Mixed Race Studies

Profiles in the Diaspora: Re-thinking Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Afro-Puerto Rican Father of the Global African Diaspora

Okay Africa: International Edition
2017-05-06

David Pastor

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Editor’s Note: In the inaugural edition of our Weekend Reading series, journalist David Pastor reviews new work on the legendary black scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg that helps reinstate his Puerto Rican identity.

NEW YORK CITY—Arturo Schomburg, namesake of the renowned Schomburg Center for Research in Black History in Harlem, is said to have identified as an afro-borinqueño, a Puerto Rican of African descent. Yet there has been a delay in acknowledging this ethnic component of his racial identity—his legacy so closely tied to the Harlem Renaissance, black history and culture.

Even during his lifetime, there were misconceptions concerning Arturo Schomburg and his intersectional background, including assertions that he had forgotten his native tongue; lost his culture, his interest in Puerto Rico, etc. Later, conflicting, often simplified views on Schomburg emerged and characterized him almost exclusively as a black scholar whose Puerto Rican identity had seemingly diminished upon his integration into the African-American community…

Read the entire article here.

SAS Researchers Probe Racial Passing, Identity Based on Two Novels

American University of Nigeria
2017-05-01

Nelly Ating

The modern-day issues of “racial passing” and “identity,” dominated the April 20 SAS research seminar presented by Dr. Agatha Ukata and Dr. Brian Reed of the English & Literature department.

The duo’s research probes the phenomenon in “Being and Not Being:  How Society Negotiates Humanity.”  This is a study based on Nella Larsen, and Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, and on Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name.

This work will be presented at the African Literature Association conference at Yale University in June.

Leading the discussion, Dr Ukata said that despite disparity in the years of publication of the novels, it is astonishing to see the recurrence of “racial passing” in this era…

Read the entire article here.

The Unbearable Whiteness Of Being

WBUR 90.9 FM
Boston, Massachusetts
2017-05-02

John Vercher

I’m raising my sons to be proud of their blackness, writes John Vercher. But they’ll benefit from their lighter skin. (Ayo Ogunseinde/Unsplash)

I used to make fun of my Pop’s Afro. Then, as now, he took meticulous care of it. I remember with such clarity the way he used to trim it in the mirror of our basement bathroom. The way he leaned over the sink to wash it, neck craned under the faucet to keep the shampoo from running in his eyes. The way he styled and shaped it to geometric perfection. That Afro was the epitome of cool.

Except to me. His natural, his turtlenecks under his leather jackets, his ankle-high leather boots, made him a walking anachronism. An outdated Richard Roundtree; Shaft in the wrong time.

I envied that hair, though I didn’t know it at the time. I still do. Not only for myself but also for my sons. I am a biracial black man, but I was not blessed with my father’s good hair. His loose curls plus my mother’s arrow-straight locks left me with a shock more Prince than Angela Davis; skin more Dwayne Johnson than Wesley Snipes. A child of the 70s, my parents let my hair grow long and wavy and so I heard that question, as early as grade school; the question that dogged me through high school, followed me to college, nipped at my heels through adulthood, until I shaved my thinning hair:

“What are you, exactly?”…

Read the entire article here.

Albanez: Exploring my mixed-race identity at NU has been invaluable experience

The Daily Northwestern
2017-05-09

Andrea Albanez, Op-Ed Contributor

In 2011, The New York Times published an article about how many young Americans were no longer defining themselves as one single race, but rather beginning to cast themselves under multiple races or calling themselves “mixed-race.” According to the article, “the crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”

I identify as a mixed-race American. I encompass an array of nationalities that define who I am biologically: Filipino from my mother’s side and Mexican, Portuguese, French and German from my father’s side. I have met many students and peers just within my first year at Northwestern that share this commonality of mixed-race background along with me. Yet though identifying as mixed is so common now, how a mixed-race individual can identify themselves in society is still a difficult feat to overcome.

As I am a makeup of 5 different races, I myself have only identified closely with two out of my five races: Filipino and Mexican, which makes up 75 percent of my overall racial identity. This is prominently because my parents shared those two ethnicities’ cultures and practices more so than those of French, Portuguese and German, which they had lesser affinities with. Because of this, I have solely defined Filipino and Mexican as my ethnicities. Yet even so, I still do not feel as strong of a connection to my ethnicities as I wish or hope to be…

Read the entire article here.

“Certain promoters would want to highlight that I was mixed race, and they’d want me to say that I was like, Southeast Asian, or not Black. Or one guy wanted me to not speak English. I was uncomfortable with a lot, obviously.

I was told I couldn’t have my hair natural. It’s not like I have the curliest of ‘fros. But they didn’t want me to have natural hair, so I would wear a hair weave because you couldn’t be a mixed Blasian if you didn’t have silky straight hair.

I had to buy my identity for $220 a pop.” —N’jaila Rhee

Esther Wang, “Let’s talk about sex (and race, and gender, and intersectionality),” Open City, March 23, 2015. http://opencitymag.aaww.org/lets-talk-njaila-rhee/.

The Manner of Blackness in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Volume 100, Number 2, 2017
pages 112-142

Michael A. Istvan Jr., Lecturer in Philosophy
Texas State University

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. This article challenges this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogenous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, this article intends to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. This article takes this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing thus has something to offer those today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

Let’s talk about sex (and race, and gender, and intersectionality)

Open City
2015-03-23

Esther Wang

N’jaila Rhee is many things — a writer; a phone sex operator, web cam girl, and former exotic dancer; a nerd; and a self-described “Blasian bitch.”

A native of New Jersey and a Rutgers University alumna, she’s carved out a niche for herself as a vocal critic and commentator on issues ranging from sex workers’ rights to favorite toys to racism in the porn industry. She uses her blog, social media, and “After Dark,” the popular podcast she co-hosts on the “This Week in Blackness” network, as platforms to voice her provocative positions.

N’jaila’s mission, it seems, is to get us all to bring our private desires out from the bedroom and into the open. Do this, and “we’re all going to be a little more healthy,” she explained on a recent evening in a Brooklyn coffee shop.

We chatted about the need for more Asian American porn, her thoughts on 50 Shades of Grey, and what it’s like to, as she put it, be constantly “dancing at the intersections of race, sex, and identity.”,,,

You became a stripper in college. Why did you decide to become a dancer?

Sex is the most natural way that I can relate to other people. And it’s always something that just felt innately right. So because it was so easy for me to express myself sexually, it was something that I felt very comfortable with…

…Did being Blasian impact the kind of work you got?

Certain promoters would want to highlight that I was mixed race, and they’d want me to say that I was like, Southeast Asian, or not Black. Or one guy wanted me to not speak English. I was uncomfortable with a lot, obviously.

I was told I couldn’t have my hair natural. It’s not like I have the curliest of ‘fros. But they didn’t want me to have natural hair, so I would wear a hair weave because you couldn’t be a mixed Blasian if you didn’t have silky straight hair.

I had to buy my identity for $220 a pop…

Read the entire interview here.

The debate over who counts as ‘American’ is nothing new

The Washington Post
2015-05-04

Alex Laughlin

(Illustration by Chris Kindred for The Washington Post))

Virginia Matsuoka was 10 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

She was playing tag football with her older brothers when her mother came outside and told them what had happened.

“And I remember my father came up behind me there,” Matsuoka said. “He put his arm around me and he said, ‘This is so bad, Ginger. This is bad.’”

Matsuoka’s mother was American and white, but her father was Japanese. By April 1942, her family was torn apart. Her father was working in Colorado, spared a stint in the internment camps because he had helpful law enforcement connections. He taught martial arts to police officers there. Two of her brothers were serving in the U.S. Army. And Matsuoka and two of her other brothers were in the Tanforan Assembly Center, an internment camp built around a racetrack near San Francisco.

Despite being displaced and separated, Matsuoka and her family remained patriotic. She recalls asking her father what it was like for her: “He said, ‘You know, Ginger, this was my country. I came here, they gave me the opportunity to make a name for myself, and then the war came along so you do things that you’ve got to do.’”

Hear Matsuoka recall her experiences in Tanforan and talk about what it was like returning to school after being separated from her friends and family…

Listen to the podcast (00:15:59) here.

Enrico Dungca’s The Amerasian Photography Project: The Forgotten Americans

Resource
2015-08-05

Marky Ramone Go

As one of the free world’s oldest allies, the United States and the Philippines have shared a storied past together. From fighting alongside each other to delay the Japanese’ war plans in World War II, to forming an armed presence in the Pacific by virtue of the United States two military bases; Clark Air Base and US Naval Base in Northern Luzon. However, hidden from these historical bonds lies a complex weave of direct blood descendants, of abandoned children sired by some members of the US Military during their service at the US bases in the Philippines, a large legion of fatherless men and women who possess multi-ethnicity looks born to single mothers, remains in search of half their roots. Often bullied in school for growing up in a broken household, these individuals harbors a secret wish of knowing their real fathers. For photographer Enrico Dungca, photographing them in order to send their message across the globe became a personal mission “The story begins with a young man I met during a trip in my birthplace, Angeles City. I was born and raised there and lived near the former Clark Air Base. I knew about the Amerasians and in fact witnessed many of them bullied and discriminated. I didn’t think much of it then for I was young and naive,” Dungca tells Resource Magazine.  More than 20 years after the last US Military Base closed down, an undeniable footprint of our Superpower ally still remains – and for some, something that needs to find closure soon…

Read the entire article here.

The Philosophy Of Multiracial Identity Vs. The Cult Of Antiracism

The Daily Caller
2017-05-03

Charles Michael Byrd, Freelance Writer
Queens, New York

Born the illegitimate, white-looking son of a dark-skinned woman in a small Virginia town in the 1950s, I squandered countless years wandering in the darkest mental ignorance before ultimately discovering that my atma-dharma (the natural devotional inclination of the soul or atma) or purpose on this planet was not to be a loyal servant to racial identity politics. Our eternal atma-dharma has nothing to do with the dharma of body, dynasty, caste or race. Those falsely identifying the body as the real self cannot fathom this.

That racial inheritance made me keenly aware, however, of the struggles multiracials endure regarding personal identification in a society that has only grudgingly begun publicly accepting the notion of hybridity. Even Barack Obama spent eight years on the global stage identifying exclusively as black, although the entire world knew of his white mother.

Against that backdrop, critics deride as naive post-racialism the notion that multiracial self-identification on the part of an ever increasing number of people may be, as the late mixed-race poet, novelist and philosopher Jean Toomer opined, “the turning point for the return of mankind, now divided into hostile races, to one unified race, namely, to the human race.”…

Read the entire article here.