Mixed Race Studies

Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

Cornell University Press
2022-03-15
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781501761973

Burton I. Kaufman, Dean Emeritus, School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor Emeritus, Department of History
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama’s was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy.

Following his election, President Obama’s supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system.

The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama’s greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States.

In estimating the course and impact of Obama’s full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.

A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

Amazon Crossing
2020-03-01
304 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1542017077
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1542016704
Audio CD ISBN: 978-1799726296

Jason Diakité

Rachel Willson-Broyles (Translator)

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history―from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds―part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.

What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.

Georgia Douglas Johnson, Harlem Renaissance Poet & Playwright

Literary Ladies Guide: Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors
2018-03-29

Nava Atlas

Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1880 – May 14, 1966) was an American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Born Georgia Douglas Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, she grew up in a mixed-race family with African American, Native American, and English roots.

Her poetry addressed issues of race as well as intensely personal yet ultimately universal themes including love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world.

Four collections of her poetry were published: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). She wrote nearly thirty plays and numerous other works, some of which have been lost…

Read the entire article here.

Joseph Jenkins Roberts: A Love for Liberia

StMU Research Scholars: Featuring Scholarly Research, Writing, and Media at St. Mary’s University
St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas
2020-02-17

Antonio Holverstott

In 1846, the governor of the African colony of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, called for a referendum to determine Liberia’s path towards independence. Eager colonists in the settlements of Monrovia, Bassa, Greenville, and Maryland affirmed their desire to have an independent Liberia.¹ However, the legislature was designated as the final judge to determine the fate of the colony’s future. During this historic moment, Roberts was seeing his vision of independence take shape in reality. The story of Joseph Jenkins Roberts and Liberia’s autonomy was unique among stories of national independence, similar to the United States’ exit from the British Empire in the middle of the 1770s and similar to the Haitian Revolution where slaves revolted against the unfair treatment of the French government.

The story of Roberts’ stride towards obtaining independence for Liberia began when he became the colonial sheriff in 1833.² One year after he took office, the colony’s main financial supporter and sponsor, the American Colonization Society (ACS), started to experience financial insolvency due to their failure of not being able to secure sufficient funds from the United States federal government and state legislatures. The questionable origins of the ACS and prejudiced motives of a percentage of its members made the organization look unappealing in the eyes of the government. In 1816, the ACS was founded as a product of a growing post-Revolutionary War movement advocating for the emigration of African Americans back to Africa.³ The end result of this emigration was the formation of a new sovereign state.⁴…

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The Afro Latino who redefined how Black history is remembered

NBC News
2022-02-24

Nicole Acevedo, Reporter

Arturo Schomburg’s experiences as an Afro Puerto Rican at the turn of the century influenced his approach to rescuing and preserving Black history.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg is regarded as one of the foundational figures of Black history in the United States, with one of the nation’s most important research and cultural institutions named after him.

Yet his legacy goes beyond the work he did as a historian, writer and collector of global Black art and historical materials.

By identifying as a Black and Puerto Rican, Schomburg’s acknowledgment of his diverse heritage helped him earn a global understanding of Black identity — a view he implemented in his approach to rescuing and preserving Black history — while he recognized the way Blackness had been erased, including in the Caribbean and Latin America…

Read the entire article here.

The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy

Swallow Press (an imprint of Ohio University Press)
January 2020
256 pages
5½ × 8½ in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8040-1221-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8040-4106-5

Julia McKenzie Munemo

In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation, and racial reckoning, Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history.

When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she—a white woman—had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.

21. Fredi’s Migration: Washington’s Forgotten War on Hollywood

Chapter in the anthology: Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History
Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano and Kalia Brooks Nelson (ed.)
(2019-09-12, Open Book Publishers)
Printed ISBN: 9781783745654
eBook ISBN: 9791036538070

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism
New York University

Nearly eight decades before #OscarsSoWhite focused attention on the dearth of roles for Blacks and other people of color in Hollywood, actress Fredi Washington became one of the most vocal critics of the industry’s racial bias. But despite her trailblazing work on stage and screen beginning in the 1920s, Washington has largely been forgotten as one of the pioneering African-American leading ladies, and for her noteworthy civil rights activism.

The eldest of five children, Washington was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1903 and relocated to Philadelphia aged eleven following the death of her mother, a former dancer. In 1919 Washington launched her own career as a chorus girl in Harlem’s Alabam Club, and, in 1926, landed a coveted role in the landmark Broadway play Shuffle Along. When the show closed she sailed to Europe to tour with her dance partner Al Moiret. Two years later she returned to the United States and starred in a string of successful films and plays including the short film Black and Tan Fantasy with Duke Ellington (1929); Black Boy starring Paul Robeson (1930); Emperor Jones with Robeson again (1933); and Drum in the Night (1933); with an equal number of plays, including Singing the Blues (1930), Sweet Chariot (1930) and Run Lil’ Chillun (1933).

Washington’s stardom was secured with her performance as Peola, the tortured bi-racial daughter who passes for white in Imitation of Life, the 1934 feature film starring Claudette Corbert and Louise Beavers. However, after achieving critical acclaim for her performance Washington was routinely passed over for lead roles. This was in part due to Hollywood’s Hays Codes, which, beginning that year, explicitly prohibited the depiction of miscegenation in film. The Hays Codes made life especially challenging for Washington, whose green eyes and pale complexion rendered her too light to be cast in films with all-Black casts. In 1937 her skin was darkened for her co-starring role in One Mile from Heaven with Bill Robinson…

Read the entire chapter here.

Running from Race

On Wisconsin
Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (alumni and friends of the University of Wisconsin, Madison)
2021-03-01

Harvey Long MA’16, Librarian, Assistant Professor
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina

Ethelene Whitmire, Professor
Departments of Afro-American Studies; German, Nordic, and Slavic; andGender & Women’s Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Librarian Louise Butler Walker ’35 took desperate measures to survive in a racist society.

During the Great Depression, Louise Butler Walker ’35 completed her bachelor’s in French and earned a library diploma from what is now UW–Madison’s Information School. Walker had been an outstanding student, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and completed a prestigious internship at the American Library Association (ALA) headquarters in Chicago. The school’s career placement office said her assets were her “brilliant mind” and “excellent academic background.” Her limitations, they said, were “racial (she is a mulatto).”

Although Walker was not privy to the egregious behind-the-scenes machinations and handwringing about her being Black, she knew that her race was detrimental to her career, so she eventually passed as white to work as a librarian in rural Wisconsin. Her story reveals the extraordinary pressures that African Americans faced…

Read the entire article here.

Descendant of Alex Manly talks about modern impact of 1898 Massacre

WECT News 6
Wilmington, North Carolina
2021-11-10

Mara McJilton, Multimedia Journalist

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) –Alex Manly was the owner of The Daily Record newspaper in 1898 when it was burned down by white supremacists.

Now, 123 years later, descendants of Manly are still trying to piece together what happened on November 10, 1898.

“The real, real granular details, the real truth of it — it’s been an ongoing experience and process,” said Alex Manly’s great-great-grandson Kieran Haile.

Haile has had a vague understanding of the 1898 Massacre since he was a teenager, but it wasn’t until about five years ago when he was nearing his 30′s that he really started to take a deep dive into history and learn more about this horrific day…

Read and watch the entire story here.

Mitski Doesn’t Bother With Labels. She Prefers Excellence

Westworld
2017-07-14

Tom Murphy

Mitski Ebru Yildiz

Mitski Miyawaki, who performs with her band under her first name, grew up in a biracial, multicultural household. During her childhood, Mitski lived in Japan, Malaysia, China, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it wasn’t until she returned to the U.S. that she had a racial designation imposed on her.

“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”

In the U.S., Mitski was regularly asked what most biracial people – her being half Japanese and half Caucasian American – are asked at least once in their lives: “What ARE you?” Mitski doesn’t particularly identify with American or Japanese culture, and her parents didn’t encourage her to choose or adopt either.

“I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that’s important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way,” observes Mitski. “Being an outsider at the time nurtured my eye as a writer.”…

Read the entire article here.