Mixed Race Studies

Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV?

Bitch Magazine
2013-09-04

Sophia Seawell

I’m usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears.

But ads are powerful. They’re a form of media where we see representations of ourselves and our society, just like on TV shows they interrupt. And it’s rare to see people like me—with a black father and a white mother—represented in ads.

Earlier this year, like many other people, I heard about a Cheerios ad, “Just Checking,” that featured an interracial family—a white mother, black father and their daughter—before I saw it. I was excited about it, sure, but why I was excited didn’t really register until I finally did see it for myself…

…The Cheerios ad caused stirred up some racist controversy, leaving many people wondering why interracial relationships still have the ability to alarm 46 years after the Supreme Court struck down laws that banned interracial marriages in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. Clearly the idea that interracial relationships are not okay runs deeper than we’d like to think.

A half-century isn’t enough time to dissolve the well-engrained ideas about race and marriage that were constructed after the Civil War, when miscegenation laws spread across the country “to serve as props for the racial system of slavery, as one more way to distinguish free Whites from slaves,”  as historian Peggy Pascoe puts it. The idea that mixing of races was unnatural, against God’s will, and would lead to biological degradation made miscegenation laws a tool to define what a legitimate family was and thereby maintain white supremacy. 

At the time of the Loving v. Virginia decision, seventeen states still had miscegenation laws in place. In fact, it took Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their law. Even more recently, in 2009, a judge in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of interracial marriage reached all-time high in 2010. In that year, about 15 percent of all new marriages were interracial and 8.4 percent of all existing marriages were interracial.

But films, TV, and advertising haven’t caught up to the current racial reality…

Read the entire article here.

Race on the Menu: Cheerios, Paula Deen, with Some Supreme Court for Dessert

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2012-06-26

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

It’s been a bad month. For some reason incidents and issues of race seems to appear like death, in groups of three. They clump together, overwhelming those whom they hurt and they come too quickly for others to process…

…But I am becoming less convinced that we will be able to have rational conversations about the facts of the cases, about how race functions in our society, what the consequences for our ignorance are for people of color. We cannot have these conversations because I am not sure we have really grappled with the reality of our condition as American citizens. We do not see ourselves as we really are. While some imagine themselves as the white wife and others as the black husband, what we fail to understand is that we are all the mixed race child. Regardless of our race we are children of this interracial union called America. We are the progeny of a tragic, dark, difficult history that we bear in our skin, even while we exhibit many wonderful possibilities.

But we will never move forward until we can admit who we are…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television

Peter Lang Publishing
Reimagining Ireland. Volume 16
2013
203 pages
5 black and white illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-3-0343-0839-7
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0353-0507-4

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

This book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation.

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. Ireland has always been a culturally diverse space and has produced a series of high-profile mixed-race stars, including Phil Lynott, Ruth Negga, and Simon Zebo, among others. Through an analysis of screen visualizations of the black Irish, this study uncovers forgotten histories, challenges the perceived homogeneity of the nation, evaluates integration, and considers the future of the new Ireland. It makes a creative and significant theoretical contribution to scholarly work on the relationship between representation and identity in Irish cinema.

This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Positioning the Black Irish: Theoretical, Historical and Visual Contexts
• Chapter One: ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’: Being Black and Irish in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
• Chapter Two: Gendering the Other: Raced Women in Irish Television (Prosperity (RTE, 2007), Love is The Drug (RTE, 2004) and Fair City (RTE, 1989–present))
• Chapter Three: New Identities in the Irish Horror Film: Isolation (O’Brien, 2005) and Boy Eats Girl (Bradley, 2005)
• Chapter Four: Black and Mixed Masculinities in Irish Cinema: The Nephew (Brady, 1998), Irish Jam (Eyres, 2006) and The Front Line (Gleeson, 2006)
• Chapter Five: Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me: Trafficked (O’Connor, 2010) and the Multicultural Irish Thriller
• Chapter Six: The Raced Stranger in Contemporary Cinema: Between the Canals (O’Connor, 2011), Sensation (Hall, 2010), The Good Man (Harrison, 2012) and The Guard (McDonagh, 2011)
• Conclusion
• Framing the Future of the Black Irish Onscreen
• Bibliography
• Index

More than a “Passing” Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 41, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2013
pages 60-86
DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2013.0048

Ellen Scott, Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Queens College, City University of New York

When we think of African American representations of 1930s Hollywood, we likely first envision the maid or butler—Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) or Gertrude Howard as Beulah Thorndyke in I’m No Angel (1933). These films arguably normalize black servitude as an inevitable part of an intractable and glamorous class system. Ramona Curry argues that Mae West’s maids “augment West’s featured—and fetishized—status, enhancing the star’s aura of power and sexual allure through their roles as servants and through their vividly contrasting visual presence, their dark skin, hair and costumes, setting off West’s shimmering bleached-blonde whiteness” (1996, 87). However, the composite image I describe above rests on a vague impression that black characters were uniformly servants and that onscreen servants always appeared in uniform. Take, as a counterexample, Morning Glory (1933), where maid Emma (Sana Rayya) seems to step out of the margins when she changes from her uniform into her fashionable leisure clothes. What is surprising is that despite Emma’s narrative insignificance, the transition is emphasized by lighting and framing—and an audacious saunter (fig. 1). Her placement at the center of the frame, between the arguing white protagonists, interrupts narrative attention, raising perhaps the ultimate cinematic question: who is she? The uniform, black and white and designedly nondescript, helps to set up the subsequent dramatic reveal of her flattering furs and hat, heightening the suddenness of the camera’s central attention to her and highlighting the inability of her uniform to contain or represent its wearer.

While the servant image was clearly the dominant black Hollywood representation during this era, it is also true that sometimes dress communicated a subtle roundness to black women’s characters and an interracial parity at a moment when censorship threatened overt statements of racial equality and images of white and black intimacy.

The Motion Picture Producer and Distributors of America’s Production Code of 1930 (commonly known as the “Hays Code”) famously repressed onscreen sexuality. But race was a part of a more daring, turmoil-ridden early Depression-era pre-Code cinema, which registered the desperate revolt of fallen women and forgotten men against a failing social system (Doherty 1999, 256). Accordingly, race also became a regulatory concern, as seen in the Code clause barring “miscegenation” and in the industry policy against racially motivated lynching (Courtney 2005; Wood 2009, 229). Costume, however, was a realm generally outside of censors’ close scrutiny in the 1930s and was thus a freer space of racial inscription than the narrative. Not only was costume essential to Depression-era screen narratives of class rise (and fall); it sometimes operated to complicate the narrative, threatening to distract viewers with its overwrought embellishment of a character’s affect and personality or glamorizing the “low” figures—the gold digger and the fallen women—that censors reviled (Gaines 1990, 188; Foster 2007; Jacobs 1997, 58-59). The lack of racial fixity in some 1930s Hollywood films revealed, if only incompletely, black women’s modern, urban personalities and small-scale revolts against the color line. Through motifs in dress—the quick-changing maid, interracial sartorial and sardonic parity, and stylized idealization of interracial spaces—aspects of these films silently normalized racial similarity and undermined the uniform servitude of the 1930s black image.

In these surprising moments black women stepped out of their prescribed subservience to glamorously become the center point of the camera’s gaze in ways that cast doubt on the naturalness of black inferiority and sometimes disrupted prevailing narratives of gender, race, and power. I begin with analysis of several pre-Code-era films and end with readings of Code-era films starring light-skinned black actress Fredi Washington, who became the vessel for dress-borne tensions about the color line latent in earlier films. Following Robert Stam’s call to resuscitate marginalized ethnic “voices” from Hollywood texts, I magnify those brief but arresting moments to which black spectators often attended where hidden worlds and selves come to the sartorial surface (Stam 1991; Everett 2000; Regester 2010). The unassuming configuration of an egalitarian ethos through…

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Breeding Unity: Battlestar Galactica’s Biracial Reproductive Futurity

Camera Obscura
Volume 27, Number 3 81 (2012)
pages 1-37
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-1727446

Anne Kustritz, Assistant Professor in Television Studies
University of Amsterdam

While Battlestar Galactica reinvigorated the science fiction genre by representing contemporary political problems in a complex, often radical fashion, the series also makes visible a new articulation of eugenic thinking. Postmodern eugenics repurposes turn-of-the-twentieth-century ideas of racial progress and recombines them with different narratives and ideologies so that audiences may receive them as new and cut off from history. By centering its finale on the survival of one genetically idealized child, Battlestar constructs a new narrative context for an old story that rationalizes the sacrifice of the nonheterosexual, nonreproductive, and nonconformist to build a “better” race. The idealization of biraciality in Battlestar puts eugenic means to modern ends: the biological construction of a future wherein difference can be dealt with in reproductive rather than political terms. Two pieces of fan video art, “Unnatural Selection” and “Battlestar Redactica,” clarify Battlestar‘s complicity in eugenic violence and history, while offering alternative solutions to the moral and narrative impasses of the series. By refusing the genetic stasis Battlestar proposes, these fan video projects invite audiences to continue exploring multiple definitions of survival, hybridity, and cultural transformation, reanimating characters sacrificed in the series on its way to genetic utopia (or dystopia) and thereby resuscitating the multiple, queer, contradictory futures they embodied.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race and the Visual Arts: LAHS-P236

Berklee College of Music
Boston, Massachusetts
Fall 2013

In this course, students explore the representation of race in visual culture and the ways in which culture marks subjects, objects, and bodies with racial identity. Wherever we look we are confronted by images that are explicitly or implicitly racialized—in artistic production, marketing and advertising, film and television, magazines and newspapers, and science and technology. In American society our history confronts us with the painful reminders of the oppression and marginalization of bodies whose color deviates from whiteness. Students explore the ways that visual artists have problematized the representation of racial identity. Students also explore how one “talks back” to images about racialized bodies. How do marketing and advertising exploit and/or privilege certain types of racialized bodies in the visual field? How have representations of racial identity evolved over the course of the history of film and television? When is racial identity foregrounded? When it is veiled and why? How do medicine and technology reconfigure how we see racialized bodies? How do other categories of difference such as gender, sexuality, and class complicate the representation of racialized bodies? In this course, students read texts from history, literature, sociology, Africana studies, visual studies, art history, and cultural studies; they view images of painting, photography, sculpture, performance art, film, television, advertising, and medical research. If you want to think critically about racialized images-from Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima and beyond-then this is the class for you!

For more information, click here.

Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production

University Press of Mississippi
2013-05-13
240 pages (approx.)
6 x 9 inches, bibliography, index
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-61703-755-9

Crystal S. Anderson, Assistant Director of Teaching Excellence, Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning and Affiliate Faculty, Korean Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

From Bruce Lee to Samurai Champloo, how Asian fictions fuse with African American creative sensibilities

In this study, Crystal S. Anderson explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, Anderson examines such cultural productions as novels (Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway [1999], Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring [1992], and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle [1996]); films (Rush Hour 2 [2001], Unleashed [2005], and The Matrix trilogy [1999-2003]); and Japanese animation (Samurai Champloo [2004]), all of which feature cross-cultural conversations. In exploring the ways in which writers and artists use this transferral, Anderson traces and tests the limits of how Afro-Asian cultural production interrogates conceptions of race, ethnic identity, politics, and transnational exchange.

Ultimately, this book reads contemporary black/Asian cultural fusions through the recurrent themes established by the films of Bruce Lee, which were among the first–and certainly most popular–works to use this exchange explicitly. As a result of such films as Enter the Dragon (1973), The Chinese Connection (1972), and The Big Boss (1971), Lee emerges as both a cross-cultural hero and global cultural icon who resonates with the experiences of African American, Asian American, and Asian youth in the 1970s. Lee’s films and iconic imagery prefigure themes that reflect cross-cultural negotiations with global culture in post-1990 Afro-Asian cultural production.

Dwayne Johnson – ‘Race Shifter’ In A Post Racial World?

Shadow and Act: On Cinema Of The African Diaspora
2013-03-27

Sergio Mims, Staff Writer

We all know that there’s been a lot of talk about how we are all now living in a “post-racial” society. Though I think, most of us will respond to that with a “Yeah right.”

But things are changing, albeit slowly, but they are changing. And it dawned on me last night, during  an advance screening of G.I. Joe: Retaliation, that the one person who could be an example of this post racial utopia we’re supposed to be living in, is Dwayne Johnson.

It should be very obvious by now the Johnson has been positioning himself to be a major A–list movie star. He easily could have just gone on to be a B-movie actor, content with doing supporting roles in action/exploitation films, and starring in direct-to-video movies, like some of his former WWE cohorts. But Johnson has much higher aspirations.

And it’s not just the film projects that he’s attached himself to, but also, either by design or by happenstance, how he’s been perceived racially by the public. He has become a “race shifter” for lack of a better word.

Through his obviously ethnic, but not clearly defined looks (he’s black Canadian/Samoan), he has managed to become “identified” as it were, by different audiences, as different things, and has used that to his advantage.

I should say that, of course, we identify him as black on S & A, or else we wouldn’t always be reporting news about his various film projects. And Johnson has neither ever obscured, or refused to acknowledge his bi-racial heritage, unlike Vin Diesel, who has gone out of his way to not publicly acknowledge his mixed heritage, preferring to instead let people think he’s, perhaps, Italian…

Read the entire article here.

UW communication professor unveils new book about race

The Daily of the University of Washington
2013-02-07

LaVendrick Smith

Ralina Joseph discusses her book cover art at “Troubling the Family and Transcending Blackness” held at the UW bookstore. Photo by Dario Nanbu

Race, reality, and pop culture collide in a new book written by one UW communication professor.

In “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” Ralina Joseph, a UW associate professor of communication, explores how multiracial African Americans were represented in the 10 years leading up to President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Joseph held a joint book-signing and discussion about mixed-race relations with UW English professor Habiba Ibrahim at the U Book Store Feb. 7.

In “Transcending Blackness,” Joseph compares real-life depictions of multiracial African Americans to their roles in pop culture and politics.

“I’m just sort of interested in seeing how multiracial people have been and are represented,” she said.

Joseph, a multiracial African American herself, said that while researching the topic, she noticed a clear difference in the way multiracial people identify in real life and the way they are identified through the media.

“What I was seeing on TV, in movies, in novels, and memoirs, was not like the kind of complex people I knew in real life,” she said.

She said multiracial African Americans she encounters in real life have fluidity in the way they identify themselves, whereas she saw a constant need to identify mixed race in pop culture in a way that often degraded African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Al Jazeera America signs Soledad O’Brien as special correspondent

Al Jazeera America
2013-07-01

Al Jazeera America, the new American news channel that will launch in August, today announced that it has signed an agreement with Emmy Award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien’s production company, Starfish Media Group. O’Brien will contribute short-form segments as Special Correspondent to Al Jazeera America’s primetime current affairs magazine program “America Tonight,” and Starfish will produce hour-long documentary specials.

“O’Brien’s career producing and reporting on the human side of many of the most important stories of the past decade will fit in perfectly with what Al Jazeera America will be covering every day,” said Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of Al Jazeera’s international operations and the senior executive developing the new channel. “Her dedication to that type of journalism is what makes it so exciting to announce that she and her production company are joining the Al Jazeera America team.”

“I look forward to beginning a relationship with Al Jazeera America, which has made a commitment to producing quality programming and pursuing underreported stories,” O’Brien said. “I am thrilled to be back in business with Kim Bondy, who is a long-time friend and among the finest journalists in the broadcast news business today. With this agreement, Starfish continues its expansion as a cross-platform media company dedicated to compelling storytelling and enterprise journalism.”

…In 2011, O’Brien won her first Emmy Award for “Crisis in Haiti” (on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360) in the category of Outstanding Live Coverage of a Current News Story – Long Form. She was also a member of the teams that earned CNN a George Foster Peabody award for coverage of the British Petroleum oil spill and of Katrina, and an Alfred I. du Pont Award for its reporting on the Southeast Asia tsunami. In 2010, the National Association of Black Journalists named O’Brien its Journalist of the Year, and the Edward R. Murrow Awards recognized her with the RTDNA/UNITY award for Latino in America.  She received the 2009 Medallion of Excellence for Leadership and Community Service Award from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute…

Read the entire press release here.