Mixed Race Studies

Brazilian soap operas slowly cast black middle class

Al Jazeera America
2015-04-11

Matt Sandy

Morgann Jezequel

Actor Sílvio Guindane poses on the set of the telenovela Vitória at Record studios, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October, 2014. Rafael Fabres / Getty Images Assignment for Al Jazeera America

Black actors move beyond roles as maids, thieves and drug dealers, but insiders say more diverse film/TV writers needed

RIO DE JANEIRO – Dressed in a fitted white designer shirt, Sílvio Guindane stood beneath a chandelier on a grand wrought iron staircase and smiled confidently. Below, a set of ornate drinking glasses sat next to a collection of spirit bottles. Above, framed monochrome prints and color landscapes adorned the walls.

It is an archetypal image of upper middle class Brazil. And for good reason as this is the set of “Vitória,” one of the country’s ubiquitous novelas, the phenomenally popular soap operas that for more than 50 years have thrived on the country’s major television networks — often by portraying lavish lifestyles beyond the means of most viewers.

There is just one thing that is unusual: Guindane, 31, who plays a successful engineer, is black…

Read the entire article here.

Was pro baseball’s first African-American player passing for white?

Vox
2015-04-11

Jenée Desmond-Harris

William Edward White on the 1879 Brown baseball team. White is in the second row, seated and wearing a hat. (Source: Brown University Archives via Slate)

A story about professional baseball’s little-known first black player (well, possible first black player) raises as many questions about racial identity as it does about the official list of African-American sports pioneers.

In a fascinating February 2014 piece for Slate, Peter Morris and Stefan Fatsis explain that William Edward White, who played one game for the National League’s Providence Grays in 1879, publicly identified as white but was actually born to a white Georgia man and an enslaved biracial woman.

William Edward White was born in 1860 to a Georgia businessman and one of his slaves, who herself was of mixed race. That made White, legally, black and a slave. But his death certificate and other information indicate that White spent his adult life passing as a white man. Since the 1879 game was unearthed a decade ago, questions about White’s race have clouded his legacy.

The laws in most states at the time would have categorized someone like White — who had one black-identified parent and roughly one-quarter African ancestry — black. But he was identified as “white” on his death certificate and several census forms, and according to Slate’s reporting, it’s unlikely that even his wife knew he was the child of a mixed-race mother.

So should he be considered the first African-American baseball player? Should we start celebrating him among other black trailblazers every February, right along with Jackie Robinson?…

Read the entire article here.

A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks

The New York Times
2015-04-11

The Editorial Board

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.

Republican lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.

It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it…

Read the entire article here.

Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans

University Press of Florida
2006-05-30
304 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2942-9

Nicole von Germeten, Associate Professor of History
Oregon State University

Celebrating the African contribution to Mexican culture, this book shows how religious brotherhoods in New Spain both preserved a distinctive African identity and helped facilitate Afro-Mexican integration into colonial society. Called confraternities, these groups provided social connections, charity, and status for Africans and their descendants for over two centuries.

Often organized by African women and dedicated to popular European and African saints, the confraternities enjoyed prestige in the Baroque religious milieu of 17th-century New Spain. One group, founded by Africans called Zapes, preserved their ethnic identity for decades even after they were enslaved and brought to the Americas. Despite ongoing legal divisions and racial hierarchies, by the end of the colonial era many descendants from African slaves had achieved a degree of status that enabled them to move up the social ladder in Hispanic society. Von Germeten reveals details of the organization and practices of more than 60 Afro-Mexican brotherhoods and examines changes in the social, family, and religious lives of their members. She presents the stories of individual Africans and their descendants—including many African women and the famous Baroque artist Juan Correa—almost entirely from evidence they themselves generated. Moving the historical focus away from negative stereotypes that have persisted for almost 500 years, this study is the first in English to deal with Afro-Mexican religious organizations.

Harlem and After: African American Literature 1925-present (EAS3241)

University of Exeter
Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom
2015-02-08

Taking as its point of departure the landmark special issue of Survey Graphic that announced the arrival on the artistic scene of the “New Negro” (1925), this module provides a historical survey of African American writing, 1925 to present. Through close readings of works by both canonical and emerging writers, it encourages students to situate these texts within their historical, social, political and literary contexts. Emphasising key literary and political movements and moments (the Harlem Renaissance; the Civil Rights Movement; Black Power; Hurricane Katrina) and recurring themes and motifs (lynching and racial violence; racial passing and mixed race subjectivity; the legacies of the Great Migration; the significance of music in African American culture; minstrelsy and the commodification of blackness), it invites students to consider the range and diversity of African American literature (poetry; short stories; essays; fiction; graphic novel) published from 1925 to today.

For more information, click here.

“Hafu” Filmmaker Spotlights Bicultural Japan

Nippon.com: Your Doorway to Japan
2013-12-27

Nishikura Megumi

The recent film Hafu documents the lives of five bicultural Japanese. Nippon.com spoke to one of the film’s two directors, Nishikura Megumi, to learn more about the film and the motivation behind it.

The number of Japanese citizens marrying foreign nationals has been increasing at a rapid pace, and every year more than 20,000 children are born in Japan to such international couples. These binational kids have been in the media spotlight lately, with many celebrities from such backgrounds appearing on television. But the image conveyed on the screen does not fully capture the reality.

Unlike many of these TV celebrities, who tend to be children of a Caucasian parent, around three-fourths of all international marriages in Japan involve a partner from another Asian country, most notably China, South Korea, and the Philippines (according to 2007 data from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare). So many of the children of these marriages do not superficially resemble what most people view as a binational—or hafu, as they are called in Japanese (from the English word “half”—as in “half-Japanese”).

The recently released film Hafu, co-produced by filmmaker Nishikura Megumi, follows the lives of five hafu raised in a bicultural environment. Nippon.com met up with Nishikura to learn more about the film and her own experiences as a bicultural person…

Read the entire interview here.

Natasha Trethewey Reactions

The Arc of the Universe Bends Towards Justice
The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio
2015-04-02

Caitlin Ziegert Mccombs

Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer prize winner and past Poet Laureate of the United States, came to visit and read some of her poetry for an audience much too large for Severance 09. After listening to some of her works read aloud, it seems she seamlessly weaves the topics of history, race, and personal narratives in the style of free verse. Before beginning each poem, Trethewey would provide some background of their origins. The first few poems she read were about her parents, in which she lingers on the issue of anti-miscegenation laws during the 1900’s as her mother and father were an interracial couple (her mother was African American and her father, white). This was a nice precursor to her readings of her new poetry collection, Thrall. Trethewey explained that ‘thrall’ was a name for someone born into servitude, which is quite fitting for a collection investigating the oppression of people of color and racial tensions over the past few hundred years. In her poem, Taxonomy, she deconstructs 18th century Casta paintings from colonial Mexico. She describes how race at this time was seen as an equation. There are whites and Mexicans, but more complexly: a white and an Amerindian mix equals a Mestizo, a Mestizo and an Amerindian mix equals a Cholo, a white and a Spaniard/African mix equals a Mulato, and so forth. These castas, or race/breed/lineage constructions dictated the lives of those so labeled. Trethewey describes the “weight of blood” as getting “heavier every year”, and the paintings of castas as “a last brush stroke [that] fixed him in his place”…

Read the entire article here.

Asian, American, Woman, Philosopher

The Stone
The New York Times
2015-04-06

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Emily S. Lee, Associate Professor of Philosophy
California State University, Fullerton

This is the ninth in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Emily S. Lee, an associate professor of philosophy at the California State University, Fullerton. She is the editor of “Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: You work at the intersection of race and phenomenology (the investigation of direct structures of experience). What got you interested in this area?

Emily S. Lee: Well, I’ve always been interested in how people can live in close proximity, share experiences, even within a family and yet draw very different conclusions from the experience. So when I began reading the French philosopher M. Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception,” I really appreciated his care and attention to how this phenomenon can occur. Because an experience is not directly drawn from the empirical circumstances; it is also structured by the accumulated history and aspirations of each of the subjects undergoing the experience, Merleau-Ponty’s work helps to systematically understand how one can share an experience, and yet still take away different conclusions.

It was with luck that while I was reading Merleau-Ponty’s book, I was also reading the critical race theorist Patricia Williams’s book, “The Alchemy of Race and Rights.” I found some of her descriptions and analysis demonstrating the chasms of understanding among different “races” incredibly enlightening. I thought an explanation for many of the racial phenomena that Williams described in terms of the inexplicable dearth of understanding among various racialized subjects could be facilitated with the phenomenological framework…

Read the entire article here.

Mashpee Musician Produces Documentary About Native, African Music

CapeNews.net
Falmouth, Massachusetts
2015-01-19

Sam Houghton

Morgan J. Peters, a Mashpee troubadour in Afro-Native-American-inspired music, with his band the Groovalottos, is on his way to producing a full-length album as well as a documentary. The “mini-film” will explore the combination of black and Native American music and how their blend gave rise to traditional and contemporary blues and funk.

The film, Mr. Peters said, will be the first of its kind. While there have been several films about folk music, mostly Euro-American, he said none have been produced exploring the “Black Indian” music experience.

Mr. Peters said that traditional Native American music has influenced such musicians as James Brown as well as contemporary and traditional blues music…

Read the entire article here.

Blaxicans (Black Mexicans) of California

African American – Latino World
2015-04-07

Bill Smith

This post is not about the black Mexicans who were historically born and raised in Mexico, but those born and raised in Los Angeles, California’s metropolitan area to Mexican and African-American parents.

According to the University of Southern California researcher Walter Thompson-Hernández, 80% of the Latinos in Los Angeles are of Mexican ancestry and either live in adjoining communities to African Americans or live alongside African Americans. Thus, there are more Blaxicans in the Los Angeles area than any other area…

Read the entire article here.