Mixed Race Studies

Birding While Indian, A Mixed-Blood Memoir

Mad Creek Books (an imprint Ohio State University Press)
June 2023
246 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
6 Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5872-9
eBook (PDF): ISBN: 978-0-8142-8289-2

Thomas C. Gannon, Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s tears when coworkers called her “squaw,” and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the Indigenous humans, animals, and land of the United States.

Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, of the aftershocks of history, and of human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world.

Table of Contents

• PREFACE: The Lifelook
• March 1965, Piss Hill: Great Horned Owl
• July 1967, Piss Hill: Lewis’s Woodpecker
• January 1968, Rapid Creek: Common Goldeneye
• June 1969, I-90: Western Meadowlark
• April 1970, Fort Pierre/Missouri River: Sandhill Crane
• June 1970, a Fort Pierre slough: Wood Duck
• August 1971, Saskatchewan: Western Grebe
• May 1977, a Rapid City marsh: Red-winged Blackbird
• June 1978, Spearfish Canyon: American Dipper
• June 1979, a Pennington County dirt road: Common Nighthawk
• August 1981, Old Faithful: Common Raven
• June 1983, a Pennington County dirt road: Long-billed Curlew
• June 1985, Skyline Drive: Field Sparrow
• June 1985, Fort Morgan, CO: House Finch
• September 1987, northern Black Hills: Mourning Dove
• December 1987, Belle Fourche, SD: [Species Unknown]
• January 1989, Rapid City, SD: European Starling
• January 1991, Gavins Point Dam: Long-tailed Duck
• April 2001, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Common Grackle
• February 2003, Kirk Funeral Home: Prairie Falcon
• April 2003, U of Iowa English-Philosophy Building: Northern Cardinal
• May 2003, Clay County Park: Bald Eagle
• June 2004, Ardmore, OK: Northern Mockingbird
• June 2005, Folsom Children’s Zoo: White Stork
• June 2006, Crazy Horse Memorial: Turkey Vulture
• July 2008, Kountze Lake: Snowy Egret
• August 2008, Fontenelle Forest: House Wren
• May 2009, the lake beside Lakeside, NE: Black-necked Stilt
• May 2009, Devils Tower: American Goldfinch
• May 2009, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Eurasian Collared-Dove
• May 2009, Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge: Marbled Godwit
• July 2009, Pioneers Park: Brown-headed Cowbird
• June 2010, Idyllwild, CA: Steller’s Jay
• June 2010, Spirit Mound: Dickcissel
• May 2011, Wilderness Park: Veery
• December 2011, Highway 385: Ferruginous Hawk
• May 2012, Indian Cave State Park: Chuck-Will’s-Widow
• June 2012, Custer State Park: Canyon Wren
• June 2012, Millwood State Park: Black-bellied Whistling-Duck
• July 2012, Newton Hills State Park: Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
• July 2012, Morrison Park: Lesser Goldfinch
• May 2013, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: Bonaparte’s Gull
• May 2014, El Segundo Beach: Brown Pelican
• March 2015, Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area: American Robin
• July 2016, Medicine Bow National Forest—Vedauwoo: Dusky Flycatcher
• November 2017, Lewis and Clark Lake: Snowy Owl
• March 2018, West Platte River Drive: Whooping Crane
• May 2018, Little Bighorn Battlefield: Red-tailed Hawk
• CODA: Birding While Indian
• Works Cited and Sources Consulted

More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew

Convergent Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-05-02
240 Pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443040

John Blake, Award-Winning CNN Journalist

An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he’d never met—and how faith brought them all together.

John Blake grew up in a notorious Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that became the setting for the HBO series The Wire. There he became a self-described “closeted biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race. The son of a Black man and a white woman who met when interracial marriage was still illegal, Blake knew this much about his mother: She vanished from his life not long after his birth, and her family rejected him because of his race.

But at the age of seventeen, Blake had a surprise encounter that uncovered a disturbing family secret. This launched him on a quest to reconcile with his white family. His search centered on two questions: “Where is my mother?” and “Where do I belong?” More Than I Imagined is Blake’s propulsive true story about how he answered those questions with the help of an interracial church, a loving caregiver’s sacrifice, and an inexplicable childhood encounter that taught him the importance of forgiveness.

Blake covered some of the biggest stories about race in America for twenty-five years before realizing that “facts don’t change people, relationships do.” He owes this discovery to “radical integration,” which was the only way forward for him and his family—and is the only way forward for America as a multiracial democracy. More Than I Imagined is a hopeful story for our difficult times.

Not White But Not (Entirely) Black: On the Complex History of “Passing” in America

Literary Hub
2023-05-03

Herb Harris

Herb Harris Explores How His Grandparents’ Defied Racial Categorization

Via New England Review

Read the entire article here.

Topsy-Turvy

New England Review
Volume 44, Number 1 (2023)

Herb Harris

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”
—Nella Larsen, Passing

I started with a group of boxes that looked like the oldest ones in the attic. The packing tape easily lifted away, no longer sticking to the cardboard, and wine glasses and dishes emerged from pages of the Washington Post from the 1970s. Several heavy boxes contained papers and photographs belonging to my grandparents, but there was one surprisingly light box. I opened it to find a collection of hand-sewn dolls and animal puppets, just a dozen or so of the thousands I knew my grandmother had made when she was a volunteer at Children’s Hospital over the years.

Among the clowns, frogs, and bunnies was one doll that had clearly been sewn with greater care and detail than the others. I recognized it as Grandma’s work, but it had a design I’d never seen before. It was a girl with light pink skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, wearing a long floral dress with a lace collar and a pink bow. I flipped it over to reveal another girl, this one with very dark brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. The two figures were joined at the torso, and the exaggerated contrast between their features gave the second doll a blackface quality. I remembered that toys like these were called Topsy-Turvy dolls and vaguely associated them with offensive Jim Crow cartoons and minstrel shows. Why would my grandmother, a Black woman, make such a thing? Grandma had died more than twenty years before, and, holding this strange doll in my hands, I had the sense that this was her last word on race.

A little research reveals that Topsy-Turvy dolls originated during the time of slavery. No one can ascribe a single meaning or purpose to them, but their dual identity suggests a connection to the mixed-race children who were a part of the plantation world. These children were enslaved people who could be bought or sold by law. They were also relatives of their owners: cousins, half-siblings, sons, and daughters. These relationships were usually denied, but they were often open secrets. The children might be symbols of the master’s potency or shameful reminders of his transgressions, or they might be objects of love or victims of abuse, but their existence was always charged with hidden meanings and deep conflicts. They could only be talked about with code words filled with ambiguity, like the language my grandparents used when they talked about race. Topsy-Turvy dolls were part of this language. They embodied many things that could never be said…

Read the entire article here.

Georgia Louise Harris Brown (June 12, 1918 – September 21, 1999)

Pioneering Women of American Architecture
October 2017

Anat Falbel
University of Campinas, Brazil

Roberta Washington, Principal
Roberta Washington Architects, New York, New York

Georgia Louise Harris Brown (1918–1999), a pioneering African American architect practicing in Chicago and Brazil from the 1940s to the 1990s, is recognized as the second African American woman licensed as an architect in the United States.¹ She forged an impressive career in industrial architecture in Brazil, where she may have immigrated in the hope of escaping racial prejudice, though she was rarely credited as the designer in publications about these works. (Generally, it was the engineering firms that received the credit.)

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Georgia Louise Harris Brown was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 12, 1918, only six years after the extension of equal voting rights to women in the state.² Her family’s genealogy of strong women of mixed ancestry included former enslaved African Americans who arrived from the South to the Union’s slavery-free state after 1861, Native Americans, and German settlers…

Read the entire article here.

Brutal Nazi Torture of Black German Boy Gert Schramm in Nazi Germany – Buchenwald – World War 2

World History
2023-03-21

Despite the Nuremberg Laws, some Black people and so called German “Aryans” still became romantically involved with one another. These relationships were dangerous for both partners, especially if they chose to try to legally marry. In Nazi Germany, everyone was required to apply for permission to marry. When interracial couples applied, their applications were consistently denied for racial reasons. These applications brought their interracial relationships to the attention of government authorities. This often had dire consequences for the couple. In multiple cases, marriage applications resulted in harassment, sterilization and the breaking up of partnerships.

Legal couples whose marriages pre-dated the Nuremberg Laws were harassed by the Nazi regime. The regime pressured white German women to divorce their Black husbands. Interracial couples and their children were often humiliated and even assaulted when they appeared together in public.

Like their parents, many Black children in Germany experienced the Nazi era as a time of increased loneliness, isolation, and exclusion. Some Black children felt German and wanted to be a part of the excitement. But Nazi racial ideology had no place for Black-German children. For Black children in Nazi Germany, schools became sites of humiliation. Black children were often degraded in racial science classes and ridiculed by teachers who supported the Nazis…

Just as the Nazification of the education system greatly restricted the rights of Jewish children to attend public schools, it also impacted Black children over the course of the 1930s. Some Black students were expelled and unable to complete their education. Few private schools would accept Black students and finding apprenticeships, which in Germany was crucial to find employment, became increasingly difficult.

Such was a case of Gert Schramm…

Watch the video here.

Identity Wars: Mixed Separatists v. Black Gatekeepers

Mixed Auntie Confidential
2023-03-16

TaRessa Stovall

Does this fight or fuel racism?

A growing trend has Mixed-race Separatists on one side, insisting that we have to identify ONLY as Mixed or we’re criticized as “One-Droppers” for refusing to separate our Mixedness from our Blackness, and rejected as problematic, inauthentic enemies of “true” Mixed identity.

On the other side, there’s a growing number of young Black folks—seemingly mostly women—who proudly self-identify as Gatekeepers. They’re adamant that Mixed-Black people aren’t Black, can’t call themselves Black, and aren’t welcome in Black spaces. This gatekeeping includes Mixed-Black people who very much identify with Black culture and community…

Read the entire article here.

The Cumulative Effects of Colorism: Race, Wealth, and Skin Tone

Social Forces
Published online: 2023-03-13
DOI: 10.1093/sf/soad038

Alexander Adames, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Pennslyvania

Researchers have long documented a persistent Black–White gap in wealth. These studies, however, often treat race as a discrete category, eluding its socially constructed nature. As a result, these studies assume that the “effect of race” is consistent across all individuals racialized as Black. Studies that make this assumption potentially obscure heterogeneity in the size of the Black–White wealth gap. Research on skin color stratification suggests that it is possible that the Black–White wealth gap varies by the extent to which a racial subgroup is deemed to fit the broader racial umbrella. In turn, I adopt a more complex operationalization of race that is based on both racial and skin tone appraisals. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I find that the Black–White wealth gap does vary by the Black skin tone subgroup. Generally, the Black–White gap in assets is smallest when focusing on lighter-skin Black people and largest when focusing on darker-skin Black people. These differences are not only the result of initial disadvantage but also cumulative disadvantage in the rate of wealth accumulation. Lastly, the findings suggest that the Black–White wealth gaps grow at a faster rate than the skin tone wealth gaps. I found that differences were robust to adjustments for parental socioeconomic status, childhood background, and interviewer characteristics. I conclude by discussing the theoretical implications for our understanding of the mechanisms undergirding Black–White disparities in wealth attainment.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Other Mother, A Novel

Counterpoint Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2022-05-03
432 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9781640095045

Rachel M. Harper

An “extraordinary” page-turning generational saga about a young man’s search for a parent he never knew, and a moving portrait of motherhood, race, and the truths we hide in the name of family (Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple)

Jenry Castillo is a musical prodigy, raised by a single mother in Miami. He arrives at Brown University on a scholarship—but also to learn more about his late father, Jasper Patterson, a famous ballet dancer who died tragically when Jenry was two. On his search, he meets his estranged grandfather, Winston Patterson, a legendary professor of African American history and a fixture at the Ivy League school, who explodes his world with one question: Why is Jenry so focused on Jasper, when it was Winston’s daughter, Juliet, who was romantically involved with Jenry’s mother? Juliet is the parent he should be looking for—his other mother.

Revelation follows revelation as each member of Jenry’s family steps forward to tell the story of his origin, uncovering a web of secrecy that binds this family together even as it keeps them apart. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, The Other Mother is a daring, ambitious novel that celebrates the complexities of love and resilience—masterfully exploring the intersections of race, class, and sexuality; the role of biology in defining who belongs to whom; and the complicated truth of what it means to be a family.

When Trying to Return Home: Stories

Counterpoint Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-02-07
272 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9781640095687

Jennifer Maritza McCauley

A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond—and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms

Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.