Mixed Race Studies

How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans

The Atlantic
2016-12-22

William A. Darity, Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics; Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity
Duke University

The country’s first black president never pursued policies bold enough to close the racial wealth gap.

Born in 1953, I am a child of the waning years of legal segregation in the United States. My parents, on the other hand, spent about 40 years of their lives under Jim Crow, and all of my grandparents lived most of their lives under official American apartheid. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, my mother and all four of my grandparents were deceased. But my father was alive and well—and absolutely thrilled to have lived to see the election of a black man as president of the United States. Usually deeply cynical about American politics and politicians, my dad could not comprehend my deep reservations about Barack Obama’s leadership. Indeed, he viewed any criticism of Obama as bringing aid and comfort to white supremacists.

My father hardly was alone among black Americans, across all generations. The near complete unanimity of passionate black American admiration for Obama carried with it an absolute resistance to hearing any complaints about the black president. And, indeed, there was much to admire: an exceptional resume, an attractive family with a black wife who is his professional and intellectual equal, handsome and greying toward distinguished maturity, a strategically wise moderate progressive political position, and a place as the—sometimes self-professed—messianic fulfillment of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. For many black Americans, the ascent of Barack Obama to the presidency was equivalent to the moment of jubilee.

An extraordinarily disciplined individual, Barack Obama preempted the smallest hint of scandal by admitting that he had smoked pot during his youth. He even crafted a narrative of a rise from adversity—growing up successfully by the efforts of a single parent despite a missing father—albeit a white single mother with a Ph.D. whose own parents were affluent residents of Hawaii. With every drop of respectability in place, his somewhat icy intellect coupled with his enthusiasm for basketball and for black music across a half century of styles, he was an inordinately appealing candidate, with an ideal combination of the cool and the rational…

Read the entire article here.

Walsh says race backlash in part led to Trump win

The Boston Globe
2016-12-20

Meghan E. Irons, Reporter

Mayor Martin J. Walsh, taking on a contentious issue rippling across the country, said Tuesday that he believes the election of Donald Trump was in part due to a backlash against the nation’s first black president.

“I would hope [that] as a country we have gone beyond that,’’ the mayor said, adding that the election exposed economic and racial divisions. “But I’m afraid that is not the case.”

Walsh took on race and other thorny issues during an hourlong interview, vowing to continue the city’s [Boston’s] race dialogues to heal “deep wounds.” The mayor discussed the cloud of federal indictments looming over his administration, laid out the posture the city aims to take with the incoming Trump administration, and made his case for his reelection, saying Boston is much better off than when he took office three years ago…

Read the entire article here.

Three movies this year show Virginia’s racial history. In short, it’s complicated.

The Washington Post
2016-12-22

Stephanie Merry, Reporter

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving in the movie “Loving.” (Ben Rothstein/Focus Features)

“Loving” shows Virginia at its most romantic and picturesque. Toward the beginning of the drama, a man takes his pregnant wife-to-be to an empty field and tells her in a slow drawl, “I’m going to build you a house right here.”

The couple stand on a patchy, tree-lined stretch of grass, the rhythmic buzzing of cicadas pulsing around them. Low-hanging clouds pass languidly overhead, and the grass flutters in the breeze; humidity practically radiates off the screen.

In the movie, Virginia is the place where these sweethearts, played by Golden Globe nominees Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga, meet and fall for each other in the mid-1950s. But it’s also the place where a white man and his wife, who’s black and Native American, would get arrested for the crime of cohabitating. Virginia forced Richard and Mildred Loving to go to jail or leave the state they loved, and they spent nearly a decade in Washington, D.C., trying to return.

Virginia showed up in three major movies this year, all based on true stories. “The Birth of a Nation,” a drama about the 1831 slave uprising led by Nat Turner, takes place in Southampton County, not far from the setting of “Hidden Figures,” which opens Sunday and tells the story of black female mathematicians working for NASA during the space race.

These dramas capture the conflicted nature of the commonwealth — the way progress and resistance are in constant battle, with some citizens rejecting the status quo just as forcefully as others cling to it…

Read the entire article here.

How Obama’s unique background shaped his outlook on race

PBS NewsHour
2016-12-21

Judy Woodruff, Co-Anchor & Managing Editor

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has criticized President Obama’s policies toward black Americans. Perhaps for that reason, he was invited to discuss such issues with Mr. Obama several times throughout the president’s second term. As part of a collaboration with The Atlantic, Coates speaks with Judy Woodruff about his latest Atlantic cover story, which considers Mr. Obama’s legacy and rare optimism through a racial lens.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As President Obama winds down his time in the White House, we will be looking back at the legacy of his presidency in the coming weeks. Tonight, as part of our partnership with “The Atlantic” magazine, my conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover story, “My President was Black.”

TA-NEHISI COATES, The Atlantic: I think so many African-Americans got so much joy out of the image of Barack and Michelle and Malia and Sasha, the first family, and that was going away, and there was a kind of sadness.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Can you put into words how much his election meant in the first place?

TA-NEHISI COATES: The notion of an African-American president for black people was perceived as being so impossible that most of the great sort of representations of it are in comedy. It’s just a moment that seemed so impossible and so far off that actually it came to be, it actually happened…

View the story here.

On Optimism and Despair

The New York Review of Books
2016-12-22

Zadie Smith

A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.

First I would like to acknowledge the absurdity of my position. Accepting a literary prize is perhaps always a little absurd, but in times like these not only the recipient but also the giver feels some sheepishness about the enterprise. But here we are. President Trump rises in the west, a united Europe drops below the horizon on the other side of the ocean—but here we still are, giving a literary prize, receiving one. So many more important things were rendered absurd by the events of November 8 that I hesitate to include my own writing in the list, and only mention it now because the most frequent question I’m asked about my work these days seems to me to have some bearing on the situation at hand.

The question is: “In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?” It is a question usually posed in a tone of sly eagerness—you will recognize this tone if you’ve ever heard a child ask permission to do something she has in fact already done…

…I realize as I write this that I have strayed some way from the happiness that should rightly attend accepting a literary prize. I am very happy to accept this great honor—please don’t mistake me. I am more than happy—I am amazed. When I started to write I never imagined that anyone outside of my neighborhood would read these books, never mind outside of England, never mind “on the continent,” as my father liked to call it. I remember how stunned I was to embark on my very first European book tour, to Germany, with my father, who had last been here in 1945, as a young soldier in the reconstruction. It was a trip filled, for him, with nostalgia: he had loved a German girl, back in 1945, and one of his great regrets, he admitted to me on that trip, was not marrying her and instead coming home, to England, and marrying first one woman and then another, my mother.

We made a funny pair on that tour, I’m sure: a young black girl and her elderly white father, clutching our guidebooks and seeking those spots in Berlin that my father had visited almost fifty years earlier. It is from him that I have inherited both my optimism and my despair, for he had been among the liberators at Belsen and therefore seen the worst this world has to offer, but had, from there, gone forward, with a sufficiently open heart and mind, striding into one failed marriage and then another, marrying both times across various lines of class, color, and temperament, and yet still found in life reasons to be cheerful, reasons even for joy.

He was, I realize now, one of the least ideological people I ever met: everything that happened to him he took as a particular case, unable or unwilling to generalize from it. He lost his livelihood but did not lose faith in his country. The education system failed him but he still revered it and placed all his hopes for his children in it. His relations with women were mostly disastrous but he did not hate women. In his mind he did not marry a black girl, he married “Yvonne,” and he did not have an experimental set of mixed-race children, he had me and my brother Ben and my brother Luke.

How rare such people are! I am not so naive even now as to believe we have enough of them at any one time in history to form a decent and tolerant society. But neither will I ever deny their existence or the possibility of lives like his. He was a member of the white working class, a man often afflicted by despair who still managed to retain a core optimism. Perhaps in a different time under different cultural influences living in a different society he would have become one of the rabid old angry white men of whom the present left is so afeared. As it was, born in 1925 and dying in 2006, he saw his children benefit from the civilized postwar protections of free education and free health care, and felt he had many reasons to be grateful…

Read the entire talk here.

Review: In New Biopic ‘Barry,’ The Real Obama Remains Hidden

Newsweek
2016-12-16

Tom Shone

While President Barack Obama decides on his future—a return to his roots as a community organizer? A de facto leader for the Trump resistance? More writing?—pop culture has stepped in to give him the Mount Rushmore treatment. First we had Southside With You, a sweet, inoffensive Sundance hit about his and Michelle Obama’s first date. Now we have Barry, Vikram Gandhi’s film for Netflix about Obama’s year as a transfer student at Columbia University, a period in which the future president read a lot of books, smoked a ton of cigarettes and eventually decided to become a community organizer. This is Obama: The Awakening.

Taking the lead is Australian actor Devon Terrell, who is more strapping than his subject but gets just the right mixture of Vulcan self-possession and self-doubt, giving him a slight stammer as ideas struggle for expression through multiple thought-menus. Casting a non-American actor was a smart move. The film records not just Obama’s first encounter with New York—the Big Apple of Ronald Reagan’s first term, with its beatboxes, graffiti and break-dancers—but with a kind of urban black experience he hadn’t experienced in Hawaii. Passing between worlds, he belongs wholly to neither…

Read the entire review here.

Children’s and Adults’ Predictions of Black, White, and Multiracial Friendship Patterns

Journal of Cognition and Development
Published online: 2016-11-22
20 pages
DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2016.1262374

Steven O. Roberts, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan

Amber D. Williams, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Texas, Austin

Susan A. Gelman, Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
University of Michigan

Cross-race friendships can promote the development of positive racial attitudes, yet they are relatively uncommon and decline with age. In an effort to further our understanding of the extent to which children expect cross-race friendships to occur, we examined 4- to 6-year-olds’ (and adults’) use of race when predicting other children’s friendship patterns. In contrast to previous research, we included White (Studies 1 and 2), Black (Study 3), and Multiracial (Study 4) participants and examined how they predicted the friendship patterns of White, Black, and Multiracial targets. Distinct response patterns were found as a function of target race, participant age group, and participant race. Participants in all groups predicted that White children would have mostly White friends and Black children would have mostly Black friends. Moreover, most participant groups predicted that Multiracial children would have Black and White friends. However, White adults predicted that Multiracial children would have mostly Black friends, whereas Multiracial children predicted that Multiracial children would have mostly White friends. These data are important for understanding beliefs about cross-race friendships, social group variation in race-based reasoning, and the experiences of Multiracial individuals more broadly.

Read or purchase the article here.