Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Skin color is historically the locally adaptive trait most commonly considered by European cultures as a “racial trait” in humans. Skin color is an adaptation to the amount of ultraviolet (uv) radiation in the environment: dark skins are adaptive in high uv environments in order to protect from radiation damage that can kill and burn cells and damage DNA if not protected by melanin, and light skins are adaptive in low uv environments in order to make sufficient vitamin D, which requires uv (Hochberg & Templeton, 2010; Jablonski & Chaplin, 2010). The geographical distribution of skin color follows the environmental factor of uv intensity. Skin color differences do not reflect overall genetic divergence. For example, the native peoples with the darkest skins live in tropical Africa and Melanesia. The dark skins of Africans and Melanesians are adaptive to the high uv found in these areas. Because Africans and Melanesians live on opposite sides of the world, they are more highly genetically differentiated than many other human populations (Figure 2) despite their similar skin colors. Europeans, who are geographically intermediate between Africa and Melanesia, are likewise intermediate at the molecular genetic level between Africans and Melanesians, even though Europeans have light skins that are adapted to the low uv environment of Europe. Skin color differences in humans are not a reliable indicator of overall genetic differentiation or evolutionary history. Moreover, skin color varies continuously among humans in a clinal fashion rather than categorical ecotypes (Relethford, 2009). Hence, there is a compelling biological reason to exclude skin color as the racially-defining adaptive trait under the ecotype concept of race.
Family Portrait in Black and White – Award Winning Documentary on Super-Foster Mom and her 16 Bi-racial Children Arrives on DVD December 4, 2012
On the heels of National Adoption Month comes a documentary that explores the growing pains of the foster system in Ukraine, dissecting one foster mother Olga Nenya and her brood of 16 mixed race orphans. A martyr for the cause of abandoned children, this foster mother fights tooth and nail to keep her family together. Unfortunately, her overbearing control of the children’s freedom limits their future opportunities. This engaging film raises many questions about parenting and is available online at regular DVD retailers including Barnes & Noble, Best Buy and Amazon or can be saved on Netflix.
Documentary Family Portrait in Black and White introduces headstrong Olga Nenya, a foster-mother to 16 Ukrainian-African orphans struggling in a small village in racially charged Ukraine. Despite hardships caused by their lack of money and the racist attitudes of their compatriots, these abandoned kids function as a family under Olga’s relentless dictatorial guidance. The film offers deep insight into a fraught community surrounding this one-of-a-kind clan and into the passions, hopes and hardships of a unique self-made family. http://www.familyportraitthefilm.com/…
An acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law, Roberts examines contemporary issues in health, bioethics, and social justice with a particular focus on how they affect the lives of women, children, and African-Americans. Synthesizing a range of disciplines, she sheds light on some of humanity’s most challenging issues to bring hope and awareness to underserved members our society.
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
April 2012
18 pages
Earl L. Harris
A CREATIVE PROJECT SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE MASTER OF ARTS
This project takes viewers inside the lives of multiracial individuals in Indiana through a 60-minute documentary. The state was broken into three parts, broken into Northern, Central, and Southern parts, with each having a person chosen to profile. This is done to educate, inform, and eliminate myths in place about multiracial individuals. Shown is how each deals with day-to-day life not always being understood or fitting in. Life is explored and documented as it happens, including interviews with individuals as part of the production in order to hear “in their own words” about experiences. Other key people, family, friends, co-workers, share thoughts on the multiracial individuals also. The goal is to capture life without affecting what happens.
Black in America is a documentary series reported by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien.
In its fifth year, CNN’s Black in America takes a look at “Who is Black in America?” Soledad O’Brien follows two 17-year-olds, Becca Khalil and Nayo Jones, on their journeys to find their racial identities.
Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies Duke University
Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English University of Washington
Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Drexel University
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
American racial history was long framed by the notion of the “one drop” rule, which within a political economy of race and difference, was a blatant attempt to embolden Whiteness and the privilege that derived from it. Scholar Yaba Blay offers a different view of the “one drop” rule with her multi-media project (1)ne Drop which “seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”
Blay, a Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Drexel University and contributing producer to CNN’s Black in America 5, which was inspired by the (1)ne Drop project, joins Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal on the November 19th episode of Left of Black to talk about the complexities of Black identity. Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part two of an interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press).
Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies Duke University
Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications University of Southern California, Annenberg
Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English University of Washington
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
For many African Americans, the practice of ‘Passing’—where light-skinned Blacks could pass for White—remains a thing connected to a difficult racial past. In her new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press), Marcia Dawkins, a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California provides a fresh take on the practice arguing that passing in the contemporary moment transcends racial performance.
Dawkins talks about her new book with Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, via Skype. Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part one of a two-part interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press) in which she links the rise of Multiracialism in the 1990s to the maintenance of traditional gender norms.
Despite the fact that advances in genetics undermine the notion that discrete and distinct racial groups exist at the biological level, the science of genetics is inadvertently reinforcing the myth that race is a biological, rather than a social, category. In this video, produced by the Center for Genetics and Society, a group of experts discusses the history and consequences of the misuse of racial categories in medicine and science. The video is a great resource for students and educators.
Race Under the Microscope features commentary on the misuse of race from esteemed professors Jonathan Kahn (Professor of Law, Hamline University), Dorothy Roberts (Professor of Law, Northwestern University), Osagie K. Obasogie (Professor of Law, University of California Hastings Law School), and Joseph Graves (Associate Dean for Research, Joint School for Nanosciences & Nanoengineering, Greensboro, NC). The excerpts used in the video were filmed during the 2011 Tarrytown Meeting.
In 1988, after the Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, Vietnamese youngsters who could prove they had been fathered by an American were issued with a ticket for the U.S. and granted six months ”upkeep”.
Overnight, society’s lowest ranks became ”golden children”, able to take a whole family to the U.S. But proving one’s paternity wasn.t a simple matter.
For many, all that was left were physical traits suggesting American parentage and, with luck, an old photo of a father in uniform.
To date, 38,000 offsprings have moved to the U.S., and this documentary by Erik Gandini introduces us to a number of Amerasians, some who have moved, and others who are about to leave Vietnam.
The reality that confronts them in the U.S. can be a challenge. Even if their look is no longer a problem in the melting pot of American society, the culture shock is considerable—language, food, culture—so much is strange to them, and they feel themselves to be neither Vietnamese nor American.
For the first time in their lives, they learn to be proud of themselves as Amerasians.
Festivals
Vue Sur les Docs, Marseille.
Golden Gate Film Festival, San Francisco.
Nordic Panorama Festival.
Leipzig documentary festival etc.
Awards
Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1999,
Silver Spire, Golden Gate Filmfestival, San Francisco, USA.
Golden Antenna, best indipendent documentary of the year, Swedish Television, 1998.
Interfilm Productions
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2011
Institutional Use: Double DVD (includes 85 and 52 minute versions)
Private Use: 85 minute DVD
Julia Ivanova, Director
Olga Nenya has 27 children. Four of them, now adults, are her biological children; the other 23 are adopted or foster children. Of those 23, 16 are biracial.
She calls them “my chocolates,” and is raising them to be patriotic Ukrainians. Some residents of Sumy, Ukraine, consider Olga a saint, but many believe she is simply crazy. An inheritance from the Soviet era, a stigma persists here against interracial relationships, and against children born as the result of romantic encounters between Ukrainian girls and exchange students from Africa. For more than a decade, Olga has been picking up the black babies left in Ukrainian orphanages and raising them together so that they may support and protect one another.
The filmmakers interview Neo-Nazis in Ukraine reveals the real dangers for a dark-skinned individual in the street. These white supremacist youth joke about their evening raids and how police seem to let them do it. Prosecutors are not particularly determined to give strict sentences to racially motivated crimes, and young thugs can get away with probation for beating someone nearly to death.
Olga sends her foster children to stay with host families in France and Italy in the summers and over Christmas, where they are cared for by charitable families who have committed to helping disadvantaged Ukrainian youth since the Chernobyl disaster. Olga’s kids now speak different languages, and the older girls chat in fluent Italian with each other even while cooking a vat of borscht. But Olga doesn’t believe in international adoption and has refused to sign adoption papers from host families that wanted to adopt her kids.
“At least when the kids grow up, they’ll have a mother to blame for all the failures that will happen in their lives,” she says.
AWARDS:
32nd GENIE AWARDS (Canada) (aka Canadian Oscars) “NOMINEE: Best Feature Documentary”
18th HOT DOCS FILM FESTIVAL (Canada) “Grand Prize: Best Canadian Film Award”
56TH VALLADOLID INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Spain) “Cultural Diversity Award” and “Time of History Third Prize”
6TH MIRADASDOC –DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL (Spain) “Audience Award”
6TH ADDIS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Ethiopia) “Jury Award – Best Documentary”
SCREENINGS:
Sundance Film Festival (USA)
International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam)
Los Angeles Film Festival (USA)
Mumbai Film Festival (India)
Haifa International Film Festival (Israel)
Hamptons International Film Festival (USA)
Cleveland International Film Festival (USA)
Glasgow International Film Festival (UK)
Thessaloniki Film Festival (Greece)
Message To Man Documentary Festival (Russia)
Bergen International Film Festival (Norway)
Vancouver International Film Festival (Canada)
New Zealand International Film Festival
Seattle International Film Festival (USA)
One World Film Festival (Romania, Czechoslovakia)
Human Watch Film Festival (UK)
Watchdocs (Poland)
What are the areas of interest? The major areas of interest covered by the film include:
human rights
critical mixed-race studies
ideology
institutionalization
identity politics
transitional economy
international adoption
foster homes
Who can benefit from the film? Family Portrait in Black and White is valuable for anyone with research interest in the following:
