Mixed Race Studies

How my white mother shaped me into a black man

Melissa Harris-Perry
MSNBC
2013-08-13

Albert L. Butler, Radio Host
900 AM WURD, Philadelphia

I am an avid watcher of Melissa Harris-Perry, so I was not at all surprised–and was quite pleased–when host Melissa Harris-Perry tackled the subject of white mothers raising black boys in America in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict. Prior to turning to her panel, the professor reminisced about her white mother offering a relevant (yet often overlooked) point that white mothers of black boys are confronted by the same realities as black mothers.

As the segment continued, I found myself nodding in agreement as the panel of mothers discussed how important it was to talk about race, discrimination, and culture with their black children. I know firsthand how important this is; I am the black son of a white mother, and my mom made sure she addressed those issues in various ways from my early childhood to my early adulthood. Even now, as I stretch across the 40-year-old threshold, we still discuss all of it. Her choices, in very large measure, empowered me to be the strong, confident black man that I am today…

Read the entire article here.

Alien Citizen, The Play

World Premier at the Asylum Lab
1078 Lillian Way
Hollywood, California 90038
Fridays & Saturdays @ 20:00 PDT (Local Time)
Preview May 3, 2013, Opens May 4 – June 1

Written and performed by Elizabeth Liang
Directed by Sofie Calderon
Associate Produced by Richard Lee, Karen Smith, and Wendy Belcher
Co-produced by Leila Ciszewski
Stage Managed by Michelle Hilyard
House Managed by Charls Sedgwick Hall and Kate Huffman
Lighting & Projection Design by Matt Richter
Sound Design by Dennis Yen
Graphic and Program Design by Gene Michael Barrera

Presented by HapaLis Productions in association with Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC)

Who are you when you’re from everywhere and nowhere? Alien Citizen is a funny and poignant one-woman show about growing up as a dual citizen of mixed heritage in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and New England.

Elizabeth Liang, like President Obama, is a Third Culture Kid or a TCK. Third Culture Kids are the children of international business people, global educators, diplomats, missionaries, and the military — anyone whose family has relocated overseas because of a job placement. Liang weaves humorous stories about growing up as an Alien Citizen abroad with American commercial jingles providing her soundtrack through language confusion, first love, culture shock, Clark Gable, and sandstorms…

Our protagonist deals with the decisions every global nomad has to make repeatedly: to adapt or to simply cope; to build a bridge or to just tolerate. From being a Guatemalan-American teen in North Africa to attending a women’s college in the USA, Alien Citizen reflects her experience that neither one was necessarily easier than the other. She realizes that girls across the world are growing into womanhood in environments that can be hostile to females (including the USA). How does a young girl cope as a border/culture/language/religion straddler in country after country that feels “other” to her when she is the “other?” Where is the line between respecting others and betraying yourself?

Humor is a great survival mechanism! And friends make all the difference.

For more information, click here.

Postwar responses to black occupation children represent a formative moment in the racial reconstruction of postfascist Germany. Military occupation between 1945 and 1949 produced some 94,000 occupation children. However, official and public attention fixed on a small subset, the so-called “farbige Mischlinge” or “colored mixed-bloods,” distinguished from the others by their black paternity. Although they constituted a small minority of postwar German births—numbering only about 3,000 in 1950 and nearly double that by 1955—West German federal and state officials, youth welfare workers, and the press invested the children with considerable symbolic significance.

The years after 1945 were constituent for contemporary German racial understanding, and postwar debates regarding “miscegenation” and “Mischlingskinder” were central to the ideological transition from National Socialist to democratic approaches to race. The term “Mischling,” in fact, survived the Third Reich and persisted well into the 1960s in official, scholarly, media, and public usage in West Germany. But its content had changed. Rather than refer to the progeny of so-called mixed unions between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans as it had during the Third Reich, immediately after the war it came to connote the offspring of white German women and foreign men of color. Thus “Mischling” remained a racialized category of social analysis and social policy after 1945, as before. But the definition of which races had mixed, as well as the social significance of such mixing, had fundamentally altered.

Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eleym and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 31-32.

Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950

Duke University
2012
286 pages

Michelle René Eley

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring Black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a dynamic and flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work—Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003)—provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films’ depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in a German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany’s history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for using poetic politics and communities of coalition to affect social change.

Read the entire thesis here.

Piesche Publishes Anthology on Audre Lorde

Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
College News
2012-12-02

In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s death, Visiting Instructor of German & Russian Studies Peggy Piesche published a new anthology, Eurer Schweigen nützt euch nichts: Audre Lorde und die Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Your Silence Will Not Protect You:  Audre Lorde and the Black Women’s Movement in Germany). The book was launched with a discussion and reading on Nov. 21 in one of the main theaters in Berlin (Volksbühne)…

Read the entire article here.

Still policing the crisis? Black and black and white mixed ‘race’ Seeking Interviewees]

University of Leeds
Leeds, West Yorkshire, England
2013-08-12

Lisa J. Long, Doctoral Researcher
School of Sociology and Social Policy

I am a Ph.D. Researcher at the University of Leeds. I am interested in understanding the experiences that black or black and white mixed ‘race’ people have had when they have found themselves in contact with the police, either as a victim of crime, when reporting a crime, as a crime suspect or in the course of routine policing enquiries e.g. stop and search. As part of my research I would like to interview black and black and white mixed ‘race’ people across all age groups (16+), both men and women with an opinion or view about policing based on personal experience.

In order to be able to take part you will need to live in the West Yorkshire area and have had experience of policing within this area.

If you would like more information about participating in the research please contact Lisa Long at ssljl@leeds.ac.uk.

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Duke University Press
2012
256 pages
118 photographs, 10 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5056-9

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich

University of Michigan Press
2004
296 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03138-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02160-4

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

It’s hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.

Tina M. Campt’s Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book.

In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?

The answers to Campt’s questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

Contents

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Memory, and Historical Representation: Contextualizing Black German Narratives of the Third Reich
• Part I: Echoes of Imagined Danger – Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 1: “Resonant Echoes”: The Rhineland Campaign and Converging Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 2: Confronting Racial Danger, Neutralizing Racial Pollution: Afro-Germans and the National Socialist Sterilization Program
• Part II: Memory Narratives/Memory Technologies: Race, Gendering, and the Politics of Memory Work
  • Chapter 3: Conversations with the “Other Within”: Memories of a Black German Coming of Age in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 4: Identifying as the “Other Within”: National Socialist Racial Politics and an Afro-German Childhood in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 5: Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space – Writing History Between the Lines: A Postscript
• Appendix: Original German Interview Excerpts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe

University of Michigan Press
2009
272 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03344-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02578-7

Rita Chin, Associate Professor of History
University of Michigan

Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential Research Professor
Northern Illinois University

Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History
University of Michigan

Atina Grossmann, Professor of History
Cooper Union, New York

An investigation of the concept of “race” in post-Nazi Germany

What happened to “race,” race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of “race” since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks—arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany—the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with “race” in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.

After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration—and about just how much “difference” a democracy can accommodate—are implicated in a longer history of “race.” This book explores why the concept of “race” became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from “race” for Germany and Europe as a whole.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: What’s Race Got to Do With It? Postwar German History in Context / Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 1: Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State / Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 2: From Victims to “Homeless Foreigners”: Jewish Survivors in Postwar Germany / Atina Grossmann
• CHAPTER 3: Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race / Rita Chin
• CHAPTER 4: German Democracy and the Question of Difference, 1945 1995 / Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 5: The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe / Geoff Eley
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Euer Schweigen schützt Euch nicht: Audre Lorde und die Schwarze Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Your silence will not protect you: Audre Lorde and the Black Women’s Movement in Germany)

Orlanda-Verlag
2012
160 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-3936937-95-4
(In German and English)

Edited by:

Peggy Piesche

20er Todestag der Schwarzen, lesbischen Poetin und feministischen Autorin Audre Lorde

“Euer Schweigen schützt Euch nicht” – Ein Aufruf zu Sprache und aktivem Handeln, der dringlicher nicht sein könnte. Wie viele der Appelle, Schriften und Aufrufe Audre Lordes war er prägend für die (internationale) Frauenbewegung und besonders für die Bewegung Schwarzer Frauen. Das rückhaltlose Ausloten von Sexismus, Rassismus, Homophobie und Klasse machen Audre Lorde auch zwanzig Jahre nach ihrem Tod zu einer der einflussreichsten Kämpferinnen für die Rechte Schwarzer Frauen. Der soziale Unterschied war für sie die treibende, kreative Kraft zu handeln und zu verändern. Ihre Essays, Gedichte, Vorträge und Erzählungen sind einschneidend und entschlossen, sie werfen einen schonungslosen Blick auf die Realität und transportieren dabei doch immer auch Hoffnung. Der vorliegende Band ist eine Sammlung von bereits erschienenen und bisher unveröffentlichten Texten Audre Lordes. Ergänzt werden diese durch Texte von Frauen, die gemeinsam mit der Autorin den Weg einer deutschen Schwarzen Frauenbewegung gingen und von Schwarzen Frauen der Nachfolgegenerationen aus Deutschland, die sich mit ihrem Erbe und den aktuellen Kämpfen auseinander setzen.

20th Anniversary of the death of the Black, lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you” – A call to action and active language which could not be more urgent. How many of appeals, writings and views Audre Lorde he was formative for the (international) women’s movement, and particularly for the movement of Black women. The unreserved exploration of sexism, racism, homophobia, and class make Audre Lorde, even twenty years after her death, one of the most influential fighters for the rights of black women. The social difference was to act for them, the driving creative force and change it. Her essays, poems, speeches and narratives are incisive and determined, they throw an unsparing look at the reality, transporting always hope. The present volume is a collection of previously published and unpublished texts Audre Lorde. These are complemented by texts by women who went along with the author the way a German black women’s movement and the subsequent generations of black women from Germany who deal with their heritage and the current struggles apart.