Mixed Race Studies

A Tie That Binds Across Cultures

The New York Times
2014-01-10

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more.

Bob and Chiyoko Bermant met in 1973 as graduate students at the University of Kansas. Bob was majoring in psychology, and Chiyoko, who is Japanese, was studying linguistics. They married in 1974 before moving to Waukesha, Wis., where Bob is a professor at the local University of Wisconsin campus. Chiyoko works as a docent at the Ten Chimneys Estate and does Japanese-English translations for a local martial arts master. The couple has one adult son.

How did you meet?

Bob: She was looking for help with English grammar for her papers. One of my roommates was Japanese and told her I would help.

Chiyoko: Bob asked me to come to their apartment. I thought he was going to write in red ink where I had missed an “s” or the first person and it turned out he very thoroughly and patiently went over the paper with me…

Did you face prejudice as a mixed-race couple in the Midwest?

Bob: The only thing I remember was in Lawrence right after we were engaged we went into a Denny’s and they wouldn’t serve us. We just walked out.

How about Chiyoko’s parents?

Chiyoko: From the beginning my mother said that it would not work and nothing I could say or do changed her determination until the end of her life. That does not mean she didn’t like Bob. She saw me as a kind of war bride or mail-order bride.

My parents were divorced and my father was more open-minded. Once we were married, he just wanted to know when he was going to have a grandchild…

Read the entire interview here.

Gov’t to overhaul services for multicultural families

Yonhap News Agency
Seoul, South Korea
2014-01-15

Shim Sun-ah

SEOUL, Jan. 15 (Yonhap) — The government plans to streamline its support system for multicultural families to help them integrate into society, officials said Wednesday.

The move comes as some existing services, including Korean-language education, have been redundant or failed to reach those in need who are in distant rural areas.

Under the plan, immigrants can learn the Korean language at local government-designated locations in their respective neighborhoods and earn incentives that would later be helpful when they apply for citizenship, according to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

Currently, only those who successfully finish a Korean-language course offered by the justice ministry are eligible for incentives such as exemption from a written test or an interview when they apply for naturalization.

The nation’s two call immigration centers — one for marriage immigrants and the other for foreign residents in general — will be integrated, so they can more effectively serve the foreign population, the ministry said…

…The envisioned new organization will offer various support for children raised by single parents, grandparents or North Korean defectors, as well as in multiracial families, the government said…

Read the entire article here.

Rite Of “Passing”

CBS News
2007-10-28

Russ Mitchell

For 23 years Bliss Broyard was white, living in tony Greenwich, Conn., isolated from people of color and influenced by the racial attitudes of her surroundings, reports CBS News’ Russ Mitchell.

Asked if she used to tell black jokes, Broyard said:

“I did, in high school and it’s a very painful memory looking back now. There was a student, an African-American student who was sitting at the table who got up and left and I felt horrible about it and kept wanting to apologize to him but never did.”

Her life was based on a secret held by her father, Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990. He was the influential book critic for the New York Times for 18 years.

“I think my father, as a consequence, cut himself off from his family and history, and I think he suffered for that,” said Broyard.

Anatole Broyard was Creole, born in 1920. His light-skinned parents, the children of free blacks, moved from New Orleans to Brooklyn, New York, where during the Depression they passed as white to get work…

…”One Drop,” Bliss Broyard’s new book, chronicles her father’s failure to tell her and her brother about his racial identity and how they had to learn the news from their mother only weeks before he died.

“It’s amazing because we’re the people that are closest to him and the secret was about us too,” said Broyard.

And, she says, one that has had lasting consequences.

“I was really angry at him and one of the hardest things, his immediate family his sister and cousin, it’s been very, very hard to repair that rift,” said Broyard.

Historically, Broyard’s secret was not unique. According to an Ohio State study published in the late 1950s, the number of fair-skinned blacks crossing the color line between 1861 and 1950 grew from 3,000 a year to more than 15,000 a year. And by the trend’s peak in 1950, it was estimated 28 million Americans who identified themselves as white had black ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist by G. Reginald Daniel (review)

Hispanic Review
Volume 82, Number 1, Winter 2014
pages 116-119
DOI: 10.1353/hir.2014.0008

Mércia Santana Flannery, Lecturer of Portuguese
Romance Languages Department
University of Pennsylvania

G. Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, 336 pages, hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05246-5. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the sociologist Erving Goffman (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963) discusses the relationship between individuals who possess a social stigma and the “normals” (8). Reginald Daniel’s new book, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, discusses the stigmatized identity of the most celebrated Brazilian novelist as perceived in his literary work. Machado’s biography is traced, his work commented on, and we are offered a picture of the Brazilian mulatto writer as a way to understand the inclusion, or lack thereof, of race relations and black identification in his writings.

Having written extensively about Brazil’s racial relations and about Machado, Daniel is delving into known territory, being more than well qualified to take on the subject. In the introduction, the author comments on the importance of Machado’s legacy to the Brazilian literary canon, and on this famous author’s “betrayal” and his “racial self-negation” (1). From here on, the assumption seems to be that a mulatto writer should be expected to make his race a topic of his literary writings, but we miss the advancement of this line of thought.

In the first chapter, Daniel includes a panoramic consideration of Brazil’s racial configuration. A recapitulation of the country’s racial makeup and the role of miscegenation as an explanation for who Brazilians are as a people is also incorporated. Daniel discusses the Brazilian preference for the white-European phenotype, along with the stigmatization of African ancestry, which foregrounds the ensuing analysis of Machado’s relationship with his own racial ambiguity.

This chapter supplies an interesting account of Brazil, and particularly Rio de Janeiro, during the nineteenth century, the time when Machado wrote and that he used to contextualize most of his novels and short stories. Daniel stresses Brazil’s looking to the outside, especially to Europe (France and England in particular) as a way for the elites to “reckon with the embarrassing gulf between themselves and the masses” (26). Machado is guilty of the same, having chiseled out his characters mostly from European models.

In chapter two, Daniel reflects on the “absence” of literary voices of African ancestry in Brazil. He explains this situation through a description of the African Brazilian condition, which worked to “neutralize” those who could have worked as “mouthpieces in the African Brazilian struggle” (35). According to Daniel, this was a result of how European Brazilians thought about blackness. Considering that blackness in Brazil was so “irreconcilable with social advancement,” those who moved upwards could only be perceived as “whitened” (35). The chapter includes a brief account of other Brazilian mulatto writers and the degree to which they included the African Brazilian tradition in their work. For example, Caldas Barbosa used the African Brazilian vernacular in his modinhas and lundus, whereas Lima Barreto “openly discussed the topic of racism from an African Brazilian point of view” (58).

In chapter three, Daniel offers a biographical account of Machado’s life, including his modest origins in Livramento (born to a Portuguese immigrant mother, a washerwoman and seamstress, and a mulatto house painter), until his death as an acclaimed writer in Laranjeiras. Machado’s transition, the accomplishment of his hard-fought upward mobility, with scant formal education, as he was mostly self-taught, is a reason for praise and part of what is used to compose his portrait as a genius. However, as Daniel indicates, Machado was also condemned for his refusal to discuss racial themes in his works, or, as demonstrated by José do Patrocínio’s accusation, for having “hated his race” (67).

What is unclear is how we are meant to believe that Machado was a detractor, in view of what was said thus far in the book about Brazil’s racial relations. Was Machado acting as the majority of Brazilians did—and do—as far as race is concerned? Do we expect more of him because of his notoriety? In addition, Daniel notes, citing other scholars, that “Machado disguised his mulatto facial features by wearing a thick moustache and a beard and that he also wore his hair closely cropped in his late years to enhance this camouflage…

UNC professor studies race, drug abuse

The Daily Tar Heel
University of North Carolina
2014-01-13

Erin Davis

Growing up in rural North Carolina, Trenette Clark watched as some loved ones went to jail at young ages and others lost their children to the Child Welfare System.

She came to wonder why some drug users’ behavior spirals into a vortex of addiction and why those exposed to the same drug can have very different experiences from one another. She also wondered why so much research was restricted to one race.

After receiving a $829,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Clark, a UNC professor of social work, hopes to answer these questions and many more, specifically questions surrounding the practically untouched topic of biracial adolescents…

Read the entire article here.

Concubinage Law Reaches Negro Only

Lafayette Adviser
Lafayette, Louisiana
Friday, 1910-04-29
page 1, columns 3-4
Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)

By Vote of 3 to 2 Supreme Court Upholds Decision of the Lower Court.

LOUISIANA STATUTE HELD TO BE OF LIMITED SCOPE.

Mulattoes, Quadroons and Octaroons Not  included—Opinion Read by Justice Provosty.

Dally States.

Justices Nicholls and Land dissenting, the State Supreme Court Monday handed down a decision sustaining the decision of Judge Chretien, in the case of the State vs. Octave Treadway and Josephine Treadway, charged with violating the law prohibiting concubinage. In the Criminal Court the defense maintained that Josephine Treadway could not be considered a “colored person,” because she is an octoroon. It was pointed out that the Supreme Court had already decided that an octaroon is not a colored person in the accepted sense of the term as employed years ago. Judge Chretien sustained this argument, and dismissed the accused of the charge of concubinage. Both accused came to New Orleans from Plaquemine Parish.

Associate Justice O. O. Provosty, who was the organ of the Court, says in part:

“This sole question is whether an octoroon is ‘a person of the negro or black race’ within the meaning of the statute.”

Scientifically or ethnologically, a person is Caucasian or negro in the same proportion in which the two strains of blood are mixed in his veins; and therefore, scientifically or ethnologically, a person with seven-eighths white blood in his veins and one-eighth negro blood is seven-eighths white and one-eighth negro. But the words of a statute are not to be understood in their technical, but in their popular sense; and the prosecution contends that the popular meanings of the word negro includes an octoroon. The dictionaries show that the word negro does not include an octoroon within its meaning. In North Carolina a person who has one-sixteenth or more of African blood is a negro, but it gives as us authority for that statement the decision of the Supreme Court of the State, the Court having simply applied or enforced the following statute:

“All free persons descended from negro ancestors to the fourth generation inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation may have been a white person, shall be deemed free negroes and persons of mixed blood.”

The court points out the fact that the Louisiana statute does not define the word negro as including a person of mixed blood.  Had it done so there would, be an end of all questions. The prosecution contends that the word does not need to be defined in a statute; that popularly it has a definite well-known meaning.

The Court says: “There is a word in the English language which does express the meaning of a person of mixed negro and other blood, which has been coined for the very purpose of expressing that meaning, and because the word negro was not known to express it, and the need of a word to express it made itself imperatively felt. That word is the word ‘colored.’ The word ‘colored,’ in the United States at least, when used to designate the race of a person is unmistakable; it means a person of negro blood, pure or mixed, and the term applies no matter what may be the proportion of the mixture, so long as the negro blood is traceable. In our constitution and laws when it has become necessary to use a word comprehending within its meaning both negroes, properly so called, and persons of mixed blood, the term ‘colored’ has invariably been used.”

The court says there are no negroes who are not persons of color, but there are persons of color, who are not negroes. The term ‘color’ as applied to race, was given the meaning of the word negro for the very purpose of having in the language a term including within its meaning both persona of pure and of mixed blood; but the converse is not true.

The word negro was never adopted into the language for the purpose of designating persons of mixed blood. On the contrary, it was for the purpose and the sole purpose of expressing the meaning of persons of the pure race, and it can have now a different or more enlarged meaning only by wrenching it from its original meaning, as was done with the word “colored” and imparting to it a meaning different from that which it was intended to bear and has always borne in the language. The legislature might do this but the statute by which it did it would have authority only in Louisiana and the word negro would still continue to mean, the world over, outside of Louisiana, a person of the pure African race.

“We do not think,” says the court, “there could be any serious denial of the fact that in Louisiana the meaning of the words, mulatto, quadroon and octoroon are of a definite meaning as the words man or child, and that among educated people at least, they are as well and widely known, and we think that there can be no serious denial of the fact that in Louisiana and indeed throughout the United States, except on the Pacific slope, the word colored when applied to race, has the definite and well-known meaning of a person having negro blood in his veins. We think also that any candid mind must admit that the word ‘negro’ of itself unqualified, does not necessarily include within its meaning persons possessed of only an admixture of negro blood; notably those whose admixture is so slight that in their case even an expert can not be positive.”

Challenging a Pan-African Identity: The Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips

Journal of American Studies
Volume 45, Issue 3 (August 2011)
pages 483-502
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875810002410

Gregory D. Smithers, Visiting Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

In her 1986 book All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author’s experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou’s quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou’s work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama’s rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist’s couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television [Galvin Review]

Film Ireland
Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland
2014-01-13

Steven Galvin, Editor

Dr Zélie Asava introduces her book The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television, a critical investigation of race in contemporary Irish visual culture which explores concepts of Irish identity, history and nation in relation to screen representations of those who have become known as the ‘new Irish’.

In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the ‘new Irish’. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. 2013 has seen a plethora of Irish films exploring the interstices of identity, borderlands and cross-cultural communications in the Irish space: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave features Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender and Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga in a slavery-era narrative; Neil Jordan’s Byzantium features Saoirse Ronan as an English vampire who falls in love with an all-too human Irish-American in Britain and brings him to Ireland to become immortal; Paula Kehoe’s An Dubh ina Gheal [Assimilation] looks at the Irish-Aborigines’ of Australia, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy positions the Irishman within a transnational, interracial context in Mister John; the Boorsma brothers’ Milo utilizes the racial narrative of ‘passing’ to illuminate issues of disability and discrimination, centralising an Irish family who are also Dutch-Romanian; and Ama’s storyline on Fair City examines the position of illegals in Ireland and the challenges of blending distinctly different cultural values.

As Fintan O’Toole notes, there is no genuine newness in the ‘new Irish’, as Ireland has a history of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity, but ‘understanding globalization in the Irish context is as much a task of remembrance as it is of encountering the new’ (2009: viii). Following O’Toole, my book aims to connect the ‘dislocated continuity’ of racial discourses which have been circulating for many hundreds of years in Ireland and highlights the need to break down essentialist conceptualisations of Irishness by asserting its diversity, nonfixity and instability.  As racial representations tend to be focused on black/white issues, the book reflects this by looking at dominant screen representations of the ‘new Irish’ as non-white. However, it does also examine other marginalised identities in Ireland by referencing Jewish, Romanian, Traveller and a variety of Eastern European characters in brief. There is still much more work to be done on this subject and it is my hope that this book will serve as a contribution to that dialogue. The book asks how and why black and mixed-race characters are represented in Irish screen culture, and how this fits into broader shifts in the visual industries, in national politics and in the international landscape…

Read the entire review here.

A Daughter Discovers Branches of the Family Tree Pruned by Her Father

The New York Times
2007-11-07

Mimi Read

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 6 — In a white-box living room in an apartment on lower St. Charles Avenue here, the dining table was set for a family party: plastic bowls of chips, dip and salsa; a plastic bag of sepia-toned family photographs waiting to be opened; and a copy of Bliss Broyard’s new book, “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets.”

In town late last month for a publicity tour, Ms. Broyard, 41, grabbed and greeted cousins one after another as they came through the door. The gathering was at the temporary apartment of one cousin, Sheila Marie Prevost, 43, who lost her Upper Ninth Ward house and most of her possessions in Hurricane Katrina. Swing-era jazz filled the room. Ms. Broyard was guest of honor and auxiliary hostess.

In one animated moment she stood in a doorway tossing her dark curls, waving a chicken leg in one hand and a bowl of red beans and rice in the other.

“Thank you for letting us invade your house — it’s Creole domination!” she called out to Ms. Prevost’s companion.

It has been a decade since Ms. Broyard discovered her New Orleans kin. Despite skin tones ranging from alabaster to brown, most of them regard themselves as black. Ms. Broyard believed herself to be completely white until 17 years ago. She grew up in an idyllic enclave in Southport, Conn., and spent weekends at an all-white yacht club there. She attended prep school and summered on Martha’s Vineyard.

Her father was Anatole Broyard, a longtime book critic and essayist for The New York Times. Somewhere during his years at Brooklyn College he slipped over the color line and began passing as white.

It was only on Mr. Broyard’s deathbed in 1990 that his daughter, then 24, learned the family secret: “Your father is part black,” her mother, Alexandra, blurted out to Ms. Broyard and her brother, Todd, when their father couldn’t muster the words…

…When Ms. Broyard first showed up in New Orleans in 1993 to research her book, released last month, she couldn’t help noticing several Broyards in the phone book. On a later trip she worked up the courage to call some.

“I was worried they wouldn’t want to know me or they’d be angry,” she said.

In fact, many cousins who convened at the family get-together last month had known about Ms. Broyard and her father long before she contacted them. Even though they kept his secret, they talked about him among themselves. Anatole Broyard had been their high-achieving superstar. Occasionally, a Broyard aunt would clip one of his reviews and pass it around town…

Read the entire article here.

The Bots Are Taking Over

The New York Times Magazine
2013-12-20

Julie Bosman

Photographs by Rebecca Smeyne

Mikaiah and Anaiah Lei, the brothers from Los Angeles who make up the band the Bots, have been writing and playing rock songs together for seven years. Now 20 and 17, they are on the cusp of stardom as they ride a wave of praise from critics and prepare for the release of a full-length album early in 2014. When asked to describe their music, Mikaiah says: “People have said we sound like the Black Keys and Bad Brains and Black Flag. . . . ‘Dude, you’re like a little Jimi Hendrix’ — I find that very flattering.” Still, he questions such comparisons. “We show up at so many venues — ‘Are you guys rappers or something?’ That’s racist. Because I’m wearing a baseball cap and I’m a little bit brown. It’s frustrating. Jeez, I’m half Asian, but that doesn’t declare any specific genre of music.”

View the photographs here.