Mixed Race Studies

Black U.K. beauty magazine accidentally put a white model on its cover. Apologies followed.

The Washington Post
2016-11-22

Travis M. Andrews, Staff Writer

Emily Bador is a white woman. She is not, therefore, a black woman. Normally, that wouldn’t be news worth reporting, mostly because it isn’t news.

But her race came into play recently due to the new cover of Blackhair magazine, a British glossy that bills itself as “an international bi-monthly magazine for the style conscious black woman. Packed with 100’s of hair inspirations, fashion, lifestyle and celebrity interviews, we are one of the leading publications for women of colour in Europe.”

The magazine, which generally if not always features black or mixed-race models, used her photograph for the cover of its December/January issue. The editors have admitted they didn’t know she was white…

…According to Blackhair’s editor, Keysha Davis, who wrote a note on the magazine’s Facebook page, the publication runs photographs they receive from PR companies and salons. They specifically request that these photographs be of black or mixed-race women…

Read the entire article here.

White Model Apologizes After Her Photo Shows Up On Blackhair Magazine

The Huffington Post
2016-11-21

Zeba Blay

“I’m very sorry this cover was taken away from a black woman,” she wrote.

Blackhair magazine had some explaining to do after mistakenly featuring a white model rocking afro-textured hair on the cover of its latest issue. The publication, known for offering hair tips and tricks for black and mixed-race women, was called out by a white model Emily Bador who says an old modeling photo of her was used without her permission for the December/January issue of the mag.

In an Instagram post published on Sunday, Bador shared a photo of the cover, writing in a caption that she “deeply and sincerely” apologized for the picture. Bador explained to her over 64,000 followers that the image had been taken three or four years ago when she was around 15 years old, before she had learned about the concept of cultural appropriation and the stigma many black women receive for wearing their hair in its natural state…

Read the entire article here.

After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region

Arsenal Pulp Press
2011-05-10
176 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781551523743
ePub ISBN: 9781551523873

Wayde Compton

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed Vancouver poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. It riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or “Canaan“) encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped in a kind of history rarely written about, explore the language of racial misrecognition (a.k.a. “passing“), the subjectivity of black writers in the unblack Pacific northwest, the failure of urban renewal, black and Asian comedy as a counterweight to official multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself. Compton marks the passing of old modes of antiracism and multiculturalism, and points toward what may or may not be a “post-racial” future, but will without doubt be a brave new world of cultural perception.

Written with the same poetic perceptiveness as cultural theorists Rinaldo Walcott and Dionne Brand, After Canaan is a brilliant and thoughtful collection of essays that ought to be required reading for all.

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.

Ace of Spades, A Memoir

Henry Holt and Co.
2007
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0312426316
Ebook ISBN: 978-1429905039

David Matthews

A take-no-prisoners tale of growing up without knowing who you are

When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege.

While his father, a black activist who counted Malcolm X among his friends, worked long hours as managing editor at the Baltimore Afro-American, David spent his early years escaping wicked-stepmother types and nursing an eleven-hour-a-day TV habit alongside his grandmother in her old-folks-home apartment. In Reagan-era America, there was no box marked “Other,” no multiculturalism or self-serving political correctness, only a young boy’s need to make it in a clearly segregated world where white meant “have” and black meant “have not.” Without particular allegiance to either, David careened in and out of community college, dead-end jobs, his father’s life, and girls’ pants.

A bracing yet hilarious reinvention of the American story of passing, Ace of Spades marks the debut of an irresistible and fiercely original new voice.

Read an excerpt here.

Passing in the Age of Rachel Dolezal, or Is Everyone Catfishing?

Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship
Issue One (November 2016)

Judy Phagan, Associate Professor of English
St. Joseph’s College, New York

Rachel Doležal

It was revealed in the New York Times and on national television in the summer of 2015 that Africana Studies professor and N.A.A.C.P. director of the Spokane chapter, Rachel Dolezal, had possibly falsified her ethnicity. She was subjected to national scrutiny and ridicule after it appeared she fabricated her own racial background. The Times also wondered if Rachel Dolezal would give up her “part-time teaching position in African American Studies at Eastern Washington University.” She did. It is fascinating to me that this little story garnered so much national attention. What ensued was a Swiftian tempest in a teapot in which pundits labeled Dolezal a “liar.” She was living as a black woman while her parents outed her as white. They even went on national television to show Rachel Dolezal’s baby pictures. The combination of white parents and a white little girl added up to one conclusion—that Dolezal was indeed white. It felt like everyone I knew that summer was angry at Dolezal. She seemed to be a white woman “passing” as an African American. Historically, passing was usually performed by African Americans light-skinned enough, often of mixed racial background, to “pass” as white. There are dozens of books on the topic by sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Passing is anything but new, as this paper will discuss. Passing, as a sociological phenomenon, is generally studied in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and/or (dis)ability. Add the 21st century concern for our personal image (think Facebook) and the issue gets even muddier. We see reflected in television and film, Youtube, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse discussions of passing, although we may not immediately recognize it as such. This is no doubt a reflection of our American obsession with race, which has again hit the media (and our hearts) this summer of 2016. This paper will explore many facets of passing as the term is used in 2016 and demonstrate that passing is merely a part of one’s identity formation; it is not a crime…

Read the entire article here.

Black Like Us

Original Works Publishing
2016-11-08
102 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1630920944

Rachel Atkins

Foreword by Allyson Hobbs, Ph.D

Family secrets ripple through time when three present-day sisters discover the truth about a young African-American woman passing for white sixty years before. What happens in between is a frank and funny look at the shifting boundaries of tolerance and what identity really means.

BrownBox Theatre and Sound Theatre Company to Present Encore Reading of BLACK LIKE US

Broadway World
2016-11-05

BWW News Desk

To celebrate the publication of the play Black Like Us, BrownBox Theatre joins forces with Sound Theatre Company to present an “encore” staged reading of the Gregory Award Winning Play at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. Black Like Us is a funny, poignant, and deeply relevant story about the bonds of family, the struggles of identity, and the far-reaching effects of one woman’s decision. The play is set in Seattle’s Central District neighborhood, not far from the location of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, and spans decades of change that have impacted that community.

In their second collaboration, BrownBox Theatre and Sound Theatre Company present the staged reading of Gregory Award winning play

Black Like Us at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. Performances are Saturday, November 19 at 2:00pm and at 7:00 pm and free and open to the public. There is a reception between the performances to celebrate the publication of this script and the work of playwright Rachel Atkins and the companies of artists who helped to develop this multi-award-winning play.

Sound Theatre Company and BrownBox Theatre last collaborated on the 2015 production of Marcus Gardley’s visionary and poetic play, …And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi at the Center Theatre at the Seattle Center Armory.

In 1958, a young African-American woman makes the life-changing decision to start passing for white, creating a ripple effect through multiple generations. In 2013, her granddaughters accidentally discover her secret and seek out the family she left behind. Moving back and forth through time, what happens in between is a frank and funny look at the shifting boundaries of tolerance, as they are all faced with the many questions of what identity really means…

Read the entire article here.

‘Loving’ inspires a DIY Film Festival of miscegenation films and shows you need to see…

CinemaInMind: Thinking about film… and other stuff
2016-11-03

Tim Cogshell, Critic At Large
Alt Film Guide

You don’t need to wait for the local art house to put on a themed film festival. Tim Cogshell, film critic for KPCC’s Filmweek and Alt Film Guide, and who blogs at CinemaInMind, is producing a series of DIY Film Festivals for Off-Ramp listeners to throw in the comfort of their own homes…

Read the entire article here.

From Raised Eyebrows To Raised Curtains: Rachel Atkins Tackles Racial Identity

KUOW.org 94.9 FM: Seattle News & Information
Seattle, Washington
2014-02-27

Marcie Sillman, Arts and Culture Reporter

Actresses Kia Pierce and Marquicia Dominguez in Rachel Atkins’ play, “Black Like Us.” Credit Courtesy of Annex Theatre/Shane Regan

When Rachel Atkins was 7, she and her sisters got a new stepfather. Atkins loved this man, but when she and her family went out in public, they raised a lot of eyebrows.

“My stepdad, who raised me, was black,” says Atkins. “We were three little white Jewish girls in New Jersey, when multi-racial families were not that common. We would get asked all the time, ‘Who’s that guy with your family?’ And we’d say, ‘That’s our dad.'”

Decades later, Atkins’ experience was part of the impetus behind her new play “Black Like Us,” currently having its world premiere production at Seattle’s Annex Theater.

“Black Like Us” is about two black sisters in 1950s Seattle. Feisty Maxine is attracted to the nascent Civil Rights movement; lighter-skinned Florence is in love with a white man. Following her heart, Florence passes herself off as white and estranges herself from her entire family…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview here.