Mixed Race Studies

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.

“We Were Married on the Second Day of June, and the Police Came After Us the 14th of July.”

The Washingtonian
2016-11-02

Hillary Kelly, Design & Style Editor

Richard and Mildred Loving. Photograph by Grey Villet.

An oral history, nearly 50 years later, of the landmark Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage—and is the subject of a talked-about movie out this month.

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving drove from their home in Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, DC, to be married. Twenty-four states, including Virginia, still outlawed interracial marriage at the time. Mildred was part Native American and part African-American; Richard was white. Their union would eventually result in their banishment from the state and a nine-year legal battle.

On November 4, almost 50 years after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision that the Lovings’ marriage was valid—and that marriage is a universal right—Hollywood is set to release Loving, already on Oscar lists. As director Jeff Nichols explained when asked why he took on the project, “We have very painful wounds in this country, and they need to be brought out into the light. And it’s gonna be an awkward, uncomfortable, painful conversation that’s going to continue for a while.”

The movie focuses on Mildred and Richard’s romance. We looked behind the scenes of the struggle itself, talking to insiders including the couple’s attorneys—then just out of law school—to revisit the case. One remarkable aspect: Unlike other civil-rights champions of their era, the Lovings never set out to change the course of history. “What happened, we real­ly didn’t intend for it to happen,” Mildred said in 1992. “What we wanted, we wanted to come home.”

This is the story of how a quiet couple from rural Virginia brought about marriage equality for themselves, and for all…

Read the entire article here.

How Trevor Noah went from biracial youth in S. Africa to leading light on U.S. TV

The Washington Post
2016-11-12

Karen Heller, National Features Writer

“Daily Show” host Trevor Noah has a new memoir about growing up mixed race in apartheid South Africa. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

NEW YORK — Trump. Trump. Clinton. The Obamas dancing like dorks.

Such is the stuff of a recent pre-election morning meeting at “The Daily Show” headquarters. Trevor Noah enters, water bottle and orange in hand, and wedges himself in among the writers, his back never pressing against the sofa.

“Can we talk about Brexit?” he asks. “I find Brexit fascinating, because in the U.S., people see it as done and dusted.”

They talk of Brexit, how British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resembles a Muppet. But then the discussion swiftly returns to the steady drip of Trump, Trump, Trump.

You may hire a guy for his global perspective, but comedy comes back to the familiar fast.

Last year, after a 16-year reign, Jon Stewart was replaced by a young comedian who is nothing like him: foreign, biracial, cool, GQ-photogenic and utterly unknown to Americans, having appeared on the show only three times before being tapped as the successor….

Read the entire article here.

Opinion/Commentary: The facts behind loving, law, and ‘Loving’

The Daily Progress
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-11-13

Jeff E. Schapiro, Politics columnist
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia

Focus Features via AP Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga protray an interracial couple from Virginia whose romance and marraiage made history. The story or Richard and Mildred Loving is told, Hollywood-style in the movie “Loving.”

In 1963, Bernie Cohen, a lawyer in Alexandria, was representing Richard and Mildred Loving, a mixed-race couple from Virginia facing a predicament considered unthinkable today: They’d been banished from the state for 25 years for violating its prohibition on interracial marriage.

Living in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal and where they were wed in 1958, the Lovings wanted to return home, to rural Caroline County. To get there would require a long journey through the courts.

Having lost the initial challenge in state court, Cohen consulted with his constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, Chester Antieau. He introduced Cohen to another former student, Phil Hirschkop.

Cohen and Hirschkop were alike: Both were Jewish boys from Brooklyn who had settled in segregationist Harry Byrd’s Virginia. They also were liberals, committed to racial equality and social justice at a time when both could be scarce, especially in the American South.

It was Cohen’s and Hirschkop’s different legal backgrounds — the former was a trial lawyer; the latter, a civil rights lawyer — that would bring them together for the successful battle that concluded with a 1967 ruling by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court voiding Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute and those of 15 other states.

The decision allowed the Lovings — he was white; she was black — to openly live out their days in Caroline County.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of a ruling on marriage equality that would presage the Supreme Court order legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, a new film by Jeff Nichols, the writer-director, recounts the couple’s ordeal…

Read the entire article here.

Can We Talk

Mixed Roots Stories
2016-11-02

Chelene Knight

Please check one of the following boxes:

Black

White

Asian

Indigenous

Métis

Other

In my younger days I remember filling out a job application and staring at that question about race for so long. Do I check the ‘Black” box? What the hell is “Other?” My hand hovered over the question for a long time …

The more I write about life as a mixed-race person, and what this means to me as a mother, woman, writer etc, the more the writing itself tends to be less about race and more about missing pieces, and figuring out the order of these pieces and how to put them together. And not only the pieces I’ve never had, but re-working and making do with the ones I do have…

Read the entire article here.

‘Loving’ revisits a landmark Supreme Court case with radical restraint

The Washington Post
2016-11-10

Ann Hornaday, Film Critic

‘Loving’ is a quietly radical movie. A portrait of Richard and Mildred Loving, who became unwitting activists for interracial marriage when they wed in 1958, this gentle, deeply affecting story dispenses with the usual conventions of stirring appeals to the audience’s social conscience.

Viewers expecting a climactic showdown at the United States Supreme Court — which in 1967 handed down the landmark decision bearing the Lovings’ name, declaring anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional — or highly pitched speeches about civil rights, privacy and marriage equality will be surprised by a film that steadfastly avoids the most obvious and tempting theatrical manipulations. Instead, viewers are confronted by something far more revolutionary and transformative, in the form of two people’s devotion to each other, and the deep-seated psychological and state forces driven to derangement by that purest emotional truth.

Based on Nancy Buirski’s wonderful 2012 HBO documentary “The Loving Story” and judiciously dramatized by writer-director Jeff Nichols, “Loving” gets underway just as Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred (Ruth Negga) decide to get married, after Mildred discovers she’s pregnant. A longtime couple in the rural town of Central Point, Va., Richard and Mildred reflect the organic ethnic integration of a community in which white, black and Native American citizens routinely befriended and relied on each other…

Read the entire review here.

Who is to blame for Donald Trump’s victory?

New Statesman
2016-11-09

Helen Lewis, Deputy Editor

A narrative that attributes Trump’s triumph to the “working class” forgets the role of racism, sexism and the right-wing media.

As it became clear that Donald Trump had won Pennsylvania, putting the presidency in the grasp of those tiny hands, the activist and academic Van Jones looked crushed. “It’s hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us,” he told CNN viewers. “You tell your kids: ‘Don’t be a bully.’ You tell your kids: ‘Don’t be a bigot.’ You tell your kids: ‘Do your homework and be prepared.’ And then you have this outcome.”

There are many ways to read Trump’s victory, but all of them should acknowledge just how improbable it would have seemed even a few years ago. The real-estate magnate has been both a registered Democrat and a Republican; he has married three times and had numerous girlfriends; he was initially progressive on subjects such as abortion. Hell, he might even believe in evolution. Normally these would have been seen as disqualifying characteristics for anyone seeking the Republican nomination…

…In the coming days, mentally insert the word “white” into any commentary you hear about the “working class” or the “left behind”. African Americans, not a well-off sector of the population, voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton; she had a lead among Hispanic voters. The group that voted Trump is the same demographic that brought us Brexit: older, white, living outside the big cities, with not much, but something to lose. Many feel ill-equipped for the future: Trump scored a landslide among white voters without a degree.

The racism was there from the start. Trump’s candidacy was born through questioning the legitimacy of the first mixed-race president. Some of his supporters post anti-Semitic abuse on Twitter and shout “lügenpresse”, a Nazi-era term meaning “lying press”, at journalists. The campaign turned a blind eye to this. At rallies, Trump always included his own version of a two-minute hate directed at the media, which were confined to a press pen. His final campaign video named prominent Jewish public figures – Janet Yellen of the Fed, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs – alongside classic tropes of “global special interests” that “control the levers of power”. Although many conservative local newspapers turned against him, Trump did secure one coveted endorsement: from the Crusader, the official publication of the Ku Klux Klan…

Read the entire article here.

After Obama Victory, Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016

The Onion
November 2012

Sources say the screaming orb might be the only potential candidate that would tap into Republicans’ deep-seated, seething fury after this election.

Hollywood has long shown discomfort with interracial couples, but change is happening

The Los Angeles Times
2016-11-10

Lewis Beale

Katherine Houghton puts a flower in Sidney Poitier’s hair in a scene from the film “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.” (Getty Images)

In 1967, the same year the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia struck down laws banning miscegenation, Sidney Poitier starred in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” as a black man romantically involved with blond Katherine Houghton.

Yet in both real and reel life, black-white romantic relationships were problematic, fraught with legal and social taboos. In the case of Loving, that meant rural Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving, who married in Washington, D.C., in 1958, were arrested in their home state, forced to move away or be jailed, and spent years fighting the racist law that affected them until the Supreme Court unanimously overturned it.

“The fact any miscegenation laws even existed, these are vestiges of slavery,” says Jeff Nichols, director of “Loving,” a new film based on the famous case starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. “All of this speaks to the institutionalized racism in the South.”

“Guess,” which was released six months after the Loving decision, was, in its own way, meant to be a liberal antidote to situations like this. In director Stanley Kramer’s film,  parents and friends of the romantic couple discuss the pros and cons of their romance in a civilized manner until the woman’s father (played by Spencer Tracy) gives his blessing to the relationship…

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.