Mixed Race Studies

Where Is My Family on TV?

The New York Times
2014-02-08

Jenna Wortham, Technology Reporter

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in an idling car with my mom and sister outside a convenience store in Virginia. Dad’s inside, buying cigarettes and scratch-off lottery tickets. Suddenly, a wild-eyed man appears at the driver-side window, yelling about white women and black men and how they don’t belong together. My mother goes feral, blocking his access to us. My father runs out, furious and swearing, before driving us away. I don’t remember what happened next, just a confusing and searing shame about the ugliness that the sight of my family could provoke.

I hadn’t thought about that in years. But it bubbled up last spring in response to the vitriolic reactions to a Cheerios commercial showing a family that echoed my own: black dad, white mom, mocha-skinned little girl with soft curly hair. The commercial was uploaded to YouTube, where it provoked such foul, overtly racist reactions that General Mills, the maker of Cheerios, decided to delete all of the comments. The memory bubbled up once again last weekend when the same family appeared in a second Cheerios commercial, just as mild and sweet-tempered, shown during the Super Bowl. That one, too, drew online criticism, if not as intense.

Sticks and stones, the saying goes, especially on the Internet. But the outpouring of disgust about an innocuous 30-second marketing spot may signal something deeper at work, a denial of the reality that the face of our nation is changing, and fast.

According to a 2012 Census Bureau report, mixed-race Americans, while still a small minority, are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the country, driven by immigration and an uptick in intermarriage. Yet while there are some very public examples of seemingly stable mixed-race families — the de Blasios of New York or even Kim, Kanye and sweet baby Nori come to mind — they are remarkably absent from our screens. (Our biracial president does get his share of screen time, of course.)…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Alexandre Dumas: An Original Writer of Colour

Media Diversified: Tackling the Lack of Diversity in UK Media and the Ubiquity of Whiteness
2014-02-02

Glen Chisholm, Councilor (Labor Party)
Ipswich, England

A new generation of viewers are being introduced to the swashbuckling adventures of D’Artagnan and his friends and brothers in arms Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Many will know their motto,

“All for one, One for all”

as their adventures are played out in the BBC’s new Sunday night family drama series. The Three Musketeers has been produced on screen in film and TV numerous times. even in the form of a cartoon, “Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds” in the early 80′s.

For me it’s great that once again these works are getting exposure as I’ve felt a love for stories of adventure ever since I was a child. I remember my father had a collection of classic books, bound in faux leather with gold leaf print. This of course caught my attention and when I started reading them they captured my imagination. As I got older I wanted to learn more about who had created such wonderful tales and when I looked I was inspired by what I saw. Alexandre Dumas a man who like me was mixed race, a man who was black and went on to be one of the most widely read French authors in history…

Read the entire article here.

Cheerios revisits mixed-race family for Super Bowl spot

Today
2014-01-29

Ben Popken, Senior Staff Writer/Editor

For its first ever Super Bowl ad, Cheerios is telling racists to “stick a spoon in it.”

General Mills is portraying in its big game spot the same mixed-race family that drew so many hateful remarks on YouTube last May that the manufacturer had to disable comments on the video. The bigot backlash itself provoked a bigger backlash by Americans who supported the video. The clip ended up racking up over 5 million views.

In the new ad, a black father uses pieces of the cereal on the kitchen table to represent the members of the family and explain to his young bi-racial daughter Gracie how she’s getting a baby brother. Her white, pregnant mother looks on and makes a surprised face when the father assents after Gracie uses the cereal to bargain for a new puppy…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television [Galvin Review]

Film Ireland
Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland
2014-01-13

Steven Galvin, Editor

Dr Zélie Asava introduces her book The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television, a critical investigation of race in contemporary Irish visual culture which explores concepts of Irish identity, history and nation in relation to screen representations of those who have become known as the ‘new Irish’.

In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the ‘new Irish’. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. 2013 has seen a plethora of Irish films exploring the interstices of identity, borderlands and cross-cultural communications in the Irish space: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave features Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender and Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga in a slavery-era narrative; Neil Jordan’s Byzantium features Saoirse Ronan as an English vampire who falls in love with an all-too human Irish-American in Britain and brings him to Ireland to become immortal; Paula Kehoe’s An Dubh ina Gheal [Assimilation] looks at the Irish-Aborigines’ of Australia, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy positions the Irishman within a transnational, interracial context in Mister John; the Boorsma brothers’ Milo utilizes the racial narrative of ‘passing’ to illuminate issues of disability and discrimination, centralising an Irish family who are also Dutch-Romanian; and Ama’s storyline on Fair City examines the position of illegals in Ireland and the challenges of blending distinctly different cultural values.

As Fintan O’Toole notes, there is no genuine newness in the ‘new Irish’, as Ireland has a history of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity, but ‘understanding globalization in the Irish context is as much a task of remembrance as it is of encountering the new’ (2009: viii). Following O’Toole, my book aims to connect the ‘dislocated continuity’ of racial discourses which have been circulating for many hundreds of years in Ireland and highlights the need to break down essentialist conceptualisations of Irishness by asserting its diversity, nonfixity and instability.  As racial representations tend to be focused on black/white issues, the book reflects this by looking at dominant screen representations of the ‘new Irish’ as non-white. However, it does also examine other marginalised identities in Ireland by referencing Jewish, Romanian, Traveller and a variety of Eastern European characters in brief. There is still much more work to be done on this subject and it is my hope that this book will serve as a contribution to that dialogue. The book asks how and why black and mixed-race characters are represented in Irish screen culture, and how this fits into broader shifts in the visual industries, in national politics and in the international landscape…

Read the entire review here.

Overturning Anti-Miscegenation Laws: News Media Coverage of the Lovings’ Legal Case Against the State of Virginia

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 43, Number 4 (May 2012)
pages 427-443
DOI: 10.1177/0021934711428070

Jennifer Hoewe
College of Communications
Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Geri Alumit Zeldes, Associate Professor
School of Journalism
Michigan State University

This study fills a gap in scholarship by exploring historical news coverage of interracial relationships. It examines coverage by The New York Times, Washington Post and Times-Herald, and Chicago Tribune of the progression of the landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, which prohibited marriage between any White and non-White person. An analysis of the frames and sources used in these publications’ news stories about the case indicate all three publications’ coverage favored the Lovings.

Read or purchase the article here.

The New York Times and NPR Are Still Clueless About Latinos

Alisa Valdes: Official Website for Writer and Producer Alisa Valdes
2014-01-03

Alisa Valdes

More than a decade ago, when I worked as a staff writer for two of the nation’s top newspapers (The Boston Globe and the LA Times), I was often disappointed to see my fellow writers and editors using the words “Hispanic” or “Latino” as physical descriptors. They seemed to believe the US Census category of Hispanic/Latino to denote physical, “racial” characteristics, in spite of race itself being entirely a social construct with no basis in genetic or scientific fact, and in spite of the United States Census Bureau itself stating clearly that “Hispanics may be of any race.”

Put in simpler terms, Latin America is as “racially” or physically diverse as the United States as a whole. There is no single “type” or “race” of human being in Latin America, and as a result Latinos are “racially”/physically as diverse as the United States population as a whole — or as the entirety of humanity…

Read the entire article here.

The Alternative History of 2013: Alt-Weeklies Year in Review

AAN News
Association of Alternative Newsmedia
2013-12-19

Jason Zaragoza

For our first-ever Alt-Weeklies Year in Review, we asked AAN editors and reporters to share the stories they are the most — and least — proud of from the past year. What follows is an edited version of their responses.

…Stephen Segal, Philadelphia Weekly

Philly Weekly produced an awful lot in 2013 that I’m proud of — but if I have to pick one single piece I found most noteworthy, I’ll point to an issue where our staff got out of the way and let the primary source speak for itself. We excerpted as a cover story Prof. Yaba Blay’s provocative new book “One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race,” which presents stunning photographic portraits of variously-hued and multiracial Black Americans alongside essays by those subjects in which they discussed how their specific skin color, and its relationship to their lives, has shaped their unique identities. Just fascinating reading. (And an editorial note: Among other things, I find this story has pushed me into the school of thought that, AP style notwithstanding, “Black” should indeed be a capitalized ethnic term.)…

Read the entire article here.

A True History Full of Romance: Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media, and Popular Culture (1883-1955)

Amsterdam University Press
2012-04-02
184 pages
Soft Cover ISBN: 9789089644251

Marga Altena, Historian of Visual Culture

This important study about ethnically mixed marriages in the Netherlands of the 1883-1955 period offers a compelling overview on the nature and experience of ethnicity from a wide range of scholarly perspectives.

Drawing from exhaustive research in the Netherlands, Europe and the Americas, Altena offers illuminating new insights into mixed-marriage families as they were depicted in the arts and in news media; and how the families themselves in turn reacted to, and influenced those images. The author focuses on well-documented individuals and shows how they gained a coherent voice in Dutch culture. Altena attributes to them conscious agency in their own self-presentation, rather than just viewing them as victims of racial prejudice.

A timely contribution to the debate surrounding ethnicity and integration in Dutch society, this work demonstrates how that process was mediated by the various agencies, while placing special emphasis on the marginal groups within central news media as crucial in the opinion making.

Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place

University of Oklahoma Press
2001
288 pages
5.25″ x 8.5″
Illustrations: 17 b&w photos
Paperback ISBN: 9780806133812

Louis Owens (1948-2002), Professor of English and Native American Studies
University of California, Davis

In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe “Indian Territory” that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial “Territory” is what Owens defines as “Frontier,” a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge.

Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D’Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

I Call Myself What I like: Mixed Race Identity & Social Media

University of Leicester
October 2013
68 pages

Nadia Riepenhausen

Submitted for the degree of MA in Mass Communications, Media & Public Relations

This research study asserts that mixed race people are hyper-visible in terms of their images in media and popular culture, yet still remain largely invisible, due to a lack of recognition and acknowledgment, in mainstream media. As a result of a lack of representation, social media has become an important and significant way for mixed race people to interact, in terms of producing and consuming content. The study uses a qualitative research methodology, in the form of in-depth interviews, as well as incorporating several theories, including a ‘uses and gratifications’ approach. The research also shows that social media allows those who identify as mixed race to navigate multiple identities more freely and express themselves in ways that are not always possible in ‘real life’.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 Research questions
  • 1.2 Why mixed race?
• 2. Theoretical Perspective
  • 2.1 Representation theory
  • 2.2 New ethnicities
  • 2.3 Critical theories and mixed race
  • 2.4 Uses and gratifications theory and social media
• 3. Literature Review
  • 3.1 Mixed race studies
  • 3.2 Race, mixed race and media
  • 3.3 Social media and race
• 4. Research Methodology
  • 4.1 Objectives of research
  • 4.2 Qualitative Research/In-depth Interviews
  • 4.3 Research sample
  • 4.4 Shared Identities
  • 4.5 Data Collection and analysis
• 5. Results and Discussion
  • 5.1 Multiple Identities
  • 5.2 Mixed race identity and gender
  • 5.3 Media representations of mixed race
  • 5.4 Navigating mixed race and social media
  • 5.5 Creating new identities.
  • 5.6 ‘Produsage’
  • 5.7 Cheerios Commercial
  • 5.8 The way forward
• 6. Conclusion
  • 6.1 Limitations
  • 6.2 Future Research
• 7. Appendices
• 8. References

Read the entire thesis here.