Mixed Race Studies

The PEN Ten with Mat Johnson

PEN American Center
2015-03-17

Randa Jarrar

The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, guest editor Randa Jarrar talks with Mat Johnson, the author of Pym and the graphic novel Incognegro. His upcoming novel, Loving Day, will be published by Spiegiel & Grau on May 26. Johnson is a Full Professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

When did being a writer begin to inform your sense of identity?

Oh sweet lord, I don’t know. When people started to treat me with respect and stop reacting to me like I was a big goon asshole? That part’s nice. Not to be a twit and turn the question around just to show you how deep I am, but it’s kinda been the other way around. I already had an identity, writing allowed me to clear a place in the world for it to exist. I’m a 6’4”, 230 lbs guy who looks like a Latvian rugby player, but I’m actually a black man of biracial descent. On the page, with Incognegro and Pym, and this new one Loving Day, I created a place for myself, so the world can see me coming…

…What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?

This whole damn book I just wrote, Loving Day. I spent the first decades of my life overcompensating for my whitish appearance within the black community, rejecting mixed identity as an escape plan for self-hating blacks of mixed descent. Then as an adult, I slowly began seeing the merits of self-identifying as biracial, and eventually the need for it, despite larger ambivalence to it in the larger black community. So I was petrified to actually talk about this directly in my new novel. I know some old allies are not going to be happy. But art shouldn’t be about making people happy, or confirming their existing ideas. I had to say this, my truth. This book is my coming out as a mulatto…

Read the entire interview here.

Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America – Book Review

National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA)
2016-04-04

Shauna Harris

Rockquemore, Kerry Ann and David L. Brunsma, Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (Second Edition) (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

Beyond Black is a groundbreaking study that used both interview and survey data of young black/white individuals that sought to understand the meaning of being racially mixed in the United States by providing a theoretical and methodical analysis of racial identity for multiracial individuals in post-civil rights America.

Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David Brunsma document the comprehensive range of racial identities of individuals that have one Black and one White parent and provide a sociological explanation of the identity choices facing those who are racially mixed. The purpose of focusing on black/white racially mixed individuals stems from the fact these two groups still have the most social and spatial separation in the United States. Racial categorization among black/white individuals still poses continuing questions about how racially mixed individuals construct their identity and the constant use of the one-drop rule to identity multiracial individuals as black…

Read the entire review here.

The New Jewish Diaspora?

Forward
2016-04-28

Sam Kestenbaum
Shavei Israel

For centuries, world travelers dreamed of finding distant Jewish tribes in the faraway corners of their known world — over the mountains, in remote villages, practicing customs preserved in isolation.
Today, a quick Google search will do.

In Facebook groups and on Skype, on Whatsapp and Instagram, communities from Africa, Asia and the Americas gather to explore Judaism — and, as many see it, to rekindle ancestral connections to their ancient faith.

Individuals and communities have emerged in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, China, India, Spain, Peru, Portugal and elsewhere. Estimates vary about the numbers of broadly defined “emerging” communities — and range at the upper end in the millions.

Is this the Jewish Diaspora of the 21st century?

That’s the question that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is now considering. The State of Israel, for the most part, has kept many of these groups at a distance, wary of making blanket decisions and of parsing out each community’s complicated ancestral claims or individual religious practice…

Read the entire article here.

The Digital Afterlife of Lost Family Photos

On Photography
The New York Times Magazine
2016-04-26

Teju Cole

The backs of found photos from the writer’s “Mrs. X” collection. Credit Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

The photographs were Polaroids, taken between the 1970s and the 2000s. Zun Lee bought them at flea markets, at garage sales or on eBay. Most of them depicted African-Americans: people wearing stylish clothes, relaxing in the yard, celebrating birthdays. A few depicted people in prison uniforms. All the photographs had somehow been separated from their original owners and had become what Lee calls “orphaned Polaroids.”

Found photographs have long been important to artists like Lee. Photos taken by amateurs can sometimes acquire new value on account of their uniqueness, their age or simply the knowledge that they were once meaningful to a stranger. As part of a group, they can evoke a collector’s sensibility or tell us something about a historical period in a way professional photographs might not. For Lee, collecting found photographs of African-­Americans — a project he called “Fade Resistance” — had an additional and deeply personal meaning.

Lee was raised in Germany by Korean parents. In his 30s, his mother told him that the man who raised him was not his biological father. But because her relationship with that man, who was black, had been fleeting, she refused to tell her son more about him. This revelation, at once momentous and limited, changed Lee’s life. To make sense of his personal loss, and to explore his connectedness to black America, he took up photography. I became friends with Lee around the time he began making pictures of black fathers and their children in the Bronx and elsewhere; that project led to a book, “Father Figure,” for which I wrote a preface. Later, Lee began to collect the Polaroids — thousands of them — that ended up in “Fade Resistance.”…

Read the entire article here.

Malia Bouattia’s tactics will define her leadership of NUS

Wonkhe: Higher education: policy, people and politics.
London, England, United Kingdom
2016-04-26

Debbie McVitty, Director of Policy
University of Bedfordshire

Last week’s election of Malia Bouattia as the next President of the National Union of Students (NUS) has split the commentariat, with some celebrating the fact that she is both the first Muslim and the first Black female President of NUS, and others pointing to her record of expressing political views that some have interpreted as anti-Semitism. Over the weekend, Bouattia has sought to offer explanations and context for her comments, but in the meantime, several students’ unions have expressed their intention to disaffiliate from NUS as a consequence of her presidency. What is the higher education sector to make of all this?…

Read the entire article here.

The Life and Work of Doctor-Turned-Photographer Zun Lee

PetaPixel
2016-02-13

Michael Zhang, Founder & Co-Editor

By day, Zun Lee is a doctor in Toronto, Canada. When he’s not working, he’s often unwinding from stress with a camera in hand. As a self-taught photographer, his documentary and street projects have caught the eye of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Magnum, and more.

The 8-minute video above by Format’s InFrame is an inspiring look at Lee’s life and work.

Lee first got into photography in 2009 after a colleague gifted him with a camera…

Read the entire article here.

At Yale, a Right That Doesn’t Outweigh a Wrong

The New York Times
2016-04-29

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V & C Vann Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

NEW HAVEN — Yale made a grievous mistake this week when it announced that it would keep the name of an avowed white supremacist, John C. Calhoun, on a residential college, despite decades of vigorous alumni and student protests. The decision to name residential colleges for Benjamin Franklin and Anna Pauline Murray, a black civil rights activist, does nothing to redeem this wrong.

It is not a just compromise to split the difference between Calhoun and Murray; there should be no compromise between such stark contrasts in values. The decision to retain the Calhoun name continues the pain inflicted every day on students who live in a dormitory named for a man distinguished by being one of the country’s most egregious racists.

To be sure, there’s something noteworthy about the contrast between these two figures who now sit across campus from each other. Although they lived in different centuries, Calhoun in the 19th, and Murray in the 20th, in many ways, she lived in — and fought against — the world that he built.

Calhoun, a Yale graduate, congressman and the seventh vice president of the United States, owned dozens of slaves in Fort Hill, S.C. Murray grew up in poverty in Durham, N. C., as the granddaughter of an enslaved woman. Calhoun championed slavery as a “positive good”; Murray’s great-grandmother was raped by her slave master. Calhoun profited immensely from the labor of the enslaved people on his plantation; Murray was a radical labor activist in Harlem during the Great Depression…

Read the entire article here.

Raising mixed race kids

Special Broadcasting Service Corporation
Melbourne, Australia
2016-04-27

Ian Rose

The prospect of a family holiday has Ian Rose reflecting on the pleasures of bringing up mixed-race children, and the responsibility to keep them in touch with both cultures.

Let’s get this out there straight away. I am a pom. An unreconstructed, unapologetic, dyed-in-the-wool Englishman. I take tea in the morning, consider any code of football using a non-round ball to be knuckle-headed frippery, and I will automatically apologise if you stand on my foot.

Eight years and counting down-under has not made the slightest dent in my pomminess.

I was brought here by the love of an endlessly patient Vietnamese-Australian woman, a love that has borne hybrid fruit in the form of two children, now aged an exhausting five and six. They’re Aussie. But they’re English, too. And Vietnamese.

So this year, to connect them with that side of their heritage, we’ve decided to take a family holiday to Vietnam.

“Hey, kids,” I announce at the dinner table, partly to distract the boy from his greens.

“Guess where we’re going on holiday? To Vietnam! Yaaaaay!”

My daughter’s face falls into a gurn of displeasure.

“Awww,” she laments, “why can’t we go to England?”…

Read the entire article here.