Mixed Race Studies

How Pat Cleveland Conquered Racism to Become the World’s First Black Supermodel

Harper’s Bazaar
2016-06-15

Kate Storey, News Edtor

Photograph: Kathryn Wirsing

Pat Cleveland was 16 years old when she was told she would never make it as a model.

It was the late Sixties, and Cleveland, who had just signed with Ford Models, was sitting nervously in a large leather chair in the agency’s intimidating Manhattan office. Co-founder Eileen Ford had requested to see the lanky teenager for some “real” talk.

“Patricia, we have very few colored girls in our agency. And do you know why?” Cleveland remembers Ford saying. “Because there is no work for colored girls. The only reason I took you is because [photographer] Oleg Cassini recommended you. But I really think you will never make it in the modeling business.”…

Read the entire article here.

Considering Brazil’s Racial Heritage

Hyperallergic
2014-12-15

Laura C. Mallonee

The 18th-century Brazilian sculptor Aleijadinho was the mixed-race son of a black slave and one of his country’s most legendary artists. In the gold-rich state of Minas Gerais, where millions lost their lives in the mines, tourists still pay to visit the immaculate baroque churches he embellished. Though leprosy took his fingers, rumor has it he continued chiseling away with tools tied to the stumps of his hands.

Aleijadinho’s enigmatic life married two contrasting subjects that have preoccupied Adriana Varejão for the past 20 years: the oft-forgotten history of Brazil’s mestizo identity, and the dramatic baroque art of the colonial period. These underpin series like Tongues and Incisions (1997–2003) and more recently Polvo (2013–2014), both which are currently featured in Adriana Varejão at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston — the artist’s first U.S. solo museum show.

Varejão spoke with us recently from her studio in Rio de Janeiro about her childhood in Brasilia, why she is drawn to painting meat, and how she feels about being a “Latin American artist.”

Laura C. Mallonee: Your family lived in Brasilia when you were very young, because your father was a pilot in the air force. That would have been less than a decade after the city was completed in 1960. What was it like?

Adriana Varejão: Just emptiness. No history. Very red, because the earth is red, and there was a lot of earth around because there was not much vegetation. They’d just built everything. This crazy president had decided to build a capital in the middle of nowhere. They called many people from all over Brazil to build Brasilia, so there was a huge amount of immigrants. Black people, Indian people, very mixed race. Very, very poor people. And they built these satellite cities where these people used to live. They were miserable cities. My mother used to work with child malnutrition in a hospital in one of them. I remember the kids with those huge bellies…

…LCM: How do you view yourself racially?

AV: I am as Portuguese as I am Indian as I am black. I believe in building a mestizo identity, which means to have everything together with balance. When people come to Brazil, they forget their ancestral identity. They tend to. So Brazilians become Brazilians very quick. People don’t say here, “I’m Afro-this and this.” Or, “I’m Portuguese this and this.” No, they say, “I’m Brazilian.” This is a good point about us…

Read the entire interview here.

Pat Cleveland: Early Supermodel and Author With Many Tales

The New York Times
2016-06-15

Guy Trebay, Chief Menswear Critic

The fashion model Pat Cleveland in her home studio in New Jersey. Credit Chad Batka for The New York Times

WILLINGBORO, N.J. — The peacocks were rooting around in the bushes, strutting and pecking and ruffling their trains. Occasionally, one — Boy or Big Boy, say, or Snow White — struck a pose, tipping its beak up to emit a banshee shriek.

“They’re just a bunch of drama queens, honey,” said Pat Cleveland, as she sat in the backyard of her house in a rural part of New Jersey, sipping on a sinister-looking juice drink the color and texture of algae. Drama queens, as it happens, is a topic on which Ms. Cleveland has some stories to tell.

This she does in “Walking with the Muses,” a picaresque new memoir about a tall, skinny mixed-race girl (“not black enough to be black or white enough to be white”) hailing from a section of East Harlem that she terms the Golden Edge.

In her 1950s childhood, Ms. Cleveland writes, that neighborhood was still representative of a now largely bygone city, a place where “the Jews, the blacks, the Irish and the Puerto Ricans all had a corner of their own.”…

…American fashion, in particular, during the era when Ms. Cleveland first appeared, was also more porous and racially diverse than it would be in the subsequent decades. Success in the business was measured in those days not by social media metrics but by an ability to bewitch the cognoscenti, to make yours a name they whispered about.

And seemingly Ms. Cleveland has been an object of fascination for those around her almost from the time she was born 65 years ago to a white Swedish saxophonist and an African-American artist from the South. Soon after, Ms. Cleveland’s father, Johnny Johnston, returned to Sweden, leaving her mother, Lady Bird Cleveland, to raise her freckle-faced young daughter alone.

“If you’re a single black woman and have a Swedish lover, life is never going to be easy, and Lady Bird didn’t have the opportunities in life,” Ms. Cleveland said. “But her lesson to me was always, whatever your circumstances are, it’s up to you to create your own world.”…

…At the height of her powers, that same skinny girl from Harlem was transformed into a star on the evening of Nov. 28, 1973, when she — one of 30 black models chosen to participate in a benefit runway show held at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris — took to the stage in front of 800 guests, many of them prominent or titled, and, spinning and twirling, left little doubt in the minds of observers that the immediate future of fashion belonged not to the Old World but to the New…

Read the entire article here.

9 Famous Faces On The Struggles And Beauty Of Being Afro-Latino

The Huffington Post
2016-02-18

Carolina Moreno, Editor

Afro-Latinos face many challenges when it comes to identity, particularly when people refuse to believe that being Black and Latino aren’t mutually exclusive experiences.

The Latino identity denotes an ethnicity, which means that Latinos exist in every color and race imaginable — and explaining the difference between race and ethnicity can be quite a cumbersome task to take on on a daily basis. And yet, many Afro-Latinos are often forced to do so after being told they’re not “Latino enough” or being asked to choose between being Black and Latino.

While many Latino actors have been brutally honest about the limitations that come with working in a predominately white industry, Afro-Latino celebrities often face even tougher challenges in Hollywood and beyond.

Take a look at what Laz Alonso (“The Mysteries of Laura”), Tatyana Ali (“Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”) and more famous Afro-Latinos have said about being Black and Latino…

Read the entire article here.

A Brazilian Artist’s ‘Self-Portraits’ Explore The Beauty Of Interracial Identity

The Huffington Post
2016-06-17

Katherine Brooks, Senior Arts & Culture Editor

In honor of mestizaje, Adriana Varejão paints herself donning the markings and ornamentation of Native Americans.

In 1976, a Brazilian census asked citizens of the country — for the very first time — to describe and identify their own skin color.

This was a significant moment for the former European colony, now considered one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world, that’s historically struggled with discriminatory policies that disproportionately affect African descendants and interracial people. Though it may have been used for more nefarious purposes at the time, the census was a small step in affirming the many identities that exist in Brazil, wedged in the massive gap between black and white.

The survey produced over 130 different skin color descriptions, ranging from “Morena-roxa” (purplish-tan) to “Café-com-leite” (milky coffee) to “Queimada-de-sol” (sun-kissed). Fast forward a few decades, and Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão became transfixed with the multitude of colors expressed in the census, interested in the ways it illustrated — in sensual detail — the beauty of mestizaje, or the mixing of ancestries, in her home.

So in 2014, Varejão, who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, created “Polvo,” a series of self-portraits that explore the diversity of identity in Brazil using a paint palette inspired by the 1976 census. First, she mixed oil paints herself, reproducing colors like “Amarela-quemada” (burnt yellow or ochre) and “Paraíba” (like the color of marupa wood) as pigments. Then, she painted her own image, over and over, in a variety of browns, pinks, blacks and whites; a reflection of the many ways Brazilian self-definition takes form…

Read the entire article here.

Talking Race: Space and Body

The Bennington Free Press
Bennington College, Bennington College, Vermont
2016-05-26

Samantha Barnett ‘19

I constantly think about how I move through space, how I claim space, how being mixed race means not knowing how my body will be identified. I think about how the first thing that I do when I walk into a classroom is count how many people of color are in the room. I think about whether or not they will identify me as a person of color; I think about how the professor already has. I think about being in an anthropology class, the discussion for the day being on race, the class divided into groups– there is one person of color per group. We’re here to “explain race.” I think about walking through my common room one day and listening to two white students saying, “Why do we call people of color ‘people of color’? It’s stupid, what can we call them instead?”

One of the first things that I’ve learned as a student of color at Bennington is how to hear what I’m really being asked…

Read the entire article here.

Visible and Invisible Hapa Exhibit at Japanese American Museum San Jose

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2016-05-20

Grace Hwang Lynch

Bay Area people… there’s an exhibit about the history of hapa Japanese Americans at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose.

Titled Visible and Invisible, it’s similar to the exhibit of the same name at LA’s Japanese American National Museum, but this collection is unique and has many ties to the local area.

Curated by historical sociologist Cindy Nakashima and art professor Fred Liang, the small but significant collection shows the history of mixed-race Japanese Americans from the 1860s to the current day, when the majority of Japanese Americans are projected to be mixed-race by 2020. “The first Nisei was a hapa, for heaven’s sake!” says Nakashima, who also curated the 2013 Los Angeles exhibit with Lily Anne Yumi Welty and Duncan Ryuken Williams.

Read the entire article here.

Yara Shahidi, the Iranian-American Star of ‘Black-ish,’ Is Breaking Stereotypes On & Off Screen

Muftah
2016-06-03

Alex Shams

Over the last two years, the hit ABC sitcom “Black-ish” has deftly explored issues of race, class, and gender in the United States through the eyes of an upper-middle class, African-American family. The show has received rave reviews for portraying the unique struggles of the Johnson family, offering an incisive critique of racism in modern America without being too preachy.

What few people know, however, is that the role of Zoey, the Johnson’s eldest daughter, is played by a sixteen-year-old, Iranian-American actress. Born to an Iranian father, Afshin Shahidi, and a mother of mixed African-American and Native Choctaw heritage, Keri Salter, Yara Shahidi lived in Minneapolis before moving to California at a young age…

Read the entire article here.

Large Abroad | London poet laureate Raymond Antrobus staying true to Jamaican roots

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2016-06-13

Andre Poyser

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus continues to be in strong contention to be named Young Poet Laureate for London – a position awarded annually to a poet age 21-30 living in the United Kingdom capital.

Antrobus, a second-generation Jamaican born and bred in East London, has been redefining what it means to be a poet in the 21st century through monologues, which Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes describes as stunning studies of voice and substance.

While he only visits Jamaica occasionally, the young poet says he owes his graceful and finely crafted lyric poems, another characterisation penned by Dawes, to his Jamaican heritage…

Read the entire article here.

‘Breaking’ Presents: Xenia Rubinos, a Powerhose Singer/Songwriter Unafraid to Learn Out Loud

Colorlines
2016-06-10

Sameer Rao, Culture Reporter/Blogger

Xenia Rubinos in concert Photo: John Felix Shaw/Anti- Records

On her funky second album, “Black Terry Cat,” the genre-bender explores identity, police violence and the hidden labor of Latino/a restaurant workers.

For our latest Breaking, we’re highlighting singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos. The multi-instrumentalist, who hit the national scene with 2013’s “Magic Trix,” continues her personal and creative development on the funky, frenetic “Black Terry Cat.”

Hometown: Hartford, Connecticut

Based In: New York City

Sound: A chaotic mix of R&B, rock, hip-hop and jazz that underscores Rubinos’ robust mezzo-soprano. Her lyrics are sometimes wry, sometimes incorporating Spanish-language passages,

Why You Should Care: Depending on your background and worldview, Xenia Rubinos’ music sounds either like modern-day Latin pop, avant-garde R&B or a tapestry from an indie artist with too many influences to count. Either way, it sounds like nothing you’ve heard before—which, as she told us, is kind of the point.

…Juxtaposed, “Mexican Chef” and “Black Stars” speak volumes about the ongoing evolution of Rubios’ identity. While she identifies as Afro-Latina, she tells Colorlines that she does not identify as Black. “My family history is complicated, and I still don’t fully know the extent of it,” she says after describing her Black maternal great grandmother, her Puerto Rican family’s Taino heritage and her paternal grandfather’s emigration from Spain. “I started reading on the Afro-Latina diaspora two years ago, and I’m still ignorant to a lot of that, but I started seeing myself in that term. I explore the ‘Afro’ part of my cultural identity, and how I do or don’t fit into that, on ‘Black Terry Cat.'” She says that’s a big part of why hip-hop permeates this album…

Read the entire article here.