Mixed Race Studies

The Third Musketeer

The New York Times
2012-09-14
 
Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus
Harvard University

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7.

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom ­Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography.

Despite Reiss’s extensive research, the count remains a somewhat remote figure, since his contemporaries usually described him in conventional superlatives. The chief source of information is a highly romanticized memoir by his son, who was not yet 4 when he died, and who idealized him, in Reiss’s words, as “the purest, noblest man who ever lived.” Still, such language seems deserved. General Dumas was majestically tall (“his proportions were those of a Greek hero”), a crack swordsman and horseman (“looking like a centaur”), utterly fearless, generous to subordinates and a loving husband and father. He was also exceptionally good-looking, though the portraits that survive are less spectacular than the majestic Adonis depicted in the book’s cover illustration.

Dumas was born in 1762 at the western end of Saint-Domingue, the colony that is now Haiti. Remarkably, the French Empire guaranteed protection and opportunities to people of mixed race, and when the boy’s father brought him to France at the age of 14 he was able to receive a first-rate education and later to join the army. He never cared much for his feckless father, however, and took the name Dumas from his slave mother, about whom very little is known…

Read the entire review here.

Stir Builds Over Actress to Portray Nina Simone

The New York Times
2012-09-12

Tanzina Vega

In the digital age Hollywood casting decisions leaked from behind closed doors can instantly become fodder for public debate. And when the decision involves race and celebrity, the debate can get very heated.

The online media world has been abuzz with criticism for nearly a month now over the news — first reported by The Hollywood Reporter — that the actress Zoe Saldana would be cast as the singer Nina Simone in the forthcoming film “Nina” based on her life.

Few have attacked Ms. Saldana for her virtues as an actress. Instead, much of the reaction has focused on whether Ms. Saldana was cast because she, unlike Simone, is light skinned and therefore a more palatable choice for the Hollywood film than a darker skinned actress.

“Hollywood and the media have a tendency to whitewash and lightwash a lot of stories, particularly when black actresses are concerned,” said Tiffani Jones, the founder of the blog Coffee Rhetoric. Ms. Jones wrote a blog post titled “(Mis)Casting Call: The Erasure of Nina Simone’s Image.”…

…Recently an online petition was circulated to protest the casting of the light-skinned actress Thandie Newton in the film based on Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Half of a Yellow Sun,” which centers on the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70); there was some criticism of the casting of the biracial Jaqueline Fleming as Harriet Tubman in the film “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”…

…Casting an actress who does not look like Simone is troubling, said Yaba Blay, a scholar of African and diaspora studies and the author of a forthcoming book called “(1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race, and Identity.”

“The power of her aesthetics was part of her power,” Dr. Blay said. “This was a woman who prevailed and triumphed despite her aesthetic.” Dark-skinned actresses, she added, are “already erased from the media, especially in the role of the ‘it girl’ or the love interest.”…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial and monoracial infant own-race face perception: an eye tracking study

Developmental Science
Published online: 2012-09-07
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01170.x

Sarah E. Gaither
Department of Psychology
Tufts University

Kristin Pauker, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii

Scott P. Johnson, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

We know that early experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing, but we know little about how infants learn to distinguish faces from different races, especially for non-Caucasian populations. Moreover, it is unknown whether differential processing of different race faces observed in typically studied monoracial infants extends to biracial infants as well. Thus, we investigated 3-month-old Caucasian, Asian and biracial (Caucasian-Asian) infants’ ability to distinguish Caucasian and Asian faces. Infants completed two within-subject, infant-controlled habituation sequences and test trials as an eye tracker recorded looking times and scanning patterns. Examination of individual differences revealed significant positive correlations between own-race novelty preference and scanning frequency between eye and mouth regions of own-race habituation stimuli for Caucasian and Asian infants, suggesting that facility in own-race face discrimination stems from active inspection of internal facial features in these groups. Biracial infants, however, showed the opposite effect: An ‘own-race’ novelty preference was associated with reduced scanning between eye and mouth regions of ‘own-race’ habituation stimuli, suggesting that biracial infants use a distinct approach to processing frequently encountered faces. Future directions for investigating face processing development in biracial populations are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.

Job Openings at Lehman College, Bronx, NY (City University of New York)

Claims of Anti-Obama Racism Create Anger, Frustration

The Associated Press
2012-09-09

Jesse Washington, National Writer, Race and Ethnicity

Is it because he’s black?

The question of whether race fuels opposition to President Barack Obama has become one of the most divisive topics of the election. It is sowing anger and frustration among conservatives who are labeled racist simply for opposing Obama’s policies and liberals who see no other explanation for such deep dislike of the president.

It is an accusation almost impossible to prove, yet it remains inseparable from the African-American experience. The idea, which seemed to die in 2008 when Obama became the first black president, is now rearing its head from college campuses to cable TV as the Democratic incumbent faces Mitt Romney, the white Republican challenger.

Four years after an election that inspired hopes of a post-racial future, there are signs that political passions are dragging us backward…

Read the entire article here.

Helen Grant first black female minister in the UK

Afro-Europe International Blog
2012-09-09

Helen Grant MP has been made a Minister in David Cameron’s Ministerial reshuffle this September. She is now the first female black cabinet Minister in the UK.

Grant, 50, was born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father, but grew up in a single parent family after her parents separated and her father emigrated to the United States…

Read the entire article here.

Is Obama still black?

Aljazeera
2012-09-06

Harvey Young, Associate Professor of Theatre, Performance Studies; African American Studies; Radio/Television/Film Studies
Northwestern University
(also Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University)

Barack Obama, to many, is not “as noticeably” or, perhaps, “meaningfully black as he once was”, writes Young.

Race is an attribute that generally proves less and less noticeable as a person becomes more and more familiar to us. When we first encounter strangers, we pay attention to appearance. You can learn a lot by looking at a person. Or, so we presume. My mother used to tell my sister that the truth of a man could be gleaned from a glimpse at his shoes. An ex-girlfriend once confessed to me that my having clean, trimmed fingernails when we first met was sufficient evidence that I was good boyfriend material…

…Interestingly, as we spend more time with people, we become so well acquainted with them that we begin to overlook those visibly dramatic features that we could not help but notice during an initial encounter. Over time, and depending upon the social situations in which we locate ourselves, we can forget a person’s race as easily as husbands (or wives) can misremember their partners’ eye colour or fail to recognise a new hairstyle. Proximity and familiarity results in an overlooking of detail and, arguably, forgetting.

Shift in perspective

Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the President of the United States, regardless of the person who actually holds the office, there are few international figures more familiar to global audiences. The US President is omnipresent, with his image appearing in major newspapers and magazines among other media outlets almost every day across the globe.

Four years ago, when Barack Obama was a stranger who travelled the US and Europe in an attempt to introduce himself to the world, he was clearly, noticeably, identifiably and undeniably black. He was the black candidate for the US presidency. As the black candidate, he felt compelled to give a major talk on race and the dangers of racist vitriol. Voters, who didn’t want to vote for him, faced accusations of being a racist. Voters, who did vote for him, often cited race as an influential factor (and sometimes the only factor) in their vote. When Obama won the election, newspapers across the country resurrected the image and voice of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. to proudly proclaim “Dream Fulfilled”…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (review)

Shakespeare Quarterly
Volume 63, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 244-246
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0017

Virginia Mason Vaughan, Professor of English
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

If you teach Shakespeare’s plays at an American university, college, or secondary school (as I do), and if you’ve ever felt a disconnect between what you do in the classroom and the real lives of your students, this book is the antidote you need. With unfailing honesty, clarity, and courage, Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America confronts the elephant in the room we so seldom admit to seeing—race—particularly in regard to Shakespeare’s cultural authority. Thompson casts her questioning gaze on the ways Shakespeare is studied, taught, and performed in twenty-first-century America; less traditionally, she examines the plays’ appropriation in film, novels, prison and reform programs, and new media such as YouTube. Her wide-ranging inquiry compels the reader to question all sorts of assumptions—about Shakespeare, race, and (most often) the ways both of these are entwined in American thought and practice.

Thompson explains her title’s significance in her introduction. In his address to the Venetian Senate, Othello describes Desdemona’s fascination with his adventures; she found his stories “‘passing strange’” and listened to them “with a greedy ear.” The phrase conveys the unusual wonder Desdemona felt, but Thompson connects the words to the American trope of “passing,” often used in narratives about individuals who pretend to be a member of a racial category other than their own; passing implies the creation of an alternative identity and reflects the desire to “rewrite a story from a different point of view” (11). Finally, “passing” also connotes the changes that take place through time. She stresses that Shakespeare “was / is always defined through the recreation of his identity, image, texts, and performances. . . . [He] needs to be rendered as contingent—as in process and as passing—as the creative moment in which his name, image, text, and performance are invoked” (17).

In the next chapter, Thompson tackles assumptions about Shakespeare’s universalism as reflected in two contemporary films: the small-budget, independent Suture (1993) and the Hollywood comedy Bringing Down the House (2003). Although neither film is about Shakespeare, Thompson shows how the concept of Shakespeare as a universal figure can be appropriated to stand for white, Western culture. Thompson next interrogates the implications of Maya Angelou’s often-repeated claim that Shakespeare was black. She frames Farrukh Dhondy’s Black Swan, a young adult novel whose Afro-Caribbean hero tries to seize Shakespeare’s cultural capital for himself, as a kind of “strategic essentialism”—“the practice of promoting racial differences as inherent, fundamentally different, and therefore fixed in order to create affiliation, cohesion, and unity within a racialized group” (13, 49). Even though most readers will not be familiar with these texts, they will find Thompson’s detailed analysis intriguing.

Chapter 4 moves to multicultural theater, a topic in which Thompson, who edited the collection Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006), has particular expertise. Here, she probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will “enhance the play’s social resonance” (76); and cross-cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location and culture. Yet, Thompson argues, theater practitioners seldom interrogate their own practices or face up to those practices’ messy contradictions. Using the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as her primary example, Thompson calls for theater practitioners to recognize and discuss the semiotics of race in their productions.

Thompson’s next topic is even more nervous making: whether a role originally intended for a white actor in blackface (Othello, for example) should ever be performed according to “original-staging” practices. As someone who has written on this controversial topic, I appreciated…

Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities

The New York Times
2012-08-30

Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s government has enacted one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws, requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country.

The law, signed Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff, seeks to reverse the racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of Africa. Despite strides over the last decade in lifting millions out of poverty, Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.

“Brazil owes a historical debt to a huge part of its own population,” said Jorge Werthein, who directs the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies. “The democratization of higher education, which has always been a dream for the most neglected students in public schools, is one way of paying this debt.”…

…But while affirmative action has come under threat in the United States, it is taking deeper root in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country. Though the new legislation, called the Law of Social Quotas, is expected to face legal challenges, it drew broad support among lawmakers.

Of Brazil’s 81 senators, only one voted against the law this month. Other spheres of government here have also supported affirmative action measures. In a closely watched decision in April, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the racial quotas enacted in 2004 by the University of Brasília, which reserved 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race students…

…Brazil’s 2010 census showed that a slight majority of this nation’s 196 million people defined themselves as black or mixed-race, a shift from previous decades during which most Brazilians called themselves white…

Read the entire article here.

Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection
2012-08-30

NPR Staff

As summer winds down, All Things Considered is winding down its series “Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.”

For the past few months, the show has asked listeners to tell their stories about a particular piece of music they associate with their parents. Listener Melanie Cowart of San Antonio, Texas, wrote in to explain how Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” — a song that’s been interpreted by Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald and many others — became a running soundtrack for her parents’ relationship.

“My father was African-American; my mother was white,” Cowart tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “They met in 1929, at a time when that type of a relationship was not something that was acceptable in society. In fact, in many states, including in Missouri where they met, it was against the law. But they fell in love and formed a very strong bond.”…

Read the entire transcript here. Download the audio here (00:05:42).