Mixed Race Studies

Naia Reborn: See the Surprising Face of a First American

NBC News
2015-01-05

Alan Boyle, Digital’s Science Editor

Timothy Archibald / National Geographic

Researchers and artists have reconstructed the face of a teenage girl who lived 12,000 years ago in Mexico, and it’s not the kind of face a person might typically associate with Native Americans.

The remains of the girl, nicknamed Naia (after the Greek term for a water nymph), were recovered from an underwater cave on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Naia is regarded as one of the earliest known residents of the Americas — but her skull has a shape associated with African or South Pacific populations rather than the typical Siberian look.

Despite that different look, researchers say Naia is genetically related to Native Americans who came to America later, from Siberia via the Beringia land bridge…

Read the entire article here.

Women in TV 2015: Tracee Ellis Ross in ‘black-ish’

Elle
2015-01-08

Seth Plattner, Culture Editor

This article appears in the February 2015 issue of ELLE magazine.

Clones and copywriters. Journalists and sex scientists. Cult survivors and carnival acts. These actors fearlessly take on roles that are all over the map. So what do they have in common? A gift for delivering complex female characters who always leave us wanting just one more episode, please!

There are on-screen moms—and then there are Prime-Time Matriarchs. Thanks to Tracee Ellis Ross, Rainbow “Bow” Johnson of ABC’s Black-ish may just be the next Clair Huxtable or Marge Simpson. She first played the den-mother type in a group of four friends living in Los Angeles on UPN/The CW’s Girlfriends. On Black-ish, Ross, 42, is now lending that warmth (and many a sideways glance) to a traditional family setup and an audience of nearly 8 million viewers per week.

Bow is an anesthesiologist who, with her ad-man husband, Dre (Anthony Anderson), is raising four precocious kids in upper-class suburban L.A.—and has to constantly deal with Dre’s concern that their family isn’t adequately in touch with all that it means to be black. In exploring that issue through one family, Black-ish makes race not a thing by making it a thing. “In 1950, the black experience was specific,” says Ross, a former model who is the daughter of Diana Ross and Robert Ellis Silberstein. “But in this day and age, it isn’t. Race, culture, family, socioeconomics, tradition—we’re pulling from all those places to pull the whole conversation forward.”

Say It Loud, I’m Coloured and I’m Proud

The Root
2013-10-08

Lindsay Johns

Not black, not African: One man says it’s not easy being “Coloured” in South Africa.

Editor’s note: The spelling of the ethnic term “Coloured,” used within the context of South African history and culture, reflects the writer’s preference.

(The Root) — I know what you’re probably thinking, and to be honest, I don’t blame you. You probably took one look at the title of this piece and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, what kind of misguided individual, brainwashed by self-hate into a feeble attempt at reclaiming the oppressor’s language, would write a thing like that?” Regressive. Jarring. Distasteful, even. A deliberately provocative throwback to the demeaning racial abuse of the Jim Crow era, painfully evocative of segregated water fountains, restaurants, the backs of buses and despicable “Colored Only” signage.

Let me swiftly disabuse you of any such notion. Yes, you read the title correctly. Coloured and proud is what I am. And what’s more, I didn’t put my hands up to make inverted comma signs around the word, as if asking for special dispensation for the benefit of the politically correct brigade, whose knee-jerk reaction is to see it as an intrinsically bad word, without wholly understanding its usage or history in a broader, global context. I’m certainly not trying to be needlessly provocative but instead am trying to make a serious point. Just hear me out before you rush to judge or, worse still, take offense.

Let me make it very clear. I know full well that in an American or a British context, the term “colored” (or “coloured”) is an outdated and undeniably pejorative epithet. On that we are in wholehearted agreement. So you’ll be relieved to hear that I’m not using it in that context; nor would I ever.

My family are Coloured from Cape Town in South Africa. And here’s the rub: In a South African context, “Coloured” is a wholly acceptable word. But, pray tell, I hear you ask, what exactly do I mean by “Coloured”? I can almost hear the confusion in your voice. That’s another word for “black,” right? Or do I mean “light-skinned”? Or does it mean “mixed-race”? In fact, it can mean all and none of the above…

Read the entire article here.

To heal world, show solidarity with Jews of color, too

J.: the Jewish news weekly of Northern California
San Francisco, California
2015-01-08

Kim Carter Martinez
Oakland, California

My name is Kim. I am black, I am Jewish, and my life matters. For the last few months, our country has seen a movement growing from a wave of protests against the police and vigilante law enforcement killings of unarmed black men.

As a country we have struggled with talking about the issues of police brutality and racism — individual racism, and the systemic and institutionalized racism that black and brown people in our country fall victim to on a daily basis.

In America, a black person is killed by the police or by vigilante law enforcement every 28 hours. #BlackLivesMatter, the movement that arose out of the outrage over these killings, describes itself as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise … [an affirmation of black folks’] contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”

Over and over again, I’ve heard people in the Jewish community talk about #BlackLivesMatter as if the violence and racism toward people of color is happening to an outside group we are not a part of. It’s happening to “them,” and we can only show solidarity to this group in certain ways because it is a group to which we do not belong…

Read the entire article here.