Mixed Race Studies

I Feel Guilty for Being Able to ‘Pass’ as a Person of Color

Kveller
2016-02-18

Elana Rabinowitz
Brooklyn, New York

He called me negra. Not mami or guapa, but what translates to “black woman.” I wasn’t offended. More confused. The thing is, I’m really just a white Jewish girl from Brooklyn. There, I said it.

Junot Diaz came to give a book talk and I was awestruck by the man who stood in front of me, waxing poetically in a black hoodie sweatshirt. Would that have been the time to correct a genius? Oh, I am sorry, Junot, I’m actually just another Jewish girl from Brooklyn. I balked.

My last name is Rabinowitz, and with a name like that, and a life like mine, I’ve had my share of jokes and stereotypes, but never anything I couldn’t handle. The more interesting paradox is that the hue of my skin and the positioning of my features has often made me appear more Hispanic than anything else. After a while you get used to it, and eventually, I even started to believe it. I lived and studied in Ecuador, Argentina, and Mexico. Each trip I returned home with more mannerisms and vocabulary inadvertently adding to my new identity…

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Chirlane McCray and the Limits of First-Ladyship

The New York Times Magazine
2016-02-09

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray
Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

What two years in Gracie Mansion have meant for a woman who aspired to be the “voice for the forgotten voices.”

The first time I had lunch with Chirlane McCray at Gracie Mansion, I was distracted by the wallpaper. This was just about a year after her husband, Bill de Blasio, was sworn in as mayor of New York. In a breathlessly short period, McCray had gone from being a poet, wife and mother, with a job writing ad copy for a neighborhood hospital, to being first lady of New York City with a day-to-day schedule that could consist of everything from reading books to kindergartners in a classroom in East New York to exchanging pleasantries with Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge.

Standing near the head of a long, polished dining table, as a young white woman in a chef’s uniform recited the lunch menu, McCray repeated our choices to me and her chief of staff. But my attention kept drifting to the walls, where a Zuber wallpaper from the 1830s depicted a maiden, her complexion a flushed peaches and cream, trapped in an almost-embrace with a pale and severe-looking soldier in a red-and-blue military uniform. Before they moved into Gracie, McCray and de Blasio lived in a vinyl-sided townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and worked out at the local Y.M.C.A. Shortly after de Blasio became mayor, McCray said she would be a ‘‘voice for the forgotten voices,’’ because, she said, ‘‘black women do not have as many positive images in the media as we should.’’ How did it feel for that woman to regularly dine within this patrician fantasy?…

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray
Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

…What made de Blasio exceptional during his campaign in 2013 was his ability to convincingly articulate what many minority families had never heard a white man say publicly about race. He understood their fears and related to them. He was the one candidate who seemed to know intimately the fatigue that many of them felt after 12 years of Michael Bloomberg’s leadership as mayor. This was in large part because of the woman by his side with the long dreadlocks, tiny nose ring and activist past. Though she had obviously not made de Blasio black, she gave black New Yorkers a sense of representation, a sense that unlike Rudolph W. Giuliani or Bloomberg, her husband did not lack empathy toward their concerns…

Read the entire article here.

Al Sharpton says some criticism of de Blasio is related to his mixed race family

The New York Daily News
2016-01-05

Jennifer Fermino, City Hall Bureau Chief

The Rev. Al Sharpton thinks that some of Mayor de Blasio’s woes stem from his mixed race family.

Speaking Tuesday morning at an interfaith breakfast, Sharpton said that de Blasio, whose wife is black and has two mixed-race kids, and President Obama have upset the status quo.

“We elected a President of a different race, and a different bent. And not long after this city elected a mayor, after years of developers and others setting the tone in this city, that set a different tone in New York,” said Sharpton.

“And when many looked up and saw an African-American family in the White House, and a biracial family in Gracie Mansion at the same time, they tried to trump them.”

The comment — and veiled barb at White House contender Donald Trump — drew laughter from the crowd, which included many faith leaders as well as de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray.

“God always has the prophets for the time in which they live,” said Sharpton.

“You’re in the age of Obama. You’re in the age of de Blasio. Put away your sermons from the age of Nixon.”…

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The many faces of Frederick Douglass

Democrat and Chronicle
Rochester, New York
2015-12-25

Jim Memmott, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

Portrait of Frederick Douglass taken November 3, 1882 by John Howe Kent, 24 State Street, Rochester, New York (Photo: Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries)

In November 1882, Frederick Douglass, escaped slave, orator, abolitionist, writer, lecturer, was back in Rochester, the city where he had lived for nearly 30 years, to give a talk.

Not surprisingly, he found time to visit the studio of Rochester photographer John Howe Kent to pose for a portrait.

The photograph, which is among the collection of the University of Rochester, shows a white-haired, bearded and contemplative Douglass. He looks away from the camera, his brow furrowed, his eyes on a distant prize.

According to the authors of a rich and rewarding book, the recently published Picturing Frederick Douglass, Kent’s picture became a lasting image of Douglass. It was used as the illustration facing the title page of the last edition of Douglass’s autobiography. And it was reproduced again and again on monuments, on a postage stamp and in drawings.

As the subtitle of Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American makes clear, the Rochester picture is just one of many of Douglass taken during a time when photography was coming of age.

The authors of the book, John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd and Celeste-Marie Bernier, have identified 160 separate photographs of Douglass, a handful taken in Rochester, and all republished in the book.

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Bombay To Brooklyn: New York’s Indian Jews Strive To Preserve Heritage

News India Times
New York, New York
2015-12-14

Ela Dutt, Managing Editor

Siona Benjamin. Photo by Sami studio

Siona Benjamin, a greater New York City artist, hangs her “very typical” Indian Jewish Mezuzah, a prayer scroll in an engraved casing, on her door to remind her of her cultural roots. “Every time I walk through my main door, it reminds me of my Indian Jewish background,” especially so during Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights that began Dec. 6 and stretches over 8 days.

Originally from Bombay, Benjamin’s art is a blend of her background growing up in a Hindu and Muslim society, educated in Catholic and Zoroastrian schools, raised Jewish and now living in America. She is among the barely 100 or so Bene Israelis left in the Tri-state area, and the 350 or so around the U.S. according to Rabbi Romiel Daniel, rabbi and president of the Rego Park Jewish Center who since 1995, has tried to keep his flock together and raise awareness among the second and third generation Bene Israeli youth.

Some of the history of this small and unique community is captured in the exhibit “Baghdadis & the Bene Israel in Bollywood & Beyond” that opened in early November at the Center for Jewish History in New York City and will be on till April 1. Presented by the American Sephardi Federation, most of the items at the exhibit come from the Joyce and Kenneth Robbins collection, and highlight how Indian Jews, women in particular, were leaders in Bollywood and beyond at a time when custom and tradition kept many other Indian women out of Bollywood.

In exploring the largely forgotten history of the Bene Israel of India, the exhibition showcases the careers of Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), (Florence Ezekiel) Nadira, Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Abraham and Rachel Sofaer, Ezra Mir, RJ Minney, and Joseph David Penkar, each of whom played multiple roles in front of and behind-the-scenes in Bollywood…

Read the entire article here.

Mayor de Blasio Has Lost Support of White New Yorkers, Poll Finds

The New York Times
2015-11-18

Michael M. Grynbaum, City Hall Bureau Chief

Alexander Burns, Political Correspondent

Dalia Sussman, Polling Editor

Nearing the midpoint of his term, Mayor Bill de Blasio is confronting a city that is deeply divided about his ability to lead, with his efforts to create a more liberal New York overshadowed by growing worries about homelessness and crime, a new poll finds.

Nowhere is that concern more visible than among a group, long cool to Mr. de Blasio, that he has now decisively lost: whites.

Just 28 percent of white New Yorkers approve of the Democratic mayor’s performance, and 59 percent now disapprove, up sharply from the start of his term, according to a citywide poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. Nearly half say that the city is a worse place to live under his watch — only 9 percent say it is better — and 51 percent say New York is now less safe, even as crime statistics reach historic lows.

Over all, 52 percent of New Yorkers say the city is on the wrong track, including 62 percent of whites and 51 percent of Hispanics. Black residents are evenly split…

…Mr. de Blasio, whose black wife and biracial children are central to his image as a champion of multiethnic New York, secured his mayoralty with substantial black support. But he also won in white liberal enclaves like brownstone Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, places where his stock has since fallen…

Read the entire article here.

Something Old, Something New

BBC Radio 4
2015-10-06

Johny Pitts, Host

Peter Meanwell, Producer

Recorded & mixed! Finished @BBCRadio4 (Engineer Steve Hellier with Johny Pitts) Source: Peter Meanwell

From Sheffield to South Carolina, Johny Pitts explores alternative Black British identity.

What happens when your Dad’s an African-American soul star [Richie Pitts] and your Mum’s a music-loving girl from working class Sheffield? Are your roots on the terraces at a Sheffield United match, or in the stylings of a Spike Lee film? For writer and photographer Johny Pitts, whose parents met in the heyday of Northern Soul, on the dance floor of the legendary King Mojo club, how he navigates his black roots has always been an issue. Not being directly connected to the Caribbean or West African diaspora culture, all he was told at school was that his ancestors were slaves, so for BBC Radio 4, he heads off to the USA, to trace his father’s musical migration, and tell an alternative story of Black British identity.

From Pitsmore in Sheffield, to Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, and all the way down to South Carolina, where his grandmother picked cotton, Johny Pitts heads off on a journey of self-discovery. On the way he meets author Caryl Phillips, Kadija, a half sister he never knew, and historian Bernard Powers. He visits the Concorde Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, and the Bush River Missionary Baptist Church, in Newberry, South Carolina. He tracks down a whole host of long-lost cousins, and talks to Pulitzer winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. On the way he shines a light on the shadows of his ancestry, and finds stories and culture that deliver him to a new understanding of his own mixed race identity and history.

Listen to the story here.

Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray are now empty nesters as daughter goes to college

The New York Daily News
2015-09-17

Jennifer Fermino, City Hall Bureau Chief

Chiara de Blasio, seen here with her mom, First Lady Chirlane McCray, left for college on Thursday. David Wexler/New York Daily News

The city’s First Family is officially empty Gracie Mansion-ers.

Chiara de Blasio left for college Thursday, marking the first time in 21 years that Mayor de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, won’t have one of their kids living under their roof.

Chiara’s younger brother, Dante, left for his freshman year at Yale in late August.

“In a few hours, I will be experiencing the empty nest for the very first time,” a bittersweet de Blasio told the Daily News.

He said it’s the first time they haven’t had a child at the house since Dec. 6. 1994 — Chiara’s birthday…

Read the entire article here.

James Blake doesn’t want NYPD cop who tackled him to ‘ever have a badge and gun again’

The New York Daily News
2015-09-12

Wayne Coffey, Special Reporter

Rich Schapiro, Staff Writer

Retired tennis star James Blake said Saturday the NYPD cop who brutally wrestled him to the ground should be served his walking papers.

“I want him to know what he did was wrong, and that in my opinion he doesn’t deserve to ever have a badge and a gun again, because he doesn’t know how to handle that responsibility effectively,” Blake, 35, told the Daily News. “He doesn’t deserve to have the same title as officers who are doing good work and are really helping keep the rest of the city safe.”

Blake called on the NYPD to can Officer James Frascatore a day after the department released disturbing video showing the WWE-style takedown outside a Midtown hotel Wednesday…

…Blake initially said he believed race was a factor in the rough arrest. But asked Saturday whether he thought white tennis stars such as Andy Roddick or Mardy Fish would have been treated the same way, he demurred.

“I don’t want to say that at all because I think that muddies the issue at hand,” said Blake, who was born to a black father and a white mother. “In this incident it was the excessive force that’s really the issue, because it was a nonviolent crime.”…

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James Blake and the Myth of an Unarrestable Black Man

The Daily Beast
2015-09-10

Tomás Ríos

Bill Bratton said race ‘had nothing at all to do’ with tennis star James Blake’s wrongful collaring and arrest. The numbers tell a different story.

What does a non-white person have to do for the police to leave them alone? The ready answer is that you have to be more famous than former tennis star James Blake.

Blake was leaving his Midtown Manhattan hotel to make corporate appearances at the U.S. Open when five white, plainclothes New York City police officers tackled and handcuffed him on Wednesday.

The real answer, of course, is that not being white means there is no escape from the consequences of not being white.

Among those who buy into the mythic moral righteousness of our police forces, there is a belief that people of color need only be perfect little humans to cancel out the realities of a racist society. Go to college, smile, pull up your pants, don’t smile at white women, and the prescription for transcending race goes on and on.

It seems not even James Blake—who attended Harvard, overcame scoliosis and a broken neck to become a world-class tennis player, and is now a cancer research philanthropist—can be that perfect. The numbers on incarceration make that much clear…

Read the entire article here.