Mixed Race Studies

Interview: Nia King, “Bodies on the Line”

Mixed Reader: A blog of mixed race literature
2013-04-27

Tali Weinberg

Nia King is multimedia producer with a passion for social justice. She started out as a zinester writing about mixed-race identity, made a short film about searching for trans-friendly housing in the Bay Area, and has recently transitioned into journalism. Her ongoing projects include a web comic about her interracial relationship, and a podcast about queer and trans art activists of color. Feminist textile artist Tali Weinberg, an MFA student at California College of Art, recently interviewed Nia for part of her thesis on women art activists in the Bay Area. Below is an abridged transcript of the interview.

Do you consider yourself part of a certain activist or artistic lineage?

 As a queer, mixed-race woman of color who’s an ex-punk and an ex-anarchist I feel like there’s lots of different things that I draw from, some of which have nothing to do with my identity. Jaime Hernandez is definitely my biggest influence in terms of my comics. He and his brother do a series of comics called Love and Rockets. His branch of the Love and Rockets franchise is about these two young queer punk rockers growing up outside LA, I think one of them is Chicana and the other is Colombian and Scottish. For me as a young punk growing up in a white scene, seeing queer women of color represented in comics as actual people was a really amazing thing.

 I also really love the visual art. Every panel looks like something you could put up on a wall, which is not something you see with all comics. There’s a really strong graphic style with a lot of solid black and white shapes that are really sort of distinct visually and that’s something I also really draw from…

Read the entire interview here.

Family and Community History of the Winton Triangle

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
2013-04-22, 21:00-22:00 EDT (2013-04-23, 01:00-02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

From Family History to Community History—the Chowan Discovery Group Story with Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group (CDG).

The mission of the Chowan Discovery Group  is to research, document, preserve and present the 400+ year-old history of the landowning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area centered in Hertford County, North Carolina.

Founded in 2007, the Chowan Discovery Group (http://www.chowandiscovery.org/)  co-produced in 2009 its first major presentation, a stage production, scripted by Jones, called The Winton Triangle.  The book, Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, features Jones’ summary of the Triangle’s history.

In addition to writing articles, Jones has made numerous presentations about the Winton Triangle’s history on national and regional radio, at colleges and universities, museums and to civic groups. The North Carolina Office of Archives and History accepted four of his nominations for highway historical markers.

A native of Cofield, a village in the Winton Triangle, Marvin Jones began this project a decade ago by scanning the photograph collection of relatives and neighbors.  The Winton Triangle digital collection now has over 7,000 files of photographs, documents, maps, audio and video recordings.

Jones is the owner of Marvin T. Jones & Associates, a professional photography company in Washington, DC.  He has  published in well-known magazines and has worked in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.  Howard University and Roanoke-Chowan Community College hosted Jones’ exhibit on Somalia.

For more information, click here.

Brown Babies Germany’s Forgotten Children – Henriette Cain

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
2013-01-17

Bernice Bennett, Host

Are you searching for your family?  Are you German, Brown and want to learn more about your American or German heritage?

Join Henriette Cain Genealogist, Search Consultant and Secretary of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS), Inc.  Mrs. Cain – a brown baby adoptee successfully found all members of her birth family. She is now helping others with their searches through her company S.U.N. Public Records Research. She offers family history research and strives to reunite families and friends. She is prominently featured in the documentary – “Brown Babies: Deutschlands verlorene Kinder“.

Mrs. Cain is also a Founding Member, co-founder and former Vice President of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical  Society of the Northen Illinois Southern Wisconsin Chapter; a member of the Noxubee County (MS) Historical Society, and a former volunteer Librarian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Family History Library.

Play in your default player here.

Richard Pryor’s Daughter on Growing Up Biracial

WNYC Radio
New York, New York
WNYC News
2013-04-07

Soterios Johnson

April 7, 2013 – Richard Pryor, one of the most influential comedians of all-time, gained pop star status in the 1970’s with his incisive storytelling about issues including race.  Now, his daughter Rain is sharing her take on growing up biracial in ’70s and ’80s Los Angeles, the child of the African-American comic genius and a Jewish go-go dancer.

In her one-woman show, “Fried Chicken and Latkes,” Pryor brings to life the family members, societal pressures and personal experiences that forged her identity at a time when attitudes about race in the U.S. were rapidly changing.

“I really wanted to tell a story about me, so people would get to know who I am,” Pryor said.  “But at the same time really talk about things that were important to me.  And, race was always such a big issue for me, and still is, especially in our country.”…

Read the entire article here. Download the interview here.

A White Face With A Forgotten African Family

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2012-11-24

Jacki Lyden, Host

Growing up blond-haired and blue-eyed in Southern California, Joe Mozingo always thought his family name was Italian.

But as an adult, Mozingo became skeptical of that theory when friends and co-workers began to ask him about his unusual-sounding last name.

The journey to discover the truth about the Mozingo name took him from the libraries of Los Angeles to the courthouses and plantations of Virginia and, finally, to Africa.

Mozingo spoke with weekends on All Thing Considered guest host Jacki Lyden about his first book, The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family, which chronicles that journey…

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo

The Rumpus
2013-03-04

Peter Orner

I recently finished a powerful book about a journey to find the origin of a name. It’s called the The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo. The book details Mozingo’s search for the origin of the name “Mozingo,” which, he comes to understand, is one of the few African names to survive not only the Middle Passage, but the history of American slavery itself.

The book takes Mozingo, a Los Angeles Times reporter, on a great chase—from Los Angeles, to the American South, to Angola—as he traces the history of the first American Mozingo, Edward Mozingo, a former slave from West-Central Africa who eventually won his freedom by suing for it in a Virginia court. Some Mozingos fought for the Union; others for the Confederacy. Some were abolitionists; others were in the Ku Klux Klan. One thing they all have in common is Edward Mozingo, a man who—in spite of everything—held onto his royal name…

…The Rumpus: Your story is especially remarkable in that Mozingo is only one of two African names to survive slavery. Since you had no idea how significant your name actually was when you went into this, could you trace how the revelation came about?

Joe Mozingo: The understanding that I descended from this African man who kept his African name came in different waves. First there was puzzlement—how could this be?—then deep curiosity, then frustration, and eventually this exhilaration. The frustration was this: I needed to envision my ancestor, Edward, but subconsciously I harbored this white-black binary view that has been bestowed to us by American history. I was white. So it was hard to envision him as my ancestor at first. But that blockage gave way as I researched more, visited the places Edward lived, met more Mozingos—black, white, and in-between—and went to Africa. The exhilaration came then, when I felt that link to him, to this lineage spinning back to the beginning. In Angola, where he sailed off into the Atlantic for Jamestown, that connection to this eternal system just welled up inside. It was this great feeling of opening up…

Read the entire interview here.

Don Lemon: It only takes one drop

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-15

Don Lemon, Anchor
CNN Newsroom

This piece is part of a three-part series tied to the (1)ne Drop Project.

(CNN) – For years, the woman on the left in the photograph below could not be friendly to her own husband in public. She would pretend she didn’t know him or tell people he was her driver. She didn’t want him to be beaten in public as he had many times before.

She learned that particular survival technique from the woman in the photograph on the right, her mother and my grandmother, who had to use it from the 1930s until my grandfather died in the 1960s. Both women were often mistaken for white. And for whatever privileges my aunt and grandmother might have received for their light skin, their husbands paid for it by beatings or threats from white men. One handed-down family story that sticks with me is how my uncle was lucky to have survived a savage throttling in the 1950s after exiting a ferry crossing the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to Port Allen. Apparently, he and my aunt had let down their guard. They never did it again.

Heck, as a child, I wasn’t even sure about my grandmother or my aunt. “Is Aunt-ee Lacy white?” I’d ask. “Lacy’s black,” an adult would say. Of course the reply was followed by a big laugh and a phrase I’d never forget: “It only takes one drop.” Meaning it only takes one drop of “Negro” blood to make you black…

Read the entire article here and watch a interview with (1)ne Drop Project author Dr. Yaba Blay here.

Adopting the wisdom of Pearl S. Buck

gbtimes: The Third Angle Chinese news and video reports on China today
2013-03-26

Asa Butcher

When listing an author’s life achievements, it is rare for their Nobel Prize for Literature and Pulitzer Prize to be overshadowed. However, Pearl S. Buck’s humanitarian work with children leaves those awards in the dark.

A pioneer in mixed race adoption, Pearl S. Buck was ahead of her time in many issues considered unpopular in 1950’s America, all of which contributed to her being counted as one of the 20th century’s greatest women.

In the second part of our interview with Mrs. Janet Mintzer, CEO and President of Pearl S. Buck International, we talk to her about the adoption legacy and how it all began.

Part one of the interview is available here.

Match a child

The Welcome House Child Adoption Program, created by Pearl S. Buck in 1949, currently have adoption programs in China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Korea, and the Philippines. They have found families for more than 7,000 children that, six decades ago, were ‘considered unadoptable’.

“If you were bi-racial in the United States in the late-‘40s you were considered unadoptable – that was the mentality of the time period. Adoption was secretive and they would match parents that had blond hair with blond-haired kids or blue eyes with blue-eyed kids because that’s just the way it was done back then,” begins Mrs. Mintzer.

She explains that there were no mixed race parents able to adopt, so officials were unable to ‘match’ a child, so they were left to languish in the orphanage. Pearl S. Buck was well-known in adoption circles, having written about the issue and also having adopted several orphans, including two bi-racial children…

Read the entire article here.

Talkin’ Race with Laura and Wei Ming

The Magic Mulatto: Bringing the fine art of Race Talk straight to the people
2013-03-26

Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
University of Illinois, Chicago

“In 1969, we weren’t at war with China.”

If that sentence leaves you perplexed in any way, you need to do two things. First listen to the audio of the conversation I had with Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis…

…The second thing you need to do is check out their project, War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, which investigates constructions of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States. This is a “multi-platform project (book, traveling art exhibition, website and blog) that examines how, or even if, mixed heritage Asian Americans address hybrid identities in their artwork, as well as how perspectives from critical mixed race studies illuminate intersections of racialization, war and imperialism, gender and sexuality, and citizenship and nationality.”…

Read the article and listen to the interview here.

Mixing it Up

Salon
2001-03-08

Suzy Hansen

Alabama just legalized black-white marriage. An expert talks about why it took so long and the American obsession with racial purity.

In November 2000, after a statewide vote in a special election, Alabama became the last state to overturn a law that was an ugly reminder of America’s past, a ban on interracial marriage. The one-time home of George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. had held onto the provision for 33 years after the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Yet as the election revealed — 40 percent of Alabamans voted to keep the ban — many people still see the necessity for a law that prohibits blacks and whites from mixing blood.

Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1978. He has been studying and writing about the history of American interracial relationships since 1986. Sollors is the editor of the recently published “Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law,” a fascinating survey of legal decisions, literary criticism and essays by writers and scholars including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Randall Kennedy. Salon spoke with Sollors by phone from his office in Cambridge about the mixed-race origins — and multiracial future — of the nation.

What took Alabama so long to overturn its anti-miscegenation law?

In the years after the Civil War, most of the Southern states made miscegenation bans part of their constitutions. And part of the constitutional provision was that no legislation should ever change them. These were not just ordinary laws that you could modify with a simple majority; they called for very complicated processes and very large majorities to be overturned.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated these anti-miscegenation provisions with the Loving vs. Virginia case, and the Southern states began to adjust. But not right away. In the first 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a lot of activism or popular support for having the laws changed — no politician wanted to be caught trying to remove those statutes. I think Mississippi did it in 1987 or 1988 — 20 years after the Loving vs. Virginia case…

…What’s been going on with racial categories in the census is also interesting.

The census had two rules. One is the 1997 rule that permitted everyone to mark more than one box in the 2000 census. Then came the 2000 evaluation procedure, which allowed the census to classify anyone who marked more than one box as part of the “people of color” category — if there was a white and color mix indicated.

Essentially, it’s one thing to say that a person can fall into multiple racial categories, but what happens to all the people in the old categories? It can have some disastrous consequences now because in some states, apparently many white Americans found it fashionable to indicate that they were Native American. In some counties where Native Americans were a minority they may now end up as a majority. There are lots of headaches with counting and civil rights and voting rights and districting that are going to come in the next two years as a result of this census decision…

Read the entire interview here.