Mixed Race Studies

High Yellow (1965, trailer) [Starring Cynthia Hull]

YouTube
Department of Afro-American Research Arts Culture
2017-06-29

Cynthia Wood, a light-skinned 17-year-old girl, tries to pass as white after getting hired by wealthy movie magnate Mr. Langley, who has problems with his spoiled wife and promiscuous teenage daughter and son.

Watch the full movie (01:20:11) here.

Permanent marker: Augusta plaque honors 19th century Black female millionaire

The Augusta Chronicle
Augusta, Georgia
2021-05-21

Joe Hotchkiss

Corey Rogers (center), historian at the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, and Elyse Butler (second from left), marker manager for the Georgia Historical Society, unveil the marker at 448 Telfair St. in Augusta commemorating the former home of Black millionaire Amanda America Dickson Toomer. At far left is building owner John Hock, who funded and supervised the home’s exterior renovations. Rogers (center), historian at the Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, and Elyse Butler (second from left), marker manager for the Georgia Historical Society, unveil the marker at 448 Telfair St. in Augusta commemorating the former home of Black millionaire Amanda America Dickson Toomer. At far left is building owner John Hock, who funded and supervised the home’s exterior renovations. JOE HOTCHKISS/THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

Harrell Lawson grew up in Hancock County in the 1960s, listening to tales about the old plantation across the road.

“I used to hear stories about how a Black woman used to own it, but I didn’t know my relation to her at the time,” he said.

More people know now. On Friday, a Georgia historical marker was unveiled in downtown Augusta to mark the home at 448 Telfair St. where Amanda America Dickson Toomer – perhaps the richest Black woman of the 19th century – spent the last seven years of her life.

Lawson, who maintains homes in Stone Mountain and Sparta, joined about a dozen other Toomer descendants at the marker ceremony in front of a renovated exterior that took months for John Hock, the house’s owner, to complete with a team of subcontractors.

While the outside has been repainted, refitted and repaired to match its original appearance, the inside has more modern features and will continue to be used as an attorney’s office.

“This whole project was to commemorate the life of Amanda, and I think we did it,” Hock said…

…Who was Amanda America Dickson Toomer?

Dickson was born in 1849 to prominent Hancock County plantation owner David Dickson and a 12-year-old slave. Legally a slave owned by her white grandmother, the biracial child was reared in her father’s household. She learned to read and write, and assumed the social graces of white Southern affluence.

When David Dickson died in 1885, he willed to Amanda 15,000 acres of land and about $500,000, which Amanda’s biographer Dr. Kent Anderson Leslie said equals more than $3 million today. Other modern estimates place the amount even higher.

Scores of Dickson’s white relatives emerged to contest the will, outraged at the prospect of a biracial, legally illegitimate woman inheriting such immense wealth in the post-Civil War South. But Leslie said at the ceremony Friday that the young heiress had a plan…

Read the entire article here.

The Racism of the Great Outdoors

The Washington Post Magazine
2021-05-19

By Ikya Kandula
Photos by Bill O’Leary

Gabrielle Dickerson, a member of Brown Girls Climb, along the Northwest Branch Trail in Silver Spring.

Hikers and climbers of color face a host of obstacles, from bigoted route names to Confederate flags. This D.C.-based group is trying to change that.

Five years ago, Gabrielle Dickerson, then a sophomore at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, lay awake in her sleeping bag on her first overnight climbing trip, enveloped by the woods of the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve near Fayetteville, W.Va. Like many rock climbers in the D.C. area, she’d been drawn to the New, as outdoor enthusiasts call it — a five-hour road trip from Washington — because it offers 1,400 of the best climbing routes in the United States.

The rest of her group had swiftly fallen asleep after a day of projecting — the process of strategizing about, and eventually completing, a climb with no breaks — but apprehension took hold of Dickerson. “I was very aware of how uncomfortable I was in the backcountry of West Virginia,” Dickerson recalls. “Not only because I was a Black woman, but also because of the relationship and trauma my ancestors had with the woods.” Her grandfather had been born on a North Carolina cotton farm in 1930 and picked cotton until he escaped from the owner in his teens. On his way to Philadelphia and a new life, he witnessed his best friend get lynched in the woods…

…Brown Girls Climb was launched in 2016 by Bethany Lebewitz, a biracial climber living in Austin. A year later, when Lebewitz moved to D.C., she met outdoor instructor Brittany Leavitt, and together with Monserrat Alvarez Matehuala, Laura Edmondson, Sasha McGhee, and Jael Berger, they built an infrastructure of meetups for Black and Brown women in climbing gyms and at outdoor spots in the Washington region. “I was just floored by the fact that there was this large group of people of color climbing,” Dickerson says of her first Brown Girls Climb meetup, “because that wasn’t like what I had seen when I went to my climbing sessions at the gym, and definitely not when I was climbing outside.”…

Read the entire article here.

“I See Me with Rebecca Carroll”

Black America
CUNY TV, New York, New York
2021-02-08

Carol Jenkins, Hosts

Rebecca Carroll talks with us about her latest book, “Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir” that walks us through her struggle with race and identity as she navigates life in a white world.

Black America is an in-depth conversation that explores what it means to be Black in America. The show profiles Black activists, academics, business leaders, sports figures, elected officials, artists and writers to gauge this experience in a time of both turbulence and breakthroughs.

Black America is hosted by Carol Jenkins, Emmy award winning New York City journalist, and founding president of The Women’s Media Center.

Rebecca Carroll: “Surviving the White Gaze” & Transracial Adoption | The Daily Social Distancing Show

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
2021-03-17

Rebecca Carroll discusses her new memoir that examines transracial adoption and forging her own Black identity.

Watch the video here.

CMRS Book Talk With Dr. Jasmine Mitchell

Critical Mixed Race Studies
2021-03-08

We’re happy to announce that our first book talk with Dr. Jasmine Mitchell on Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media is available for you to view on our website and YouTube.

Also, keep a look out for the details of our upcoming book talks! We’ve lined up a couple of recently released books that you’ll love…

Our next one will be with some of the authors from Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education: Contesting Knowledge, Honoring Voice, and Innovating Practice, edited by Drs. Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero and Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe.

Afterwards, we’ll talk with Drs. Chinelo L. Njaka and Jennifer Patrice Sims on their book, Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future.

How one woman discovered her true cultural heritage

BBC News
2021-04-06

What would you do if you discovered one of your parents wasn’t who they said they were?

That’s what happened to Gail Lukasik who found out her mother had ‘passed’ as white to escape racial segregation in the US, in the early 20th Century.

She was, in fact, mixed race but had kept it secret all her life and made Gail promise to keep the secret until after she died.

Gail has turned her story into a book called White Like Her.

Video produced by Trystan Young.

Watch the video here.

Volunteers Needed for Research Study on Multiracial Women and the Law

Carnegie Mellon University
2021-03-30

Julie Mi-Yeong Kidder, Doctoral Student, Instructor of First Year Writing
Rhetoric Program, Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Do you identify as a multiracial woman who works in the law? Are you interested in participating in a research study on racial and gender identity in the legal field?

Qualifications:

1. Are at least 18 years old
2. Identify as a woman
3. Identify as two or more races
4. Are actively working or studying in the legal field

1. Participation Involves One 45-90 minute interview over Zoom
2. There is no direct compensation for participation.
3. Participation is voluntary.

For any questions or to schedule your interview session, please email Julie Kidder, Principal Investigator.

T Book Club: A Discussion on “Passing”

T Magazine
The New York Times
2021-03-10, 00:00Z (2021-03-09, 19:00 EST; 2021-03-09, 16:00 PST)
This event begins at 2021-03-09, 19:00 Eastern Standard Time for viewers in North America.

Join T’s book club, which focuses on classic works of American literature, for a conversation on Nella Larsen’s “Passing” led by the novelist Brit Bennett.

The third title selected for T Magazine’s book club, Nella Larsen’s “Passing” (1929) tells the story of two old friends, both Black women, who reunite in 1920s Harlem, despite the fact that one of them is living as a white person. Critically acclaimed at the time of its publication, the novel captures the social anxieties that plagued America during the Great Migration and remains a resonant portrait of a fractured nation.

On March 9, watch a virtual discussion of the book, featuring the novelist Brit Bennett in conversation with T features director Thessaly La Force, that will address questions from readers. And, in the weeks leading up to the event, look for articles on “Passing” at tmagazine.com. We hope you’ll read along — and R.S.V.P. above.

For more information, click here.

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.