Mixed Race Studies

In Depth with Gerald Horne

In Depth
C-SPAN
2016-10-02

Peter Slen, Host

Gerald Horne, Professor of History and African-American Studies
University of Houston

Author Gerald Horne talked about his life and career and responded to viewer comments and questions. His most recent book is Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary.

Gerald Horne is the author of numerous books, including Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic, Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African-American Freedom Struggle, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African-Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation, Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii, and W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, among others [including The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States].

Watch the interview (03:00:05) here.

Speaker Series: Memory, History, Race, and America’s National Parks

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, New York 10037
Tuesday, 2016-10-18, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

As a young girl Lauret Savoy developed a deeply personal connection to the American land, visiting numerous national parks with her parents. But as she traversed the well-worn paths of Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon and Zion, she began to wonder about the footsteps of her ancestors, and how they marked the very land she walked upon. From the Buffalo Soldiers who safeguarded Yosemite and Sequoia to the painful legacy of Japanese-American internment camps, national parks hold some of the most important yet muted narratives of the American identity.

In her newest work, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history, and ideas of “race,” mark a person, a people, and the land. In distinctive and illuminating prose, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.

Join Alan Spears for a conversation with [National Parks Conservation Association] NPCA Trustee Lauret Savoy about her journeys across the American Landscape and the oft forgotten stories of the places we cherish and call our national parks. She will challenge you to redefine current concepts regarding the meaning of public lands and their place in our shared history…

For more information, click here.

Federal officials may revamp how Americans identify race, ethnicity on census and other forms

Pew Research Center
2016-10-04

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer/Editor

Federal officials are moving ahead with the most important potential changes in two decades in how the government asks Americans about their racial and Hispanic identity. They include combining separate race and Hispanic questions into one and adding a new Middle East-North Africa category.

If approved by the Office of Management and Budget, the revisions would be made on the 2020 census questionnaire and other federal government surveys or forms. Federal statistics about race and Hispanic identity are used to enforce civil rights laws, assist in political redistricting and provide data for research that compares the status of different groups…

Read the entire article here.

“He’s gonna have a hard time proving he’s a brother.” According to my mother, these are the first words I ever heard in my life. And they were spoken by the pediatrician who delivered me at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California. Dr. Boynton was her name.

“He’s gonna have a hard time proving he’s a brother.” A brother.

This was the [19]70s. And, the doctor who said those words, our pediatrician, couldn’t have realized how right she was. But at the same time, she couldn’t have realized how wrong.

Because while I have spent my life proving in a sense, my black identity—I am of mixed race—I have also succeeded in sense that I have been accepted as an African-American and indeed have become a professor of Africana studies.

Zebulon Miletsky, “Tracing Your “Routes”,”  TEDx Talks: TEDxSBUWomen, Stony Brook University, State University of New York, July 10, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpqUAxh7X74. (00:00:09-00:01:22).

Dear Mister Shakespeare – inspired by Othello

British Council
2016-10-07

Multimedia visual artist Phoebe Boswell has written an original piece, ‘Dear Mister Shakespeare’, in which she questions Shakespeare on the inherent racial tensions within his writing of Othello in the 1600s, and how these tensions continue to resonate today.

The film, directed by Shola Amoo, is a collage of modern black British experience, and follows Othello’s (Ashley Thomas aka Bashy) journey as a ‘man through time’.

But what most people don’t realize is that the best part of being mixed-race isn’t that you don’t look like any certain race or anything physical. It’s the fusion of the different food styles your parents and community bring to the table.

Susanna Mostaghim, “What Growing Up Mixed-Race Taught Me About Food,” Spoon University, September 13, 2016. http://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/what-growing-up-mixed-race-taught-me-about-food/.

‘I had to sneak around trying not to be seen’ – What growing up in Ireland was like for three mixed race Irish people

The Irish Post
2016-10-15

Erica Doyle Higgins, Digital Reporter

(Pictures: Tracey Anderson/Getty)

FOR the first time during Black History Month, an exhibition celebrating mixed race Irish has gone on display in the London Irish Centre.

The #IAmIrish Project celebrates diversity, while opening the dialogue on being mixed race and Irish.

As part of the Project and Black History Month, three people told The Irish Post their experiences of growing up mixed race in Ireland…

Read the entire article here.