Mixed Race Studies

Maybe You’re Just An Asshole: The Mixed Race Persecution Complex

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
2014-07-25

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
California State University, Dominguez Hills

“Black girls are always hatin’ on me. I can’t help it if their man prefers light-skinned pretty women.”

“You have no idea how hard it is to be mixed race.”

I get it. Being mixed race in a mono-racial society is tough. There still isn’t much room for multiplicity in our society. From race categories on forms, to Barack Obama being called the first “Black” president even as he was raised by his white grandparents, to people asking a mixed race person “what are you?” as if being mixed means you are freak, it is undoubtedly hard where it seems people want to force you into a box just to make their lives easier. I get it….I live that same reality on a daily basis but I have also noticed another phenomenon that either few mixed race people acknowledge, understand or are willing to talk about and that is what I call “the mixed race persecution” complex…

Read the entire article here.

The journalistic survey, and monographic studies of Obama have been joined by some important anthologies. One of the first notable anthologies written about race and Obama was edited by historian and political scientist Manning Marable and civil rights attorney Kristen Clarke. This volume, entitled Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black Americas New Leadership (2009), traces the evolution of black leadership and black politics since the civil rights movement, including essays that specifically interrogate the intersection of race and gender. The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s A More Perfect Union Speech (2009), edited by Denean Sharpley-Whiting, includes key chapters on the Obama speech by Bakari Kitwana and William Julius Wilson. Social scientists Matthew Hughey and Gregory S. Parks compiled an edited volume entitled The Obama’s and a (Post) Racial America? (2011), which examines the unconscious anti-black bias harbored by whites in US society, including commentaries by some noted race scholars. These are but a few of the torrent of scholarly publications on race and the Obama phenomenon. For an extensive list of over 400 publications on Obama see Steven F. Riley’s Mixed Race Studies website: http://www.mixedracestudies.org?cat=63.

Hettie V. Williams and G. Reginald Daniel, “Preface,” in Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union, eds. G. Reginald Daniel and Hettie V. Williams (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). xvii.

At last, a home for black history

The Guardian
2014-07-23

Paul Reid, Director
Black Cultural Archives

The launch of the Black Cultural Archives will show that our presence in the UK is measured in millennia, not decades

I remember the time I got caned at school. It was the 1970s, and during a history lesson I put my hand up and asked: “Sir, were there people in America before Christopher Columbus?” I wasn’t trying to be difficult, just trying to engage with some complicated questions. But my teacher saw it as some kind of act of subversion.

Like many black males at the time, I was trying to work out my place in British society. And there were no teachers to guide us through our journey of self-discovery. Through my later work as a community youth worker, I realise that today’s young people are still working through these identity issues.

If my teacher had told my class that the black presence in Britain could be measured in millennia, and that we were not just passing through or tagged on to the end of the colonial story, we might have had a different sense of belonging; I might have had a different idea of what was possible; I might have seen something to aspire to…

…In 1981, after the first of these, a group of concerned black people got together seeking a place where the presence and history of black people could be told positively and accurately. Not just the history of enslavement and of Windrush, but a history that goes as far back as the African Roman emperor Septimius Severus, who is buried in York, and tells the story of the continued presence of black people in the United Kingdom ever since. The idea of the Black Cultural Archives was born…

Read the entire article here.