Mixed Race Studies

‘Mixed-ish’ Cast Reacts to ABC Cancellation After Two Seasons: “Onward And Upward”

Deadline
2021-05-14

Alexandra Del Rosario, TV Reporter

Kelsey McNeal/ABC

The actresses behind Mixed-ish‘s Johnson family broke their silence on social media after ABC announced that it will not renew the comedy for a third season.

Arica Himmel, who stars as the younger version of Tracee Ellis Ross’ Rainbow “Bow” Johnson, first posted her reaction to the news on Instagram. She reminisced on her time on the series, following in Ross’ steps and more.

“TI want to thank our many loyal fans who joined us each week for the last two years on our journey from the commune to the ‘burbs — it has been an amazing experience and I will miss my TV family more than you can imagine,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

As a ‘white-passing’ Asian American, I feel grief, shame and confusion right now

TODAY
2021-04-02

Maura Hohman, Weekend Editor and Reporter

Melea McCreary and Maura Hohman, a broadcast producer and digital editor for TODAY, share their experiences growing up with Filipino mothers but passing as non-Asian. As Asian Americans across the country are targeted for their appearance, they share their identity crisis. Courtesy Maura Hohman/Melea McCreary/ Fabio Briganti

Schoolmates never pulled their eyes sideways at me, but one did ask if my mom was my nanny and tried to convince me I was adopted.

During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, TODAY is sharing the community’s history, pain, joy and what’s next for the AAPI movement. We will be publishing personal essays, stories, videos and specials throughout the entire month of May.

I’ll never know exactly how much privilege my face has afforded me, though I’ve often wondered about the magnitude. No stranger has ever yelled a racial slur at me, but at a previous job a client spoke poorly of Filipinos not knowing half my family is from there. Schoolmates never pulled their eyes sideways at me, but one did ask if my mom was my nanny and tried to convince me I was adopted. In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings that left eight people dead, including six Asian American women, a few friends have texted to see how I’m doing. But over the years, so many friends have said they don’t consider me Asian...

Read the entire interview here.

Fredi Washington and Her Defining Role in Imitation of Life

Blog
Amistad Research Center
2018-07-02

The Fredi Washington papers at the Amistad Research Center highlights the life of the African American actress, dancer, and activist known for her stage and screen rolls from the 1920-1940s. She was born Fredericka Carolyn Washington in Savannah, Georgia on December 23, 1903, and was one of nine children of Robert T. and Harriet Walker Ward Washington. Fredi’s mother died when she was young, and she attended St. Elizabeth’s Convent in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania with her sister Isabel. Fredi moved to Harlem in 1919 to live with her grandmother. She left school and soon entered show business. She began her career in the early 1920s as a chorus dancer in Nobble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along. She adopted the stage name Edith Warren in 1926 when she acted in the lead role opposite Paul Robeson in Black Boy…

Read the entire article here.

Regé-Jean Page rises above ‘Krypton’ casting controversy: ‘We still fly’

The Los Angeles Times
2021-04-06

Christi Carras, Staff Writer

“Bridgerton” star Regé-Jean Page attends a 2020 Vanity Fair BAFTAs party in London. (Jeff Spicer / Getty Images)

DC Entertainment reportedly passed on “Bridgerton” breakout Regé-Jean Page for a role in Syfy’s “Krypton” after an executive allegedly argued that the series’ lead could not be portrayed by a Black actor.

Before his star skyrocketed with the release of Shonda Rhimes’ hit period drama, Page auditioned to play Superman’s grandfather in the action program, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Despite the “Krypton” creators’ reported desire to diversify the DC Extended Universe, then-DC chief creative officer Geoffrey Johns allegedly said Superman’s grandfather could not be Black.

In a statement paraphrased Tuesday by THR, a rep for Johns defended the casting decision on the grounds that the Hollywood exec “believed fans expected the character to look like a young Henry Cavill,” who is white and plays Superman in the DC films. The starring role in “Krypton,” which ran for two seasons from 2018 to 2019, eventually went to white actor Cameron Cuffe…

Read the entire article here.

Call For Participants: Are You a Multiracial Musician?

University of St. Thomas, Minnesota
School of Education
St. Paul, Minnesota
2021-03-07

Ilah Raleigh, M.M., Education Leadership Ed.D. Doctoral Candidate; Arts Education Leader & Performing Artist

Dear Multiracial Musicians:

I am conducting research on the contributions of multiracial artists in the contemporary commercial music (CCM) genres of country, hip-hop, and/or reggaetón. The purpose of my study is to investigate the historic and contemporary events, trends, and developments in American contemporary commercial music (CCM) which are ignored, erased, and misunderstood. This research has potential value to students, educators, and scholars of music, music education, and critical mixed race studies.

I am recruiting research participants who meet the following criteria:

• 18 years or older.
• Multiracial ancestry and/or parentage, though they do not have to self-identify as racially and/or ethnically mixed.
• Musical artists working in the genres of country, hip-hop, and/or reggaetón. This can include vocalists, emcees, deejays, instrumentalists, composers and/or producers.
• At least three years of pre-professional training or professional experience in the music industry.

Please note: Participation in this study is voluntary and participants may withdraw at any time during the study. Research participants will not be compensated for their participation. Survey data will be destroyed if a potential participant chooses to not participate.

Please follow the link here to a pre-screening recruitment survey.

Questions? Contact ilah.raleigh@stthomas.edu. To learn more, visit my professional website.

Ilah Raleigh, M.M. (Principal Investigator)

They Were Black. Their Parents Were White. Growing Up Was Complicated.

The New York Times
Book Reviews
2021-02-23

Bliss Broyard

Georgina Lawton (Left), Rebecca Carroll (Right) Jamie Simonds/Loftus Media, Laura Fuchs

Georgina Lawton, Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2021)

Rebecca Carroll, Surviving the White Gaze, A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021)

For most of us, racial identity is a combination of inheritance (you are what your parents are) and influence (you’re a product of where and how you were raised). But what if you are raised by people who didn’t look like you, in communities where you were the only one, steeped in a culture whose power was amassed through your oppression?

In a pair of new memoirs — “Surviving the White Gaze,” by the American cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, and “Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong,” by the British journalist Georgina Lawton — two women recount growing up as Black girls with white parents who loved them deeply but failed them miserably by not seeing and celebrating them for who they were…

Read the review of both books here.

ONE DROP: Shifting the Lens on Race

Beacon Press
2021-02-16
288 pages
9 x 9 Inches
ISBN: 978-080707336-0

Yaba Blay

Challenges narrow perceptions of Blackness as both an identity and lived reality to understand the diversity of what it means to be Black in the US and around the world

• What exactly is Blackness and what does it mean to be Black?
• Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness?
• Who determines who is Black and who is not?
• Who’s Black, who’s not, and who cares?

In the United States, a Black person has come to be defined as any person with any known Black ancestry. Statutorily referred to as “the rule of hypodescent,” this definition of Blackness is more popularly known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a person with any trace of Black ancestry, however small or (in)visible, cannot be considered White. A method of social order that began almost immediately after the arrival of enslaved Africans in America, by 1910 it was the law in almost all southern states. At a time when the one-drop rule functioned to protect and preserve White racial purity, Blackness was both a matter of biology and the law. One was either Black or White. Period. Has the social and political landscape changed one hundred years later?

One Drop explores the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference. Featuring the perspectives of 60 contributors representing 25 countries and combining candid narratives with striking portraiture, this book provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. Although contributors use varying terms to self-identify, they all see themselves as part of the larger racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to as Black. They have all had their identity called into question simply because they do not fit neatly into the stereotypical “Black box”—dark skin, “kinky” hair, broad nose, full lips, etc. Most have been asked “What are you?” or the more politically correct “Where are you from?” throughout their lives. It is through contributors’ lived experiences with and lived imaginings of Black identity that we can visualize multiple possibilities for Blackness.

Table of Contents

• Author’s Note
• Intro
• Introspection
• Mixed Black
• American Black
• Diaspora Black
• Outro
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About

Meet The Quebec Dads Making Beautiful Black And Mixed-Race Dolls

The Huffington Post
2021-02-10

Amélie Hubert-Rouleau

A little girl with her Ymma doll. INSTAGRAM/YMMA.WORLD

“We realized that the Black dolls were missing.”

Ymma’s website prominently features a Nelson Mandela quote: “It is in your hands to make a better world for all who live in it.”

Gaëtan Etoga and Yannick Nguepdjop take that literally. The two Quebec dads founded the company, which makes Black and mixed-race dolls, to inspire children and expose them to difference…

Read the entire article here.

Camila Pitanga on people questioning her blackness: “It’s as violent as if I was barred from a restaurant or a hotel because of my color.”

Black Brazil Today
2012-02-11

Marques Travae

Having captured the hearts of millions of Brazilians with her portrayals of several memorable characters in Brazil’s ever popular novelas, Camila Pitanga has earned her wings as a top actress and one of the most visible black actresses on the air. Her success is the fruit of hard work, an early start (appearing in the film Quilombo at age 6 in 1984) and having a famous father couldn’t have hurt (father Antônio Pitanga is a long-time actor). Of her role as Rose, an ex-domestic in the novela, Cama de Gato, Pitanga says: “I identify myself with Rose because she is a fighter and I have this reference in my family. My father is a man of humble origins from Bahia, he was a mailman and it was the arts that created his identity. Rose will not become an artist but she has a dignity that I identify with.”…

Read the entire interview here.

The Afro-Latinx Experience Is Essential To Our International Reckoning On Race

National Public Radio
ALT.LATINO
2020-07-03

Felix Contreras
Anaïs Laurent
Marisa Arbona-Ruiz
Jasmine Garsd

In Tijuana, raised fists show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images

Let’s pause the music for a bit and talk through some things.

In three segments, we’re going to have a conversation about how Afro-Latinx folks often get left out of national discussions about Blackness and, in particular, the Black Lives Matter movement. Petra Rivera-Rideua, of Wellesley College, and Omaris Z. Zamora, of Rutgers, help us wade through layers of complexities. Our newest contributor to the Alt.Latino family, NPR publicist Anaïs Laurent, lends her considerable knowledge of Afro-Latinx culture and reggaeton to the conversation.

“I don’t think that the media, on a national level, is doing the work to understand that Blackness is heterogeneous,” Zamora says.

“There are Black Latinos, there are Afro Latinos who very much a part of Black Lives Matter and the experiences we’re talking about,” Laurent adds.

Read the entire story here.