Mixed Race Studies

Tell Me a Story: Genomics vs. Indigenous Origin Narratives

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26, Number 4, Religion & Genetics (Aug-Oct 2013)
pages 11-13

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

On April 13, 2005 the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism issued a press release opposing the Genographic Project, which aimed to sample 100,000 indigenous and other traditional peoples to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.” IPCB critiques Genographic, and the Human Genome Diversity Project before it, as the contemporary continuation of colonial, extractive research. The analysis is also a fundamental historical examination of Western science. IPCB foregrounds the intellectual and institutional authority that science, a powerful tool of colonizing states, has to appropriate indigenous bodies – both dead and living – material cultural artifacts, and indigenous cultural narratives in the service of academic knowledge production.

Critics point out that such knowledge rarely serves indigenous peoples’ interests and can actively harm them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries massacre sites and graves were plundered for body parts to be used in scientific investigations that inform today’s anthropological and biological research on Native Americans. Throughout the 20th century, indigenous peoples around the world witnessed the too common practice of “helicopter research” – quick sampling without return of results or benefit to subjects. Indigenous DNA samples and data taken in earlier decades when ethics standards were lax continue to be used and cited in contemporary investigations, bringing those injustices into the 21st century. And new, more ethical research still takes time from other pressing projects and needs. Informed community review and collaboration with researchers will increase community benefit, but informed participation has costs. It takes resources to build capacity to sit at the table as equals instead of as vulnerable subjects – as simply the raw materials for science…

Read the entire article here.

Amalgamation

Weekly Banner-Watchman
Athens, Georgia
1889-03-26
page 1, columns 3-4
The Athens Historic Newspaper database is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE.
Transcribed by Steven F. Riley

A Reply By Rev. S. P. Richardson D. D. to a Sermon By Dr. Talmage, Preached in Brooklyn, N.Y. March 3rd, on “The United States, Immigration Ethology, and the Amalgamation of All the Races.

Text Acts XVII and part of the 20th verse, “And hath made of one blood all nations,” (the whole verse) of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The whole verse shows clearly that God, instead of intending to unite by immigration and amalgamation all nationalities, before determined and appointed their bounds of separation. He gave Africa to Ham, Asia to Shem and Europe and the West to Japheth. He also gave form, brain and color to each family suited to develop the countries in which he placed them.

Dr. Talmadge says: “The advantage of the influx of nations, through mighty additions of foreign population to our above population I think God is giving, to fill this land with a race of people 95 per cent superior to anything the world has ever seen. Marriage outside of one own nationality and with another style of nationality is a mighty gain.”

The Doctor then speaks of himself and of the very great gain by mixing the Scotch and Irish. Dr. Talmage knows that the European nations are largely made up of the white or Japhethic race, all of the one primordial race. The Doctor is a great man in some respects, but what would he have been if only his Scotch and Irish blood had been supplemented with a little sprinkling of negro, Indian and Hottentot? He proposes to make (not the North) “but the whole United States a great caldron, in which to mix all races and all nationalities, and to formulate in this caldron, out of all races, a new race or manhood “95 par cent, superior to anything this world has ever seen.”

The Doctor proves, as he thinks, from his garbled text, and from a scientific analysis of one single part of man, “the blood” that all men are the same. Now if the Doctor really wanted to be fair in his presentation of his subject to the world, why did he not subject the hair, skin, bones and odor of all the races to the same analysis? Why just take one thing, “the blood.” All animals have some one thing in common with man, seeing, hearing and tasting belong to the ass as well as the man.

If all the races are one when put into his big caldron, will they not still be one when he takes them out? If the putting of all the races into the big caldron, with all their different colors and odors, would make them all Scotch-Irish, it might be well to put them in, but so far as the experiment has been made up to date, the facts are that in exact proportion as you put in white, black, or yellow, it comes out white, black or yellow in the very same proportion it was put in. If the white and black mix they will be mulattoes in all coming generations.

I have never seen the results of amalgamation on so large a scale as the Doctor proposes with his great caldron; but I have seen the white, black and Indian, all mixed up in one person, but that person was nothing like Dr. Talmage’s beauty nor was he 95 per cent. beyond anything I had ever seen. The white and yellow were very much marred in the mixture, and the black not much improved, if improved at all. The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct. My long observation goes to prove that in mixing the races all are weakened and none are benefitted. All the different families of the same race may be benefitted by mixing, like the Scotch and the Irish, but never by mixing the races. If God had intended the amalgamation of all the races, why did He, by creation, or miraculous interposition separate the races, and appoint them bounds, and give to each the place of his habitation. The negro is not a human invention, nor is the white or yellow man, but a divine appointment. The three colors are primordial, and are not radically changed by food, or climate. The negro was black four thousand years ago, as he is now. God says he cannot change his skin any more than the leopard can change his spots, and yet the Doctor would change God’s decree.

Europe and the North brought the negro from his God-given home, and sold him to the South, then becoming dissatisfied with what they had done, destroyed a half million of Southern white people to set the four million of negroes free. In their modes of warfare they showed that they were capable of the deepest depravity, and really acted worse than common Savages. Now they are dissatisfied with the freedom of the negro, and their most popular and sensational preacher sounded the bugle note on the 3d of March in Brooklyn, N.Y., to rig up a big caldron, into which be proposes to cast both negroes and whites, and stew them both down to a common mulatto, and destroy both the white and black races, and substitute them with a race of mulattoes, a type of humanity God never made. There is not a mulatto or mule in the primordial type, in the kingdom of nature. The Bible, experience and God in universal nature, are all pronounced against the amalgamation of the races. I have never known a Scotch-Irishman, Dutchman or Englishman, not even a cold blooded Yankee to improve their posterity by mixing with negroes and Indians. Nor have I ever known the negro or Indian much improved by mixing with them. The real facts are the negro has no more affinities for the white and yellow races, than they have for him.

Dr. Talmage says: “There was a time when I entertained race prejudices, but thanks to God that prejudice is gone and if I set in a church on one side a black man and on the other side an Indian and before me a Chinaman and behind me a Turk, I would be as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant auiience. The sooner we get this corpse of race prejudice buried the healthier will be (not our Northern) but American atmosphere.”  This is the most pronounced social equality and amalgamation I have ever heard from any man. I have denied, that the Northern churches held any such views, and that it was only a ghost of Southern imagination. Dr. Talmage is a representative mam, and knows the mind and feelings of the North.

Dr. Talmage ought to be a good Presbyterian and let God’s divine decrees alone. Did God not ordain the races? The Doctor ought to be tried for heresy and put out of the church for trying to violate the divine decrees by making mulattoes out of people which God has made white and black. I would suggest to the good Doctor and his brilliant congregation, to make the experiment of mixing the races on a smaller scale, and not have so large a funeral all at onca. Let one of the Doctor’s daughters marry a negro, and another a Chinamen, and another a Hottentot, and then let his Elders follow his exaple, and take time and see if, on a small scale, they can produce a race 95 per cent above anything the world has ever seen.  Then show his picture of this new development to his Northern friends, who drive the negro children out of their white public schools.  If the North will fix up large gardens and invite the negroes to come up North among their friends, and then enter into a hearty amalgamation, the negro problem may be solved.

If the good Doctor will take the time and pains to review the history of nations, their decay and final fall, he will see that in most instances their ruin was the result, both religiously and politically of mixing nations and amalgamation. God forbade the Jews to mix with other nations. Dr. Talmage, in the face of the Bible, proposes to build up a great nation out of the very causes that have destroyed greater nations. I have no doubt but our good Dr. Talmage and brilliant Brooklyn congregations would suffer crucifixion before they would mix their families with negroes, Chinamen and Hottentots. This great country has been built up, not by the Hametic or Shemetic races, but by the children of Japheth–English, Dutch, Scotch and Irish, and the country will never be injured by the immigration, of those nationalities, or our amalgamation with them. I am English and German, but no negro or Chinaman. An Englishman or Scotchman is not a foreigner in this country, but one of the same white family. —S. P. Richardson.

Room for All

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Monday, 1889-03-04
page 2, column 4
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection
Transcribed and edited by Steven F. Riley

Rev. Dr. Talmage as an Anti Know Nothing.

Rev. Dr. Talmage preached a patriotic sermon yesterday morning. His subject was: “Should America, be Reserved for Americans?” and he answered it in the most anti-Know Nothing style. A very large audience listened. The text was: “And hath made of one blood all nation.” The preacher spoke in part as follows:

I think God built this continent and organized this United States Republic, to demonstrate the stupendous idea of my text. If a Persian stays in Persia he remains Persian, if a Swiss stays in Switzerland he remains a Swiss, if an Austrian stays in Austria he remains an Austrian; but all these and other nationalities coining to America become Americans. This continent is a chemical laboratory where all foreign bloods are to be inextricably mixed, and race antipathies race prejudices are to perish, and this sermon is an ax by which I hope to kill some of them or help to kill some of them.

It is not a difficult thing for me to preach this sermon, because while my ancestors came to this country about two hundred and fifty years ago, some of them came from Wales, and some from Scotland, and some from Holland, and some from other nationalities, so that I feel at home with all people from under the sky and feel a blood relation to all of them. There are madcaps and patriotic lunatics who are ever and anon crying out, “America for Americans! down with the Germans! down with the Irish! down with the Jews! down with the Chinese!” and these vociferations come from many directions, and I propose this morning, as far as possible, to drown them out by the full organ of my text, and to pull out all the stops and put my foot on the pedal that will open the loudest pipes, and run my fingers over all the four banks of ivory keys while I play the chant of my text: “God hath made of one blood all nations.”

There are not five persons in this audience, or in any audience to-day in America—unless it be on an Indian reservation—who did not descend from foreigners, if you go far enough back. The only native Americans are the Modocs and the Mohawks and the Choctaws and the Cherokees and the Seminoles and the Shawnees and such like. If the cry, “America for Americans,” be a Christian and righteous cry, then you and I have no business here, and we had better charter the steamers and the sloops and the yachts and the men of war and get out of this land as quick as possible. If this cry that I abhor had been a successful cry at the start, where now stand our American cities would have stood Indian wigwams, and the Connecticut and the Hudson, instead of being cut with the prow of steamers, would be cut with canoes, and the Mississippi River, instead of being the main artery of this continent would have been only a trough for deer and antelope and wild pigeons to drink out of.

What makes the cry “America for Americans” the more absurd and the more inhuman and the more unchristian is the fact that people who only arrived in this country in their boyhood or only one or two generations back are joining in the cry. Escaped from foreign despotisms themselves, they say: “Now shut the door; don’t let any more escape.” Having got ashore in the lifeboat from the shipwreck, they say: “Now pull up the boat on the beach and let all the rest of the passengers go to the bottom.” And people who have yet the Scotch and the Irish and the English and the Italian brogue are saying: “America for Americans.” How would it be if the native inhabitants of heaven, the angels who were born there, the cherubim and seraphim who have always lived there–should come out on the shore of heaven when you and I at last try to go up, and they should come out and shout to us: “Go back: Heaven for the Heavenians!”

The fact is, that here is a subject which needs to be presented from every American pulpit. Of course, we do not want America to become a convict colony. We would build a wall high as heaven and deep as hell against all foreign thieves, cut throats, pickpockets and Anarchists. We would not allow them even to wipe their feet on the mat of the outside door of Castle Garden. If England and France and Germany and Russia send their vagabonds here because they want to get rid of them, let us put those vagabonds in chains and send them back again to the place whence they came.

But you build a wall at the Narrows, in front of New York Harbor, or at the Golden Gate, in front of San Francisco, to keep out the honest, hard working populations of this world who want to breathe the free air of America, or get a better livelihood for their families, and it is only a question of time when that wall will tumble down on us under the red hot thunderbolts of the Lord God Almighty. They are coming, they will continue to come, and, if I had voice loud enough to be heard across the seas this morning, I would put it to the utmost tension and I would say: “Let them come!” You mean, shriveled up, stingy, blasted soul, seated at your silver dinner plate piled up with bursting roast turkey incarnadined with cranberry, your mouth full and your fork full, cramming down a superabundance that sets your digestive organs into a state of terror, do let some
other nation of the earth have at least a wishing bone.

I believe that some of this cry is an honest cry on the part of people who really fear that America is going to be over-crowded. Now, let me say to all such people: Take the populations’ of the whole earth—all the people of Europe, Asia, Africa and all the islands of the sea—and pour them out on the American continent, and yet there will be room. The Rocky Mountain desert and all the other American barrenesses are to be fertilized, and as Salt Lake City and Utah once could not have raised in many places as much as a spear of grass, they have become the gardens of the world through artificial irrigation, so the time will come when all the barren places on this American continent through artificial irrigation will be brought into a productive state, and, like Illinois’ prairie, wave with wheat fields, or, like Wisconsin farm, rustle with corn tassels. Beside that, after a century or two, when the country gets tolerably well occupied the tide of immigration will set the other way, and the politics and the governmental affairs of other nations; all being made right and Ireland turned into one complete garden, it will invite generations back again, and Russia brought out from, under despotism and made a glorious place to live in, will invite whole generations of Russians back again, and every year there will he hundreds of thousands of Americans going to other continents. And then, the centuries rolling on, after a while all the continents full and crowded, what then?

Some night, a panther meteor wandering through the heavens will put its paw on the world and stop it. Then putting its panther teeth into the neck of the mountain ranges, it will take our world and shake it lifeless, as easily as a rat terrier a rat. I have as much fear that the porpoises in the Atlantic Ocean will multiply until they stop the shipping as I have fear that this country will ever be too much crowded. By the addition of a foreign population to our native population and the intermingling of races on this continent there is going after a while to be a race in 95 per cent, better, stronger, mightier than any race now on the earth, on either side of the Atlantic. Intermarriage of families, intermarriage of nations is depressing, crippling. Marriage outside of one’s nationality, and especially marriage into a style of nationality entirely different from your own is a mighty gain. What makes the Scotch-Irish blood second in pedigree to none because of its brain and stamina of character? It is because the two most unlike people in the world are a Scotchman and an Irishman. Those nationalities intermingle and have the Scotch-Irish blood, and then they go right up to the Supreme Court bench, and right to the front or all merchandise and all jurisprudence.

Nothing so accelerates the human race as the mingling of races. And in this country we are going to have all the opposite nationalities intermingled. It is the intermingling of the races in America that is going to destroy the last vestige of race prejudice. How heaven feels about it you may conclude from the fact that Christ, a Jew and born of a Jewess, promulgated a religion for all races, and that Paul, a Jew, became the chief apostle to the Gentiles, and that Christ has allowed to burst upon us in splendor in this very year the charity of Mr. Hirsch, the Jew, who, after giving $10,000,000 to Christian charities and hospitals in January gave $40,000,000 for schools to educate the Jews in France, Germany and Russia, and, as he says, to extinguish race prejudice. Those $50,000,000 given to the Christians and the Jews for alleviating and educational purposes, not bestowed in a last will and testament when a man must give up his money anyhow, but at 55 years of age and in good health—a magnificence of benevolence never equated since the world was created.

I confess that I used to have some race prejudices, but, thank God, they have all gone, and if I sat to-day in this church, and on one side of me sat a black man, and on the other side of me sat an Indian, and before me sat a Chinaman, and behind me sat a Turk, I would be just as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant assemblage, and I am about as happy now as I can be and live. Oh it will be healthy for this American atmosphere, healthy for American life when we can take this miserable corpse of race prejudice and bury it. Bring all your spades now and let us dig a grave. Dig it deep down, deeper down, deeper down until we come to the very heart of the earth, half way across China, but no further lest the poison get out on the other side of the world. Then let down this accursed carcass of race prejudice into this deep grave. Then put on the top of it all the mean things that have ever been said about Jew and Gentile, between Turk and Russian, between English and French, between Mongolian and anti Mongolian. Then let us have for a tombstone a scorched and jagged chunk of scoria spit out by some volcanic eruption and chisel on it this epitaph: “Here lies one who cursed the centuries, aged nearly 6.000 years. Departed this life for the perdition from whence it came. No peace to its ashes.”

Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America

Oxford University Press
2010-02-16
352 Pages
15 b/w photos
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780195379792
Paperback ISBN: 9780199794454

Sharon Davies, Professor of Law; Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer’s motive? The priest had married Stephenson’s eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.

Sharon Davies’s Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson’s crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and “foreigners” as well. In one of the case’s most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson’s defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black.

Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Best Laid Plans
• 2. A Parish to Run
• 3. Until Death Do Us Part
• 4. A City Reacts
• 5. A Killer Speaks
• 6. The Building of a Defense
• 7. The Engines of Justice Turn
• 8. Black Robes, White Robes
• 9. Trials and Tribulations
• 10. A Jury’s Verdict
• Epilogue

Latina/o Healing Practices: Mestizo and Indigenous Perspectives

Routledge
2008-05-19
360 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-95420-4

Edited by:

Brian McNeill, Professor and director of training for the Counseling Psychology Program
Washington State University

Joseph M. Cervantes, Professor in the Department of Counseling
California State University, Fullerton

This edited volume focuses on the role of traditional or indigenous healers, as well as the application of traditional healing practices in contemporary counseling and therapeutic modalities with Latina/o people. The book offers a broad coverage of important topics, such as traditional healer’s views of mental/psychological health and well-being, the use of traditional healing techniques in contemporary psychotherapy, and herbal remedies in psychiatric practice. It also discusses common factors across traditional healing methods and contemporary psychotherapies, the importance of spirituality in counseling and everyday life, the application of indigenous healing practices with Latina/o undergraduates, indigenous techniques in working with perpetrators of domestic violence, and religious healing systems and biomedical models. The book is an important reference for anyone working within the general field of mental health practice and those seeking to understand culturally relevant practice with Latina/o populations.

Contents

• An Appreciation of Dr. Michael W. Smith (1960-2006) Lorraine Garcia-Teague
• Contributors
• Introduction: Counselors and Curanderas/os—Parallels in the Healing Process Brian W. McNeill and Joseph M. Cervantes
• Part One: Mestiza/o and Indigenous Perspectives
  • Chapter 1: What Is Indigenous About Being Indigenous? The Mestiza/o Experience Joseph M. Cervantes
  • Chapter 2: Latina/o Folk Saints and Marian Devotions: Popular Religiosity and Healing Fernando A. Ortiz and Kenneth G. Davis
  • Chapter 3: Santeria and the Healing Process in Cuba and the United States Brian W. McNeill, Eileen Esquivel, Arlene Carkasco, and Rosalilia Mendoza
• Part Two: Indigenous and Mestiza/o Healing Practices
  • Chapter 4: The Use of Psychotropic Herbal and Natural Medicines in Latina/o and Mestiza/o Populations German Ascani and Michael W. Smith
  • Chapter 5: Brazil’s Ultimate Healing Resource: The Power of Spirit Sandra Nuñez
  • Chapter 6: La Limpia de San Lazaro as Individual and Collective Cleansing Rite Karen V. Holliday
  • Chapter 7: Resé un Ave María y Encendí una Velita: The Use of Spirituality and Religion as a Means of Coping with Educational Experiences for Latina/o College Students Jeanett Castellanos and Alberta M. Gloria
• Part Three: Contemporary Aspects of Mestiza/o and Indigenous Healing Practices: Reclamation and Integration
  • Chapter 8: Los Espiritus Siguen Hablando: Chicana Spiritualities Lara Medina
  • Chapter 9: Religious Healing and Biomedicine in Comparative Context Karen V. Holliday
  • Chapter 10: Curanderismo: Religious and Spiritual Worldviews and Indigenous Healing Traditions Fernando A. Ortiz, Kenneth G. Davis, and Brian W. McNeill
• Part Four: Epilogue
  • Epilogue: Summary and Future Research and Practice Agendas Joseph M. Cervantes and Brian W. McNeill
• Index

Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History

University of Texas Press
2003
456 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
142 illustrations, 3 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-292-70527

Teresa Palomo Acosta

Ruthe Winegarten (1929-2004)

Awards

• 2004 T.R. Fehrenbach Award; Texas Historical Commission
• Texas Reference Source Award; Reference Round Table, Texas Library Association

This groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries

Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries.

The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas’ lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas’ contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

Contents

• Foreword by Cynthia E. Orozco
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Native Women, Mestizas, and Colonists
• Chapter 2: The Status of Women in the Colonial Period
• Chapter 3: From the Republic of Texas to 1900
• Chapter 4: Revolution, Racism, and Resistance: 1900-1940
• Chapter 5: Life in Rural Texas: 1900-1940
• Chapter 6: Life in Urban Texas: 1900-1940
• Chapter 7: Education: Learning, Teaching, Leading
• Chapter 8: Entering Business and the Professions
• Chapter 9: Faith and Community
• Chapter 10: Politics, the Chicano Movement, and Tejana Feminism
• Chapter 11: Winning and Holding Public Office
• Chapter 12: Arts and Culture Epilogue: Grinding Corn Fifty Notable Tejanas
• Time Line
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Is There a “New Black Theology?” Yes and No.

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-11-28

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Last week I had the distinct privilege of sitting on a panel with Willie James Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, and Edward Philip Antonio with Joanne Terrell responding. The panel was convened by the Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings in Chicago, IL [Illinois] from November 16-20.

The title of the panel was “Towards a New Black Theology?: Going Back in Order to Move Forward!” and centered upon the work of Jennings (The Christian Imagination), Carter (Race: A Theological Account), and myself (Redeeming Mulatto) and how we intersect with and diverge from Black Theology. As a panel we did not directly address the nomenclature “New Black Theology” which is not a terribly apt term for the work that we do, but it would also be a mistake to suggest that we are not indebted to Black Theological reflection either. The question of the name is less important than our hope that people might begin to enter into the problems and possibilities that animate our theological work. In the presentations we each, in our own way, sought to highlight both our connections to traditions and sensibilities of Black Christian thought as well as highlight how we are imagining a way forward…

…What follows is the text of my presentation, “Theology From and To: What is Mulatto Theology?”…

…What “mulatto” in a mulattic theological framework suggests is not the valorization of the mixed race body, nor the marginalization of the mixed race body. Rather, “mulatto” gestures towards the situatedness of bodies in a racial world where a person and a people occupy multiple spaces at once. The life of discipleship is navigating these various realities, discovering patterns of unfaithfulness as well as the continual possibilities that stand before us. “Mulatto” theology suggests that we stand in a space that is both transgressive and transgressed, that we cannot separate ourselves from the realities of our tragic beginnings, but that these realities do not exonerate us or protect us from perpetuating old terrors in new ways. We are children of mothers and fathers with complicated and tragic stories, but we cannot excise ourselves from them. A mulattic theology seeks to exist between these realities and discern patterns of faithfulness in their midst. Out of this reality a mulatto theology does not work to establish a cultural space or retrieve a tradition…

Read the entire article here.

The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945

Harvard University Press
February 2011
272 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
20 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674057012

George Bornstein, C. A. Patrides Professor of Literature, Emeritus
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.”

While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Races
• 2. Diasporas and Nationalisms
• 3. Melting Pots
• 4. Popular and Institutional Cultures
• 5. The Gathering Storm: The 1930s and World War II
• Notes
• Index

Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about ‘Jews’ in the Twenty-First Century

Berghahn Books
May 2013
398 pages
bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-892-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85745-893-3

Edited by:

Efraim Sicher, Professor of Comparative and English Literature
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and “Jews”, and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors—leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies—discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.

Contents

• Foreword / Sander Gilman
• Introduction: Rethinking Discourses about “Jews” / Efraim Sicher
• PART I: JEWS AND RACE IN AMERICA
  • Chapter 1. “I’m not White – I’m Jewish”: The Racial Politics of American Jews / Cheryl Greenberg
  • Chapter 2. Reflections on Black/Jewish Relations in the Age of Obama / Ibrahim Sundiata
  • Chapter 3. Stains, Plots, and the Neighbor Thing: Jews, Blacks and Philip Roth’s Utopias / Adam Zachary Newton
  • Chapter 4. Spaces of Ambivalence: Blacks and Jews in New York City / Catherine Rottenberg
  • Chapter 5. African-American Culture, Anthropological Practices and the Jewish “Race” in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men / Dalit Alperovich
  • Chapter 6. Jewish Characters in Weeds: Reinserting ‘Race’ into the Postmodern Discourse on American Jews / Hannah Adelman Komy Ofir and Shlomi Deloia
• PART II: JEWS AS BLACKS / BLACK JEWS
  • Chapter 7. A Member of the Club? How Black Jews Negotiate Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism / Bruce Haynes
  • Chapter 8. Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel: The Discourses of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Racism / Steven Kaplan
  • Chapter 9. Black-Jews in Academic and Institutional Discourse / Yonah Zianga
  • Chapter 10. The “Descendants of David” of Madagascar: Crypto-Judaic identities in 21st century Africa / Edith Bruder
• PART III: DISCOURSES OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES
  • Chapter 11. After the Fact: “Jews” in Post-1945 German Physical Anthropology / Amos Morris-Reich
  • Chapter 12. Genes as Jewish History?: Human Population Genetics in the Service of Historians / Noa Sophie Kohler and Dan Mishmar
  • Chapter 13. Sarrazin and the Myth of the “Jewish Gene” / Klaus Hödl
  • Chapter 14. Blood, Soul, Race, and Suffering: Full-Bodied Ethnography and Expressions of Jewish Belonging / Fran Markowitz
  • Chapter 15. Jews, Muslims, European Identities: Multiculturalism and Anti-Semitism in Britain / Efraim Sicher
  • Chapter 16. Brothers in Misery: Re-connecting Sociologies of Racism and Anti-Semitism / Glynis Cousin and Robert Fine
  • Chapter 17. Race by the Grace of God: Race, Religion, and the Construction of “Jew” and “Arab” / Ivan Davidson Kalmar
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Black And Jewish And Read All Over

The Jewish Week
2013-07-16

Julie Wiener

She may currently live on the Upper East Side, but Simone Weichselbaum, 31, remains a Brooklyn girl. Raised in Williamsburg and Crown Heights by her Ashkenazi Jewish dad (who freelances for The Jewish Week) and Jamaican mom, Weichselbaum, a Park East Day School grad (she formally converted to Judaism at age 7), covers Brooklyn for the Daily News.

Her coverage — “piercing, respectful, accurate and entertaining reporting of the multicultural borough, in particular its Orthodox Jews and Jews of color” — earned her the 2013 “Media Award” from Be’chol Lashon, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that celebrates and promotes cultural/racial diversity and inclusivity in American Jewish life.

Weichselbaum — who reports on everything from crime to the city’s bike-share program (she’s an avid cyclist who often commutes to interviews on her two-wheeler) — recently met with The Jewish Week at a café near her apartment. The following is a condensed and edited version of the conversation.

Q: So what was it like growing up in an interracial and Orthodox family?

A: My parents raised me Jewish — we never talked about race. They said, “You’re biracial.” I grew up with other kids who were like that too. Park East had other biracial Jews and Jews from around the world, so it wasn’t weird to be brown there.

So, do you identify as black?

I’m proudly biracial. I’m very adamant about this. I don’t understand why people pick one. I’m Jamaican and Jewish. I have friends who are biracial and say they’re black Jews or Latino Jews. I’m like, “You’re mom’s white, knock it off.” … I like [Shlomo] Carlebach and Biggie Smalls. I listen to both on a daily basis…

Read the entire article here.