Mixed Race Studies

New Film “Whole” Looks at Daily Struggles of Mixed-Race Japanese

Nippon.com: Your Doorway to Japan
2021-11-25

Matsumoto Takuya

As the population of mixed-race Japanese—popularly called hāfu—grows, entertainers and athletes with bicultural backgrounds are increasingly prominent. However, most of those considered hāfu in Japan live normal, private lives, struggling daily with curiosity, prejudice, and their own identity conflicts. Whole, a new short film, takes up the issues facing just such people through the story of two young men. We spoke with the director, writer, and leading actor about the film…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3’ Nominated For Grammy Award

uDiscover Music
2021-11-24

Sharon Kelly

Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of ‘Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3’ has been nominated for a Grammy Award.

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra’s critically acclaimed Deutsche Grammophon recording of Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 has been nominated for Best Orchestral Performance for the 2022 Grammy Awards. The Grammy, which celebrates both artistic and technical achievement, is the recording industry’s most prestigious award.

“We’re honoured that the Recording Academy continues to recognise our work,” said Dr Clemens Trautmann, President Deutsche Grammophon. “Over the past year our artists have released some extraordinary recordings, from monuments of the repertoire such as Mahler’s ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ to the recently rediscovered symphonies of Florence Price. They have connected with new audiences around the world and demonstrated the life-enhancing spirit of classical music in all its forms. I’m delighted that their achievements are reflected in the nominations for the 2022 GRAMMY Awards.”…

Read the entire article here.

An Overdue Ovation for Florence Price

Little Rock Soirée
2021-09-29

Heather Honaker

“I am a woman, and I have some Negro blood in my veins – and you will understand some of the difficulties that confront one in such a position. Please judge my music on its own merit,” wrote Florence Price to Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky in 1943.

Price was born a Little Rock native in 1887 into a mixed-race family at 2100 Broadway. Her father was the only Black dentist in town, and her mother was a music teacher. She began playing the piano and composing music at 3 years old, and at 11, published her first work. She graduated valedictorian of Capitol Hill High School at the age of 14 and went on to study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston at 16.

One of only three Black students at the conservatory, Price was counseled by her mother to list her hometown as Pueblo, Mexico, to conceal her race. She graduated with honors in three years with a double-major in organ performance and piano teaching.

After school, she came home to teach at Cotton Plant Academy and then Shorter College before moving to Atlanta to become head of the Clark College Music Department. In 1912, she returned to Little Rock to marry attorney Thomas Price and raise a family.

Racial tensions caused them to move to Chicago in 1927, and it wasn’t long before she and her husband divorced. There, she attended classes to perfect her craft, played the organ for silent film screenings and wrote songs for radio ads…

Read the entire article here.

My Boyfriend’s Parents Are Ignorant About Race. Why Should I Have to Teach Them?

The New York Times
2021-11-25

Philip Galanes

Miguel Porlan

A reader seeks advice on dealing with people who undermine her experience as a mixed-race woman.

I am a mixed-race college student and identify as Black. For a year, I’ve been dating a white guy. We’ve never had an issue with race — until now. When I met his parents for the first time, ahead of the family’s big Thanksgiving feast, his father told me that being mixed race is “the best of both worlds.” I didn’t follow. So, he explained: You’re “really white,” but you get the advantages of being Black in college admissions and diversity hiring. I was stunned! My boyfriend, on the other hand, doesn’t see the problem. He says his parents are clueless about race, and it’s our job to help them understand. But I’m not interested in that job. I canceled my Thanksgiving visit, and now my boyfriend is mad at me. Advice?

TRACEY

Your boyfriend and his dad both owe you apologies, for different offenses…

Read the entire letter here.

The Experiment Podcast: How Netflix’s Passing Upends a Hollywood Genre

The Atlantic
2021-11-18

The American movie industry has a long, problematic history with stories about racial passing. But the actor-writer-director Rebecca Hall is trying to tell a new kind of story.

Hollywood has a long history of “passing movies”—films in which Black characters pass for white—usually starring white actors. Even as these films have attempted to depict the devastating effect of racism in America, they have trafficked in tired tropes about Blackness. But a new movie from the actor-writer-director Rebecca Hall takes the problematic conventions of this uniquely American genre and turns them on their head. Hall tells the story of how her movie came to life, and how making the film helped her grapple with her own family’s secrets around race and identity.

Listen to the podcast (00:31:41) here.

My Complicated Relationship with Passing for White

TruJuLo Media
2021-11-19

Fanshen Cox, Actor, Educator, Writer, Producer

This week I share my experience with the concept of passing for white as I watch the #Netflix film #Passing starring #TessaThompson and #RuthNegga and directed by #RebeccaHall. I share important books and history lessons I’ve learned as I shape my understanding of racism and the invention of #whiteness in the United States.

TruJuLo is a production company that uplifts stories that speak truth in pursuit of justice in service of LOVE. This Youtube channel is dedicated to teaching, learning, inspiring, spreading joy and navigating the challenges that BIPOC filmmakers experience in their filmmaking journeys.

I’m a Black, Jamaican, Cherokee, Blackfeet and Danish playwright, producer, executive producer, actor and development executive working in Hollywood. I spent 7 years traveling across the country presenting my one-woman show One Drop of Love and have worked as a producer and development executive at Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Pearl Street Films, for 5 years. I’m also the co-author of the Inclusion Rider, along with Kalpana Kotagal and Color of Change. I’m here to share the lessons I’ve learned as a BIPOC, Global Majority Member filmmaker, storyteller, playwright and theatre producer.

Mixed-Race Melodrama: Métisse

Dr Zélie Asava: Rethinking Representation
2020-12-14

Zélie Asava, Academic. Speaker. Author.

Métisse [Mixed-Race] (Kassovitz, France, 1993) adheres to the ethics of beur cinema by reimagining the French nuclear family as black, mixed and white through its central characters. As a pioneering work it is flawed but, by directly engaging with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality, the film challenges the culturally embedded assumptions of its socio-historic moment and space.

Like Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine, Métisse visualises a France infused with Americana – various scenes feature fast food chains, basketball, drug dealing, graffiti, and hip hop. This cross-cultural focus belies the mixed history of the French nation, and locates the film in a society and industry profoundly changed by the post-WWII period of American commercial domination.[1] Métisse’s mise en scène evades traditional Parisian tropes – key landmarks are absent and there is little philosophising or romance (only its troublesome consequences). The protagonists are immature anti-heroes – rather than effortlessly chic intellectuals – and embody a mixed-race France. As such, they stand as a contrast to contemporaneous cinema culture – e.g. Amélie (Jeunet, France, 2001) or Les Apprentis [The Apprentices] (Salvadori, France, 1995) – where Paris is visualised through a white lens. Métisse is a conscious attempt to rewrite the city as its ordinary inhabitants know it; to show characters driven by tangible problems rather than ennui…

Read the entire review here.

What the Coloring of America Requires of White People

Three-Fifths
2021-11-08

Frank Robinson
Austin, Texas

The Census makes clear that America’s demographics are changing. The percentage of white Americans dropped, while percentages of people of color, of multiethnic and multiracial people, increased. Welcome to our emerging reality.

To some whites, this is the dreaded harbinger of a nightmarish future where we are not in control. Numbers only confirm what’s been underway for some time. Like it or not, we must learn to voluntarily surrender every existing sense of entitlement to control the spaces we occupy. What is called for is the giving of respect.

All white people are not dismayed, afraid or angry. Many are secretly or openly hopeful of America becoming better, doing better. Some have invested time to learn facts and actual history, done work on themselves, and even with imperfect understanding, they step up, speak up and put themselves at risk of hostile neighbors, kinfolk, and co-workers. Some do it out of human decency, some with conviction this is good, godly, and right. If that’s you, I want to encourage you and say I’m kinda proud of you. Keep moving forward in educating yourself to become the thermostat and not the thermometer in your sphere of influence. Learn from good examples. Also, learn what not to do from bad examples and failures, including your own…

Read the entire article here.

Uncloaking a Lost Cause: Decolonizing ancestry estimation in the United States

American Journal of Biological Anthropology
Volume 175, Issue 2, June 2021 (Special Issue: Race reconciled II: Interpreting and communicating biological variation and race in 2021)
pages 422-436
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24212

Elizabeth A. DiGangi, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Binghamton University, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York

Jonathan D. Bethard, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida

Since the professionalization of US-based forensic anthropology in the 1970s, ancestry estimation has been included as a standard part of the biological profile, because practitioners have assumed it necessary to achieve identifications in medicolegal contexts. Simultaneously, forensic anthropologists have not fully considered the racist context of the criminal justice system in the United States related to the treatment of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; nor have we considered that ancestry estimation might actually hinder identification efforts because of entrenched racial biases. Despite ongoing criticisms from mainstream biological anthropology that ancestry estimation perpetuates race science, forensic anthropologists have continued the practice. Recent years have seen the prolific development of retooled typological approaches with 21st century statistical prowess to include methods for estimating ancestry from cranial morphoscopic traits, despite no evidence that these traits reflect microevolutionary processes or are suitable genetic proxies for population structure; and such approaches have failed to critically evaluate the societal consequences for perpetuating the biological race concept. Around the country, these methods are enculturated in every aspect of the discipline ranging from university classrooms, to the board-certification examination marking the culmination of training, to standard operating procedures adopted by forensic anthropology laboratories. Here, we use critical race theory to interrogate the approaches utilized to estimate ancestry to include a critique of the continued use of morphoscopic traits, and we assert that the practice of ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy. Based on the lack of scientific support that these traits reflect evolutionary history, and the inability to disentangle skeletal-based ancestry estimates from supporting the biological validity of race, we urge all forensic anthropologists to abolish the practice of ancestry estimation.

Read the entire article in PDF or HTML format.

Rebecca Hall’s Passing Says The Most In The Silences

Elle
2021-11-12

Christine Jean-Baptiste
Montréal, Quebec

Passing opens on a busy street in 1920s New York. A mysterious woman (Tessa Thompson) is roaming through Manhattan. In this part of town, she anxiously hides behind a wide-brimmed hat covering half her face. It’s every bit intentional. When she later settles down in the grand tea room at The Drayton Hotel, she stays camouflaged among a sea of lily-white couples. As she people-watches, her eyes lock on an almost unnoticeable old friend, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), who blends in perfectly with the crowd.

In her directorial debut, Rebecca Hall takes on an ambitious adaptation of Passing, a 1929 novel written by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen about two Black women who live parallel truths: one, Clare, is passing as white, and the other, Thompson’s Irene, envies the privileges that come with the act. When it first premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Passing was touted as a “psychological thriller about obsession, repression, and the lies people tell themselves and others to protect their carefully constructed realities.” But the film is less potent than its subject matter. Instead, race identity in America is a soft whisper that is meant to haunt instead of educate.

Though both of these light-skinned Black women have shared a similar upbringing, Irene and Clare could not have grown further apart. Irene lives in Harlem with her two children and charming husband (André Holland), who is Black. Clare has dyed her hair blonde and lives partially in Europe with her daughter and racist husband (Alexander Skarsgård), who is white. After catching up over champagne in Clare’s suite, the dynamic between the two women tightens, emphasized by the enclosing camera shots. While Clare seems delighted to be reunited with an old friend, Irene appears hesitant and reserved. It doesn’t make Irene any more comfortable when Clare says dating a rich white man is “well worth the price,” implying that she’s comfortable passing as a white woman and benefiting from it. Or when Clare’s husband walks in, expressing his gratitude for Clare’s “whiteness.” Irene soon realizes that her childhood friend was now someone with a secret, because the man who hates Black people so much did not realize his wife was one…

Read the article here.