Mixed Race Studies

Love and hate: interracial couples speak out about the racism they’ve faced

The Guardian
2015-11-26

Nell Frizzell

‘I asked them to share any negative comments they’d overheard about themselves.’ All photographs by Donna Pinckley

A couple stand by a flower bed. Her arm is wrapped about his waist like a rose climbing a tree. He rests his cheek on the top of her head. They stare down the lens, their bodies pressed together from thigh to neck in the late afternoon sun. “They are disgusting”, reads a handwritten caption below the image – as jarring as a rock to a toe.

This shot is one of US photographer Donna Pinckley’s ongoing series Sticks and Stones, which pairs interracial couples with the abuse they’ve received, sometimes directly, sometimes overheard. A southern girl at heart (she tells me that she could never move further north than Little Rock, Arkansas, where she lives), Pinckley works in black and white and the couples she depicts include a wide range of ethnicities and sexualities…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

In the Creole Twilight: Poems and Songs from Louisiana Folklore

Louisiana State University Press
September 2015
88 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
30 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807161548

Joshua Clegg Caffery, Visiting Professor in Folklore
Indiana University, Bloomington

Many recurring motifs found in south Louisiana’s culture spring from the state’s rich folklore. Influenced by settlers of European and African heritage, celebrated customs like the Courir de Mardi Gras and fabled creatures like the Loup-Garou are outgrowths of the region’s distinctive oral traditions. Joshua Clegg Caffery’s In the Creole Twilight draws from this vibrant and diverse legacy to create an accessible reimagining of traditional storytelling and song.

A scholar and Grammy-nominated musician, Caffery borrows from the syllabic structures, rhyme schemes, narratives, and settings that characterize Louisiana songs and tales to create new verse that is both well-researched and refreshingly inventive. Paired with original pen-and-ink illustrations as well as notes that clarify the origins of characters and themes, Caffery’s compositions provide a link to the old worlds of southern Louisiana while constructing an entirely new one.

Identity Does Not Define Experiences

The Oberlin Review
Oberlin, Ohio
2015-04-24

Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura, College senior

To the Editors:

My name is Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura. I take he, him and his. I am a mixed-race Japanese American. I am cisgender and heterosexual; I am from Ohio and a strictly middle-class background. (I received a federal Pell Grant one year and not others because my family is right on the cusp of certain federal guidelines.) My father is an immigrant with no college degree, while my mother has a Master’s degree. (You might be surprised at who makes more money.) I am the oldest and only son of four children. I am graduating in May and have gained tremendously from my Oberlin education.

This introduction is meant to highlight both my social privileges and challenges. (These are in fact relative terms, which means some elements of my identity have simultaneously advantaged me and been used to discriminate against me.) Asian Americans (particularly Midwestern ones and Ohio students in general) make up a fraction of Oberlin’s student body, while students of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian descents are disproportionately represented, relative to their national populations, in American college campuses. In this country, people generally refer to me as part Asian, whereas in Japan I am overwhelmingly thought of as White. I will graduate from Oberlin with roughly $35,000 in loans (higher than the national average), yet statistics indicate I am better positioned to find a good job and start a family than my peers on this campus who come from low-income backgrounds.

There are many layers to my life story. I straddle the boundary between majority and minority, sometimes enjoying the benefits of one while enduring the hardships of the other…

Read the entire letter here.

The quadroon concubines of New Orleans on Wanton Weekends

Jude Knight
2015-10-25

Jude Knight

In New Orleans at the end of the 18th Century, a wealthy white man would generally live on his plantation with his wife and children, but he would also have a townhouse in New Orleans where his other family lived: his quadroon mistress and the children he had made with her.

To the men and women involved, these marriages de la main gauche (left-handed marriages) were honourable arrangements. The women were faithful to their protectors, and the men were expected to provide for their children. It was what a gentleman did…

Read the entire article here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: A Conversation With Trevor Noah

Monkey See: Pop-Culture News And Analysis From NPR
National Public Radio
2015-11-27

Linda Holmes, Host
Monkey See Blog

Linda Holmes and Trevor Noah talk during NPR’s Weekend In Washington event on October 31. (Paul Morigi/AP Images for NPR)

It’s Thanksgiving week, and Team PCHH [Pop Culture Happy Hour] is enjoying some downtime, which makes it a perfect moment to bring you a special show. On Oct. 31 — a few hours before our live show with Fred Armisen — I sat down for a chat here in Washington with Trevor Noah, who was then about a month into his gig as the host of The Daily Show.

(I should also add that he had his appendix out four days later, so who knows? Maybe this was the very last interview for which his appendix was present.)

Noah has a really interesting story, not only because he’s been famous for longer than a lot of Americans realized when he took over for Jon Stewart, but also because in that time, he’s had a lot of chances to reflect for a guy who’s only 31…

Read the introduction here. Listen to the story here (00:55:42). Download the story here.

Incognegro, A Graphic Mystery

Vertigo
2008
136 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-140121097

Mat Johnson, Author

Warren Pleece, Artist

Mat Johnson, winner of the prestigious Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, constructs a fearless graphic novel that is both a page-turning mystery and a disturbing exploration of race and self-image in America, masterfully illustrated with rich period detail by Warren Pleece (The Invisibles, Hellblazer). In the early 20th century, when lynchings were commonplace throughout the American South, a few courageous reporters from the North risked their lives to expose these atrocities. They were African-American men who, due to their light skin color, could pass for white. They called this dangerous assignment going “incognegro.” Zane Pinchback, a reporter for the New York-based New Holland Herald, is sent to investigate the arrest of his own brother, charged with the brutal murder of a white woman in Mississippi. With a lynch mob already swarming, Zane must stay “incognegro” long enough to uncover the truth behind the murder in order to save his brother — and himself.

Hapa-Palooza 2015 | Talking Hapa With Canadian Broadcaster Margaret Gallager

Schema Magazine
2015-09-17

Marissa Willcox

Hapa-palooza is here! Celebrating what Vancouver does best: mixed-heritage and blended cultural identities. Drawing from the Hawaiian origin of the word “hapa” (used by many people in Canada and U.S. who identify as being of mixed-heritage) Vancouver is a perfect venue this year’s diverse array of speakers, workshops and family events.

This festival spans over four days and features many mixed-heritage voices, including Vancouver’s much-loved broadcaster Margaret Gallager. An award winning CBC radio host, she joins Lawrence Hill on September 17th for a much-anticipated evening of stimulating conversation at the GoldCorp Centre for the Arts. Marissa Willcox had a chance to ask her a few questions about her cultural identity and work in Canada’s public broadcaster.

Marissa Willcox: As a broadcaster and community member of mixed-heritage, to what extent is Vancouver’s ethnic and cultural diversity an aspect of the stories you cover?

Margaret Gallager: As someone who works for the public broadcaster, it’s part of my job (and privilege) to reflect Canadian society through the stories I bring to air. And diversity is a huge part of who we are, especially in Vancouver. So, if you’re doing your job right, some of those stories are naturally going to come from diverse communities.

I’d say that cultural diversity is better reflected in the media these days than it was when I was growing up, whether that is in the stories that are told, or the people who are presenting them. And I think that change came about in part through a conscious effort that has taken years…

Read the entire interview here.

“Watch me go invisible”: Representing Racial Passing in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro

South Central Review
Volume 32, Number 3, Fall 2015
pages 45-69

Sinéad Moynihan, Senior Lecturer
University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom

This essay examines the potential of the graphic novel as a vehicle to explore one of the most enduring tropes in American culture: racial passing. As what Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven term a “hybrid project,” graphic narrative has the potential to pose “a challenge to the structure of binary classification that opposes a set of terms, privileging one.” Since passing narratives are themselves devoted to unsettling binaries – racial binaries – this essay considers the marrying of the graphic novel and the passing narrative in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008). How, in other words, can what Scott McCloud terms “the art of the invisible” (comics) depict what Joel Williamson memorably calls “invisible blackness”?

The essay is particular interested in two aspects of Incognegro’s hybridity, one of which relates content, the other to form. First, in terms of content, the collaborators make several significant revisions to the comic book’s signature character, the superhero, amalgamating the conventions of the superhero story with those of passing narratives in order to destabilise some of both genres’ most telling assumptions. Second, in terms of formal devices, this essay examines the particular combination of visual and textual vocabularies deployed in Incognegro to portray the ambiguously-raced subject, comparing it to the ways in which such subjects have been racially-encoded in more conventional literary and cinematic narratives of passing. Ultimately, this essay considers whether Incognegro’s hybrid properties offer new political possibilities for the narrative of racial passing.

Read or purchase the article here.

Misty Copeland Is Helping To Bring Dance Lessons To Rwandan Kids

The Huffington Post
2015-11-25

Rahel Gebreyes, Editor, HuffPost Live

The dancer just returned from Kigali, Rwanda, where shared her love of dance with children in the city.

Ballerina Misty Copeland has made a name for herself breaking barriers for black dancers in the United States, and she’s taking her passion abroad to do the same in Rwanda.

This month, Copeland teamed up with MindLeaps, a nonprofit organization that brings dance instruction, vocational training and academics to the children of developing countries. Copeland traveled to Rwanda to launch the MindLeaps Girls Program and documented her journey via YouTube and Instagram.

Michael Eric Dyson Discusses His Cover Story on Hillary Clinton

The New Republic
Minutes
2015-11-27

Mikaela Lefrak, Associate Editor

“Obama will probably go down in history as one of the greatest presidents we’ve had. I just don’t think that the issue of race will earn him those kudos.” That’s professor Michael Eric Dyson’s opinion on the first black president of the United States. Dyson, a New Republic contributing editor, wrote “Yes She Can,” the cover story of our January/February issue. It’s an in-depth profile of Hillary Clinton and how she’s addressing race in America.

We sat down with Dyson to discuss some of the big issues discussed in the article. He talked with us about how Clinton can address race and gender, what President Obama has (and has not) done for black Americans, and which Republican presidential candidate would be the least bad option for the United States.