Mixed Race Studies

“I consider myself black. I consider myself biracial too. But for me—I’m not trying to define it for other people—because as you just said, other people feel differently. But, I look at being biracial as a category of being black.” —Lacey Schwartz

Ebro in the Morning, “Movie “Little White Lie” Creator Lacey Schwartz Talks Not Knowing She Was Black [VIDEO],” HOT 97, WQHT 97.1 FM New York, New York, November 26, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHrA_-5Fp8. (00:07:02-00:08:10).

“Asian Latinos” and the U.S. Census

AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community
Volume 10, Number 2 (2012)
pages 119-138
DOI: 10.17953/appc.10.2.m04004632k7n353l

Robert Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Kevin Escudero, Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, Professor Emerita
Department of Community Health Sciences and Department of Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Paul Ong, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Tarry Hum, Professor
Department of Urban Studies and Graduate Center Doctoral Program in Environmental Psychology
Queens College, City University of New York

Numbering more than 300,000, “Asian Latinos” are a large but overlooked segment of the Asian American and Latino populations of the United States. Drawing from data generated from the 5 percent Public Use Microdata Samples of the 2000 U.S. Census, this article provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of the Asian Latino community. In particular, it examines the demographic characteristics of population size, geographic distribution, national origin, gender, age, citizenship, and educational attainment. In addition, it examines several policy implications related to Asian Latino coalition building and undocumented immigrant advocacy.

Read or purchase the article here.

It was against this backdrop that the three races met and mingled along the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Long before the end of the eighteenth century, miscegenation had become a problem for New England settlers, who, if they had no clear idea of the nature of Africans, had even less understanding of the nature of the growing number of mulattos. Unlike blacks, who might be of African, Caribbean, or American birth, mulattos were usually born in the New World and were, therefore, not only racially distinct from Africans and Europeans but culturally distinct as well. The New England colonies recognized them as a separate group. Massachusetts made the first distinction between blacks and mulattos in 1693, Connecticut did so in 1704, and Rhode Island and New Hampshire followed in 1714. In addition to sexual relations between blacks and whites, Native Americans and blacks also came together and produced children. Greene believes the lowly status assigned both groups in white dominated New England served to erase any distinction between them, and, as they were common victims of oppression, they naturally drew together. In any event, along the eastern seaboard there was a mixing of Native Americans, whites, and blacks during the colonial era.

Rhett S. Jones, “Miscegenation and Acculturation in the Narragansett Country of Rhode Island, 1710-1790,” Trotter Review, Volume 3, Issue 1 (1989), 10. http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol3/iss1/4/.

Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Macmillan
Ninth Edition
2014
732 pages
Paper Text ISBN-10: 1-4292-4217-5; ISBN-13: 978-1-4292-4217-2

Paula S. Rothenberg, Senior Fellow; The Murphy Institute, City University of New York
Professor Emerita; William Patterson University of New Jersey

Like no other text, this best-selling anthology effectively introduces students to the complexity of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States and illustrates how these categories operate and interact in society. The combination of thoughtfully selected readings, deftly written introductions, and careful organization make Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Ninth Edition, the most engaging and balanced presentation of these issues available today.

In addition to including scholarly selections from authors like Beverly Tatum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Annette Lareau, and Jonathan Kozol, Rothenberg includes historical documents like the Three-Fifths Compromise, firsthand narrative accounts of how these issues have affected the lives of individuals, and popular press pieces reporting on discrimination in everyday life.

This edition includes 28 new selections considering such relevant topics as the citizenship and immigration, transgender identity, the 2010 census, multiracial identity, the 99% and the occupy movement, the tragic story of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, South Asian Identity post 9/11, multiracial identity, disability, sexual harassment in the teenage years, and much more.

Table of Contents ^*Articles new or revised for this edition

• Part I THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
  • 1 Racial Formations / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
  • 2 The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch / Richard Wright
  • 3 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege / Pem Davidson Buck
  • 4 How Jews Became White Folks / Karen Brodkin
  • 5 “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender / Judith Lorber
  • 6 The Social Construction of Sexuality / Ruth Hubbard
  • 7 The Invention of Heterosexuality / Jonathan Ned Katz
  • 8 Masculinity as Homophobia / Michael S. Kimmel
  • 9 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History / Douglas C. Baynton
  • 10 Deconstructing the Underclass / Herbert Gans
  • 11 Domination and Subordination / Jean Baker Miller
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part II UNDERSTANDING RACISM, SEXISM, HETEROSEXISM, AND CLASS PRIVILEGE
  • 1 Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” / Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • 2 Color-Blind Racism / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • 3 Smells Like Racism / Rita Chaudhry Sethi
  • 4 Oppression / Marilyn Frye
  • 5 Patriarchy / Allan G. Johnson
  • 6 Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism / Suzanne Pharr
  • ^*7 The 10 Percent Problem / Kate Clinton
  • 8 White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack / Peggy McIntosh
  • ^*9 Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life / Annette Lareau
  • ^*10 Class in America—2012 / Gregory Mantsios
• Part III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
  • 1 A Nation of None and All of the Above / Sam Roberts
  • 2 A New Century: Immigration and the US / MPI Staff, updated by Kevin Jernegan
  • ^*3 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America / Mae Ngai
  • 4 Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves / Evelyn Alsultany
  • ^*5 For many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color / Mireya Navarro
  • ^*6 Testimony / Sonny Singh
  • 7 Asian American? / Sonia Shah
  • 8 The Myth of the Model Minority / Noy Thrupkaew
  • 9 Personal Voices: Facing Up to Race / Carrie Ching
  • Suggestions for Further Readings
• Part IV DISCRIMINATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
  • 1 The Problem: Discrimination / U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
  • 2 Abercrombie Settles Class-Action Suit
  • 3 Apparel Factory Workers Were Cheated, State Says / Steven Greenhouse
  • 4 Women in the State Police: Trouble in the Ranks / Jonathan Schuppe
  • ^*5 Why Transgender Identification Matters / Rebecca Juro
  • 6 Where “English Only” Falls Short / Stacy A. Teicher
  • 7 Blacks vs. Latinos at Work / Miriam Jordan
  • 8 Manhattan Store Owner Accused of Underpaying and Sexually Harassing Workers / Steven Greenhouse
  • 9 Muslim-American Running Back off the Team at New Mexico State / Matthew Rothschild
  • 10 Tennessee Judge Tells Immigrant Mothers: Learn English or Else / Ellen Barry
  • ^*11 Tucson’s Ousted Mexican-American Studies Director Speaks: The Fight’s Not Over / Julianne Hing
  • 12 My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish / Mana Lumumba-Kasongo
  • 13 The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School / Jeffrey Gettleman
  • 14 Race and Family Income of Students Influence Guidance Counselors’ Advice, Study Finds / Eric Hoover
  • 15 College Choices Are Limited for Students from Needy Families, Report Says / Stephen Burd
  • 16 Wealthy Often Win the Race for Merit-Based College Aid / Jay Mathews
  • 17 On L.I., Raid Stirs Dispute over Influx of Immigrants / Bruce Lambert
  • 18 More Blacks Live with Pollution / Associated Press
  • ^*19 National Study Finds Widespread Sexual Harassment of Students in Grades 7-12 / Jenny Anderson
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part V THE ECONOMICS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
  • ^*1 Imagine a Country—2012 / Holly Sklar
  • ^*2 Dr King Weeps from His Grave / Cornel West
  • ^*3 Rich People Create Jobs! And Five Other Myths That Must Die for our Economy to Live / Kevin Drum
  • ^*4 It’s Official: The Rich Got Richer: Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds / Robert Pear
  • ^*5 Study Finds Big Spike in the Poorest in the U.S. / Sabrina Tavernise
  • ^*6 The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class / Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
  • ^*7 Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Twenty-to-One: Executive Summary / Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor
  • 8 The Economic Reality of Being Asian American / Meizhu Lui and others
  • 9 The Economic Reality of Being Latino/a in the U.S. / Meizhu Lui and others
  • ^*10 Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites / Sabrina Tavernise
  • ^*11 Gender Gap on Wages is Slow to Close / Motoko Rich
  • 12 Women Losing Ground / Ruth Conniff
  • 13 Lilly’s Big Day / Gail Collins
  • 14 “Savage Inequalities” Revisited / Bob Feldman
  • 15 Cause of Death: Inequality / Alejandro Reuss
  • ^*16 Undocumented Immigrants Find Paths to College, Careers / Gosnia Wozniacka
  • 17 Immigration’s Aftermath / Alejandro Portes
  • ^*18 Inequality Undermines Democracy / Eduardo Porter
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VI MANY VOICES, MANY LIVES: SOME CONSEQUENCES OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER INEQUALITY
  • 1 Civilize Them with a Stick / Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes
  • 2 Then Came the War / Yuri Kochiyama
  • 3 Yellow / Frank Wu
  • 4 The Arab Woman and I / Mona Fayad
  • 5 Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past / Oscar Casares
  • 6 The Event of Becoming / Jewelle L. Gomez
  • 7 This Person Doesn’t Sound White / Ziba Kashef
  • ^*8 In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger / Susan Saulny
  • 9 Family Ties and the Entanglements of Caste / Joseph Berger
  • 10 Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain / Don Sabo
  • 11 The Slave Side of Sunday / Dave Zirin
  • 12 He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy / Tommi Avicolli
  • 13 Requiem for the Champ / June Jordan
  • ^*14 Against Bullying or On Loving Queer Kids / Richard Kim
  • 15 Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge / Alex Williams
  • 16 The Case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson: Ableism, Heterosexism, and Sexism / Joan L. Griscom
  • ^*17 Misconceptions Regarding the Body / Jennifer Bartlett
  • 18 C. P. Ellis / Studs Terkel
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VII HOW IT HAPPENED: RACE AND GENDER ISSUES IN U.S. LAW
  • 1 Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival /U.S. Commission on Human Rights
  • 2 An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712
  • 3 The “Three-Fifths Compromise”: The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2
  • 4 An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read
  • 5 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
  • 6 The Antisuffragists: Selected Papers, 1852–1887
  • 7 People v. Hall, 1854
  • 8 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
  • 9 The Emancipation Proclamation / Abraham Lincoln
  • 10 United States Constitution: Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments
  • 11 The Black Codes / W. E. B. Du Bois
  • 12 Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873
  • 13 Minor v. Happersett, 1875
  • 14 California Constitution, 1876
  • 15 Elk v. Wilkins, November 3, 1884
  • 16 Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
  • 17 United States Constitution: Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
  • 18 Korematsu v. United States, 1944
  • 19 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
  • 20 Roe v. Wade, 1973
  • 21 The Equal Rights Amendment (Defeated)
  • 22 Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 2003
  • ^*23 Equal Protection Indeed / The Economist
  • ^*24 Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution / Linda Hirshman
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VIII MAINTAINING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER HIERARCHIES: REPRODUCING “REALITY”
  • 1 Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes / Mark Snyder
  • 2 Anti-Gay Stereotype / Richard D. Mohr
  • 3 White Lies / Maurice Berger
  • 4 Am I Thin Enough Yet? / Sharlene Hesse-Biber
  • 5 Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse / Sut Jhally
  • 6 The Plutocratic Culture: Institutions, Values, and Ideologies / Michael Parenti
  • 7 Media Magic: Making Class Invisible / Gregory Mantsios
  • 8 Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid / Jonathan Kozol
  • 9 Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex / Angela Davis
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part IX SOCIAL CHANGE: REVISIONING THE FUTURE AND MAKING A DIFFERENCE
  • 1 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference / Audre Lorde
  • 2 Feminism: A Transformational Politic / bell hooks
  • 3 A New Vision of Masculinity / Cooper Thompson
  • 4 Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression: The Role of Allies as Agents of Change / Andrea Ayvazian
  • 5 Rethinking Volunteerism in America / Gavin Leonard
  • ^*6 The Most Important Thing in the World / Naomi Klein
  • ^*7 Beyond Elections: People Power / Mark Bittman
  • ^*8 Demand the Impossible / Matthew Rothschild
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index

Mulattoes like Sally Hemings have been both weaponized and victimized in a complicated racial structure designed to protect white supremacy while satisfying the sexual fetishes of white, slave-owning rapists. Light skinned slaves were often given better positions on plantations, treated better. Sometimes they became enforcers over other, darker people. Sometimes they were freed upon the death of their masters/fathers. But, the success of the Haitian Revolution was predicated in part on the ability of mulattoes, quadroons and octaroons to overlook these light skinned privileges and see the white supremacy behind them so they could join in arms with darker Black people to throw off their French masters and become the first free, European-style democracy in the western hemisphere. Around the same time, laws defining whiteness and the rights of white people in the United States were being more clearly and cleverly delineated, to prevent indentured Irish from joining with Black slaves in a similar fashion.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Hold Fast to Blackness,” Medium, July 29, 2015. https://medium.com/@chanda/hold-fast-to-blackness-3e4fa529917d.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs (review) [Cutter]

African American Review
Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2015
pages 381-383

Martha J. Cutter, Professor of English and Africana Studies
University of Connecticut

Hobbs, Allyson, A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)

The historian Allyson Hobbs opens her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life with an anecdote about a young child living on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1930s who is light enough to pass for white. Her parents (who are also light enough to pass) make the heart-wrenching decision to send her to live as a white person in Los Angeles, without them. She cries, pleads, and begs to stay with her parents, but they are adamant. Many years later when the father is dying the mother calls home the daughter, now a young woman who has married a white man and has had white children, but she refuses to return. This incident—sourced as “one of my family’s stories” (4)—seems an unusual way to begin a book titled A Chosen Exile, for the young girl’s exile is not chosen by any means. It is also a curiously ambiguous story. We may wonder (for example) why the parents do not go with the child, whether she has relatives in California to whom she is sent, and what age she is when this event occurs. This tantalizing story leaves a reader with more questions than it answers, and it belies the richness of Hobbs’s work in the book as a whole. Hobbs does not use this anecdote to elucidate some of the mysteries around passing or the difficulty of excavating the history of the racial passer, who disappears into whiteness. Instead, the story is deployed in support of the central argument of her book—that “racial passing is an exile” (4) and “the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from” (18). But how can we know that passing is “losing what you pass away from” based on this anecdote? In Hobbs’s book, the young girl is never heard from again. Perhaps she found freedom in her whiteness, or perhaps not. She might have had a permanent sense of exile, but this is never elucidated.

The use of this anecdote reflects a systemic flaw in Hobbs’s otherwise powerful and eloquent book. Her source material often opens up in provocative ways the can of worms that is racial passing, but then she sometimes forces those messy, squiggly worms back into a single “can”—the frame of family loss and exile. Hobbs makes the dubious claim that “historians and literary scholars have paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white rather than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity” (11). To counter this tendency, she mines historical sources on passing “to discover a coherent and enduring narrative of loss” (24). At various points, she does acknowledge the shifting meaning of racial passing; for example, she states that “to pass as white varied and cannot be collapsed into a singular narrative” (15) and that “passing was by no means a static practice” (25). By the end of the book, her argument evolves into a more nuanced one: “Loss was a prerequisite of passing. But the losses that passing demanded were not all the same for those who passed. … For some, [passing] was undoubtedly a bitter bargain. But for others, the connection with oneself and one’s past had been lost long ago” (230). Hobbs here articulates some of the plural possibilities of passing—the way it can come to mean both conscription to a certain racial ideology and liberation from this very same ideology at one and the same time.

Hobbs’s book might have put forward from its start, then, a slightly more nuanced overarching framework. But in many ways this book is a very valuable resource for scholars interested in the history of passing, as well as students who may need a broad overview of the phenomenon. It examines the more-than-250-year history of passing in the United States, reaching back to the time of the American Revolution and forward to our current so-called “mulatto millennium,” or “Generation E.A.”—“ethnically ambiguous” (276). Most unique about the book is the wealth of source materials (much of which is…

Read the entire article here.

The Racial Discrimination Embedded in Modern Medicine

Newsweek
2015-10-20

Lindsey Konkel

Minutes separated Are’Yana Hill from death as she struggled to breathe in the hallway of her San Francisco high school. The 18-year-old had lived with asthma attacks since before she could talk, and on that day, in April 2014, she could not speak. She thrust the rescue inhaler she carried in her backpack between her lips and inhaled. No relief. It felt, she thought, as if a charley horse had formed in her chest, knotting her lungs—each gasp trammeled by tightening airways. Her pursed lips turned gray, and all she could think about was her unborn baby. Hill, eight months pregnant, clutched her inhaler and prayed for paramedics to arrive.

“I take my medicine every day. I do everything the doctors tell me. I’ve tried every single thing, and I still have attacks,” Hill said a little more than a year later, as a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital’s Asthma Clinic placed a stethoscope on her back, between her shoulders. Her wheezing was barely audible. Each expiration sounded like the whistle of a distant tea kettle.

The attack in 2014 put Hill in the hospital. Asthma attack patients in the emergency room are often given oxygen and albuterol or other medications to relax the airways through a nebulizer mask. These treatments typically last a couple of hours, but Hill’s airways weren’t opening. She breathed through a nebulizer continuously for a week while the doctors closely monitored her pregnancy. Hill has brittle asthma—severe and unpredictable attacks that are poorly controlled, even with medication. Two weeks after she left the hospital, her son was born, healthy. Others are not as lucky…

…In the U.S. medical community, studying racial differences in disease susceptibility and response to treatments remains controversial. Race and ethnicity are social constructs that have been used to marginalize and exploit. Scientifically, race serves only as a crude proxy for what experts call genetic ancestry—the diverse signatures that arose in the genetic code as our ancestors traversed the globe.

Some experts worry that a focus on finding genetic differences obscures the need to address the socioeconomic disparities that lead to uneven access to health care in the U.S. “Focusing on inclusion in clinical trials is a great way to ignore the fact that large numbers of poor and minority people are getting less than optimal health care,” says Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

Yet because of its social baggage, race remains a powerful tool for studying patterns of disease and health, according to Sam Oh, an epidemiologist in Burchard’s laboratory at UCSF. A person’s self-identified race or ethnicity can offer important clues beyond genetic ancestry about important cultural, socioeconomic and environmental factors that may influence disease risk…

Read the entire article here.

Hold Fast to Blackness

Medium
2015-07-29

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies
University of New Hampshire

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Nederland

This is not another essay about how hard it is to be light skinned in a dark man’s world. Why? Because the suggestion that this is a dark man’s world is ridiculous. Unless you’ve had your head up your butt, we quite clearly do not live in a version of the universe where overall it is better to be dark. The reality is that 2Pac was speaking in opposition to mainstream logic when he rapped, “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker the flesh, the deeper the roots.”

I’m sure there are many light skinned people including those with bi- and multiracial/ethnic families who would complain that 2Pac spoke words of erasure. But to make this complaint is to not acknowledge, plainly, that in fact he is speaking against erasure. To be light skinned, in reality, is to have a choice about what role we play in this process, for or against, constructive or destructive.

I have a Black Caribbean momma and a white Jewish father. My mom’s family hails from Barbados, vaguely of “West African Origin.” We don’t really know where or if maybe we come from somewhere else because identity and language are one of the many things European slave traders and slave owners stole from kidnapped Africans and their descendents. My dad’s family was chased out of the Ukraine and Russia by anti-Jewish pogroms and were Yiddish speaking until it became clear that looking like them and being English speaking was better.

When I was born, my parents were scared to introduce me to my dad’s maternal grandfather. It wasn’t clear whether he would accept a “nigger baby.” This is the first story I know of that clearly delineates the difference between my white father and me. My white father lives in the tent of whiteness: he is accepted as white and is treated as such on the street, in airports, by the police, by shop clerks, by everyone who speaks to and everyone who sees him. My dad lives in a version of the world where who he is is the default and where no one ever had to ask whether he would be excluded by members of his family simply because of his skin color.

It is true that my father has a different experience with the tent of whiteness than his father did in his early years. Born in 1917 in Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn, my Grandpa Norman would have been a dirty Jew to many white non-Jews. But when he died in 1988 Los Angeles, my Grandpa was white with the rest of them. The tent of whiteness expands as people sufficiently European-looking become broadly accepted as, “not-Black, not heading toward Black or any of the other darker kinds.” This expansion is predicated somewhat on the fundamental belief that the darker people are, the more dangerous, deficient and less human they are.

I am dark enough to not live within the tent of whiteness, but I am light enough that many people experience significant confusion when trying to class what level of “not-white, maybe heading toward-Black, deficient” I am. Depending on the year and location, I am a “dirty Arab/Muslim,” a fellow Latina, a Mulatto, a Mizrahi Jew, a half-white person who suspiciously may not be down with Black folks…

Read the entire article here.

The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.

This forced resettlement was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson’s “Indian removal” campaigns of the 1830s, which gave rise to the original Trail of Tears as it drove tribes of Native Americans out of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. It was bigger than the immigration of Jews into the United States during the 19th century, when some 500,000 arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore. This movement lasted longer and grabbed up more people than any other migration in North America before 1900.

Edward Ball, “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2015. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968.

“I’ve never strayed away from being black. I’m biracial but something that my mom constantly said to me growing up in southern California was ‘Yes, you are Italian, you are German, and you are black, but you are going to be viewed by the world as a black woman’.” —Misty Copeland

Maya Chung, “New Film Shows Misty Copeland’s Journey as a Black Ballerina,” NBC News, September 30, 2015. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/new-film-shows-misty-copelands-journey-black-ballerina-n434951.