Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-Race Politics: Bill de Blasio’s 2013 New York City Mayoral Campaign

University of Michigan
Haven Hall, Room 4701
505 State Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Monday, 2016-03-14, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Michelle May-Curry
American Culture

Please join the Black Humanities Collective as we workshop a presentation by Michelle May-Curry, a doctoral student in American Culture. Dinner will be served. Though RSVP’s are not required, they are encouraged. Graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty in and outside of the humanities are welcomed to attend.

This paper investigates the ways in which multicultural rhetoric situates black-white mixed-race individuals and their families as a bridge between disparate groups and ideologies. Using Bill de Blasio’s New York City Mayoral campaign in 2013 as a case study, I highlight specific media moments in which de Blasio’s children and his interracial marriage to a black woman are deployed as symbols of political (and by extension, racial) futurity. The key questions of this paper ask: How was mixed-race as a symbol deployed in the de Blasio campaign, particularly in the context of the family? What specifically did mixed-race symbolize in this political sphere? Did de Blasio’s family fight back against essentialized multicultural ideals or simply deploy them to capture the minority vote? In answering these questions I conduct a close reading of de Blasio’s well-known TV advertisement featuring his then 15-year-old son Dante, and put it in conversation with persistent racisms in the form of police brutality, an issue that was central to de Blasio’s campaign. This work engages topics at the intersection of critical mixed-race studies, performance studies, and visual culture, drawing upon and contesting current research that places mixed-race people at the forefront of a changing American demographic and political climate.

For more information, click here.

Dr. Rainbow Johnson: Tracee Ellis Ross and Mixed Race on Black-ish

Kaleido[scopes]: Diaspora Re-imagined
Williams College Student Research Journal
2014-10-27

Michelle May-Curry, Contributing Writer

Mixed race women. The tragic mulatta, the jezebel, the code-switcher, the new millennium mulatta, and the exceptional multiracial are terms and ideas that audiences subconsciously pull from to index mixed race identity. Some of these tropes are centuries old – the tragic mulatta calls to mind a woman who cannot find a home in either of her identities and as such meets her downfall through racelessness. Other terms like the “new millenium mulatta” are new, and describe a woman who constantly seeks to transcend her blackness and climb the racial hierarchy. But these terms do not quite begin to describe who Dr. Rainbow Johnson is on ABC’s new show Black-ish. What role Rainbow plays within the black experience, however, is a question that Black-ish might not know the answer to just yet.

Tracee Ellis Ross, the mixed race actress of Girlfriends fame, plays Rainbow (Bow for short), a 21st century working mother of four. As the show might imply, Ross’ character is black…ish. Bow is a self identified mixed race woman and the matriarch to an upper class black family in the suburbs. The product of hippie parents, as her rather eccentric name might suggest, Bow’s upbringing was progressive and far less “traditionally” black compared to her husband’s, who grew up in Compton. As for Ross, the actress is a self-identified black woman who simultaneously acknowledges both her black and white identities. Ross’ identity is rather abnormal for a mixed woman of her generation- most mixed race people born before the 1980′s recount stories of how black was the natural and only identity choice they had to make. The most famous example we can look to today who shares this opinion is our president, Barack Obama…

Read the entire article here.