Mixed Race Studies

Race Card: Corinne Bailey Rae and Zadie Smith Navigate Race and Art

Bitch Magazine
2010-01-21

Nadra Kareem

Works by two mixed-race Brits—musician Corinne Bailey Rae and writer Zadie Smith—have recently been profiled in the New York Times. Both women navigate their collective white and Caribbean ancestry by embracing hybridity instead of relegating themselves to one group. Their doing so challenges entrenched American notions of race that say that multiracial people must choose one ethnicity or another, not all.

The English-Jamaican Smith, who rose to fame upon the publication of her 2000 bestselling book White Teeth, regards Zora Neale Hurston and Barack Obama as her sister and brother in arms. In her new book of essays, Changing My Mind, Smith praises Hurston for making “‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.”…

…For singer Corinne Bailey Rae, whose mother is white and father is from the West Indian island of St. Kitts, being mixed-race had a direct impact on her music. Now, 30, Bailey Rae gravitated towards grunge in her teens…

Read the entire article here.

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 Yellow-Ass Nigga’?: Hip Hop and the ‘Mixed-Race’ Experience

Intermix
Academic Papers
February 2010

Dr. Kevin Searle

Hip Hop has always engaged with the politics of ‘race’ and racism. From the Black Panther Party-inspired Marxism of acts such as The Coup and Immortal Technique, to the Nation of Islam-influenced stance of Public Enemy and Ice Cube, to the black feminism of Ursula Rucker and MeShell Ndgeocello, socially conscious emcees have approached the issues from a number of angles. In the context of this engagement with the politics of ‘race’ and racism, the topics of ‘mixed race’ and interracial relationships have often featured.

This article explores some of the lyrics about the ‘mixed-race’ experience in Hip Hop. It does not aim to provide an exhaustive list of songs which have engaged with issues of ‘mixed-race,’ but to serve as an introduction. The article is borne out of my longstanding interest in Hip Hop, and much of the research involved me consulting my ever-growing record collection, and songs which have come to my attention over the years.

Hip Hop provides the soundtrack to the lives of many ‘mixed-race’ youth and adults. The genre is perhaps more relevant to the ‘mixed-race’ experience than any other form of music. Charlie Owen (2001: 138) has noted how ‘mixed-race’ people constitute a relatively young population. This population has been at its largest, at a time when Hip Hop has taken its greatest share of record sales. However, as many emcees have pointed out, in rhymes which engage with such themes as the division of labour on slave-plantations in the American South, this does not in anyway mean that ‘mixed race’ people somehow constitute a ‘new racial group.’

The present article is structured into four main sections. The first engages with songs about the ‘mixed-race’ experience, the second looks at lyrics about interracial relationships, the third about colour/shade and the final part focuses on tracks about women and colour. It is perhaps worth noting that a number of artists, from different musical genres, have commented on all of these themes, prior to the dawn of Hip Hop in the 1970s.3 In his book On Racial Frontiers…, Gregory Stephens (1999: 170) argues that Bob Marley was, ‘a master of employing double-voiced lyrics,’ and Marley’s line: ‘I’m a rainbow too,’ on the track Sun is Shining constitutes a comment on the artists’ ‘biraciality.’ Nina Simone described a woman who was the product of interracial rape in her song Four Women. The blues artist, Big Bill Broonzy drew upon the African-American expression: If you’re white, you’re all right, If you’re brown stick around, if you’re black, get back’, in the song Black, Brown and White. And, socially conscious soul singer, Curtis Mayfield, admonished ‘high yellow girls’ in We the People who are Darker than Blue, additionally, as Mike Rugel (2007) shows, the theme of women and colour has also been present in a number of blues songs…

Read the entire article here.

Telling a Tall Tale, Family-Style—Author and Cultural Historian Scott Sandage Delivers 17th Annual Levine Lecture

Rider University News
Rider University, New Jersey
2008-10-16

For all his traditional academic rearing, Scott Sandage readily concedes that the revival of narrative has brought a new vitality to the discipline of history. “It was long considered unintellectual to tell stories,” explained Sandage, an associate professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But today, with the rise in history writers like David McCullough, it’s become a way to compete with them for people’s attention.”

Sandage, who presented the 17th Annual Levine Lecture at Rider University on October 16, arrived with a new twist on a story that had been often told on the old American frontier, but was unfamiliar to the capacity audience in the Sweigart Auditorium. In doing so, Sandage not only shone a new light on the social conceptions of race, but framed it in a surprisingly personal context.

A noted author and cultural historian, Sandage specializes in the 19th century United States and in the changing aspects of American identity. He spoke in support of his current book project, Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, which focuses on a little-known, mixed-race Native American reservation in southeast Nebraska and investigates how family folklore has shaped racial identity in the United States.

“This is a story of what race is and how Americans have determined what race a person belongs to based on what stories can be told about them,” Sandage began. He set the scene of the so-called Half-Breed Creek, a reservation established by the United States government in 1856 as a place for those who claimed partial, but not full, Native American lineage. “The thinking was that the smart, educated half of the half-breed would organize the Indians into making trouble” in the already tenuous location, situated in the only spot in the United States where slave, free and Indian territories met at the same time, he explained…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids

Chronicle Books
2010-03-17
264 pages
7 x 7 in; 127 color photographs
ISBN 9780811874083
ISBN10 0811874087

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng

Afterword by Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian)

Mixed — From beloved writer and artist Kip Fulbeck, author of Part Asian, 100% Hapa, this timely collection of portraits celebrates the faces and voices of mixed-race children. At a time when 7 million people in the U.S. alone identify as belonging to more than one race, interest in issues of multiracial identity is rapidly growing. Overflowing with uplifting elements—including charming images, handwritten statements from the children, first-person text from their parents, a foreword by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng (President Obama‘s sister), and an afterword by international star Cher (who is part Cherokee)—this volume is an inspiring vision of the future.

Visit the official website at www.MixedKids.com.

Interview with Ngozi Onwurah

African Women in Cinema
African Literature Association Conference
April 1997
East Lansing, Michigan

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.  You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.  Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.  Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.  Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.  The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different.  So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.

It is less complicated on a personal level.  On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from.  But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work.  So it gets complicated and sometimes I don’t think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa.  It is two different experiences.

In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?

The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity.  Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically.  Politically I am black; emotionally I’m black.  But once you say that “unequivocally, I’m black,” there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.

On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there’s black and there’s white and they seem to very rarely mix.  They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that’s not the case in England.

If I had to choose…if someone says to me, choose…if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I’d go over to the black side, but I don’t particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do.  Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life—who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth—is my mother; second my grandmother.  These are two white women.  These are the people who have formed me.  And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us.  This is a strange place to be.  It informs everything you do basically.

In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British?  You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker.  A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday’s Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.

It’s more complicated than that.

Could you talk about these complicated identities?

It is incredibly complicated.  All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life.  Basically, since I came out of my mother’s womb it’s been a chameleon situation for me.  It’s much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear.  I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously…

Read the entire interview here.

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.

IC Documentarians: Incongruities Investigator – Nisma Zaman

Ithica College Quarterly
2006/4

Mbeti Hyess

Nisma Zaman ’92 solidified her passion for documentary filmmaking at IC, where she began work on a short 16mm film exploring mixed-race identities. Beyond Black and White went on to debut at the Asian American International Film Festival in 1995 and remains in distribution with Women Make Movies.

After graduating, Zaman began a four-year stint at the New York Center for Visual History, a nonprofit arts and culture documentary organization, where she worked on a variety of productions including the PBS series American Cinema. Simultaneously she moonlighted on the postproduction of Jennifer Fox’s acclaimed film series American Love Story, following the lives of an interracial family. In 1996 Zaman served as a production coordinator on Walk This Way, a program exploring children’s experiences of race and difference for USA Network’s “Erase the Hate” campaign. This provided a perfect segue into her ever-increasing role on Nickelodeon’s Little Bill, a 52-episode digital animation series based on Bill Cosby’s children’s books, for which she won an Emmy as a coordinating producer…

Read the entire article here.

…Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). But on a fundamental level, Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity. The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from Françoise Lionnet, The Body Beautiful effectively “subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and Manichean categories collapse into each other.” And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.

Diana Adesola Mafe. “Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2008, Volume 29, Number 1, pages 37-50.