Mixed Race Studies

No doubt I am mixed, but I’m mixed and black. Blackness can accommodate mixedness, in a way that whiteness, with its myths of purity cannot. In some contexts I am black, in others mixed, sometimes I am Irish, others Nigerian (white is still off limits), but I am always me, always with the potential to identify as any of these things.

Emma Dabiri, “Emma: On Whether Irish Black People Are Woke, and on Changing “Foreign” Names,” Dublin Inquirer, October 25, 2017. https://www.dublininquirer.com/2017/10/25/emma-on-whether-irish-black-people-are-woke-and-on-changing-foreign-names/.

Emma: On Whether Irish Black People Are Woke, and on Changing “Foreign” Names

Dublin Inquirer
2017-10-25

Emma Dabiri

Illustration by Rob Mirolo

Do you think Irish black people are woke? What’s being woke? Is there any civil-rights movement? You’re mixed race, so are you black? Africa: would someone like yourself get the culture? What did you get culture-wise from your father’s side? Irish people come across as just trying to look for one person they can say… Yes, here is our black successful person, as opposed to uplift black Irish people in general […] In Dublin, Pavee Point has a centre. The LGBT community has Outhouse. Why do you think ethnic minorities don’t have such a place?

Cheeky! This is like 10 questions but I like ‘em, so let’s go. Let’s start with explaining “woke”. “Staying woke” refers to questioning the dominant paradigm, and occupying a state of awareness about structural oppressions.

The phrase “staying woke” has some early references in the 1960s, it was then further popularised in the 2008 song “Master Teacher” by Erykah Badu, but really caught on following the wave of protest after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the subsequent rise of Black Lives Matter. In 2016, “woke” entered into the Oxford Dictionary…

…Am I black? Gosh you aren’t shying away from the big questions, now are ye? But yes, I identify as black. The thing is, despite being told I was black (and often not so politely) my whole damn life, and often being reminded that I wasn’t “really Irish”, my claiming of my blackness still elicits occasional cries of “But what about your ma?” or “You’re erasing your Irishness!” Blah blah di blah blah blah.

I think what we really need to look at is why a person with a white parent can identify as black, but why a person with a black parent can rarely, if ever, identify as white. We have to stop acting as though racial constructions are rational or ordered. They are not. I always say that you cannot be “half white”. You are either white or you’re not. And I’m not…

Read the entire article here.

Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897

University of California Press
December 1995
365 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520203433

Robert M. Levine (1941-2003), Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
University of Miami

The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization.

In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa’s acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the eyes of the inhabitants of Canudos, however, this historical incident lends itself to a bold new interpretation which challenges the traditional polemics on the subject. While the Canudos movement has been consistently viewed either as a rebellion of crazed fanatics or as a model of proletarian resistance to oppression, Levine deftly demonstrates that it was, in fact, neither.

Vale of Tears probes the reasons for the Brazilian ambivalence toward its social history, giving much weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-race descent. They were perceived as opponents to progress and civilization and, by inference, to Brazil’s attempts to “whiten” itself. As a result there are major insights to be found here into Brazilians’ self-image over the past century.

Real American: A Memoir

Henry Holt and Co.
2017-10-03
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781250137746

Julie Lythcott-Haims

A fearless debut memoir in which beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a biracial black woman in America.

Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called “micro” aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person’s inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims’s path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered “the other.”

For one year, all the South Asians in the US were considered “white”

Quartz
2017-09-02

Preeti Varathan

Stand and be counted. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

The history of classifying South Asians in the United States is fraught. For most of the 20th century, the census and courts did not consider South Asians as a distinct race, in part because their numbers were negligible. In 1970, the US census decided South Asians were white.

Racially designating South Asians, especially from the Indian subcontinent, is complicated. India is home to more than 2,000 ethnic groups. In the early 1900s, scholars believed that a major ancestral group, the Aryans, migrated to the subcontinent from Europe. They indisputably integrated into Indian culture—the Mahabharata, one of the most well-known ancient Indian epics, tells the story of Aryan warriors who fought among their families for political and spiritual legitimacy. They grouped into an elite, fair-skinned class, possibly explaining the diversity in skin tones of Indians today.

So what happened in 1970? Let’s go back to 1919…

Read the entire article here.

I don’t usually do this, but…

Simply Eartha
2017-11-18

Kitt Shapiro

Eartha Kitt leaving hospital after giving birth to her daughter Kitt (c. 1961-11-26).

I don’t usually respond to negative comments, but I am compelled to do so here because I feel there is an opportunity for dialogue on a subject that many struggle with and is very relevant in today’s times.

As the most popular post on my blog, ‘Why Don’t You Look More Like Your Mother?’, continues to receive a lot of attention, one recent comment has brought me back to the subject of race, specifically, mixed race, and the desire of some truly ignorant people to deny the existence of others, because they do not ‘fit’ the stereotype of how ‘mixed race’ people should look…

Eartha Kitt with daughter Kitt Shapiro

Read the entire article here.

Lucy Parsons bio reveals new facts about the birth, ethnicity of the ‘Goddess of Anarchy’

The Chicago Tribune
2017-11-15

Mark Jacob, Metro Editor

A new biography of Lucy Parsons reveals new facts about her life. Photo courtesy of the Lucy Parsons Project/Justice Design (/ LUCY PARSONS PROJECT)

Lucy Parsons, an anarchist firebrand who was one of the most enigmatic Chicagoans ever, might fit in better today than she did during her own time a century ago.

She was a black woman married to a white man. Scandalous then, no big thing now…

She favored an eight-hour workday and a social safety net, positions that made her a radical in the late 1800s but would qualify her for Congress today.

And Parsons had another trait of today’s politicians: She was a merchant of misinformation.

“Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” is an important new biography by University of Texas historian Jacqueline Jones that fact-checks Parsons’ made-up details about her own background, correcting errors existing in virtually every biographical sketch ever written about this amazing woman…

Read the entire article here.

‘I tried to be what white people valued’ — a searing memoir of growing up biracial

The Chicago Tribune
2017-11-10

Heidi Stevens, Contact Reporter

Julie Lythcott-Haims’ “Real American: A Memoir” tells her story of growing up with an African-American father and a white British mother in the 1970s and early ’80s in New York, Wisconsin and Virginia. (Julie Lythcott-Haims photo by Kristina Vetter)

Julie Lythcott-Haims has written a deeply affecting memoir about growing up biracial.

It’s poetic and candid, and it dives into discussions we really ought to be having about race in America — past, present and future.

“Real American: A Memoir” (Henry Holt) tells Lythcott-Haims’ story of growing up with an African-American father and a white British mother in the 1970s and early ’80s in New York, Wisconsin and Virginia. It’s a series of essays that read like individual poems — some brief, some ballads — that work together to narrate her life.

One goes like this:…

Read the entire article here.

“What are you?”: Embracing a mixed-roots identity

The Pitt News
2017-11-12

Erica Brandbergh, Columnist

(Illustration by Raka Sarkar | Senior Staff Illustrator)

I once asked my dad, out of curiosity, whether he put Caucasian, Asian or both on surveys that ask about his race. He paused for a bit and said he didn’t know. I asked if he identified with one more than the other, and he was unsure of that as well.

My dad is half-Japanese. He was born on an American Army base in Okinawa and came to the United States at a young age with my grandparents and his siblings. His mom — who we call “Oba” — is from southwestern Japan. My Oba never taught my father Japanese, so I never learned much beyond the basics that she taught me when she was my kindergarten teacher.

Despite my diminished interaction with my non-white heritage, it was clear from my experiences growing up as someone with only one-quarter Asian ancestry that white society at large didn’t consider me fully one of its own. That reality is even more pronounced for people who are half non-white, like my father, or even more…

Read the entire article here.