Mixed Race Studies

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.”…

Read the entire article here.

The genes that build America

The Guardian
2007-07-14

Paul Harris, US Correspondent

From the discovery that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is descended from white slave owners to the realisation that the majority of black Americans have European ancestors, a boom in ‘recreational genetics’ is forcing America to redefine its roots. Paul Harris pieces together the DNA jigsaw of what it really means to be born in the USA

Al Sharpton walked into a South Carolina pine forest just outside the sleepy southern town of Edgefield and stopped at a cluster of toothlike unmarked gravestones. This was the former plantation on which a few generations ago his ancestors had worked, lived, loved and died, owned as property by white masters. ‘You must assume that it’s family here,’ Sharpton said, referring to the abandoned slave graveyard.

A few weeks previously Reverend Sharpton, one of America’s most outspoken black civil rights leaders, had not known of the cemetery’s existence. But researchers had explored his genealogy and broken the news to him. Sharpton’s story had an astonishing twist: the genealogists discovered that his ancestors had once been owned by the ancestors of Strom Thurmond, the Senator and former segregationist who once ran for president on a racist platform. The phrase ‘ironic coincidence’ did not begin to cover it…

Read the entire article here.