Mixed Race Studies

Brendon Ayanbadejo, Baltimore Ravens Linebacker, Talks Gay Marriage And LGBT Rights

The Huffington Post
2012-09-12

Michelangelo Signorile

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is going “full steam ahead” after his battle with Maryland legislator C. Emmett Burns Jr., who last week wrote a letter calling on the team’s owner to silence Ayanbadejo regarding his public advocacy of gay marriage, only to back down amid a national uproar. (Listen to the full interview below)

“The Ravens reached out to me,” Ayanbadejo said. “[Ravens president] Dick Cass and [Ravens] owner Steve Bisciotti said, ‘Brendon, you’re a great person. Keep doing your thing. We believe in you. This is not a team that believes in discrimination in any way, shape, or form. You have this tremendous platform here. Use it. And go ahead and continue to be you, and grow and shape and change the world while you have the ability to do it.’”…

…Discussing what motivates him to take up the cause of LGBT equality and gay marriage, Ayanbadejo pointed to his upbringing.

“I’m a product of two biracial parents — so actually, I’m not biracial, but I’m a product of it,” he said, laughing. “My dad is Nigerian. My mom is Irish-American. So I kind of never really fit in. From the black community, I was considered white. From the white community, I was considered black. And then from my own Nigerian community, I wasn’t considered Nigerian. I was considered a black American. I kind of never fit in, kind of had to find my own niche and find my own way. So I’ve experienced discrimination at a young age, and it’s made me the person who I am today.”…

Read the entire article here.

Standing Up at an Early Age

The New York Times
2012-09-14

Adam Himmelsbach

Views on Gay Rights of Ravens’ Ayanbadejo Are Rooted in Upbringing

In recent weeks, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo has been praised in many quarters for supporting the legalization of same-sex marriage. His stance is not new, but it reached a wider audience after a Maryland legislator urged the Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to silence him.

For Ayanbadejo, 36, it was a comforting shift from 2009, when he became one of the first athletes from a major American professional sports team to speak out in support of same-sex marriage. That year, he found gay slurs directed at him on Internet message boards. In the Ravens’ locker room, players made crude remarks and asked him when he would reveal his homosexuality, he said.

“If I was walking by, and they wanted to be immature and make comments, I’d keep walking,” said Ayanbadejo, who has a 1-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter with his longtime girlfriend. “If they wanted to be real men and have conversations, I would have, but no one did.”

If those players had heard Ayanbadejo’s story, they would have learned how his views were shaped. His father is Nigerian, and his mother is Irish-American, and he was given the first name Oladele, which translates to “wealth follows me home.” But for much of his childhood, that did not ring true…

…Ayanbadejo began going by his middle name, Brendon, to fit in. He starred for Santa Cruz High School’s football team, but he was also active in theater, rode a skateboard and befriended many openly gay students. He had been accepted as a biracial boy from a Chicago housing project, so he accepted everyone else’s differences, too, he said…

Read the entire article here.

Reflections of a Racial Queer

Multicultural Perspectives
Volume 12, Issue 2, 2010
pages 107-112
DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2010.481213

Aurora Chang-Ross
Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin

In this article, I reflect on my personal experiences of racial queerness. In an effort to speak my secrets, I explore my identity production as a Multiracial person by critically examining my positionality throughout various key stages in my life. I present Multiracial microaggressions –those accumulated moments that underscore my racial queerness and argue that these phenomena, while taxing, also confer agency. I propose a conceptual framework that incorporates both queer theory and borderlands theory as a potential framework from which to study how Multiracial individuals are positioned as racial queers. I argue that queerness, for the Multiracial individual, may denote both deviance (from the monoracial norm) and a unique individuality (stemming from one’s Multiracial background). By offering my testimonial as a racial queer and introducing the racial queer conceptual framework, I come a bit closer to naming my experience as a Multiracial individual and providing a space from which others can do the same.

Read or purchase the article here.

Pink and Blue in Black and White: Why Binary, Prescriptive Approaches to Human Categorization Still Won’t Yield the Desired Result

IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law
Honors Scholars Program
2010
23 pages

Karlyn Meyer

INTRODUCTION: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND MISCEGENATION

A Texas court asked “can a physician change the gender of a person with a scalpel, drugs and counseling- or is a person’s gender immutably fixed by our Creator at birth?” The Kansas Supreme Court echoed this inquiry. What the Texas Court characterized as a deep, philosophical question. others have called “loaded question.” The court’s framing of the issue previewed its ruling from the opinion’s first page. But the court’s Terminology indicated just how complicated The question was.

The question arose in a suit under Texas’ wrongful death statute. Christie Littleton lost her husband Jonathon in 1996. To have standing as his beneficiary, she had to be his surviving spouse. But Texas law threatened the validity of their marriage. This is because forty-four years earlier. Christie was bom a “physically healthy male” named Lee Cavalos, Jr. Thus the court posed. “[i]f Christie is a woman, she may bring this action. If Christie is a man. she may not.” When Christie was fifteen years old. Texas was one of fifteen states whose anti-miscegenation laws were overturned by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. In the years prior to this, the majority of states promulgated statutes preventing white people from marrying, or at least procreating, with people of color. In these states, the desire to prevent miscegenation was rivaled only bv the challenge of categorizing the races.

The Littleton opinion showed a court grappling with biological and social factors in an attempt to categorize Christie Littleton. The court framed the issue as determining her gender: male or female. But gender, like race, is a social construction. And like race, while it is heavily associated with biological characteristics, it lacks a true biological definition. Still, these constructions are firmly rooted in our society, and have served as a predicate to social citizenship. This citizenship, or the “status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. has been conditioned on race as well as conforming to a specific set of sexual norms. But the state’s continuous attempts to define its populace, thus regulating its citizens, are as complicated when the categories are male and female as when the categories are black and white…

Read the entire essay here.

Uncertainty and evolution: Contributions to identity development for female college students who identify as multiracial/biracial-bisexual/pansexual

Iowa State University
2008
322 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3310805
ISBN: 9780549596066

Alissa Renee King

A dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In this study, I explored how female college students who identify as multiracial/biracial-bisexual/pansexual made meaning of their racial and sexual identities, how they described their identity development process, and the ways in which college contributed to their identity formation. Utilizing a proposed model of biracial-bisexual identity development and the ecology of student development model as foundations for this study, I sought to better understand the experiences both before and during college, and the impacts of those two environments on the processes of racial and sexual identity formation for the female college students in this study. Findings, based on in-depth interviews, revealed that the females in this study were impacted in different ways during the pre-college experience and during college, with influences coming from family, peers, and the school setting before college. The themes during the college experience at the time of the interviews were related to Trying On new labels, Negotiating Self within a variety of spaces, and Finding Fit in places where the participants felt safe and supported. Findings also revealed that context had the biggest impact on identity development and that racial and sexual identity were primarily separate processes rather than intersecting experiences. I offered contributions to biracial-bisexual identity models and I shared recommendations for current practice and future research to better serve females in both secondary and post-secondary institutions who identify as multiracial/biracial-bisexual/pansexual.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America

New York University Press
November 2012
272 pages
10 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814765463
Paper ISBN: 9780814765470

Antonio López, Assistant Professor of English
George Washington University

In Unbecoming Blackness, Antonio López uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences.

López shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O’Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the U.S and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.

Gay male pornography and the re/de/construction of postcolonial queer identity in Mexico

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
ISSN: 14742756
Volume 8 Issue 2 (November 2010)

Gustavo Subero, Independent Researcher

Since colonial times, the figuration of the Latin(o) male homosexual has been highly exoticized and troped in western media accounts (Shohat and Stam 1994; Ramirez Berg 2002), as they are depicted as hypermasculine figures whose raw sexuality functions as an unquestionable sign of their inner primal machismo. This view on male (homo)sexuality has been further reinforced through the kind of images of Latin(o) men that have been presented in male gay pornography. Such stereotyped representations of male (homo)sexuality have permeated into a global, socio-sexual imaginary that persists in placing such men within a sexual and erotic order in which their bodies convey an extreme form of primal sexuality. As a result, the emergence of national gay pornographic industry(ies) in Mexico has resulted in a re-evaluation of the social and sexual notions commonly associated with male (homo)sexuality. The mestizo (mixed race) gay man is both deconstructed from his positions of sexual subordination (differently from submission) to a white subject (even when such coloured individuals take the active role during sex) and reconstructed in a new space of libidinal economy. This article offers an analysis of the role that national gay pornography has played in shaping Mexican gay men’s perception of their own sexuality taking as a point of departure their own national and ethnic background. The research will focus on a number of films made by Mecos Films and Eros Digital in Mexico, and demonstrate that such films have challenged notions of gender and sexual universalism, and instead offer new alternatives for the production and execution of desire amongst coloured men.

What I’ve learned from living with HIV

The Melissa Harris-Perry Blog
2012-07-01

Macalester College

Ed. note: This is a guest column by our guest today, Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, the Dean of Multicultural Life at Macalester College. Chris normally tweets this essay out every December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day, but was kind enough to allow us to share it in this space.

My name is Chris, and I live with HIV.

I know some were here last year [on my Twitter timeline], so I’ll try not to bore you. I just want to remind us that we are here among you, living, thriving, sometimes barely surviving w HIV/AIDS. I’d like to tell my story: why I made choices I did and what I’ve learned-because I have learned a great deal about myself from this disease.

To start: I have been positive for 15 years. March 10, 2010 was  my anniversary. I am 41 years old. In fact, I was born exactly 1 week before Stonewall rebellion in NYC. I was born and raised in a working-class Boston neighborhood. I grew up in uber-dysfunctional family: brother diagnosed as sociopath in teens, dad an alcoholic, mom mentally ill. It was hell in that family, I was a little “sissy” who knew at early age he was gay. I was OK with it but knew others wouldn’t be. I was terrorized as kid-ass kicked a lot. My city didn’t like “femme” boys. Also, I am mixed: dad was white, mom Latina…long before mixed folks were cool. We just were odd. So I grew up alone, and lonely…

Read the entire essay here.

Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
June 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. Although this case promotes marital freedom and racial equality, there are still significant legal and social barriers to the free formation of intimate relationships. Marriage continues to be the sole measure of commitment, mixed relationships continue to be rare, and same-sex marriage is only legal in 6 out of 50 states. Most discussion of Loving celebrates the symbolic dismantling of marital discrimination. This book, however, takes a more critical approach to ask how Loving has influenced the “loving” of America. How far have we come since then, and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

Table of Contents

• Introduction Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor
• Part I: Explaining Loving v. Virginia
  • 1. The legacy of Loving John DeWitt Gregory and Joanna L. Grossman
• Part II: Historical Antecedents to Loving
  • 2. The ‘love’ of Loving Jason A. Gillmer
  • 3. Loving in Indian territory: tribal miscegenation law in historical perspective Carla Pratt
  • 4. American mestizo: Filipinos and antimiscegenation laws in California Leti Volpp
  • 5. Perez v. Sharp and the limits of Loving: race, marriage, and citizenship reconsidered R. A. Lenhardt
• Part III: Loving and Interracial Relationships: Contemporary Challenges
  • 6. The road to Loving: the legacy of antimiscegenation law Kevin Noble Maillard
  • 7. Love at the margins: the racialization of sex and the sexualization of race Camille A. Nelson
  • 8. The crime of Loving: Loving, Lawrence, and beyond I. Bennett Capers
  • 9. What’s Loving got to do with it? Law shaping experience and experience shaping law Renée M. Landers
  • 10. Fear of a ‘Brown’ planet or a new hybrid culture? Jacquelyn Bridgeman
• Part IV: Considering the Limits of Loving
  • 11. Black pluralism in post-Loving America Taunya Lovell Banks
  • 12. Multiracialism and reparations: accounting for political blackness Angelique Davis
  • 13. Finding a Loving home Angela Onwuachi-Willig and Jacob Willig-Onwuachi
• Part V: Loving outside the United States Borders
  • 14. Racially inadmissible wives Rose Cuison Villazor
  • 15. Flying buttresses Nancy K. Ota
  • 16. Crossing borders: Loving v. Virginia as a story of migration Victor Romero
• Part VI: Loving and Beyond: Marriage, Intimacy and Diverse Relationships
  • 17. Black vs. gay: centering LBGT people of color in civil marriage debates Adele Morrison
  • 18. Forty years after Loving: a legacy of unintended consequences Rachel F. Moran
  • 19. The end of marriage Tucker Culbertson
  • 20. Afterword Peter Wallenstein

We the Animals, A Novel

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2011-08-30
144 pages
5 x 8
Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547576725; ISBN-10:0547576722
Paperback ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547844190; ISBN-10:0547844190
E-Book ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547577005; ISBN-10:0547577001

Justin Torres

Three brothers tear their way through childhood— smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.

Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.