Mixed Race Studies

The Pose as Interventionist Gesture: Erica Lord and Decolonizing the Proper Subject of Memory

E-Misférica
Decolonial Gesture, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014

Colleen Kim Daniher
School of Communication
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

This article investigates the decolonial politics of the pose in the photographic and installation work of mixed-race Native Alaskan artist Erica Lord. Refiguring the pose as decolonial gesture, I argue that Lord’s poses can be understood as decolonial labor because of the ways in which they employ messy genealogies of colonial space and time in order to disrupt the linear unfolding of white settler colonial history. In the act of posing, Lord intervenes in a visual and historical archive that positions both Native and mixed race subjects—especially women—as particularly vulnerable subjects to the ongoing Western imperial project of assimilationist inclusion. Lord’s photographic poses enact a literal seizure of time that resists both the presumed past-ness of the Native American and the presumed futurity of the racially-ambiguous, mixed race woman. In so doing, she revises the temporal politics of both, critically calling into question “the proper” subject of memory.

And it is always exciting, then and now, to realize that you are not a person or a voice that stands alone […] There’s this quote that I repeat to myself all the time, I put it on the starter slide for just about every presentation I give, and I think about it often…

Erica Lord, in interview with Dasha Shleyeva

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent we are still afraid
so it is better to speak
remembering
we were never
meant to survive

Audre Lorde from Litany for Survival

A woman, hair bleached blond and eyes rimmed with kohl, gazes directly into the camera. She is naked, save for a banana-lined skirt and piles of necklaces cascading down her bare breasts. Back arched, her hands wrapped around her exposed stomach, the woman’s feet are planted firmly on the ground, yet her long legged stance suggests the latent possibility of movement, of dance. We have seen this image, differently, before. Behind her, a double shadow, as if in flight, splays against the obvious studio backdrop. Moving between darkness and light, stillness and movement, presence and absence, the photograph conjures the ghost of Josephine Baker only to refract it, multiplying different trajectories of space and time both into the past and into the future.

The image is multimedia artist Erica Lord’s 2005 self-portrait, Danse Sauvage, and it features the artist in costume and in character as Baker. Lord is a self-identified mixed-race Native Alaskan of Athabascan (interior Alaska), Inupiat (North and Northwest Alaska), Finnish, Swedish, English, and Japanese descent. She has described the work as being “a direct response to the feeling of being seen as exotic,” explaining that she: “tried looking back in history, at other mixed women, or other Native women who sort of owned that power [of exoticism] […] The photograph sort of grew from this desire to emulate or embody that sort of force or power that she [Josephine Baker] had” (Shleyeva 2010). Although some might object to Lord’s proximate staging of North American Indigenous and Black diasporic histories, this essay seizes upon Lord’s identificatory “look back in history” in order to examine the ways in which such a gesture critically addresses the overlapping but sometimes fraught relationship between decolonizing and antiracist epistemological stances. Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua have characterized this antagonism as an issue of historical memory: critical race and postcolonial theory systematically erases Aboriginal peoples and decolonization from the construction of knowledge about ‘race,’ racism, racial subjectivities, and antiracism…the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from the project of antiracism erases them from history. (Lawrence and Dua 2005, 132)…

Read the entire article here.

It’s her Ferguson — and it’s not all black and white

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-11-17

Moni Basu

Ferguson, Missouri (CNN) — Stefannie Wheat carried a yard sign all the way from her Midwestern town to the nation’s capital. She visited the White House and tucked it into the guard rail.

“I Love Ferguson,” it said.

It was mid-October and her beloved city turned restive after the police shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown. Businesses were boarded up and losing money, protests had on occasion turned violent and anxiety had spread through the city of 22,000 people northwest of St. Louis.

Ferguson, the quiet community she chose to make home, had become synonymous with racism, injustice and police brutality. Wheat wanted to scream.

Her Ferguson was not what it had become in the headlines.

For this 45-year-old white woman, things were far more complex than they appeared in the news. The world that she, like many others, saw as black and white had morphed into myriad shades of gray over the years.

She has been married to Ken, who is black, for almost two decades. She adopted Christopher, a black child from a foster home. In eight years, he will turn 18, Brown’s age at the time of his death, and embark on life in a world she knows is still full of hate…

Read the entire article here.

Reflections on the 2014 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

Multiracial Asian Families: thinking about race, families, children, and the intersection of mixed ID/Asian
2014-11-16

Sharon H. Chang

Ah. Where do I begin. I’m sitting on a plane waiting to takeoff to Seattle (correction, taking off) thinking on my last 3 days in Chicago at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference. I’m exhilarated, emotional, exhausted, enlightened. I got to present some of my research for the first time. After years of researching, [a] major milestone. I got to be with and meet in the flesh so many folk doing great work whom I had mostly only known by name or via social media thumbnails till that point: Eliaichi Kimaro of A Lot Like You; Jeff Chiba Stearns of One Big Hapa Family, Yellow Sticky Notes, and the forthcoming Mixed Match; Megumi Nishikura of Hafu; Fanshen Cox [Digiovanni] of One Drop of Love and, with partner Chandra Crudup, Mixed Roots Stories; Ken Tanabe of Loving Day; Co-creators of War Baby / Love Child (as well as two of the conference’s founders) Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis; and Steven Riley of MixedRaceStudies.org…

Read the entire article here.

The Value of Whiteness

The Diary of a Mad Law Professor
The Nation
2014-11-12

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia Law School, New York, New York

A lawsuit is being waged against the “wrongful birth” of a black child.

In a recent encounter between Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, the two men discussed “white privilege.” O’Reilly maintained that his accomplishments had nothing to do with race and everything to do with hard work. Stewart pointed out that O’Reilly had grown up in Levittown, New York, a planned community to which the federal and local governments transferred tremendous mortgage subsidies and other public benefits—while barring black people from living there—in the post–World War II period. O’Reilly thereby reaped the benefits of a massive, racially exclusive government wealth transfer. As legal scholar Cheryl Harris observed in a 1993 Harvard Law Review article, “the law has established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness”—its value dependent on the full faith and credit placed in it, ephemeral but with material consequences.

A recent lawsuit brought by Jennifer Cramblett pursues the stolen property of whiteness in unusually literal terms. Cramblett is suing an Ohio sperm bank for mistakenly inseminating her with the sperm of an African-American donor, “a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter [Payton] in an all-white community,” according to the Chicago Tribune. Cramblett is suing for breach of warranty and negligence in mishandling the vials of sperm with which she was inseminated, as well as emotional and economic loss as a result of “wrongful birth,” which deprived her of the whiteness she thought she was purchasing…

Read the entire article here.

Q&A with Dorothy Roberts

Penn Current: News, ideas and conversations from the University of Pennsylvania
2014-10-16

Greg Johnson, Managing Editor

When Dorothy Roberts was 3 months old, she moved with her parents from Chicago to Liberia, where her mother, Iris, had worked as a young woman after leaving Jamaica.

It was the first of Dorothy’s many trips abroad, and one during which her father, Robert, took a bunch of photographs and filmed home movies with his 16-millimeter camera. The Roberts family moved back to Chicago when Dorothy was 2, and she can recall weekly screenings of the 16-milimeter reels from Liberia in he living room.

“I had a very strong interest in learning about other parts of the world from when I was very little,” says Roberts, the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. “My whole childhood revolved around learning about other parts of the world and engaging with people from around the world.”

Robert was an anthropologist and Iris was working on her Ph.D. in anthropology when Dorothy was born. They raised their daughters as citizens of the world in a home filled with a wealth of books and ethnographies about different cultures, places, and people. The Roberts home stayed connected with the international community, hosting foreign-exchange students and living overseas.

Five-year-old Dorothy had already decided she was going to be an anthropologist—as her parents expected—and would sneak into her father’s office and spend hours reading his books. The family spent two years in Egypt when she was a teenager, reinforcing her status as a global citizen.

Twenty-one-year-old Dorothy, after finishing her undergraduate studies at Yale, including a year in South America, decided she wanted to be a lawyer, and enrolled at Harvard Law School.

“I got a law degree and went into legal practice because I thought that was the best tool for doing social justice work,” says Roberts, who has joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences and Penn Law School. Her work focuses on gender, bioethics, health, and social justice issues, specifically those that affect the lives of children, women, and African Americans.

Roberts began her legal career with one of the icons of the Civil Rights Movement, Judge Constance Baker Motley, for whom she clerked in the early 1980s. After practicing law in the private sector, she started her teaching career in 1988 at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark, an institution known for its history of social justice advocacy. She was a professor at Northwestern School of Law before joining Penn in 2012.

The Current sat down with Roberts in Penn Law’s Golkin Hall for a conversation about her globetrotting, her influential parents, racism in the child welfare system, the degradation of black bodies, the resurgence of race in science, and controversial decisions by the United States Supreme Court…

…Q.Your most recent book, ‘Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century,’ examines the resurgence of biological concepts of race in genomic science and biotechnologies. What is it about?

A. Biological explanations have historically been a powerful way of convincing people that social inequality is natural and, therefore, does not require social change. To me, that is what the eugenics movement, which was prominent in the United States from the 1920s until World War II, was all about. Mainstream science in the United States promoted biological explanations for social inequality, claiming it resulted from differences in people’s inherited genetic traits. That basic ideology continues to this day in what is seen as cutting-edge and sophisticated scientific research. You can tie together all of my work from ‘Killing the Black Body’ to ‘Fatal Invention’ as uncovering the ways in which that basic philosophy—disguising social inequalities as biological ones—continues to fuel unjust social policies and legitimize very brutal practices against the most marginalized people in this country, blaming them for their own disadvantaged status. How can you blame the least powerful people for creating powerful systems of inequality in the United States? But the biological explanation for inequality deludes people into thinking that is possible—that it’s natural for black infants to die at two or three times the rate of white infants; it’s natural for black people to be incarcerated at many times the rate of white people; it’s natural for black children to have lower graduation rates than white children; it’s natural for black people to have a fraction of the wealth white people have. Americans who don’t want to explain these glaring inequities as stemming from institutionalized racism find comfort in explaining them as stemming from a natural order of human beings…

…What are you currently working on? I understand you are continuing a research project that was originally started by your father.

A. I’m working on a book using about 500 interviews of black/white couples that my father conducted in Chicago from 1937 to 1980. He was working on a book on interracial marriage my whole childhood but he never wrote it. My father was white and my mother was black. I want to take advantage of this extraordinary archive to study the relationship between the experiences and views of these couples and the intensifying challenge to the racial order that occurred during that period. How did they understand their own marriages in terms of changing race relations and politics in Chicago? I’m very interested in the role interracial marriage has played in perpetuating and contesting racial inequality.

While my father believed that interracial marriage could be a key strategy for overcoming racism, I neither glorify nor ignore its political significance. I am investigating interracial marriage from the perspective of black-white couples without assuming an inherently problematic or progressive role in the advancement of racial equality. And I’m very excited to explore what the interviews reveal.

Read the entire interview here.

To Tell the Truth: Alumna’s new film about family secrets to show at Boston film festival (video)

Harvard Law Today
Alumni Focus
2014-11-12

Lewis Rice

Lacey Schwartz ’03 will return to Cambridge this weekend to speak about her new documentary “Little White Lie,” showing Saturday Nov. 15 and 17 as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival. The film traces her personal story of being raised as a white Jewish girl in Woodstock, N.Y., only to find out as a young adult that her biological father was an African-American man with whom her mother had an affair (a family friend who died nearly ten years ago). In an interview with Harvard Law Today, she spoke about family secrets, the universal appeal of her story, and the power of film to reveal truths—including at Harvard Law School…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Fourteen Frames’ aims to create discussions on race, identity

The Daily Northwestern
Evanston, Illinois
2014-11-11

Shane McKeon, Reporter

A group within Global Engagement Summit launched a Tumblr page and physical gallery profiling 14 Northwestern students and their experiences with race and identity.

“Fourteen Frames” opened at Norris University Center on Nov. 5, the same day the Tumblr page went live with supplemental videos of some of the gallery’s subjects. The OpenShutter Project, a group within GES that focuses on discussing social change through art and visual media, organized the exhibit.

The page contains links to short videos of some of the students, who discuss what race and identity mean to them. In addition, other students can submit their own views on race through a text field linked on the page.

Medill junior Kalina Silverman, co-founder and co-president of the Mixed Race Student Coalition, was featured in the gallery and said it is important to discuss race on college campuses.

“Race is a tricky phenomenon to navigate on campus, especially when you grow up defining yourself a certain way,” Silverman said. “Then you come to campus and your philosophies and political views are also swayed as you learn more and more. It’s up to you to choose how to define yourself, and that can be very tricky.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ibeyi: “I feel like our father is looking over us”

DIY Magazine
London, United Kingdom
2014-11-11

Jamie Milton

Photo: Emma Swann

From ancient teachings to modern electronics, these French-Cuban twins bring a modern hybrid of pop.

Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Díaz make up Ibeyi, two French-Cuban twins producing music with XL Recordings head honcho Richard Russell at the helm. Earlier this year Russell helped out on Damon Albarn’s solo debut ‘Everyday Robots’, a project that’s been a long time coming but was practically forced into existence. Ibeyi, on the flipside, comes off like something eager to career into view, the first step of an act that’s only just beginning to evolve.

The pair’s basics build on the teachings of the Yoruba culture, which in their own words believes in “energy”, not necessarily spirits, “love and life and death”, but not strictly life after death. Musically, Yoruba teaches the importance of dance and percussion, the latter of which their late Father, Anga Díaz, became celebrated for. It’s not something that strictly runs in the family, mind you.

“Oh no, I’m bad at percussion!” proclaims the afro-sporting Lisa-Kainde. “But I appreciate it so much. When you’re a child you must have to learn how to dance with rhythm. It’s one of the most amazing things.”…

Read the entire interview here.

‘What are you, anyway?’: Why I loved growing up in a mixed-race family

The Digital Universe
Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah
2014-11-01

Angela Marler

When I was a kid it was completely normal for me to spend one weekend with my mom’s side of the family, roasting a goat in a pit in the driveway, surrounded by fruit trees and watching Telemundo. It was also normal for me to spend a Sunday with my dad’s relatives, lounging in a million-dollar home, playing video games and feasting on all-American roast and potatoes.

I felt equally comfortable in either situation, and I loved both sides and their quirks. My heritage was something I was proud of, and even if some people didn’t believe that my brother (dark-skinned with thick, curly hair) was the offspring of my father (extremely white and balding), I liked the fact that my family was a little different from my friends’ families…

Read the entire article here.

‘Global Mixed Race’ conference welcomes scholars, filmmakers to Chicago

DePaul University
News Release
2014-10-29

DePaul University faculty Laura Kina and Camilla Fojas cofounded the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference and will deliver opening remarks at this year’s event. (Photo by Jamie Moncrief

Rebecca King-O’Riain, senior lecturer at the National University Ireland Maynooth, will give a keynote speech at the “Global Mixed Race” conference at DePaul University. (Photo courtesy of Rebecca King-O’Riain)

Zélie Asava of the Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland will discuss mixed race representations in Irish cinema at the “Global Mixed Race” conference at DePaul University. (Photo courtesy of Zélie Asava)

DePaul University to host free gathering Nov. 13-15

CHICAGO — Critical mixed race studies, a growing academic field that crosses national, disciplinary and racial boundaries, will be the focus of discussion by scholars, filmmakers and performers at an international conference Nov. 13-15 in Chicago. “Global Mixed Race” will be held at DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Campus, 2250 N. Sheffield Ave. In addition to presentations of scholarly research, there will be live performances and film screenings, including the Chicago premiere of “Finding Samuel Lowe: From Harlem to China” by director Paula Williams Madison.

Nearly 200 presenters from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan and Australia will participate in 45 panels during this third biennial conference, which was founded at DePaul in 2010.

“We wanted to create a dynamic space for ongoing scholarly antiracist conversations, debates, and creative processes around multiraciality that also is open and inclusive for the general public, community organizations, and those involved in the arts,” said Laura Kina, cofounder of the conference and professor of art, media and design at DePaul University. Kina is coauthor of “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art” and an artist whose solo exhibitions include “Blue Hawai’I” and “Sugar.”

Camilla Fojas, conference cofounder and professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul, will deliver the welcoming address with Kina.

“Critical mixed race studies is comparative and interdisciplinary. It engages colonial and imperial histories, giving it a transnational and global focus,” Fojas said. Her research focuses on transnational American media and cultural studies in a comparative imperial context. Her newest work, “Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power,” examines how the United States has narrated its relationship with island territories, including Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

The conference will feature two keynote speakers from Ireland: Rebecca King-O’Riain and Zélie Asava…

Read the entire press release here.