Mixed Race Studies

Phillip Handy – Race and gender in the family

Rutgers University Undergraduate Research Spotlight
2009-07-26

Phillip Handy
Rutgers University

Phillip Handy discusses his research, which looks into the question of how mother-daughter and father-son relationships impact a mixed-race child’s racial identity.

Phillip is advised by Dr. Diana Sanchez, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University.

A Knock Out: A film by Tessa Boerman and Samuel Reiziger

Women Make Movies
Netherlands, 2004
53 minutes
Color, VHS/DVD
Subtitled
Order No. W05882

Boxing champion Michele Aboro grew up in South London, where life for a girl was never easy, let alone for a mixed-race lesbian girl. Thanks to her tenacious spirit and an uncanny talent for combat sports, she put her difficult past behind her and managed to sign a contract with the biggest boxing promoter in Europe. She won all 21 fights, 18 of them with a knockout – an exceptional achievement in women’s boxing. But despite her spectacular record in the ring, her career came to a sudden halt when her promoter broke her contract under the belief that she was not “promotable.”

Refusing to vamp up her image and pose naked in magazines, this undefeated world champion was abandoned by an industry more interested in selling sex than sport. A Knock Out interweaves Aboro’s personal story with interviews with boxers whose wild success strikes a painful contrast with Aboro’s struggles. Searching for logic behind Aboro’s case, this poignant documentary captures a universal story of fighting for one’s identity and offers a probing look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the increased commercialization of women’s sports.

Coffee Colored Children: A film by Ngozi Onwurah

Women Make Movies
England, 1988
23 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm/DVD
Order No. W99160

• National Black Programming Consortium, Prized Pieces
• San Francisco Film Festival, Golden Gate Award

This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to wash their skin white with scouring powder. Starkly emotional and visually compelling, this semi-autobiographical testimony to the profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride is a powerful catalyst for discussion.

The work opens with a video essay showing adults and children of many ethnicities interacting harmoniously to an upbeat and soulful song with a chorus about “coffee-colored people.” Through narration by her and her brother and dramatization, Onwurah relays incidents from her own childhood. She recounts the brutal and racist vandalization of her apartment. In reenactments, she is seen making up her face with white makeup and scrubbing her body in the bathtub with chemical abrasives. At the close of the piece, she and her brother stand in front of a fire, burning symbolic mementos of their pain and confusion over their own physical identities. “Melting pot,” she asks, “or incinerator?” The work is approximately 16 and one-half minutes long.

Director:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Producers:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

Editor:
Onwurah, Ngozi A.

Performers:
Onwurah, Madge
McKay, Haley
McKay, Michael
McKay, Anette
Onwurah, Ngozi A.
Onwurah, Simon K.

Race – The Power of an Illusion

California Newsreel – Film and video for social change since 1968
2003
3 Episodes, 56 minutes each
DVD and VHS

The division of the world’s peoples into distinct groups – “red,” “black,” “white” or “yellow” peoples – has became so deeply imbedded in our psyches, so widely accepted, many would promptly dismiss as crazy any suggestion of its falsity. Yet, that’s exactly what this provocative, new three-hour series by California Newsreel claims. Race – The Power of an Illusion questions the very idea of race as biology, suggesting that a belief in race is no more sound than believing that the sun revolves around the earth.

Yet race still matters. Just because race doesn’t exist in biology doesn’t mean it isn’t very real, helping shape life chances and opportunities.

Episode 1– The Difference Between Us [transcript] examines the contemporary science – including genetics – that challenges our common sense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.

Episode 2– The Story We Tell [transcript] uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as “natural.”

Episode 3– The House We Live [transcript] In asks, If race is not biology, what is it? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions “make” race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.

By asking, What is this thing called ‘race’?, a question so basic it is rarely asked, Race – The Power of an Illusion helps set the terms that any further discussion of race must first take into account. Ideal for human biology, anthropology, sociology, American studies, and cultural studies.

Read the online transcript here.
Visit the facilitator guide website here.

The End of Black History: A Postscript to My Son

Newsweek.com
2010-02-28
00:13:57

Raina Kelley, Weekly Columnist

In trying to understand what black history will mean to my son when he’s old enough to wonder, I went in search of the purpose of Black History Month. (Video: Raina Kelly, Jon Groat; Additional material courtesy Angelique Kidjo, Penn Museum)

Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold

WMPG-FM (Portland, Maine) and The Salt Institute
2009

Rob Rosenthal, Radio Producer

Kate Philbrick, Photographer

WMPG-FM, in collaboration with the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, announces the premier of “Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold”, a radio and photo documentary recounting this infamous event and its impact on several generations of descendants. The documentary is produced by Kate Philbrick, photographer, and Rob Rosenthal, radio producer.

On July 1st, 1912, George Pease took a short boat ride over to Malaga Island, just off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Pease landed the boat then probably stood on the shell-covered beach at the north end of the island. What he found may have surprised him.

Pease went to Malaga that day as an agent of the state of Maine. It was his job to carry out the final steps of a state-sponsored eviction. Pease was there to clean out the island – to make sure everyone who lived there was gone and to burn down their houses. But there was no one there. Malaga was empty.

Malaga is a small island, about 40 acres. It’s covered with tall pine and spruce trees, the shores are rocky – it’s really a “textbook” Maine island. No one lives on Malaga today but, in 1912, there was a village of about 45 people. A few of the families had lived on the island for decades raising children and scraping a living from the ocean. Malaga was home.

The settlement was poor and families struggled – like most fishing communities on the Maine coast one hundred years ago. What made Malaga different was the people. Black, white, and mixed-race families lived on the island. And that set them apart. Far apart…

…And, descendants of the evicted islanders have largely remained silent, too. The local stigma of mixed-blood and “feeblemindedness” attached to the island and descendents is still present – even today. In fact, some say Malaga is a story best left untold…

Read the entire article here.
View a short video here.

Interrogating Identities: Exploring Racism, Community and Belonging Among Mixed Race Youth in Canada

Centre for Culture, Identity and Education
University of British Columbia
2008-04-02
Video Length: 00:27:20

Leanne Taylor
York University

Youth Research Symposium – Video-stream. (April 2, 2008). These video streams feature speakers from the Day-Long Youth Research Symposium and showcase the role of interdisciplinary research in rethinking conceptualizations of ‘marginalized’ youth identity’, debates on youth subcultures versus post-subcultures, issues of gender, sexuality and social exclusion, and the history of policing and surveillance of young bodies over time and across national spaces.

Download the video here. [Warning: Due to extremely large file size (257 MB) right-click the link and download the video to your computer.]

‘Multiracial Identity’ documentary film and discussion

Portland State University
228 Smith Union
Wednesday, 2010-03-03, from 18:30-21:00 PST (Local Time)

This new documentary explores the social and political impact of adding a Multiracial Category (the fastest growing demographic in America) as a stand-alone racial group on the US Census. Different racial and cultural groups see multiracialism differently. For some Whites, multiracialism represents the pollution of the White race. For some Blacks it represents an attempt to escape Blackness. And for some Asians, Latinos and Arabs, multiracialism represents the dilution of the culture. Preview this 88-minute film, followed by refreshments and join the discussion with filmmaker Brian Chinhema, Sarah Ross, Director, HONEY (Honoring our New Ethnic Youth) Inc., Thomas Wright, Director, Oregon Council on Multiracial Affairs, and Dana Stone, Adjunct Faculty, University of Oregon Couples & Family Therapy.

Sponsored by Multicultural Center, the Presidents Commission on the Status of Women, and the Center for Academic Excellence. For more information, contact Patrice Hudson, Co-Chair, Presidents Commission on the Status of Women at (503)725-8327 or pjhudson@pdx.edu.

Africanastudies: YouTube Channel

First Documentary Posted: 2008-03-27

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

Reconstructs the involuntary planetary dispersion of African populations, with their millenary cultural capitals, between the 15th and 19th centuries; and analyses the africanization of the places of arrival through their ethnic contributions.

Reconstruye la dispersión planetaria involuntaria de poblaciones africanas, con sus capitales culturales milenarios, entre los siglos XV y XIX; y analiza la africanización, mediante sus aportaciones étnicas, de los lugares de llegada.

View all of the documentaries here.
Also visit the blog here.

Exploring the Realities of Hapa-ness – Curtiss Rooks

Revelations & Resilience: Exploring the Realities of Hapa-ness
Japanese American National Museum
Presented by Discover Nikkei
2008-04-12

Curtiss Takada Rooks
Loyola Marymount University

Introduction: Revelations and Resilience

Part 1

Part 2