Mixed Race Studies

Obituaries: Fredi Washington, 90, Actress; Broke Ground for Black Artists

The New York Times
1994-06-30

Sheila Rule

Fredi Washington, one of the first black actresses to gain recognition for her work on stage and in film, died on Tuesday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Stamford, Conn., where she lived. She was 90.

The cause was pneumonia, which developed after a stroke, said her sister, Isabel Powell.

Miss Washington’s best-known performance was as the young mulatto who passes for white in the 1934 film “Imitation of Life.” Her performance was so convincing that she was accused of denying her heritage in her private life.

“She did pass for white when she was traveling in the South with Duke Ellington and his band,” said Jean-Claude Baker, a restaurateur and author and a friend of Ms. Washington’s. “They could not go into ice-cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give it to Ellington and the band. Whites screamed at her, ‘Nigger lover!’ “…

Read the entire obituary here.

Free Soldiers of Color

The New York Times
2012-02-17

Donald R. Shaffer, Lecturer in History
Upper Iowa University
and blogger at Civil War Emancipation

On Feb. 15, 1862, Louisiana dissolved all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. What made the New Orleans unit special was that it was composed of African-Americans.

It was natural that the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy would be found in Louisiana, and more specifically in New Orleans, which boasted French, Spanish and African roots. The Crescent City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, by far the largest in the antebellum South, with an 1860 population of over 168,000 people (in contrast, the runner-up, Charleston, S.C., had just 40,000).

A distinctive group in the diverse city was the French-speaking gens de couleur libre, or “free people of color.” The progeny of European men and women of African descent, this group carved out a place in Louisiana society somewhere between the white population and the more purely African-descended slaves. Their position largely was as an inheritance of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, which exhibited greater toleration for mixed-raced persons. Indeed, many gens de couleur libre owned property (some even owned slaves), worked at skilled or professional occupations, and embraced the cultural trappings of respectable society. Yet as hard as they tried to gain acceptance as a third caste, the gens de couleur libre still found many whites hostile on account of their obvious if muted African ancestry. If their position was better than that of most Southern blacks, it was by no means equal to that of Louisiana whites…

Read the entire essay here.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of the New York Times)
2012-02-15

Eusebius McKaiser, political Analyst
Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa

JOHANNESBURG – A few weeks ago, a British friend of mine served a sumptuous confession as a starter for dinner, “I only realized recently that you’re not actually black!” We had met several years back in the English midlands, where, judging by her remark, I had passed as black. But now that she has lived in South Africa for a few months, she is fluent in the local racial vocabulary: things are not quite black and white.

Let me explain. In South Africa I’m referred to as “colored,” a term that does not have the same derogatory denotation here as it does in the United States when it is hurled at black Americans. I am not black. I am of mixed racial heritage, as my parents are and their parents were.

When racist colonial settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa during the 17th century, their racism did not preclude sexual relations with the locals. Several generations later, the colored community is ostensibly an ethnic group just like the Xhosas or the Zulus or any of the other myriad groupings within South Africa’s borders. It makes up  9 percent of the country’s population of 50.6 million.

…The lack of adequate economic opportunity for coloreds since the dawn of democracy here — combined with their lingering, paralyzing sense of victimhood — explains why the colored community is the most class-homogenous racial grouping in South Africa: an essentially poor, lower-working-class community. Very few of its members escape that stereotype.

In the Western Cape, the province with the largest concentration of colored people in the country, rates of fetal alcohol syndrome are some of the worst in the world. This community is like the drunken uncle of the South African family, the relative you tuck away when posh visitors come around. Paradoxically, many more colored people are worse off than black Africans now than were during apartheid…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Art Review: A Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)

The New York Times
2012-01-26

Martha Schwendener

What’s the difference between a political activist and a political hero? It’s often a matter of intention versus accident. Within the civil rights movement Rosa Parks is seen as an activist: She trained at the Highlander Folk School for social justice in Tennessee, and her refusal to give up her seat on a crowded bus was the catalyst for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed in “The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet” as heroes who fell into history by accident.

he Loving story is well known in the annals of American civil rights history. It began on July 11, 1958, when a Virginia county sheriff and two deputies entered the Lovings’ bedroom at 2 a.m. and arrested them for violating the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage. (Or you might say it began several years earlier, when Richard Loving, a white teenager, met Mildred Jeter, a girl of African-American and American Indian descent, six years his junior.)

When, at 18, Mildred became pregnant, the couple decided to marry in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal. They were arrested five weeks later when they returned to Virginia and tried to live as husband and wife, kicking off a nine-year legal odyssey…

Read the entire article here.

For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits

The New York Times
2007-04-09

Lawrence Downes

Reporters have been shuttling across the Pacific lately in search of the early chapters of Senator Barack Obama’s life story. Their guidebook is his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes his adolescence in Honolulu—where he was born and lived through high school, except for a few years in Indonesia—as a difficult time marked by drug use, disaffection and a painful search for identity.

The New York Times listed the ingredients of his young psyche as “racial confusion,” “feelings of alienation” and “disquietude.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that it was not just angst, but boiling angst.

Sounds oddly bleak, doesn’t it? Angst boils up in most people at some point in life, but if there were any place the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan could have fit in, wouldn’t it have been Hawaii? If there is a heaven, it probably looks a lot like Oahu, and the happy souls in it probably go around talking like our national spokesman for racial relaxation, Senator Obama.

So who was this brooding Barry, taking lessons in African-American swagger from a black high-school buddy, Ray, studying black nationalism and going to black parties on Army bases?

His struggle may seem strange in that setting, but the setting itself was strange. Hawaii, where I also grew up in the 1970’s, is famously mellow about race and ethnicity. It’s what you would expect from an ocean crossroads populated by Polynesians and early-20th-century plantation immigrants from across the globe. But tolerant is not the same as oblivious. Hawaii is acutely conscious of—you could say hung up on—racial, ethnic and cultural differences…

…Beyond that, his parents—University of Hawaii graduate students—and his Kansas grandparents, who helped raise him after his father returned to Africa, had no roots in the local culture. He lived in a state that, then as now, had a minuscule African-American population. He seems to have been surrounded by people who knew just enough about black America to be stupidly insensitive, and his family couldn’t help him.

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he wrote. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

In one sense, he wasn’t alone. Being black isn’t common in Hawaii, but being biracial is. There’s a Hawaiian word for it—hapa, or half—that traditionally refers to combinations of white with Hawaiian or Asian, though many use it for any racial blend. Being hapa is hardly cause for discrimination in mixed-up Hawaii, but it can be problematic. Dwelling on it can tie a person in knots. It can be disorienting to feel forced to choose between identities when you are both and neither. It can be infuriating to be stared at by people trying to puzzle out what you are…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Race

The New York Times
2008-11-04

The editorial writers Lawrence Downes and Brent Staples discuss how Senator Obama’s mixed-race identity has shaped his persona and his candidacy.

View the video here (00:05:13).

Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think

The New York Times
2005-10-31

Brent Staples

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name—and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we’ve found—Richard Staples—was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved…

…As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.

By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters’ wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.

Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The “one drop” laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.

Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community, nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, South Asian, Native American—you name it. These defectors often married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was either illegal or socially stigmatized…

Read the entire essay here.

With DNA Testing, Suddenly They Are Family

The New York Times
2011-01-24

Rachel L. Swarns

ST. LOUIS — Growing up, Khrys Vaughan always believed that she had inherited her looks and mannerisms from her father, and that her appreciation for tradition and old-fashioned gentility stemmed from her parents’ Southern roots. But those facets of her self-image crumbled when she was told, at age 42, that she had been adopted.

She began searching for her origins, only to find out that her adoption records had been sealed, a common practice in the 1960s. Then Mrs. Vaughan stumbled across an ad from a DNA testing company offering to help people who had been adopted find clues to their ancestry and connections to blood relatives.

About five weeks after shipping off two tiny vials of her cells from a swab of her cheek, Mrs. Vaughan received an e-mail informing her that her bloodlines extended to France, Romania and West Africa. She was also given the names and e-mail addresses of a dozen distant cousins. This month, she drove 208 miles from her hometown here to Evansville, Ind., to meet her third cousin, the first relative to respond to her e-mails. Mrs. Vaughan is black and her cousin is white, and they have yet to find their common ancestor. But Mrs. Vaughan says that does not matter…

…Within minutes of receiving the names of her distant relatives, Mrs. Vaughan, a freelance project manager, was admiring their photographs on Facebook. Another adoptee who found family through DNA testing, Kathy Borgmann, a 49-year-old corn farmer in New Palestine, Ind., exchanged e-mails with cousins who delighted her by saying, “Welcome to the family.”…

…Not everyone is hoping to find new relatives. Some adoptees who have found genetic matches have been rebuffed by their distant kin. Most people take genealogical DNA tests to fill gaps in their family trees, not to find new members of their clans. Mr. Bogner said several cousins identified through DNA testing stopped communicating once they learned he was adopted. “It was horribly disappointing,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Johnny Otis, ‘Godfather of Rhythm and Blues,’ Dies at 90

New York Times
2012-01-19

Ihsan Taylor

Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, songwriter, impresario, disc jockey and talent scout often called “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died on Tuesday at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Terry Gould.

Leading a band in the late 1940s that combined the high musical standards of big-band jazz with the raw urgency of gospel music and the blues, Mr. Otis played a key role in creating a new sound for a new audience of young urban blacks, a sound that within a few years would form the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.

With his uncanny ear for talent, he helped steer a long list of performers to stardom, among them Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Esther Phillips and Big Mama Thornton — whose hit recording of “Hound Dog,” made in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley’s, was produced by Mr. Otis and featured him on drums.

…Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, a fact that as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and considered himself, he said, “black by persuasion.”

“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

The New York Times
2012-01-13

Mireya Navarro

Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”

More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories—indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs…

…A majority of Latinos identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A. Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because “I am light-skinned” and that is how she is viewed in her native Dominican Republic.

But she says there is no question that she is seen as different from the white majority in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”

Some of the latest research, however, shows that many Latinos—like Irish and Italian immigrants before them—drop the Latino label to call themselves simply “white.” A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found that the parents of more than a quarter of third-generation children with Mexican ancestry do not identify their children as Latino on census forms.

Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents married to non-Mexicans, usually non-Hispanic whites. These Latinos tend to have high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. That means that many successful Latinos are no longer present in statistics tracking Latino economic and social progress across generations, hence many studies showing little or no progress for third-generation Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study…

…On the other side of the spectrum are black Latinos, who say they feel the sting of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging among many black Latinos who are now coming together in conferences and organizations.

Miriam Jiménez Román, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says that issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and dark-skinned Latinos led her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census encouraging Latinos of African descent to “check both: Latino and black.” “When you sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Latinos who identified as black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population…

Read the entire article here.