Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Cool: Bill de Blasio’s Fresh Electoral Asset

The Atlantic
2013-11-06

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

The New York mayor-elect’s family—both fascinatingly ordinary and shockingly modern—proved to be one his greatest strengths.

“I’m Bill de Blasio, and I’m not a boring white guy.”

How’s that for a political opener? This is how the New York mayor-elect describes himself. At an August fundraiser for the Young Progressives for de Blasio, his daughter Chiara introduced him to the crowd, making an appeal for a new kind of inclusive city politics. Flanked by her entire family, she remarked, “If we’re gonna bring new ideas to the table and create a world, a society … where everyone has a chance, we need to start listening to everybody’s ideas.”

What are these bold and inventive ideas of the new mayor? Some of them follow a traditional Democratic nesting doll scheme: good government followed by more jobs succeeded by affordable housing topped off by better schools. Add in reason, compassion, equality, and whoomp! There it is—a consummate progressive platform. But the de Blasio campaign offered another idea that most campaigns can’t: the racially integrated family.

Like it or not, it works.

De Blasio is white. His wife, Chirlane McCray, is black. Their two children, Dante and Chiara, are biracial. Their campaign literature relentlessly spotlighted the effortless interracial cool of Brooklyn bohemia—that wonderful, eucalyptus-scented world of woody brownstones, aromatic teas, and gloriously integrated Cheerios breakfasts. His website features his family and marriage first, ahead of “Issues.” At his rallies, his wife and children are the feature rather than the curtain call. His mailings ask recipients to “Meet the BROOKLYN FAMILY who’s fighting to change New York.” They picture the smiling family, drinking orange juice and playing Trivial Pursuit…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio Is Elected New York City Mayor

The New York Times
2013-11-05

Michael Barbaro

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio hugged his son, Dante, at an election night party on Tuesday. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor on Tuesday..

His overwhelming victory, stretching from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of northwest Queens, amounted to a forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who is the city’s public advocate, defeated his Republican opponent, Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It was the most sweeping victory in a mayor’s race since 1985, when Edward I. Koch won by 68 points, and it gave Mr. de Blasio what he said was an unmistakable mandate to pursue his liberal agenda….

…To an unusual degree, he relied on his own biracial family to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate, electrifying voters with a television commercial featuring his charismatic teenage son, Dante, who has a towering Afro…

Read the entire article here.

Diverse Neighborhood Has Mixed Enthusiasm About New York City Mayor’s Race

The New York Times
2013-11-03

Cara Buckley

The last presidential candidate Steve Waldman voted for was Hubert H. Humphrey. The last mayor he cast a ballot for was Edward I. Koch. And he’ll be darned if he is going to break his nonvoting streak by partaking in the mayoral election on Tuesday.

The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, reminds him too much of Rudolph W. Giuliani, of whom he takes a dim view. The Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, strikes him as likely to help people who abuse welfare. Mr. Waldman, a 65-year-old computer supplier, sees the city is on a reverse Robin Hood course — with parking fines, bridge tolls and assorted high taxes — and extracting more dollars from people like him…

…With New York City on the verge of electing a new mayor for the first time in 12 years, the people of Sheepshead Bay, with its mosaic of Russians, Irish, Italians and Jews, have views on the city’s prospects that are as diverse as their neighborhood. The community can at times seem ethnically segmented, but the four-decade-old El Greco serves as an enduring melting pot, and draws hordes of local residents by the boothful each weekend…

…Ms. McField, who works as an accountant for the Administration for Children’s Services, said she yearned for an end to the Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics that Mr. de Blasio has vowed to change. Ms. McField said that many of her family members had been harassed by the police, including her husband, John McField, 36, a former corrections officer who recently returned from serving as an Army specialist in Afghanistan.

“Being black in New York, we see a lot of things that other people don’t see,” Ms. McField said as her family tucked into brunch. “It’s emotional for me,” she added, her eyes welling, “It’s targeting.”…

…Yet Luchia Larrazabal, a caregiver who was eating with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, said she pinned her hopes on Mr. de Blasio to help bridge one of the city’s enduring issues — racial schisms. After all, he is white, his wife is black and their two children are biracial.

“Because of the mixed race,” Ms. Larrazabal said, “I look forward to him uniting everyone.”

Read the entire article here.

The Uniqueness of Dante de Blasio

Gotham Gazette: The Place or New York Policy and Politics
New York, New York
2013-09-24

Andy Beveridge, Professor of Sociology
Queens College, City University of New York

As New York took in the extent of the win by Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary for mayor, the impact of a powerful television ad starring his son Dante seemed plain.

The ad hit on de Blasio’s main campaign points of taxing the wealthy, ending a “stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color” and universal pre-K. But it was the messenger that made it a show-stopper: A mixed-race kid with an exuberant Afro speaking to the camera about how his dad was “the only Democrat with the guts to really break with the Bloomberg years.”

De Blasio’s wife is a black woman, and both Dante and Chiara (his daughter) are mixed race. With his family and the ad featuring his son playing key roles in his campaign, de Blasio split the black vote almost evenly with former comptroller Bill Thompson, the only black candidate for mayor.

Remember, in the primary between Hillary Clinton and Obama, who is mixed race, in 2008 Hillary Clinton did better among white and Hispanic voters than she did overall, and Barack Obama won the black vote by a very wide margin in an overall close race. In terms of who voted for whom, race mattered.

As Joe Lenski, the man behind the exit polls, said in the Daily News, “I don’t know if I could ever remember a race where a black guy is (close to) losing the black vote, the woman is losing the woman vote, the Jewish guy is losing the Jewish vote. It’s quite impressive …. De Blasio did a good job of saying, ‘I’m one of you even though I’m not personally one of you.’ He was able to say, ‘my wife is African-American, my kids are multiracial.”

How unique is Dante de Blasio, the 16-year-old superstar of the 2013 elections, who communicated this important message? Just how many New Yorkers are non-Hispanic males who would identify themselves as black and white? An analysis of 2010 Census data shows that very few young New Yorkers are black and white, and even fewer are non-Hispanic black and white. Furthermore, there are much lower proportions of such individuals in New York City in the country at large. These data are presented in the accompanying table, and some are summarized in the two charts below…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio Responds to Lhota’s Doomsday Ad With a Cheery One

Politicker
2013-10-17

Colin Campbell

Tale of Two Ads

A day after Joe Lhota released an ad warning of apocalyptic results if rival Bill de Blasio is elected mayor–complete with photos of race riots and corpses–Mr. de Blasio is out with a new spot of his own.

But Mr. de Blasio’s ad, narrated by his daughter Chiara, is almost saturated in sweetness.

“From the start of this campaign, Bill de Blasio has offered a vision for New York that leaves no one behind. Now that my dad’s on the move. His opponents are on the attack,” says the older of the de Blasio kids, wearing her signature rose-adorned headband, as cheery music plays…

Read the entire article here.

New recognition for first black U.S. doctor with medical degree

American Medical News
2010-11-08

Kevin B. O’Reilly

Dr. James McCune Smith’s descendants unveiled a new headstone in a ceremony to commemorate his achievements as a physician, essayist and abolitionist.

The New York City burial site of the nation’s first black medical degree-holder received a new headstone—one provided by his white descendants in a recent public ceremony.

Dr. James McCune Smith received his medical degree at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837, forced to go overseas for his education due to U.S. colleges’ racist admissions policies. Historians say the training provided at European medical schools at that time was, ironically, superior to that offered in the U.S.

Greta Blau, Dr. Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, learned that she was descended from the doctor after finding his name inscribed in a family Bible. She recognized the name from a history paper she had written years earlier in college.

After confirming the family connection through genealogical research, Blau learned that Dr. Smith’s five surviving children passed, lived and identified as white in society after he died in 1865.

Dr. Smith treated both black and white patients in New York City. He was the first black doctor to write a medical case report—presented to the New York Medical and Surgical Society in 1840.

He also was the first black physician to have a medical scientific paper published, in the New York Journal of Medicine in 1844, and was a prominent essayist who attacked slavery and racial theories positing blacks’ inferiority. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass and wrote the introduction to his 1855 autobiography…

Read the entire article here.

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

HarperCollins Publishers
2013-09-10
544 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780060882389; ISBN10: 0060882387
eBook ISBN: 9780062199126; ISBN10: 0062199129

Carla Kaplan, Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.”

Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press—portrayed as monstrous or insane—Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for “exotic” dancers and “hot” jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women—many from New York’s wealthiest social echelons—who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst—all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.

In a vibrant blend of social history and biography, award-winning writer Carla Kaplan offers a joint portrait of six iconoclastic women who risked ostracism to follow their inclinations—and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the bargain. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, alters our perception of this historical moment, and brings Miss Anne to vivid life.

Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form

The New York Times
2013-09-14

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

ARGUABLY, New York’s identity politics peaked in 1945. That year, William O’Dwyer, the Democratic Party machine’s mayoral favorite, was Irish and from Brooklyn. Lazarus Joseph, the candidate for comptroller, was Jewish and from the Bronx. Party leaders balanced their citywide ticket with a candidate for City Council president by plucking the name of Vincent R. Impellitteri, an obscure legal secretary to a Manhattan judge, from the index to the official city directory.

“We flipped through the Green Book for the longest Italian name we could find,” Bert Stand, the secretary of Tammany Hall, the venerable Democratic organization, explained at the time.

Last week, after Bill de Blasio finished first in the Democratic mayoral primary, students of New York politics were already pronouncing identity politics dead. After all, half the black voters abandoned the black candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., to back Mr. de Blasio (he and Mr. Thompson each got 42 percent among blacks, according to an Edison Research survey of voters leaving the polls). Ideology trumped race as even the Rev. Al Sharpton, more impressed with Mr. de Blasio’s policy agenda, remained publicly neutral instead of reflexively endorsing the black candidate. Mr. Thompson carried Italian and Irish Catholic districts in Staten Island and Breezy Point, Queens, which, in the past, have not routinely embraced black candidates, as well as several Orthodox Jewish and Russian enclaves…

…This year, said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a neighbor of Mr. de Blasio, “the really big story is that black central Brooklyn, the single largest contiguous settlement of black people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, did not back an African-American who climbed up the rungs of regular Democratic politics in the borough, but chose instead a younger white leader in a biracial family who is a former organizer and much more Obamaesque.”…

Read the entire news analysis here.

Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension

The New York Times
2013-09-11

Michael Barbaro, Political Writer

The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened.

Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.

They then turned to his 15-year-old son, but nothing seemed to go right. The de Blasio family kitchen in Brooklyn was not big enough for the camera crew, so they borrowed a bigger one from a neighbor.

The neighbor’s kitchen turned out to be too fancy, sending the wrong message for a populist candidate. So a long lens was used to blur out the expensive fixtures.

But when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.

“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio First in Mayoral Primary; Unclear if He Avoids a Runoff

The New York Times
2013-09-10

David M. Halbfinger, Reporter

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes than any of his rivals in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

But as Mr. de Blasio, an activist-turned-operative and now the city’s public advocate, celebrated a remarkable come-from-behind surge, it was not clear if he had won the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff election on Oct. 1 with William C. Thompson Jr., who finished second. At night’s end, he had won just over 40 percent of the ballots counted; thousands of paper ballots had yet to be tallied, which could take days.

…Mr. de Blasio, a white Brooklynite who frequently showcased his biracial family, built a broad coalition of support among nearly every category of Democratic primary voters on Tuesday, according to the exit poll by Edison Research. His critique of a city divided between rich and poor — tried in the past by other candidates in New York and nationally with little success — resonated…

“I love his message about the tale of two cities, the big inequality gap,” said Jelani Wheeler, 19, a politics student at St. John’s University in Queens…

Read the entire article here.