Mixed Race Studies

Britain’s black queen: Will Meghan Markle really be the first mixed-race royal?

The Washington Post
2017-11-17

DeNeen L. Brown, Feature Writer

A portrait of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, and American actress Meghan Markle, who is engaged to Prince Harry. (Print Collector/Getty Images and Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images)

When Britain’s Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle announced their engagement Monday, Twitter erupted with the news that the newest princess in the royal family would be biracial.

“We got us a Black princess ya’ll,” GirlTyler exulted. “Shout out to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Their wedding will be my Super Bowl.”

We got us a Black princess ya’ll. You really can’t tell me a damn thing for the rest of the day because it won’t matter. Shout out to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Their wedding will be my Super Bowl. pic.twitter.com/WmBnGm5AuZ

— GirlTyler (@sheistyler) November 27, 2017

But Markle, whose mother is black and whose father is white, may not be the first mixed-race royal.

Some historians suspect that Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III who bore the king 15 children, was of African descent…

Read the entire article here.

‘An offer of my heart’: A story of black love after the Civil War

The Washington Post
2016-09-08

DeNeen L. Brown, Reporter

One hundred and forty-four years after they were written, the civil rights advocate found the letters in the bottom of an old suitcase, stacked in thin envelopes and tied together by a faded, baby-blue ribbon.

Somebody had preserved them with such care. Laura W. Murphy opened a letter, looked at the date and gasped.

“Who has anything [written] from 1871 in their possession?” she thought.

The handwriting was exquisite, penned by her great-grandfather in ink that flowed from a quill. In all, there were 12 letters, capturing a courtship between a black man and a black woman six years after the end of the Civil War…

Laura W. Murphy reads through letters between her great-grandparents, Mary Rebecca Lee and James W. Hughes, which were exchanged during Reconstruction. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Read the entire article here.

For many blacks, Obama’s reelection cements his legacy

The Washington Post
2012-11-07

Wil Haygood and DeNeen Brown

President Obama’s reelection — in a ferocious campaign dotted by charges of racial anger and minority-voter suppression — has provided what many blacks say will surely deepen his legacy: irrefutable evidence that his presidency is hardly a historical fluke as he has now won two national campaigns with overwhelming white support.

Obama, the nation’s first black president, was already soaked in history, a figure seen in the aftermath of his 2008 victory as the culmination of a decades-long civil rights crusade that suffered the assassination of beloved figures who fought and marched for the right to vote and freely pursue the American dream.

But Obama’s first term as president also saw him pelted with racially charged denunciations — some from politicians — that reopened festering wounds and even fears in the African American community for his safety. At times it felt as if the W.E.B. Du Bois prophecy — the problem of the 20th century would be the color line, he famously opined — had leapt right into the 21st century…

Read the entire article here.

Danielle Evans, an author straddling racial divides

Washington Post
2010-10-07

DeNeen L. Brown, Staff Writer

It is the tale of a biracial girl who is sent by her mother one summer to visit her white grandmother. But the grandmother immediately disapproves of her daughter’s child with the brown skin and long, curly hair. “If I thought my grandmother would like me better when my mother wasn’t around, our reunion quickly disabused me of the thought… ,” [Danielle] Evans reads.

The grandmother greets the girl, whose name is Tara, with an obligatory kiss, then tentatively touches her hair, which is twisted into tight cornrows.

“Did your mother do this to you?” Evans reads, standing in a black sweater dress in front of a stack of her books. A small crowd spills attentively before her into the aisles.

” ‘My hair?’

” . . . ‘Mommy can’t do my hair,’ I said. ‘A girl from her school did it for her.’

” ‘I swear, even on a different continent, that woman — When you go upstairs, take them out. You’re a perfectly decent-looking child, and for whatever reason your mother sends you looking like a little hoodlum.’

” ‘I am wearing pink,’ I said, more in my own defense than in my mother’s.”

The crowd laughs nervously. Evans continues to read. Some attendees will say later that they were astounded by the maturity of Evans’s voice as a writer, by the telling of stories of characters who seem so familiar. Depending on who is listening, the characters in the collection—titled “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self“—could be a best friend or that girl down the street, but many of them are “outsiders,” says Evans, black or biracial people who are wrestling with race and the legacy of race in a so-called post-racial era…

…”Right now we have a moment with a lot of language about post-racialism and yet a lot of evidence that we are clearly not post-anything,” she says, “and there’s a lot of room for complication, contradiction and ambiguity, which is good territory for fiction.”…

Read the entire article here.