Mixed Race Studies

Nihon NY – Episode 30 – JERO

Japan Society NYC
2012-06-18

Pittsburgh-native, Tokyo-based enka superstar JERO made his New York debut at Japan Society earlier this month. With his smooth voice and hip-hop stylings, JERO has breathed new life into this sentimental Japanese music genre often associated with themes of one’s hometown, lost loves and sake. Often referred to as the Japanese blues or Japanese country music, enka’s melodies and required vocal techniques make it a quintessentially Japanese musical style. Since releasing his debut single Umiyuki (Ocean Snow) in 2008, JERO has received the Japan Record Awards Best New Artist award and has appeared on Japan’s most prestigious New Year’s music spectacular Kohaku Uta Gassen. In this intimate evening, JERO will talk with the incomparable Japan expert and Japan Society’s former Executive Vice President John Wheeler, about his relationship with the Japanese world of enka and serenade audiences with his own original songs as well as enka classics including those of Misora Hibari (美空 ひばり) and Itsuki Hiroshi (五木ひろし) among others.

On this episode of Nihon NY, we feature snippets of his performance at our venue, as well as an interview about his origins and his career as an enka singer.

The song names in order of appearance:
1. Umiyuki　（海雪）
2. Harebutai　（晴れ舞台）
3. Yuki Guni　（雪国）
4. Tsugaru Heiya　（津軽平野）
5. Suki Yaki （上を向いて歩こう）

Interview begins at 00:11:29.

Race Is a Four-Letter Word

National Film Board of Canada
2006
00:55:21

Sobaz Benjamin

Speaking biologically, ‘race’ is a spectral concept. Black, brown, red, white, and yellow, considered purely as skin colours, merit no more significance than a tattoo. The ‘skin your’re in’ is about as meaningful as ectoplasm.

Scientists remind us that not only are we all essentially the same, but we all have the same genetic ancestor. Eve was a black, African woman.

Nevertheless, history and politics, sociology and economics, transform skin colour – ‘race’ – into either a golden sheathe or a leaden prison of shame.

In Europe and North America, blackness can still seem a burden. It can still brand its possessors as uncivilized, exotic, and menacing. But it can also be prized, lusted after and viewed as a precious enhancement, like gold foil.

In Race Is a Four-Letter Word, director Sobaz Benjamin highlights Canadian contradictions and conflicts around race. Heroically, he exposes himself, too: a black man who grew up hating himself, trying to bleach his skin with chemicals, and then struggling to appreciate the meaning of his culture and heritage as an ‘Afro-Saxon’ Briton, then Grenadian and now Haligonian-Nova Scotian-Canadian.

Courageously, Benjamin strips away the masks and armour of race, of blackness and whiteness, to reveal the vulnerable and human, including that very sex that inspires so much primal envy and dread. This brave film forces us to unmask and to look unflinchingly at our real selves.

Sobaz Benjamin showcases the stories of a white man who is culturally and psychologically black; of a black woman who wants to be considered iconically Canadian; of another black woman who retreats to England rather than continue to face Canada’s racial cold war; and of himself, a black man who has learned to love his complexity.

In the end, Race Is a Four-Letter Word teaches us that the soul has no colour. Yet, we also learn that race is a marathon we are all forced to run.

Race Is a Four-Letter Word was produced as part of the Reel Diversity Competition for emerging filmmakers of colour. Reel Diversity is a National Film Board of Canada initiative in partnership with CBC Newsworld.

The Colour of Beauty

National Film Board of Canada
2010
00:16:50

Elizabeth St. Philip

Renee Thompson is trying to make it as a top fashion model in New York. She’s got the looks, the walk and the drive. But she’s a black model in a world where white women represent the standard of beauty. Agencies rarely hire black models. And when they do, they want them to look “like white girls dipped in chocolate.”

The Colour of Beauty is a shocking short documentary that examines racism in the fashion industry. Is a black model less attractive to designers, casting directors and consumers? What is the colour of beauty?

View the French version here.

Between: Living in the Hyphen

National Film Board of Canada
2005
00:43:43

Anne Marie Nakagawa

Anne Marie Nakagawa’s documentary examines what it means to have a background of mixed ancestries that cannot be easily categorized. By focusing on 7 Canadians who have one parent from a European background and one of a visible minority, she attempts to get at the root of what it means to be multi-ethnic in a world that wants each person to fit into a single category. Finding a satisfactory frame of reference in our ‘multicultural utopia’ turns out to be more complex than one might think. Between: Living in the Hyphen offers a provocative glimpse of what the future holds: a departure from hyphenated names towards a celebration of fluidity and being mixed.

Darling: New & Selected Poems

Bloodaxe Books
2007
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1 85224 777 0

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

Humour, gender, sexuality, sensuality, identity, racism, cultural difference: when do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay’s part of the equation. Darling brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask, as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers.

Kay’s poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. The title of her acclaimed short story collection, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice – the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.

Jackie Kay reads from Darling

Jackie Kay reads three poems, ‘In My Country’, ‘Somebody Else’ and ‘Darling’, from Darling: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes eight poems from Darling read by Jackie Kay.  Jackie Kay was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by Scottish parents. With humour and emotional directness, her poetry explores gender, sexuality, identity, racism and cultural difference as well as love and music. Her poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. We filmed her at her home in Manchester in 2007.

A short biography of Jackie Kay written by Elizabeth Shostak can be read here.  An excerpt is below.

Unconventional Upbringing
Kay’s fascination with themes of identity can be traced to an upbringing that set her apart, in many ways, from the majority culture in her native Scotland. Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she was adopted by a white family and raised in Glasgow, where she often accompanied her communist parents to antiapartheid demonstrations and peace rallies. Life wasn’t easy for a biracial child in mostly–white Glasgow. “I still have Scottish people asking me where I’m from,” she told Guardian writer Libby Brooks. “They won’t actually hear my voice, because they’re too busy seeing my face.”…

Early Works Explored Identity
When Kay was twelve, she wrote One Person, Two Names, an eighty–page story about an African–American girl who pretended to be white. The question of how we define ourselves, and why, has intrigued Kay in all her subsequent work…

¹Shostak, Elizabeth. “Kay, Jackie 1961–.” Contemporary Black Biography. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. (May 2, 2010). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2873900038.html

Interview with Mixed In Canada’s Rema Tavares

100% Mixed Show
2012-03-12

Phil Koo

Mixed-Me founder Rema Tavares talks about her website.

Don Lemon: It only takes one drop

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-15

Don Lemon, Anchor
CNN Newsroom

This piece is part of a three-part series tied to the (1)ne Drop Project.

(CNN) – For years, the woman on the left in the photograph below could not be friendly to her own husband in public. She would pretend she didn’t know him or tell people he was her driver. She didn’t want him to be beaten in public as he had many times before.

She learned that particular survival technique from the woman in the photograph on the right, her mother and my grandmother, who had to use it from the 1930s until my grandfather died in the 1960s. Both women were often mistaken for white. And for whatever privileges my aunt and grandmother might have received for their light skin, their husbands paid for it by beatings or threats from white men. One handed-down family story that sticks with me is how my uncle was lucky to have survived a savage throttling in the 1950s after exiting a ferry crossing the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to Port Allen. Apparently, he and my aunt had let down their guard. They never did it again.

Heck, as a child, I wasn’t even sure about my grandmother or my aunt. “Is Aunt-ee Lacy white?” I’d ask. “Lacy’s black,” an adult would say. Of course the reply was followed by a big laugh and a phrase I’d never forget: “It only takes one drop.” Meaning it only takes one drop of “Negro” blood to make you black…

Read the entire article here and watch a interview with (1)ne Drop Project author Dr. Yaba Blay here.

Barry McGee

art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century
Public Broadcasting Service
Season 1 (2001), Place

About Barry McGee

A lauded and much-respected cult figure in a bi-coastal subculture that comprises skaters, graffiti artists, and West Coast surfers, Barry McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to live and work. In 1991, he received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name “Twist.” He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum. His trademark icon, a male caricature with sagging eyes and a bemused expression, recalls the homeless people and transients who call the streets their home. McGee says, “Compelling art, to me, is a name carved into a tree.” His work has been shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and on streets and trains all over the United States. He and his daughter, Asha, live in San Francisco.

The Body Beautiful: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

Women Make Movies
England, 1991
23 minutes
Color, VHS/16mm/DVD
Order No. W99229

Melbourne Film Festival, Best Documentary

This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.

BlackAtlas and Laura Izibor in Dublin, Ireland

BlackAtlas
American Airlines
2012-09-28

Laura Izibor, Singer/Songwriter

Singer/Songwriter Laura Izibor explores multicultural Dublin, Ireland through her eyes.  Featured are Temple Bar area, the pubs, the Guinness factory, the Grand Canal, the Royal Canal and a statue of Phil Lynott (the only African-Irish statue in Ireland).