Mixed Race Studies

The Remix: Dr. Yaba Blay on Colorism, Kendrick Lamar & Trevor Noah

The Remix with Dr. James Peterson
WHYY 90.9 FM
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2015-04-01

James Braxton Peterson, Host and Associate professor of English
Lehigh University, Lehigh, Pennsylvania

Comedy Central has named South African comedian Trevor Noah to helm “The Daily Show” when John Stewart departs later this year. It took slightly less than 24 hours for Noah to come under attack for remarks he made on Twitter that some perceived as anti-semitic and misogynistic. We can’t predict how Noah will weather the controversy, but Dr. James Peterson says he’s not surprised, because comics seem to consistently run into trouble for offensive remarks on Twitter.

“The Remix” is more interested in the fact that Comedy Central has appointed two men of color to lead their two most popular time slots (Larry Wilmore’s “The Nightly Show” replaced “The Colbert Report“) and the ways that might affect the nation’s daily consumption of news and news satire.

Peterson welcomes scholar, teacher and activist Dr. Yaba Blay to “The Remix” to discuss colorism, segregation within the African-American community, and cultural expressions of whiteness. The two also take a look at Blay’s book, “(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race,” and her initiation into the Yoruba religion.

After a brief hiatus, “Props” is back, and this time, Kendrick Lamar gets some praise for taking risks on his new album “To Pimp a Butterfly.”

Listen to the episode here.

How I Learned to Stop Worshipping Whiteness While Growing Up Biracial

For Harriet
2015-04-08

Joleen Brantle

I haven’t always been very racially aware. When I was a child Pokémon cards, cartoons, and school were of vastly greater importance to me. I was raised in a very diverse city with a strong Latino presence. I had friends of every race. Why would one’s skin color matter? It certainly didn’t to me.

That naivety ended abruptly in 5th grade. Two significant factors came to a head. I began attending an all-white conservative Church, and my African-American father died; which catalyzed my process of rejecting him to appease the pain he had caused me, the effects of which I’m still working to undo.

Until I started attending this Church, I really hadn’t been in many, if any, racially segregated spheres. So it was a bit of a culture shock when I met people who referred to me as a “little colored girl” and told me interracial marriage, which I am proudly the product of, is a sin. But I loved these white people! As a child I always sought to please and generally took everything an adult said as the infallible truth (that actually began changing around this time). These people looked just like my mother and were very kind to me with the exception of the occasional offhand, casually racist, remark. What was I supposed to think?…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Identity, which do you identify with?

The Spartan Daily: Serving San Jose State since 1934
San Jose, California
2015-04-09

Andrea Sandoval

Identity is a complicated matter; everyone has one, but rarely are people aware of how they get one. The boundaries, symbols and language that make identity stand out are often unclear.

What qualities make one the person they are?

Skin color, hair texture and eye shape are all obvious characteristics when identity comes into play.

Being biracial, or being a part of two racial groups, can raise questions as to which ethnic group to identify with. Being multiracial may be even harder, but race remains a commonly used term for categorization.

According to psychologist Bryan Gros, there is no proof that multiracial students have more issues such as depression or anxiety then the general public.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that multiracial people together with blacks, Hispanics and Asians, will represent a majority of the U.S. population by mid-century. Right now, about 8 percent of the population is multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

A real-life Lucious Lyon: The former slave who built a Beale Street “Empire” and transformed Memphis

Salon
2015-04-04

Preston Lauterbach

Bob Church (Credit: University of Memphis Special Collections)

Memphis — and music as we know it — wouldn’t be the same without Robert Church’s legacy of vice, virtue and power

Depending on which critic or fan you ask, Fox TV’s “Empire” is somewhere between Shakespeare’s drama “King Lear” and Norman Lear’s campy “Good Times.” Less apparent to the show’s legions of viewers is how the story of Lucious Lyon and Empire Entertainment echoes the original black empire, a real-life dynasty of vice, virtue, and power, built in the heart of the old Confederacy just after the Civil War by a former slave who became monarch, Robert Church.

Like Lucious Lyon, who must plan for the future of his empire after being diagnosed with a crippling, often fatal, ailment, Bob Church had plenty of reasons to consider his legacy. It wasn’t so much that a specific death sentence loomed over Church—he just happened to find himself in life threatening situations, often. By his early 30s, Church had survived two gunshot wounds to his head, a steamboat disaster, a Civil War naval battle that he escaped by swimming the Mississippi River and an assassination attempt that backfired when a shotgun aimed at him exploded toward the shooter. Had Bob Church not been the combination of tough and lucky that saved him in these fateful scrapes, legendary Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, might be just another strip of concrete. Instead, it gained such an extraordinary reputation that Memphis entertainer Rufus Thomas would crack, “If you could be black on Beale Street one Saturday night, you’d never want to be white no more.”

Beale Street’s birth as an alternate universe for black America, a center of political clout and cultural fertility that changed America, all began with Church…

…Understanding the uncertainty of the vice-lord life in a hell-roaring river town, Church knew he must cultivate an heir. His eldest son Thomas lived in New York, passing for white, some have said. Thomas wouldn’t do. Eldest daughter Mary had become a steadfast leader in her own right, the first black woman on Washington, D.C.’s board of education and a founder of the NAACP. She could not be compromised. As with Lucious Lyon’s three sons, there was some competition among the Church children—they all would have liked to keep his money—but unlike “Empire’s” twisted succession plot, old man Church had no doubt who to choose: his youngest son, Robert Jr…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Love is coming to Massachusetts and New York in April

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval
2015-04-07

Photo by Jeff Lorch

“What Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni brings to the table is a moving and insightful microscope to our belief that there is such a thing as race and how the assignment of identity plays out in destructive ways that impact each and every one of us. This is a critical component that often gets missed in our attempts to dismantle this social construct.” —Carol Ross, Media and Climate Communications Specialist for Amherst, Massachusetts.

For more information, click here.

Michelle Obama: A Life

Knopf
2015-04-07
432 pages
6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-95882-2

Peter Slevin, Associate Professor of Journalism
Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

An inspiring story, richly detailed and written with élan, here is the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama, a woman of achievement and purpose—and the most unlikely first lady in modern American history. With disciplined reporting and a storyteller’s eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago’s largely segregated South Side.

The journey winds from the intricacies of her upbringing as the highly focused daughter of a gregarious city water-plant worker afflicted with multiple sclerosis to the tribulations she faces at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s. And then returning to Chicago, where she works in an elite law firm and meets a law student from Hawaii named Barack Obama. Unsatisfied by corporate law, Michelle embarks on a search for meaningful work that takes her back to the community of her South Side youth, even as she struggles to find balance as a mother and a professional—while married to a man who wants to be president.

Slevin deftly explores the drama of Barack’s historic campaigns and the harsh glare faced by Michelle in a role both relentlessly public and not entirely of her choosing. He offers a fresh and compelling view of the White House years when Michelle Obama casts herself as mentor, teacher, champion of nutrition, supporter of military families, and fervent opponent of inequality.

Black and Yellow: Blasian Narratives

Psychology Today
2015-04-07

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Ed.D.

Crossing racial borders through storytelling

Saturday night I went to an event called, Black and Yellow: Blasian Narratives, featuring students from Stanford joining a group from Morehouse and Spelman, two historically black colleges. The students presented both monologues and interactive storytelling. Their diversity was stunning, Asian being Korean, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Japanese, and Vietnamese, with diverse forms of Black as well, from the Caribbean to Ghana. The purpose of the project by Canon Empire, a Cambodian American filmmaker and storyteller, is to unite Asian and Black communities through “Blasian” narratives and intimate and critical dialogues about race. He seeks to illuminate the reality that two communities historically socialized to see each other as polarized opposites and as competition and comparisons actually have much in common.

The presentations showed the complexity of lives that cross borders and enter liminal and marginal spaces, where creativity can flourish. Each person, in their own unique way, expressed their identities-in-flux, as if they were re-creating it right there on stage. As I watched them perform I was reminded of the wisdom of the identity scholar Erikson, who reminded us that: “Identity consciousness is overcome by a sense of identity won in action.”…

Read the entire article here.

How one man has made a mark on history in northeast N.C.

The Outer Banks Voice
2015-04-04

Ed Beckley

Marvin T. Jones has a passion for local heritage and is responsible for a half dozen historical markers in the area.

Our region’s rich history is brought to the fore each time someone who passes a historical marker on the side of the road, stops, reads and ponders. But who dreams up these visual reminders of our times gone by and makes them appear before our eyes?

They’re people such as Marvin T. Jones, who grew up in rural Hertford County, “taking much notice of them (as a small boy) and pleased when my first school, C.S. Brown, received one in the 1980’s.”

Jones has a passion for local heritage and is responsible for a half dozen historical markers in the area, including The Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, the Algonquian Village of Dasemunkepeuc in Dare County and four others inland.

The North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program reports more than 1,400 markers in place in the state since 1936. Twenty-five are in Dare County. They are not only a tribute to the places and patriots of the past, but to the people who work to place them for posterity. Jones is squarely in that category…

…He has a rich diverse racial background, as is the case of so many others in that area. It was his mother’s mention of her ancestor, a Chowanoke Native-American leader, which impelled him to research the area’s history all the way back to the first English colonists in 1584. Jones is a mix of mostly Chowanoke, Tuscarora, European and African descent, with roots as far away as India…

Read the entire article here.

Does the “White Privilege” Umbrella cover Black and Biracial Children? (Survey included)

Lisa W. Rosenberg: Writings on Body Image and Identity
2015-04-03

Lisa W. Rosenberg

This is the first post I have written soliciting responses to a survey—so I’m stating it up front: At the end of this post is an actual, honest-to-goodness survey for those who are interested and who fit the demographics* I’m looking for.

So, what is this about “White Privilege?” Sounds kind of political, kind of threatening, no?

The first time I heard the term “White Privilege,” I was in my late twenties and teaching at a very exclusive, private girls’ school on the Upper East Side of New York. Peggy McIntosh, PhD., the feminist, antiracism activist and associate director of the Wellesley College Women’s Project, had been brought in by the Parents’ Diversity Awareness Committee of said school. McIntosh, who is white, was there to discuss her famous paper, White Privilege, Unpacking the Invisible Backpack, as part of a workshop for staff, parents and students about the ways in which whites unwittingly benefit from racism on a daily basis…

Read the entire article here.

LAURA KINA Blue Hawai’i

The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture
Brooklyn, New York
2015-04-02

Jonathan Goodman

HAROLD B. LEMMERMAN GALLERY, NEW JERSEY CITY UNIVERSITY JANUARY 27 – MARCH 3, 2015

As an Asian-American painter of mixed background, Laura Kina creates work that is as culturally relevant as it is emotionally resonant. Her father, who is of Japanese descent, grew up in Hawai’i, where he worked on sugarcane plantations before moving to the American mainland to become a doctor. In the compelling paintings shown in Blue Hawai’i, Kina addresses the persistence of Japanese culture among the sugarcane workers, many of whom, like the artist’s father, had family ties to the Japanese island Okinawa. In 2009, Kina and her father traveled to his plantation community in Hawai’i to gain a sense of his past; then, in 2012, Kina and her father traveled to Okinawa itself, again to research the immigration of poor Japanese who came to Hawai’i to harvest cane. The paintings on view in Blue Hawai’i allude to her discoveries, which entail both the remnants of Japanese habits among the Hawaiian workers—the word “blue” in the title of the show refers to the blue kimonos refashioned for plantation work—and the gradual, often troubled and troubling acculturation process. The exhibition consequently bridges inevitable feelings of displacement and loss with the desire to document Kina’s father’s past…

Read the entire review here.