Mixed Race Studies

As a ‘white-passing’ Asian American, I feel grief, shame and confusion right now

TODAY
2021-04-02

Maura Hohman, Weekend Editor and Reporter

Melea McCreary and Maura Hohman, a broadcast producer and digital editor for TODAY, share their experiences growing up with Filipino mothers but passing as non-Asian. As Asian Americans across the country are targeted for their appearance, they share their identity crisis. Courtesy Maura Hohman/Melea McCreary/ Fabio Briganti

Schoolmates never pulled their eyes sideways at me, but one did ask if my mom was my nanny and tried to convince me I was adopted.

During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, TODAY is sharing the community’s history, pain, joy and what’s next for the AAPI movement. We will be publishing personal essays, stories, videos and specials throughout the entire month of May.

I’ll never know exactly how much privilege my face has afforded me, though I’ve often wondered about the magnitude. No stranger has ever yelled a racial slur at me, but at a previous job a client spoke poorly of Filipinos not knowing half my family is from there. Schoolmates never pulled their eyes sideways at me, but one did ask if my mom was my nanny and tried to convince me I was adopted. In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings that left eight people dead, including six Asian American women, a few friends have texted to see how I’m doing. But over the years, so many friends have said they don’t consider me Asian...

Read the entire interview here.

Aftershocks: A Memoir

Simon & Schuster
2021-01-12
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781982111229
Paperback ISBN-13: 9781982111236
eBook ISBN-13: 9781982111243
Unabridged Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781797108698

Nadia Owusu

In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.

Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo.

With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together.

Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.

Heralding a dazzling new writer, Aftershocks joins the likes of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts.

To Fathom His Very Roots: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and “Evidence” of His Literary Racial Passing

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2021
page 69-80
DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2021.0008

DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas, El Paso

During the latter part of the long nineteenth century, actor and author Sylvester Clark “Chief Buffalo Child” Long Lance completely discarded his African American ancestry to assert a composite Native American identity. He did so in hopes of escaping anti-Black violence. His writings suggest that he believed that performing the racialized stereotype of the “noble savage” would better position him to achieve inclusion in US society, which was otherwise denied to him in his legal “colored” (read: Black) racial identity. His complex and problematic approach to his ancestry and racial identity invites scholars to critically consider how some authors simultaneously challenged yet adhered to social expectations regarding racial identification when reflecting on their personal lives and asserting their racial identities in literature. Long Lance’s life and writings invite scholars to question what counts as “evidence” to prove so-called racial passing when authors or their characters reflect on certain aspects of their ancestry and racial identity. In this essay, I examine the complexities of racial passing in nineteenth and twentieth century literatures with attention to Long Lance’s unique perspective of his racial identity and shows how he used literary and legal racial passing to challenge racial binarism.

Read or purchase the article here.

Fredi Washington and Her Defining Role in Imitation of Life

Blog
Amistad Research Center
2018-07-02

The Fredi Washington papers at the Amistad Research Center highlights the life of the African American actress, dancer, and activist known for her stage and screen rolls from the 1920-1940s. She was born Fredericka Carolyn Washington in Savannah, Georgia on December 23, 1903, and was one of nine children of Robert T. and Harriet Walker Ward Washington. Fredi’s mother died when she was young, and she attended St. Elizabeth’s Convent in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania with her sister Isabel. Fredi moved to Harlem in 1919 to live with her grandmother. She left school and soon entered show business. She began her career in the early 1920s as a chorus dancer in Nobble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along. She adopted the stage name Edith Warren in 1926 when she acted in the lead role opposite Paul Robeson in Black Boy…

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Selected Writings on Race and Difference

Duke University Press
April 2021
376 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1166-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1052-4

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Professor of American Studies
Graduate Center, City University of New York

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race Is the Prism / Paul Gilroy
• Part I. Riots, Race, and Representation
  • 1. Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation [1959]
  • 2. The Young Englanders [1967]
  • 3. Black Men, White Media [1974]
  • 4. Race and “Moral Panics” in Postwar Britain [1978]
  • 5. Summer in the City [1981]
  • 6. Drifting into a Law and Order Society: The 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture [1982]
  • 7. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media [1981]
• Part II. The Politics of Intellectual Work Against Racism
  • 8. Teaching Race [1980]
  • 9. Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society [1977]
  • 10. “Africa” Is Alive and Well in the Diaspora: Cultures of Resistance: Slavery, Religious Revival and Political Cultism in Jamaica [1975]
  • 11. Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]
  • 12. New Ethnicities [1983]
  • 13. Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990]
  • 14. C. L. R. James: A Portrait [1992]
  • 15. Calypso Kings [2002]
• Part III. Cultural and Multicultural Questions
  • 16. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1968]
  • 17. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998]
  • 18. Why Fanon? [1996]
  • 19. Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”? [1997]
  • 20. “In but Not of Europe”: Europe and Its Myths [2003]
  • 21. Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities [2006]
  • 22. The Multicultural Question [2000]
• Index
• Place of First Publication

Book Review: A Cosmologist Throws Light on a Universe of Bias

Undark
2021-04-16

Joshua Roebke

Top: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an award-winning physicist,⁠ feminist, activist, and the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in the field of theoretical cosmology. Visual: Courtesy Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

In “The Disordered Cosmos,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein contemplates the exclusionary culture of physics.

EVERY COMMUNITY GUARDS a creation story, a theory of cosmic origins. In much of sub-Saharan West Africa, for the past few thousand years, itinerant storytellers known as griots have communicated these and other tales through song. Cosmologists also intone a theory of cosmic origins, known as the Big Bang, albeit through journal articles and math.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a cosmologist who is adept with both equations and “the keeper of a deeply human impulse” to understand our universe. In her first book, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred⁠,” Prescod-Weinstein also admits she is a griot, one who knows the music of the cosmos but sings of earthbound concerns. She is an award-winning physicist,⁠ feminist, and activist who is not only, as she says, the first Jewish “queer agender Black woman⁠” to become a theoretical cosmologist, she is the first Black woman ever to earn a Ph.D. in the subject.

Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in the department of women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She thus enjoys a unique frame of reference from which to appraise science and her fellow scientists. She is an insider whom others nonetheless cast as an outsider, because of her identity, orientation, and the tint of her skin. From the outside, however, she admits a fuller view of her field. She perceives the “structures that were invisible to people,”⁠ and reveals them…

Read the entire review here.