Mixed Race Studies

Race In The Northwest: Hood River Man Learns His Family’s Surprising Truth

Oregon Public Broadcasting
2016-12-07

Anna Griffin, News Director

Hood River writer and cidermaker John Metta. Anna Griffin/OPB

Hood River, Oregon—John Metta grew up thinking of himself as mixed race: His mother was white. His father’s side of the family proudly proclaimed themselves a blend of African-American and Native American.

“Actually, I grew up always being the Indian kid at school,” he said. “I have pictures of myself in like fourth and fifth grade, and my hair was dead straight parted in the middle. I looked like the typical Native American.”

The family wasn’t entirely clear on where that Native American element entered the mix — someone at some point had spent time on the Seneca reservation in Western New York. Still, they embraced their native side…

…A few years ago, Metta’s sisters got curious about precisely which tribes and parts of the country their relatives came from. They asked an uncle to swab his cheek and had the sample tested. How much Native American blood did they find?…

Read the entire article here.

Patrick Wolfe: Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race

New Books Network
2016-11-07

Lynette Russell, Professor
Monash University, Australia

Aziz Rana, Professor of Law
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Widely known for his pioneering work in the field of settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe advanced the theory that settler colonialism was, “a structure, not an event.” In early 2016, Wolfe deepened this analysis through his most recent book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso Books, 2016) which takes a comparative approach to five cases in: Australia, Brazil, Europe, North America, and Palestine/Israel. Just as settler colonialism grew through institutionalized structures of Indigenous elimination, categorical notions of race grew through purpose-driven (and context-specific) exploitation, classification and separation. In Traces of History, the machinery and genealogy of race are as present in land relations as they are in legal precedents.

Wolfe ties together a transnational pattern of labor substitution and slavery, Indigenous land dispossession, and the inception of racial categories which continue to normalize these historical processes into the present. While the Indigenous/settler relationship is binary across societies, Wolfe posits, the seemingly fixed concepts of race it produces are, actually, widely varied. Bearing strong threads of influence by Said, DuBois, Marx, and countless Indigenous and Aboriginal scholars, Wolfe lays down a model for drawing connections across these cases, while simultaneously acknowledging that as with any ongoing process, there remain pathways for optimism and change.

Patrick Wolfe passed away in February 2016 shortly after the publication of Traces of History. The following interview is with Dr. Lynette Russell and Dr. Aziz Rana, two of Wolfe’s many colleagues and thought partners both impacted by and familiar with his work. Prompted by the release of Traces of History and Wolfe’s untimely passing soon after, the interview recorded here engages the book as a platform for broader discussion about the substance of Wolfe’s intellectual pursuits, integrity, commitments and the creativity and challenges borne of them…

Listen to the interview (00:48:39) here. Download the interview here.

Carina E. Ray: Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana [Interview]

New Books Network
2016-10-07

Dawne Curry, Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and empire in this thought-provoking study that challenges the notion of identity and the politics that surround it. Ray plumbs the depth of an array of archival material, which includes travel narratives, visual sources, administrative records, wills, and personal and official correspondence. She also conducted interviews to further piece together the inner lives of Africans and Europeans to show how interracial marriages and relationships evolved in Ghana. In a very compelling way, Ray deconstructs intersexual economies to show their linkages to the slave trade and beyond. Her opening vignette not only sets the stage for the themes she addresses to illustrate how Africans had agency even when it came to marrying across the color line. Shortlisted for the United Kingdom’s Fage and Oliver Prize and the winner of the American Historical Associations’s Wesley-Logan Prize for African Diaspora History, this groundbreaking book has set new standards for understanding race, its implementation and its interpretation not only in Africa but also around the world.

Listen to the interview (00:57:50) here. Download the interview here.

You took a DNA test and it says you are Native American. So what?

PRI’s The World
Public Radio International
2016-11-24

Andrea Crossan, Senior Producer
Boston, Massachusetts

Have you been tempted to try one of those genetic testing kits, like the ones sold by Ancestry.com or 23andme.com?

Maybe you’ve seen a commercial featuring Kim Trujillo.

In it, Trujillo talks about how she discovered she was part Native American.

So you get the kit, swab your mouth, mail it back and you find out you are Native American. Then what?…

Read the story here. Listen to the story (00:05:15) here. Download the story here.

Terry and Judy – A Mixed Race Journey

The listening project: It’s surprising what you hear when you listen
BBC Radio 4
2016-11-23, 10:55Z

Fi Glover, Presenter

Marya Burgess, Producer

Fi Glover introduces a conversation between a mixed race couple who met at a time when their relationship was a lot more unusual than it is today. Another in the series that proves it’s surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation – they’re not BBC interviews, and that’s an important difference – lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject.

Listen to the conversation here.

The Latinos Of Asia

Think
KERA
Dallas, Texas
2016-11-14

Krys Boyd, Host and Managing Editor

Filipino Americans are classified by the U.S. Census as Asian. But because of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, many Filipinos also feel part Latino. This hour, we’ll talk about how skin color, history and other factors contribute to cultural identity with sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo, author of “The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race” (Stanford University Press).

Download the episode (00:48:18) here.

Growing up Indigenous when you don’t look it

Unreserved
CBC Radio
2016-11-06

Rosanna Deerchild, Host

From r: Trevor Jang, Julie Daum, and Daniel Bear. (Supplied)

Has anyone ever asked you where you come from? Or what your ethnic background is?

Ethnicity and how the world perceives you don’t always go together. Which presents a challenge for a growing number of Indigenous people who might not look exactly like their ancestors.

This week on Unreserved we are speaking with several Indigenous Canadians who are not visibly Indigenous…

…”For young Indigenous people who don’t look Indigenous, they want to explore their culture but they don’t want to be judged … well what’s worse? Being judged or not having a culture?”…

Read the introduction here. Listen to the story (00:19:26) here.

TriPod Mythbusters: Quadroon Balls And Plaçage

Tripod
WWNO 89.9 FM
New Orleans, Louisiana
2016-09-22

Laine Kaplan-Levenson, Host

There is a common myth told about 19th-century New Orleans. It goes something like this: Imagine you’re in an elegant dance hall in New Orleans in the early 1800s. Looking around, you see a large group of white men and free women of color, who were at the time called quadroons, meaning they supposedly had ¼ African ancestry. The mothers play matchmakers, and introduce their daughters to these white men, who then ask their hand in a dance.

The ballroom is fancy, and the invited guests look the part. When a match is made, a contract is drawn up. The white man agrees to take care of the young woman and any children she may have with him. This arrangement was called “plaçage.”

Charles Chamberlain teaches history at the University of New Orleans. “Plaçage is defined historically as where a white man would basically have a relationship with a free woman of color where she would be kept, so that he would provide her with a house and some form of income so that she could maintain a lifestyle.”

What Chamberlain is describing is basically a common-law marriage. And those did happen. But the idea of Quadroon Balls is way sexier, which helps explain why they get talked about so much. French Quarter tour guides walk by the Bourbon Orleans hotel and talk about the famous quadroon balls that took place inside. But try to find proof of plaçage Chamberlain says, and it’s not there…

Listen to the story here.

Britain’s Black Past

BBC Radio 4
2016-10-03

The Invisible Presence

Professor Gretchen Gerzina explores a largely unknown past – the lives of black people who settled in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

She reveals a startling paradox – although Britain was at the heart of a thriving slave trade, it was still possible for many black people to live here in freedom and prosperity. A few even made it to the very top of fashionable society.

But there were others who were brought over by slave-owners from the West Indies and who were never free, despite living for the rest of their lives in Glasgow or Bristol or London. Some took the law into their own hands, and managed to free themselves, others went further and advocated violent revolution. Free or unfree, they all saw Britain as a place of opportunity that could become a home.

Over two weeks, Professor Gerzina travels across Britain and talks to historians, unearthing new evidence about Britain’s black past. From a country estate in Chepstow, via the docks of Liverpool, to grand houses in London and Bristol, she evokes the daily texture of black people’s lives.

In the first programme in the series, Professor Gerzina travels to Sunderland Point to discover a remote grave in the corner of a windswept field – a memorial to a young black cabin boy, abandoned on the coast by his slave-owning master. This poignant story sparks questions about how we remember black figures from the past.

Listen to the episode (00:13:15) here.

How do multiracial Asian people fit into discussions around race?

The Record
KUOW.org 94.9 FM | Seattle News & Information
2016-09-29

Caroline Chamberlain, Acquisitions Producer

Bill Radke, Host

Bill Radke sits down with Sharon H. Chang, author of “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World.”

She explains why it’s important to study the experiences of mixed race people and how it relates to our broader history of race in this country.

Listen to the interview (00:12:32) here.