Category: Media Archive

  • The Global African – Mexican Afro-descendants The Global African 2014-12-03 Bill Fletcher, Host Randal Archibold, Bureau Chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean The New York Times (Author of the article “Negro? Prieto? Moreno? A Question of Identity for Black Mexicans”) William Loren Katz Author of: Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage Each week on…

  • CUNY Exhibition Documents Lives of Black Africans in Early Dominican Republic The New York Times 2015-07-13 Sandra E. Garcia Scholars at the City University of New York are using clues left in 16th-century manuscripts and Spanish records to track the lives of the earliest black Africans in the Dominican Republic. An exhibition now on view…

  • Faking Black identity: An American tradition The New Pittsburgh Courier Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2015-06-27 Robert Fikes Jr., Reference Librarian San Diego State University, San Diego, California The recent case of Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who reinvented herself as African American and headed the Spokane, Washington NAACP, is just the latest sensationalized instance of “passing.”  Though…

  • The Unperformative President TDR: The Drama Review Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2015 (T226) pages 7-8 Richard Schechner, University Professor; Professor, Performance Studies New York University Who is President Barack Obama? What will his legacy be? Why is he so unpopular that his own Democratic Party shunned him during the 2014 elections? The Dems got…

  • Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin (review) [Black] TDR: The Drama Review Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2015 (T226) pages 178-180 Alex W. Black Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,…

  • “Canadian-First”: Mixed Race Self-Identification and Canadian Belonging Canadian Ethnic Studies Volume 47, Number 2, 2015 pages 21-44 DOI: 10.1353/ces.2015.0017 Jillian Paragg Department of Sociology University of Alberta Not being read or identified by others as “Canadian” was a common thread in semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted with 19 young adults of mixed race in a…

  • Early Afro-Mexican Settlers in California C-SPAN: Created by Cable 2015-05-20 Host: California Historical Society Professor Carlos Manuel Salomon, author of Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California, talked about Mexicans of African descent who were some of the first non-Indian settlers in California. Many came from Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico, with the Anza Expedition in…

  • Mexico’s hidden people Cable News Network (CNN) 2015-07-10 Abby Reimer, Special to CNN Photograph: Mara Sanchez Renero (CNN)—An estimated 200,000 Africans were brought to Mexico under slavery, which ended in the country in 1829. Yet Afro-Mexicans remain a marginalized and often forgotten part of Mexico’s identity. Photographer Mara Sanchez Renero first learned about Afro-Mexicans as…

  • A Bias More Than Skin Deep The New York Times 2015-07-13 Charles M. Blow I will never forget the October 2013 feature on National Geographic’s website: There was a pair of portraits of olive-skinned, ruby-lipped boys, one with a mane of curly black hair, the other with the tendrils of blond curls falling into his…

  • Well known as an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting “amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks. “The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts” chronicles a grassroots movement to…