Mixed Race Studies

5 Steps Latinos Can Take to Combat Anti-Blackness

Remezcla
2016-07-09

Andrew S. Vargas

We are all reeling from the events of this past week. The deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police have become an all-too-familiar narrative in our public life, but each time we are confronted with these images it dredges up centuries of pain weighing on our collective conscience. Latinos of color acutely relate to the struggle African Americans face against their constant dehumanization by our country’s law enforcement institutions. It is a struggle that we often share on the streets, in the courtroom, and in our mainstream media. But we would be mistaken to assume that our experience of injustice is comparable.

The culture of the United States has been built on a racial binary designed to exclude and oppress the descendants of Africans brought into this country against their will. Anti-blackness is not the occupation of hateful individuals, rather it is embedded within the very notion of race in the US, and reflected in all of its institutions. As Latinos – which is, itself a designation of ethnicity, not race – we often find ourselves struggling to stake out a place within this rigid racial landscape, while dealing with our own internalized biases and societal pressures to assimilate into whiteness…

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“Yes We Can” Barack Obama’s Proverbial Rhetoric

Peter Lang Publishing
2009
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-0668-2
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4331-0667

Wolfgang Mieder, Professor of German and Folklore
University of Vermont

As President Barack Obama outlined his promise for change during the presidential campaign, he made effective use of proverbs and proverbial phrases, and invented many quotable epithets that have all the makings of future proverbs. This book examines how Obama’s natural and authentic reliance on traditional metaphors enhances his impressive rhetoric, rather than reducing it to mere sound bites. Proverbs, with their often colorful metaphors, add expressiveness and emotion to his communications, giving people the opportunity to follow his pragmatic or philosophical arguments through common language. No matter the subject, Obama’s prose contains metaphorical language that makes his rhetoric and oratory universally accessible.

This book contains detailed analyses of the proverbial rhetoric in Obama’s books Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). A section looks at his proverbial language in 229 speeches, news conferences, interviews, and radio addresses, and the final section presents in-depth studies of his seven most significant addresses. It includes a comprehensive contextualized index of 1714 proverbial texts found within the writings and speeches from Obama’s political beginnings to his memorable inaugural address.

Blackness cannot be taken away from us. Biraciality cannot be taken away from us. They exist as tangibly as our skin, made from Europe and Africa. We are the colonizer and the colonized. We are the oppressor and the oppressed. We bleed for our brothers and sisters. We carry on our backs the weight of what one half of us did to the other. We slip easily into white spheres, taking notes and taking names while nodding our European heads.

Shannon Luders-Manuel, “Can Biracial Activists Speak To Black Issues?,” The Establishment, July 6, 2016. http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/07/06/can-biracial-activists-speak-to-black-issues-jesse-williams-bet/.

Obama’s Delicate Balance on Issue of Race and Policing

The New York Times
2017-07-08

Mark Landler, White House Correspondent

Michael D. Shear, White House Correspondent

WARSAW — As Air Force One headed for Europe on Thursday afternoon, President Obama holed up in the plane’s office editing a Facebook post meant to express his anguish at two deadly shootings by police officers. Given what had happened, he told his aides, he didn’t think it was enough.

Wrestling with what the appropriate thing to do instead was the start of a wrenching 10 hours in which Mr. Obama would find himself whipsawed by grim events back home, forcing him to once again search for the right tone in a moment of national shock and mourning.

In that time, Mr. Obama delivered a trans-Atlantic call for racial justice after the gruesome deaths of two black men at the hands of the police, only to face the same television cameras hours later to denounce the killings of five officers by a black sniper.

For Mr. Obama, the killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul and the bloody reprisal in Dallas encapsulated the challenge he has faced throughout his presidency: how to confront a justice system that he views as tilted against the very people whom he, as the nation’s first black president, seemed singularly equipped to help…

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Can Biracial Activists Speak To Black Issues?

The Establishment
2016-07-06

Shannon Luders-Manuel

While my first instinct was to celebrate Jesse Williams’ recent Humanitarian Award from BET, my second instinct, which came just seconds later, was to brace myself for the backlash.

The Grey’s Anatomy actor and former teacher has been a highly visible activist within the Black Lives Matter movement, recently executive producing the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement. Yet those born of racial admixture are often viewed as half-as, half-ass appropriators of blackness. We’re often seen as deceitful, dangerous, and damaging to black solidarity.

In his BET acceptance speech, Williams called out police brutality and the racial injustices black people have faced throughout history: “There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they haven’t levied against us.” He added that, “We want [freedom] now.”

While fallout from his speech continues to reverberate—dueling petitions are now raging, calling for him to be fired from/kept on Grey’s Anatomy, respectively—his words were largely well-received in both black and white spheres. But, like anyone of mixed parentage who publicly rails against racial injustice, some questioned his right to speak at all…

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Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

Public Seminar
2016-07-08

McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media in Liberal Studies
The New School for Social Research

#BLM passes The New School.

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering an anti-racist vision that is transnational and cosmopolitan, but which draws on popular and vernacular forms of hybridity rather than elite ones.

In Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Harvard 2010), Gilroy offers a series of essays on the culture of what he has famously called the Black Atlantic (Verso 1993) as an alternative to race-talk but which is also outside of the various alternative nationalisms that flourish as a response. It is not reducible to liberalism, and it also attempts to fend off incorporation into the culture industry. That might be an urgent project for this “age of rendition.” (87) One in which in Judith Butler’s terms that which is grievable, or in Donna Haraway’s that which is killable, are respectively diminishing and expanding categories.

Gilroy is wary of responses to racism that borrow from it. He would probably strongly reject Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of all politics as necessarily based on a tangible equality of participation in a shared substance, which the necessarily excludes the other as unequal to us. Hence he is not any more inclined towards Black nationalism than towards any other. Instead, he builds upon the moral economies of the Black Atlantic, in which the struggle against slavery and racism pose the question of a trans-national belonging, or what I would call he problem of species-being. Just as EP Thompson saw the English working class as self-making, Gilroy is interested in the coming in to being of a people in struggle, but beyond Thompson’s rather provincial national frame. Along with others influenced by the cultural studies tradition such as Andrew Ross and Angela McRobbie, he is interested more in vernacular than elite cultural forms…

…Gilroy: “What answers does the mixed-race person give to the apostles of purity, who can be found in all communities?” (103) Marley borrowed from Jamaican rude boys, from Curtis Mayfield, but also from Black Power: ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ as a famous Marley song has it – but not the deputy. For Gilroy, Marley is a version of Blackness that can include, but is not reducible to, African-American culture. It borrows from the diasporic cult of Ethiopia but makes it more a symbolic than an actual homeland. From the Rastafarians it also takes a view of wage-work not as self-mastery but as an extension of slavery. From the discovery of swinging London it evolves into the ‘Kinky Reggae’ of the ‘Midnight Ravers’.

Where Marley had been an itinerant worker, Hendrix was a former soldier, who swapped the ‘Machine gun’ for the electric guitar, itself also bound up in curious ways with military technology. He produced an Afro-futurist sound that was, as Caetano Veloso put it, “half blues, half Stockhausen” (130) Gilroy: “Hendrix’s career tells us that by this point, black music could produce its own public world: a social corona that could nourish or host an alternative sensibility, a structure of feeling that might function to make wrongs and injustices more bearable in the short term but could also promote a sense of different possibilities, providing healing glimpses of an alternative moral, artistic, and political order.” (147)…

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White people, don’t tell me what Martin Luther King would think of Black Lives Matter

Vox
2016-07-08

Jon Crowley
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

I woke up Thursday morning and accidentally watched a video of Alton Sterling being killed by the police. In a world of social feeds and autoplaying video, I’m far from the only person who had this experience. Within 10 minutes I was reading descriptions of how Philando Castile had been killed, again by the police.

Like many people of color, I’ve been warned about interactions with the police since I was a little kid. Despite being a light-skinned, mixed-race black person, despite growing up in a safe suburban area, this warning was a part of my childhood.

And seeing, very explicitly, how easily two black men met violent deaths at the hands of people who are supposed to serve their communities, pushed me past my hard-earned emotional distance from the subject and made me feel scared. Scared and alone, even as I saw the reactions pouring out from people of every race, nationality, and culture, looking to express the same fear and outrage.

There are a lot of people from other communities or racial groups who want to express support, and a lot of people who want to explain why these men had it coming.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m going to assume you’re trying to find something positive to do or say, beyond offering hopes or prayers or condolences.

If you want to know what I’d consider the bare minimum of support you could offer to the people of color in your life, here’s a starting point:…

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MSU faculty contribute to book on white privilege

Mississippi State University
2016-07-01

Contact: Allison Matthews

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Two Mississippi State faculty members helped lead a literary effort examining the basis and scope of racial identity as an American social structure.

Stephen Middleton, professor of history and director for African American Studies at MSU, along with associate professor of English and African American Studies Donald Shaffer, served on the editing team for “The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity.” A University Press of Mississippi publication, the collection of essays specifically looks at the origins of white privilege and the various social, cultural, political and economic practices that underwrite its ideological influence in American society. David Roediger of the University of Kansas also was co-editor.

“This book explores an old story in American culture,” said Middleton, the project’s lead editor. “It reviews a time when we thought about ourselves in certain ways, and the two categories that defined us more than any other were ‘white’ and ‘black.’ It’s an old story of what we’ve learned about our history and what we tell ourselves.”

“Whiteness” is a socially and legally constructed category, Middleton said, woven into the American psyche over time based on the need for cheap labor. This established a power and economic structure favorable to whites that socially and legally denied access to non-whites…

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#BlackLivesMatter

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Spring 2015

Reverend Charles Williams II, Senior Pastor
King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan

Demonstrator protesting the police killing of teenager Michael Brown, Ferguson, Aug. 18, 2014. Charlie Riedel/Associated Press.

Conservative backlash against Barack Obama and continuing police brutality against blacks indicates the country’s legacy of slavery has not been overcome.

In 2008, the United States electorate chose the first African American president since the inception of the Republic more than two centuries earlier. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party candidate, received 69.5 million votes out of the total 131.4 million total votes cast—the highest number in presidential election history. The more than 60 percent turnout of eligible voters was put at the highest in nearly fifty years. More than fifteen million ballots were cast by first-time voters who heavily favored Obama—comprising nearly 15.2 percent of all votes cast for him, compared to 7.5 percent of all votes cast for Republican John McCain.

Many Americans were dazzled by the energy created in a campaign of hope and change. Understandably, many hoped and perhaps even assumed that the change would further improve race relations in America. Anti-establishment youth had embraced a man who aspired to lead the American establishment, with hip-hop artists such as Nas and Young Jeezy producing tracks like “Black President” and “My President.” This newfound political energy was promoted through political paraphernalia that carried pictures of candidate Obama in a red, white, and blue filter. The music, the bumper stickers, the mood, and the candidate did not represent blackness or whiteness; they represented humanity, patriotism, and coming change. They evoked the spirit of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, and even of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in Boston, when he intoned, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”

The election of an African American man as president of the Republic led many to conclude that the nation had reached a historic turning point. The high turnout for Obama, including among white voters, seemed to demonstrate that change had truly come. Some dared to believe that the United States was becoming a “colorblind society.” After the 2008 election, college classrooms across the country were bursting in conversations debating “are we now a post-racial society?” Statistics showing greater numbers of black doctors, lawyers, and CEOs helped quantify the argument…

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