Mixed Race Studies

A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

Amazon Crossing
2020-03-01
304 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1542017077
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1542016704
Audio CD ISBN: 978-1799726296

Jason Diakité

Rachel Willson-Broyles (Translator)

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history―from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds―part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.

What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.

“Black is Polish”: young black Poles create platform to discuss race in Poland

Notes From Poland
2021-06-23

Zula Rabikowska

A year ago, an image of a black Polish girl protesting at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Warsaw helped to rekindle a long-running debate about language, racial identity and stereotypes in Poland. “Stop calling me Murzyn”, read her placard, referring to a Polish term for a black person that many say has come to hold pejorative meaning.

The Council for the Polish Language agreed with them in a recent declaration, saying that the word “Murzyn” “should be avoided in the media, official administration and at schools,” as it is no longer neutral, but “burdened with negative connotations”.

The #dontcallmemurzyn campaign, set up to fight against racial discrimination in the aftermath of the controversy, received domestic and international attention. To continue and broaden the movement’s work, its creators have now set up an educational platform called “Black is Polish”.

They say they hope to make racism a topic people understand and care about, to fight against what they see as deeply entrenched racism and inequality, and to bring about a long-needed transformation of Polish society…

Read the entire article here.

The Films of Branwen Okpako: CfP for a GSA Panel Series

DEFA Film Library

January 2022

We invite contributions for a series of panels on Branwen Okpako’s films, for the 2022 GSA conference, September 15-18, 2022. Co-sponsored by the Black German Heritage & Research Association (BGHRA) and the DEFA Film Library, these panels seek to explore the range of stories and rich imagery in the films of this groundbreaking director.

The deadline for submission is 2022-02-28.

Relevant topics might include:

• Afro-Germanness and Afro-German creativity and artistic production;
• Form, filmmaking, and aesthetics;
• Postcolonial and feminist consciousness at the intersections of multiple cultural and familial
• traditions, norms, values;
• Regimes of the body; femininity and gender;
• Engagement with disciplinary regimes, e.g. the police, political regimes, or language;
• German reunification and its repercussion on discourses of racialization, positionality and representation in Europe and Germany;
• Family his- and herstories;
• Affiliation and belonging;
• Political activism and self-empowerment; and
• The reception of Branwen Okpako’s films.

For more information, click here.

Poland’s multicultural music landscape: from Afro-Polish folk to Polish jazz from Peru

Notes From Poland
2022-02-17

Zula Rabikowska

Poland is often depicted as an ethnically homogeneous country, and in some senses it is. Contemporary Polish identity, however, is more complex and diverse than is often represented in the media, and the markers of Polishness are changing.

Historically, Poland was a multicultural country, with a third of its population composed of minorities. That rich legacy is still reflected in contemporary culture, from food to literature and art.

Though the death, destruction and displacement of World War Two ended that ethnic diversity, the postwar era was marked by migrations from fellow communist countries, in particular Vietnam. And in recent years, Poland has recorded one of Europe’s highest rates of immigration…

Read the entire article here.

Moses Roper: the fugitive from slavery cast aside by British abolitionists

The Guardian
2022-02-16

Mark Brown, North of England correspondent

Historians argue Roper’s story could have helped end US slavery earlier but supporters turned on him

In his day, the 19th-century fugitive from slavery Moses Roper was a well-known public figure who toured Britain and Ireland telling gripped and shocked audiences about his horrific experiences in Florida.

Today he is largely overlooked but, two Newcastle University academics argue, the important story of this fascinating man represents a “lost opportunity” for the British abolition movement to have helped end slavery in the US earlier.

Bruce Baker, a reader in American history, said it was surprising how little attention had been paid to Roper, given he was a pioneer. “Historians haven’t really paid a lot of attention to Roper, even though he was the first fugitive slave to lecture in the cause of abolition in Britain and Ireland.”

Baker and his colleague Fionnghuala Sweeney, a reader in American and Black Atlantic Literatures, have now published a paper in an academic journal and are working on a full biography of Roper. They aim to rescue him from obscurity, painting a picture of a radical, driven man ruined by the British abolition movement that turned against him.

Roper fled enslavement in Florida in 1834 and, fearing for his safety, made his way to Britain, where he was supported by churchmen and abolitionists. They helped fund his education and in 1837 he published the first edition of his Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery…

Read the entire article here.

‘I am not a beggar’: Moses Roper, Black Witness and the Lost Opportunity of British Abolitionism

Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Published online 2022-02-09
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2022.2027656

Fionnghuala Sweeney, Reader in American and Black Atlantic Literatures
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Bruce E. Baker, Historian
Paxton, Scotland, United Kingdom

Scholars have long known the Narrative of North Carolina writer and activist Moses Roper, first published in London in 1837. This article uses newly discovered sources and the multiple editions of the Narrative to reconstitute the biography of this first fugitive slave abolitionist to lecture in Ireland and Britain. It explores Roper’s interactions with British abolitionists, especially prominent Baptist ministers Francis A. Cox and Thomas Price. Roper’s indisputable witness to the horrors of American slavery played a crucial role in refocusing British and Irish attention from the completed task of West Indian emancipation to the looming work yet to be done in the United States. Supporting Roper’s independence, in both his campaigning and his creation of his own British family, proved too much for the British abolitionist establishment, resulting in Roper being cast out and a major opportunity to lead on matters of transatlantic moral consequence lost. More significantly, African American voice was denied its authority and a platform from which to speak.

Read the entire article here.

Afro Germany – being black and German | DW Documentary

DW Documentary
2017-03-29

Black and German: news anchor Jana Pareigis has spent her entire life being asked about her skin color and afro hair. What is it like to be Black in Germany? What needs to change?

In our documentary “Afro Germany”, Pareigis travels through Germany to speak with other black Germans, including rap and hip hop artists and pro footballers, and find out what their experiences of racism in Germany have been. “Where are you from?” Afro-German journalist Jana Pareigis has heard that question since her early childhood. And she’s not alone. Black people have been living in Germany for around 400 years, and today there are an estimated one million Germans with dark skin. But they still get asked the often latently racist question, “Where are you from?” Jana Pareigis is familiar with the undercurrents of racism in the western world. When she was a child, the Afro-German TV presenter also thought her skin color was a disadvantage. “When I was young, I wanted to be white,” she says. Pareigis takes us on a trip through Germany from its colonial past up to the present day, visiting other Black Germans to talk about their experiences. They include German rapper and hip hop artist Samy Deluxe, pro footballer Gerald Asamoah and Theodor Michael, who lived as a Black man in the Third Reich. They talk about what it’s like to be Black in Germany.

Taffy Abel medaled in the 1924 Olympics. Few knew of his Indigenous heritage

National Public Radio
2022-02-07

Troy Oppie, Host/Reporter
Boise State Public Radio, Boise, Idaho

At the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, about two dozen American dignitaries and athletes trudged through snowy streets in the opening parade. The American flag – then with just 48 stars – was carried by hockey player Clarence “Taffy” Abel.

What few outside his family and close friends knew at that time: Taffy Abel was Native American – the first Indigenous athlete to carry the flag at the Olympics. Within days he’d become the first Native American to win a medal in winter games history.

“A Native American, carrying our stars and stripes, nearly 100 years ago,” reflects George Jones, Abel’s 73-year-old nephew by marriage. His voice quivered with pride as he spoke of that moment.

Family stories passed down tell how Abel, his sister Gertrude, and his mother Charlotte – a Canadian Chippewa (now called Ojibwe) – all passed themselves off as white, mostly by not talking about it.

“The main thing that they were fearful of,” says Jones, “[was] that Taffy and his sister would be taken away to an Indian residential school.”…

Read the entire story here.

The Forgotten Story of Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert

Bacchus Tales & Co.
August 2017

J. C. Phillips, Co-Founder, Publisher, Writer

Charles Lucien Lambert ​Sr.

The story of this brilliant, sometime forgotten, underrated composer can date back to the ugly history of racial discrimination in the United States. His family’s sojourner led this brilliant man to work and strive in his chosen profession. It was that sacrifice of his father that made that opportunity possible…

Read the entire article here.

Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

The Atlantic
2022-02-03

Adam Serwer, Staff Writer

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks…

Read the entire article here.