Mixed Race Studies

Daughter Discovers Father’s Black Lineage

National Public Radio
2007-10-02

Farai Chideya, Host

Famed literary critic Anatole Broyard carried a big secret most of his life. He was a black man passing as white. His daughter, Bliss Broyard, writes about how she learned of her father’s hidden life and explored her black ancestry in the memoir One Drop.

Anatole Broyard was one of the most respected literary critics. The late editor and columnist for the New York Times book review provided a lavish life for his family in New England, but he carried a secret so deep that he couldn’t tell his own children.

Now, his daughter Bliss Broyard has written the memoir “One Drop” about his life and her search for her family.

Bliss, welcome to the show.

Ms. BLISS BROYARD (Daughter of Anatole Broyard; Author, “One Drop”): Thanks, Farai, for having me.

CHIDEYA: So when your father was dying, you find out the big family secret: That your father is part-black. Your brother says, that’s all? What was your reaction?

Ms. BROYARD: Pretty much along the same lines. The afternoon that we found out, we had just witnessed my father suffering terrible pain. He was in the last stages of prostate cancer. So my mom took it upon herself to tell us because it seemed clear that my father wasn’t going to live very much longer.

So it seems, frankly, like not a big deal. And we had known about a secret for a couple of months, and I imagined that it was, you know, my dad had witnessed some horrible crime or incest or something. So the fact that it was just that he was part-black and we didn’t even realize or understand exactly why had it been a secret at all…

Listen to the interview here. Read the transcript here. Download the interview here.

What was it like raising three biracial children?

WBEZ 91.5
Chicago, Illinois
2015-03-06

Bill Healy

Rosa Ramirez was in basic training in the Army, when she came across a girl in her barracks with red hair and blue eyes. “What kind of blood do you have?” Ramirez asked her. “Do you see the world blue?”

Ramirez had gone to high school in Texas and spent time picking fruit in the fields of California. But when it came to race, she was clueless.

Ramirez tells her daughter, Judy, in this week’s StoryCorps, “In my hometown, it was Mexicans and whites. We didn’t have any idea about blacks or Germans or Italians.”

Rosa Ramirez served four years in the military before moving to Virginia, where she met her future husband. Her daughter asked what it was like when Rosa told her parents she wanted to marry a black man?…

Read the entire article here.

Box Marked Black + Futility of Nicknames

Stage and Studio with Dmae Roberts: The Best of Performing, Literary and Media Arts
KBOO 90.7 FM or KBOO.FM
Portland, Oregon
2015-02-24, 11:00-12:00 PST (Local Time)

Dmae Roberts, Host

Dmae spotlights two different writers: Damaris Webb who’s performing her autobiographical play The Box Marked Black about growing up mixed race and Matt Kolbet, a writer in Newberg who’s just published his debut novel The Futility of Nicknames which is inspired by some elements of his life but is an entirely fictional story. Two varied stories: one real, one imaginary on the next Stage & Studio.

Damaris Webb is a performer, director and teaching artist who recently (re) relocated to Portland, OR after 26 years making and producing work in New York City. Ms Webb holds her MFA from Naropa’s Contemporary Performance Program, and her BFA from NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing. Her original work is often seen in non-traditional performance venues such as late night parties, warehouses and church basements, it is sometimes epic and may involve zombies, superheroes or sock puppets. Recent projects include directing Rich Rubin’s “Cottonwood in the Flood” staged reading for the 2015 Fertile Ground. In Portland, she offers Contemplative Dance Practice through Be Space and is a coach for PlayWrite, Inc. For more info: www.DamarisWebb.com.

The Box Marked Black is a tender solo performance piece, tracing the experience of growing up mulatto in the pre-Huxtable era. With only Jenny Willis from The Jeffersons as a guide, our multi-disciplinary storyteller creates narrative from the perspective of both sides of her interracial family, embodying multiple characters, childhood memories (including a Roots sock puppet re-enactment) and fantasy…

For more information, click here. Download the episode (00:32:01) here.

One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’ To Confront Race And Identity In The U.S.

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2015-02-16

Jeff Lunden

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins may be only 30 years old, but he’s already compiled an impressive resume. His theatrical works, which look at race and identity in America, have been performed in New York and around the country. Last year, Jacobs-Jenkins won the best new American play Obie Award for two of his works, Appropriate and An Octoroon.

An Octoroon is currently playing at Theater for a New Audience in New York…

…Over the past five years, the young playwright has written a trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America. In Neighbors, a family of minstrels in blackface moves in next to a contemporary mixed-race family. In Appropriate, a white family discovers their dead father belonged to the KKK. His latest, An Octoroon, is a loose adaptation of a play written more than 150 years ago that deals with identity and race.

“They are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form,” he says. “And also, my obligation, as a human being with regards to any of these themes.”

It is Jacob-Jenkins’ self-examination that drove Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic for The New York Times, to rank An Octoroon on the top of his best pays list last year. He saw it at Soho Rep, a tiny off-Broadway theater.

“[Jacobs-Jenkins] starts off from self-consciousness, which you would think would be a crippling place for a playwright to begin,” Brantley says.”But his self-consciousness isn’t just particular; it’s national, it’s universal. And it’s the self-consciousness of realizing that we don’t have the vocabulary, the tools to discuss race.”

The play, based on a 1859 melodrama by the Irish-Anglo playwright Dion Boucicault, tells the story of a young man who’s about to inherit a plantation and falls in love with a woman who is an octoroon — seven-eighths white, one-eighth black.

Director Sarah Benson points out that, in the original, all the parts had to be played by white actors…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

The Garifuna Exodus

Latino USA
2015-01-23

Maria Hinojosa, Executive Producer & Anchor

Marlon Bishop, Producer

For centuries, the Garifuna people — descendents of both Africans and indigenous Arawak people from the Caribbean — have lived peacefully in seaside towns on the North Coast of Honduras. There’s always been a trickle of migration from the community to the United States – especially the Bronx, where the largest Garifuna community outside of Central America lives.

But starting last spring, the trickle of migrants became a flood. Hundreds of Garifuna from each town left, thousands all together, embarking on the dangerous journey through Central America and Mexico to the U.S. border. It was mostly mothers with small children. They showed up in places like the Bronx, seeking refuge with family members, wearing GPS ankle monitors placed on them by U.S. immigration officers who detained them. They await court dates in limbo, unsure if they will be forced to go back to the homes they fled…

Read the entire introduction and listen to the story here.

The gains and losses of racial “code switching”

KALW 91.7 FM
San Francisco, California
2015-01-27

Hana Baba, News Reporter/Host

On today’s episode of “Crosscurrents,” we are talking about identity. We have heard how people, whether intentionally or not, can “pass” as another race, just by the sound of their voice. Passing can also be a full-time, physical endeavor. The United States has a long history of African Americans who chose to live as white in their daily lives.

Stanford Professor Allyson Hobbs recently released a book covering this history, called A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Hobbs recently visited KALW, and I asked her to explain when and why this form of “code switching” was preferred.

ALLYSON HOBBS: Particularly during the Jim Crow era, which was the era of legalized segregation, there were many advantages to passing as white. … To pass as white meant to get a better job, it meant to live in a better neighborhood, being treated with much more respect and dignity than African Americans were often treated…

Listen to the interview here.

A Dialogue on Institutional Colorism and Moving Toward Healing with Dr. Yaba Blay

For Harriet
2015-01-28

Kimberly Foster, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher

For Harriet is nearly five years old, and I’ve learned there are a few topics that are sure to spark contentious debate. Colorism is one of them. Discussions on colorism provoke strong feelings in Black women, in particular, and it seems that rarely do the conversation’s participants walk away with a deeper understanding of the institutional consequences of colorism or the ways we can move forward in combatting them.

What Bill Duke’s Light Girls documentary sorely missed was the voice of a Black woman colorism scholar, so I felt compelled to speak with Dr. Yaba Blay about how we can have a more effective conversation on colorism in our attempts to heal. Dr. Blay is currently co-director and assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University. She’s the artistic director and producer of the (1)ne Drop Project, and she was a consulting producer for CNN’s Black in America 5.

Read her phenomenal book, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race…

Listen to the interview and read the transcript here.

Mixed Kids Roundtable: The Politics of Multiracialism and Identity

iMiXWHATiLiKE!: Emancipatory Journalism and Broadcasting
2015-01-23

Jared Ball, Host and Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

We were joined in this edition of iMiXWHATiLiKE! by a roundtable of panelists for a discussion of the politics of multiracialism and identity. Our guests included: Dr. Ralina Joseph, associate professor in UW’s Department of Communication and adjunct associate professor in the Departments of American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Her first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2012), critiques anti-Black racism in mixed-race African American representations in the decade leading up to Obama’s 2008 election; Dr. Darwin Fishman, Adjunct Professor at San Diego City College; and Ms. Lisa Fager, Professional agitator, Free Mind. Co-founder Industry Ears. Social market-er. HIV/AIDS Advocate. Indy Voter. Hip Hop. Black. White. Spook Who Sat By the Door. We talked about the film Dear White People and more generally about the history of multiracial identities and the politics of popular culture representation of those identities, and bunch more!

Have That Awkward Conversation About Race – And Yes, Whiteness Too

KUOW 94.9 FM
Seattle, Washington
2014-12-24

Jamala Henderson, Morning Newscaster/Reporter

Protests over high profile police shootings have renewed calls to discuss police treatment of African-Americans – and talk about race relations in general. But how do we have those difficult and often awkward conversations? KUOW’s Jamala Henderson put that question to University of Washington Professor Ralina Joseph. Highlights from the interview:

How do I talk about race with family and friends?

I tell them you need to just start talking. It needs to be a conversation about what does your family look like? What does your family talk about? What are the silences that you have? There’s not one simple answer. The answer is honestly engaging in dialog engaging in conversation.

What makes race so difficult to talk about?

Some people refuse to name people by race and ethnicity for example in thinking that that’s a progressive move that shows to them they’re colorblind and they’re above labeling people.

But I think that’s actually part of the problem. Pretending that people are all the same, that we don’t see difference, doesn’t actually make disproportionality go away. It just means that we don’t actually have the tools to be able to talk about describe race…

Read the interview here. Listen to the interview here.

What If Everything You Know About Race Is Wrong?

Texas Public Radio
San Antonio, Texas
2015-01-15

Jack Morgan, Arts and Culture Reporter

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

A one-woman show is coming to the Tobin Center and it’s probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s called “One Drop of Love.” starring Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

“How did you get mixed up with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?” I asked.

(Laughs) “I think I met Matt when I was about 12 and Ben when we started high school together,” DiGiovanni told me. “And we did theater—we had a very wonderful theater program at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. And these two guys are such wonderful human beings.”

A year ago, DiGiovanni first produced this one-woman show for a Master of Fine Arts degree thesis performance.

“Ben came and saw my thesis performance and just said afterwards ‘I think this is really great and important and I’d like to help you get it to a wider audience.’”

Matt Damon also saw it and agreed with his friend. Thus DiGiovanni’s tour was conceived. So exactly what is One Drop of Love? It’s talking about one of this country’s most difficult subjects: race.

“I never know what kinds of experiences the people in the audience have had with race and racism,” DiGiovanni explains.

The whole show revolves around this premise.

“I start off the show as the character from a 1790 census, on which there were only three racial categories.”

In her show, she goes around her audience, linking audience members to one of those racial categories.

Walking through an audience, she names them: “Okay, white…black…mulatto…Chinese? Yes, hello…quadroon…no, I see you! An Indian…”

It’s one part history, one part performance art.

“There are people who look at me and shake their head and say ‘no, that’s not what I am!’ Which is very much the point, because that’s how the census was counted until 1970. A census worker would just go around and guess the race of the person they were looking at.”

She says race, in a sense, isn’t even real…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:03:34) here.