Mixed Race Studies

New Hampshire: Beyond Black & White

Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
2019-2020 Elinor Williams Hooker Expanded Tea Talk Series
Keene State College
Young Student Center
Mountain View Room
229 Main Street
Keene, New Hampshire 03435
Sunday, 2019-11-10, 14:00 EST

Contact information:
JerriAnne Boggis, Executive Director
603-570-8469

Panelists: David Watters, Darrell Hucks, & (TBA)
Moderator: Dottie Morris

Moving beyond rigid racial identities, this talk will explore the contemporary as well as historic intersection between Black and Indigenous communities, the presence of “passing” mixed race individuals, and the most recent immigrant experience within a New England context. These complex interactions, connections conflicts, experiences, and resistant efforts of Black, white and multi-racial citizens will be explored through scholarly research and an analysis of the film Lost Boundaries.

For more information, click here.

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Bloomsbury
2019-02-21
232 pages
9 colour and 37 bw illus
229 x 152 mm
Hardback 9781501332357

Lyneise E. Williams, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term ‘Latinize’ is introduced to connect France’s early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population.

Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans.

After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
  • The Term “Latin American”
  • Why Paris?
  • Much More Than Primitivism
  • Reduced to Latin Americans
  • Parisian Figurations of Blackness from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
  • Overview of the Study
• Chapter 1: Playing Up Blackness and Indianness; Downplaying Europeanness
  • Editing Francisco Laso: Racializing Spanish and Portuguese Americans
  • Performing Rastaquerismo
  • Justified by Anthropology: Quatrefages, Hamy, and the Casta Paintings
  • Latin American Self-Representation
  • The Shifting Rastaquouère
  • Maintaining Anthropological Interpretations in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Chocolat the Clown: Not Just Black
  • Chocolat and Footit: Partners in Contrast
  • The Auguste Chocolat
  • The Give and Take of Chocolat and Footit
  • Chocolat and Footit at the Nouveau Cirque
  • Chocolat as Brand Image
  • Beneath the Surface
  • Chocolat as Mixed Animal
  • Chocolat the Contaminant
  • Impure Chocolat(e)
  • Chocolat, That Special Ingredient: The Racially Mixed Object of Desire
  • Complicating Notions of Minstrelsy
  • Lip Interventions
  • Representations Through Clothing
  • Sexualizing Black Dandies
  • Assimilating the Latin
  • Beyond the Circus
  • Chocolat, Object of Gay Desire
  • Chocolat and the Elite and the Virile
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Alfonso Teofilo Brown: Agency and Impositions of Blackness and Europeanness
  • Sport and the Imagined Ideal Male Body
  • Black Boxers in Turn-of-the-Century France
  • Gangly Brown
  • The Purity and Hybridity of Gangly Brown
  • Brown the Gentleman
  • Images of Black Difference
  • Brown the Philanthropist
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Figari’s Blacks: Negotiating French and Southern Cone Blackness
  • Figari and Paris
  • Contested Whiteness and the Black Body
  • Conceptualizing Regional Identity
  • Through the Anthropological Gaze
  • Candombe as Framing Device
  • Gender and Race in Candombe
  • Objects as Markers
  • Figari as “Naïf” Painter
  • Increasing Latin American Presence in Paris
  • Perceptions of Black Uruguayans
  • Figari’s Evolution in Paris
  • Contradictions and Contrasts between Figari’s Paintings and Written Work
  • Conclusion
• Coda
• Select Bibliography

How ‘mixed-ish’ Failed To Tackle Biracial Identity and Chose To Rely On Tropes

Wear Your Voice
2019-10-02

Nylah Burton

Set in the 1980s, ABC’s mixed-ish, the newest black-ish spin-off, tells the story of Dr. Rainbow “Bow” Johnson’s (Arica Himmel) experience growing up biracial. The Johnson family — white father Paul (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), Black mother Alicia (Tika Sumpter), Bow and her siblings Johan (Ethan William Childress) and Santamonica (Mykal-Michelle Harris) — are also former members of a “hippy” commune, where presumably, neither race nor racism existed.

The show’s premise is that being forced into the “real world,” where race and racism do exist, is a major source of culture shock that the entire family must now navigate.

As a Black multiracial woman who doesn’t have a white parent, I’m tired of portrayals of mixedness that mock Blackness, portray multiraciality and interracial marriages as the more “righteous” path, and ignore experiences that don’t fit into POC/white binaries.

Unfortunately, mixed-ish embodies all this and more…

Read the entire article here.

A Simplistic View of a Mixed-ish America

The Atlantic
2019-10-26

Hannah Giorgis

ABC / Byron Cohen

ABC’s Black-ish spinoff joins a new memoir by Thomas Chatterton Williams in presenting a seemingly enlightened but ahistorical view of race.

Mixed-ish, the prequel of the Tracee Ellis Ross–fronted sitcom Black-ish, begins with a rupture. At the tender age of 12, Rainbow “Bow” Johnson (played by Arica Himmel) is ejected from the hippie commune where she and her family live. As the adult Bow, Ross narrates the predicament that follows the government raid of the utopian community: Bow’s black mother and white father must now raise their three biracial children in the harsh world of mid-1980s suburban America. Though it’s set during the broader tumult of the Reagan era, Mixed-ish is driven by the identity crisis that Rainbow and her siblings, Johan and Santamonica, face. On their first day at their new school, the trio are stopped by a pair of dark-skinned students who ask them, “What are you weirdos mixed with?” When the fairer-skinned Johnson kids naively respond, “What’s ‘mixed’?” their classmates laugh.

Ross, who also serves as a series writer and executive producer, talks viewers through this confrontation in a didactic voiceover. “I know the idea of not understanding what it means to be mixed sounds crazy, but you have to understand—growing up on the commune, race wasn’t a thing,” she says. “Do you have any idea how many more mixed babies there are today? Probably because interracial marriage was illegal until the Loving Act of 1967,” she explains, adding that she and her siblings were “were basically the beta testers for biraciality.” In this scene and in later episodes, Mixed-ish falls into the trap of framing its protagonists as pioneers of mixed-race consciousness, rather than inheritors of a long and complex history…

…In addition to Mixed-ish, Loving and the mythos surrounding it has provided fodder for another recent work about biraciality. In his new book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, the author Thomas Chatterton Williams notes that his “black” father and “white” mother met the year after the Loving decision. (In an author’s note, Williams explains that he sought “to cast doubt on and reject terms … such as ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘mixed,’ ‘biracial,’ ‘Asian,’ ‘Latino,’ ‘monoracial,’ etc.” by placing them in quotation marks.) The author’s second memoir, Self-Portrait was inspired by a moment of shock. When Williams’s white French wife gave birth to their daughter, he was stunned to see that the child had blond hair. The baby’s appearance upended Williams’s self-conception: How could he, a biracial man who’d identified as black and written Obama-era columns about his future children being undeniably black, produce a child who looked, well, white?…

Read the entire article here.

Who Was the Real James Young Deer?

Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue May 2013 (2013-04-30)
10 pages

Angela Aleiss, Full Time Lecturer, Information Systems
California State University, Long Beach

The Mysterious Identity of the Pathè Producer Finally Comes to Light

“With his acting experience and technical know-how, Young Deer soon advanced to one of Pathé’s leading filmmakers. His Indian identity served him well: no one in the cast or crew at that time would have taken orders from a black man.”

Few in Hollywood knew that James Young Deer, general manager of Pathé Frères West Coast Studio from 1911 to 1914, was really an imposter. After all, Young Deer had earned a reputation as the first Native American producer and had worked alongside D. W. Griffith, Fred J. Balshofer, and Mack Sennett. As one of Hollywood’s pioneer filmmakers, Young Deer oversaw the production of more than 100 one-reel silent Westerns for Pathé, the world’s largest production company with an American studio in Edendale in Los Angeles.

Young Deer was married to Lillian St. Cyr, a Winnebago Indian from Nebraska known as “Princess Red Wing” and star of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1914 classic The Squaw Man. He boasted of a full-blooded Winnebago heritage similar to his wife: his birthplace became Dakota City, Nebraska, and his father was “Green Rainbow” from the Winnebago reservation. He claimed he attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first off-reservation Indian boarding school.

In a 2010 BBC Radio 3 segment, “James Young Deer: The Winnebago Film-Maker,” no one — including this author — could unscramble Young Deer’s murky past. Young Deer was elusive, and a search in his background leads to a maze of contradictions and discrepancies. But after ten months of poking through dusty archives and faded vital records and tracking down Lillian’s relatives, the identity of this mysterious filmmaker finally came to light. His real name: James Young Johnson, born about April 1, 1878, in Washington, D.C., to mulatto parents George Durham Johnson and Emma Margaret Young.

“If Young Deer claimed to be Winnebago, he was lying to himself and others to promote himself,” says David Smith, Winnebago historian, author, and former director of Indian Studies at Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska. Smith has heard endless stories about Young Deer’s supposed Winnebago heritage, and he’s had enough. His reaction is understandable: Native American identity is an especially sensitive issue, and no Indian tribe wants their name appropriated by some wannabe.

Little did anyone know that Young Deer’s true heritage lies hidden within the small mid-Atlantic community of whites, African Americans, and Native Americans once known as the “Moors of Delaware.” So secluded were these people that the late historian Clinton A. Weslager referred to them as “Delaware’s Forgotten Folk.”…

Read the entire article here.

This Afro-Latina Started a Magazine in Puerto Rico to Celebrate Black Beauty

The Oprah Magazine
2019-09-20

Natasha S. Alford

Mikey Cordero

Revista étnica shines a spotlight on Afro-Latino culture on the island.

When Sacha Antonetty-Lebrón was a young child growing up in Puerto Rico, she attended modeling school, her dreams of appearing in advertisements sprouting like the palm trees in the sandy streets of her native island.

But even with her bright eyes and perfect smile, Antonetty-Lebrón was often warned there may be one factor that worked against her.

“The owner invited me to the modeling school but made sure to tell me, ‘They didn’t ask for Black girls, but I’m going to send you. Do the best you can do,’ Antonetty-Lebrón remembers.

And when she did get calls for castings, she rarely saw any other Black faces. Antonetty-Lebrón, whose skin was a deep rich brown, learned at an early age that Afro-Latinos—or afro descendientes—were noticeably absent in nearly every form of Spanish media in Puerto Rico.

From TV anchors to beauty queens, the “ideal” Puerto Rican was always fair-skinned with European features—despite the fact that Puerto Rico’s rich history includes African, Taino native, and Spaniard ancestry.

Still, when Afro-Latino images did appear in media or television, they were often in offensive or derogatory roles—and just like in the United States, actors would even dress in blackface for comedy…

Read the entire article here.

‘Carnival Row’: Philo and the Politics of Passing

Fangirlish
2019-09-11

Lissete Lanuza Sáenz, Co-Executive Editor

CarnivalRow_Ep101_D22_JT_0621.CR2

Usually when I watch a show, almost without fault, I relate to one of the female characters. This probably has a lot to do with how male characters are written – emotions, what are those? – and of course, also with the fact that, as a woman, it’s easier to see myself in the experiences of another woman.

The exact opposite happened to me with Carnival Row.

Sure, part of that might have been that the first time I actually felt Vignette was somewhere around episode seven. Before that, her storyline, while not a total bore, just wasn’t hitting any emotional chord with me. And well, despite how much I ended up liking Imogen, it’s fair to say that, for at least half the season, it was impossible to actively like her.

There was Tourmaline, of course, but she was treated a bit like a love interest, even if her relationship with Vignette was never the main focus of Carnival Row; she barely got any storyline on her own.

Yes, these are the justifications I gave myself. The rationalization for what I’m about to say.

Philo is, by far, my favorite character on Carnival Row…

Read the entire article here.

Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?

Discover Society
2019-08-23

Chantelle Lewis, Ph.D. Student
Sociology Department
Goldsmiths, University of London

In response to recent mainstream media outlets featuring and celebrating ‘mixed-race’ populations as a symptom of progress in our society, my concern is this simplistic analysis conceals the broader structural implications of mixedness.

Given the opportunity, we all like talking about how we feel about our identity. If, like me, you belong to a racialised group, we become particularly animated by these opportunities because whiteness permeates so much of public life. We want to think about our varying family histories and how we embody them (or not) within our appearance and how we live our lives.

More often than not, when there is a public discussion about racialised identities, ‘mixed-race’ people are given too much space to grapple with theirs without critically engaging with their own structural positionalities. My contention is that these discussions will often position identity in abstraction from discussions of place and space, class, gender, and wider structural issues…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race and the Media: Notes from a Workshop

Afropean. Adventures in Black Europe
2019-05-09

Nina Camara

Multiracial people are very visible in popular culture, however, what picture(s) does it paint?

As someone who grew up in a culture where people of colour are a small minority, I always felt ambiguous about the attention directed at us as a result of our difference. I longed to find out about the experiences of other mixed-race individuals. Living in London finally enabled me to explore this collective experience and create a space to have these discussions. In order to do so, I facilitated an informal workshop which brought together people of mixed-race origins to reflect upon our portrayals in various media outlets and their wider impact.

The group consisted of 8 individuals with heritages spanning many cultures, including the Middle East, Britain, Eastern Europe, India, Jamaica, the US (including Native American heritage) and Nigeria. Through a series of activities, we explored our self-perceptions, examples of how the mixed-race experience is represented across various media outlets and popular beliefs that are pervasive in wider society about mixed-race people. Upon reflection, it was a good learning curve and a fun way to ponder the complexity of mixed-race experience on a relaxed Sunday afternoon. Here is a quick summary of our conversation…

Read the entire article here.

The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience

Scientific American
2019-07-29

Angela Saini

Credit: Getty Images

The author of Superior: The Return of Race Science knows this from firsthand experience

Last month, I temporarily deactivated my Twitter account following a colossal dump of racist abuse into my feed, including a man in Texas whipping up his followers to phone into an NPR radio show on which I was a guest to ask about “white genocide.” Others played a guessing game around my skin color in the belief this would help them gauge my IQ. On YouTube, one of the editors of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific journal founded after the Second World War to argue against desegregation and racial mixing, imitated me by dressing up in an “Indian shirt” (I am British; my parents were born in India). The comments underneath said I should I go back to where I came from.

It’s just another day online.

The abuse I’ve seen isn’t unusual. Others receive worse, especially if they are in the public eye. My particular crime was to have written a well-reviewed popular science book about why racial categories are not as biologically meaningful as we think and how, in fact, they have been used to justify slavery and the Holocaust. These are ideas so widely accepted in mainstream academia that it should be blandly uncontroversial to repeat them. Yet to read some of the comments I’ve received, one might imagine I was hopelessly deluded…

Read the entire article here.