Mixed Race Studies

Books: Black and white thinking

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Edward P. Antonio, Associate Professor of Theology and Social Theory
Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado

Brian Bantum. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 260 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781602582934.

Redeeming Mulatto presents a complex argument about theology and race. It is impossible to do it justice in a short review. Brian Bantum persuasively challenges traditional ways of thinking about race in the United States by theologically retrieving interracial identity as an important category that has been unduly neglected. In this way he addresses the American tendency to understand race relations in terms of the binary opposition between black and white.

Bantum describes the historical experience of being mulatto/a by suggesting that race in the U.S. functions like religion or as a form of discipleship into which we are all recruited…

Read or purchase the article here.

The new black theology: Retrieving ancient sources to challenge racism

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Jonathan Tran, Assistant Professor of Religion
Baylor University, Waco, Texas

Read Edward Antonio’s review of Brian Bantum’s Redeeming Mulatto (subscription required)

A couple years ago, when the Century asked some leading theologians to name five “essential theology books of the past 25 years,” J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008) was one of the few books mentioned more than once and the only one that was published in the past five years. Last year, the Ameri­can Academy of Religion gave its Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion to Willie J. Jennings’s The Christian Imagi­nation: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). These two influential works, together with Re­deeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Baylor University Press, 2010), by Brian Bantum (who studied at Duke with both Carter and Jennings), represent a major theological shift that will—if  taken as seriously as it deserves—change the face not only of black theology but theology as a whole….

…In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum makes his own use of patristic formulations about Christ in order to address the promises and challenges of interracial existence. He views mixed-race persons through the lens of “the hypostatic union,” the early church’s term for the union of divine and human in Christ. Amid the pains and confusions of what was once branded “mongrelization” stands the fullness of Christ’s joining of humanity and divinity. For Bantum, the mulatto “participates in” Christ’s fullness; biracial individuals “perform” the drama of redemption as scripted in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In Christ’s person, one confronts not only the mystery of divinity but the “impossible possibility” of humanity joined to divinity. Jesus “was mulatto not solely because he was a ‘mixture,’ but because his very body confounds the boundaries of purity/impurity and humanity/divinity that seemed necessary for us to imagine who we thought we should be.”

Baptized into this body, the church in all of its differences offers the world a genuinely reconciled body of diverse persons, in contrast to political orders that exclude (the opposite of baptism) in the name of race, gender, nation, class, ethnicity and so on. According to Bantum, the church speaks the language attuned to this politics of difference: prayer. This is good news for each one of us who is “passing” through America’s complex racial heritage, and it is an indictment of those seeking racial purity and the banishment of racial difference.

When Bantum uses creedal affirmations of Christ’s humanity and divinity to uplift historically shamed biracial persons, he, like Carter and Jennings, speaks in terms that cannot be easily dismissed by white theologians. If Bantum is right about Christology, any Christian (white or otherwise) who affirms the Chalcedonian formula about Christ’s two natures must rethink mulatto life. And if he refuses such rethinking, he cannot blame Bantum’s alleged lack of orthodoxy…

Read the entire article here.

Episode 13: An ‘All-American’ Student Leader’s Search for Identity

Say Something: College Life. One Student at a Time.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-25

Robin Wilson

“One assumes it’s very hard to be religious and still be gay.”
 
Ari Shroyer
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

In this episode, we hear from Ari Shroyer, a sophomore at Roosevelt University, who tells us what it’s like to be a gay, conservative, biracial student-body president—and explains how the university’s openly gay president has served as an inspiration.

Listen to the interview here.

Mulatto Machiavelli, Jean Pierre Boyer, and The Haiti of His Day

John Edward Baur

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 32, Number 3 (July, 1947)
pages 307-353

Toussaint Louverture opened the gate of Haitian liberty, but Jean Pierre Boyer kept it open. Toussaint, ” First of the Blacks,” may be called the Washington of Haiti, but Boyer was neither ”First of the Mulattoes” nor a Haitian Lincoln. He was a colored Machiavelli. Only a Machiavelli would have been ready, willing, and able to lead his country against the greatest obstacles any new nation hadfaced in modern times.

Hated by the Great Powers because she had been born of a slave revolt against France, Haiti was an outcast, almost an outlaw state. The new nation had been the battlefield of French Revolutionary commissioners, sent to stir up the slaves and the mulattoes against their royalist dominators. Santo Domingo had been devastated by a British invasion in the 1790’s and, later, by the brother-in-law of Napoleon, General Leclerc, who attempted to restore French control in the island in 1802. Added to these troubles was the racial war of mulattoes and Negroes for supremacy and, finally, a division of the new nation itself into two hostile states. The land was ruined agriculturally, commercially, politically, and spiritually. So it was from 1804 to 1818 when Boyer gained power. Even a Machiavelli, endowed with the best of human learning and wisdom, would have been befuddled on facing the bitter harvest of this, the New World’s bloodiest and most nearly complete revolution…

Purchase the article here. Read pages 307-349 article here.

Census releases data on American Indian population

Miami Herald
2012-01-25

Felicia Fonseca
Associated Press

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Almost half of American Indians and Alaska Natives identify with multiple races, representing a group that grew by 39 percent over a decade, according to U.S. Census data released Wednesday.

Of the 5.2 million people counted as Natives in 2010, nearly 2.3 million reported being Native in combination with one or more of six other race categories, showcasing a growing diversity among Natives. Those who added black, white or both as a personal identifier made up 84 percent of the multi-racial group.

Tribal officials and organizations look to Census data for funding, to plan communities, to foster solidarity among tribes and for accountability from federal agencies that have a trust responsibility with tribal members.

The bump in the multi-racial group from 1.6 million in 2000 to nearly 2.3 million in 2010 was higher than that of those who reported being solely of Native descent…

…The Blackfeet Nation in Montana had the highest proportion of people who reported being part of more than one racial group or tribe at 74 percent. Among Alaska Native groups, the Tlingit-Haida had the highest proportion of mixed-race Natives at 42 percent.

The number of Natives identifying with at least one other race increased in all but three states from 2000 to 2010, according to the Census…

Read the entire article here.

Telling His Story, Keeping His Promises: MOsley WOtta as performer and father

True North
Central Oregon Parenting
January/February 2012

Michelle Bazemore
photography by Kimberly Teichrow

Note from Steven F. Riley: I will be the co-host on the February 22, 2012 podcast of Mixed Chicks Chat with featured guest Jason Graham.

It’s difficult to spend time with Jason Graham without feeling like you’re in the presence of someone on the brink. Here is a person who has understood the art of performance since he was very small: a kid who could make his divorced parent laugh through her tears after a particularly nasty telephone conversation with her ex; an artist not content to kill it in his hometown; a man who empowers kids to find their voices by directing them to “tell your individual version. The theme has been done, but not your version.”

His version is a study in juxtaposition. He is a rapper, but doesn’t embody the mainstream definition of a hip hop star. He is modern, but inspired by ancient themes. He is physically graceful, yet enjoys playing a grotesque role to make his audience uncomfortable, and to relay a philosophy about superficiality. In his music he will break up a rapid-fire delivery of rap with a sudden drawn-out melodic phrase, often with a theatrical inflection a la Busta Rhymes.

To label Jason Graham a rapper is selling him rather short. Seemingly driven to express himself creatively with whatever medium he is given, Graham is rightly labeled a performance artist. A distinctive voice coupled with the ability to manipulate words into a rhythmic, thought-provoking stream of consciousness make him a natural spoken-word poet and emcee. But he also paints on anything that paint adheres to, from canvas to shovels to jackets, and uses his theater background to create masks, costumes, and props to evoke different characters on stage. Graham’s upbringing in a creative, multi-cultural family has influenced his artistry, adding depth to his performances.

Compared to many commercially successful rappers, Graham is unusually willing to express vulnerability and self-doubt. “I’m comfortable being uncomfortable,” he says without irony, “and that’s what makes me glorious.” As a mixed-race kid transplanted to Bend from Chicago when he was nine years old, he knows about being self-conscious, but says emphatically that he wasn’t “supposed to escape that one way or the other.” He has gradually become more comfortable with calling himself an artist. “It’s dangerous because you invest so much of your love into something you’ve been told time and time again may not work out,” he admits. “But just because you’re an investment banker doesn’t mean it’s going to work out either. Security’s very relative.” …

…The name MOsley WOtta refers to the water content of the human body. At most times during life, the human body is made up of more than 50% water, or “mostly water.” It’s an overt gesture to draw a line of internal commonality among people who are increasingly driven to express themselves as individuals externally through fashion, body art and other surface displays. “We’re always trying to find a balance between fitting in and being ourselves,” says Graham…

Read the entire article here.