Mixed Race Studies

Japanese-Brazilian Music and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Dekasegi Era: A lecture by Shanna Lorenz

Barnard College, Columbia University
Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard Hall
3009 Broadway, New York, New York
2013-02-28, 18:00 EST (Local Time)

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor, Music; Advisory Committee, Latino/a and Latin American Studies
Occidental College, Los Angeles

This talk explores how circular migration between Brazil and Japan since 1990 has led Japanese-Brazilians to push back against the stereotypes that have circumscribed their participation in Brazilian society and, in some cases, to assert more forcefully their allegiance with the Brazilian nation. At the forefront of these social changes, musicians are using their art to redefine perceptions of the Nikkei community in Brazil, reshaping the musical resources and national mythologies of Japan and Brazil.

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It’s all in the mix

NOW
2009-05-22

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“I am apartment hunting with Hala who looks like a cheap whore,” read the text message that Hala’s friend accidently sent to her while they were walking together.  Hala, who is 27 and has a Nigerian mother and a Lebanese father, was shocked and ended up giving this “friend,” who is gay, a two-hour lecture. “For someone who is gay, who goes on saying Lebanon is not accommodating gay people, you’re just a typical Lebanese in the end,” she told him.
 
Ever since Hala’s decision to move from Nigeria to Lebanon for her studies at the American University of Science and Technology (AUST), each day has been a battle. The color of her skin is the reason why.
 
Most African women in Lebanon come from Ethiopia. According to Tsega Berhan, who works at the Ethiopian Consulate in Lebanon, an estimated 55,000 Ethiopian domestic workers live in Lebanon, and their brown skin resembles Hala’s. Ethiopians are often seen as either maids or prostitutes – the two occupations most looked down on in Lebanon – and for this reason, Hala faces racism and harassment on a day-to-day basis.

While Hala is constantly hurt by people’s words, she believes that coming to Lebanon at the age of 20 helped her to cope. She did not try to change herself for the sake of others’ perceptions, but instead started to surround herself with circles of trusted friends who accept her as she is. However, Hala’s strategy only goes so far…

…Hala’s skin has colored her love life as well. While she had dated Lebanese men before, it never developed into anything serious. “I have a lot of guy friends, but at the same time, it’s so funny because none of my guy friends would ever date a black girl. They’re not racist, but because they have racist families, they don’t want the headache.”

When she went to a guy friend’s house, his mother looked at her with a suspicious eye and asked her neighbor, who was sitting next to her, her opinion of Hala. The neighbor told Hala to turn her face, scrutinized her from head to toe, and then commented in Arabic, “She would look better if she washes the dirt off her body.” Hala caught the comment and never went to the house again. After this and other similar incidents, Hala learned that her father would have never married her mother had they met in Lebanon.
 
Taking it day by day
 
“I do feel Lebanese but it’s not in a typical way. You’re more aware of your differences. In Lebanon, I have to mention that I’m half-Filipino, but when I’m in the Philippines… I have to tell [relatives] I am half-Lebanese… People pick out the differences before they look at the similarities,” says Gaby, who is 19. He spent most of his life in Lebanon with a loving, stable family composed of a Filipina mother, a Lebanese father and three brothers. His parents met in Saudi Arabia more than 20 years ago, when his mother was working as a nurse there and his father was on a business trip.

For Gaby, growing up in Lebanon and dealing with racism has never been as dramatic as it was for Hala. He says he never really experienced confusion about his identity as a child or adolescent, even when he was made fun of for being different. “As a person, you don’t really analyze your situation so much and say you’re confused. What am I going to do? You just sort of live normally,” he says, adding that having three brothers also helped.

Perhaps because he doesn’t get sexually harassed as women of color do, Gaby views Lebanese as “respectful” of diversity and sees their racist comments as coming “offhand,” rather than intentionally. Nonetheless, he knows how his Filipina mother, who comes from a country that has over 30,000 nationals working as live-in maids in Lebanon, “gets a lot of crap.”

“Sometimes, someone would come over to the house, selling something or whatever, and my mom would answer the door. And then they’d ask to see the Madame.” Gaby has also grown up seeing his father defend his mother when confronted with racist comments. His parents never directly told him, but seeing this, he says, “I realized in a subtle way that you should fight back. But you don’t let it get to you….You can take [being mixed] as a disability, but I don’t think I ever took it as that.”…

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Sabrina Jacobucci: “Mixed race children often face the same issues black mono-heritage children face. No matter their skin tone, they are seen as black and therefore it is healthier and more empowering for them to identify as such, without denying their dual heritage at the same time. A racist is not going to ask them whether they are mixed-race.”

Stephen Ogongo, “There are Italians with black skin,” Africa News, May 28, 2010. http://www.africa-news.eu/africans-abroad/africans-in-italy/747-there-are-italians-with-black-skin.html.

US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey on the legacy of the Civil War

The Washington Post
2013-01-30

Ron Charles

One hundred and fifty years later, Americans are still fighting the Civil War, US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey said at the Library of Congress on Wednesday. The field of battle is now historical memory, and gatling guns have been replaced by symbols, but the contest over what sort of nation this will be — and was — continues, according to the 46-year-old poet.

Before a standing-room-only crowd of 300 people, Trethewey focused her remarks on Walt Whitman’s complicated response to black soldiers. Her lecture — in association with the Library’s “Civil War in America” exhibit — elegantly blended scholarship, cultural criticism and poetry…

…When she toured historic sites in her native Mississippi, where “the dead stand up in stone,” she found the same act of erasure still being carried out by memorials, plaques and even tour guides working for the Park Service. The record is “rife with omission and embellishment” that keeps “blacks relegated to the margins of historical memory,” she said. The Daughters of the Confederacy worked diligently to make sure that Americans remember the Civil War “only in terms of states’ rights, not in terms of slavery.”

Trethewey’s lecture this week was a kind of homecoming. Ten years ago, she conducted research on black soldiers in the Library of Congress and composed parts of her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, “Native Guard,” in the Main Reading Room. Her most recent collection, “Thrall,” explores her life as the daughter of an African American woman and a white man, the poet Eric Trethewey…

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Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 44, Number 2 (March 2013)
pages 158-181
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712471533

Katerina Deliovsky, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

This article examines a selection of the North American scholarly research that calls for “moving beyond” a “Black/White binary paradigm.” Some scholars suggest this paradigm limits or obscures a complex understanding of the historical record on race, racism, and racialization for Asian, Latina/o, Mexican, and Native Americans. On the face of it, the notion of a Black/White binary paradigm and the call to move beyond appears persuasive. The discourse of a Black/White binary paradigm, however, confuses, misnames, and simplifies the historical and contemporary experiences structured within what is, in fact, the racially incorporative matrix of a black/white Manicheanism. We assert this call sets up blackness and, by extension, people socially defined as “black” as impediments to multiracial coalition building. As a result, “moving beyond” is epistemologically faulty and politically harmful for African-descended people because it is based on “bad faith” toward blackness.

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‘Romance of Race’ reveals rich cultural history

BGSU News
Bowling Green, Ohio
Thursday, 2013-02-14

A new book by Dr. Jolie Sheffer is further confirmation that one should never doubt the power of the pen. “The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1890-1930,” published in January by Rutgers University Press, explains the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism.

Like their male counterparts Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in Europe, these authors provided their largely middle-class, female readers an intimate and sympathetic look at people with whose lives they were otherwise unfamiliar. Through stories of romances between white men and minority women told in human terms, authors such as María Cristina Mena, Mourning Dove, Onoto Watanna and Pauline Hopkins created a vision of the United States as a mixed-race, even incestuous nation, says Sheffer, English and American culture studies…

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An evening wtih Lawrence Hill

Central YMCA
20 Grosvenor Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, 2013-02-21, 18:30-21:00 EST (Local Time)

RSVP Deadline: 2013-02-19

Join us for an evening celebrating Black History Month with renowned Canadian author, Lawrence Hill.

Lawrence Hill has written a number of award winning books including The Book of Negroes….

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