Mixed Race Studies

Jussie Smollett Talks About Growing Up in a Biracial Home and Pranking His ‘Empire’ Costars

ABC News
2016-04-08

Angela Williams, Entertainment TV Producer

There is lots of great music, loads of drama and plenty of surprises packed into each episode of Fox’s “Empire.” And much of it is centered around break-out star Jussie Smollett who plays singer/musician Jamal Lyon, son of fictitious music moguls Cookie and Luscious Lyon (played by Taraji P. Henson and Terrance Howard). It’s the role that has thrust Smollett into the spotlight – something he’s still wrapping his head around.

“I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday and I was just in a lunch meeting and then I look and there’s paparazzi out there taking pictures. And I’m like, ‘That’s so weird. It’s not normal,’” Smollett told ABC News. “At first you’re looking around, and you’re like, ‘Is One Direction here? Where’s Michael B. Jordan?’ And then you realize that they’re there for you. And I’m like, ‘There’s gotta be something better to do than follow me around,’” joked Smollett.

Smollett’s character is struggling to gain his father’s approval.

“And because he’s gay, Luscious, played by the great Terrance Howard, is not very supportive,” said Smollett. “He’s not happy. He’s not going on any marches with his son, let’s just say that. He ain’t gone be there.”

A gay, black man living in the world of hip-hop is a role rarely seen on prime-time television. But Smollett said he feels no added pressure on how he portrays the character…

…Smollett’s confidence likely stems from his upbringing. He grew up in a tight-knit family with a diverse background — his mother is African American and his father is Russian-Polish — and he’s one of six siblings.

“We’re a very close family, a functioning family, instead of dysfunctional – unlike the Lyons,” Smollett said. “No one’s ever loved me in spite of who I am. They’ve always loved me because of who I am.”…

Read the entire article here.

Allyson Hobbs discusses A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Monday, 2016-04-11, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University Allyson Hobbs discusses the paperback release of her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

About A Chosen Exile

Countless African Americans have passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and communities. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile. This history of passing explores the possibilities, challenges, and losses that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.

For more information, click here.

So here I am. I’m still black and I’m proud, but I will acknowledge the white blood that is running through my veins if pressed more about my heritage. I also love to see the shock on peoples’ faces when I tell them that my ancestors were raped by slave masters and my “mulatto” and “quadroon” ancestors kept mixing with other mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. It depends on the audience how deep I want to go.

Amal Gonzalez, “How To Identify With Your People When Your People Won’t Let You,” Swirl Nation Blog, March 30, 2016. http://www.swirlnationblog.com/blog/2016/3/30/how-to-identify-with-your-people-when-your-people-wont-let-you.

Toward building a conceptual framework on intermarriage

Ethnicities
Volume 16, Number 4, August 2016
pages 497-520
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638402

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmö University, Sweden; Sophia University, Japan

Nahikari Irastorza, Marie Curie Research Fellow
Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare
Malmö University, Sweden

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Increasing migration worldwide and the cultural diversity generated as a consequence of international migration has facilitated the unions of people from different countries, religions, races, and ethnicities. Such unions are often celebrated as a sign of integration; however, at the same time as they challenge people’s idea of us and them, intermarriages in fact still remain controversial, and even to some extent, taboo in many societies. Research and theorizing on intermarriage is conducted predominantly in the English-speaking North American and British contexts. This special issue includes empirical studies from not only the English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, and the UK, but also from Japan, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Spain and demonstrate the increasingly diverse directions taken in the study of intermarriage in regards to the patterns, experiences, and social implications of intermarriages. Moreover, the articles address the assumed link between intermarriage and “integration.”

Read or purchase the article here.

How To Identify With Your People When Your People Won’t Let You

Swirl Nation Blog
2016-03-30

Amal Gonzalez

This is very hard for me to write because I don’t know how to begin.

I’ve written about being racially ambiguous. Growing up in a predominantly white environment without real examples of people who are mixed-raced in the media made me “other”, but definitely not white, or at least not 100% white. I’ve written about my parents both being mixed-race, but because of the one-drop-rule, they were black and never were allowed, or even compelled to identify as anything other than black. My dad definitely “looks” like he has African blood flowing through his veins – full lips, coarse, kinky hair, and a slightly broader nose. My mother, on the other hand, has been identified as Latina, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Jewish. She has naturally soft hair, an angular nose, fairer skin, not pale. However, my mother grew up with 6 black sisters in a white rural town in California. Everyone knew her family and she was reminded she was black every day.

So you can only imagine, when it came to raising me and my sisters, we were told about our white relatives. We were told about our family members we will probably never meet because they decided to “pass” during a time when being white was truly a privilege. BUT we never identified with being white or bi-racial. It was always people around me that pointed out my differences, the “other”. It was society that pointed out that I didn’t necessarily fit in one category based on my physical appearance…

Read the entire article here.

Meet Yosif Stalin, The Soviet-Born Black American From Kremlin, Virginia

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
2016-04-08

Carl Schrek

KREMLIN, Virginia — Yosif Stalin stood before his Kremlin home on a windswept afternoon this spring, his weathered hands gripping his walker. “I still own it,” he said of the white, two-story house off a lonely country road.

It’s no coincidence that this octogenarian was named after one of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictators, but it’s just half of his name. His full name is Yosif Stalin Kim Roane, and he was the first child of African-American parents ever born in the Soviet Union.

“Didn’t nobody pay that no mind,” Roane said of his notorious namesake in a recent interview with RFE/RL. “They mostly called me Joe.”

Roane, 84, is among the few living offspring of African-Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s to seek a better life in the nascent communist state.

Most of these voyagers were driven by political convictions or economic hardship amid the Great Depression and pernicious racism in the United States, including the segregationist Jim Crow laws of the American South.

That Roane was born in an empire run from the Kremlin and grew up in this tiny Virginia hamlet of the same name is a coincidence that inspired the title of a recent documentary, Kremlin To Kremlin, aimed at preserving the record of his family’s remarkable journey for future generations…

Read the entire article here.

The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed

The Guardian
2016-04-04

Paul Mason

Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies … a scene from the film Kes. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Thatcherism didn’t just crush the unions, it crushed a story – as the report that says working-class white children go backwards at school proves

The report came couched in the usual language of inclusion, technocracy and “what works”. Disadvantaged children are doing so badly at school that only one in five hits an international benchmark designed by the authors.

But the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids…

Read the entire article here.

The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race

Oxford University Press
2016-02-18
192 Pages
7 Black and white
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199386260

Carlos Hoyt, Jr.

• It is written by a person who is intimately familiar with living as an adversely racialized person
• It introduces readers to the non-racial worldview
• It provides first-person narratives of people commonalty ascribed to the black/African American racial category who eschew racial identification altogether.
• It furnishes the concept of racialization as the antidote to normalizing race as a naturally and unavoidable aspect of identity.
• It explains essentialism
• It reconciles the seeming conflict between race-conscious and color-blind ideologies
• It provides a way beyond the problems of race that plague this country

For the vast majority of human existence we did without the idea of race. Since its inception a mere few hundred years ago, and despite the voluminous documentation of the problems associated with living within the racial worldview, we have come to act as if race is something we cannot live without. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race presents a penetrating, provocative, and promising analysis of and alternative to the hegemonic racial worldview. How race came about, how it evolved into a natural-seeming aspect of human identity, and how racialization, as a habit of the mind, can be broken is presented through the unique and corrective framing of race as a time-bound (versus eternal) concept, the lifespan of which is traceable and the demise of which is predictable. The narratives of individuals who do not subscribe to racial identity despite be ascribed to the black/African American racial category are presented as clear and compelling illustrations of how a non-racial identity and worldview is possible and arguably preferable to the status quo. Our view of and approach to race (in theory, pedagogy, and policy) is so firmly ensconced in a sense of it as inescapable and indispensible that we are in effect shackled to the lethal absurdity we seek to escape. Theorist, teachers, policy-makers and anyone who seeks a transformative perspective on race and racial identity will be challenged, enriched, and empowered by this refreshing treatment of one of our most confounding and consequential dilemmas.

Table of Contents

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Lethal Absurdity De Jour
• PART I: UNDERSTANDING RACE
  • 1. Simile, Metaphors and Analogs for Race
  • 2. Same World, Different Worldviews: Not ALL the Black Kids Sat Together in the Cafeteria
  • 3. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Race and Racialization in Five Epochs
• PART II: TRANSCENDING RACE
  • 4. Who Are The Race Transcenders? Narratives of Non-racial Identity Development
  • 5. Race Transcendence, Race Consciousness and Post-race
• PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE NONRACIAL WORLDVIEW
  • 6. Race Without Reification: Pedagogy, Practice and Policy from a Non-racial Perspective
  • 7. Beyond the Panopticon: Liberating the Tragic Essentialist and Promoting Racial Disobedience
• Appendixes:
  • Appendix A: Pre-interview Background Information Form
  • Appendix B: Semi-structured Open-ended Interview Questions and Interview Domains Matrix
• References
• Index

Of association, assimilation and mixed-race marriages

Oman Daily Observer
2016-03-21

Ali Ahmed Al Riyami

It is said that ‘love knows no bounds’ and, as such, when two people meet and fall in love there is little that can stop there union and all that it entails; especially the expected outcome, which is in fact the main reason that a man and a woman conjoin in the first place — whether consciously or unconsciously — of producing offspring and securing their gene pools. In a world that has seen the mass movement and migrations of people, across boarders and continents, it is not surprising, then, that the incidence of mixed marriages between people of different national and cultural origins, faiths and creeds takes place.

In Britain, it is reported that one in ten marriages is by a mixed race couple; something almost unimaginable and very rare just a few decades ago and yet, as the figures show, is becoming quite commonplace…

Read the entire article here.