Mixed Race Studies

‘Loving Day,’ by Mat Johnson

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2015-06-01

Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson’s ribald, incisive novel “Loving Day.” Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it’s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: “I look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again.”

The house is haunted. There are ghosts, mostly of neighborhood crackheads — that is, if we take Warren’s word for it; our narrator’s psyche is as wrecked as his inheritance. An “inept” comic book artist — “My work is too realistic, too sober” — he has moved back to America from Wales after a failed business and broken marriage. He’s wrecked, too, by his liminal ­racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither — call him a man divided against himself. “I am a racial optical illusion,” he says.

Warren lives and breathes what W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness, by which the American black person is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Except Warren’s body is white, making things even thornier; he’s perpetually performing a black identity that isn’t written all over his face — as when he describes “letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom’s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off.”…

Read the entire review here.

Review: Mat Johnson’s ‘Loving Day’ Takes a Satirical Slant on Racial Identities

The New York Times
2015-05-26

Dwight Garner, Senior writer and book critic

Mat Johnson’s new novel, “Loving Day,” takes its title from an unofficial holiday, one his narrator likens to “Mulatto Christmas.” It’s the observance of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 decriminalized interracial marriage in America.

Mr. Johnson, whose previous novels include the excellent “Pym” (2011), is himself the product of such a marriage — his mother is black, his father not just white but Irish white — and the politics of his own racial mix is a topic he’s written about with discernment and a rumbling wit.

In The New York Times Magazine recently, he described learning from a DNA test that he is 26 percent African. “I wasn’t a mustefino,” he said, as if paging through a field guide. “(Who has even heard of a mustefino?) I surpassed octoroon status, too; I was a quadroon with a percentage point to spare.”

“Loving Day” is about being blackish in America, a subject about which Mr. Johnson has emerged as satirist, historian, spy, social media trickster (follow him on Twitter) and demon-fingered blues guitarist.

The novel is about a man in early middle age named Warren Duffy, who loosely resembles Mr. Johnson. That is, he’s a culturally sophisticated black man who can just about pass for white. He considers himself “black, with an asterisk,” adding, “The asterisk is my whole body.”…

Read the entire review here.

A Qualitative Examination of Multiracial Students’ Coping Responses to Experiences with Prejudice and Discrimination in College

Journal of College Student Development
Volume 56, Number 4, May 2015
pages 331-348
DOI: 10.1353/csd.2015.0041

Samuel D. Museus, Associate Professor of Higher Education
Morgridge College of Education
University of Denver

Susan A. Lambe Sariñana, Clinical Psychologist
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Tasha Kawamata Ryan

National data indicate that multiracial individuals comprise a substantial and growing proportion of the US population, but this community is often invisible in higher education research and discourse. This study aims to increase knowledge of mixed-race students in higher education by examining the ways in which they cope with experienced prejudice and discrimination in college. Findings indicate that multiracial college students cope with prejudice and discrimination by educating others about multiracial issues, utilizing support networks, embracing fluidity of multiracial identity, and avoiding confrontation with sources of prejudice and discrimination. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Crowe’s ‘whitewashing’ sparks criticism from advocates

BBC News
2015-06-07

Elena Boffetta, BBC Washington

Hollywood’s reliance on bankable – and often white – actors has led to another round of sharp criticism of filmmakers for “whitewashing” roles where race and ethnicity play a part.

In Aloha, Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Emma Stone, a American actress with blonde hair and green eyes, was cast as Allison Ng – a junior fighter pilot who was part-Chinese, part-Hawaiian and part-Swedish.

Soon after the release, there was an uproar of criticism from social media against Crowe’s casting choice.

Both Asians and non-Asians asked why they didn’t pick an Asian actress to play a character who is part-Asian.

One advocacy group called Aloha “a whitewashed film” that failed to portray the ethnical diversity of Hawaii.

The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) noted 60% of Hawaii’s population is Asian-American Pacific Islanders and 30% Caucasian, a fact not reflected in the film.

Crowe apologised on his website but said he based the Ng character on a real-life redheaded Hawaiian who felt compelled to constantly over-explain her unlikely ethnicity.

“I can understand what Crowe said about his intention that he based his character on someone that didn’t look Asian but identified with the culture but you could have casted someone who was part Hawaiian,” Guy Aoki, the founding president of MANAA, said.

“Whitewashing” casting differs from “colour-blind casting,” where a role is cast when factors of race or ethnicity are irrelevant to the character or plot…

…Hollywood has been accused of whitewashing Asians for decades…

Read the entire article here.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
2002

Richard Wormser, Series producer, Co-writer

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, “Jim Crow” came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

In June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the “Colored” car. He was a Creole of Color, a term used to refer to black persons in New Orleans who traced some of their ancestors to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana before it became part of the United States. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and held the Louisiana segregation statute…

Read the entire article here.

Caution and Skepticism About Univision-TheRoot Merger

All Digitocracy
2015-06-03

Jillian Báez, Assistant Professor of Media Culture
College of Staten Island, City University of New York

TV Network’s history of racism and colorism may not bode well for website formerly owned by The Washington Post Company

Two weeks ago Spanish-language television giant Univision announced its acquisition of TheRoot.com, one of the top African American news websites. Coverage of the merger was quite celebratory and echoed co-founder Henry Louis Gates’ statement that “This bold new partnership between Univision and TheRoot underscores the ties that have long bound people of color together throughout the Western Hemisphere and is a sign of even greater levels of communication, collaboration and exchange between these culturally vital groups of people.”

But while Gates is obviously optimistic about the venture, I’m a little skeptical. Univision has some issues that no one has talked about that might impact things. For one thing, it’s digital presence, Fusion, is struggling to get traffic to its own website. Secondly, the parent company’s history as a serial consolidator and nasty habit of broadcasting racist content makes me cautious about this venture…

Read the entire article here.

The Gains and Losses of Passing for White – Ernest Torregano

Creolegen
2015-05-31

Jari Honora, Founder and Consultant

In 1912, Ernest Joseph Torregano, a thirty-year old New Orleans native, was a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. For about three years, Torregano had worked the run from New Orleans to San Francisco. After each successful run, he would return home to his wife, Viola Perrett Torregano, and his only child, Gladys Marguerite, who had been born on 7 February 1904. Like so many other Southerners of color, Ernest Torregano found moving to California to be a golden opportunity to better himself. In his case however, it came at a drastic cost – the loss of his wife and child. He was able to use what was undoubtedly his God-given intelligence and aptitude, but to do so, he passed for white. In his early adult years, Ernest had worked as a singer and handyman for a traveling minstrel troupe. It was while with the troupe, that he met one of it’s pretty stars, a guitar-playing young lady named Viola Perrett. They were married and soon had their daughter Gladys, after which they quit the show so that he could sign-on with the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Concurrent with his employment on the railroad, Ernest completed his high school studies and through independent study courses and classes at the Saint Ignatius College of Law, he was able to pass the California bar examination on 7 April 1913. During all of this time, he maintained a foot in both worlds – telling friends and relatives in New Orleans that he was working as a warehouseman in San Francisco, even having relatives to visit, while all the way he kept up a separate white identity for the sake of his schooling and his intended profession. He regularly went back to New Orleans, spending time with his wife and daughter who lived in the home of his mother, Mrs. Louise Johnson Torregano…

Read the entire article here.

10 Afro-Puerto Ricans Everyone Should Know

La Respuesta: A magazine to (Re)Imagine Boricua Diaspora
2015-06-03

La Respuesta magazine is dedicated to both resurrecting lost history and highlighting marginalized communities within our “gran familia puertorriqueña”. Afrodescendientes boricuas is one such community, who are, at best – forgotten or ignored – and at worst – exoticized, feared, or even hated. So, with pride and determination, we humbly compiled a list of 10 “Black Boricuas” we think have impacted our history and identities.

Of course, there are many, many more. You can find some Afro-Boricuas in our list “20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know” (we did not reproduce them here so as to give room to name others). For the sake of space and capacity, we can only give you a taste – but let’s start a dialogue. Please, share with us the names of other Afro-Puerto Ricans you may know! ¡Qué Viva Puerto Rico Negro!…

Read the entire article here.

Cracking The Code

The New Yorker
2015-05-14

Jesmyn Ward, Associate Professor of English
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

I had always understood my ancestry to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans—but in what proportion?

When my father moved to Oakland, California, after Hurricane Camille wrecked the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in 1969, strangers he encountered from El Salvador and Mexico and Puerto Rico would spit rapid-fire Spanish at him, expecting a reply in kind. “Are you Samoan?” a Samoan asked him once. But my father, with his black, silky hair that curled into Coke-bottle waves at the ends, skin the color of milky tea, and cheekbones like dorsal fins breaking the water of his face, was none of these things. He attended an all-black high school in Oakland; in his class pictures, his is one of the few light faces. His hair is parted in the middle and falls away in a blowsy Afro, coarsened to the right texture by multiple applications of relaxer.

My father was born in 1956 in Pass Christian, a small Mississippi town on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles from New Orleans. He grew up in a dilapidated single-story house: four rooms, with a kitchen tacked onto the back. It was built along the railroad tracks and shook when trains sped by; the wood of the sloped floor rotted at the corners. The house was nothing like the great columned mansions strung along the man-made beach just half a mile or so down the road, houses graced with front-facing balconies so that the wealthy white families who lived in them could gaze out at the flat pan of the water and the searing, pale sand, where mangrove trees had grown before they’d bulldozed the land.

Put simply, my father grew up as a black boy in a black family in the deep South, where being black, in the sixties, was complicated. The same was true in the eighties, when I was growing up in DeLisle, a town a few miles north of Pass Christian. Once, when I was a teen, we stood together in a drugstore checkout line behind an older, blondish white woman. My father, an inveterate joker, kept shoving me between my shoulder blades, trying to make me stumble into her. “Daddy, stop,” I mouthed, as I tried to avoid a collision. I was horrified: Daddy’s going to make me knock this white woman over. Then she turned around, and I realized that it was my grandaunt Eunice, my grandmother’s sister—that she was blood. “I thought you were white,” I said, and she and my father laughed.

Coastal Mississippi is a place where Eunice—a woman pale as milk, with blond hair and African heritage—is considered, and considers herself, black. The one-drop rule is real here. Eunice wasn’t allowed on the beaches of the Gulf Coast or Lake Pontchartrain until the early seventies. The state so fiercely neglected her education that her grandfather established a community school for black children. Once Eunice graduated, after the eighth grade, her schooling was done. She worked in her father’s fields, and then as a cleaning woman for the white families in their mansions on the coast. On the local TV station, she watched commentators discuss what it meant to be a proper Creole, women who were darker than her asserting that true Creoles have only Spanish and French ancestry. Theirs was part of an ongoing attempt to write anyone with African or Native American heritage out of the region’s history; to erase us from the story of the plantations, the swamps, the bayou; to deny that plaçage, those unofficial unions, during the time of anti-miscegenation laws, between European men and women of African heritage had ever taken place…

Read the entire article here.

Why You Can Kiss My Mulatto Ass

BuzzFeed
2015-05-26

Mat Johnson, BuzzFeed Contributor

“The recent re-emergence of mulatto identity isn’t about race, it’s about actively acknowledging a multiethnic reality in a simplistically racialized world.”

Yo, I’m a mulatto. And I have to tell you, it’s great. I was black for most of my life, which is also great, but the thing is I look white and, coincidentally, my dad’s also white (he’s great too), and after a while I needed a word that offered me a better fit, and acknowledge my father and his whole family’s impact on my life, which was also a big part of my identity. So I converted to mulatto, which I see as a subset of the larger African American experience.

I actually love the word mulatto. I love it for its rolling linguistic sound — moo-lah-toe — sliding off my tongue the way Lolita did for Humbert Humbert. But I also love mulatto for the illicit pleasure of watching the uncomfortable cringe the word sometimes elicits from others, even when I say it to describe myself: an African American novelist who just happens to look like a washed-up Latvian rugby player. The discomfort is a response I’ve encountered from black people, from white people, and even sometimes from many mulattoes — or rather, I should say, “first-generation mixed people of black and white ancestry.” That inelegant mouthful is what mulatto means, but I can’t shorten it without saying “mulatto,” because there is no other word in the English language that captures that meaning while connecting it with the larger sociopolitical history of North America.

The word mulatto is at some level absurd: Of course it’s absurd; it’s an antiquated relic of a racist past. Just like the reductive racial classifications of black and white, which are equally absurd in the face of the overwhelming complexity of ethnicity, caste, and historical context…

Read the entire article here.