Mixed Race Studies

Beacon Goes to the Movies: “Loving” and the History of White Supremacy

Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Press
2016-12-15

Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, Editorial Assistant

When publicity assistant Perpetua Charles and senior editor Joanna Green first began planning a staff trip to see the film Loving in celebration of Beacon’s forthcoming book on the same topic five months ago, they couldn’t have known for sure what our political environment would be as they and fellow members of the Beacon Press staff walked through a rainy November night to the theater. Exactly a week after the country watched the electoral votes tally in favor of a divisive Republican presidential candidate, we came together to view a retelling of how Mildred and Richard Loving, a young interracial couple from Virginia, helped end the ban on interracial marriage in the United States.

“Biopics like this leave you with an overwhelming sense of hope, right? Making you think that as soon as the anti-miscegenation laws were overturned, every interracial couple was getting married left and right and naysayers kept their mouths shut. But that’s surely not what happened,” Perpetua said, going into the film.

From reading an early copy of Sheryll Cashin’s upcoming book, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy, I gradually came to the understanding that the story this film set out to tell feels big because it is big. Not only is it the story of Richard and Mildred Loving—their love, their decision to formally wed, their beloved hometown of Central Point, Virginia turning against them, their exile to Washington D.C., and the ten years they spent mired in the legal battle that would culminate in the seminal Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. It is also a four hundred-year-old story of people defying a deeply entrenched and fiercely protected color line to love or marry in America. It is a story that has gone on for as long as this country has existed, and as this election has confirmed, is nowhere near over…

Read the entire review here.

My fear killer will get pension, by daughter of train IRA bomb victim

The Belfast Telegraph
2016-12-17

David Young

Jayne Olorunda

The daughter of a man killed in an IRA blast on a train has claimed her elderly mother would be excluded from a proposed victims’ pension scheme while the IRA terrorist whose bomb killed her father would be eligible – because he was injured but survived.

Read the entire article here.

The only people who qualify as non-racist are those who defy and denounce the false logic of race altogether.

Carlos Hoyt, “Mean, Kind Or Non: Which Type Of Racist Are You?” Cognoscenti, WBUR 90.9 FM, December 15, 2016. http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/12/15/race-and-racism-carlos-hoyt.

The Mythic Root of Racism

Sociological Inquiry
Volume 63, Issue 3, July 1993
pages 339–350
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.1993.tb00314.x

Donal E. Muir, Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama

The term “race” was introduced into science two and a half centuries ago as an arbitrary convenience to describe geographic groupings of humans. These ad hoc racial taxonomies were seized upon, however, as “scientific” justification for slavery and other forms of social, political, and economic oppression. Over the last fifty years, geneticists and biologists have quietly abandoned race as a scientific concept, leaving the general public unaware that racial categories, associated only with culturally selected, physically superficial characteristics, are social rather than genetic. As a result, most individuals remain “racist” in the sense of predicating interaction on racial assignments thought to reflect deep physiological differences. Some of these are conventionally recognized “mean racists.” The remainder, however, could well be considered “kind racists,” for their seeming benign tolerance defines limits to integration, and their unreflective perpetuation of the enabling belief of racism, that races exist physiologically, serves as a wellspring for mean racism during social crises. Many societies are thus much more racist than they appear. Since the belief that others are physically distinct tends to extend social distance and exacerbate hostility, analysts of social conflict ignore this pool of hidden racism at their peril.

Read or purchased the article here.

“We’ve had the worst of the hatred that Northern Ireland has to give – sectarian and racist – levelled at us and we just can’t take any more,” she says.

“We are a mixed race family and don’t always blend in. Growing up we became used to stares and taunts, but that was all we had. Naively I thought that Northern Ireland seemed to be changing, more and more people of colour were coming in and we no longer stood out as much.” —Jayne Olorunda

Stephanie Bell, “I couldn’t cope with seeing Sinn Fein’s new MLA on TV or radio… I’d be thinking all the time: your father killed my father,” The Belfast Telegraph, December 16, 2016. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/i-couldnt-cope-with-seeing-sinn-feins-new-mla-on-tv-or-radio-id-be-thinking-all-the-time-your-father-killed-my-father-35297664.html.

A Comic’s Secret Southern Story

Below The Line
Garden & Gun
2016-12-13

CJ Lotz

A panel from “Krazy Kat.” Courtesy Krazy

Before “The Far Side,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” or even Mickey Mouse, one cartoon stole the show. From 1913 to 1944, a panel called “Krazy Kat” ran in newspapers across the country and counted “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz and the poet E.E. Cummings among its fans. The strip featured beautiful backgrounds and simply sketched cat and mouse characters that switched between philosophical dialog and slapstick situations—the mouse was forever trying to hit the cat with a brick. But the New Orleans-born artist behind the drawings, George Herriman, was a private man whose life was a mystery. That is until now, with the release of the illustrator’s biography, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White.

Author Michael Tisserand (also a New Orleanian) spent ten years researching this thorough work that chronicles not only the career of the twentieth century Southern artist, but Herriman’s big secret: He was born to a prominent Creole family in New Orleans and spent his adult years “passing” for white at the newspapers where he worked in New York and Los Angeles. At the time, living as a black man would have threatened his livelihood, his home, and his relationships. We spoke with Tisserand about Herriman’s complicated story and what it means to honor the artist’s legacy today…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed race couples still face racism in Australia

news.com.au
Sydney, Australia
2016-12-17

Ginger Gorman

Ginger, her husband Don, and their daughter Elsa when she was younger.Source: Supplied

BETWEEN us, my husband and I have got Spanish, Filipino, Chinese, Slovakian, English, Scottish and Irish heritage. In appearance, he’s Asian and I’m caucasian.

This is 2016 and so you wouldn’t even think that was even worth mentioning. But the fact is, reasonably often this affects the way other people treat us.

When we first got together, I just didn’t notice. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I refused to notice. (Backstory: I spent years at an international school where every second person had mixed-race parents. For me, this was just an everyday occurrence.)

Then one day when our eldest daughter, Elsa, was about 18 months old we took her to the doctor. My husband, Don, was holding Elsa in his arms at the reception counter. In the familiar way of a couple, I was standing to his left and our arms were casually touching.

A lady standing to the right of Don commented on how cute Elsa was and then asked him: “Where’s your wife?”

Don pointed to me and the lady went bright red in the face and started stammering: “Oh, oh.”…

Read the entire article here.

In the public’s view, Obama will be remembered more for the Affordable Care Act than other aspects of his presidency — including his election as the nation’s first black president. When asked what Obama will be most remembered for, 35% volunteer the 2010 health care law (or mention health care more generally) while 17% say it will be Obama’s election as the first black president.

“Obama Leaves Office on High Note, But Public Has Mixed Views of Accomplishments,” Pew Research Center, December 14, 2016. 5.
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/12/14133019/12-14-16-Obama-legacy-release.pdf.

Mean, Kind Or Non: Which Type Of Racist Are You?

Cognoscenti
WBUR 90.9 FM
Boston, Massachusetts
2016-12-15

Carlos Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Wheelock College, Boston, Massachusetts

We have to stop believing and acting as if we can have it both ways, writes Carlos Hoyt: adhering to the notion of race while also trying to end racism. Pictured: Richard Spencer, who leads a movement that mixes racism, white nationalism and populism, speaks at the Texas A&M University campus Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in College Station, Texas. (David J. Phillip/AP)

COMMENTARY

Do you take issue with the following declaration?

“Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity.”

Let’s break it down. Many people are aware that the concept of race has no biological validity; that it’s a social construct, like gender or money, which are “real” only in so far as we treat them as such. So, in response to the first part of the thesis, many people might say, “Race is a social construct with very real effects.” As such, race certainly matters in myriad ways. As for race as the foundation of identity, many people might reason that, since identity is multi-faceted, race is, indeed, among the factors that comprise it…

Read the entire article here.