Mixed Race Studies

The Many Lives Of Pauli Murray

The New Yorker
2017-04-17

Kathryn Schulz, Staff Writer

It was Pauli Murray’s fate to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes. CREDIT COURTESY SCHLESINGER LIBRARY / RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE / HARVARD UNIVERSITY

She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women’s movement. Why haven’t you heard of her?

The wager was ten dollars. It was 1944, and the law students of Howard University were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow. In the half century since Plessy v. Ferguson, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine—arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the “separate” part instead?

That student’s name was Pauli Murray. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her—she was the only woman among them and first in the class—but that day they laughed out loud. Her idea was both impractical and reckless, they told her; any challenge to Plessy would result in the Supreme Court affirming it instead. Undeterred, Murray told them they were wrong. Then, with the whole class as her witness, she made a bet with her professor, a man named Spottswood Robinson: ten bucks said Plessy would be overturned within twenty-five years.

Murray was right. Plessy was overturned in a decade—and, when it was, Robinson owed her a lot more than ten dollars. In her final law-school paper, Murray had formalized the idea she’d hatched in class that day, arguing that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Some years later, when Robinson joined with Thurgood Marshall and others to try to end Jim Crow, he remembered Murray’s paper, fished it out of his files, and presented it to his colleagues—the team that, in 1954, successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education…

Read the entire article here.

Early Afro-Brazilian Soccer Stars and the Myth of Racial Democracy

Sport In American History
2017-03-23

Zachary R. Bigalke
Department of History
University of Oregon

Carlos Molinari, “Time do Bangu em 1905,” Bangu.net, via Ludopédio, Francisco Carregal is pictured seated front row and center in the photo.

The ideology of racial democracy cast a long shadow over twentieth-century race relations in Brazil. First popularized by influential Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre, this theory presumed a level racial playing field that was paradoxically dependent on the whitening of the populace. Rather than helping to drive the country toward a multiracial future, racial democracy shrouded the structural issues that remained as a legacy of Brazilian slavery.

Throughout his corpus of writings, Freyre portrayed Afro-Brazilians as sexualized Dionysian figures with a florid talent for bodily movement, expressed not only through capoeira and samba but also on the soccer pitch. Freyre used soccer as a foil for his theories of racial democracy throughout the course of his career, assigning certain attributes such as surprise, skill, cleverness, speed, and spontaneity on a racialized basis even as he tried to claim racial syncretism both in soccer and in broader society. Journalist Mario Filho furthered this discourse in his 1947 book O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro, for which Freyre wrote the introduction. Freyre and later Filho lionized certain players while glossing over others to create the myth that soccer exemplified multiracial harmony within Brazil’s racial democracy.

The career arcs of two key soccer players—Francisco Carregal in Rio de Janeiro and Arthur Friedenreich in São Paulo—offer a lens to evaluate the extent of Afro-Brazilian agency during the early decades of soccer’s growth in Brazil. The stories of their respective careers and historical representations illustrate the extent to which the myth of racial democracy was contingent on the process of whitening, in soccer’s case less through manipulation of behavioral traits and physical appearance.

To better understand these individuals and their status in Brazilian soccer as vanguards for future generations of Afro-Brazilian players, let’s look at both men through the context of their careers as well as their portrayals by Filho in his landmark text…

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of Human Races, Second Edition

Wheatmark
2016-07-25
288 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1627874175

Alain F. Corcos, Professor Emeritus of Botany and Plant Pathology
Michigan State University

The idea that human races exist is a socially constructed myth that has no grounding in science. Regardless of skin, hair, or eye color, stature or physiognomy, we are all of one race. Nonetheless, scientists, social scientists, and pseudoscientists have, for three centuries, tried vainly to prove that distinctive and separate “races” of humanity exist. These protagonists of race theory have based their flawed research on one or more of five specious assumptions:

• humanity can be classified into groups using identifiable physical characteristics
• human characteristics are transmitted “through the blood”
• distinct human physical characteristics are inherited together
• physical features can be linked to human behavior
• human groups or “races” are by their very nature unequal and, therefore, they can be ranked in order of intellectual, moral, and cultural superiority

The Myth of Human Races systematically dispels these fallacies and unravels the web of flawed research that has been woven to demonstrate the superiority of one group of people over another.

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer

University of Tennessee Press
2007-09-30
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1572335806

Mark Whalan, Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English
University of Oregon

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of “Young American” writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism.

Focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer’s Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson’s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson’s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production.

The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the “buried cultures” of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the “folk” aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer’’ monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity.

Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to “Young America,” suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.

Mexican Is Not a Race

The New Inquiry
2017-04-06

Chris Chen and Wendy Trevino

Poet Wendy Trevino argues that a radical new Chicanx politics means forging an identity based on shared political struggle, not myths of racial homogeneity–an idea rooted in anarchist struggles along the Texas-Mexican border a century ago

WITH the recent publication of a chapbook of sonnets, Brazilian Is Not a Race, poet Wendy Trevino excavates a history of racial violence at the borders of the U.S. and beyond. The chapbook also describes a childhood spent in the Rio Grande Valley where the narrator is pressured to internalize the social hierarchies that organize daily life in Harlingen, Texas.

Blurring boundaries of polemic and historical description, the poems trace the roots of these social divisions through the legacy of murderous state and settler border violence. But Trevino balances this account with a less familiar counter-history of militant Tejano resistance, embodied in figures like anarcho-syndicalist Ricardo Flores Magón. By presenting both histories, the work shows how border-making congeals racist “commonsense” assumptions over time, and also interrogates fundamentally anti-black and anti-indigenous Latin American state programs to cultivate cultural unity through “race mixing.” Attentive to the emergence of racial hierarchies out of a history of enslavement and the Spanish and English colonization of the Americas, Trevino’s writing returns to an unsettled past where unity is not a precondition for political action, but a product of it…

…CHRIS CHEN. I know Vasconcelos and Gloria Anzaldua have different understandings of the political implications of miscegenation. I’m reminded here of critic Jared Sexton’s account of how Vasconcelos’s version of mestizaje preserves an anti-black and anti-indigenous racial order as a “dream of unequivocally hierarchical global integration” whose “eugenicist impulses and implications are unavoidable, casting long shadows over whatever limited threats it presents to the ‘ethnic absolutism’ of Anglo-Saxon white supremacy.”

WENDY TREVINO. During “nation building” in both Mexico and Brazil, elites promoted strong mestizaje ideologies that imagined the prototypical citizens of each country to be mixed-race, although the imagined mix was different in each country. To say a country or place is racially homogenous because everyone’s a “mix” of the same peoples is to acknowledge existing racial divisions without acknowledging the racial hierarchies from which they stem, and as long as there are prisons, plantations, maquiladoras, favelas, etc., one can only ignore these hierarchies and their relation to the racialization of peoples. This conception of mestizaje can also erase whole groups of people, which became clear to me when I returned to Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands and the story of Malinche…

Read the entire interview here.

Doctor Who’s Pearl Mackie: ‘When I was little there weren’t many people like me on TV’

The Guardian
2017-04-09

Sarah Hughes

Pearl Mackie: ‘This is by far the biggest thing I have ever done, which is amazing.’ Pearl wears top £26 urbanoutfitters.com. Make-up by Linda Johansson at One Represents using YSL Beauty. Hair by Bianca Simone Scott using Mizani. Fashion assistant Bemi Shaw. Photograph: Andrew Woffinden for the Observer

Meet Doctor Who’s new companion, Pearl Mackie. She tells Sarah Hughes why it’s so important to have diverse actors on TV, and how her friends are making sure her feet stay on the ground

The moment when Pearl Mackie understood just how big her new role as Doctor Who’s latest companion was came early in filming. “There was a scene in episode three that was so awesome – in the sense that I was awestruck by the scale of the set – that it was really humbling. I stood there looking at it, thinking, ‘Oh. Wow. This is a very big show.’ When you see it from the inside, that’s when you realise how massive it is.”

She’s not wrong — Doctor Who is, as 29-year-old Mackie puts it, “properly, globally huge”. The most successful science fiction series in television history, this tale of a history-haunted time lord and his adventures across the universe with various sidekicks has progressed far beyond its days as children’s tea-time entertainment. In 2013 the 50th anniversary special broke viewing records around the world after being aired in 94 countries simultaneously while the current Doctor, Peter Capaldi, began his stint by undertaking a rock star-style world tour with then companion Jenna Coleman, taking in Cardiff, London, Seoul, Sydney, New York, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. At each stop they were greeted by queues of fans, many of them in costume. There were Weeping Angels and Daleks, Cybermen and companions, and a whole host of Doctors, from every stage of this very British institution’s lengthy career…

…She spent much of her own childhood searching for a similar jolt of recognition. “When Alicia Keys came out that was a big thing for me because she was mixed race as well,” she says. “There were a lot of people I liked on screen, like Judi Dench, she’s wicked, but that’s very different to having someone where you think, ‘She looks like me, maybe I could do that.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Skin Color and Politics Focus of Dan T. Blue Symposium

North Carolina Central University
Durham, North Carolina
2017-04-03

Yaba Blay

North Carolina Central University (NCCU)’s 2017 Dan T. Blue Symposium in Political Science will take place April 10-13 with a focus on “The Politics of Skin Color.”

The conference is hosted by Yaba Blay, Ph.D., holder of the Dan T. Blue Endowed Chair at NCCU. Blay is a nationally recognized researcher and ethnographer who uses personal and social narratives to explore issues of race, class and culture. All events during the symposium are free and open to the public.

“Light skin versus dark skin: Which is more socially advantageous? Regarded as more beautiful? Considered more Black? Treated more favorably by the law?” Blay asks. “These are not as much questions of personal opinion as they are issues of power and politics.”

The symposium keynote event brings Blay on stage with CNN contributor and activist Michaela Angela Davis and Patrice Grell Yursik, whose online persona Afrobella is considered the godmother of brown beauty blogging, for a public conversation about colorism beginning at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, at the A.E. Student Union.

Blay defines colorism as a discriminatory system of value based on skin tone that encourages people of color to opt for separation in place of unity. Photography from her 2013 book “(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race,” will be on display April 10-13 in a pop-up exhibit at the NCCU Museum of Art, with an opening reception Tuesday, April 11, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.  Blay will present a lecture on her work immediately following the reception in the Hubbard-Totten Building Auditorium…

Read the entire article here.

Genetic Determinism, Technology Optimism, and Race

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 661, Issue 1, 2015
pages 160-180
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215587875

Jennifer Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Maya Sen, Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Harvard University

We begin with a typology of Americans’ understanding of the links between genetic inheritance and racial or ethnic groups. The typology has two dimensions: one running from genetic determinism to social construction, and the other from technology optimism to technology pessimism. Construing each dimension as a dichotomy enables four distinct political perspectives on the possibilities for reducing racial inequality in the United States through genomics. We then use a new public opinion survey to analyze Americans’ use of the typology. Survey respondents who perceive that some phenotypes are more prevalent in one group than another due to genetic factors are disproportionately technology optimists. Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to hold that set of views, as are self-identified blacks, whites, and Latinos. The article discusses the findings and speculates about alternative interpretations of the fact that partisanship and group identity do not differentiate Americans in their views of the links between genetic inheritance and racial inequality.

Read the entire article here.

[Interview] If only parents gave DNA samples when they put children up for adoption

The Hankyoreh
2017-04-04

Kang Sung-man, Senior Staff writer

Bella Siegel-Dalton is a mixed-race adoptee who returned to South Korea after 51 years to look for her biological mother’s family. The big Korean letters on her shirt say, “Back in South Korea, my mother’s country.” (by Kang Sung-man, senior staff writer)

More Korean adoptees are organizing to search for their birth parents through DNA testing

Bella Siegel-Dalton is back in South Korea for the first time since being adopted by a family in the Napa Valley of northern California in 1966. When Bella Siegel-Dalton, 56, met a Hankyoreh reporter in a coffee shop on the first floor of the Lotte Hotel in Seoul on Apr. 1, her face was pallid. Because of kidney trouble, she needs to receive a transplant within two years. She’s also receiving chemotherapy after being diagnosed with leukemia.

Seven years ago, Siegel-Dalton identified her biological father in the US through DNA testing, but he had already passed away. During this trip to South Korea she says she wants to find her biological mother. “My 17-day trip to South Korea is challenging, so I’m gritting my teeth and hanging on. But it’s not painful, because this visit is so important to me,” she said.

Siegel-Dalton is a mixed-race adoptee who was born in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi Province, in 1961, to a South Korean woman and an American soldier. Her birth name was Lee Ji-sun. “My adoptive parents were really good people. My mother was an English teacher with a Master’s degree, while my father was a researcher for Shell Oil. They would sometimes let me try kimchi and listen to ‘Arirang’ so that I wouldn’t forget my memories of Korea,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Understanding Our Roots – White Supremacy is More Than the KKK

TEDxWCC
TEDx Talks
2017-04-05

Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York

Several strong experiences with the complexities of race as a child led Hephzibah to wanting to escape these problems by becoming a business major and ‘marrying well’. As she embarked on that path she found that solution incomplete and unfulfilling and so move into studying economics and sociology. Since then, she has developed an understanding of how White Privilege and White Supremacy shaped the structures not only of her childhood, but also of our country.

Dr. Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl is a sociologist who specializes in the study of race and contemporary racial inequality, and has a focus on American multiracialism. She is the author of the book Multiracialism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Analysis of Asian-White and Black-White Multiracials and co-editor of the reader Race and Ethnicity: Constancy in Change. In addition to her research on multiracialism, she is invested in the pedagogy of race and is beginning new work on gentrification. Dr. strmic-pawl is also the founder of the campaign to create a holiday in honor of the Civil Rights Movement activist, Ella Baker (www.supportellabakerday.com). She is currently an assistant professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York and resides in Brooklyn.