Mixed Race Studies

Millennial women are more likely to identify as mixed race

The Lily
2017-07-06

Kristal Brent Zook

(iStock/Lily illustration)

ANALYSIS | Why men and women see themselves differently may have more to do with societal perceptions

The multiracial population in the U.S. is increasing each year, but here’s a riddle: Why are young mixed-race women more likely to identify as multiracial than men?

According to a 2016 study of 37,000 first year college students by Stanford University political scientist Lauren Davenport, 74 percent of biracial black/white women said they were multiracial, while only 64 percent of men from the same background labeled themselves that way. The numbers broke down along similar lines for mixed-heritage Latino and Asian men and women.

Who raises you can play a role on how you identify racially, as well as your neighborhood, family income, and educational level. But why men and women see themselves differently may have more to do with societal perceptions of what’s beautiful, or dangerous…

Read the entire article here.

The ‘Father of Black History’ Was Afro-Puerto Rican

Latino USA
National Public Radio
2017-06-30

Janice Llamoca, Digital Media Editor
Futuro Media Group

There’s a building in Harlem that houses, some say, the largest collection of Black history in the world. At the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, you can see and touch original documents like the Malcolm X papers and the Nate King Cole papers. The center also holds specialized exhibits, film screenings, and panel discussions.

The center is named after Arturo Schomburg, also known as the “Father of Black History,” who sold his personal collection of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and data to the New York Public Library in 1926…

Listen to the story (00:09:28) here.

Fighting for Black Lives in Colombia: ‘The People Do Not Give Up, Damn It’

The Root
2017-07-01

Lori S. Robinson

iStock

Editor’s note: This story is the first in a three-part series looking at the fight for rights of black people in Colombia. This first piece explores the history of Afro-Colombians and the impact of the recently ended war with the FARC. Subsequent stories will examine the current political environment. 

Black activism started in Colombia when Africans arrived in chains.

Spaniards were early kingpins in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, first importing kidnapped Africans into what was then New Granada in the 1520s—a century before the British brought this epic crime against humanity to North America.

Concentrated along the country’s Pacific coast, enslaved people were forced to do agricultural labor and, primarily, to mine gold. This region became majority black during colonial times. It still is…

…Colombia never had legal segregation after slavery, like the United States. The national narrative of Colombia, like most of Latin America, has been that inequality is economic, not racial, and that significant racial mixing throughout the country’s history proves that racism doesn’t exist. According to Perea, Colombians have gone so far as to say that “racism was solely an expression of North American culture.”

Meanwhile, the largest numbers of black Colombians have been isolated, abandoned by their own government, without educational or employment opportunities, living in poverty…

Read the entire article here.

From Loving v. Virginia To Barack Obama: The Symbolic Tie That Binds

Creighton Law Review
Volume 50, Number 3 (2017)
pages 641-668

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jasmine Kelekay
Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

I. INTRODUCTION

The year 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, which declared anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional. For many, the Loving decision represents a symbolic turning point in the history of United States racial politics. Some even celebrate the Loving decision and the argued subsequent “biracial baby boom” as the beginning of a post-racial United States. Indeed, statistics indicating that fifteen percent of all new marriages are interracial and polls suggesting that a majority of Americans today approve of interracial marriage are cited as evidence of the erosion of racial boundaries and tensions. For many, the 2008 election of Barack Hussein Obama, the offspring of an African father and European American mother, as the forty-fourth President—and the first Black President—of the United States similarly marked a symbolic victory affirming that racism has finally been overcome and the United States is a truly post-racial society. However, the year 2017 also marks the end of Obama’s presidency and—importantly—the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Consequently, we are not only forced to examine this critical juncture in the history of United States racial politics, but are also required to critically examine the past fifty years and ask the following question: to what extent have the symbolic victories of Loving and the election of Obama been imbued with aspirations that have yet to be fully actualized? Loving and the election of President Obama are undoubtedly important milestones in the history of United States jurisprudence and racial politics. Yet a careful analysis of interracial marriage trends, the politics of mixed race identity, and the waves of backlash against Obama’s presidency—which range from contesting his legitimacy and opposing his political efforts to explicitly racist rhetoric and the recent election of Donald Trump as President—suggest that the post-racial potential promised by Loving has remained more aspirational than actualized. Accordingly, in order to understand the legacy of Loving, we must think critically about interracial intimacy and contemporary United States race relations, taking into account the persistent inequities imbedded in the United States racial order and the continued relevance of anti-Blackness in the struggles for a more egalitarian society.

Read the entire article here.

‘Bleach bath’, clothes pins on the nose and ‘black monkey’: Study exposes racism in interracial families debunking one of Brazil’s greatest myths

Black Women of Brazil
2017-06-27

Courtesy of Jornal Floripa

What happens when there is racism in the home? In what way does it manifest? How can interracial marriages generate children who are segregated in their own home environment because of their color? Why do many white people deny the black race of their spouses – chosen by them – and even their children? Some answers to these questions appear in a study by the doctor in social psychology Lia Schucman, who researches racial relations in Brazil.

For her postdoctoral work at USP (University of São Paulo), entitled Famílias Inter-Raciais: Tensões entre Cor e Amor (Inter-Racial Families: Tensions Between Color and Love), she interviewed 13 families who were willing to talk about the subject – often in conversations punctuated by tension and disagreement in relation to the races. In the end, the psychologist used reports from five families with different manifestations of what Lia called “racism of intimacy”…

Read the entire article here.

Ngozi Onwurah: the forgotten pioneer of black British film

gal-dem
2017-06-20

Varaidzo

‘The Body Beautiful‘ by Ngozi Onwurah. Image via BFI

Ngozi Onwurah, despite being the director of the first independent black British feature film to be released, is not a household name. For a long time, her film Welcome II The Terrordome (1995), was the only film by a black woman to have a UK release. Like many black British women pioneers, her contributions to her craft have been pushed to the peripheries of British film history, yet revisiting her films reveals them to be prescient explorations of race that are just as relevant today.

Onwurah was born to a white mother and a black father in 1960s Nigeria. She was raised in England by her mother, alongside her two other siblings (one of whom, Simon Onwurah, produced Welcome II The Terrordome). Her first work, Coffee Coloured Children (1988), uses Onwurah’s own personal narrative to look at the experiences of being a black mixed-race child in England. It begins gleefully with folk of all races gathered together, dancing, laughing, rejoicing, to the ever optimistic soundtrack of Blue Mink’s song ‘Melting Pot’. The tone of the film darkens almost instantly, its extended background monologue beginning with the question “our childhood memories are blurred, murky, why did the big boys throw dog shit on our front door?”. This is coupled with the visual of this particular act being reproduced for the viewer…

Read the entire article here.

Princess Nokia Is Ready to Reign

The Village Voice
2017-03-29

Ivie Ani

ioulex

I meet up with Destiny Frasqueri — the 24-year-old Nuyorican alternative hip-hop artist known variously as Princess Nokia, Wavy Spice, or simply Destiny — in the East Village. I’m running late; she’s even later, so I get to the Astor Place cube first. Fifteen minutes later she walks up, dressed, as she’d indicated in a text apologizing for being behind schedule, in a beige duster coat and sweats to match, carrying a cherry-print Louis V bag. She’s wearing oversize shades, no makeup, just a touch of mascara. Her dark hair blows in the breeze, caressing a diamond-studded choker.

Frasqueri has appeared in Vogue, modeled for Calvin Klein, and had her song “Tomboy” used for an Alexander Wang runway show. But what makes her a figure of fascination for music aficionados in their teens and early twenties is the way she celebrates the beauty of imperfection, building a hero’s identity out of being a self-described “fucked-up kid.” She’s stunning yet still rough around the edges, rhyming about wearing dirty sneakers, smoking blunts in the stairwell, and proclaiming the power in her heritage. For her followers, her attractiveness lies in her contrasts. “Eczema so bad I’m bleeding,” she raps on “Bart Simpson,” the first track on 1992, the album she put up on SoundCloud last September. Sure enough, I look down and her irritated hands are bleeding slightly.

“I’m just ghetto as hell,” she says once we’ve settled in at San Loco for some chicken nachos. “That’s the only way that I know how to just be myself.”…

…Frasqueri’s mom passed by the time she was nine, and she grew up living in various homes across the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side. She experienced abusive foster care, life in the projects, and brief escapes to camp with wealthy kids from the Upper West Side. She’d skip class but bury herself in books, digging deep into the Black literary canon. (“I am Black Harlem Renaissance,” she says. “I am Walter Dean Myers and Langston Hughes, baby.”) She taught herself, studying Kemetic philosophy, practicing brujería and Santería, claiming her inheritance of Yoruba and Taíno cultures, and falling in love with New York City. Pissy project elevators and breezy summer barbecues in the street suffuse Frasqueri’s memories. She represents a specific kind of New York, what she describes as her own “urban realism.” “What makes life beautiful?” she muses at one point. “The ghetto makes life beautiful. Black people make life beautiful.”…

…“I’m a Brown Afro-indigenous woman. That makes people uncomfortable as it is. The folks that have a problem with me and say, ‘You still live with privilege. You not fully Black.’ I can’t win and I can’t lose, so I’ma just keep going.” She smiles. “Yes, I’m mixed-race. There’s girls who look like me and glorify being exotic. I have a responsibility to my Blackness.”…

Read the entire article here.

I Only Protested the Affordable Care Act Because the President Was Black. Please Don’t Take Away My Health Insurance

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
2017-06-27

David Bradley Isenberg
New York, New York

Back in 2009, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was being debated in Congress, I was fuming with anger. How could I, a fiscal conservative, support a program that would drive down my insurance costs and cover my child’s preexisting condition? It clearly was a flawed bill that would ruin small businesses.

I nearly boiled over for eight years, and rightly so. But now that President Obama has finally left office, and the Republicans want to take away my health insurance options and increase my premiums, I just want to be up front about something.

It was never about the taxes. It was always about the president’s Blackness. It was super related to his race. Arguably, completely and wholly tied to race, alright? And now that the president is normal again, I’d be very grateful to be able to enjoy this health insurance and all these patient protections that have saved my small business and my child’s life. So please, don’t repeal the Affordable Care Act..

Read (and enjoy) the entire article here.

The Afro-Latino Festival NYC Celebrates A Culture That’s Ready To Be Heard

The Village Voice
2017-06-27

Siddhartha Mitter

Two revelers dance at last year’s festival Source: New Visual Collective

At 26, Amara La Negra, the Dominican-American singer, has a string of energetic tropical-funk hits in Spanish, fierce dance moves, a fashion line, hundreds of thousands of social media followers, and rising star power in her hometown of Miami and back in the Dominican Republic. But Amara is also Afro-Latina — a visibly, unapologetically Black woman making her career in worlds where colorism still runs rampant, among them the D.R. with its social hierarchy and the international Latin entertainment industry. With her dark skin, exuberant Afro, and in-your-face “La Negra” stage name, Amara is making a point.

“Change would be more Afro-Latinos in Hollywood, more on magazine covers,” Amara says. “It would be main roles in novelas, which we don’t yet have. They’ll cast you to be either a slave, a gangster, or a prostitute. They stereotype us.” Last year, a light-skinned beauty queen put on blackface and butt pads to parody Amara on Dominican TV. “We’re still a long way [from] seeing big change,” Amara says. “But we’re being more vocal.”…

…In New York City, the flagship venue for the new cultural reassertion is the Afro-Latino Festival, which holds its fifth edition on July 7 and 8. A grassroots project led by Mai-Elka Prado Gil and Amilcar Priestley, a Panamanian couple in Brooklyn, it has ballooned since 2013 from an outdoor afternoon party to a two-day international summit gathering musicians, filmmakers, activists, scholars, and partygoers….

Read the entire article here.

The Mexipino Experience: Growing Up Mexican and Filipino in San Diego

Remezcla
2017-06-27

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

Author Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. Photo by Jimaya Gomez, Art by Alan López for Remezcla.

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is the author of Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Growing up in San Diego, I remember watching my abuelito tend the guava tree he grew for my mother, while singing along to the Mexican rancheras that blared from his tiny radio in the backyard. When my mother called him in for lunch, he’d start whistling, as Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de mi Padre echoed from the house. We both knew that we’d be eating caldo de res con arroz Mexicano. Once a month, my Filipino grandfather, or tata, would also pay us visits from San Francisco. I’d help him and my mother cook Filipino delicacies, like chicken adobo, pansit, and lumpia. He’d have us in tears, laughing at his jokes, while the smell of soy sauce and vinegar permeated the entire house.

Many of our family functions centered on moments like these – eating Filipino food while listening to Mexican music, bathing ourselves in the experiences that were for me, the essence of being a Mexipino…

Read the entire article here.