Mixed Race Studies

Kamala Harris gets personal

The Washington Post
2019-09-23

Jennifer Rubin, Opinion Writer

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) stands ahead of her address to an NAACP banquet on Saturday in Charleston, S.C. (Meg Kinnard/AP)

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has built her career on a model of inclusive, progressive change. She tells voters she became a prosecutor so she could change the system from the inside. However, she has rarely described herself as an insider on behalf of the African American community. But her address at the Charleston, S.C. NAACP Fund Banquet on Saturday shows that’s changing.

At the onset of her campaign, Harris was criticized as not sharing enough of herself. While she has touted her education at Howard University and raised her experience being bused to school as a young girl, her presidential campaign has stressed universality and inclusion. Her “3 a.m. agenda” has stressed that what keeps us up at night — medical bills, housing, our kids’ education — does not depend on whether one is a Republican or Democrat. She routinely states that “we have so much more in common than what separates us.”

That reticence, by necessity, has receded. Voters demand a level of candor and intimacy from their presidential candidates. To both define her message and defend her record, she has had to explain her tenure as a prosecutor and rebutted claims that she was a cog in the machine of mass incarceration. She’s been obliged to share stories of her experience as a prosecutor comforting mothers whose children have been shot and killed and in instituting anti-bias training for police officers.

Read the entire article here.

Her [Brittany Howard’s] most striking lyrics come on Goat Head [in her album Jaime], as she discusses growing up as the child of a poor, interracial couple in rural Alabama.

“When I was born – or rather when my sister was born in 1984 – that was like the first wave of mixed babies, little brown babies,” she says.

“My mama would go around town, pushing my sister and I in a cart to the grocery store, and people would actually come up to her and lecture her. They would say, ‘Do you know what you’ve done?'”

In the song, she recalls an incident that happened when she was a baby, but was told about later, where “someone cut off a goat’s head, and they put it in the back of my dad’s car and slashed his tyres, and smeared blood all over his car”.

“It’s always been a part of me, that story,” says Howard. “Because Athens was a beautiful, peaceful country place, where people are neighbours and we really care about each other. But there’s a racial line, or there was at least, and that’s why I wanted to write that song. Just to explain where I was coming from.”

Mark Savage, “Brittany Howard finds freedom after Alabama Shakes,” BBC News, September 25, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49808839.

Book Reviews: Self-Portrait in Black and White

Tablet
2019-09-24

Daniel Oppenheimer

The rewards of subordinating racial or ethnic identity, in the new memoiristic essay by the author of ‘Losing My Cool’

Thomas Chatterton Williams’ new book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, is a few things. It’a memoiristic follow-up to his first book, Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd; a meditation on what it means for a black man to discover that he’s fathered white children; and an impassioned argument for rejecting the whole modern paradigm of black and white.

It’s also, I think, an effort to answer for himself one of the essential questions that many older liberals, who were formed before the rise of identity politics, simply can’t answer or even adequately ask. What does one get in return for subordinating one’s racial or ethnic identity? Folks like Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Sam Harris, Laura Kipnis, Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Chait, and Jonathan Haidt are on the front lines of the present culture war making compelling arguments that our society needs shared values and narratives to sustain itself, that collectively it is in our best interests to privilege our commonalities over our differences. They’re not, however, providing interesting or persuasive psychological answers to why any given individual would be moved to let his or her racial or ethnic identity attenuate when it is actively providing strength and solace. Or why young people, not yet fully formed, would abstain from the identities that are not just au courant but manifestly powerful in their capacity to compel deference or compliance from the establishment. They’re not offering a new synthesis that incorporates some of the insights and aesthetics of identity politics. They’re mostly arguing for a return to the previous liberal synthesis…

Read the entire review here.

Neo-race Realities in the Obama Era

SUNY Press
May 2019
174 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-7415-1

Edited by:

Heather E. Harris, Professor of Communication
Stevenson University, Stevenson, Maryland

Considers the impact of neo-racism during the Obama presidency.

Neo-race Realities in the Obama Era expands the discourse about Barack Obama’s two terms as president by reflecting upon the impact of neo-racism during his tenure. Continually in conversation with Étienne Balibar’s conceptualization of neo-racism as being racism without race, the contributors examine how identities become the target of neo-racist discriminatory practices and policies in the United States. Individual chapters explore how President Obama’s multiple and intersecting identities beyond the racial binaries of Black and White were perceived, as well as how his presence impacted certain marginalized groups in our society as a result of his administration’s policies. Evidencing the hegemonic complexity of neo-racism in the United States, the contributors illustrate how the mythic post-race society that many wished for on election night in 2008 was deferred, in order to return to the uncomfortable comfort zone of the way America used to be.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Foreword / Amardo Rodríguez
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Heather E. Harris
• Part I
  • 1. Obama’s Transformation of American Myths / Zoë Hess Carney
  • 2. Transformational Masculinity and Fathering in the Age of Obama: “Roses and Thorns” / Shanette M. Harris
  • 3. How Obama’s Hybridity Stifled Black Nationalist Rhetorical Identity: An Ideological Analysis on His Two-Term Third-Space Leadership / Omowale T. Elson
• Part II
  • 4. “Who Gets to Say Hussein? The Impact of Anti-Muslim Sentiment during the Obama Era” / Nura A. Sediqe
  • 5. The End of AIDS? A Critical Analysis of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy / Andrew R. Spieldenner, Tomeka M. Robinson, and Anjuliet G. Woodruffe
  • 6. The President Was Black, Y’all: Presidential Humor, Neo-racism, and the Social Construction of Blackness and Whiteness / Jenny Ungbha Korn
  • 7. L’homme de la créolisation: Obama, Neo-racism, and Cultural and Territorial Creolization / Douglas-Wade Brunton
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index

“I’m Black, Native, gay, and I’m proud”: Fentress LeBeau shares his story about being a minority among his people

West River Eagle
Eagle Butte, South Dakota
2019-09-25

Alaina Adakai (Alaina Beautiful Bald Eagle), Managing Editor

Fentress LeBeau

Much can be said about Fentress LeBeau — with his energetic wit and bright smile, he can light up any room. Standing 6’ tall, with his hair in long braids, Fentress makes no effort to hide his chin strap beard, even as he wears glittery eyeshadow and vibrant lipstick.

By just being himself, the 20-year old Eagle Butte resident unintentionally draws attention, which sometimes results in negative and violent responses from others.

After years of suppressing his feelings and finally being confident with his identity, Fentress said he is ready to bring awareness to the two-spirit community on Cheyenne River, a sensitive topic that is not usually talked about openly; however, it is matter of great cultural significance that must be addressed, said Fentress.

Childhood memories: always knowing he was different

Fentress is the son of Amber LeBeau, a Lakota descendant of Chief Swift Bird (Oohenumpa), and an African American father. Fentress said many of his childhood memories were of being bullied for being different, first for his skin color, and then for his sexual orientation.

“Whenever we were three or four years old, people would bully us because my sister and I were black. At that age, I don’t think people knew I was two-spirited, so the bullying was because of my skin color,” said Fentress…

Read the entire article here.

Brittany Howard finds freedom after Alabama Shakes

BBC News
2019-09-25

Mark Savage, BBC music reporter

Brittany Howard: “If I was going to make a solo record, I knew it had to be something true.” Brantley Gutierrez

In the middle of making her new album, Brittany Howard decided to record the air conditioner.

Holding a microphone to ceiling, she captured the unit’s electromagnetic pulse, turned it into a tape loop, then transposed it onto a keyboard.

“In the end, I think we were overly ambitious,” she reflects. “Because it turned out to be terrible.”

The experiment may have been scrapped, but it illustrates the sense of freedom Howard felt as she made her first solo album…

Read the entire article here.

Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist’s Story from the Jim Crow South

Yale University Press
2019-09-24
352 pages
6⅛ x 9¼
9 b/w illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780300242607

Adele Logan Alexander, Emeritus Professor of History
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Born in the late nineteenth century into an affluent family of mixed race—black, white, and Cherokee—Adella Hunt Logan (1863–1915) was a key figure in the fight to obtain voting rights for women of color. A professor at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and a close friend of Booker T. Washington, Adella was in contact with luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Despite her self-identification as an African American, she looked white and would often pass for white at segregated suffrage conferences, gaining access to information and political tactics used in the “white world” that might benefit her African American community.

Written by Adella’s granddaughter Adele Logan Alexander, this long-overdue consideration of Adella’s pioneering work as a black suffragist is woven into a riveting multigenerational family saga and shines new light on the unresolved relationships between race, class, gender, and power in American society.

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

Verso Books
2019-09-24
416 pages
6 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9781788735094
Ebook ISBN: 9781788735124

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies; Professor of American Studies
Yale University

A haunting and evocative history of British empire, told through one woman’s search through her family’s story

“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post–World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt.

Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the “white Carbys” and the “black Carbys,” as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.

Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.