Month: February 2017

  • Throughout my month here at open-book.ca I’ve been sharing my conversations with various members of the literary community. Our last conversation is with noted poet, Adebe DeRango-Adem. To learn more about her current collection, Terra Incognita please visit here or her Facebook page.

  • Rosemary Adaser was one of many mixed-race children considered illegitimate who was brought up in institutions run by the Catholic church in Ireland between the 1950s and 1970s. She tells of the abuse and racist treatment she suffered, and returns to her school in Kilkenny for the first time in 40 years and attempts to…

  • A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs (review) Journal of Southern History Volume 82, Number 2, May 2016 pages 465-466 DOI: 10.1353/soh.2016.0107 Wilma King, Professor Emerita of History University of Missouri A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. By Allyson Hobbs. (Cambridge, Mass., and…

  • LOS ANGELES, CA – The fourth Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, “Explorations in Trans (gender, gressions, migrations, racial) Fifty Years After Loving v. Virginia,” will bring together academics, activists, and artists from across the US and abroad to explore the latest developments in critical mixed race studies. The Conference will be held at The University…

  • Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” is one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen—I would have stayed in the theater in New York to see the film again if the next showing had not been sold out. The newly released film powerfully illustrates, through James Baldwin’s prophetic work, that the insanity now…

  • This debate over “who counts” has created somewhat of an identity crisis in the black community, exposing a divide between those who think being black should be based on physical looks, and those who think being black is more than looks.

  • LC lecturer looks back on landmark court case on mixed-race marriage The News & Advance Lynchburg, Virginia 2017-02-22 Josh Moody Today Americans enjoy the Constitutional right to marry regardless of race — but it wasn’t always so, and landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia can be thanked for breaking down that barrier. The famous…

  • Before Loving, there was Kinney in Augusta County The News Leader Staunton, Virginia 2017-01-08 Dale M. Brumfield, Special to The News Leader “By the laws of Virginia (C. V. 1873, ch. 105, § 1), all marriages between a white person and a negro are absolutely void…” —Kinney v. Commonwealth, Oct. 3, 1878, Supreme Court of…

  • I heard of Adrienne Dawes when a show that talked about Mexican identity called Casta came on my radar.  I knew that I had to connect with her.  She is a boss writer and the head of a production company called Heckle Her.  She is the mastermind behind dope shows like Doper than Dope, Am…

  • Too Black for the adoption agencies but not Black enough for the political campaigners.  On growing up an adoptee of mixed heritage in Britain.