Mixed Race Studies

On Becoming Black, Becoming White and Being Human: Rachel Dolezal and the Fluidity of Race

Truthdig
2015-06-18

Channing G. Joseph

Library of Congress

For decades, no one knew my cousin Ernest Torregano was black. At least, no one who mattered in his new life.

Not the clients or associates of the prominent bankruptcy law firm with which he had built his reputation and his fortune. Not the other members of the San Francisco Planning Commission, of which he had been president. And certainly not the mayor, Elmer Robinson, with whom Ernest had been close since their days as fresh new lawyers in the city. It is quite likely, I think, that Ernest never admitted, even to Pearl, his second wife of 30 years, that she had married an African-American man.

Few understood the true extent of my cousin’s labyrinth of secrets until he was already dead and buried. By then, he had successfully “passed for white” for more than 40 years.

When his only child, Gladys Stevens, learned that her father had not died in 1915 but had been alive until 1954, she filed suit to claim her share of his estate—worth about $300,000 then, or about $2.6 million today. After a protracted legal battle to prove she really was Ernest’s daughter, she won. Meanwhile, her story—and Ernest’s—made national headlines for nearly seven years. One Oklahoma newspaper announced: “Widow Claims Rich Lawyer Was Really Her Negro Father.” A Connecticut paper proclaimed: “Daughter’s Suit Reveals Double Life of Man Who Passed Over Color Line.” But Newsweek magazine’s headline captured the essence of the story in just three words: “The Second Man.”

Born into a mixed-race family in New Orleans in 1882, the First Man was the fair-skinned son of a white father and a mixed-race mother. And because he so loved to sing and to laugh and to travel, he joined a touring minstrel troupe, performing in blackface makeup for cheering crowds across the South. In that show, he met Viola, who played the guitar, and they married. After their daughter, Gladys, was born, the First Man took a job as a Pullman porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad line from New Orleans to San Francisco—to make a better living for his new family. But at some point along the way—perhaps as he gazed through a train car window at the countryside rolling by or as he wandered along Market Street among white people who did not sneer at him or call him “boy”—he decided he would never return home. (According to one account, his mother, who supported the idea of his passing, convinced him that Viola and Gladys had been killed and that he should forget them forever.)…

Read the entire article here.

The Greatest, Muhammad Ali, was very proud of his Irish roots

Irish Central
2016-06-04

Niall O’Dowd, Founder

Muhammad Ali arrives at Turnpike Road in Ennis, County Clare, the location of the birthplace of his great grandfather Abe O’Grady, with his wife Yolanda (lonnie) right, in 2009. Photo by: Photocall Ireland/Eamonn Farrell/RollingNews.ie

The death of boxing legend Muhammad Ali at 74 from Parkinson’s will bring back many glorious memories of the greatest athlete of our times.

At his height Ali was the most graceful, talented and brilliant heavyweight boxers who ever stepped inside the ropes.

Though incapacitated by Parkinson’s in later life, he always managed to retain the star power and unique presence that always distinguishes the greatest…

…Ali was more than a boxer of course, he was a fighter who refused to become cannon fodder in the Vietnam War the greatest mistaken war America entered until the invasion of Iraq. He was also a poet, a showman, a lover of many women, a devout Muslim, simply a legend.

Ali’s stance to end the Vietnam War when he refused to be drafted cost us the best years of his sporting life. He came back still a brilliant boxer, but the man who could float like a butterfly could never quite recover that greatness.

Still the fights with Joe Frazier the” rope a dope” that saw him defeat George Foreman in Zaire in the “Rumble in the Jungle” will forever enshrine his name in history.

The astonishing fact that he had Irish roots, being descended from Abe Grady, an Irishman from Ennis, County Clare only became known later in life…

Read the entire article here.

This web series asks black women around the world to explain what beauty means to them

Fusion
2016-06-02

Tahirah Hairston

Courtesy of Un-Ruly

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s not the impression you’d get from flipping through a fashion magazine. The images we see in mainstream media every day suggest that there’s only one way to be beautiful: white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, thin body. Not only do these ideals exclude women of color altogether, but they also reinforce the troubling idea that you should change your hair, skin color, or body to be a part of the club.

But thanks to social media and the internet, there are new gatekeepers changing the conversation about what it means to be beautiful, practicing inclusive representation, and creating places to explore, talk, and educate. Antonia Opiah is one of them. In 2013, she started launched her hair blog and e-commerce site Un-ruly, which has everything from hair commentary, styling tips and recommendations for products to buy. It was in creating this website that Opiah became comfortable in her own skin and hair…

Read the entire interview here.

Social-practice art challenges the status quo

The Winnipeg Free Press
2016-05-30

Alison Gillmor, Writer – Arts and Life

From KC Adams’ Perception series, 2014-15.

Adams’ portraits blend personal, political

Even if you don’t regularly visit art galleries, you probably saw some of KC Adams’ work in the weeks following the notorious Maclean’s magazine article that labelled Winnipeg “Canada’s most racist city.”

Perception, a photographic series the visual artist started in 2014, was all over the place, challenging stereotypes about indigenous people from bus shelters, billboards, and across social media.

Using black-and-white photographic diptychs, Adams shot each of her subjects twice. In the first image, the faces are accompanied with ugly words such as “Squaw,” “Victim” and “Government Mooch.” In the second image, the subjects — usually looking much happier — offer up their own descriptions of themselves (“golfer,” “homeowner,” “taxpayer,” “father,” “mother,” “sundancer”). The two-part images are straight-up, immediate and effective.

Adams, who is of Cree, Ojibway, Scottish, and English descent, was thrilled to see the works on city streets, where average Winnipeggers might view them while waiting for a bus, grabbing some lunch or going to a Jets game. “(Perception) is not geared toward the art world,” Adams explains. “It’s geared toward the public.”…

Read the entire article here.

#myLovingDay: How the Lovings’ trials paved the way for today’s multiracial families

The Los Angeles Times
2016-06-03

Michelle Maltais

Mildred and Richard Loving, convicted in Virginia of marrying while interracial. (Associated Press)

I like to say that I am because of Loving. Mildred and Richard Loving.

In the early 1970s when my parents met, the only laws that really mattered in their relationship were the laws of attraction. But in 1958 when Mildred and Richard married, interracial marriage wasn’t just complicated, it was illegal. Since they couldn’t get married in their home state of Virginia (or 24 other states), they went to the District of Columbia and were wed on June 2, 1958…

…My own “Loving” story started in the early ’70s in Palm Desert, Calif. At that time, no one else in my neighborhood  —  or in my school —  looked like me. No one’s family looked like mine.

Was California in the early 1970s anything like the South of the ‘50s and ‘60s? Not at all…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review: Mixed-race youth and schooling: the fifth minority

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2016-06-01
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2016.1190852

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
University of Leeds

Mixed-race youth and schooling: the fifth minority, by Sandra Winn Tutwiler, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016, xv + 241 pp., £29.95 (paperback), ISBN-13 978-1138021938

Mixed-race youth and schooling offers a welcome contribution to a sparse area of academic inquiry. Making the case that as a group mixed-race individuals are constitutive of the ‘fifth minority’ in the United States, the book is interested in the schooling of children of ’minority/non-minority’ and ‘minority/minority’ parents.

With a primary target audience of school teachers and educationalists, the book of nine chapters is divided into three sections. Section one considers how race constitutes a determinant factor in lived experiences in the United States, and how this implicates mixed-race individuals particularly. In section two, Winn Tutwiler turns to look at how mixed-race children interact with their families, peers, communities and schools and how these interactions impact upon schooling experiences. The third and final section of the book focuses on how mixedness is constructed in the school, and by teachers. This section concludes by outlining how schooling environments can be supportive of mixed-race students.

Chapter one looks at the emergence and permanence of race, white supremacy, and the racial stratification of society. The chapter refutes notions that race is reducible to class before beginning to probe how mixedness impacts upon race discourse and stratification.

Building on this, the second chapter considers how, historically, white supremacist power structures have responded to the potential challenges mixed-race people present to ’societies wanting uncomplicated divisions by race’ (28). This chapter considers different responses to mixedness and explores interesting distinctions between different mixed-race groups. Winn Tutwiler shows that white America has a deep-rooted and abiding moral aversion to racial mixing and historically this engendered a proliferation of anti-miscegenation laws and morals.

In Chapter three, Winn Tutwiler seeks to provide a knowledge base for educators on the processes of racial identity formation for mixed-race youth. This endeavour, Win Tutwiler explains, is essential to countering teachers’ ideas that may be based upon stereotypes and misinformation. Emphasizing the importance for the ‘social, emotional and academic well—being’ of mixed-race youth, this chapter gives an overview of some of the (predominantly) psychological literature on racial identity (57). Winn Tutwiler unpicks what she sees as some often fundamental inadequacies in the application of theories developed for monoracial identities to mixed-race children. Although perhaps understandable due to the predominance in existing literature, this chapter seems to focus heavily on Black-white mixed-race identity and thus it is unclear how widely applicable some of the cited research is to other mixed-race groups.

As the focus shifts slightly to look at how these identities are constituted and lived, chapter four considers the role of the family in the lives of mixed-race…

Read or purchase the review here.

Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity

Rutgers University Press
December 2006
252 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3957-7
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-4132-7

Kia Lilly Caldwell, Associate Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

For most of the twentieth century, Brazil was widely regarded as a “racial democracy“—a country untainted by the scourge of racism and prejudice. In recent decades, however, this image has been severely critiqued, with a growing number of studies highlighting persistent and deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination and inequality. Yet, recent work on race and racism has rarely considered gender as part of its analysis.

In Negras in Brazil, Kia Lilly Caldwell examines the life experiences of Afro-Brazilian women whose stories have until now been largely untold. This pathbreaking study analyzes the links between race and gender and broader processes of social, economic, and political exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement organizations and thirty-five life history interviews, Caldwell explores the everyday struggles Afro-Brazilian women face in their efforts to achieve equal rights and full citizenship. She also shows how the black women’s movement, which has emerged in recent decades, has sought to challenge racial and gender discrimination in Brazil. While proposing a broader view of citizenship that includes domains such as popular culture and the body, Negras in Brazil highlights the continuing relevance of identity politics for members of racially marginalized communities. Providing new insights into black women’s social activism and a gendered perspective on Brazilian racial dynamics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American Studies, African diaspora studies, women’s studies, politics, and cultural anthropology.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Re-envisioning the Brazilian Nation
  • 1. “A Foot in the Kitchen”: Brazilian Discourses on Race, Hybridity, and National identity
  • 2. Women in and out of Place: Engendering Brazil’s Racial Democracy
• PART TWO: The Body and Subjectivity
  • 3. “Look at Her Hair”: The Body Politics of Black Womanhood
  • 4. Becoming a Mulher Negra
• PART THREE: Activism and Resistance
  • 5. “What Citizenship is This?”: Narratives of Marginality and Struggle
  • 6. The Black Women’s Movement: Politicizing and Reconstructing Collective Identities
• Epilogue: Resenvisioning Racial Essentialism and Identity Politics
• Notes
• References
• Index

Philanthropy, Jobs for African Youth, Racial Passing

Top of Mind with Julie Rose
BYU Radio
2016-05-25

Julie Rose, Host

…Racial Passing (52:22)

Guest: Allyson Hobbs, PhD, Assistant Professor of American History at Stanford University, Author of “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.”

A 1949 film called “Lost Boundaries” tells the mostly-true story of Albert and Thyra Johnston – a respected doctor and his blue-eyed high-society wife – who passed for “white” in a New Hampshire town, raised their children to believe they were white and then were outed as having African American heritage. The film ends with a minister preaching a sermon about tolerance. The subtext is that this is a town of magnanimous white Christians willing to forgive the Johnstons for deceiving them.

But were the Johnstons really in need of forgiveness? Or did the greater sin lie with the community’s racist conditions that prompted the Johnstons to claim whiteness in the first place?

Stanford history professor Allyson Hobbs explores the long history of racial passing in America in her acclaimed 2014 book, “A Chosen Exile.” It is fundamentally, she says, a book about loss. Those who “passed” as white had a world of privileges opened up to them from the time of slavery through the era of Jim Crow laws. But they lost family and ties to a community. Many even lost themselves.

Listen to the interview (00:52:22) here.

In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs

University of North Carolina Press
May 2016
Approx. 432 pages
6.125 x 9.25, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3520-3

Stephen M. Ward, Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

James Boggs (1919-1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) were two largely unsung but critically important figures in the black freedom struggle. James Boggs was the son of an Alabama sharecropper who came to Detroit during the Great Migration, becoming an automobile worker and a union leader. Grace Lee was a Chinese American scholar who studied Hegel, worked with Caribbean political theorist C. L. R. James, and moved to Detroit to work toward a new American revolution. As husband and wife, the couple was influential in the early stages of what would become the Black Power movement, laying the intellectual foundation for labor and urban struggles during one of the most active social movement periods in modern U.S. history.

Stephen Ward details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses’ lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward’s book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.

Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era

University of Chicago Press
April 2016
272 pages
3 halftones, 55 line drawings, 11 tables
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780226353012
Cloth ISBN: 9780226352961
E-book ISBN: 9780226353159

Michael Tesler, Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of California, Irvine

When Barack Obama won the presidency, many posited that we were entering into a post-racial period in American politics. Regrettably, the reality hasn’t lived up to that expectation. Instead, Americans’ political beliefs have become significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Obama’s presidency—in spite of his administration’s considerable efforts to neutralize the political impact of race.

Michael Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.

One of the most important books on American racial politics in recent years, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? is required reading for anyone wishing to understand what has happened in the United States during Obama’s presidency and how it might shape the country long after he leaves office.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Obama as Most-Racial
• Chapter 1. Racial Attitudes and American Politics in the Age of Obama
• Chapter 2. The Spillover of Racialization Hypothesis
• Chapter 3. The Obama Presidency, Racial Attitudes, and the 2012 Election
• Chapter 4. Racial Attitudes and Evaluations of Public Figures in the Obama Era
• Chapter 5. The Spillover of Racialization into Public Policy Preferences
• Chapter 6. Racial Attitudes and Voting for Congress in the Obama Era
• Chapter 7. The Growing Racialization of Partisan Attachments
• Chapter 8. The Expanding Political Divide between White and Nonwhite Americans
• Chapter 9. Conclusion: Racial Politics in the Obama and Post-Obama Eras
• Notes
• References
• Index