Mixed Race Studies

the forgotten history of the reno: manchester’s original nightclub for mixed race youth

i-D
Vice
2019-02-21

Kamila Rymajdo, Northern correspondent

Image from @excavatingthereno

Thirty years after it closed, Manchester nightclub the Reno has been excavated by playwright Linda Brogan and a team of volunteers — now they’re taking over Whitworth Art Gallery to continue telling its story.

“We dipped our fingers in the fountain of youth,” is how Jamaican-Irish playwright Linda Brogan explains the 2017 archaeological excavation of The Reno, Manchester’s original nightclub for mixed-race youth. Opened in the early 1960s, and famously visited by Muhammad Ali, the funk and soul venue enjoyed a heyday in the 1970s, only to close in 1986, and be demolished a year later. Overgrown by grass in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Moss Side — where Manchester’s Irish, West Indian and African communities have traditionally lived — it was all but forgotten. Until now.

“Once you got in, it was like you were home,” remembers Barrie George, a retired Manchester City Football Club steward, who partook in the club’s excavation.

Stigmatised by the 1930 ‘Fletcher Report’ (a controversial paper that described children of mixed heritage as suffering from inherent physical and mental defects) people such as Barrie and Linda found themselves caught between two different communities. “When we’d go to town, white people would say, ‘black this, black that,’ then we’d go out in Moss Side and the Jamaican people would go, ‘you mixed race, two nation, people with no countries,’ so it was like we were battling with two,” explains another Reno regular, Steve Cottier, his words echoing around the vast expanse of Whitworth Art Gallery’s upper floor. We’re here because, starting on 15 March, the gallery will be the site of a year long residency, during which Linda, and twelve former Reno regulars, will explore the club’s historical context and attempt to strengthen its legacy…

Linda Brogan Contact interview from matt kowalczuk on Vimeo.

Read the entire article here.

Artists on Artists: Genevieve Gaignard on Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

MOCA
Museum of Contemporary Art
Los Angeles, California
2019-01-24

Genevieve Gaignard’s work mixes elements of self-portraiture, collage, and sculpture to present nuanced issues surrounding race, beauty, and cultural identity. Gaignard’s staged photographs create a platform for what she calls “persona-play-performances” within these spaces. The performances enacted within her photographic works are a combination of autobiography and allegory. Responding to the photographs on view in Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin, Gaignard will expand on how these three legendary practitioners have influenced her own photographic work.

Secrets of famous 1930s ‘blonde bombshell of rhythm’ revealed with help from UW library

UW News
University of Washington
2012-03-27

Molly McElroy

We all have things in our past that we gloss over. Some secrets might just be embarrassing or unflattering. But others may be more serious, and people who conceal these truths may fear that revealing them would undermine their livelihoods.

Such was likely the case with an Emmy-winning female bandleader who rose to fame in the 1930s and led bands until the 1960s. Known as “the blonde bombshell of rhythm,” this sex symbol hailing from Chicago had security to protect her from the men who mobbed her performances.

See why they were so enchanted:

Ina Ray Hutton, who died in 1984 at age 67, also had a secret that could have damaged her stardom. A reporter from KUOW radio, with help from the UW libraries, recently revealed the secret. It turns out that the blonde bombshell had more than hair-dye to hide…

Read the entire article here.

Chi-Chi tells Tubridy about her Mum’s heartbreaking story

The Ryan Tubridy Show
RTÉ Radio 1
2018-03-12

Chi-Chi Nwanoku

Acclaimed double bass player and professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Chi-Chi Nwanoku OBE spoke to Ryan Tubridy about the extraordinary and poignant story of how her Irish mother met her Nigerian father in the 1950’s.

“Theirs was an unconventional coupling… My mother was white, my father was black. Society was not in favour of this kind of union.

“As soon as my mother let her parents know that she’d met the man of her dreams, they said never darken our doorstep again.”

Chi-Chi’s mum did as she was told but received a surprise visit when her own mother showed up on their doorstep in London three months after Chi-Chi’s birth. She secretly stayed for a week and that was the last the family ever saw of her…

Listen to the interview (00:21:11) here.

Largest tribe in East called NC home for centuries. Feds say it’s not Indian enough.

The Charlotte Observer
2019-02-15

Bruce Henderson

The largest American Indian tribe east of the Mississippi, North Carolina’s Lumbee, counts 55,000 members and has called the state’s southern coastal plain home for centuries. But to the federal government the tribe exists largely in name only.

Unlike the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the Smokies, the Lumbee have no reservation and no glitzy casino.

Instead you might notice on a drive to the beach that U.S. 74 in Robeson County, Lumbee territory, is called American Indian Highway. Lumbee tribal offices are housed in a turtle-shaped building in Pembroke, the heart of their community. A school that opened there in 1887 to train American Indian teachers is now UNC Pembroke.

South of the highway, a state historical marker commemorates the Battle of Hayes Pond, in which armed Lumbees routed Ku Klux Klan members intent on intimidating them in 1958.

Reader Elisabeth Wiener of Durham wanted to know about the history of the Lumbees, their native territory and why they aren’t a federally recognized tribe. She queried CuriousNC, a special reporting project by The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun that invites readers to ask questions for journalists to answer…

Read the entire article here.

Episode 4

Shade Podcast: UK culture and news podcast focused on the mixed race experience
2019-02-15

Laura Hesketh, Co-Host
Liverpool, England

Lou Mensah, Co-Host
London, England

With special guest, Steven F. Riley, founder of MixedRaceStudies.org!

Neneh Cherry on being mixed race in the music industry, controversial new Netflix Show ‘Always a Witch’, Viola Davis and the Liam Neeson controversy, Queen Ifrica on colourism, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America by IbI Zoboi, Grace Wales Bonner, plus more.

Listen to the episode (00:36:55) here. Download the episode here.

Theaster Gates on how his new show was inspired by the eviction of 45 people from an island in Maine

The Art Newspaper
2019-02-01

Anna Swansom

Theaster Gates ©Theaster Gates; Photo: Julian Salinas

The Chicago-based artist’s exhibition in Paris examines the forced removal in 1911 of the inhabitants of Malaga Island

The US artist Theaster Gates has taken the eviction of a mixed-race community from a small island in Maine as the starting point for his first solo exhibition in France, opening this month at the Palais de Tokyo. In 1912, 45 people from Malaga Island were evicted by the state authorities and eight of them were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded following the state’s purchase of the island in 1911. The island, a poor fishing village of black, white and mixed-race people, was ridiculed in a Maine newspaper as a “strange community” of “peculiar people”; its eviction has recently been described by a US documentary as having been motivated by economics, racism, eugenics and political retribution.

Through new works including sculptures, a film and a video, the Chicago-based artist has developed the wide-ranging project and exhibition, Amalgam, which explores the complexity of interraciality and migratory histories. The show has been organised by Katell Jaffrès and has received support from Regen Projects, Richard Gray Gallery and White Cube.

The Art Newspaper: How did you become interested in the history of Malaga Island and how did this lead to Amalgam?

Theaster Gates: I had started a residency in 2017 at Colby College in Maine and was visiting a friend who said there was this important, not well-known history about this island that used to have black and mixed-race people that were evicted. We were in a boat and he suggested having lobsters on the adjacent island before checking it out. So I learned of it quite leisurely and then started to do research.

The idea of interracial mixing led to the creation of a sculptural form, “amalgam”: a by-product of what happens when one artistic form from history meets another one to create a new kind of work. I wanted to create a bridge that would make people more curious about this island and for people who are of mixed race and from backgrounds where their parents are of different religions, I wanted Malaga to be a place where all mixes felt that they had a home. The beauty of mixing is one of the cornerstones of the exhibition…

Read the interview article here.

Episode 1

Shade Podcast: UK culture and news podcast focused on the mixed race experience
2019-01-19

Laura Hesketh, Co-Host
Liverpool, England

Lou Mensah, Co-Host
London, England

Debut episode from Laura Hesketh & Lou Mensah where we discuss identification, Meghan Markle (00:01:36), the Khloé Kardashian bi racial doll tweet (00:07:25), Colin Kaepernick (00:10:40), Steven Riley (00:12:22), and more.

Listen to the episode (00:14:19) here. Download the episode here.

Jhené Aiko and the Problem of Multiracial Self-Representation

Hapa Music is Black and Brown
Discover Nikkei
2019-01-29

Sonia C. Gomez, Postdoctoral Fellow
Mahindra Humanities Center
Harvard University

Jhené Aiko. Photo courtesy of The come Up Show.

At the 2018 VH1 Mother’s Day music tribute concert titled, Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Moms, Grammy nominated singer and songwriter Jhené Aiko recited this poem she wrote for her mother, Christina Yamamoto, a woman of African American and Japanese ancestry:

“I found another grey hair today but I was not bothered at all. I feel like I earned it. I’m better, I’m wiser, I’m leveling up overall. I am becoming my mother, my beautiful mother, who taught me with age, comes might. I’m becoming my mother, my beautiful mother, she is love in the flesh, what a sight.”

Afterwards, Aiko and her young daughter, Namiko Love, serenaded the audience with an original song Aiko wrote titled, Sing to Me. The performance was a touching display of affection between three generations of women, and as such, offers an opportunity to reflect on the role Aiko’s mother’s racial heritage has played in Aiko’s musical career. After all, she is her mother’s daughter.

Jhené Aiko Chilombo was born in 1988 in Los Angeles to Christina Yamamoto, a woman who is African American and Japanese, and Karamo Chilombo, a man of mixed-Black and Native American ancestry. Aiko is one of five siblings who grew up in a multiracial and tight-knit family from Ladera Heights, a Black middle-class enclave in south Los Angeles. Aiko’s sister, Mila J, is a singer, songwriter, and dancer herself…

Read the entire article here.

‘White Like Her’ Optioned For TV Series By FGW Productions

Deadline Hollywood
2019-01-15

Anita Busch, Film Editor

Skyhorse Publishing/Jerome Lukasik

EXCLUSIVE: The bestselling book White Like Her, author Gail Lukasik’s personal exploration about her mother’s decision to hide her African American heritage and pass for white, has been optioned by FGW Productions (Who Killed Tupac?). White Like Her will be adapted as a dramatic TV series.

The book, published last year by Skyhorse Publishing, was inspired by Lukasik’s appearance on PBS’ Genealogy Roadshow. Vowed to secrecy until her mother’s death, Lukasik revealed on national television to 1.5 million people that her mother passed for white. Within 24 hours of her appearance, the family she never knew she had, found her.

Set against the historical backdrop of the Jim Crow South, the book chronicles Lukasik’s journey to uncover the truth of her mother’s racial heritage and to understand her mother’s decision to pass for white. The project will be produced by Stephanie Frederic and Susan Banks in association with Tricia Woodgett of TigerEye Films and Datari Turner of Datari Turner Productions…

Read the entire article here.