Mixed Race Studies

What the #ThankYouLovings campaign gets wrong about interracial couples and the future of America

Fusion
2016-12-09

Tahirah Hairston

FOCUS FEATURES

Last month, Loving, a biopic about Mildred and Richard Loving—the couple at the center of the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision which struck down bans on interracial marriage in 1967—was released nationwide. June 12th, 2017 will be the 50th anniversary of the historic trial.

As a way to celebrate the Lovings—and promote the movie—the Loving Twitter account began encouraging people to use the hashtag #ThankYouLovings. The hashtag has been shared across social media, accompanied by photos of interracial couples—everything from candid selfies to intimate wedding photos.

It’s important, beautiful, and in a sense almost surreal to see how much America has progressed—and how much it has failed—in one photo and one film. On one hand, there is no rule on who we can or can’t love. People of all races and, thanks to last year’s Supreme Court ruling, genders, can now marry. On the other hand, we’re no closer to ending systematic racism, sexism or homophobia, with the 2016 election being our most up-to-date example…

Read the entire article here.

Why A New Mixed Race Generation Will Not Solve Racism

BuzzFeed
2017-02-10

Lauren Michele Jackson, BuzzFeed Contributor
Chicago, Illinois

A promotional still from A United Kingdom. Fox Searchlight Pictures

Love may trump hate, but it can’t cure white supremacy.

On January 23, Chrissy Teigen — model, “domestic goddess,” and number one John Legend troll — decided to have some fun with Richard Spencer on Twitter. Now best known as the neo-Nazi who got punched at the January 20 presidential inauguration, Spencer was salving his wounded pride with a “selection of Nelson Mandela quotes. 😉”. The tweet to which Teigen responded, however, was actually a quote from Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become,” Spencer tweeted. Teigen’s @reply: “you became someone who was punched in the face.”

When Spencer attempted to embarrass Teigen, implying she was not educated enough to recognize a quote from Mandela (while, again, the quote in question was not from Mandela), Teigen responded with “you are a literally a nazi. I don’t even need to come up with a comeback. Thanks, nazi!” Teigen meanwhile tweeted to her followers sans @reply, “Hey guys, just conversing with a literal nazi over here wyd,” followed by “Nothing I could say will piss him off more than the fact I have a black/asian/white baby. Life is grand.”.

A month prior, Ellen Pompeo of Grey’s Anatomy summoned her black husband and mixed children in a similar maneuver, if under slightly different circumstances. Against criticism she received for her usage of brown emojis in a tweet applauding A&E’s decision to revamp its (now canceled) docuseries on the KKK, Pompeo told followers, “You do realize…being married to a black man and having black children can make you a target from racist white people right? That’s a thing.” In response to one user’s taunt (“SHUT UP, WHITE LADY”) she tweeted, “That’s white lady with a black husband and black children to you babe.”

In their respective contexts, the tweets from Teigen and Pompeo look very different if not completely contradictory. Chrissy Teigen snubs the nose of a professed white supremacist and flounces away with her superstar black husband and multiracial child; Pompeo calls up her black husband and children to deflect criticism. And yet, very similarly, both position interracial relationships — implied in Teigen’s case — and multiracial children as the antidote to racism. That they are both able to invoke this rationale so congruently points to a culture-wide infatuation with interracial relationships and their heteronormative outcome, multiracial children. In advertising, on film, and on TV, there is a common preference for multiracial-looking people, along with the belief that they represent a utopian political future. Why do multiracial children so often function as the antonym for racism? What is the political value of an interracial relationship? The notion that cream-colored babies will save the world is a popular one. Unfortunately, it’s a myth…

Read the entire article here.

Reel Representation: Amma Asante’s films adeptly portray multiracial identity

The Daily Bruin
Los Angeles, California
2017-02-09

Olivia Mazzucato

Diversity in film and television came into the spotlight in 2016 with #OscarsSoWhite. A USC study in 2016 found only about a quarter of speaking characters belonged to non-white racial/ethnic groups. In “Reel Representation,” columnist Olivia Mazzucato discusses different issues of race and representation in media as they relate to new movies and TV shows.

The closest I’ve ever felt to seeing myself on screen is when I watched the film “Belle.”

“Belle” tells the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an enslaved African woman and a white British officer. She’s brought to England and raised by her uncle, an earl and the Lord Chief Justice, and finds herself facing a choice between two men – a poor vicar’s son, whom she loves, and a naive aristocrat with a bigoted family. Throughout the film, she tries to reconcile her identities, both as an heiress in the British upper class and as a black woman struggling to find her place in a shifting society.

I may not be able to relate directly to Dido’s life, but her struggles with identity are all too familiar to me.

As someone who is biracial – half Italian-American and half Japanese-American – it’s difficult to process my identity, particularly when it comes to seeing myself represented in media. I don’t look like the white female characters I see, nor the few Asian characters that occasionally grace the screen. On some level, I feel like I’ll never truly be represented because my identity is so specific…

Read the entire article here.

In Plain Sight: Changing Representations of “Biracial” People in Film 1903-2015

Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
December 2016
247 pages

Charles Lawrence Gray

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Educational Policy and Leadership)

Rooted in slavery, the United States in both law and custom has a long history of adhering to the one drop rule–the stipulation that any amount of African ancestry constitutes an individual as black. Given this history, decidedly mixed race people have been subjected to a number of degrading stereotypes. In examining the three broad themes of the tragic mulatto, racial passing, and racelessness in cinema, this dissertation asks to what extent film representations of mixed race characters have had the capacity to educate audiences beyond stereotypes. Although a number of film scholars and critics have analyzed mixed race characters in American cinema, there is no treatment spanning the last century that comprehensively analyzes each film’s capacity to diminish racism.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Mixed: Documentary to Explore Interracial Families

American University
Washington, D.C.
2016-12-15

Gregg Sangillo, Online Writer

School of Communication professors Leena Jayaswal (l) and Caty Borum Chattoo (r) are making a film about interracial families in the United States.

It took a while for documentary filmmakers Leena Jayaswal and Caty Borum Chattoo to realize that they were part of their own story. They’re both in interracial marriages with biracial children, and that’s the subject of their upcoming film, Mixed.

“Everybody kept telling us this film is about the two of you. And we said, ‘No, it’s not.’ But then somebody would say, ‘Why are you making this film?’” Jayaswal recalls.

The documentary is a travelogue—talking with people in Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, and Los Angeles, among other places—but Jayaswal and Borum Chattoo are inextricably linked to the subject matter at hand.

“It’s a journey film about the two of us finding mixed-race stories across America,” says Jayaswal, an associate professor at American University’s School of Communication.

Throughout the process, they’ve discovered so much more about their country—and themselves. “We actually had all these questions. How does mixed-race identity develop? So we talked to a psychologist about that. What’s the media representation? So we talked to a bunch of Hollywood people. So we’re finding those answers,” says Borum Chattoo, an executive in residence at SOC…

Read the entire article here.

Three movies this year show Virginia’s racial history. In short, it’s complicated.

The Washington Post
2016-12-22

Stephanie Merry, Reporter

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving in the movie “Loving.” (Ben Rothstein/Focus Features)

“Loving” shows Virginia at its most romantic and picturesque. Toward the beginning of the drama, a man takes his pregnant wife-to-be to an empty field and tells her in a slow drawl, “I’m going to build you a house right here.”

The couple stand on a patchy, tree-lined stretch of grass, the rhythmic buzzing of cicadas pulsing around them. Low-hanging clouds pass languidly overhead, and the grass flutters in the breeze; humidity practically radiates off the screen.

In the movie, Virginia is the place where these sweethearts, played by Golden Globe nominees Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga, meet and fall for each other in the mid-1950s. But it’s also the place where a white man and his wife, who’s black and Native American, would get arrested for the crime of cohabitating. Virginia forced Richard and Mildred Loving to go to jail or leave the state they loved, and they spent nearly a decade in Washington, D.C., trying to return.

Virginia showed up in three major movies this year, all based on true stories. “The Birth of a Nation,” a drama about the 1831 slave uprising led by Nat Turner, takes place in Southampton County, not far from the setting of “Hidden Figures,” which opens Sunday and tells the story of black female mathematicians working for NASA during the space race.

These dramas capture the conflicted nature of the commonwealth — the way progress and resistance are in constant battle, with some citizens rejecting the status quo just as forcefully as others cling to it…

Read the entire article here.

Are Brazilians Latinos? What their identity struggle tells us about race in America

The Conversation
2016-12-20

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University, New York, New York

Bikini waxes, keratin hair blowouts and all-you-can-eat steakhouses.

In the United States, all three are closely associated with the word “Brazilian.” Yet, although none of these things are linked to Latino identity, one of the questions that journalists frequently ask me is, “Are Brazilians Latinos?” Surprisingly, many Brazilian-Americans also ask me the same question. As one of my students put it, “Because ‘Brazilian’ is not an option in any census, job or college form, you get older and wonder, where do I fit in?”

The confusion is warranted.

It illuminates how U.S. public discourse and policy classifies 57 million people from very different ethnic, racial and national backgrounds into the categories of “Latino” and “Hispanic.” That Brazilians do not quite fit the box enables us to probe the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” and their implications. This is important at a time when Latinos are reaching 18 percent of the U.S. population…

Read the entire article here.

The people running the media are the problem

Nieman Lab
2016-12-13

Matt Waite, Founder, Drone Journalism Lab; Professor of Journalism
University of Nebraska

This month, I spent a week surrounded by bright, well-meaning journalism and tech thinkers. Session after session, day after day, conversations kept coming back to these questions: How do we restore trust in media? How do we reach Middle America? What do we do about fake news?

Here’s my prediction for 2017. It’s the safest prediction I could make beyond the sun coming up in the morning. It’s aimed right at the people who run news organizations.

You won’t fix this. Any of this. Not in 2017. Not soon…

Read the entire article here.

Black-ish Recap: The Bunny Magnet

Vulture
2016-12-01

Nichole Perkins

It’s been a while since we’ve had such a perfect episode of Black-ish, but “Being Bow-racial” was worth the wait. Junior’s [Marcus Scribner]white girlfriend sends Bow [Tracee Ellis Ross] on the sort of identity crisis she hasn’t had since college. She narrates, giving us a much-needed break from Dre’s [Anthony Anderson] sensitive ego. Johan [Daveed Diggs] even returns, with a growing attraction to Ruby [Jenifer Lewis]. Yes, that’s right. It’s an incredible episode.

Bow meets Junior’s white girlfriend, Megan [Annelise Grace], who had saved him from a bunch of bullies, and Bow instantly hates her. Dre figures out Bow dislikes Megan because she’s white and it fills him with glee. Their mistrust of white people is something they can use to bond as they grow old together. He’s surprised because Bow claims not to see color, and she reminds him that’s not who she is. Johan thinks they should overlook all the race stuff and celebrate the fact that Junior has a girlfriend. After all, Junior is a tough sell. He wears a cape.

Although Dre is enjoying Bow’s anti-Megan feelings, Ruby is confused by them. Ruby knows it’s natural to hate the women your son brings home to date, but Bow has a white father. She tells Bow that she’s white, which Bow denies. Ruby tells her a black woman would be able to tell if someone was sneaking in in the middle of the night to cut off inches of her hair. Not that Ruby has been doing that to Bow. Of course not. Ruby tells Bow that if she knew who she was, she wouldn’t have any issues with Junior bringing home a white girl…

Read the entire article here.

More than a house slave

Medium
2016-11-20

Gabrielle Pilgrim

“It’s my black girl who looks like a white girl with a tan and a bad hair day.”

I saw Birth of a Nation and I liked it, as much as one can like a movie that gruesomely shows her ancestors being tortured, raped, beaten, broken, and lynched. Today, I am not analyzing the film. I thought it was cinematically great: I left mad, but inspired. I was particularly drawn to the house slave Isaiah (played by Roger Guenveur Smith) as I am regularly fascinated with multiracial, racially ambiguous, and lightskin black folks.

I don’t know if nonblack people are aware of the “black enough” vs “not black enough” spectrum, but it is real — so real. Colorism is real. The fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of stereotypes is real. Middle to upper-middle class black folks may experience feeling like “not enough.” Childish Gambino voices his struggles with justifying his blackness: “Culture shock at barber shops cause I ain’t hood enough / We all look the same to the cops, ain’t that good enough?” Biracial/multiracial black folks may experience feeling like they are “not enough:”…

Read the entire article here.