Mixed Race Studies

Love in the face of racism: Being an interracial family

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-11-25

Jareen Imam, Social Discovery Producer

CNN)—When Karen Garsee picked her 5-year-old daughter up from kindergarten in September, she wasn’t prepared for what Kaylee had to say.

The kids at school wouldn’t play with me today.

Why?

Because I’m brown.

Those words struck Garsee right in the heart. Being white, she didn’t know what she could say to make her daughter feel better. At that moment, they simply embraced.

“I didn’t think kids at that age really thought about other kids being different,” Garsee says.

That wouldn’t be the last time the schoolchildren didn’t want to play with Kaylee.

“We live in the South and racism is loud and it’s still out there,” Garsee says.

A CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll on race found that about half (49%) of Americans say racism is a big problem in our society. Compare that to 2011 when 28% said racism was a big problem. And in 1995, shortly after the O.J. Simpson trial and a couple of years after the race riots in Los Angeles, 41% of people said racism was a big societal problem…

Read the entire article here.

National Affairs: Who Would Be King

Time
1923-10-08

Word came to the U. S. that William Henry Ellis, who preferred to style himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, died in Mexico City. Mr. Ellis was one of the most remarkable men who ever acted as agent for the State Department. He was known chiefly for the famous incident in which he delivered a commercial Treaty from this country to King Menelik of Abyssinia. But his unusual history began much earlier.

He was born in Victoria, Tex., in 1864 and claimed to be of Cuban parentage, on account of which he used the Spanish form of…

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Mixed-race marriages a reflection of multicultural Blacktown

The Daily Telegraph
Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
2015-12-01

Nick Houghton

Joanne Vella, Editor
Blacktown Advocate

• Quakers Hill one of Blacktown’s most livable suburbs
• Iranian migrant calls ‘multicultural tolerant’ Australia home

WHEN Stephen Zahra went on a four-week holiday to Vietnam in 2006, little did he know how life changing the trip would be.

His love for Vietnam inspired him to quit his job and move permanently to the southeast east Asian nation.

It was a decision which would lead him to the love of his life, his wife Dao Nguyen, and the start of his present day life back in Australia as a happily married father of daughter Hayley.

Stephen, a second generation Maltese, and Vietnamese Dao are the changing face of Australian families and the multicultural melting pot which is Blacktown.

“Our wedding day in Ho Chi Minh City was probably the biggest reminder how big the mix of cultures is between Dao and myself,” Stephen said.

“My family flew over for the wedding and despite having no ability to speak Vietnamese with Dao’s family found a way to communicate and make the day truly memorable…

Read the entire article here.

Keep It Simple at TEDxIndianapolis

The Indianapolis Star
2015-10-21

Leslie Bailey

“When asked how he created his masterpiece, Michelangelo said, ‘It was easy. You just chip away that which does not look like David.’ What if our lives are our masterpiece? What if we chipped away all that was unnecessary, all the clutter and the busyness, and focused on that which really mattered — our passions and our relationships.”

This is the “big idea” Maura Malloy will share when she takes the stage at TEDxIndianapolis on Tuesday. Malloy, 36, is among approximately 20 speakers who will present their ideas at the conference with the theme of “Keep It Simple.” Other speakers include a homeless advocate, an origami artist, a musician and a handful of professors…

…In her talk, Malloy will share her journey to a minimalist lifestyle, as well as tools on how everyone can create their own “masterpiece” life. For Malloy, the spark ignited during a semester studying in India during her sophomore year at the University of Notre Dame. She was allowed one 40-pound bag of belongings for the semester. “It opened my eyes to how little you need to be joyful, especially when it comes to children,” said Malloy, who is expecting her first child in November…

…Malloy, who grew up in South Bend, moved to New York City when she was 25 to pursue a career in acting. She ultimately turned to screenwriting, which she continued doing after moving back to Indiana with her husband, Rory Collins, 2012.

She currently has two projects in development with actress Tessa Thompson attached to both films. The first, “An Illuminated Life” [See: An Illuminated Life: Bella da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege] is a biopic about Belle da Costa Greene, an African-American woman who lived as a white woman while working as J.P. Morgan’s right-hand woman at the turn of the century. The other project, “Our Rebels,” is a smaller, independent film Malloy describes as a “platonic love story.”…

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Krotoa-Eva’s Suite: A performance by poet Toni Stuart

Goldsmiths University of London
New Cross
London, United Kingdom
Caribbean Studies Centre
Top Floor, Education Building
2015-12-03, 18:30-20:30Z

Join the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies and the Centre for Feminist Research for a performance by poet Toni Stuart and a ‘Stories are Medicine’ discussion circle.

Toni Stuart (@nomadpoet) is a poet, performer, festival organiser and educator from Cape Town, South Africa.

She’ll be performing poems from her collection in progress, Krotoa-Eva’s Suite – a cape jazz poem in three movements. This is the re-imagined story of Krotoa-Eva, a Khoi woman who played a pivotal role in South African history in the 17th Century, when the first European settlers arrived at Cape Town, as it is known today. The poems give voice to Krotoa-Eva’s “interior” life, and aim to offer a counter-narrative to the male, colonial perspectives through which her story has previously been told.

The performance will be followed by an informal discussion circle around the role of self-care and healing in our work as feminists. And, it will explore how stories and the creative arts might facilitate and support this practice.

For more information, click here.

Intersection Episode 10: Being Melissa Harris-Perry Is a Full-Time Job

The New Republic
Intersection with Jamil Smith
2015-12-01

Jamil Smith, Senior Editor and Host

Professor, feminist, TV host, activist, mom, rabid hip-hop fan. Melissa Harris-Perry works seven days a week balancing all her identities, and she isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Besides hosting her eponymous MSNBC news show and teaching political science and running an institute at Wake Forest University, she is also on the front lines of an intersectional fight for racial justice and women’s rights.

This November, the Anna Julia Cooper Center, a research center directed by Dr. Harris-Perry, partnered with the White House Council on Women and Girls to co-host a major conference on expanding opportunities for women and girls of color. Her center is also part of new collaborative to advance equity for women and girls of color through research…

Listen to the interview here.

A stone for the Chief: Black Anchorage leader who passed as white honored with memorial

Alaska Dispatch News
Anchorage, Alaska
2015-10-29

Mike Dunham, Play & Arts & Entertainment Reporter

From left, Corey Todoroff, Jim Vignola and Lex Patten of the Anchorage Fire Department unveil a new grave marker for longtime Anchorage Fire Chief Thomas Bevers, who passed away in 1944, during a ceremony at the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery on Thursday, October 29, 2015. Bevers was also notable for co-founding what would become the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous festival, and for being a black man who passed as white. Loren Holmes / ADN

The 1930 Anchorage census tells us this about Thomas S. Bevers: He was 39 years old, male, married, white, a veteran of the World War and the city’s fire chief.

But his final resting place was unmarked until Thursday, when an honor guard from the Anchorage Fire Department unveiled a headstone for him at a ceremony in the Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery.

As his job title suggests, Bevers was more important than the average roustabout hoping to strike it rich — or maybe just get by — in the far-off territory of Alaska. He arrived in Anchorage in 1921 and served as a volunteer fireman. The ladder wagons were pulled by horses and the pumps were worked by hand.

By 1930, he was in the front ranks of city leaders, a man of property, a landlord, a partner in a major fur farm on 10th Avenue. He became involved with civic causes that included building a new hospital and Merrill Field. His ongoing business ventures ranged from establishing the Fairview neighborhood (originally Bevers Subdivision) to part-ownership of the Buffalo Mine near Chickaloon.

He was a member of the Anchorage Boosters Club who loved to give visitors tours of Anchorage while extolling its possibilities. Most famously, he co-founded the Fur Rendezvous winter festival.

Anchorage Fire Department Chief Thomas Bevers in the 1930s Courtesy Anchorage Fire Department

In 1922 Bevers became the first paid fireman in the city. He retired from the position of chief in 1940 and ran for city council in 1941, winning the office with 772 votes.

In October 1944, during a duck hunting trip on the north side of Knik Arm, he went to bed and quietly died of a heart attack. An editorial in the Anchorage Times lamented, “Anchorage (has) lost one of its best friends and leaders.”

He had no immediate family in the territory. The 1940 census listed him as single. Officials summoned a sister in Virginia to come and claim the body.

Upon her arrival, his friends and business partners did a double take…

Read the entire article here.

“Brillo head,” “Don King,” “Sideshow Bob”: It took me years to embrace the hair that white people scorned

Salon
2015-11-28

Sarah Enelow

Growing up, everyone thought they could “fix” my hair. I believed them, and paid the price.

I was 16 and had been in the bathroom for two hours working on my hair. My tools were scattered all over the sink: a brush with bent-up bristles, a dozen barrettes and ties clogged with clumps of my torn-out hair, a spray bottle of water, loads of leave-in conditioner, and various gels and serums for “damaged” hair with names like Frizz Be Gone.

That month’s Seventeen magazine lay open to a tutorial on creating an “effortless” up-do, modeled by a cheerful blonde, but what I saw in the small mirror hanging on a nail above the sink was an ungainly afro whose tight, wiry, dark brown curls had been ripped apart. My eyes were red from crying and my skinny arms were exhausted from being held above my head so long.

I shoved the butt of my hand into the mirror—it went pop as shards of glass fell into the sink and a thin stream of blood ran down my forearm. I got myself a Band-aid, cleaned up quietly, pulled my hair back into a low bun, and retreated to my room. If I left my hair in that bun long enough, it might be semi-straight when I took it out, so long as it never got wet again, but that wasn’t feasible. When I started growing my hair out around age 8, I didn’t realize I had to de-tangle it daily in the shower, so one morning I woke up with fat dreadlocks and had to get them cut out…

Read the entire article here.

‘We have a right to determine how our histories are told’: An interview with poet Toni Stuart

Goldsmiths University of London
News
2015-11-25

Sarah Cox

On Thursday 3 December the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies (CCDS) and Centre for Feminist Research host a spoken word performance by Toni Stuart: poet, festival organiser and educator, recently named on the South African Mail & Guardian’s list of inspiring young South Africans. Toni is also a Goldsmiths graduate, completing her MA Writer/Teacher with us this year as a 2014/2015 Chevening Scholar. We caught up with her to find out more about her work and Goldsmiths experience.

Toni was first introduced to Goldsmiths by friend and fellow poet Raymond Antrobus while he was studying for his MA Writer/Teacher here. Raymond was also taking part in our Spoken Word Educators Programme (SWEP), working with school children to develop their confidence, self expression, oral communication and literary skills.

Invited in to teach for the day at the school where Raymond was based, Toni got a taste for what being poet-in-residence was like and also learnt more about our MA – a course taught by the Departments of Educational Studies and English and Comparative Literature.

“It sounded like exactly what I wanted,” she says. “A course that allowed me to develop my creative writing and teaching practices simultaneously, with a specific focus on developing my own pedagogy and ‘poetry syllabus’. I don’t know of any other course like it in the world. And, the SWEP – started by Peter Kahn and now with Jacob Sam-La Rose as director – is the only one of its kind in the world as well.”

After her performance at Goldsmiths this December, Toni and her audience will be taking part in a discussion circle exploring the use of stories as medicine. As a 32-year old mixed heritage South African woman poet, she believes her work – and that of her generation – is to heal the wounds that they have inherited from their parents’ generation and from the past.

“Sometimes these wounds are apparent and we’re able to address them directly, other times they are unconsciously passed down through many generations,” she says. “My experience of working in the NGO sector in the past, and in the arts sector now, is that self-care is fundamental if we hope for our work to have a meaningful impact in our communities, and, that in order for our work to be sustainable we need to ensure we are taking care of ourselves first…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Black-ish’ Star Yara Shahidi Is a Role Model Off-Screen

The New York Times
2015-11-27

Hannah Seligson

Ms. Shahidi, 15, won the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series this year. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times

“Life as a teenager can be down right chaotic,” the actress Yara Shahidi, 15, told an audience last month at Cipriani 42nd Street, where she was being honored by the Young Women’s Leadership Network. “We must also realize that it is up to us whether these years will feel like a melancholy struggle or an opportunity for growth or experiences of a lifetime.”

For Ms. Shahidi, it’s certainly the latter.

As the actress who plays Zoey, the smart but entitled daughter on ABC’s “Black-ish,” a situation comedy about a prosperous black family wrestling with racial issues, Ms. Shahidi certainly has a platform to be heard. But she has not stopped there.

When she’s not taping “Black-ish,” she is a full-time social activist, inspiring young women to excel academically, volunteering at medical clinics and starting her own mentoring club…

There are few African-American actresses her age who are having the kind of cultural and social impact that Ms. Shahidi is, both on and off screen. This year, she was nominated for a Teen Choice Award for best breakout star. She won a N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series…

…Activism runs in her family. “I was raised by a bunch of humanitarians,” she said, referring to her African-American mother, Keri-Salter Shahidi, a commercial actress, and her Iranian father, Afshin Shahidi, a cinematographer. Her maternal grandfather was involved in the civil rights movement…

Read the entire article here.