Mixed Race Studies

I can pass, but I will always choose to out myself because blackness is power. The coolest thing about me is being black. When they assume otherwise, I do not get mad or accusatory; I understand the complexity of genes and phenotypes. I embraced the role of house slave when I resignated with Isaiah in Birth of a Nation because we have been cultured to compare each other’s pain. My insides are screaming: “I HURT TOO.” Yet, I know that feeling robbed of my heritage, spliced, and everything but whole does not compare to the aggressions darker folks face. I know that at the end of the day, I am privileged, I get to live.

Gabrielle Pilgrim, “More than a house slave,” Medium, November 20, 2016. https://medium.com/@gpilgrim/more-than-a-house-slave-2bfeb8ad6eac.

What I Found in Standing Rock

The Players’ Tribune
2016-12-01

Bronson Koenig, Guard
Wisconsin Badgers

Photos by Alexandra Hootnick/The Players’ Tribune

Near the edge of the Standing Rock camp in North Dakota, about 50 yards from a tributary of the Missouri River, there’s a basketball hoop. It’s one of those worn-out outdoor hoops that leans forward a little bit, almost as if the wind had bent it.

In September, I drove from my home state of Wisconsin to the Standing Rock reservation, land of the Hunkpapa Sioux. I got in after dark so I didn’t see the layout of the whole camp until the sun rose the next morning. When I unzipped my tent, I saw a valley full of Native people — thousands of people camping out in tents, RVs and teepees — from over 300 tribes. There were license plates from almost every state.

They’d come to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, an underground oil pipeline being constructed less than a half mile from the reservation. The tribe says the pipeline will plow through ancient burial grounds and could poison the reservation’s water supply, as well as the water supply of millions of people downriver.

In the morning air I smelled burning sage, the plant used during Native American spiritual ceremonies. A woman walked by with a shirt that read THIS IS OUR LAND, and a couple of kids on horses trotted past. Someone was giving directions to a communal kitchen and generators were humming nearby. I saw some flags flying upside down, the signal for distress. I could hear Sioux singers and the unmistakable thumping of drums. It sounded like a battle cry…

…I’m one of about 60 Native American students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a school with more than 30,000 undergrads, and one of only about 40 Native American Division I men’s college basketball players in the country. I’m not too surprised that almost no one at school knew much about the Ho-Chunk tribe. My whole life, I’ve had friends and classmates ask me the most basic questions about my heritage. Did I wear feathers? Do my parents run a casino? One high school classmate even admitted that he didn’t think Indian reservations still existed. Before I got to college, I had rarely ever heard a mention of Native American history in school — all I remember from 11th grade is some reading about Native American agriculture and a couple of paragraphs in a history book on the Trail of Tears, the forced march on which all those people died in the winter of 1838…

Read the entire article here.

Event Review: Salena Godden’s #LIVEwire Album Launch

Welcome to the MA in Black British Writing
The world-first Masters programme in Black British literature at Goldsmiths, University of London
2016-12-09

Heather Marks

Soho holds many secrets, and last night revealed one of them to be Salena Godden’s spoken word album launch at Carnesky’s Finishing School. Descending the steps into the basement of the old Foyles, I was met by the gaze of pop art portraits at every turn, until I entered the intimate setting for the evening’s entertainment. Against the brightly lit stage, I slunk into the oh-so-Soho dimly lit claret background to watch the evening unfold…

…Salena Godden took to the stage to perform some of her poems to an eagerly awaiting audience. Godden delved into The Good Immigrant to read her excerpt ‘SHADE’. Lines such as “Some days I look like Beyoncé, some days I look like Rihanna” touched on colourism and its exotification of light skinned black women. Other lines like “It all depends on the filter and the time of year…it depends on what point people are trying to make” spoke to the oft-touted lie of ‘not seeing people’s colour’ as Godden listed the world events which do and do not make the news – “oh, Boko Haram black? No, not today”. Godden spoke to the world around her and kept her work current, making reference to the refugee crisis in Calais in her readings from ‘SHADE’, and Can’t Be Bovvered from her album LIVEwire. Godden threw punches at colourism and political inaction,  and the frustration one could sense in her words landed well with the audience…

Read the entire article here.

More than a house slave

Medium
2016-11-20

Gabrielle Pilgrim

“It’s my black girl who looks like a white girl with a tan and a bad hair day.”

I saw Birth of a Nation and I liked it, as much as one can like a movie that gruesomely shows her ancestors being tortured, raped, beaten, broken, and lynched. Today, I am not analyzing the film. I thought it was cinematically great: I left mad, but inspired. I was particularly drawn to the house slave Isaiah (played by Roger Guenveur Smith) as I am regularly fascinated with multiracial, racially ambiguous, and lightskin black folks.

I don’t know if nonblack people are aware of the “black enough” vs “not black enough” spectrum, but it is real — so real. Colorism is real. The fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of stereotypes is real. Middle to upper-middle class black folks may experience feeling like “not enough.” Childish Gambino voices his struggles with justifying his blackness: “Culture shock at barber shops cause I ain’t hood enough / We all look the same to the cops, ain’t that good enough?” Biracial/multiracial black folks may experience feeling like they are “not enough:”…

Read the entire article here.

What is the Black Atlantic? My Comparative Perspective

Afro-Europe International Blog
2011-01-09

Sibo Kano

Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1994) is a difficult read but it’s a very influential book. An author who builds further on Gilroy’s work and who writes very accessible books about blackness is Livio Sansone (professor of anthropology at the University of Bahia, Brazil). His book ‘Blackness Without Ethnicity’ (2003) was a very insightful read that I recommend to anyone interested in the subject. In this book he compares black Brazilian experience and cultural production with the African American experience (check this blog www.afrobrazilamerica.com on the difference between black US and black Brazil experiences). One of the chapters of the book even goes further and is based on his research among black youth in Amsterdam compared to black youth in Bahia and Rio. Generally Sansone has written interesting articles about blackness and Western Afro cultures (check this article) . Below I will give my understandings and perspectives on the Black Atlantic, as an inherent part of the broad social and cultural entity called ‘The West’.

There are black people living in all countries of the Americas, in Europe and of course in Africa. The history of all these black populations is interrelated and all in reference to their relation to white European culture. African nations are (unfortunately) a consequence of European history and international affairs. African elites have often Europe and European languages as a reference point for culture, knowledge and social emancipation. The same thing can be said in an even more thorough sense of Latin America. All these cultures, or at least its elites and urban populations are therefore according to me part of the same Western world.

But the black populations of these nations are not all the same, just as all these countries differ from each other although being interrelated in history. Black Brazilians experience race in a very different way than African Americans. Black Britons do not express their identity within the UK in the same way as Black French communities in France. Each country has its own dynamics, history, culture and identity. Still there is also much in common which is all centered around three elements: history, race and Africa…

Read the entire article here.

Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is a dance to the rhythms of womanhood

iNews
2016-11-02

Salena Godden

Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016)

Swing Time is a quiet and rhythmic book. Just as the title suggests, this book swings, oscillating from past to present, like the steady rhythm of a pendulum.

This is the story of two brown girls who dream of dancing. Tracey is the skint but talented one; our unnamed first person narrator… not so much. Where Tracey’s mother serves Angel Delight in a kitchen with a cork board heaving with gold medals, our narrator’s mother wears a cocked beret and keeps her head buried in books to better herself.

Living on the same estate, the mothers come from two different worlds, and the girls’ friendship blossoms awkwardly. They compare and compete, outgrow each other to take different paths, then come full circle.

This is a book about living in the spotlight and living in the wings. It time-travels using music and dance, from north London to west Africa, from the ghosts of Chicago swing to Hollywood musicals, jazz and ragtime, to reggae and the golden era of hip-hop. It is also, centrally, about female friendships: the strange envy one might feel when a friend seems to be moving on, moving away, moving faster, almost betraying us with their successful career or by having a baby or getting married. We all have had that friend or maybe we are that friend to someone else…

Read the entire review here.

When Looks Deceive: Being Biracial in Poland

Wanderfull
2016-11-14

Julia Kitlinski-hong
San Francisco, California

It was a late December evening and my mom had just arrived in Krakow, where I had been studying for the past three months. We were making our way from my apartment to where she was staying in the nearby city center.

As we approached the Main Square, a group of rowdy young men approached us.

It happened in a brief second, but their words were unmistakably clear.

“Ching-ching-chong.”

It lingered in the shadows of the street long after they disappeared down the road…

Read the entire article here.

What Being of Mixed Heritage Has Taught Me About Identity

VICE
2016-12-10

Salma Haidrani

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

“What are you?” When you think about it, it’s a pretty stupid question to ask another person, especially when you already know the answer: a human, just like you mate. But that doesn’t stop people directing it at people like me, who are of dual ethnic heritage or “mixed-race.” If your parents are of distinctly different ethnic groups, you feel like you have to “pick a side”—and the inevitable questions vary from ones shouted in a crowded pub to those staring up in black-and-white next to a checkbox on a form.

We’re so far down the road of thinking about race as a biological reality that we’ve forgotten it’s a construct. There are no links between how much melanin someone has in their skin and their culture. There are no links between melanin and intellect, physical abilities or creative skills. Proximity and language have tended to have more to do with what makes people of the same ethnic group seem similar—the colour of their skin doesn’t determine that.

For that reason, it’s silly to think that the experiences of the 1.2 million people in the UK who identify as “mixed” would be identical. Some are happy to define themselves in that way, while last year the British Sociological Association deemed deemed the term mixed-race as “misleading since it implies that a ‘pure race’ exists”…

Read the entire article here.

From Her Dad To Her ‘Jamish’ Roots, A Poet Pieces Her Story Together

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2014-12-28

Arun Rath, Host

Growing up in 1970s England, Salena Godden stood out. Her mother was Jamaican and her father was an Irish jazz musician who mysteriously disappeared from her life when she was very young.

In her memoir, Springfield Road, the writer, poet and musician tells the story of finding her personal identity, beginning with the word she made up to describe her race: Jamish.

“It’s kind of … a mix of being Jamaican, Irish, English,” she tells NPR’s Arun Rath. “It’s the name I gave myself.”…

Read the story here. Download the interview (00:06:15) here. Read the transcript here.

Trevor Noah Still Doesn’t Get It

BuzzFeed
2016-12-06

Tomi Obaro, BuzzFeed News Reporter

Trevor Noah (Paul Zimmerman / Getty Images)

The Daily Show host and biracial South African comic’s recent comments suggest a profound misunderstanding of the way racism works in America.

“There’s many assumptions I’ve made about America that I’ve realized were wrong,” said Trevor Noah toward the beginning of his 2013 stand-up special, African in America. Slightly heavier than he is now and sporting a leather jacket and baggy jeans, this was Trevor Noah before he became the third host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and, by extension, the latest purveyor of a pervasive, noxious type of moderate liberalism.

“For one,” Noah said in the special, “I thought people spoke English here.” He paused, allowing for a few bouts of laughter. Then he flashed a smile. “Far from it. It’s just what Americans have done with the language you guys have, just, wow. You’ve done something, you’ve put 22’s on the English language. It’s got rims — it’s pimp my language.”

Then Noah launched into an anecdote about meeting a woman who wanted him to look at something. “She was like” — here Noah began wagging his head from side to side — “Oh my god, look over thurr!” he exclaimed, using African-American vernacular. It was a cringeworthy moment, indicative of a troubling reflexive tendency toward anti-blackness that Noah often seems blithely unaware of. And although he has moved away from this sort of overtly racist humor, his recent work as host of The Daily Show has shown that Noah still doesn’t quite grasp the reality — the frustration, the difficulty, the literally life-and-death stakes — of the black American experience…

…Trevor Noah’s American breakthrough happened rapidly. He had appeared on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show only three times before he was tapped to replace him in March 2015. Before Noah even began the job, he was roundly chastised for some old, unfunny tweets about fat women and Jews, among others. But Noah was quick to put those things behind him: “To reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn’t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian,” he tweeted later that month. Instead, he decided to embrace his perspective as an outsider. As the biracial child of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father, he occupied a liminal space in his home country. “I’ve lived a life where I’ve never really fit in anywhere,” he told an interviewer in a 2011 documentary about his life, Born to Walk. And so his foreignness and his biracial identity became the primary lens through which he would approach his comedy in America…

Read the entire article here.