Mixed Race Studies

Kamala Harris Is Dreaming Big

Vogue
April 2018

Abby Aguirre

Harris in Los Angeles with beneficiaries of the DREAM Act—which the senator has made a priority to protect. Photographed by Zoe Ghertner, Vogue, April 2018

IT’S A COLD JANUARY NIGHT in D.C., and I’m at the Hart Senate Office Building, trailing U.S. Senator Kamala Harris into a conference room. Inside, a group of young Latino congressional staffers has gathered to meet the Democratic star from California. When she enters, flanked by aides, and dressed in a navy suit, matching ruffled blouse, black pearls, and stilettos that give her petite five-feet-four frame a few extra inches of height, the staffers immediately rise from their chairs.

Harris has an air of celebrity that, under normal circumstances, a freshman senator wouldn’t have had time to acquire. But this year has been anything but normal. She greets the 20-somethings as though they’re relatives at a family reunion: “Hi, everybody! Hi, guys!” Then she notices that one of the staffers is still seated, and her voice drops a full octave: “Stand up, man!”

The startled staffer springs to his feet. “Kevin,” he says, extending a hand.

“What’s your last name?” demands Harris.

“Figueroa.”

“Thank you!” She shakes his hand. “Kamala Harris.” (That’s pronounced “comma-la,” by the way, and you’d better get it right.)…

Harris with her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who emigrated from India to study at Berkeley in the ’60s. Photo: Courtesy of Kamala Harris

…HARRIS’S POLITICAL CAREER—seven years as district attorney in San Francisco and then another six as attorney general of California—amounts to an extraordinary run of firsts. She was the first woman and the first person of color to be elected to both positions, and she is now America’s first Indian-American senator and California’s first black senator. In 2012, Harris spoke in prime time at the Democratic National Convention. More Americans learned her name the following year, when President Obama apologized for saying Harris was not only “brilliant,” “dedicated,” and “tough,” but that she “also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general in the country.”…

Read the entire article here.

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

Sunday Review
Gray Matter
The New York Times
2018-03-23

David Reich, Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
also, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Angie Wang

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view…

Read the entire article here.

Tie-Dyed Realities in a Monochromatic World: Deconstructing the Effects of Racial Microaggressions on Black-White Multiracial University Students

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California
2013
431 pages
ISBN: 9781303700170

Claire Anne Touchstone

A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the School of Education, Loyola Marymount University, in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education

Traditional policies dictate that Black-White multiracial people conform to monoracial minority status arising from Hypodescent (the “One-Drop Rule“) and White privilege. Despite some social recognition of Black-White persons as multiracial, racial microaggressions persist in daily life. Subtle racist acts (Sue, Capodilupo, Torino, Bucceri, Holder, Nadal, & Esquilin, 2007b) negatively impact multiracial identity development. Since 2007, studies have increasingly focused on the impact of racial microaggressions on particular monoracial ethnic groups. Johnston and Nadal (2010) delineated general racial microaggressions for multiracial people. This project examines the effects of racial microaggressions on the multiracial identity development of 11 part-Black multiracial university students, including the concerns and challenges they face in familial, academic, and social racial identity formation. Data were analyzed through a typological analysis and Racial and Multiracial Microaggressions typologies (Johnston & Nadal, 2010; Sue et al., 2007b). Three themes arose: (a) the external societal pressure for the multiracial person to identify monoracially; (b) the internalized struggle within the mixed-race person to create a cohesive self-identity; and (c) the assertion of a multiracial identity. Participants experienced Racial Microaggressions (Sue, 2010a; Sue et al., 2007b), Multiracial Microaggressions (Johnston & Nadal, 2010), and Monoracial Stereotypes (Nadal, Wong, Griffin, Sriken, Vargas, Wideman, & Kolawole, 2011). Implications included encouraging a multiracial identity, educating the school community, and eliminating racial microaggressions and stereotypes.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Creative Producer, Passing by Indigo Griffiths

Arts Jobs
Arts Council England
March 2018

Closes: 2018-03-26
Location: London, England
Type: Part-Time
Salary: Paid (£10k-15k pro rata)
Artform: Theater
Contact: Gemma Aked-Priestley and Indigo Griffiths

Description

Chicago. 1941. Joey, John and Eliza are siblings but their lives are about to take different paths. Joey is embracing the New Negro Movement, John is breaking barriers at college and Eliza is preparing to pass as white. In a world where everything is determined by race, what can you gain by concealing who you are, and more importantly what can you lose?

Passing is a new play by Indigo Griffiths exposing the controversial practice of “racial passing” – the use of skin colour as social currency.

In August 2017 the project undertook Arts Council funded R&D at the Nuffield Southampton Theatres, culminating in an industry sharing at The Bunker. A rehearsed reading will take place on Wednesday 14th March in collaboration with Women@RADA: https://www.rada.ac.uk/whats-on/playreadings

The Creative Producer will lead a fundraising campaign, support budgeting, marketing, the formation of the creative team and be involved with all aspects of the production. Fee is funding dependant but will be in line with ITC recommended rates. Creative meetings will begin in May 2018 for a Spring 2019 production.

Gemma’s directing credits include Gracie (Finborough Theatre) Grimm: An Untold Tale (Underbelly, Edinburgh Festival) and Tender Napalm (Karamel Club). She is the Assistant Director for The Mono Box. Assistant Direction includes Sam Hodges on the world premiere of Howard Brenton’s The Shadow Factory (Nuffield Southampton Theatres) and Daniel Goldman on Thebes Land (Arcola). She is the recipient of bursaries from the Mayflower Theatre, Barker-Mill Foundation and JMK Trust.

Indigo’s Writing credits include The Mulatto Girl (Nuffield Theatre Lab) and Passing (The Bunker/The Pleasance). She is a member of the Papatango Writers Course 2017-18 and in 2018 completed An Introduction to Screenwriting course (University of East Anglia). Indigo’s focus is on exploring unheard female voices and the mixed-race narrative. She is currently working on a trilogy of plays that explore mixed race heritage (Passing, The Mulatto Girl and The Island.)

Please send a CV and short letter of interest to Gemma.aked-priestley@hotmail.co.uk/ indigo.griffiths@hotmail.co.uk.

For more information, click here.

National Geographic Replaces Racist Fictions With Post-racial Fantasies

New York Magazine
2018-03-16

Lauren Michele Jackson

Photo: Courtesy of National Geographic. Photograph by Robin Hammond

In her honest but odd memoir that it seems, thankfully, few besides me have read, National Geographic emerges as a crucial touchstone to Rachel Dolezal’s supposed racial awakening. Isolated regionally and culturally by Christian-fundamentalist parents, copies of the magazine were one of the few tokens from 1980s and ’90s American culture allowed to Dolezal in a home that forbade television and processed food. And while her older brother scrounged pages for photos of topless women, NatGeo begat Rachel’s earliest racial fantasies. Coating herself in mud from head to feet, she “would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo,” images conjured exclusively by the monthly magazine. “I would stay in this fantasy world as long as I possibly could,” Dolezal writes. “It was never long enough.”

Over the last century, National Geographic has used the guise of ethnographic research to stoke the racial imaginations of curious white people. Investigating peoples and cultures like flora, splaying their images upon glossy pages with unchecked fascination, the magazine does not have a great track record when it comes to stories about people of color. And yet, these are the stories NatGeo is most famous for, training generation after generation to gawk at peoples other than themselves through telephoto lenses. Founded in 1888 to document the interests of affluent explorers, the name alone evokes a colonial impulse — the National Geographic Society started as a private club dedicated to worldly, exotic travel. The publication has long been an unrepentant descendant of those beginnings — until now, allegedly…

Read the entire article here.

Walter Tull should get Military Cross, says Tottenham MP David Lammy

BBC News
2018-03-23

Richard Conway, BBC Radio 5 live sports news correspondent

Walter Tull died on the battlefields of northern France in 1918

Walter Tull – one of England’s first black professional footballers – should be awarded a Military Cross 100 years after his death, says Tottenham MP David Lammy.

Tull, who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, died aged 29 when he was shot on the battlefields of France during World War One.

He was Britain’s first black Army officer to command white troops.

“His service on behalf of this country was immense,” Lammy said…

Read the entire article here.

Asian, White, multiethnic, multiracial, mixed-race, interracial, biracial!

2018-03-22

Michele Chan, Master Candidate
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Do any of these labels resonate with you? If so, maybe you would like to participate in a research study about multiracial Asian Americans.

We are seeking participants to participate in a study about the experiences of multiracial Asian Americans. In order to participate, we ask that you are:

1. Aged 18 to aged 44
2. Currently live in the U.S.
3. Have one biological parent who is racially White and another biological parent who is racially Asian

We are very interested in hearing about your unique experiences as an individual with both Asian and White heritages.

Please consider completing our short, online survey, which will take no more than 30 minutes to finish. To take the survey, click here.

In return for your participation, you may choose to enter into a drawing to win a $20 dollar gift card to Target.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the investigators:

• Lisa Kiang, Ph.D., Wake Forest University, Phone: (336) 758-5750, E-Mail: kiangl@wfu.edu
• Michele Chan, B.S., Wake Forest University, Master Candidate, E-Mail: chanmg16@wfu.edu

Thank you.

My Transracial Testimony

Chicago Now
2017-11-05

Doriana Markovitz

Bio: I am a biracial woman, but I identify as Black. My birthmother is what Puerto Ricans call Spanish. I was adopted by two white women when I was a week old. They later divorced. My Jewish mama, who gave me my last name Markovitz, remarried and adopted 2 more baby girls, later on, giving me siblings and ending my own unique child experience at 14. During that time, I swallowed a white liberal education for 9 years, until I was forced to puke it back up in the later years of my high school experience. This is my testimony, my hymnal, my stories, my life as a transracial adoptee.

I have been raised by many mothers; many women have poured themselves into me. I am the product of the multi-dimensionality of womanhood. I have only ever known that experience, the struggle, and hardship, while also the joy and the power that women can offer to one another and their children.

Three women have raised me — the mothers who adopted me, but also the woman who took me in when those two women fell out of love.

Motherhood lives inside my skin, but I am also motherless because there is a woman out there who I do not know, but whose body was my first home. I knew this from the time I could understand that the women who chose me did not look like me.

Their skin did not look like mine, their hair did not feel like mine, and their bodies were not shaped like mine. Even though I knew this, I felt safe inside that truth. I felt loved inside that truth until I couldn’t any longer…

Read the entire article here.

Kali Nicole Gross

New Books Network
2018-03-13

Host:

Christine Lamberson, Assistant Professor of History
Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas

Kali Nicole Gross

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America
Oxford University Press 2016

True crime is as popular as ever in our present moment. Both television and podcast series have gained critical praise and large audiences by exploring largely unknown individual crimes in depth and using them to consider broader questions surrounding the justice system, guilt and innocence, class and racial inequality, and evidence. Rarely do we get to think historically about these broader topics through the lens of individual, especially unknown, cases in light of the challenges posed by researching historical crimes. Kali Nicole Gross, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University New Brunswick, has done incredible research to do just that in her new book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, Hardcover 2016, Paperback 2018). The book won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

The book tells the story of the discovery of a torso, the investigation of the murder, and the life of the accused—Hannah Mary Tabbs. The body was discovered in 1887 and drew an unusual amount of attention in the segregated areas in and around Philadelphia, especially given the victim and accused were black. In this episode of the podcast, Gross discusses why the case caught the eye of the public and investigators at the time. She also explains some of the broader context and insights of the case. Finally, she talks about her research process. We don’t give away the resolution of the case in our conversation, but will introduce you to Hannah Mary Tabbs and the world of post-Reconstruction Philadelphia in which she lived.

Listen to the interview (00:56:48) here. Download the interview here.

Self-Hate & Forgiveness

OpenHeartTin: Spiritual Journey. Awareness. Love. Healing.
2018-02-07

Sonja Jackson

In case anyone was wondering, I am a black female. I have a little more than that thrown in there (my mom is white/black and my biological father is black), but I identify as black. I’d like to identify as nothing, but hey. Not because I hate being black, but because I’m tired of race and separation. I wish people saw my soul and not my body. But then at the same time, I like seeing different races. Different shades. It adds some spice to life. But when I was younger, I hated being black. I also hated being female. This one is hard for me to write because I still don’t think I’ve completely forgiven myself for having felt this way in the past. I’m ashamed and it’s hard to admit. But I also don’t feel it was all my own beliefs. I’ll get more into that later…

Read the entire article here.