Mixed Race Studies

A mixed-race German confronts white supremacists face-to-face, including the Klan

Public Radio International
2014-09-15

Leo Hornak, Producer

Susie Blair, Producer

Most people would probably run for shelter if confronted with death threats. But Mo Asumang had a different impulse: “I don’t want to hide — it’s not my nature.”

Asumang — who is half-German and half-Ghanaian — came into the public eye during the 1990s as one of the first black women on German television. More recently, the actress and presenter became the target of right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis simply for being a person of color on television.

One particularly jarring threat came via song — a track titled “This Bullet Is For You, Mo Asumang” by the German white-power band White Aryan Rebels.

“Of course I get emails from neo-Nazis, and they are really awful,” she says. “I don’t want to mention what they write.”

But instead of shying away from her attackers, Asumang decided to confront them directly. “I thought, ‘Who are these people? How do they react when they meet me?’” she says.

She filmed those confrontations as part of an upcoming documentary called “The Aryans.” The title references the attacks against her, which are based on her “non-Aryan” identity. But Aryan is a problematic title — one that Asumang says was co-opted by the Nazis to describe the “master race.” Historically, she says, it’s not a white identity at all…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview here.

Claude Haffner: “Black Here, White There” | “Footprints of My Other”

African Women in Cinema Blog
2012-03-15

Beti Ellerson, Director/Directrice
Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema

Interview with Claude Haffner and translation from French by Beti Ellerson, March 2012.

An interview with Franco-Congolese filmmaker Claude Haffner by Beti Ellerson regarding her documentary film, Footprints of My Other (2012)

Beti Ellerson: Claude, a moving autobiographical story about your place “in between”—black and white as a racial signifier, Africa and Europe—their contrasting beliefs and customs, class, status and gender—what you represent as an Alsatian and its contradictions as a Congolese. I also discern your need to redefine yourself in relationship to your father and mother—a liberation, as you call it, and finally as an expectant mother, your research on the formation of identity and how you will transmit your own multiple identity to your child with the hopes that she will be able to find, as you have between black and white, her own colour. Some reflections?

Claude Haffner: Initially, I wanted to make a film that focused solely on the diamond operations and the turmoil that I discovered the first time I went to the Congo. I saw the poverty in which my mother’s family lived, and I wanted to talk about this heartbreaking reality in a different manner than that presented by the media, that is to say without the tendency to dwell on the sordid side of life, which I hate. I looked for a way to educate and at the same time not bore the viewer, but also that he or she may be able to identify with the story, whether the person is black, white or any other colour of the rainbow. I knew that to bring it to the screen, I had to enter into the story. But I did not at all imagine that I would talk about myself, my history, my bi-raciality.

Then I contacted the South African producer/director Ramadan Suleman to propose the project. Ramadan read the draft and immediately called me back to say that he liked the idea a lot and he was prepared to produce the film, however he thought that I had to be more involved in it since it was my family, my country, my feelings; that this aspect should be more pronounced. So I added my individual history to the story.

But what is wonderful about the documentary is that no matter how much one may write and rewrite the script, at the end it is the characters and the scenes that are shot that will decide the final product. The issue of culture, of being mixed-race, the place between father and mother, the transmission of identity to the child, none of these themes were written. They emerged during the filming. I had not planned to talk about skin colour with my cousins for example. It’s what is called the “magic of the documentary.” At least that’s the way I love films and how I would like to make them. Not knowing everything in advance about how the film will look, not forcing situations in order to relate the story, but rather leaving room for unanticipated situations. The film should redefine itself as the shooting unfolds in the same way that the filmmaker redefines herself in relation to her initial idea and to her subject. This is evident in the fact that in 2004 I could not foresee that I would be expecting a child after having filmed in the Congo, and that I would actually include myself, while pregnant, during the scenes in Alsace. Somehow, the film helped me to define my identity and my place between Europe and Africa and to become aware of the richness that I possess to have come from a double culture or perhaps I should say, multiple…

Read the entire article here.

Black Dox: Father Figure

By Blacks: Canadian Black owned everything
2014-09-04

Nicole Franklin

Zun Lee

Father Figure – Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

Photographer: Zun Lee www.zunlee.com
IG, Facebook: zunleephoto
Twitter: @zunleephoto
Project Timeframe: September 2011 – present
Publisher/Contact/Pre-order: Ceibafoto LLC
Book Release: September 19, 2014.
Awards: Named on “PDN 30 2014,” Photo District News’ annual global list of 30 new and emerging photographers to watch.
Book Trailer: Father Figure – Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

Over the course of three years, photographer Zun Lee built trusted relationships with Black fathers from different walks of life. He witnessed intimate parenting scenarios that are often missing from the public realm and that he himself did not experience as a child. Deeply autobiographical, the book of photographs titled Father Figure – Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood connotes Mr. Lee’s attempt to deal with his own resentment toward his absent Black father.

Reportage photography has been one of our most valuable resources when it comes to examining the human race from the 19th century through today. Throughout history many have been intrigued by the story behind a single photograph—a captured frame of hope, despair, conflict or exhilaration. The instinct of many professional and amateur photographers to snap that split second of humanity has been a gift to all who seek a glimpse of the past. There is a stillness and an indelible command of focus that leaves an observer transfixed when a documentary image is the epitome of the perfect shot. Self-taught photographer Zun Lee has been on a lifelong quest looking for that perfect image—that loving father.

Lee, a Toronto-based physician and now self-described street photographer, was born in Germany but knew as a boy that his personal story was incomplete. He discovered early on that his upbringing to a Korean mother and father was not his true background. The real story: Lee’s Black father left his mother upon learning she was pregnant. The disclosure of this truth left Lee with a sense of loss and abandonment that stayed with him as an adult. In a search for the compassion of which he felt robbed, Lee and his camera sought out images of strong, involved and devoted fathers—Black fathers—who society has deemed nonexistent…

Read the entire article here.

Mothly Guest Author: Araújo, Emanoel

GAM – Global Art and the Museum
Karlsruhe, Germany
March 2009

This month it is a great pleasure for us to present as our fifth guest author Emanoel Araújo, founder of the Museu AfroBrasil, who was interviewed by Hans Belting on the occasion of the first GAM Platform in São Paulo in 2008. In this interview Araújo not only discusses the role of contemporary art in today’s Brazil, but also provides us a deep insight into the creation of this unique institution throughout the world.

The Museu AfroBrasil in São Paulo. A New Museum Concept

The Museu AfroBrasil was created by municipal decree on November 20, 2003—Black Awareness Day—in a ceremony attended by state representatives and the Afro-Brazilian community of São Paulo. On this occasion, the Governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alkmin, donated the Manoel da Nóbrega Pavilion, designed by the Architect Oscar Niemeyer, and located in the beautiful Ibirapuere Park, the city’s central park, to house the Museu AfroBrasil.

The museum opened on October 23, 2004 with Museu AfroBrasil: um Conceito em Perspectiva [Afro-Brazil Museum: a Concept in Perspective]. On November 20 of the same year, the exhibition Brasileiro, Brasileiros [Brazilian, Brazilians] was dedicated to the presence of the three races in Brazil. “Some people may not accept the idea of racial mixture that Brazil represents,” said Araújo, current director of the museum. The Museu AfroBrasil, as the visitor’s guide explains, “aims to tell an alternative Brazilian history. This means it has the complex task of deconstructing an image of the black population constructed from a historically inferior perspective, and of transforming it into a prestigious image founded on equality and belonging, so re-confirming a sense of respect for one of the founding populations of Brazil. […] In the 20th century the artistic division created by [… ] academic art widened. On [the other hand] there were distinguished Black artists who, because they were outside the canon of […] art, were considered merely talented craftsmen or, at most, ‘popular artists’– […] By putting these artists side-by-side the Museum would like to highlight the historical and ultimately arbitrary nature of this separation, and emphasize the intrinsic value of the works by Black artists for which these distinctions lose all meaning.”

Interview with Hans Belting

Hans Belting (H.B.): What is the role of contemporary art in Brazil today?

Emanoel Araújo (E.A.): I think it was important to create the Bienal de São Paulo to pull Brazil out of her cultural isolation faced by the hegemony of other countries. It was also important for Brazilian art to invite the Swiss artist Max Bill, and his Unidade Tri–Partida [Tripartite Unity] to the biennial in 1951, as his presence consolidated the Concretism movement. Currently, globalization meets with a certain commitment of the galleries and art fairs throughout the world; however, contemporary art in Brazil is marked by a discourse that is not necessarily comprehensible abroad, where the regime of international curators pursues other interests. Usually, artists in Brazil looked beyond borders and identified with the ‘established’, or the ‘civilized’, without paying tribute to their roots and to the fact that they mixed with others to become Brazilian. This type of anthropophagia led to a certain mystique without which all artistic expression on this side of the Atlantic would look like second class art…

…H.B.: How would you describe the relationship between the museum that you have founded and the community museums of the United States?

E.A.: I do not care for the community museums of the United States, and I am not even sure whether they exist. However, I should add that we are worlds apart from their racial problems. Our ethnic composition is rooted in Portuguese colonialism, and we are Catholic. The Portuguese, a people born out of many races, where ethnic mixing comes with enforced rule, are very different from the Calvinist protestant formation of the United States. Our colors, and there are many, were perversely created to allow for a system of racial democracy, where the white established a pact in the definition of race according to color. Brazil was not only a slave- driven society, but also the last country in the Americas to free its slaves on whose labor wealth was based. This labor was used to grow sugarcane, tobacco, coffee and to mine for gold and precious stones, and today Brazil has still not come to terms with the question of this slave-driven society. In the nineteenth century, when slavery was flourishing, some blacks were more important than they are today. There were Negro poets, journalists, jurists, physicians, editors, writers and engineers. Negroes were forgotten after slavery was abolished in 1888, with the military coup of the republic carried out by the land-owning elites, the oligarchies of Brazil. The exodus to the periphery of major towns and cities, and the lack of any formal education for the people made, and continues to make a very big difference between Brazil and the United States…

Read the entire interview here.

How the slave trade shaped the Baroque

The Art Newspaper
Focus, Issue 260, September 2014

Emanoel Araujo, Founder, Head Curator and Director
Museu AfroBrasil, São Paulo, Brazil

As Catholicism spread across the colonies, slaves and freedmen created a uniquely Brazilian style

The Baroque movement that spread across the Portuguese and Spanish colonies has been important to the Catholic hegemony of the New World since 1500. The image of the cross was used as a powerful symbol of evangelisation so that the work of the Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans and other religious brotherhoods and third orders could add European men and women, Indians and Africans to the Christian faith that developed as the glue binding a new era during the 17th and 18th centuries in Brazil.

Wild and tropical Brazil was the ideal environment for a new aesthetic, which was made a reality through the force of the colonisers and through slaves from West and Central Africa, who overflowed from the country’s sugar mills to the gold and diamond mines of Minas Gerais state.

Gold, frankincense and myrrh

Black and mixed-race slaves and freedmen were fundamental in the building of one of the richest periods in Brazilian art. In the midst of many disgraces, their vision shows the impact of miscegenation in the culture of the national Baroque.

The Baroque ideal meant the transformation in curves of the tenets of Classical art. It was the great spectacle of the forms of nature mixed with a strongly angled geometry in gold and white marble. Dark wood was put together with large panels of Portuguese blue tiles; ceilings were painted with illusionist paintings against a sensory backdrop of frankincense, myrrh and organ music.

Brazilian gold reached Portugal in tonnes, while the few bars remaining adorned the carvings of the altars of hundreds of churches, cathedrals and monasteries across the country. Artists, gilders, sculptors, woodcarvers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, cabinetmakers, carpenters and masons transformed humble chapels of rammed earth (taipa), made of wattle and daub (pau-a-pique), into monumental churches, convents and cathedrals with interiors covered in pure gold and sterling-silver devotions.

Much of this work was done by black and mixed-race slaves and freedmen, despite restrictions such as a decree banning African and African-Brazilian goldsmiths in 1621. This culminated in goldsmiths’ stalls being smashed in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia in 1766, although there are some examples of these decrees being dismissed…

Read the entire article here.

Belle: A Film That Defied Expectations

The Root
2014-08-24

Julie Walker

The film’s star and director talked to The Root about how an inspirational character helped shaped the movie, which is now out on DVD.

Actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who stars in the movie Belle—now out on DVD—grew up in England watching Jane Austen films but never imagined that she would play the lead in a period drama.

Those films, like the books they were based on, never had black or biracial heroines, but Belle does. The film was inspired by the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an enslaved African woman and an officer in the British Royal Navy. Belle was raised a free woman in 17th-century England.

The film opened in May to rave reviews and so far has grossed $10,722,990 (as of Aug. 24, 2014), according to Box Office Mojo. Not bad for a movie that only opened on four screens and had trouble getting made because of the subject matter.

The film’s star and director talked to The Root about how an inspirational character helped shaped the movie, which is now out on DVD.

Mbatha-Raw told The Root in May, before the film’s U.S. release, that she wanted young girls to be able to see themselves in Belle. “This is the first time I have seen a period drama with a biracial woman as the lead and it is told from a female British perspective,” said Mbatha-Raw, who has a white English mother and black South African father. “The film explores issues of identity, race, class and gender, which are very universal themes, but also the film is this sweeping love story. It is such a different perspective, and I think it is important to know as a biracial person myself.”…

…That director is Amma Asante, who is also British. She echoed the same sentiment when The Root spoke with her before the film’s U.S. premiere.

“There was a little girl who looked like me and you, who helped to change the course of our history. That’s a good thing; we can celebrate that,” Asante said.

It was the idea that a black woman would be the focus that drew Asante to the story. “I feel like it is essential to explore these stories because they are part of what makes us who we are today, and we are all responsible to own our history. We need to tell these stories,” said Asante, who signed on to the project in 2009…

Read the entire article here.

Chronicling Mississippi’s ‘Church Mothers,’ and Getting to Know a Grandmother

The New York Times
2014-08-29

Samuel G. Freedman, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University, New York

SUMNER, Miss. — Toward noon on a torrid Monday in the Mississippi Delta, Alysia Burton Steele drove down Highway 49, looking for the crossroads near the Old Antioch Baptist Church. There, at the corner of a road called Friendship, she turned into the African-American section of Sumner, a dwindling hamlet of about 300 that suffices as a county seat.

A photographer by training and a professor by title, Ms. Steele was headed for the homes of two older neighbors, Lela Bearden, 88, and Herma Mims Floyd. She was bringing the women legacies to inspect, legacies in the form of portraits and testimonies she had taken of them over the last few years.

Ms. Bearden and Ms. Floyd were part of a larger assemblage of 50 African-American women whom Ms. Steele had chosen to chronicle in text and image for a book-in-progress she has titled “Jewels in the Delta.”

Whether by formal investiture or informal acclamation, nearly all the women in the book held the title of “church mother,” a term of respect and homage in black Christianity. As lifelong residents of the Delta — the landscape of the blues bards Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the terrain of the civil rights crusaders Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer — the women had lived through segregation and struggle and liberation.

“I knew there were hard times,” said Ms. Steele, 44. “But I did not understand it. Just to hear the things they went through. That blacks couldn’t try on shoes in stores. That you couldn’t go to school if there was cotton to pick. The stories made me cry. They put a face on history for me. I felt like I got my private history lesson.”

In her work, Ms. Steele has attested to the worth of lives that Jim Crow meant to render worthless. At times, she has had to convince the church mothers themselves that their stories were significant enough to be part of a book…

…For Ms. Steele, such biography served a covertly personal purpose. The past for which she was searching in the Delta was that of her own grandmother, Althenia Burton.

As the daughter of a black father and white mother, who divorced when she was 3, Ms. Steele was raised by her paternal grandparents. While young Alysia cherished her grandmother, her Gram, she also bitterly resisted her. When her grandmother insisted on bringing Alysia to church, the girl poked holes in her tights in the futile attempt at an excuse to miss it. Even as Ms. Burton cultivated her granddaughter’s ambition for college, she dismissed her passion for photography with the pronouncement “Pick a real major.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Mother’s Love: Stories of Struggle, Sacrifice, Love and Wisdom

The Root
2014-05-11

Breanna Edwards

Journalist Alysia Steele’s explores the “jewels in the Mississippi Delta” who held it down for their families through decades of strife and racial struggle.

It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and many of us may feel the keen absence of the women who meant the most to us.

How many times have you wished you could turn back the hands of time and have one more conversation with one of the most influential women of your life? Maybe have notes of memorable anecdotes they shared?

This was one of Alysia Steele’s biggest regrets concerning her paternal grandmother, Althenia A. Burton, who died 20 years ago. Since then, the memory of her grandmother has stayed with Steele, never fading, and ultimately culminating in the conception of her current project, a book proposal, “Jewels in the Delta,” that has gained interest from publishers.

“I have a huge sense of regret that as a trained journalist I never had the foresight to get her story and I’ll never hear her voice again, and I can’t even tell you how much that hurts me,” Steele tells The Root.

Steele has interviewed about 47 women and is conducting the last of what will be a total of 50 interviews in the coming days. The project has taken her approximately 11 months to complete and countless hours of recording, transcribing, coaxing and traveling. It’s been hard work, to be sure, but to Steele the end goal has been more than worth it.

“How many of us stop and talk to our grandparents to get to their stories? To really ask them the questions that are hard?” she adds…

…In an excerpt from Steele’s book proposal, Virginia Hower, 93, shared how she “felt dirty” because of her ability to pass for white in a segregated society.

It was horror. You felt bad because you couldn’t be with your grandmother or your grandfather. You just accepted it. I couldn’t be with them because they were darker. Sometimes you felt bad because you could ride in a clean coach and just to think that your grandmother couldn’t kiss you as you stepped off the train. But they accepted it, so why not enjoy the clean train? And then when I got down on the streets, we all kiss and carry on. Those was happy moments. And then you got to thinkin’ how foolish this life is, how foolish. Then you got to thinkin’ about it and say take advantage of it and a lot of people down here in Clarksdale, they went to Chicago in ’41 and never revealed they were colored.

So many fascinating stories from unassuming women who had nothing but love for their respective husbands and children and who never really spoke about the troubles and trials they had endured…

Read the entire article here.

Steve Byrne: Irish-Korean American Writes About His Life for TV

CAAM (Center for Asian American Media)
2014-08-15

Dino-Ray Ramos

For three seasons on network TV, an Irish-Korean American comedian has been writing and starring in his own show, to little fanfare. Now, Steve Byrne of TBS’ Sullivan & Son shares how he nabbed a sitcom deal, what it’s like being mixed race in Hollywood, and writing his reality.

Byrne got his start in the comedy club scene in the Big Apple. If there is one date that Byrne remembers, it’s the date of his first stand-up gig. After finishing school in Ohio, he moved to New York City and crashed on his parents’ couch. While looking for a job, he stumbled upon the popular comedy club, Carolines. He would watch stand-up comedians on stage and thought it looked like fun. Four months later, on September 30, 1997, he tried it out and said he just knew right away that that’s what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

The season finale of Sullivan & Son airs Tuesday, August 19th on TBS with special guest star Margaret Cho. I had a chance to sit down with Byrne for an extensive chat about his show and about race in Hollywood.

Where did the idea of Sullivan & Son come from?
Vince (Vaughn) and I used to hike all the time. He said, “You should write some for yourself because your opportunities are limited given your background.” In Hollywood, I went for Asian roles but I wasn’t Asian enough and I’d go for white roles and wasn’t white enough.

I bought a bunch of books, I studied. About eight months later, I turned the script to Vince. He took a look at it and said it’s pretty good. We went to meet with some showrunners. I met with Rob Long and Peter Billingsley who work with Vince Vaughn. All of us have been pals for a long time. We finessed the script. Turned it from a diner into a bar, made it a thousand times funnier, and I think within a few months, we were making it…

Read the entire interview here.

Re:Membering (our memories our stories)

Hapa Happy Hour: A lively discussion and celebration of the mixed heritage experience.
2014-08-04

Hosts:

Rena Heinrich
Hiwa Bourne
Lisa Liang

The ladies talk about Lisa’s succesful one woman show: Alien CItizen: An Earth Odyssey! Recorded last year (July 2013).

Download the episode here.