Mixed Race Studies

When Skin Privilege and Racial Belonging Collide

(not) Mixed (up): A Biracial Swirl in a Black and White World
2016-01-25

Shannon Luders-Manuel

I’ve been thinking a lot about color / race privilege and why it’s such a hot button issue for the biracial community. In a Facebook group that I moderate, for mixed race women of African-American or African descent, members have been arguing about issues related to color privilege and mulitiracial privilege: a) whether these are separate privileges, b) whether monoracial people also have privilege, c) whether the biracial / mixed race community should shoulder privileges even though we didn’t ask for them, d) whether the black community uses color privilege and multiracial privilege as a way to silence multiracial voices.

For anyone not familiar with the recent discussion around privileges, most noticeably white privilege, this vlog is an excellent place to start…

…So why is it so hard for us in the multiracial community, and those with light-skinned privilege, to accept these realities without feeling defensive? Are we just reacting the same way some people do when confronted with white privilege, or does it go deeper?…

Read the entire article here.

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race

Wiley
January 2015
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-118-95872-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-119-24198-0
E-book ISBN: 978-1-118-95965-7

Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology and Education
Columbia University, New York, New York

Turn Uncomfortable Conversations into Meaningful Dialogue

If you believe that talking about race is impolite, or that “colorblindness” is the preferred approach, you must read this book. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence debunks the most pervasive myths using evidence, easy-to-understand examples, and practical tools.

This significant work answers all your questions about discussing race by covering:

• Characteristics of typical, unproductive conversations on race
• Tacit and explicit social rules related to talking about racial issues
• Race-specific difficulties and misconceptions regarding race talk
• Concrete advice for educators and parents on approaching race in a new way

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• SECTION ONE: THE CHARACTERISTICS, DYNAMICS, AND MEANING OF RACE TALK
  • CHAPTER ONE What Is Race Talk?
    • Race Talk Represents a Potential Clash of Racial Realities
    • Race Talk Pushes Emotional Hot Buttons
    • Race Talk Evokes Avoidance Strategies
    • Why Is Successful Race Talk Important?
  • CHAPTER TWO The Characteristics and Dynamics of Race Talk
    • What Are Characteristics of Race Talk?
    • How Do Societal Ground Rules (Norms) Impede Race Talk?
    • Why Is Race Talk So Difficult and Uncomfortable for Participants?
    • Conclusions
  • CHAPTER THREE The Stories We Tell: White Talk Versus Back Talk
    • Race Talk: Narratives and Counter-Narratives
    • Telling on Racism: Unmasking Ugly Secrets
• SECTION TWO: THE CONSTRAINING GROUND RULES FOR RACE TALK
  • CHAPTER FOUR “The Entire World’s a Stage!”
    • The Politeness Protocol and Race Talk
    • The Academic Protocol and Race Talk
  • CHAPTER FIVE Color-Blind Means Color-Mute
    • Color-Evasion: “We Are All the Same Under the Skin”
    • Stereotype-Evasion: “I Don’t Believe in Those Stereotypes”
    • Power-Evasion: “Everyone Can Make It in Society, If They Work Hard Enough”
    • Myth of the Melting Pot
• SECTION THREE: WHY IS IT DIFFICULT FOR PEOPLE OF COLOR TO HONESTLY TALK ABOUT RACE?
  • CHAPTER SIX “What Are the Consequences for Saying What I Mean?”
    • Ethnocentric Monoculturalism
    • Power and Oppression
  • CHAPTER SEVEN “To Speak or How to Speak, That Is the Question”
    • Communication Styles
    • Nonverbal Communication
    • Nonverbal Communication in Race Talk: Sociopolitical Considerations
    • Being Constrained and Silenced: Impact on People of Color
    • Conclusions
• SECTION FOUR: WHY IS IT DIFFICULT FOR WHITE PEOPLE TO HONESTLY TALK ABOUT RACE?
  • CHAPTER EIGHT “I’m Not Racist!”
    • Cognitive Avoidance—Racism Denial
    • Emotional Avoidance—Fear, Guilt, and Other Feelings
    • Behavioral Avoidance—Helplessness and Hopelessness
    • Emotional Roadblocks to Race Talk
  • CHAPTER NINE “I’m Not White; I’m Italian!”
    • What Does It Mean to Be White?
    • The Invisibility of Whiteness: What Does It Mean?
    • The Fear of Owning White Privilege
    • Fear of Taking Personal Responsibility to End Racism: Moving From Being Nonracist to Becoming Antiracist
• SECTION FIVE: RACE TALK AND SPECIAL GROUP CONSIDERATIONS
  • CHAPTER TEN Interracial/Interethnic Race Talk: Difficult Dialogues Between Groups of Color
    • Interracial/Interethnic Relationship Issues
    • Race Talk: Fears of Divide and Conquer
    • Sources of Conflict Between People of Color
  • CHAPTER ELEVEN Race Talk and White Racial Identity Development: For Whites Only
    • Developing a Nonracist and Antiracist Racial Identity
    • White Racial Identity Development and Race Talk
• SECTION SIX: GUIDELINES, CONDITIONS, AND SOLUTIONS FOR HAVING HONEST RACIAL DIALOGUES
  • CHAPTER TWELVE Being an Agent of Change: Guidelines for Educators, Parents, and Trainers
    • Talking to Children About Race and Racism
    • Guidelines for Taking Personal Responsibility for Change
  • CHAPTER THIRTEEN Helping People Talk About Race: Facilitation Skills for Educators and Trainers
    • Ineffective Strategies: Five Things Not to Do
    • Successful Strategies: Eleven Potentially Positive Actions
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index

Artist Phoebe Boswell explores what ‘home’ is, migration, family and Kenya’s troubled past

True Africa
2015-11-05

Phoebe Boswell is one of the most exciting young artists working today. Her moving-image installation, The Matter of Memory, was exhibited at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery in London in 2014 alongside John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome. She is involved in Paul Goodwin’s African Diaspora Artists of the 21st Century project and is currently collaborating with Binyavanga Wainaina on a digital literary project called Since Everything Suddens in the Hurricane.

Her work mainly focuses on ‘transient middle points and passages of migration’, hardly surprising given her upbringing. She was born in Kenya, she spent most of her childhood in the Middle East before coming to London where she now lives and works. She took some time to tell us about her exhibition at the Gothenburg Biennale where she recreated her grandmother’s living room and what’s next for her.

Could you tell us about the Gothenburg Biennale and your piece?

The theme of GIBCA this year is A Story Within a Story, a title allows us as artists the opportunity to really play with the construction of storytelling. Elvira Dyangani Ose is at the curatorial helm of GIBCA and has offered us this title with the aim of contesting history, of rewriting it from new and perhaps previously silenced vantage points.

Curatorially, she has brought together works that seek to re-examine and possibly debunk predetermined histories, histories constructed in stuffy seats of power in order to control the collective memory of who we are, where we are, why we are, and how we came to be. The question she and the Biennale are asking the audience is: ‘If you could rewrite history, what would you do?’ It’s a very participatory experience. It’s a Biennale full of works which demand the audience to be active.

The Matter of Memory Courtesy of GIBCA ©Hendrik Zeitler

My piece in it is an immersive installation called The Matter of Memory. Within the Hasselblad Centre of the Gothenburg Art Museum, I have recreated my grandmother’s living room and filled the fabric of it – its wallpaper, teacups, milk pots, lamps, mantelpiece etc – with drawings, props, sculptures, sound and animated projections based on stories my Kikuyu mother and fourth generation British Kenyan father told me of their childhood memories of ‘home’…

Read the entire interview here.

Review ‘Democracy in Black’ is a bracing call to action for African Americans

The Los Angeles Times
2016-01-21

Kiese Laymon, Professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown, 2016)

“We laud our democratic virtues to others and represent ourselves to the world as a place of freedom and equality,” Eddie Glaude writes of the U.S. in his unflinching new book, “Democracy in Black,” “all while our way of life makes possible choices that reproduce so much evil, and we don’t see it happening — or worse, we don’t want to know about it.”

Glaude’s “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul” is as narratively unrelenting as it is thematically percussive, calling for black Americans to take dramatic action in our lives, voting booths and on the streets to contend with a “value gap” that has left African Americans behind socially and economically.

On Jan. 13, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, delivered a boastful State of the Union rooted in American exceptionalism, the importance of political cooperation and predictably, what we have, will, and can do to our enemies with our big American guns. Eight days earlier, Obama had held a press conference during which he cried over the murders of 30 American children and countless others victims of citizens wielding small American guns.

I watched both political spectacles, knowing that while the violent, often racist American weight on President’s Obama’s back has been so terrifyingly heavy, the violent, exceptional American weight that he and all American presidents must abusively wield is heavier. “Democracy in Black,” one of the most imaginative, daring books of the 21st century, effectively argues that this weight — rooted in American exceptionalism — impedes a national reckoning of how the racial “value gap” in our nation sanctions black Americans terror while providing systemic unearned value to white Americans.

The book asks us to reconsider not simply what presidential tears for systemic violence initiated and condoned by our nation might look like, but what can a revolution fueled by politically active black Americans wholly disinterested in presidential tears, speeches or “post-racial” policy actually accomplish. In this way, the book is not just post-Obama; it is post-presidential…

Read the entire review here.

Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

Crown
2016-01-12
288 Pages
6-1/4 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780804137416
Ebook ISBN: 9780804137423

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies
Princeton University

A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society

America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency—at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we’ve solved America’s race problem.

Democracy in Black is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America–and offers thoughts on a better way forward. Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.

Documenting the UK’s Black and Mixed Race Gingers

Vice
2105-08-24

Natasha Culzac

Francis Johnson by Michelle Marshall

How would you describe a typical redhead? Do you think of Julianne Moore: light skinned and beautiful, with rust-coloured hair and a flush of crimson through her porcelain cheeks? Or do you think of Ed Sheeran?

Either way, it’s likely the redhead in your mind is white. Red hair is mainly considered the preserve of northern Europe, a Celtic-Germanic trait. This is what resulted in London-based photographer Michelle Marshall’s quest to capture as many Afro Caribbean redheads as possible as part of her project, MC1R.

MC1R, or Melanocortin 1 receptor if you’re feeling fancy, is the gene responsible for red hair. Mutations in it can cause various degrees of pigmentation. It’ll either work “properly”, causing your hair to get darker, or it will become dysfunctional, not activate and then fail to turn red pigment to brown, causing a build up of red pigment and thus, red hair…

…Dr George Busby from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics agrees. He says that the red hair and freckles is the likely result of the historical interactions between Europeans and Africans in the formation of the Caribbean populations – most notably with Brits, as the Spanish and Portuguese went to South America.

George states: “This might also explain why you occasionally see red hair on a black Caribbean person who has two black parents. By chance alone, it might be that they are both carrying a European mutation which has come together in their child.”

Most of Michelle’s subjects have been in the UK, though she’s had a lot of interest in the US and some in mainland Europe. “I’ve got the whole of London on this,” she laughs, when describing her army of spotters…

Read the entire article here.

There’s no such thing as half-white or half-black. There’s no such thing as equality in America.

Amber Rambharose, “My Whiteness And My Blackness Are Not Reconcilable.” RaceBaitR, August 25, 2015. http://racebaitr.com/2015/08/25/my-whiteness-and-my-blackness-are-not-reconcilable/.

A Tale of Two Dinners

The Moth: True Stories Told Live
Added: 2015-05-12
Recorded: 1999-04-19

Bliss Broyard

A daughter discovers her father’s painstakingly kept secret.

Listen to the episode here.

Call for Mixed Race Interviewees

Mixed Race Feminist Blog
2016-01-23

Nicola Codner

I am currently looking for mixed race people to take part in interviews for Mixed Race Feminist Blog. The aim of these interviews is to help mixed race people share their experiences without censoring and also to help them promote any work that they wish to (such as blogs, artwork and so on).

You can see recent examples of previous interviews on the blog below:

• “A Mixed Race Feminist Blog Interview with TaRessa Stovall” (2016-01-22)
• “A Mixed Race Feminist Blog Interview with Isabel Adonis” (2016-01-15)

All mixed race perspectives are welcome! The blog is currently lacking the following voices at the moment for interviews, which are encouraged: male, LGBTQIA, non-black/ white racial mix, non-American, people in their early to mid-twenties, people living with disabilities and/or mental health issues.

If you are interested in taking part or have any questions about the interviews, please contact me at: nicolacodner@yahoo.com

My Whiteness And My Blackness Are Not Reconcilable.

RaceBaitR
2015-08-25

Amber Rambharose, Associate Editor
xoJane

Almost any given object can be split in half with each half making up 50% of whole.

I can only think of one exception.

When someone asks if I am half black or half white, I don’t want to give the comfortable response they are looking for. Any answer would imply that my Whiteness and Blackness are equal. Any answer would feel like a betrayal.

It’s a stupid question…

Read the entire article here.