Mixed Race Studies

In Celebration of Loving Day: Raising Multiracial Kids

PBS Parents
Expert Tips & Advice
2018-06-12

Marj Kleinman

One year ago today, I met six-year-old Mattie (below) at a Loving Day event. Families had gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia, the 1967 landmark Supreme Court decision that made interracial marriage legal across the United States.

Between blowing bubbles and dancing, Mattie told me: “Today is a special day and it doesn’t matter if you’re black, brown or any other color; it’s just about your love.”

Her dad, Allen, shared, “It’s important to be here because we want the future to be brighter, safer and more diverse for them. We want to show them that that exists now and make it more commonplace going forward.”

In the last 50 years, the number of interracial marriages has increased dramatically — as has public acceptance of these marriages. Yet parents still face a variety of challenges around raising multiracial kids. Allen and his wife, Kelly (with their kids, below) said that they sometimes face stares and the question, “Is that really your child?”…

Read the entire article here.

Hungary’s first black MP aims to ‘destroy prejudice’

BBC News
2018-06-11

Tom Mulligan

Orsolya Kovacs Olivio Kocsis-Cake: Fidesz always finds an enemy who must be hated

Hungary has a reputation for anti-immigration politics, but a young black liberal MP wants to revamp the country’s image.

Olivio Kocsis-Cake, of the opposition Parbeszed (Dialogue) party, is being sworn in as an MP on Monday, taking a seat vacated by a colleague who is stepping down.

Mr Kocsis-Cake (pronounced “kochish-tsocker”) has become a talking point in Hungary because of the strong anti-migrant rhetoric – particularly against non-whites – ratcheted up by members of the governing Fidesz party, its loyal national media and far-right groups like Jobbik.

“In the 1990s I was physically in danger a number of times when confronted by skinheads on the street. But now this is very unusual. Mostly I just get suspicious looks,” Mr Kocsis-Cake told independent news website Index.hu.

Parbeszed won just five seats in the 2018 election, in which the right-wing Fidesz of Prime Minister Viktor Orban secured a super-majority of 133 seats and the ultra-nationalist Jobbik came second with 26 seats…

…Two different generations

Olivio Kocsis-Cake was born in 1980. His mother is Hungarian and his father, from Guinea-Bissau, came to Hungary via Senegal in 1976, aged 18.

Like many students invited to communist Eastern Europe from developing countries, Marcelo Cake-Baly studied and graduated at the Karl Marx Economics University. He settled and found work as a Budapest tram-driver and was even a one-time film actor…

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The Bi-Racial Artist Using White-Passing Characters to Talk About Blackness

Sleek
2018-06-07

Harriet Shepherd, Junior Editor

Drive-By, Side-Eye, 2016 © Genevieve Gaignard, courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

Genevieve Gaignard uses American stereotypes and comfortable settings to confront uncomfortable issues surrounding race and identity.

American artist Genevieve Gaignard is a homebody. Not in the sense that she’s confined to the couch every Friday night, but rather that she’s infatuated with domestic spaces. “I’ve always had this fascination with what people surround themselves with in their homes,” she tells SLEEK. It’s a theme that’s been a constant in her work since she threw in the towel at cookery school and headed down a fine art path. From the panoramic interiors she lensed for her Yale application, to the carefully curated domestic installations that made up her solo show, Smell the Roses, at the Californian African American Museum earlier this year, to the household-centric creations currently on display at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London — home is where Gaignard’s heart is.

Though she’s what you’d call a multidisciplinary artist, it’s Gaignard’s photography that’s earned her such widespread attention. Known for turning the lens on herself, Gaignard’s Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraits occupy a complex realm where class, race and gender intersect, seeing the artist assume caricatured roles that toy with her own bi-racial identity and the way that blackness and whiteness is perceived. And the home, more often than not, provides the comfortable backdrop for Gaignard’s more uncomfortable subject matter…

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Growing, Faltering, Changing, Growing: Lessons From Kay WalkingStick

The New York Times
2018-06-07

Holland Cotter, Co-chief Art Critic

Kay WalkingStick’s “New Mexico Desert,” 2011, in which bands of Navajo patterning float across scrub land and mesas as if surveying and protecting them. National Museum of the American Indian

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — An artist’s career retrospective, if shaped with care, is more than a look at a life of labor. It’s also a record of contingent lives, cultural changes and a political passage in time. This is true of “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” an era-spanning survey of this 83-year-old painter at the Montclair Art Museum here. Yet what powers the chronologically arranged show, first and last, is the personal: the sense it gives of one worker growing, changing, faltering, then growing and changing more.

Born in 1935 in Syracuse, Ms. WalkingStick was the child of a biracial marriage: “Syracuse Girl Weds Cherokee Indian” was the headline on the report of her parents’ wedding in the local newspaper. As it turned out, she saw little of her father over the years, though her mother, Scottish-Irish by descent, made a point of instilling pride in her daughter’s Native American heritage.

Ms. WalkingStick studied painting in college, and as a young wife and mother in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, she continued to paint, keeping a close eye on what was happening in Manhattan. Among the earliest pieces in the show, from 1971, are two crisp, Pop-ish silhouette images in bright colors of female nudes. The artist herself was the model, and feminism — or at least the loosened-up spirit of it — a spur…

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DePaul among first to offer critical ethnic studies graduate program

DePaul University Newsline
Chicago, Illinois
2018-05-31

Nicole Ross, Executive Communications Assistant

Laura Kina, Vincent DePaul professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, left, and Alexis Beamon, graduate assistant. Kina is the director of the Critical Ethnic Studies MA program and is a visual artist whose research and teaching focuses on Asian American and mixed race history and representation. (DePaul University/Jeff Carrion)

At this year’s TEDxDePaulUniversity, Whitney Spencer encouraged the audience to question societal norms with her talk, Reimagining the Intellectual. A first-year graduate student in DePaul’s Critical Ethnic Studies program, Spencer highlighted that America’s understanding of what it means to be “an intellectual” is limited by preconceived racial stereotypes.

“As a first-generation college graduate, I aim to critique the construction of black intellectual ‘lack,’ disrupt restrictive ideologies and encourage the intellectual practices of black people,” Spencer says. “I’m continuing to explore this work as a CES graduate student at DePaul.”

DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences is among the first in the nation to offer a Master of Arts in Critical Ethnic Studies, which supports the study of such topics by providing an advanced analysis of race and ethnicity. Founded in 2015, the program’s second cohort will graduate this June.

With Chicago as a classroom, students like Spencer examine the systematic marginalization of racial minorities within an urban context as well as the global implications of these structures. This includes a look at how groups use art, culture, political organization and other forms of social expression to respond and counter these forces.

“The program is interdisciplinary and intersectional – pulling from existing courses like women’s and gender and international studies,” says Laura Kina, professor of art, media and design and director of the Critical Ethnic Studies program. “This allows us to look at subjects in a comparative framework.”

Kina first noticed DePaul’s need and opportunity for such a master’s program several years ago. “I helped found the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference at DePaul in 2010, which garnered a lot of attention from the community – so much so that it eventually expanded into its own association,” Kina says. “Around 2011, other faculty members and I started crafting the master’s program to build upon our existing African America and black Diaspora and Latin American and Latino studies programs.”…

Read the entire article here.

Exposure to Biracial Faces Reduces Colorblindness

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
First published 2018-06-06
DOI: 10.1177/0146167218778012

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Negin R. Toosi, Diversity Researcher
Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Laura G. Babbitt, Researcher
Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Samuel R. Sommers, Director of the Undergraduate Program; Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Across six studies, we demonstrate that exposure to biracial individuals significantly reduces endorsement of colorblindness as a racial ideology among White individuals. Real-world exposure to biracial individuals predicts lower levels of colorblindness compared with White and Black exposure (Study 1). Brief manipulated exposure to images of biracial faces reduces colorblindness compared with exposure to White faces, Black faces, a set of diverse monoracial faces, or abstract images (Studies 2-5). In addition, these effects occur only when a biracial label is paired with the face rather than resulting from the novelty of the mixed-race faces themselves (Study 4). Finally, we show that the shift in White participants’ colorblindness attitudes is driven by social tuning, based on participants’ expectations that biracial individuals are lower in colorblindness than monoracial individuals (Studies 5-6). These studies suggest that the multiracial population’s increasing size and visibility has the potential to positively shift racial attitudes.

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Pondering My Black, Biracial and Multiracial Identity Post Hurricane Maria

Multiracial Media: Voice of the Multiracial Community
2018-05-27

Sarah Ratliff

I have been writing from the Biracial and Multiracial perspective since I co-authored the book, Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide in 2015. Being Biracial is an anthology of essays from either Multiracial people or parents of mixed race kids.

In my essay I wrote about being the product of a Black and Japanese mother and a White (German, Dutch and Irish) father who were married in New York City in 1960.

I wrote about my experiences being “light, bright and clearly half White” while being raised to self-identify as Black, and of course, having to explain for the elevendy millionth time why I self-identified this way. I shared moments of complete vulnerability and isolation because I grew so frustrated trying to explain that being Black isn’t just about complexion but lived experiences as well…

Read the entire article here.

A French-Rwandan Rap Star Turned Novelist From Burundi

The New York Times
2018-05-29

Tobias Grey

“Small Country,” by Gaël Faye, is about a boy, living in Burundi during the war between the Hutus and Tutsis, who loses his innocence in spite of desperately wanting to cling onto it. Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

PARIS — “It felt like an injustice to me,” said the rapper and novelist Gaël Faye, about having to leave civil-war-torn Burundi in 1995 to come live in France. Mr. Faye, who was 13 at the time, had to contend with the shock of a new culture and moving with his younger sister into the cramped space of his mother’s apartment in Versailles.

Months went by without unpacking his suitcases. “When I went to school I used to take what I needed and put it back afterward,” the 36-year-old author said in a recent interview in Paris. “I’d convinced myself that any day my father would ring up and tell us that the war had ended and we could come back. But the war ended up lasting until 2005 by which time I was an adult.”

In his first novel, “Small Country” — a huge hit in France when it was published in 2016 and where it sold 700,000 copies — Mr. Faye wrote with a rare and subtle yearning about his youthful escapades in and around Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. It has now been translated from French into English by Sarah Ardizzone and is being released by Hogarth on June 5.

“Small Country,” which in its original language shares the title of one of Mr. Faye’s most popular songs, “Petit Pays,” is told from the perspective of Gabriel, a 10-year-old boy with a French father and a Rwandan mother (the same mixed-race parentage as Mr. Faye). He is part of a gang of young boys sneaking beers in cabaret bars and stealing mangoes from local gardens to sell on the black market…

Read the entire article here.

“The law recognizes racial instinct”: Tucker v. Blease and the Black–White Paradigm in the Jim Crow South

Law and History Review
Volume 29, Issue 2 (May 2011)
pages 471-495
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248011000058

John W. Wertheimer, Jessica Bradshaw, Allyson Cobb, Harper Addison, E. Dudley Colhoun, Samuel Diamant, Andrew Gilbert, Jeffrey Higgs, Nicholas Skipper

On January 24, 1913, the trustees of the Dalcho School, a segregated, all-white public school in Dillon County, South Carolina, summarily dismissed Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert Kirby, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen, respectively. According to testimony offered in a subsequent hearing, the boys had “always properly behaved,” were “good pupils,” and “never …exercise[d] any bad influence in school.” Moreover, the boys’ overwhelmingly white ancestry, in the words of the South Carolina Supreme Court, technically “entitled [them] to be classified as white,” according to state law. Nevertheless, because local whites believed that the Kirbys were “not of pure Caucasian blood,” and that therefore their removal was in the segregated school’s best interest, the court, in Tucker v. Blease (1914), upheld their expulsion.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mexico’s Color Line and the Cultural Imperialism of Light-Skin Preference

Truthout
2018-05-26

Roberto Rodriguez, Associate Professor in Mexican American Studies
University of Arizona

A busy street in Mexico City. (Photo: Getty Images)

The color of the people of Mexico is one of the things that had a most profound effect on my psyche when I first visited the place of my birth in 1976 at the age of 22. The people came in all colors, though primarily different shades of red-brown, owing to the nation’s Indigenous roots.

Having grown up in a white-dominant society, it was an affirmation of my own brown skin color, in sharp contrast with the artificial color of official Mexico. I was used to seeing government bureaucrats and those that graced the nation’s television screens with light skin, bleached blond hair and artificial blue or green eyes.

The truth is, more than 40 years later, the nation’s color line has seemingly not changed much at all. When I first noticed this preference for light skin in Mexico, it was present at every turn and every corner. It wasn’t just a case of difference, but also disdain. Apparently, all things that were light were “good” and all things dark were “bad.” This was especially true of television. White or light skin was preferred for virtually every role, except the ones for the subservient, demeaning and outlaw roles…

Read the entire article here.