Mixed Race Studies

The story of John Roland Redd a.k.a. Korla Pandit is unlike any I’ve encountered in popular culture. He presented an abstracted yet alluring version of India without even a semblance of authenticity. Korla represented the Far East as viewed through the eyes of the West. That speech comparing rubies to wisdom, for instance, comes not from anything in the Hindu religion but is a paraphrase of Proverbs 8:11 from the Old Testament. Even more obviously, the electric organ is not remotely Indian in nature. From what I can determine, the instrument was largely developed and popularized in the United States. However, the eerie and unearthly tones Pandit/Redd was able to conjure from it seemed to transport listeners to an exotic world of mystery, some indefinable place far away. That was the real magic behind what he did.

Joe Blevins, “The Greatest Pretender: Korla Pandit, music’s most magnificent fraud,” Dead 2 Rights: A Folksy Down-Home Blog, May 19, 2013. http://d2rights.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-greatest-pretender-korla-pandit.html.

Multiethnic Adults Grapple With Questions of Identity

KQED News
San Francisco, California
2015-10-14

Adizah Eghan

In his 1964 Nobel Prize lecture, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described humanity as a “world house,” filled with family of all backgrounds who must somehow learn to live with each other.

Within the borders of our countries, cities and states, our own homes are increasingly becoming multi-ethnic, multiracial microcosms of the greater world house to which King refers.

Today, nearly one in six newlyweds marries across racial or ethnic lines. If we continue in this direction, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that the multiracial population will triple by 2060…

On the most recent episode of So Well Spoken, we dove into the complex world of multiethnic families, interracial marriages and cross-cultural adoptions. How do families handle racial issues and celebrate who they are?

Read the entire article here. Listen to the episode (00:51:26) here.

Brown campus newspaper issues apology after racist columns

The Associated Press
2015-10-07

Amy Anthony

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Brown University campus newspaper apologized Wednesday after publishing what it says were two “deeply hurtful” and racist columns.

The Brown Daily Herald’s editorial board published an editor’s note saying it regretted the hurt caused by the two opinion columns, both written by student M. Dzhali Maier.

One titled “The white privilege of cows,” which was published Monday, “invoked the notion of biological differences between races,” while “Columbian Exchange Day,” published Tuesday, argued that Native Americans should be thankful for colonialism, according to the editor’s note.

“The white privilege of cows” column was left on The Herald’s website “in an effort to be transparent,” according to an editor’s note later added to it. The “Columbian Exchange Day” column was removed and replaced by an editor’s note. That column was “unintentionally published due to an internal error,” according to the note. It was online for about an hour before it was taken down.

“We understand that these columns contained racist content that has no place in our paper or community,” the editor’s note said…

Read the entire article here.

A Statement from a Collective of Multiracial and Biracial Students

bluestockings magazine
Monday, 2015-10-12

Multiracial and Biracial Students at Brown

For further context, please see the bluestockings editors statement.

Introduction

We, a collective of multiracial and biracial students, write this statement to address the publication of a series of articles by the Brown Daily Herald, as well the publication of “An open letter to students on power, learning and responsibility” written by President Christina Paxson, Richard Locke, a provost, and Russell Carey, executive vice president for planning and policy. We write out of deep concern for the decisions made by the Brown Daily Herald to publish the racist opinion articles “The White Privilege of Cows,” and “Columbian Exchange Day” [by M. Dzhali Maler ’17] on October 5th, and October 6th, 2015, respectively, and the administration’s choice to address the publishing of these articles with an open letter that minimizes the pain of Native and Indigenous students.

The Herald’s staff privileges writers who continue in the legacy of white supremacy, further marginalizing students already systemically oppressed by the University. In an effort to recenter and stand in solidarity with Native and Indigenous students, we call attention to The Herald’s errors and their history of racism…

…We also call multiracial and biracial community members to interrogate the ways in which we are complicit in the erasure of Native and Indigenous people. Moreover, multiracial, biracial and Indigenous identities are not separate—there are multi- and biracial people who hold Indigenous identity. We, as a community that experiences multiple histories of racism and colonization while often being heralded as a signal of the end of racism, must evaluate, address, and decolonize our own actions…

Read the entire article here.

The Greatest Pretender: Korla Pandit, music’s most magnificent fraud

Dead 2 Rights: A Folksy Down-Home Blog
2013-05-19

Joe Blevins

A few of Korla’s two dozen albums. You might notice a recurring visual motif on the LP covers.

“For wisdom is better than rubies, and all things to be desired are not to be compared unto it. We bring you musical gems from near and far, blended into a pattern of glorious harmony, a program based on the universal language of music. It is our pleasure to present to you…”

Korla Pandit spoke not a word when he was on camera. He just wore a bejeweled turban, played the organ… and stared. That was the extent of his act. It was all he needed — the shimmery tones of his music, the vague evocation of the Far East, and that indelible Mona Lisa countenance with its piercing dark eyes and intriguing half-smile. It was a potent combination which carried him along for nearly half a century. And yet, Korla Pandit never really existed at all. It depends, I suppose, on your definition of “existed.” Either way, his story is one of the most implausible and oddly inspiring in the history of popular music.

I first encountered Korla Pandit without any clue to his identity or knowledge of his past. Portraying himself, Korla made a memorable cameo in Tim Burton’s 1994 film, Ed Wood. In the scene, notorious director Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Johnny Depp) is holding a wrap party for his 1955 sci-fi/horor anti-epic, Bride of the Monster. The wild celebration, attended by Bela Lugosi and the other oddballs and grotesques who orbited Wood, is held in the meat-packing plant of the film’s major backer, wealthy rancher Donald McCoy (Rance Howard). While the carcasses of slaughtered animals hang from hooks all around them, the revelers are treated to a suggestive dance routine performed by Wood himself, costumed as a harem girl. Korla Pandit, immaculately attired in a Nehru jacket and the ever-present turban, accompanies him on the organ with a composition called “Nautch Dance,” referring to a seductive style of dance popularized in early-1900s India…

Read the entire article here.

From Multiracial to Transgender? Assessing Attitudes toward Expanding Gender Options on the US Census

Transgender Studies Quarterly
Volume 2, Number 1, February 2015
pages 77-100
DOI: 10.1215/23289252-2848895

Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Jenifer Bratter, Associate Professor of Sociology
Rice University, Houston, Texas

In 2000, the US Census Bureau acknowledged multiracial Americans on the decennial census in an attempt to better capture racial heterogeneity and to more closely align what is publicly collected on forms with people’s personal understandings of their racial identity. In this article, we start a discussion of how the census—a major source of political identity recognition and legitimation—could be more inclusive of gender variance. We ask: (1) Is there support for a transgender category on the US census? (2) Who might select a transgender option if it were provided? To answer these questions, we conducted questionnaire research at three transgender and genderqueer conferences and found strong support for the inclusion of a transgender category. Conversely, we found that many people did not currently check “transgender” on forms when given the opportunity. As we show, the decision to check “transgender” varies by what we term gender identity validation. In other words, people who identified as male or female and who felt others viewed them as unequivocally male or female, respectively, were less likely to check “transgender” than people who identified as transgender or who experienced a discrepancy between their self-perceived and other-perceived gender identity. These differences suggest that—similar to the push for adding a multiracial category to the census—the expansion of sex/gender categories is most likely to come from individuals who experience themselves as constrained by the existing possibilities and/or who are stigmatized by others’ conceptions of the appropriate alignment of bodies and genders.

Read or puchase the article here.

OPINION: The changing racial makeup

Commerce News Today
Commerce, Georgia
2015-10-13

Cameron Whitlock, Reporter

The racial makeup of the United States is changing. That’s not an opinion, that’s a cold hard fact.

By 2050, racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. population.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau and a study from the Pew Research Center, “white” Americans will have gone from 85 percent of the population in 1960, to 43 percent in 2060. Meanwhile, the number of black and Hispanic Americans will, make up a combined 45 percent of the population.

There are many contributing factors, the largest of which are immigration and the intermarriage of races. Until the middle of the 20th century, the American immigrant population largely consisted of white European expats. Nowadays, European immigration to the Americas sparse, while immigrants from Latin America make up over 50 percent of our naturalized citizens…

…I recall an ITBS (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) exam back in primary school. As with most standardized tests, the ITBS info sheet required you to pencil in your age, gender and race. The same still applies for most colleges, job applications and a number of other forms. But at what point do we categorize someone in a particular race? I vaguely remember the confusion felt by one of my Asian-American classmates when he was asked to pencil in his race. His mother was a Korean born immigrant, while his father was a white, natural-born American. He can’t check the “white” box, yet he doesn’t consider himself an “Asian, Pacific islander.” He’s certainly not “Native American” or “Black.” The only other option was just that – “other.” But what does that even mean? Now, such applications or forms typically list another option such as “mixed race.” But with such a vague destruction, is that information valuable in any way? …

Read the entire article here.

Lecture, forum at UH-Hilo to explore Filipino identity

Hawaii Tribune-Herald
Hilo, Hawaii
2015-10-13

Dr. Ronald R. Sundstrom

Dr. Ronald Sundstrom, professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco, will deliver a public lecture titled “The Filipino-American Experience and The Post-Racial State” from 4-5:30 p.m. Friday at the University of Hawaii at Hilo UCB 127.

The presentation, part of UH-Hilo’s Filipino-American Heritage Month events, is open to the public.

There also will be an academic forum titled “Knowledge, Power and Identity” from 11-11:50 a.m. Friday in UCB 111.

Dr. Celia Bardwell Jones, UH-Hilo philosophy professor, and the Filipino-American Heritage Month committee organized the academic forum and public lecture to tackle sensitive and provocative issues of Filipino identity.

Sundstrom comes from a mixed-race Filipino heritage and was born as a Filipino Amerasian child in Olongapo, Subic Bay. He later had to nationalize in order to claim his U.S. citizenship.

Additionally, he teaches for USF’s African-American studies program and the master of public affairs program for the Leo T. McCarthy Center of Public Service and the Common Good…

Read the entire article here.

Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope And The Campaign For Change

Abrams
2009-10-01
184 pages
150 full-color illustrations
Trim Size: 9 x 11
Paperback ISBN: 0-8109-8498-9

Edited by:

Shepard Fairey

Jennifer Gross

Few events in recent memory have captivated the world’s attention like that of Barack Obama’s historic presidential campaign. Not only did it stir passionate political momentum, but it also inspired the creative talents of a world of artists, illustrators, and graphic designers.

Shepard Fairey’s iconic Hope portrait became the face of the campaign and, more than ever before, innovative graphic design became a central strategy for winning the race.

Comprised of collages, paintings, photo composites, prints, and computer-generated pieces, Art for Obama showcases the well-known images of the campaign as well as less famous but equally creative pieces from around the globe. This is a volume for design and art aficionados, as well as supporters of the 44th President of the United States who want a keepsake as uncommon as his extraordinary campaign.

Exotic Korla Pandit hid race under swami persona

SFGate
2015-08-15

Jessica Zack

Eric Christensen grew up in San Francisco in the 1950s and remembers his mother, “like a lot of women then, being transfixed by Korla Pandit on television. He wore a jeweled turban and had these mesmerizing eyes that made women feel he could see right through them. Korla was this otherworldly, captivating guy, and we all thought he and his music were from another land.”

Christensen, who lives in Mill Valley, and his former KGO TV colleague John Turner of Berkeley have chronicled Pandit’s life story in their new documentary “Korla,” which has its Bay Area premiere at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora on Aug. 20.

From his first 1949 episodes of “Adventures in Music” on Southern California’s KTLA, Pandit rode an almost 50-year-long wave of success — as a TV sensation, prolific recording artist (13 albums with Berkeley’s Fantasy Records) and “grandfather of exotica music” — based not only on his keyboard prowess but on his enigmatic swami persona.

With his heavily kohl-rimmed eyes and upturned half-smile, Pandit coaxed unusual sounds from the Hammond B-3 organ, playing “musical gems from far and near” — faux-Polynesian sounds, Hawaiian war chants, “hypnotiques” — while extolling the virtues of “divine consciousness” and “the universal language of music.”

Yet, unbeknownst to his legions of fans until after his death in Petaluma in 1998, at age 77, Pandit’s hypnotic Svengali look and supposedly Hindu name were part of an expertly crafted fiction of self-invention. A magazine profile by R. J. Smith in 2001 revealed that Pandit was actually African American, a minister’s son born John Roland Redd, from Columbia, Mo…

…The film incorporates interviews with music and sociology experts — including Carlos Santana (who likens Pandit to Miles Davis), The Chronicle’s Radio Waves columnist Ben Fong-Torres and UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Harry Edwards — as well as with Pandit’s nephew Gary Cloud, to examine, says Christensen, “this amazing act, even by show business standards. This wasn’t an act that occurred onstage for an hour or two, this was 24/7, all through his life. Korla put on this persona and couldn’t take it off. Living a lie on a daily basis must have been very difficult.”

“Korla’s life story illustrates what African Americans knew at the time: ‘If I can be anything other than black, my life could change dramatically,’” says Stanford University Assistant Professor of History Allyson Hobbs, whose new book “A Chosen Exile” explores the stories of individuals who passed as someone else racially from the late 19th century through the 1950s. “If they could just twist people’s perception of them even one degree — in this case, from black to another minority — doors previously closed would open.”…

Read the entire article here.