Mixed Race Studies

The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

The Aspen Institute
2016-07-02

As Michael Eric Dyson notes in the introduction to his 2016 book, “[President] Obama provoked great hope and fear about what a black presidency might mean to our democracy. White and black folk, and brown and beige ones, too have had their views of race and politics turned topsy-turvy.” Join Dyson and The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart for a look at how the politics of race have shaped Obama’s identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has Obama dealt publicly with race—as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from the president’s major speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?

JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews

University of Nebraska Press
July 2016
198 pages
6 tables, 1 appendix
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-8565-1

Helen Kiyong Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Noah Samuel Leavitt, Associate Dean of Students
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

In 2010 approximately 15 percent of all new marriages in the United States were between spouses of different racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, raising increasingly relevant questions regarding the multicultural identities of new spouses and their offspring. But while new census categories and a growing body of statistics provide data, they tell us little about the inner workings of day-to-day life for such couples and their children.

JewAsian is a qualitative examination of the intersection of race, religion, and ethnicity in the increasing number of households that are Jewish American and Asian American. Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Samuel Leavitt’s book explores the larger social dimensions of intermarriages to explain how these particular unions reflect not only the identity of married individuals but also the communities to which they belong. Using in-depth interviews with couples and the children of Jewish American and Asian American marriages, Kim and Leavitt’s research sheds much-needed light on the everyday lives of these partnerships and how their children negotiate their own identities in the twenty-first century.

My mixed-race sons look white, but that doesn’t mean racism stays away

She Knows
2016-07-09

Fahmida Rashid

My mixed-race sons can ‘pass’ for white, and that creates its own pile of issues

The first time was when Jake was in kindergarten. He was showing off the drawing of our family: father, mother, baby brother and himself. He’d even drawn the cat. I was perplexed that he’d colored three of the stick figures brown and one pink. I pointed to one, ignoring the names he’d written over each, and asked, “Who is that?”

“That’s me!” he said, with that mix of exasperation and long-suffering that only 6-year-olds can pull off and still be adorable.

“But why are you brown?” I pressed, ignoring his father’s “don’t go there” look.

Jake and his brother Sam are light-skinned. Not as pale as their father, who hails from the South and can his trace ancestry back to Colonial America, but still light enough that they get asked if they are Greek or Italian. Nothing close to my brown, the one who hails from the subcontinent, the land of spice and tropical sun. Yet he’d colored all three of us the same brown and couldn’t figure out why his mother was asking dumb questions…

Read the entire article here.

How Reggie Yates went from kids’ TV to confronting neo-Nazis

The Guardian
2016-06-28

Hannah J. Davies

Louis Theroux 2.0: Reggie Yates in a cell at Bexar County Detention Center.

He braves Russian far-right rallies and Texas prison cells for his job. Meet the man helping to reinvent the documentary for Generation Y

While filming in South Africa in 2013, Reggie Yates experienced the two scariest moments of his TV career to date. “The director, sound man and I got caught up in a fight between two gangs,” he explains. “One of the guys pulled out a gun and I thought: ‘All bets are off.’ We got out of there, but we met up with one of the gangs again later on in this little hut and they all had their machetes out. I thought: ‘This could go wrong at any minute,’ but it didn’t. I think a lot of that came down to the respect we showed them; I don’t wear a bulletproof [vest] in these places, because [that would be] saying that I don’t trust someone or I think I’m better.” He laughs before adding: “It could’ve been worse!”…

…Starting out as a child actor in 90s barbershop sitcom Desmond’s, he went on to work as a kids’ TV presenter alongside pal Fearne Cotton on shows including CBBC’s Smile. Then came a move into radio DJing on 1Xtra, before a gig as the anchor of Radio 1’s Official Chart Show. Somehow he’s also found time to voice cartoon rodent Rastamouse and appear in Doctor Who, as well as writing and directing his own short films (his latest, Shelter, stars W1A’s Jessica Hynes). It even transpires during our conversation that he’s a “massive interiors nerd”, who teases that he might one day open a furniture store…

Read the entire article here.

Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth. We mark each other by complexion. We assign meaningless stereotypes to people according to skin color. We adore and fear and hate people on the basis of how light or dark they are.

Race, as many scientists will tell you, is not real, but racism is.

Darryl Fears, “Racism twists and distorts everything,” The Washington Post, July 8, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/racism-twists-and-distorts-everything/2016/07/08/d0f03364-4542-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html.

“I think the media does a great job of wanting to silo who we are as Americans… They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the immigrant issue, that’s the African-American issue, that’s the Asian issue.’ No, it’s us. And until we understand that we have a vested interest in all these different topics we can’t actually come together with an American agenda.” —Maria Teresa Kumar

Carolina Moreno, “Voto Latino CEO On Why Police Violence Against Latinos Isn’t In The News,” The Huffington Post, July 8, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/voto-latino-ceo-on-why-police-violence-against-latinos-isnt-in-the-news_us_577f9fa5e4b0c590f7e8df88.

Racism twists and distorts everything

The Washington Post
2016-07-08

Darryl Fears, National Enviromental Reporter

For three straight mornings, I’ve eaten breakfast sprinkled with madness. Throughout this week that started with July 4, I’ve woken to horrible news that was tough to swallow.

Like everyone else, I watched videos that captured the nation’s racial angst — two black men shot by police officers for no apparent reason, and a peaceful demonstration to protest those slayings that dissolved into the revenge murder of five police officers.

The details of what happened this week are still being pieced together by investigations in three cities, but what is clear nearly eight years after the election of the first black president is that the idea of a post-racial America was a fantasy.

I covered racial trends and demographics for The Washington Post for eight years ending in 2009, crisscrossing the country to write about segregated schools, crowded prisons and huge immigration marches, and I left the beat thinking that President Obama’s election in 2008 might bring at least a margin of the hope and change he embraced.

But America hasn’t changed…

Read the entire article here.

NYC AfroLatino Fest Comes at an Important Time

Sounds and Colours
2016-07-05

Gina Vergel

It seems the fourth edition of AfroLatinoFest in New York City comes at a crucial time.

A survey by the Pew Research Center, released in March, points to a disconnect in how some Afro-Latinos living in the United States report their race. It found that while 24 percent of U.S.-based Latinos identify as Afro-Latino, just 18 percent of that group reports its race as “Black.”

According to an article in Colorlines, “when asked directly about their race, only 18% of Afro-Latinos identified their race or one of their races as black. In fact, higher shares of Afro-Latinos identified as white alone or white in combination with another race (39%) or volunteered that their race or one of their races was Hispanic (24%). Only 9% identified as mixed race.”

And so Afro-Latino Fest, taking place from the 8th to the 10th of July, is offering a series of intellectually engaging panels, documentary screenings, and keynote speakers about AfroLatinidad, along with music and food, of course…

Read the entire article here.

Colorblindness is not Progressive: a Review of “The Color of Water”

The Tempest
2016-06-11

Maya Williams

We should make it clear that the concept of colorblindness isn’t just a white perspective to have or to talk about.

The Color of Water: a Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother (1995) tells the story of a mixed race man named James McBride and his Jewish mother coming of age in a time when mixed race visibility was relatively taboo. This nonfiction novel’s format is such a unique one because while you read it, you can see how fluid time is and how history is capable of repeating itself for generations.

This is such a good book, you guys. After re-reading it, I was struck once more by the intricacies of McBride’s storytelling, the parallels between McBride and his mother, and their human strength. Hands down, one of the most interesting people to read about in this book is Ruth McBride Jordan, the author’s mom…

Read the entire review here.