Mixed Race Studies

The Mix: Conversations with Artists…Between Races

Stage and Studio
KBOO FM, Portland, Oregon
Tuesday, 2018-03-20 19:00-19:30Z (11:00-11:30 Local Time)

Dmae Roberts, Host

“In The Mix: Conversations with Artists…Between Races” by Dmae Roberts is a radio exploration of Mixed Race. Through the voices of artists who have dedicated their lives to building bridges and bringing to light interracial issues and themes, Roberts takes us on a journey to understanding what means to be of Mixed Race.

You’ll hear Novelist Lisa See (Peony in love), Playwright Heather Raffo (9 Parts of Desire), Writer/Conceptual Artist damali ayo, Playwright Velina Hasu Houston, and three actors formerly from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Juan Rivera LaBron, Soneela Nankani and Joshua Wolf Coleman. For more info visit the Facebook page or go to MixedRaceWorld.org.

Associate producer is Sara Caswell and mix engineer is Clark Salisbury. Originally aired in 2008.

Funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

To listen to the interview, click here.

She’s Biracial, And It’s Not A Secret: Meet Duke Psychologist Sarah Gaither

The State of Things
WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio
2018-02-19

Amanda Magnus, Producer

Frank Stasio, Host

Sarah Gaither is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke, and a leading researcher in the field of biracial identity. Courtesy of Sarah Gaither

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic group in the country. The U.S. Census Bureau projects the nation’s multiracial population will triple by 2060, but not much research has been done on this group. Sarah Gaither is hoping to change that. She’s an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and she is also a biracial woman.

Listen to the interview (00:47:45) here.

National Park Service’s Betty Reid Soskin Publishes Memoir at 96

Forum
KQED Radio
San Francisco, California
2018-02-16

Mina Kim, Host

Betty Reid Soskin’s lectures at Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter Museum have garnered her national attention, including a visit with President Obama in 2015. Soskin’s talks reflect on the oft-overlooked African-American wartime experience and how opportunities for black women have changed throughout her lifetime. Now the 96-year-old has written a memoir, “Sign My Name to Freedom,” documenting her history as a political activist, musician and entrepreneur. A longtime resident of the East Bay, Soskin illustrates how the Bay Area laid the groundwork for the national civil rights movement.

Listen to the interview (00:34:56) here. Download the interview here.

Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy

Intersection
KBIA 91.3 FM
Columbia, Missouri
2018-02-06

Sara Shahriari, Abby Ivory-Ganja & Elena Rivera

This week on Intersection, we bring you excerpts from author Junot Díaz’s Jan. 22 talk at MU [University of Missouri].

Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer prize for his first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” He received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship and co-founded the Voices of Our National Arts Foundation, which holds workshops for writers of color. He is a professor of writing at MIT.

Díaz immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United State when he was six. In his literary work and activism, he tackles issues including immigration, assimilation and oppression.

His speech was part of the MU Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. event. During the talk, Díaz spoke about white supremacy, the role of artists and the lasting effects of slavery…

Read the story here. Listen to the speech (00:28:27) here.

Lena Horne Honored With A Stamp From the United States Postal Service

WBGO Journal
WBGO 88.3 FM
Newark, New Jersey
2018-01-30

Ang Santos

Lena Horne Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Lena Horne is remembered as an all-around entertainer, Hollywood actress, Grammy Award winning singer, and a Tony Award winning Broadway star. But equally important to her legacy was a willingness to use fame as a platform to promote Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Horne’s daughter Gail Lumet Buckley believes her mother would be proud to be put alongside the other members of the USPS Black Heritage Stamp Series.

Stamp photographer Christian Steiner, Horne’s daughter Gail Lumet Buckley (with family members), USPS Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman, and WBGO President Amy Niles shared personal memories and stories during the Lena Horne stamp unveiling. Credit Ang Santos / WBGO

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story (00:02:57) here.

Let’s Talk About Whiteness

On Being
2017-01-19

Krista Tippett, Host/Executive Producer

Eula Biss, Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Image by Ann Hamilton

Could we learn to talk about whiteness? The writer Eula Biss has been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — but also how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.

Listen to the interview (00:51:21) here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

The Mutating Immutable: Black, Mixed, Bi-Racial

iMiXWHATiLiKE!: Emancipatory Journalism and Broadcasting
2017-12-14

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

Panama Jackson of Very Smart Brothas joined us to discuss the shifting dynamics and politics around being “mixed” and “Black.”

The Concept of “Passing”…

Another View Radio Show
WHRV 89.5 FM
Norfolk, Virginia
2017-10-07

Barbara Hamm Lee, Executive Producer and Host

It’s a phenomenon unique to communities of color – those with very light skin “passing” for white, particularly for African Americans, during the Jim Crow era. On the next Another View we’ll talk with Donna Drew Sawyer, author of Provenance: A Novel, about what happens in the life of a fictional character who passes for white; and historian Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander who shares the history of this practice.

Download the interview (01:00:00) here.

Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken

The New Book Network
2017-02-04

Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press 2015)

“There were black Germans?”

My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and sometimes earlier), and that this community has at times had an influence on German culture, society, and racial thinking that belied its small size.

Germany’s role in colonizing Africa has received increased attention lately, with an exhibit on German colonialism appearing at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in October and recent headway on a deal for Germany to pay reparations to the descendants of Herero and Nama genocide victims in Namibia. In Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Disapora Community, 1884-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken supply a part of the colonial story that gets even less attention than that of Germans in Africa: what about Africans in Germany? Focusing primarily on a community of West-African-born black Germans and their families, Rosenhaft and Aitken trace the groups evolution in the nineteenth century through its persecutions by the Nazi state and postwar existence.

Download the interview (00:25:27) here.

WSW: Crispus Attucks And A “Blank Slate” In History

WestSouthwest
WMUK 102.1 FM
Information + Inspiration for Southwest Michigan from Western Michigan University

Gordon Evans, Host

First Marty of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory
Credit Oxford University Press

Western Michigan University History Professor Mitch Kachun says his book is about Crispus Attucks, one of the men, killed at the Boston Massacre in 1770. But he says First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory also raises questions about who’s included in history, and who is ignored.

Attucks himself was ignored for long periods of American history. Kachun says while the Boston Massacre was remembered in the 1770’s into the 1780’s, those killed were rarely mentioned by name. But Kachun says around the time of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, more attention was paid to the role of the working class in the American Revolution. Then as the anti-slavery movement became more active, the story of the mixed-race man killed in 1770 was told more often. By the end of the 1840’s and in the 1850’s, Kachun says Attucks was often referred to as a figure in the Revolution.

If Attucks had not been mixed race, Kachun says his name may not have come so much over time. He says that very few people can name any of the others killed at the Boston Massacre. Kachun says Attucks was identified as mixed-race or “mulatto,” but the initial newspaper accounts and the coroner’s report identified him as “Michael Johnson.” Kachun says that had led to theories that Crispus Attucks was hiding his identity because he had escaped slavery in 1750. But Kachun says there is no evidence to support that claim…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:29:27) here.