Mixed Race Studies

Review: Mat Johnson’s ‘Loving Day’ Takes a Satirical Slant on Racial Identities

The New York Times
2015-05-26

Dwight Garner, Senior writer and book critic

Mat Johnson’s new novel, “Loving Day,” takes its title from an unofficial holiday, one his narrator likens to “Mulatto Christmas.” It’s the observance of the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 decriminalized interracial marriage in America.

Mr. Johnson, whose previous novels include the excellent “Pym” (2011), is himself the product of such a marriage — his mother is black, his father not just white but Irish white — and the politics of his own racial mix is a topic he’s written about with discernment and a rumbling wit.

In The New York Times Magazine recently, he described learning from a DNA test that he is 26 percent African. “I wasn’t a mustefino,” he said, as if paging through a field guide. “(Who has even heard of a mustefino?) I surpassed octoroon status, too; I was a quadroon with a percentage point to spare.”

“Loving Day” is about being blackish in America, a subject about which Mr. Johnson has emerged as satirist, historian, spy, social media trickster (follow him on Twitter) and demon-fingered blues guitarist.

The novel is about a man in early middle age named Warren Duffy, who loosely resembles Mr. Johnson. That is, he’s a culturally sophisticated black man who can just about pass for white. He considers himself “black, with an asterisk,” adding, “The asterisk is my whole body.”…

Read the entire review here.

A Qualitative Examination of Multiracial Students’ Coping Responses to Experiences with Prejudice and Discrimination in College

Journal of College Student Development
Volume 56, Number 4, May 2015
pages 331-348
DOI: 10.1353/csd.2015.0041

Samuel D. Museus, Associate Professor of Higher Education
Morgridge College of Education
University of Denver

Susan A. Lambe Sariñana, Clinical Psychologist
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Tasha Kawamata Ryan

National data indicate that multiracial individuals comprise a substantial and growing proportion of the US population, but this community is often invisible in higher education research and discourse. This study aims to increase knowledge of mixed-race students in higher education by examining the ways in which they cope with experienced prejudice and discrimination in college. Findings indicate that multiracial college students cope with prejudice and discrimination by educating others about multiracial issues, utilizing support networks, embracing fluidity of multiracial identity, and avoiding confrontation with sources of prejudice and discrimination. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Crowe’s ‘whitewashing’ sparks criticism from advocates

BBC News
2015-06-07

Elena Boffetta, BBC Washington

Hollywood’s reliance on bankable – and often white – actors has led to another round of sharp criticism of filmmakers for “whitewashing” roles where race and ethnicity play a part.

In Aloha, Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Emma Stone, a American actress with blonde hair and green eyes, was cast as Allison Ng – a junior fighter pilot who was part-Chinese, part-Hawaiian and part-Swedish.

Soon after the release, there was an uproar of criticism from social media against Crowe’s casting choice.

Both Asians and non-Asians asked why they didn’t pick an Asian actress to play a character who is part-Asian.

One advocacy group called Aloha “a whitewashed film” that failed to portray the ethnical diversity of Hawaii.

The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) noted 60% of Hawaii’s population is Asian-American Pacific Islanders and 30% Caucasian, a fact not reflected in the film.

Crowe apologised on his website but said he based the Ng character on a real-life redheaded Hawaiian who felt compelled to constantly over-explain her unlikely ethnicity.

“I can understand what Crowe said about his intention that he based his character on someone that didn’t look Asian but identified with the culture but you could have casted someone who was part Hawaiian,” Guy Aoki, the founding president of MANAA, said.

“Whitewashing” casting differs from “colour-blind casting,” where a role is cast when factors of race or ethnicity are irrelevant to the character or plot…

…Hollywood has been accused of whitewashing Asians for decades…

Read the entire article here.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
2002

Richard Wormser, Series producer, Co-writer

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, “Jim Crow” came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

In June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the “Colored” car. He was a Creole of Color, a term used to refer to black persons in New Orleans who traced some of their ancestors to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana before it became part of the United States. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and held the Louisiana segregation statute…

Read the entire article here.

Caution and Skepticism About Univision-TheRoot Merger

All Digitocracy
2015-06-03

Jillian Báez, Assistant Professor of Media Culture
College of Staten Island, City University of New York

TV Network’s history of racism and colorism may not bode well for website formerly owned by The Washington Post Company

Two weeks ago Spanish-language television giant Univision announced its acquisition of TheRoot.com, one of the top African American news websites. Coverage of the merger was quite celebratory and echoed co-founder Henry Louis Gates’ statement that “This bold new partnership between Univision and TheRoot underscores the ties that have long bound people of color together throughout the Western Hemisphere and is a sign of even greater levels of communication, collaboration and exchange between these culturally vital groups of people.”

But while Gates is obviously optimistic about the venture, I’m a little skeptical. Univision has some issues that no one has talked about that might impact things. For one thing, it’s digital presence, Fusion, is struggling to get traffic to its own website. Secondly, the parent company’s history as a serial consolidator and nasty habit of broadcasting racist content makes me cautious about this venture…

Read the entire article here.

The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest

HarperCollins
2002
416 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 0002570653
Paperback ISBN: 0006531261

Aminatta Forna

An evening in 1974 when she was ten years old, Aminatta Forna opened the door to two men, members of the state secret police, come to take her father. A year later he was killed. The Devil that Danced on the Water is Aminatta’s search for the truth of her father’s fate, moving and terrifying in turns, always compelling, it traces events leading to the moment of his arrest. And what happened after he was taken away.

Aminatta Forna’s luminous memoir is a vivid and passionate account of an African childhood, of an idyll which becomes the stuff of nightmares. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain and the terrible consequences of her dissident father’s stand against tyranny.

Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity and great charisma, who quoted Alexander Pope: ‘Honour and shame from no condition arise: Act well your part for there the honour lies.’ As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. Already a political firebrand and a stylish dresser, he stole the heart of Aminatta’s mother to the dismay of her Scottish Presbyterian parents and returned home, one of those Wole Soyinka has called the ‘Renaissance generation.’ But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by the new ways of Western democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed Forna languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience and worse was to follow.

Aminatta’s search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation’s destiny begins among the country’s elite and took her to the heart of rebel territory. Determined to break the silence surrounding her father’s fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated the highest reaches of government and forced the nations politicians to confront their guilt.

The Devil that Danced on the Water is a book of pain and anger and sorrow, written with tremendous dignity and beautiful precision: a remarkable story of a father, a family, a country and a continent.

The beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself

BBC News
2015-06-04

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, Tokyo Correspondent

At first sight even I am a little confused by Ariana Miyamoto. She is tall and strikingly beautiful. But the first thing that pops in to my head when I meet the newly crowned Miss Universe Japan is that she doesn’t look very Japanese.

In just two years here I have clearly absorbed a lot of the local prejudices about what it means to be “Japanese”.

My confusion lasts only until Ariana opens her mouth. Suddenly everything about her shouts out that she is Japanese, from the soft lilting tone of her voice, to her delicate hand gestures and demure expression.

Well of course she is. Ariana was born in Japan and has lived here all her life. She knows little of her father’s home back in Arkansas in the United States. But to many Japanese, and I really do mean many, Ariana Miyamoto is not Japanese. Not fully anyway.

Ariana is what is known in Japan as a “hafu”, taken from the English word “half”. To me the word sounds derogatory. But when I ask her Ariana surprises me by defending the term, even embracing it…

…Many people here genuinely believe Japanese are unique, even genetically separate from the rest of us.

When my (Japanese) wife got pregnant, one of her friends congratulated her with the words: “It’s not easy for us Japanese to get pregnant with a foreigner”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Of course this myth is complete nonsense. Japanese are an ethnic hotch-potch, the result of different migrations over thousands of years, from the Korean peninsula, China and South East Asia. But the myth is strong, and that makes being different here hard…

Read the entire article here.

The Gains and Losses of Passing for White – Ernest Torregano

Creolegen
2015-05-31

Jari Honora, Founder and Consultant

In 1912, Ernest Joseph Torregano, a thirty-year old New Orleans native, was a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. For about three years, Torregano had worked the run from New Orleans to San Francisco. After each successful run, he would return home to his wife, Viola Perrett Torregano, and his only child, Gladys Marguerite, who had been born on 7 February 1904. Like so many other Southerners of color, Ernest Torregano found moving to California to be a golden opportunity to better himself. In his case however, it came at a drastic cost – the loss of his wife and child. He was able to use what was undoubtedly his God-given intelligence and aptitude, but to do so, he passed for white. In his early adult years, Ernest had worked as a singer and handyman for a traveling minstrel troupe. It was while with the troupe, that he met one of it’s pretty stars, a guitar-playing young lady named Viola Perrett. They were married and soon had their daughter Gladys, after which they quit the show so that he could sign-on with the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Concurrent with his employment on the railroad, Ernest completed his high school studies and through independent study courses and classes at the Saint Ignatius College of Law, he was able to pass the California bar examination on 7 April 1913. During all of this time, he maintained a foot in both worlds – telling friends and relatives in New Orleans that he was working as a warehouseman in San Francisco, even having relatives to visit, while all the way he kept up a separate white identity for the sake of his schooling and his intended profession. He regularly went back to New Orleans, spending time with his wife and daughter who lived in the home of his mother, Mrs. Louise Johnson Torregano…

Read the entire article here.

10 Afro-Puerto Ricans Everyone Should Know

La Respuesta: A magazine to (Re)Imagine Boricua Diaspora
2015-06-03

La Respuesta magazine is dedicated to both resurrecting lost history and highlighting marginalized communities within our “gran familia puertorriqueña”. Afrodescendientes boricuas is one such community, who are, at best – forgotten or ignored – and at worst – exoticized, feared, or even hated. So, with pride and determination, we humbly compiled a list of 10 “Black Boricuas” we think have impacted our history and identities.

Of course, there are many, many more. You can find some Afro-Boricuas in our list “20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know” (we did not reproduce them here so as to give room to name others). For the sake of space and capacity, we can only give you a taste – but let’s start a dialogue. Please, share with us the names of other Afro-Puerto Ricans you may know! ¡Qué Viva Puerto Rico Negro!…

Read the entire article here.

University of Salford installs new Chancellor, Professor Jackie Kay MBE

University of Salford
Salford, United Kingdom
Friday, 2015-05-01

The University celebrated the official installation of it’s sixth Chancellor, renowned poet Professor Jackie Kay MBE, at a grand ceremony in Peel Hall on Wednesday 29 April 2015.

Jackie Kay MBE was formally initiated in a ceremony that saw celebrated Accrington writer Jeanette Winterson and Salford City Mayor Ian Stewart sing the praises of the renowned Scottish poet who will now head up the university.

The role of Chancellor will see distinguished, award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays act as the ceremonial head of the institution and play an important part in representing the University of Salford and supporting the work of students and the wider community.

In addition to her role as Chancellor, Jackie will also take up the position of University ‘Writer in Residence.’ This role involves contributing major commissions to enhance learning and teaching, and broaden the students’ experience at the University…

…Jackie has published five collections of poetry for adults and several for children. Jackie’s first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and a commendation from the Forward Poetry Prize judges.

Her other awards include the Guardian First Book Award Fiction Prize for her celebrated first novel Trumpet and the Somerset Maugham Award for Other Lovers.

She also writes extensively for the stage and screen. Her play Twice Over was the first by a Black writer to be produced by Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group in 1988. Her plays have been performed at The Royal Exchange and more recently she wrote Manchester Lines for the Library Theatre.

Her drama The Lamplighter looks in depth at the Atlantic slave trade and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and published by Bloodaxe.

Jackie has lived in Manchester for over 15 years and is Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University. Jackie is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle and her 2010 book Red Dust Road is currently being made into a play for television…

Read the entire article here.