Mixed Race Studies

No Room for Beige Tears

Alison Hart
2020-06-08

Alison Hart

After the video went viral of George Floyd mercilessly murdered in the street by police, held down, knee on neck, for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the whole world woke up to the American dream for what it is. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, and many more Black lives brutalized and murdered by police and white supremacists in a country that claims “liberty and justice for all.” We still haven’t gotten off the plantation the racist system locked in place, four hundred years of Black resistance—locked in place—lock them up in prisons, in poverty as disposable citizens.

In Alameda, California, where I live, a Black man was recently arrested for dancing on the street. That’s right, dancing. He was doing his usual morning exercise routine and a white neighbor called the police. The result: police pinned him to the ground, handcuffed, arrested, and detained him. It’s on video, you can look it up. It could have turned deadly when he reached for his keys, deadly at any moment. White people policing Black bodies by calling police because of their unchecked discomfort and racial bias too often yields fatal results and should be charged as hate crimes.

White America is uncomfortable, and I say get used to it. As a mixed race Black, Native American, Irish, Scottish, English woman I have developed the skill to decenter in this racially stratified society. In order to have empathy for another’s experience, I need to decenter my own. I am able to hold my disequilibrium when in any group of people. Decentering is the first step that allows you to feel empathy outside your experience. Wherever I am I do not expect people to “get” me, to make my existence okay, or validate me…

Read the entire article here.

Soledad O’Brien: A MeToo Moment for Journalists of Color

The New York Times
2020-07-04

Soledad O’Brien

Soledad O’Brien Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

We’re finally feeling empowered to speak openly about racism in the newsroom.

Every journalist of color has a story.

My first job as an on-air reporter was at KRON in San Francisco from 1993 to 1996. I saw my new colleagues having a lively conversation and wanted to jump in. I discovered that they were talking about the “affirmative-action hire,” who turned out to be me. That’s how they saw me — it didn’t matter that I’d been a researcher and producer at NBC News or that I had gone to Harvard.

At that same job, the managers half-joked that they had taken their lives into their own hands when their morning commute was rerouted through Oakland. I was the bureau chief for the East Bay, which includes Oakland, and they would be signing off on my reports hours later.

So, as other journalists of color in these recent weeks have spoken up about their lack of representation and influence in newsrooms, and how that warps coverage, I know exactly what they’re talking about: how treatment leads to unfair coverage. What’s most disturbing, though, is how much their stories, in 2020, sound like mine from several decades ago…

Read the entire article here.

In Irish orphanages, being ‘coloured’ was a defect. I wish Mam had lived to see Black Lives Matter

The Irish Times
2020-07-04

Jess Kavanagh

Jess Kavanagh with Lorraine Maher of I Am Irish

Black Irish Lives: Multiculturalism is seen as new. But Ireland has generations of mixed-race people

I’m not a fan of weddings, but I made sure not to miss my cousin Jamie’s big day. Jamie and I always got along; racially ambiguous like myself, he looks more indigenous Latin American via Dublin 3 but is actually southeast Asian-Italian. After the wedding another cousin, annoyed at her lack of an invitation to the dinner, is spitting some low-grade venom as I roll a cigarette. I tune in at the worst moment.

“I don’t know why anyone ever told you your grandfather was a doctor. He was a sailor – and everyone knew that.”

I’m taken aback. I don’t react. If you’ve experienced racism you know this moment: a surreal outburst, wildly out of context. It happens so quickly you tend to be left feeling only confusion and mild amusement. The rage creeps in hours, maybe days later.

My biological grandfather was a Nigerian medical student and my biological grandmother was a nurse when they met. The story of their affair changes. Until I was in my 20s I was told he was a student at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland when they met, but that has shifted at times to them meeting in the UK. My mother was adopted as a newborn from a religious-run institution in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and my aunts and uncles – Nigerian-Irish, Indian-Irish, Filipino-Italian and North African-Irish – were also adopted as babies…

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The Confederate Flag Finally Falls in Mississippi

The New Yorker
2020-07-01

W. Ralph Eubanks, Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies
University of Mississippi

Even after the civil-rights movement changed Mississippi and America, the state held on to its flag, asserting that it had everything to do with heritage and nothing to do with hate. Photograph by Dan Anderson / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

Even after digging deep into my memory bank, I can’t remember the team that played at my first home football game, in 1974, when I was a student at the University of Mississippi. What reverberates from that day into my consciousness is both a sound and a vision: the abrupt thud of a bundle of flags, bearing the bright and unmistakable pattern of the Confederate stars and bars, landing at my feet. Acting on impulse, I pushed this unwanted object down a row in the stadium with my foot. Confederate flags always looked and felt like a threat, whether on the back of a pickup truck on a lonely country road or in the hands of angry white men and women on the sidelines of a civil-rights march. Given their abrupt arrival near my body, and years of conditioning as a black Mississippian, I could not resist the urge to shove them away as if they were an intruder or a bully.

Later that sunny fall afternoon, after a more amenable recipient got hold of the bundle of flags, they were passed down the row where my date and I were sitting. Both of us were dressed according to game-day tradition, me in a blazer and she in a dress and heels. When the flags reached us again, we leaned back, our hands gripping the wooden bleachers, to keep from touching what we viewed as objects of intimidation. We didn’t want to spread them. Soon, though, we were lost in a sea of the Confederate cantons that mirrored the image of the Mississippi state flag. In spite of how perfectly we conformed to the dress code, we felt as if we did not belong in the stadium. But we refused to leave—we wanted to prove that we had a right to be there…

Read the entire article here.

My message to biracial people questioning their role in Black Lives Matter

TODAY
2020-06-30

Dr. Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University

As a biracial Black and white woman with white skin and brown wavy hair, does my anger in response to the countless racist murders taking place across our country even matter? Because of how I look, I find myself questioning whether the pain I feel right now should even be acknowledged.

Over the past few weeks, I have received countless emails and Twitter messages from other biracial people — some friends, others complete strangers — asking for guidance in thinking about their own identities. One said, “I have always identified as Black, but these past few weeks have made me feel so white that now I’m questioning if I ever should have identified as Black because maybe I am too white-looking to claim that part of me.”…

Read the entire article here.