Mixed Race Studies

Dr. Yaba Blay on shifting the lens on race

Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane
WHYY 90.9 FM
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2013-10-30

Who is black? And who is not? “Mixed/Jamerian,” “Black/Latina,” “Appalachian African American” are examples of how some people of color describe themselves. Drexel University Africana Studies professor Dr. Yaba Blay explores the nuances of the politics of racial identity and hair and skin color. Her work sheds light on the legacy of the outdated “one-drop” law – that if a person had a drop of black blood, they would be forever identified as black. Through interviews and research, she shows the diversity of the many ways bi-racial and multi-racial people self-identify. Her new portrait essay book is “(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race.”

Download the episode here.

Playwright Sarah Rutherford on her play Adult Supervision

TheatreVOICE
Department of Theatre & Performance
Victoria and Albert Museum
2013-10-22

Heather Neill

Interview: Sarah Rutherford

The playwright talks to Heather Neill about her new drama, Adult Supervision, a story about race which is currently playing at the Park Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park in Jez Bond’s production. Recorded at the Park Theatre, 16 October 2013.

Listen to the interview here.

Holding Onto The Other Half Of ‘Mixed-Race’

the race card project: six word essays
Morning Edition
National Public Radio
2013-10-14

Steve Inskeep, Host

NPR continues a series of conversations about The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into those six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition.

Again and again, The Race Card Project receives submissions dealing with mixed-race identity; from a child of a mixed-race union, from a parent of mixed-race children or from someone who is trying to figure out how to identify a mixed-race student or colleague, for example.

Those kinds of stories are the largest single category of six-word submissions the Race Card Project receives, says Michele Norris, who curates the project. Many of these entries have a lot to do with labels and identity.

Wilma Stordahl, a Seattle resident who’s an account manager for a national landscape company, offered one such submission: “Norwegian with Nappy Hair Doesn’t Fit.“…

Read the article here. Listen to the story here. Read the transcript here.

The Chinese in Mexico: No Longer a Forgotten History

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-10-09, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Professor Robert Chao Romero. With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies. He considers himself fortunate to be able to study himself for a living and his research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States. He is also interested in the role played by religion in social activism.

His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico.  The Chinese in Mexico received a Latino Studies Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Romero received his J. D. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA.  

When he is not a professor, he is a pastor and director of Christian Students of Conscience, an organization which trains and mobilizes students in issues of race and social justice from a faith-based perspective.  He is also the author of Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity (October 2013).

“Slavery, Freedom and Reunion in a Colonial Connecticut Town” with Grant Hayter-Menzies, Daryl D’Angelo and Donald Roddy

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-10-03, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-10-04, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

In June 1759, Norwich, Connecticut businessman Benajah Bushnell sold Guy Drock, a slave of African ancestry, to Sarah Powers, the Caucasian woman Drock had possibly married. Ironically, this deed freed Drock from Bushnell’s control but not from slavery. In March 2012, descendants of Guy and Sarah Drock and of Benajah Bushnell came together in Norwich for the first time in over two centuries. Drock descendants Daryl D’Angelo and Donald Roddy—who when they began their research years earlier did not know they had African ancestry, and Bushnell descendant Grant Hayter-Menzies—who thought only his Southern ancestors were slave owners—met to try to understand a legacy they did not know they shared. In the town where their past began, they sought to explore the personal impact of their ancestors’ intertwined histories, how the past has shaped them, their research and their interactions with one another today, and the relatively unknown institution of slavery in early New England.

• Grant Hayter-Menzies is an internationally published biographer and journalist .
• Daryl D’Angelo is a wife and mother, photographer and writer, and lives in a small town [Amherst] in southern New Hampshire.
• Donald Roddy is a 78 year old retired Airline Pilot.

For more information, click here.

“The United States of the United Races” w/ Dr. Greg Carter

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-09-25, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Professor Greg Carter, author of The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. Professor Carter currently serves as the Associate Professor, Department of History at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin where he received his Ph.D. in 2007.

Besides receiving several prestigious awards including, the Graduate School Research Council Award (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 2009) and the Campus Reading Seminar Award (University of Wisconsin System Institute for Race and Ethnicity 2008), Professor Carter is teaching some of the coolest courses in a college setting. He continues to present some very intriguing discussions that explore the mixed race experience in media and he does this while remaining involved in the History Caucus, Minority Scholars Committee and several other committees which he actually chairs.

“Each of the seven chapters in The United States of the United Races explores how tensions in our history have revised themselves in every period since the early republic. This book presents the career of an idea through time more so than the biographies of particular writers, orators, or activists. This unified approach shows that in every period, an optimistic stance has been as central to the American conversation on race as the pessimist. Because antipathy towards mixture is so established, and because they have no formal connection to predecessors, each critic of the dominant position must re-create the position in new ways.”

Today, we will discuss Professor’s Carter’s book,  The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing and engage our listeners in a discussion centered on the history of positive ideas about racial mixing in the U.S. as well as Critical Mixed Race Studies as a field.

Sugar Pie DeSanto: After 50 Years, ‘Go Going’ Strong

Fresh Air from WHYY [Philadelphia]
National Public Radio
2010-07-29

Terry Gross, Host

Ed Ward, Rock Music Commentator

Ace Records

Sugar Pie DeSanto was born in Brooklyn in October 1935, and was christened Umpeleya Marsema Balinton. Her father was Filipino, her mother African-American. Her mother had been a concert pianist, but DeSanto says her father couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. He moved the family to San Francisco when Peliya, as they called her, was 4, and soon enough, the young girl discovered dancing and singing and made a fast friend with a neighbor named Jamesetta Hawkins, who was a member of a girl gang called the Lucky 20’s.

Hawkins wound up in jail for her gang activities, and when she got out, she formed a singing group with one of Peliya’s younger sisters. Peliya looked on in envy as Hawkins was discovered by bandleader Johnny Otis and re-christened Etta James. She started entering talent contests in San Francisco, and won so often, they told her to stop entering. At another talent contest in L.A., Otis saw her again and offered to record her. He made good on his offer, and gave her a stage name, too: Little Miss Sugar Pie…

Read the story here. Listen to the story here. Read the transcript here.

The Essential Barack Obama

Random House
2008-03-10
Abridged Compact Disc
ISBN: 978-0-7393-7594-5

Barack Obama, President of the United States

A CD collection featuring the best-selling audiobooks, The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father from Grammy^® award-winning author, Barack Obama.

The Audacity of Hope

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the audacity of hope.”

Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics–a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces–from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media–that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.

At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy–where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.

A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes–“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

Dreams from My Father

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

Black Coral: A Daughter’s Apology To Her Asian Island Mother

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-09-05, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-09-06, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

C. D. Holmes-Miller, Clergywoman, Theologian, Designer, Author

Mother with Clergywoman, Theologian, Communications Designer and author, The Rt. Reverend Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller aka Bishop Miller, M.S., MDiv.

She tells of her tumultuous, emotional teen agony of trying to accept her multiracial, multiethnic family as they struggle to fit in a “one box, one drop” racial category of being Negroes. Her coming of age story during the Civil Rights Movement leads to her back to the future 21st century revelations of her true heritage. Once taboo, her story is vogue and trending…her memoir is  a genuine catalyst for talking about race and culture, and those discussions start within the context of our families. She is the Senior Minister of The North Stamford Congregational Church in Stamford, Connecticut.

For more information, click here.

Mixed People: “Natural Bridges” to Racial Healing & Utopia?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-09-04, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Rainier Spencer, Senior Advisor to the President; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies; Founder and Director of the Afro-American Studies Program
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Rainier Spencer, Professor of Afro-American Studies in the Interdisciplinary Degrees Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He has authored three books: 1) Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Lynne Rienner, 2011; 2) Challenging Multiracial Identity, Lynne Rienner, 2006 and; 3) Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Westview, 1999.  All this and he currently serves as Senior Advisor to the UNLV President.

Dr. Spencer is the founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at UNLV and is considered one of the founders of the field of critical mixed-race theory. While his research interest is in multiracial identity from the perspective of racial skepticism, including the ways that multiracial identity is implicated in the reification of biological race his interdisciplinary teaching interests include Afro-American history and popular culture as well as American slavery. In addition to writing numerous anthology chapters in this field of study, Rainier Spencer has been interviewed by and has provided commentary for the New York Times, has appeared on both American & Canadian television to discuss mixed-race identity, and is a featured speaker in the documentary film Multiracial Identity (Abacus Productions, 2010).

Using his book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix as the foundation for today’s episode, we will discuss the long held view that mixed race people are somehow supposed to serve as a bridge to unite all people,

“But what of the notion that black/white persons are in themselves natural bridges for the facilitation of racial healing and reconciliation? It should come as no surprise that this is a biological argument dressed up in sociological attire.” —Rainier Spencer

For more information, click here.