Mixed Race Studies

Jane Bolin, the Country’s First Black Woman to Become a Judge, Is Dead at 98

The New York Times
2007-01-10

Douglas Martin

Jane Bolin, whose appointment as a family court judge by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, died on Monday in Queens. She was 98 and lived in Long Island City, Queens.

Her death was announced by her son, Yorke B. Mizelle.

Judge Bolin was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to work in the office of the New York City corporation counsel, the city’s legal department.

In January 1979, when Judge Bolin had reluctantly retired after 40 years as a judge, Constance Baker Motley, a black woman and a federal judge, called her a role model.

In her speech, Judge Motley said, “When I thereafter met you, I then knew how a lady judge should comport herself.”.

The “lady judge” was frequently in the news at the time of her appointment with accounts of her regal bearing, fashionable hats and pearls. But her achievements transcended being a shining example. As a family court judge, she ended the assignment of probation officers on the basis of race and the placement of children in child-care agencies on the basis of ethnic background.

Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Her father, Gaius C. Bolin, was the son of an American Indian woman and an African-American man. Her mother, the former Matilda Emery, was a white Englishwoman…

Read the entire obituary here.

Owning my mixed-race identity: Why I don’t have to choose sides

Salon
Wednesday, 2014-03-12

Eternity E. Martis
London, Ontario, Canada

People can’t seem to understand that I’m not either black or Anglo-Pakistani, but all of the above

My mother is Anglo-Pakistani and my father is Jamaican (and a quarter Chinese). I grew up with my mother and her family, a chubby, curly-haired, dark-skinned child eating chana masala, aloo paneer and chicken makhani.  As a child, I didn’t know I was any different from the rest of my family. But as I grew up, I realized that I was different, because I looked different.

My mom is fair-skinned with pin-straight hair. My uncle and several other members of my family are also fair with clear, light green eyes. I did not get any of those traits — I’m the darkest-skinned person in my immediate family, and the only one who’s mixed-race. As a child, I envied my mother’s skin; I longed to be white. She didn’t have to feel uncomfortable in the spaces white people inhabited. She wasn’t sneered at, followed around department stores by an employee as if she was a thief, or pushed off the sidewalk when she was walking to school by white kids. Life seemed easy for her.

I despised my father; his absence humiliated me. Not only did I loathe his withdrawn parenting, but I hated his genes. I inherited his dark skin and large nose. All six of his kids did. They were markers of my presumed inferiority, giving people a reason to treat me unkindly, giving boys a reason to rate me a “4” for my “monkey face” while my other female classmates received a generous “9.” It also didn’t matter that I was my mother’s child; nowhere did people recognize me in her…

…Someone asked me why people who are mixed with black try to distance themselves from their black ancestry, as if we are ashamed. It has nothing to do with shame; on my part, I find myself more in touch with s side now that I am older. However, I do want to bring awareness to mixed race politics and break down rigid categories of race. I do not have to be black because I am mixed; I do not have to be white because I am mixed. I do not have to be Pakistani because I am mixed. I do not have to choose a side, because I am everything…

Read the entire article here.

Butterfield featured on ‘Colbert Report’

The Wilson Times
Wilson, North Carolina
Tuesday, 2014-03-25

Corey Friedman, Times Online Editor

Comic pundit Stephen Colbert argued Obamacare and the Racial Justice Act with U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield while bashing North Carolina barbecue in a playful segment spotlighting Wilson’s congressional district.

Butterfield, a Democrat representing the state’s 1st District, appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” Monday night, the latest installment in a series of interviews with House members. Colbert asked Butterfield whether Obamacare was a “great train wreck or greatest train wreck.”

“Let me tell you, when the history of this period is written, you will see that the Affordable Care Act has been one of the most significant pieces of legislation that’s ever been passed,” Butterfield said.

Colbert asked whether President Barack Obama was lying when he told Americans that if they liked their health insurance plans, they could keep them…

…Colbert profiles congressional representatives and their constituents in his occasional “Better Know a District” segment. He’s known for using satire and deliberately taking some comments out of context for comedic effect in the often offbeat interviews…

…Racial identity framed the opening of Colbert’s segment, when he introduced Butterfield as a “prominent African-American congressman and civil rights leader,” then appeared visibly surprised upon meeting Butterfield, who is light-skinned.

“What’s happening?” Colbert asks someone off-camera. “Can someone tell me what’s happening? Is this the guy? You said he was black.”

“I have been for 66 years,” Butterfield said.

“My mistake,” replied Colbert. “I don’t see race.”

“We come in all shades,” said Butterfield. “How about that?”

“I really thought you were a white guy,” Colbert mused. “My apologies.”

The Comedy Central host teased Butterfield for supporting a plan to fund pre-kindergarten education with a tax increase of 94 cents on each pack of cigarettes, implying that the proposal would make smoking more expensive for preschoolers.

“Those who smoke cigarettes can afford to pay a little bit more to help us invest in education,” Butterfield said.

“Even a 6-year-old?” asked Colbert…

Read the entire article here.

The specific details being reported aside, the deeper structural problem with mainstream media stories on the alleged postracial power of mixed-race identity or the supposed significance of changing racial demographics is that the information presented is often one-sided, simplistic, geared to a tabloid sensibility, and does not reflect the multiform ways that edifices of power have race embedded within them, whether visible or not. It is a matter of sensationalism taking precedence over serious analysis. David Roediger identifies this tendency of providing sensationalism without substance, noting that “often multiracial identities and immigration take center stage as examples of factors making race obsolete” and that “we are often told popularly that race and racism are on predictable tracks to extinction. But we are seldom told clear or consistent stories about why white supremacy will give way and how race will become a ‘social virus’ of the past.” Roediger’s words highlight the importance of unmasking this postracial aspiration for what it is: an effort to provide comfort to a nation that is unwilling to do the hard work required to deal effectively with centuries of entrenched racism and the resultant consequences.

Spencer, Rainier, “‘Only the News They Want to Print’: Mainstream Media and Critical Mixed-Race Studies,” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, Volume 1, Number 1, (January 30, 2014). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3b34q0rf

Playing Chinese Whispers: The Official ‘Gossip’ of Racial Whitening in Jorge Amado’s Tenda dos Milagres

Forum for Modern Language Studies
Volume 50, Issue 2, April 2014
pages 196-211
DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqu006

Helen Lima de Sousa, Santander Post-Doctoral Senior Studentship in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies
Clare College, University of Cambridge

This article explores the possible inauthentic nature of official discourse, as political, religious or intellectual elites manipulate facts in a process that parallels the childhood game of Chinese Whispers. Considering this process of manipulation, and the false messages it produces, it is suggested that such discourses, while official, resemble the assumed inauthentic nature of gossip. Within the framework of this concept, the article explores the fusion of official and unofficial discourse in Jorge Amado’s novel Tenda dos milagres (1969). Initially analysing Amado’s fictionalization of the nineteenth-century Bahian doctor Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and his theories on racial whitening, the article subsequently investigates the continued manipulation of fact by the fictional Bahian political and intellectual elite of the 1960s as the image of the protagonist Pedro Archanjo is transformed, during the official posthumous celebrations of his life, from a poor mulatto who questioned the status quo, to an obedient, white intellectual.

Read or purchase the article here.

Zines from the Borderlands: Storytelling about Mixed-Heritage

Brooklyn Historical Society
Great Hall
128 Pierrepont Street
Brooklyn, New York
2014-04-24, 19:00-21:00 EST (Local Time)

How can zines create new narratives and representations for mixed-heritage people, LGBTQ communities, and people of color who are stereotyped or ignored in mainstream media?

What is the role of zines, DIY and self-publishing within marginalized communities?

How can zine culture open up space for intersectional conversations about identity and cultural hybridity?

Come participate in a vibrant conversation about race, gender, sexuality and media with four zinesters, activists and media-makers. Multimedia panel presentations will touch on themes such as: telling inclusive and intersectional stories; DIY and self-publishing; zine creation, production, and distribution; leveraging zine culture for racial and LGBTQ justice and movement building, and more.

Panelists include:

• Nia King, filmmaker, zinester and editor of MXD: True Stories by Mixed Race Writers
• Daniela Capistrano, founder of the POC Zine Project and DCAP Media
• Jenna Freedman, Barnard Zine Librarian and author of the zine Lower East Side Librarian
• Moderated by: Anne Hays, founder of Brooklyn-based zine distro, Sleeping Creatures, and founding editor of Storyscape.

For more information, click here.

Becoming a black woman: an identity in process

Black Women of Brazil: The site dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent
2013-07-31

Fernanda Souza

“(…) We are born preta (black), mulata, parda, brown, roxinha (a little purple) among others, but becoming negra (black) (1) is an achievement.” (Lélia Gonzalez)

“How (does one) to form an identity around color and non self-acceptance of blackness by the majority whose future was projected in the dream of branqueamento (whitening)?” (Munanga, p. 137, 2004)

My entire life I saw myself as a parda (brown), morena, mulata, mestiça (mixed race), but never, under any circumstances, negra (black). Although having blacks uncles and cousins, besides my late grandmother being black, I didn’t not recognize as such because of not thinking my parents were black, because I believed in the idea that blacks were only those people who had darker skin and my father and my mother could be seen, even by themselves, as mestiços and not as negros. That’s where we have one of the great subtleties while one of the biggest problems for racial consciousness in the country: the mestiço. The mestiço, as an intermediate category between white and black, is a result of the long process of mestiçagem (racial mixture) that marks Brazil. Mestiço here should be understood primarily as someone who is the child of a interracial couple (in this case, I refer to the union between a black man/ white woman and white man/black woman) and can also, to facilitate understanding of the text, be understood as someone who, even though not being the son/daughter of an interracial couple but of black parents, having lighter skin and had/has difficulty in defining themselves as black. Again I reiterate: this extension of the concept of “mestiço” is only to help in the understanding of the text and not to have to use the term “non-white” because it encompasses other ethnic groups, such as indigenous and neither “pardos (browns)”, because I find it politically innocuous for a text that will discuss mainly mestiçagem and the difficulty of asserting a racial-ethnic identity.

Miscegenation constitutes the cornerstone of the myth of racial democracy, whose central idea is that we are mestiços, the result of interbreeding between the three races – white, Indian and Black – which occurred through a contact and a harmonious coexistence between the three – forgetting that this process started from the rape of black women enslaved by plantation masters and there is nothing harmonious about it – and, in this sense, here there doesn’t exist so much discrimination and racial prejudice and people recognize themselves first as Brazilian than from a racial-ethnic identity of the oppressed, because as the myth of racial democracy dissolves, it mitigates and obscures the tensions, conflicts and racial prejudices present in Brazil, as Kabengele Munanga (2004) pointed out…

Read the entire article here.