Mixed Race Studies

The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family

Free Press (an Imprint of Simon & Schuster)
October 2012
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781451627480
eBook ISBN: 9781451627619

Joe Mozingo

“My dad’s family was a mystery,” writes prize-winning journalist Joe Mozingo. Growing up, he knew that his mother’s ancestors were from France and Sweden, but he heard only suspiciously vague stories about where his father’s family was from—Italy, Portugal, the Basque country. Then one day, a college professor told him his name may have come from sub-Saharan Africa, which made no sense at all: Mozingo was a blue-eyed white man from the suburbs of Southern California. His family greeted the news as a lark—his uncle took to calling them “Bantu warriors”—but Mozingo set off on a journey to find the truth of his roots.

He soon discovered that all Mozingos in America, including his father’s line, appeared to have descended from a black man named Edward Mozingo who was brought to the Jamestown colony as a slave in 1644 and won his freedom twenty-eight years later. He became a tenant farmer growing tobacco by a creek called Pantico Run, married a white woman, and fathered one of the country’s earliest mixed-race family lineages.

But Mozingo had so many more questions to answer. How had it been possible for Edward to keep his African name? When had some of his descendants crossed over the color line, and when had the memory of their connection to Edward been obscured? The journalist plunged deep into the scattered historical records, traveled the country meeting other Mozingos—white, black, and in between—and journeyed to Africa to learn what he could about Edward’s life there, retracing old slave routes he may have traversed.

The Fiddler on Pantico Run is the beautifully written account of Mozingo’s quest to discover his family’s lost past. A captivating narrative of both personal discovery and historical revelation that takes many turns, the book traces one family line from the ravages of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic, to the horrors of the Jamestown colony, to the mixed-race society of colonial Virginia and through the brutal imposition of racial laws, when those who could pass for white distanced themselves from their slave heritage, yet still struggled to rise above poverty. The author’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather Spencer lived as a dirt-poor white man, right down the road from James Madison, then moved west to the frontier, trying to catch a piece of America’s manifest destiny. Mozingos fought on both sides of the Civil War, some were abolitionists, some never crossed the color line, some joined the KKK. Today the majority of Mozingos are white and run the gamut from unapologetic racists to a growing number whose interracial marriages are bringing the family full circle to its mixed-race genesis.

Tugging at the buried thread of his origins, Joe Mozingo has unearthed a saga that encompasses the full sweep of the American story and lays bare the country’s tortured and paradoxical experience with race and the ways in which designations based on color are both illusory and life altering. The Fiddler on Pantico Run is both the story of one man’s search for a sense of mooring, finding a place in a continuum of ancestors, and a lyrically written exploration of lineage, identity, and race in America.

MIT Scholar Vivek Bald uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival

New York Daily News
2013-01-17

Erica Pearson

New book chronicles little-known story of Muslims from what’s now Pakistan and Bangladesh, who built a multiracial community in Harlem decades before they were legally allowed to immigrate to the U.S.

Virtually all Asian immigration to the U.S. was banned when Aladdin Ullah’s father — who left East Bengal to work on a British steamer — jumped ship in the 1920s and settled in New York.

Like hundreds of other Muslim sailors at the time, he found a home in Harlem — marrying a Puerto Rican woman and opening one of the city’s first Indian restaurants. He stayed there until his death in 1983.

“I see, now that I’m older, he kind of romanticized what Harlem was to him,” said Ullah, 44, a comedian and playwright who grew up in the George Washington Carver Houses.

“I think my father looked at Harlem as where, ‘Here is where people greet you, These people embraced me for what I am.’ ”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and filmmaker Vivek Bald, is the author of “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America,” published this month by Harvard University Press.

Bald believes Ullah’s family is the last in East Harlem with a direct connection to a little-documented community that thrived decades before the first large waves of South Asian immigration to the U.S…

… In many ways, the histories of these early immigrants became lost because they were forced into the shadows, Bald said. Race-based immigration laws — starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and extending until the quota system was overhauled in 1965 — made their presence illegal.

“If you were an Asian person, with very few exceptions you were legally barred from entering the U.S. like other immigrants,” said Bald. “You were not deemed fit to become a citizen, and in many states you could not legally own property.”

But in Harlem, Bengali immigrants married into African-American and Puerto Rican families and found jobs as doormen or dishwashers. In the 1940s, Bengali vendors sold hotdogs from carts along Madison, Lexington and Third Aves…

Read the entire article here.

Nigeria’s dangerous skin whitening obsession
 
Al Jazeera
2013-04-06

Mohammed Adow

Nigeria has the world’s highest percentage of women using skin lightening agents in the quest for “beauty”.

Lagos, Nigeria – After carefully washing her face, legs and arms, Taiwo Solomon vigorously rubs cream over her body. She is meticulous and makes sure she covers her entire face. Soloman, 32, is bleaching her skin. She believes fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. So she spends her meager savings on cheap black-market concoctions that promise to lighten her pigment.

This has been a daily routine for the past 15 years. Now several shades lighter she says her new skin makes her feel more beautiful and confident.

“Bleaching just makes me feel special, like am walking around in a spotlight,” she told Al Jazeera. “I am not seeking to be totally white, I just want to look beautiful. I cannot stop using the lightening agents,” she adds.

Solomon is not alone. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 77 percent of women in Nigeria use skin-lightening products, the world’s highest percentage. That compares with 59 percent in Togo, and 27 percent in Senegal. The reasons for this are varied but most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want “white skin”.

In many parts of Africa, lighter-skinned women are considered more beautiful and are believed to be more successful and likely to find marriage.

It’s not only women though who are obsessed with bleaching their skins. Some men too are involved in the practice…

…Dangerous consequences

Skin bleaching comes with hazardous health consequences. The dangers associated with the use of toxic compounds for skin bleaching include blood cancers such as leukemia and cancers of the liver and kidneys as well as severe skin conditions.

Hardcore bleachers use illegal ointments containing toxins like mercury, a metal that blocks production of melanin, which gives the skin its colour, but can also be toxic…

Read the entire article here.

It’s Not Always Black And White: Caught Between Two Worlds

Outskirts Press
2013-01-18
100 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781478716693

John Reed, Ph.D.

John Reed knows from experience how difficult the life of a biracial person can be. He was born in Germany after World War II to a German-Caucasian mother and an African-American father. The difficulty of finding a place in society was compounded by his mother’s rejection of him; he spent the first year of his life in a convent, cared for by nuns. As the physical, mental, and verbal abuse John suffered from his mother were mirrored by a judgmental and racist society around him, he found himself in a crisis of identity and shattered self-esteem. In this searingly honest and thought-provoking memoir, John shows us how racism is still very much alive in our current “politically correct” world, and the ways in which biracial people struggle with knowing whether they are truly accepted, or if the people around them are just playing the game. John’s path to personal healing, which included learning about and embracing his heritage, and severing ties with those who abused and failed to accept him, is an inspiration to anyone who has fought the questions of acceptance and identity. No matter what your personal background and heritage, It’s Not Always Black And White will enlighten you about what it’s like to be a person of color in a world where being white is the norm, and will vividly show you that every person, regardless of color, deserves to be treated with dignity, love, and respect.

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America [Event]

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Langston Hughes Auditorium
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, New York 10037-1801
2013-04-06, 17:30-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

A book event with theater, film, and community forum presented by afro-latin@ forum, Asian American Writer’s Workshop and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Join us for a celebration of the publication of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press) by scholar and documentary filmmaker Vivek Bald. This special event will explore the little-known stories of Muslim men from the Indian subcontinent who settled in Harlem in the 1920s-50s, married Puerto Rican, African American, and West Indian women, and became a small but significant part of the neighborhood, selling hotdogs from pushcarts, opening the neighborhood’s first Indian restaurants, and interacting with Harlem’s other Muslim communities. 

Bald will read from his book, which traces out these and other early histories of Indian Muslim men who settled in places like Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom in Detroit. East Harlem actor/playwright Alaudin Ullah will perform an excerpt from his one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams,” which focuses on the story of his father Habib, who was one of the first Bengali men to settle in Harlem. The event will also include an excerpt from “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” the documentary film on which Bald and Ullah are collaborating, followed by a panel discussion and community forum with children and descendants of some of the Bengali men who settled in Harlem in the mid-twentieth century. Plus a special guest DJ set by Himanshu Suri, aka Heems, formerly of the rap group Das Racist.

For more information, click here.

Are Hapa White Asian Americans?

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-02-01

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

Some people seem to think hapa means white Asian American, even though it originally refers to Hawaiian mixtures and is not confined to hapa haole. I never had that impression myself, as one of my first hapa friends was Margo Okazawa-Rey and she called herself, Afro Asian or black Japanese. One of my earliest colleagues was Velina Hasu Houston, who more than anyone publicly acknowledged the blackness while asserting her Japanese identity.
 
But the reality is that black Asians may still feel like they do not fully belong in hapa circles. In her blog, Grits and Sushi (gritsandsushi.com), Mitzi Uehara Carter writes of how she would meet other black Asians at the gatherings of hapa organizations and “we almost always whispered that we weren’t feelin’ the hapaness.” Not that she wasn’t feeling the “commonalities between us all–but the vast majority of the folks were Asian and white American. When I met with the other black Asians in the group, that’s when I felt a real connection emerge.”…

Read the entire article here.

Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan

Multilingual Matters
2009-12-03
280 pages
210 x 148 (A5)
Paperback ISBN: 9781847692320
Hardback ISBN: 9781847692337

Laurel Kamada, Lecturer Professor
Tohoku University, Japan

This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout—narrated in the girls’ own voices—that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.

Of Mongrels and Men: The Shared Ideology of Anti-Miscegenation Law, Chinese Exclusion, and Contemporary American Neo-Nativism

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 458
2005-02-16

Geoffrey A. Neri, Associate
Miller Barondess, LLP

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. BIRTH OF THE “ABOMINATION”: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW
  • A. Origins and Early History
  • B. Anti-Miscegenation Ideology
    • 1. Monogenism and Christian Fundamentalism
    • 2. Polygenism and Pseudoscience
    • 3. Social Darwinism
    • 4. A Beacon of Light in the Dark Age of Racist Ideology
• III. THE “YELLOW PERIL”: ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW AND CHINESE EXCLUSION
  • A. Chinese Migration to the United States in the 19th Century
    • 1. Pull Factors
    • 2. Push Factors
  • B. Anti-Chinese Immigration Legislation
  • C. The “Chinese Exclusion Case” and Plenary Power Doctrine
  • D. “Negroes or Mulattoes . . . and Mongolians”: The Anti-Miscegenation Expands to Include the Chinese
  • E. Effects of Anti-Miscegenation Law and Chinese Exclusion on Chinese Transnational Movement
• IV.MORE WHIMPER THAN BANG: THE END OF CHINESE EXCLUSION AND THE ANTI MISCEGENATION STATUTE
  • A. The End of Chinese Exclusion
  • B. The Demise of the Anti-Miscegenation Statute
    • 1. Early Challenges
    • 2. Loving
• V. THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE PERIOD OF CHINESE EXCLUSION
  • A. The Good News . . . More Progressive Racial Norms in the Modern Era
  • B. The Bad News . . . Neo-Nativism Serves up “Old Poison in New Bottles”
• VI.CONCLUSION

“We want no more mixture of races. . . . No strong nation was ever born of mongrel races of men.”
—U.S. Senator La Fayette Grover (addressing the “Chinese Problem”), June 30, 1872

I. INTRODUCTION

A complex interaction of push and pull factors created a substantial wave of Asian migration to the United States in the 19th century. In brief, acute political and economic instability and dislocation in China arising from European imperialism, internal conflict, and famine “pushed” Chinese laborers to the United States, while a demand for cheap, reliable labor brought on by burgeoning industrialization in the American West, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the 1849 California gold strike at Sutter’s Creek “pulled” them. Due to America’s historic policy of open borders, this migration was virtually unrestricted and the rapid influx of Chinese immigrants into the American West almost immediately provoked “widespread concerns about the relationship between race and national identity” in the United States. The Chinese were perceived as possessing characteristics that amounted to unbridgeable racial differences and “fears of hybridity” proliferated, prompting one California legislator to warn that “were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people, it would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.

Anti-miscegenation laws, state laws prohibiting sex and/or marriage between individuals of different “races” originally crafted to prevent the mixing of whites and blacks, were quickly extended to regulate the interaction between whites and the Chinese, the new “other” race. In a process dubbed “Negroization” by historian Dan Caldwell, the Chinese were charged with the same negative racial qualities—“[h]eathen, morally inferior, savage, and childlike . . . lustful, sensual”—that had previously been hoisted on blacks and the rhetoric of anti-black racism became the rhetoric of anti-Chinese racism. This process of reassignment occurred a number of times as subsequent groups of Asian immigrants came to the United States and anti-miscegenation laws were extended further to apply to them: Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Filipinos and eventually all Asian immigrants were subject to the prohibition against commingling with whites.

This Article will examine the anti-miscegenation statute as well as other exclusionary laws specifically applied to the Chinese diaspora in America throughout the 19th and 20th century, describing the impact these racially restrictive laws had on Chinese transnational migration during the period. It will present the anti-miscegenation statute as an emblem of the broader concern of American nativism—a concern with defining and policing American political and civic culture, with protecting American republicanism from the perceived threat posed by foreigners deemed “unassimilable.” This Article will then situate the anti-miscegenation statute within the larger framework of the xenophobic ideology animating exclusionary laws in general—an ideology in which amalgamation between white and nonwhite persons is assumed to threaten the purity of the white American body politic as much as the white American body.

Viewed in this manner, the anti-miscegenation statute, far from being a relic of America’s racist past, is especially relevant to contemporary arguments regarding immigration. For although the primary thesis of anti-miscegenation law—the assertion that nonwhites are incompatible with whites physically—has been disproven (or at least driven underground) by modern science, a dangerous corollary to that thesis—the notion that certain classes of immigrants, by virtue of their race and/or country of origin, are incompatible with American civic and political culture—endures. The modern nativist revival, this Article will conclude, invokes the specter of anti-miscegenation law and Chinese exclusion in charging that the most recent wave of migration to the United States, comprised mostly of Latinos and Asians, “cannot or will not assimilate” and threaten to degrade and undermine “national identity”…

Read the entire paper here.

So, What Are You… Anyway?: 2013 Conference on Multiracial Identity

Hosted by the Harvard College Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2013-04-05 through 2013-04-06

The Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association will host its fifth annual conference on mixed-race politics and identity issues, “So…What Are You, Anyway?” (SWAYA) on Friday, April 5, 2013 and Saturday, April 6, 2013 on the Harvard University campus. The event is open to the public and will feature an array of exciting guest lecturers who will speak on issues involving multiracial identity.

The conference will include lectures given by author Pearl Fuyo Gaskins, Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild, and Eric Hamako, as well as discussion groups led by experts on modern race relations. Last year, the event drew over one hundred students and other guests from colleges and cities around the US.

SWAYA will culminate in a special gala dinner^* in honor of the 2013 recipient of the Cultural Pioneer Award, Pearl Gaskins, author of the book What are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People…

For more information, click here.

Hapa Japan 2013

Los Angeles, California
2013-04-02 through 2013-04-06

A free Festival Celebrating Mixed-Race and Mixed-Roots Japanese People and Culture!

Come join us at Hapa Japan 2013 from April 2-6, 2013 in Los Angeles for a concert featuring emerging hapa artists, a comedy night at East West Players, readings by award-winning authors, a historical exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum, film screenings of great documentaries, and a 2-day academic conference at the University of Southern California.

For more information, click here.