Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Steve Scher: “What is President Obama?”

Ralina Joseph: “Well, if you were to ask him. President Obama is black. He is African-American.”

Steve Scher: “Yeah. When President Obama came out after the Trayvon Martin killing and he said, ‘My kids would have looked like Trayvon Martin if they had been boys.’… Let’s unpack all of the things that were being said there. What was he saying about his identity?”

Ralina Joseph: “So, this is a really interesting question. I think that he is identifying as black and in the way which we have seen President Obama identify publically it has been as black. He has also talked about his white family. He’s also famously referenced his mother from Kansas and his father from Kenya. But that has not precluded his identifying as African-American. I think that in real life that these identities are always together. They’re very much a part of each other. They’re fluidly understood. They’re simultaneous. And yet, when we understand race, we think about them in these really separate binaristic manners. So it makes sense to me that he identifies very much with Trayvon Martin’s family and also can talk about his white and Asian-American family, for example.”

Steve Scher, “Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” Weekday with Steve Scher, KUOW.org Seattle, 94.9 FM. (April 15, 2013). http://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2013/04/WeekdayA20130415.mp3 (00:18:50-00:20:07).

Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Europe, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-02-18 01:59Z by Steven

Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992

W. W. Norton & Company
1994
318 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0393034046; ISBN-13: 978-0393034042
Paperback ISBN: ISBN 978-0-393-31155-6

Yelena Khanga (with Susan Jacoby)

As the Soviet Union crumbled in early 1991, a young Russian woman in search of her past found her way to Mississippi, to the rich cotton land where her great-grandfather, a former slave, had become the largest black landowner in Yazoo County. In this extraordinary memoir, we share the life and family legacy of the Khangas over four generations and three continents. 32 pages of photos.

Tags: Russia, Soviet Union, Susan Jacoby, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, W. W. Norton & Company, Yelena Khanga

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Mixed Race Studies

Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992

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