote traditional Indian art, just as he had rejected the pressure he’d felt in art school to make work that reflected his so-called identity…

Read the entire article here.

A Black Nurse, a German Soldier and an Unlikely WWII Romance

The New York Times
2013-05-14

Alexis Clark

The nurse and the soldier may never have met – and eventually married – had it not been for the American government’s mistreatment of black women during World War II.

Elinor Elizabeth Powell was an African-American military nurse. Frederick Albert was a German prisoner of war. Their paths crossed in Arizona in 1944. It was a time when the Army was resisting enlisting black nurses and the relatively small number allowed entry tended to be assigned to the least desirable duties.

“They decided they were going to use African-Americans but in very small numbers and in segregated locations,” said Charissa Threat, a history professor at Northeastern University who teaches race and gender studies.

Ms. Powell was born in 1921 in Milton, Mass., and in, 1944, after completing basic training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., she was sent, as some other black nurses were, to tend to German prisoners of war in Florence, Ariz.

“I know the story of how they met,” said Chris Albert, 59, the youngest son of Elinor and Frederick Albert. “It was in the officers’ mess hall, and my father was working in the kitchen. He kind of boldly made his way straight for my mother and said: ‘You should know my name. I’m the man who’s going to marry you.’”

Frederick Karl Albert was born in 1925 in Oppeln, Germany. “He volunteered for the paratroops to impress his father, who served in WWI,” Mr. Albert said. “His father was an engineer and not really interested in his children. My dad ended up getting captured in Italy.”…

…The American military officially ended segregation after WWII, but for the Alberts, the issue of race would resurface throughout their lives. Their unlikely romance resulted in Stephen’s birth in December 1946. After Frederick was able to return to the United States, he and Elinor married on June 26, 1947, in Manhattan.

“I would say the first 10 years for my parents were a struggle to find some kind of economic security and a safe haven for an interracial family,” said Chris Albert, who plays the trumpet with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

“They moved to Boston and my father worked several jobs,’’ he said. “At some point, he decided it was best if they moved to Göttingen, Germany, where his parents lived. He could work for his father’s cement manufacturing business.”

But Kristina Brandner, 70, a niece of Frederick Albert, said life in Germany was difficult. “Göttingen is a small town,’’ she said. “My grandmother never had contact with black people so it was strange and uncomfortable for her with Elinor. Kids used to ask me how come there was a black woman living with us, and why is your cousin another color. Sometimes, I saw Elinor in the kitchen crying.”

In less than two years, Frederick, Elinor, Stephen and Chris, who was an infant, returned to the United States….

Read the entire article here.

Leo Branton Jr., Activists’ Lawyer, Dies at 91

The New York Times
2013-04-27

William Yardley

Associated Press Leo Branton Jr. with Angela Davis during her 1972 trial on murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges. She was acquitted.

Leo Branton Jr., a California lawyer whose moving closing argument in a racially and politically charged murder trial in 1972 helped persuade an all-white jury to acquit a black communist, the activist and academic Angela Davis, died on April 19 in Los Angeles. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by Howard Moore Jr., another lawyer who represented Ms. Davis.

Mr. Branton, a black veteran of World War II who served in a segregated Army unit, represented prominent black performers, including Nat King Cole and Dorothy Dandridge, argued cases on behalf of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, and filed numerous cases alleging police abuse. But the case with which he was most closely associated was that of Ms. Davis…

Read the entire obituary here.