Mixed Race Studies

The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the metis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.

Jean Muteba Rahier, “Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities” in Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States, eds. Jean Muteba Rahier and Percey C. Hintzen, (London: Routledge, 2003): 86.

Interview with Kym Ragusa: (Passing)

Reel New York: Season 2
thirteen: WNET New York
From Week Four (May 1997)

Kathy High, Series Curator

Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Kym Ragusa in May, 1997.

Q: The first question I’d like to ask you, Kym, is what prompted you to make the piece? It’s really a beautiful and incredibly moving piece.

Kym Ragusa: Oh, thank you.

Q: I wondered if this had been a story you’d heard before, as a child, and that you asked your grandmother to tell. How did it come about?

KR: Actually, my grandmother had told me the story a bunch of times. But I noticed that every time she told me, it was a little different. It would be more or less detailed, or the year would change. There’d always be something that was different. And I thought it would be a good idea just to try to record the stories as she told me. Part of it was to see how she remembered the story because it was something really traumatic for her. And also really pivotal in her life. And I wanted to see at different times, how and why she remembered certain things and not others. And why, at certain times, she would not tell me certain things. She wouldn’t be explicit about certain things — like her relationship with the man she traveled with. Actually, I did it over a period of three years. Another reason was that she has cancer and she’s not well now, and so I felt like I wanted to do something for her, and to preserve this part of her life that’s really her own thing that she did.
 
Read the entire interview here.

Passing

Third World Newsreel
1995
Black & White
9 minutes
United States

Kym Ragusa

The videomaker’s grandmother recounts the tale of a trip she and her lover took through the segregated South of the 1950s. As her story unfolds—revealing as much in silences and gaps as it does in its actual narrative—a blues and gospel soundtrack provides other tales of miscegenation and resistance. The story is full of tensions around race, class and color and the anxieties produced by the racial climate and violent history of the South.

Screenings

• Charlotte Film/Video Festival 1997
• Reel New York, WNET-TV

Awards

• Women in the Director’s Chair, Juror’s Prize

For more information, click here.

Fuori/Outside

Third World Newsreel
1997
Color
12 minutes
United States

Kym Ragusa

In Fuori/Outside the videomaker, a woman of African American and Italian American descent, examines her relationship with her Italian American grandmother. The lives of the two women are inextricably linked to local geographies; family stories embedded in the walls of tenement buildings and suburban landscapes. Personal memories overflow into public spaces, contradictions around race within the family are contextualized within larger conflicts between Italian Americans and African Americans. The foundation of Fuori/Outside is the powerful bond between the two women, marginalized by color and age, that survives the instability of family, class and ethnic identity.

Awards
Best Video, South Bronx Film and Video Festival, 1997

For more information, click here.

Documenting Race and Gender: Kym Ragusa Discusses “Passing” and “Fuori/Outside”

Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 30, Numbers 1/2, Looking Across the Lens: Women’s Studies and Film (Spring – Summer, 2002)
pages 213-220

Livia Tenzer, Managing Editor
Social Text

In her two award-winning short documentaries Passing (1996) and Fuori/Outside (1997), New York-based filmmaker Kym Ragusa explores the limits of the documentary genre in order to portray the centrality of race and ethnicity in U.S. women’s experience. Employing the narrative techniques of storytelling and the imagery of personal memory, Ragusa’s films relate a past that is broadly historical, yet anchored in the intimate relationships between a granddaughter and her grandmothers. Each film emerges from Ragusa’s research into the life of one of her grandmothers and reveals the social pressures and prejudices the older woman confronted. As her grandmothers’ lives connect to the present through the filmmaker, their stories provide crucial insight into how race and ethnicity continue to shape identity both inside and outside the family.

Passing records a story told to Ragusa by her African American grandmother about an incident that occurred in 1959 during a trip she took from New York City to Florida. Using still images, archival footage, and a soundtrack that mixes blues and gospel, Ragusa evokes the racial tensions of the time and creates a multilayered narrative around gender, class, and color. Traveling with an African American male friend (her then lover), the grandmother encounters the segregated and racially hostile South for the first time when her companion sends her into a diner in North Carolina to purchase food for a picnic. Inside, two white male customers repeatedly confront her with the question “What side of the tracks are you from?” When she realizes that they are asking her race, Ragusa’s light-skinned grandmother also realizes that her companion has presumed that she will be able to “pass.” Her courageous response to the people in the diner carries with it an aftermath of fear—will the two white men pursue them?—and unsettling questions about the supposed community among people categorized as racial outsiders by white social norms.

In Fuori/Outside Ragusa depicts the life of her Italian American grandmother, the person in her family who most resisted accepting…

Conference Keynote: White Privilege and the Biopolitics of Race

Understanding and Dismantling Privilege
Volume 1, Number 1 (2010)
16 pages
Online ISSN: 2152-1875

10th Annual White Privilege Conference Keynote Address
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Memphis, Tennessee

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Genomics has resurrected scientific interest in biological concepts of race by attempting to identify race at the molecular level. In that last decade, there has been an explosion of biotechnologies that use race as a biological category, such as race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial genetic testing for determining racial identity and genealogy, egg donation and embryo selection involving race, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. These technological innovations are part of a new biopolitics of race that helps to maintain white privilege in the 21st century, post-civil rights era. We must contest both the persistent myth that race is natural and persistent injustices based on race.

…My question is: How is white privilege preserved yet made invisible in the twenty-first century? That’s the tricky thing about white privilege, right? It’s been imbedded in U.S. institutions for centuries and yet many people don’t see it. I think we always have to ask, how is it that white privilege persists today? What is the mechanism that obscures white privilege in our current day and age? What are the forces, the institutions, the ways of thinking that we have to contest? The White Privilege Conference quotes on its flier a brilliant observation by Martin Luther King Jr.: “The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause.” But, of course, we can’t remove the cause of the problem if we misdiagnose it. One of the ways that white privilege is perpetuated in this country is by convincing people that it’s natural for white people to have a privileged position in society. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be.

Why do many people still believe that white privilege is natural? Why do they think it’s natural that our prisons are filled with black and brown people, that most of the children in foster care are black and brown, and that black and brown people die early deaths? How can all this inequality be natural? One way people are persuaded that inequality is natural is through a misunderstanding of genetics. On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton unveiled a working draft of the map of the human genome and famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that, in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” We differ only in a very tiny percentage of our genes. This confirmed the American Anthropological Association statement that race is a social and cultural construction. I would say, race is a political construction. The human species cannot be divided into genetically distinct races. So many scientists and scholars believed that the misunderstanding of race as a biological category had ended. Everyone would realize that all human beings are fundamentally the same. White privilege would disappear because scientists had discovered that these divisions don’t exist at the genetic level. Well, what happened?…

…So what is the origin of race? Is it genetics or is it power? One way to think about it is to ask, is there a genetic test for whiteness? Many genetic researchers focus on people of color and what’s wrong with them. Why do they die at faster rates from so many diseases? Millions of dollars goes into this kind of research seeking the genetic cause for why different groups of people of color are so diseased. But there is not very much attention to this question: What’s the genetic test for white people? If the origin of race is in genetics, we should be able to tell this racial category by the genes.

Well, if there’s a genetic test for whiteness, then tell me who in Barack Obama’s family is white. A family photo from his childhood shows his mother, who is of Irish decent; the Indonesian man she married after she separated from Barack Obama’s father, who’s Kenyan; Barack Obama’s sister, whose parents are Barack Obama’s mother and his stepfather. Who in this picture is definitely white? Apparently, just his mother. But could you tell that from a genetic test? If you test them, Barack Obama and his little sister are the genetic children of a white mother. The only way you can determine that he is black or that she is Asian and not white is to use a political test; there is no genetic test that can decide it. More generally, the only way you can tell who is white is a political test because it is a political category: White means people who are entitled to white privilege. This is a contest that’s gone on in the United States for centuries—who will be included in this category? The answer has nothing to do with genetics. At one point Jewish people were not included in this category. Irish people were not included in this category (Painter, 2010)…

Read the entire keynote here.