Mixed Race Studies

Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions

The Upshot
The New York Times
2015-01-03

Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics
Harvard University

The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.

Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers. As it turns out, an impressive body of research spanning decades addresses just these issues — and leads to some uncomfortable conclusions and makes us look at this debate from a different angle.

The central challenge of such research is isolating the effect of race from other factors. For example, we know African-Americans earn less income, on average, than whites. Maybe that is evidence that employers discriminate against them. But maybe not. We also know African-Americans tend to be stuck in neighborhoods with worse schools, and perhaps that — and not race directly — explains the wage gap. If so, perhaps policy should focus on place rather than race, as some argue.

But we can isolate the effect of race to some degree…

Read the entire article here.

I Claim Black Because My Light Skin Doesn’t Protect Me from Misogynoir

For Harriet
2015-01-03

Kesiena Boom
Brighton, England

I am a mixed race woman. One of my parents is Black and the other is white. I identify as both mixed race and as Black. I do so because of the legacy of the one drop rule and because I cannot access whiteness as it is associated with being ‘pure’ and I am clearly ‘tainted’ with my racially ambiguous looks. My afro, my golden skin, my thick figure and my full lips combine to give me an appearance that is notably not white. I feel connected to Blackness in a way I cannot feel towards whiteness. Despite being mainly raised by my white parent, it is not in whiteness that I find my home…

Read the entire article here.

Dreams of my mother…

One Love, One London
2015-01-04

Tony Thomas

It’s October 1959; Paddington station is busy… Scanning the departures board for her train a nervous looking woman hurries towards the platform. In one hand she carries a suitcase and holding her other hand tightly is a pretty 2 year old; a mixed race child. The girls’s name was Rosemary Walter and the journey she was about to embark on would change her life forever. She could not have known it off course but she was being rejected; hidden. You see Rosie’s mother, a white woman married to a white man had had a black lover and Rosie was living proof of a relationship that was not just illicit but in those days deemed utterly shameful…

These are not my words but the word’s of George Alagiah narrating the three part series Mixed Britannia. The little girl in the story is my mother; this was the tale of the early years of my mothers life…

My mother was born in 1957 to a white mother and a Jamaican father; in 1959 at the age of two she was handed over to the National Children’s Home and transported from London to Wales; she would spend the next 16 years of her life in children’s homes across the country.

The world that my mother inhabited in her youth was not like today; there were not as many black people in the country; there was no noteable mixed race population and Wales was more or less a white’s only territory. Wherever my mother would go she would not fit in. Her hair was too frizzy, she had big lips and a big nose; there was no way that she could “pass“. She was clearly an object of curiosity to the people that she met who had never interacted with a “darkie” before. On holiday’s such as Christmas unlike the other children my mother did not have a family that would come and take her back to the family home; she would spend the holiday’s with kind Welsh and English families doing a good deed.

My mother spent most of her time in care in Wales; she was sent to London, Brixton at the age of 14 to be with her “own kind” as Brixton had become known as a place where the West Indian community congregated together and it was also where her mother lived who had become an honorary Jamaican. It was the thinking of the children’s home that as she was getting to the age of having boyfriends she should be around her own kind for mating purposes.

For my mother Brixton was as much a culture shock as Wales. My mother had a Welsh accent; she was mixed-race and had never met her Jamaican father. Although she had always sympathised with African-American struggles and her obvious “otherness” made her desire to understand that part of her she knew nothing about; she was not a part of the Jamaican community…

Read the entire article here.

‘A Tale of Two Plantations,’ by Richard S. Dunn

Sunday Rook Review
The New York Times
2015-01-02

Greg Grandin, Professor of History
New York University

Dunn, Richard S., A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

For enslaved peoples in the New World, it was always the worst of times. Whether captured in Africa or born into bondage in the Americas, slaves suffered unimaginable torments and indignities. Yet the specific form their miseries took, as the historian Richard S. Dunn shows in his painstakingly researched “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia,” depended on whether one was a slave in the British Caribbean or in the United States. The contrasts between the two slave societies were many, covering family life, religious beliefs and labor practices. But one difference overrode all others. In the Caribbean, white masters treated the slaves like “disposable cogs in a machine,” working them to death on sugar plantations and then replacing them with fresh stock from Africa. In the United States, white masters treated their slaves like the machine itself — a breeding machine.

Dunn began working on this comparative study in the 1970s, around the time historians like Winthrop D. Jordan, Edmund S. Morgan and Eugene D. Genovese were revolutionizing the study of American slavery. Drawing on Freud, Marx and other social theorists, these scholars painted what Dunn calls the “big picture,” capturing the psychosexual terror, economic exploitation, resistance, and emotional and social dependency inherent in the master-slave relation.

Decades of extensive research led Dunn, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, in a different direction, away from making large historical claims or speculating about the “interiority” of slavery’s victims. Instead, he’s opted to stay close to the facts, using demographic methods to reconstruct “the individual lives and collective experiences of some 2,000 slaves on two large plantations” — Mesopotamia, which grew sugar on the western coastal plain of Jamaica, and Mount Airy, a tobacco and grain estate on the Rappahannock River in Virginia’s Northern Neck region — “during the final three generations of slavery in both places.”…

…Likewise, Dunn’s discussion of interracial sex seems tone deaf to decades of scholarship on the subject. Forty years ago, Winthrop D. Jordan wrote about the libidinal foundations of white supremacy in America. More recently, the historians Jennifer L. Morgan and Diana Paton have explored the linkages between ideology, law and sexual domination in slave societies. Dunn devotes a chapter each to two slave women, empathetically tracing their family history and considering the many hardships they endured. He mentions rape and “predatory” whites and discusses the sharp differences in the way mixed-race offspring were treated on the two plantations. Yet at times he plays down the varieties of sexual coercion that enslaved women lived under. At one point, he calls the relationship between a white overseer, his black “mistress” and his distraught wife a “ménage à trois.”…

Read the entire review here.

Edward Brooke, first black elected U.S. senator, dies at 95

USA Today
2015-01-03

Natalie DiBlasio

Former Massachusetts U.S. senator Edward Brooke, the first African American to be elected to the Senate by popular vote, has died at age 95.

Ralph Neas, a former aide, said Brooke died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Coral Gables, Fla.

“We lost a truly remarkable public servant,” says Massachusetts Gov.-elect Charlie Baker. “A war hero, a champion of equal rights for all and an example that barriers can be broken, Sen. Brooke accomplished more than most aspire to.”

The only blacks to serve in the Senate before Brooke were two men in the 1870s when senators were still chosen by state legislatures.

Brooke, a liberal Republican, was elected to the Senate in 1966 and served two terms. He earned his reputation as a liberal after becoming the first Republican senator to publicly urge President Nixon to resign…

…Historian Dennis Nordin has researched and written about African-American politicians and devoted a chapter to Brooke in his book, From Edward Brooke to Barack Obama: African American Political Success, 1966-2008.

Nordin told The Greenville News that Brooke’s political career shows independence from the GOP…

Read the entire obituary here.

Edward Brooke, Pioneering U.S. Senator in Massachusetts, Dies at 95

The New York Times
2015-01-03

Douglas Martin

Edward W. Brooke III, who in 1966 became the first African-American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, winning as a Republican in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts, died on Saturday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by Ralph Neas, a family spokesman, who said Mr. Brooke was surrounded by members of his family.

He won his Senate seat by nearly a half-million votes in 1966 and was re-elected in 1972. He remains the only black senator ever to have been returned to office.

A skilled coalition builder at a time when Congress was less partisan and ideologically divided than it is today, Mr. Brooke shunned labels, but he was seen as a centrist. His positions and votes were consistently more liberal than those of his increasingly conservative Republican colleagues.

He opposed the expansion of nuclear arsenals, pushed for improved relations with China and championed civil rights, the legalization of abortion and fair-housing policies. He urged Republicans to match the Democrats in coming up with programs to aid cities and the poor…

Read the entire obituary here.