Mixed Race Studies

Is it ’cause I’m not black?

moniquerants: Education Lover. Discoverer of Healthy Eating. Headphone Raver. Opinionated Ranter.
2015-07-06

Monique Bell

Years of mistaken identity and assumed whiteness have understandably left me with a miniature chip on my shoulder, and what better way to deal with that chip than writing to the world about it? In case you were not aware I am mixed race. Yes, half and half, not a quarter, not a distant relative, not ‘a bit of a tan’, not ‘maybe Mediterranean’, not white, not black, but actually mixed race. My mother was born in the United Kingdom and is English, my father was born in the United Kingdom too but my grandmother on my dad’s side traveled over to the UK with my great-grandmother- who we called Mama – from Trinidad to the UK, and prior to that Mama had migrated from Grenada to Trinidad. So I am half Caribbean and half English.

Ethnic identity shapes part of one’s human identity as well as the influence of one’s primary and secondary socialisation. Human identity is also shaped by how you are perceived by others; if everyone told me I was a tomato, I’d likely start believing I was indeed a giant walking talking tomato, a bit like the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson. My experience as a child was quite different to that of my peers. I grew up in an affluent predominantly White town in the Home Counties but I grew up in a far from nuclear family. Even though I regularly spent time with my dad, we were one of a few single-parent families in the town and my mum had to receive state support too. My older sister and I are different colours; in case you weren’t aware mixed race people come in a range of beautiful colours! And yes, some of us look white, some of us look black, caramel, toffee, vanilla and everything in between. This blew the shit off the heads of people in my town and even now one of the first assumptions is that we’re half sisters. Ironically, I am actually a closer skin colour to my half brother and sister who are my dads other children…

Read the entire article here.

When I Was White

The Chronicle Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2015-07-06

Sarah Valentine, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Sarah Valentine as a girl, with her two brothers (Source: Family photo)

Rachel Dolezal’s recent unmasking as a white woman living as black sparked a debate about the legitimacy of “transracial” experience. I cannot speak for Dolezal or anyone else, but I can state for a fact that racial transition is a valid experience, because I have gone through it.

While most people would look at this photo and see a black girl, two white boys, and a very surprised cat, they would be wrong. The girl in the photo is white, just like her brothers. I was raised in a white family from birth and taught to identify as white. For most of my life, I didn’t know that my biological father was black. Whenever I asked as a child about my darker skin, my mother corrected me, saying it was not dark but “olive.” When others asked if I was adopted, my mother ignored them. Eventually everyone, including me, stopped asking.

When, as an adult, I learned the truth of my paternity, I began the difficult process of changing my identity from white to black. The difficulty did not lie in an unwillingness to give up my whiteness. On the contrary, the revelation of my paternity was a relief: It confirmed that I was different from my parents and siblings, something I had felt deeply all my life.

The dilemma I faced was this: If I am mixed race and black, what do I do with the white sense of self I lived with for 27 years, and how does one become black? Is that even possible? Now, you may say that the rest of the world already saw me as black and all I had to do was catch up. True. But “catching up” meant that I had to blow the lid off the Pandora’s box of everything I thought I knew about myself and about race in America…

Read the entire article here.

The Caramel Variations

Ballet Review
Spring 2012
pages 18-30

Ian Spencer Bell

I am interested in black and mixed-race dancers, ballerinas in particular, because I see almost none in the major classical companies. Like me, the gay boy who didn’t want to be Prince Siegfied but Odette, they too are “other.” Now, when I am teaching “swan arms” to my students I think of Darci Kistler and Julie Kent. I wish an image of a black ballerina doing swan arms came to mind.

I was fourteen when I met Natalie Wright. She was walking toward me, or dancing, it was hard to tell which. We were in front of Studio One, on the fifth floor of Lincoln Center’s Rose Building, at New York City Ballet’s School of American Ballet. Her arms and legs were so long that when she walked her whole body seemed to make a swinging motion, like a chandelier earring, sparkling, dangling, golden. I fell in love with her immediately. She was everything I wanted to be: an exaggeratedly proportioned ballerina. She was exotic, too–caramel-colored, blond-streaked hair, eyes darker than the chocolate she ate every afternoon.

I’m not sure I knew she was black, or half black, rather. She was one of four black girls I befriended during my three summers at SAB. I recall only five black girls and four black boys during those months. I don’t know why I was drawn to the black girls, other than maybe because my mother, whom everyone in our small Southern town thought was a “communist,” made friends with the few black ladies who worked in our church, loved our nanny like a best friend, and picked up the old black guys in front of the Safeway and drove them wherever they needed to go. Maybe it was because I was a gay boy who, like the black girls, felt more than slightly out-of-place in that straight, white world.

Natalie wasn’t black like anyone I’d ever known. She didn’t wear her hair in tight braids with pink plastic poodle barrettes, like my friend Andrea. She didn’t shout and curse and slap my face and tell me she deserved to be the lead in the school musical, the way Porscha had. And she wasn’t like those timid, overly polite girls who hid in their mother’s skirt during one of those all-churches picnics, where we’d see the Baptists once a year.

At SAB, Natalie didn’t call people out like Nikkia had: “Oh, hell no. Someone tell that white girl to stop staring at me.” And she did not have a name like Aesha. She dressed like the ninety-nine other girls there: short denim shorts, Gap Ts, Keds, Lipsmackers lip gloss, hair tightly slicked back in a bun. In ballet class she was the same, too: black leotard, European pink tights. She looked like another girl I had fallen in love with, Riolama Lorenzo. I thought maybe Natalie was Latina, like Rio. They were both from Miami.

It was Natalie’s third summer at SAB in 1993 when we met. Balanchine’s muse, Suzanne Farrell, had recommended her for a scholarship and had taken her into the school a year early. Natalie had the highest extensions of anyone at SAB, except maybe Maria Kowroski. She could extend her leg to the front, and it would nearly touch her nose. To the side it tickled her ear. And when she lifted her leg to the back in arabesque, teachers occasionally looked concerned or told her to bring her leg down…

…I told Natalie I’d call her back. I was thinking of Misty Copeland, the only black female soloist in American Ballet Theatre. Misty is black like Natalie is black: caramel or mocha or dark cream, depending on the makeup and lighting. I see her as I saw Natalie: an extraordinarily attractive dancer with legs and feet so perfectly pretty for ballet that her racial ambiguity is secondary to her identity as a dancer. Misty is one of two black women in the company and one of three black women to have ever been a soloist in ABT. There has never been a black female principal dancer in ABT.

The first time I saw Misty dance was in ABT’s Studio Company. I watched her perform the wedding pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty. Princess Aurora is one of the big three–along with the leads in Swan Lake and The Nutcracker–for a classical ballerina, designed to show off your technique and style. Copeland was exquisite. She was in control of the slightest details: the tilt of her head, the shape of her hands, the height of her legs. But in the decade she has danced for ABT, I have rarely seen her perform these classical roles. I see her onstage in contemporary work mostly. I wondered if it had anything to do with the color of her skin.

I met Misty in the lounge at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, uptown near Lincoln Center. She had just come from a late afternoon rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera House. She strolled in wearing black leggings and tall shoes and a chain necklace and hoop earrings. She was glamorous, sexy too, ready to work an MTV red carpet. But her soft manner and thoughtful gaze dispelled any notions of her as a strident starlet.

Up close, Misty has all the attributes of a classical ballerina: delicate hands, gentle countenance, warm and sweet and friendly. When she sat, she sat like Giselle on that little wooden bench in the first act of that “white ballet,” so called because of all those long white girls in long white tutus.

I had arrived early and was having tea and thinking about the opening of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella, Passing. Irene Redfield is seated at a table in a fancy Chicago hotel restaurant observing her color rise as a woman stares at her. Irene wonders, “Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?”

Thinking of Misty, I was wondering if passing for white or Latina has helped the twenty-eight-year-old achieve success in our “national ballet company.” I asked her if she had ever read the Larsen book. She said she hadn’t. She had been reading Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, by Tom Burell.

Bell: How do you identify yourself?

Copeland: My mom told me I was black. I filled out paperwork at school that said I was black. Those were the boxes I checked. Misty laughed. She laughs a lot. But she’s serious when discussing race. Both of Misty’s parents were mixed race. Sylvia DelaCerna, Misty’s mother, was Italian and black, adopted and brought up by a black woman and her black husband in Kansas City, Missouri. DelaCerna’s adoptive mother worked for child services. DelaCerna grew up to be a professional cheerleader for the Kansas City Chiefs. Misty’s father split for Chicago when Misty was a child and left her mom with six kids.

Copeland: My mother was my role model. Growing up I felt close to Mariah Carey because she is a mixed-race woman. I’d dance to Mariah – lyrical, flowy movements – and I’d choreograph on friends.

Misty’s mother choreographed on her for talent shows. But Misty didn’t pursue dance training until she was thirteen. They were living in California, and at DelaCerna’s urging, Misty auditioned for the San Pedro Middle School drill team. Misty choreographed a routine to George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.” She became the team captain: “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to be captain.”…

Read the entire article here or here.

5 black Chicagoans who passed for white

The Chicago Sun-Times
2015-06-16

Kim Janssen, Staff Reporter

A baseball player who broke baseball’s color line decades before Jackie Robinson was born.

A pioneering politician who has a West Side school named after him.

An Emmy-winning “blonde bombshell.”

A poet at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.

And a brilliant novelist who wrote a noted novel on “passing.”

Unlike Rachel Dolezal — the white Spokane, Washington, NAACP head who has become the U.S.’s biggest viral news story after she was exposed for lying about her past to pose as a black woman — all five of these sometime Chicagoans were black. But just like Dolezal, they spent at least part of their lives pretending to be something they weren’t, historians now suspect.

Baseball player William Edward White, politician Oscar DePriest, bandleader Ina Ray Hutton, poet Jean Toomer and writer Nella Larsen all at times passed as white, it’s believed.

It’s part of the history that makes Dolezal’s masquerade so fascinating to many Americans: for centuries, African-Americans were far more likely to attempt to pass as white than the reverse. Writing in “Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life” in 1927, one of Dolezal’s predecessors at the NAACP, William Pickens, vividly described how both the violent threat of racism and the lure of white privilege exacted a powerful pull toward passing for black Americans who were able:

“If passing for white will get a fellow better accommodations on the train, better seats in the theatre, immunity from insults in public places, and may even save his life from a mob, only idiots would fail to seize the advantage of passing, at least occasionally if not permanently.”

Passing, which had mostly died out by the latter part of the 20th century, also came with a series of heavy costs: families broken by one relative’s denial of their ties to another; the constant fear of exposure; and the psychological damage of denying one’s true identity. But for these five Chicagoans, it may have been a compromise they felt forced to make…

Read the entire article here.

Dolezal, Jenner raise fundamental questions about identity

The Boston Globe
2015-06-16

Farrah Stockman, Globe Staff

Finally, Rachel Dolezal — the self-identified black daughter of two Caucasian parents — has spoken. And finally, she was asked a question I’ve been wondering for days: When did it start?

“At a very young age,” she replied. “About 5 years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon.”

It’s impossible not to be reminded of how Bruce — now Caitlyn — Jenner answered a similar question: When did you know? Jenner talked about sneaking into her mother’s closet as an 8-year-old boy to dress up in her clothes.

Comparisons between Jenner, who recently appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair as a woman, and Dolezal, who just resigned as a local leader of the NAACP after her parents outed her as white, have spawned a cottage industry of jokes and memes.

But I have yet to read a real answer to the underlying challenge these two people pose to identity in America today: If we accept that gender is fluid — a reflection of some inexplicable spiritual thing inside of us — why not race? Why do we police the boundaries of blackness more rigorously than we police womanhood?

The general consensus seems to be that as much as we want to do away with racial differences and as deeply as we believe in race as a social construct, we can’t accept Dolezal as a black woman trapped in a spray-tanned blonde’s body…

Read the entire article here.