Mixed Race Studies

Inside The Five-Day Stretch When Obama Found His Voice On Race

FiveThirtyEight
2016-05-26

The number of Americans “greatly worried” about race relations hit an all-time low, 13 percent, the year after President Obama took office. Last month, Gallup recorded the opposite, an all-time high of 35 percent.

As Obama prepares to leave office, the conversation about his legacy will no doubt include his role in how Americans see race. In the latest in FiveThirtyEight’s podcast documentary series on key election moments, we go back to the first time in Obama’s presidential career that he addressed the country’s debate over race in a big way…

…Who you’ll hear from in the podcast

• Obama’s Team
  • David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist at the time
  • Jon Favreau, Obama’s speechwriter at the time
  • Valerie Jarrett, longtime adviser to the president
  • Marty Nesbitt, one of Obama’s closest friends
• Media Members
  • Brian Ross of ABC News, whose reporting set off the firestorm
  • Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson
  • Clips of Joe Scarborough, Diane Sawyer, Chris Cuomo, Chris Matthews, Katie Couric, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove
• Analysts
  • FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten
  • The Nation’s Kai Wright

Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.

You Can’t Go from Zero to ‘The Daily Show’: The Playboy Interview with Trevor Noah

Playboy
2016-05-19

David Hochman, Contributing Editor

Has there ever been a more auspicious moment to chase after clown cars on the road to the White House? Since bravely taking over for Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show last September, South African comedian Trevor Noah has watched American politics burble into a molten mess of a reality series that even Comedy Central would find too ludicrous to green-light. Then again, Noah did not campaign for the role of satirist in chief; it found him. In March of last year, he was in a taxi heading to an event in Dubai when his manager called to ask if he wanted the planet’s most coveted fake news-anchoring job. This, after appearing a mere three times as a Daily Show correspondent. As Noah said around the time to his friend and early champion Jerry Seinfeld, “I get out of the car, and my legs—I didn’t have legs.”

Thick skin is what he really needed. The instant the gig was announced, social media cried out with a collective “Who the fuck?” followed by a judge-y indictment over a handful of old Twitter barbs that painted the little-known comic as a menace to Jews, Ebola victims and “fat chicks.” It didn’t help that TV critics held Noah to crazy-high standards: not to Jon Stewart’s early days but to Stewart at the glorious end of a 16-year run. But the sharp-suited newcomer, now 32, settled in with polish and intelligence (and without issuing any apologies) and continues to build a following with a young, plugged-in crowd that no longer treats him like Job.

Trevor Noah was born in Johannesburg on February 20, 1984 and survived a lot worse than web controversy. He grew up in the final decade of apartheid with a white Swiss German father and a black Xhosa mother who never married because mixed-race marriage was illegal in that era. Noah spent his early years in a “whites only” neighborhood where his mom had to pretend she was the maid. (His dad would walk across the street from them “like a creepy pedophile,” Noah joked in one of his routines.) After the relationship dissolved, Noah and his mother moved in with family members in the black municipality of Soweto. Experiencing such contrasting worlds made him fluent in a range of cultures and languages, including six South African dialects, English and German…

…Eight years with a black man in the White House does not appear to have eased tensions around race.

This is hard to explain to white people, but the thing about race is that you can’t turn it off. If you’re black, you are constantly black and that blackness is always affecting you in some way or another. That’s a tough conversation to have, because it can be subtle. It’s often very small things, but they pile up. Cabdrivers don’t pick you up. It happens to me. Or you go into a corner store and get followed, or people say things about you. It’s often not blatant, but it’s entrenched in the system. Over time, it might change, but if you’re black in the United States, even after two terms of President Obama, you still feel black.

I think the benefit of a movement like Black Lives Matter is that people have seen the influence they can have by actively getting out and doing something about ending the silencing of a voice. It has been a fantastic proponent for new conversations about race, which is amazing…

Read the entire interview here.

Large Abroad | London poet laureate Raymond Antrobus staying true to Jamaican roots

The Gleaner
Kingston, Jamaica
2016-06-13

Andre Poyser

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus continues to be in strong contention to be named Young Poet Laureate for London – a position awarded annually to a poet age 21-30 living in the United Kingdom capital.

Antrobus, a second-generation Jamaican born and bred in East London, has been redefining what it means to be a poet in the 21st century through monologues, which Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes describes as stunning studies of voice and substance.

While he only visits Jamaica occasionally, the young poet says he owes his graceful and finely crafted lyric poems, another characterisation penned by Dawes, to his Jamaican heritage…

Read the entire article here.

The Changing Face of Whiteness

Truthout
2016-06-05

William C. Anderson

When Guido Menzio sat down on a regional jet for a short flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse, New York, he certainly couldn’t have guessed what was going to happen. The 40-year-old economist was profiled as a terror suspect for being focused too intently on a math problem. The differential equation he was working on was possibly mistaken for terrorist scrawlings by the nervous passenger next to him, who was concerned that Menzio wasn’t polite enough, looked suspicious and was too distracted by his foreign scribblings.

After delaying the flight and profiling Menzio, the media would soon report on the “Ivy League economist” who was “ethnically profiled” for doing math on a plane. Focal points of this story were Menzio’s whiteness as an Italian and his stature as an Ivy League economist — both of which should assure him no suspicion from authorities, unless he should be mistaken for a person of color. Amid the reverberating outcry around Menzio’s treatment, the fact that no one should be treated that way may have gotten lost. After all, the passenger followed what is protocol for many; she saw something and she said something. But what is it she saw? She saw someone she was scared of and someone who was possibly not white…

Read the entire article here…

Loving Day 2016

Hapa Happy Hour
2016-06-11

Tune in with Lisa and Hiwa as they discover technology and talk about race, Loving Day, films, and politics! And feel free to contact us through hapahappyhour@gmail.com. Happy Loving Day!

Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.

Race isn’t biologically real. That doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist.

Vox
2016-06-11

Victoria M. Massie

The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it exists. And in the latest episode of MTV’s Decoded, host Franchesca Ramsey breaks down exactly why being colorblind to someone’s race not only doesn’t fix racism but, if anything, she says, actually makes matters worse.

“Have you ever wondered why people say, ‘Oh, I don’t see color’ as a way to fix racism?” Ramsey asks. “Yeah, that doesn’t work.”

Sure, race is not biologically real. But Ramsey points out that resting on that argument alone is part of the problem…

Read the entire article here.

What You Didn’t Know About Loving v. Virginia

TIME
2016-06-10

Arica L. Coleman

The landmark civil rights Supreme Court case—which made it illegal to ban interracial marriage—was about more than black and white

When the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia, defendants Richard and Mildred Loving chose not to appear in person. In 1958, they had been convicted for the felony of miscegenation. As lawyers presented their arguments, 17 states remained steadfast in their refusal to repeal such laws banning interracial marriages. But, though he did not attend the arguments, Richard sent a message to the justices: “Tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.”

The justices unanimously agreed. On June 12, 1967, proscriptions against interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional.

In the years since, the couple’s victory has often been seen as a touchstone in the fight for black civil rights. The Lovings’ lawyer’s assertion before the court that anti-miscegenation statutes were “ the most odious of the segregation laws and the slavery laws” reinforced this assumption. As historian Peter Wallenstein aptly stated in his book Tell the Court I Love My Wife, “There was no doubt in anybody’s mind as to the racial identities, white and black, of the people who claimed to be Mr. and Mrs. Loving.”

But the Lovings’ public persona was more myth than reality. While researching my book That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia, I spoke to Mildred Loving, who died in 2008. “I am not black,” she told me during a 2004 interview. “I have no black ancestry. I am Indian-Rappahannock. I told the people so when they came to arrest me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race in Post-War German Cinema in Drama ‘Toxi’ (Video)

IndiWire
April 2016

Sergio

For anyone interested in foreign films, one of the most interesting periods of German filmmaking was the post war period between 1946 to the mid 1960’s.

In effect, only two types of films were being made: pure escapist film such as musicals and comedies that were designed to make the audience completely forget the ugly events of the recent past. And then there were films like “The Lost One,” “Germany Year Zero,” and “Murderers Among Us” which explicitly dealt with the aftermath of the horrors of World War II and Germany’s guilt and repercussions.

But of all the films, one of the most fascinating, and worthy of rediscovery, is the 1952 film “Toxi,” co-written and directed by Robert Stemmie, who was a major and very successful director of the period. It was one of the very few German films made then, and even now, which seriously tried to deal with race. No doubt a very touchy and controversial subject considering Germany’s Nazi “racial purity” agenda.

For years the film was very difficult to see. I first saw it a few years ago during a film series of post-war German films. However, the film was eventually remastered and released on DVD and is available from the DEFA Film Library DVD series at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The film centers around an abandoned German “occupation baby,” which was the term for children of U.S. soldiers (stationed in Germany after the war) and German women, who were abandoned by their parents. It was estimated that there were some 3000-5000 of these children, many of whom were biracial…

Read the entire article here.

The Face: Cartography of the Void

Restless Books
March 2016
96 pages
4.5 x 0.3 x 6 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1632060433

Chris Abani

In The Face: Cartography of the Void, acclaimed poet, novelist, and screenwriter Chris Abani has given us a brief memoir that is, in the best tradition of the genre, also an exploration of the very nature of identity. Abani meditates on his own face, beginning with his early childhood that was immersed in the Igbo culture of West Africa. The Face is a lush work of art that teems with original and profound insights into the role of race, culture, and language in fashioning our sense of self. Abani’s writing is poetic, filled with stories, jokes, and reflections that draw readers into his fold; he invites them to explore their own “faces” and the experiences that have shaped them.

As Abani so lovingly puts it, this extended essay contemplates “all the people who have touched my face, slapped it, punched it, kissed it, washed it, shaved it. All of that human contact must leave some trace, some of the need and anger that motivated that touch. This face is softened by it all. Made supple by all the wonder it has beheld, all the kindness, all the generosity of life. The Face is a gift to be read, re-read, shared, and treasured, from an author at the height of his artistic powers. Abani directs his gaze both inward and out toward the world around him, creating a self-portrait in which readers will also see their own faces reflected.

Sexual Relations Between Elite White Women and Enslaved Men in the Antebellum South: A Socio-Historical Analysis

Inquiries: Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities
2013, Volume 5, Number 8
pages 1-3

J. M. Allain

There is ample evidence of sexual relations, from rapes to what appear to be relatively symbiotic romantic partnerships, between white slave masters and black women in the Antebellum South. Much rarer were sexual relations between white women and black slave men, yet they too occurred. Using an intersectional socio-historical analysis, this paper explores the factors that contributed or may have contributed to the incidence of sexual encounters between elite white women and slave men, the power dynamics embedded in them, and their implications in terms of sexual consent. The paper demonstrates how upper-class white women who engaged in these relationships used sex as an instrument of power, simultaneously perpetuating both white supremacy and patriarchy.

Read the entire article here.