Mixed Race Studies

U.S. Approval of Interracial Marriage at New High of 94%

Gallup
2021-09-10

Justin McCarthy

Story Highlights

• Approval was at just 4% in 1958, when Gallup first polled on the question
• The racial gap in approval of interracial marriage has nearly closed
• Age and regional gaps in approval have also shrunk

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ninety-four percent of U.S. adults now approve of marriages between Black people and White people, up from 87% in the prior reading from 2013. The current figure marks a new high in Gallup’s trend, which spans more than six decades. Just 4% approved when Gallup first asked the question in 1958.

The latest figure is from a Gallup poll conducted July 6-21. Shifts in the 63-year-old trend represent one of the largest transformations in public opinion in Gallup’s history — beginning at a time when interracial marriage was nearly universally opposed and continuing to its nearly universal approval today.

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage nationwide in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. A year after that decision, Gallup found support for the practice increasing, but still only a small minority of 20% approved.

Approval of interracial marriage continued to grow in the U.S. in periodic readings Gallup took over the following decades, finally reaching majority level in 1997, when support jumped from 48% to 64%. Support has increased in subsequent measures, surpassing 70% in 2003, 80% in 2011 and 90% in the current reading…

Read the entire article here.

Recalling and Reimagining Vietnam: A Conversation with Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith

World Literature Today
2019-08-12

Mary E. Adams, Associate Professor of English
University of Louisiana, Monroe

Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and raised in California. His first book, The Land Baron’s Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives, won the 2015 Indie Book Award for best poetry collection. His other works include The Land South of the Clouds and The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. He earned an MFA from McNeese State University and has taught creative writing at Louisiana Tech University since 1999.

Mary E. Adams: Your first book, The Land Baron’s Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives, focuses on your grandfather’s life, loves, and, ultimately, his years of hard labor in a reeducation camp. Why did you need to tell his story?

Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith: I learned by the age of thirty just how much of his life was kept from me, the hardships he had to go through. Lý Loc was once rich, powerful, and all of that was gone after the fall of Saigon. You’re looking at a man who owned so much land, who had seven houses, seven wives, twenty-seven children, who was a major commander for the South Vietnamese army. To have to write a letter to my mom in America begging for money is a lowly place to be. All of the sudden, out of your twenty-seven children, you have one in America who works at a sweatshop making dresses, blouses, and slacks for fifty cents per item stitched, and you’re asking her for money in order to eat, in order to be clothed. That’s the thing I had to deal with growing up, knowing he lived the rest of his life as a poor person…

Read the entire interview here.

The Story Of J.P. Morgan’s ‘Personal Librarian’ — And Why She Chose To Pass As White

Code Switch
National Public Radio
2021-08-31

Karen Grigsby Bates, Senior Correspondent

Marie Benedict (left) and Victoria Christopher Murray Phil Atkins

This summer on Code Switch, we’re talking to some of our favorite authors about books that taught us about the different dimensions of freedom. In our last installment, we talked to author Julia Alvarez about her poetry collection The Woman I Kept to Myself and how difficult it can be to share your many selves with the world. Next up, a conversation with authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray on their book The Personal Librarian.

At the turn of the 20th century, financier J.P. Morgan amassed a rich collection of antique objects related to the power of the written word: manuscripts, books, artwork. He did it all with the idea of enjoying his collection privately. But shortly after his death, Morgan’s personal librarian, a woman named Belle da Costa Greene, convinced J.P. Morgan’s son, Jack Morgan, to make the library a gift to New York City.

The Morgan, as it is now known, welcomes thousands of visitors each year — scholars, researchers, tourists and art lovers — to enjoy the collection. What most don’t know is this: For more than four decades, the library’s collections were acquired and curated by a Black woman. Belle da Costa Greene was quietly passing as white in order to work for one of the most powerful men in the United States…

Read the story here.

Defying Categories: An Interview with Hollay Ghadery

White Wall Review
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2021-09-13

Rosabel Smegal and Isobel Carnegie, Managing Editors

“A lot of people are saying I’m brave for writing this,” Hollay Ghadery tells us, grinning through the screen. “But I wish it wasn’t seen as so brave. I wish it was the way everyone was, or felt comfortable being.”

Brave is just one of the words that Ghadery’s memoir Fuse has been called since its publication by Guernica Editions in May 2021. Other words include: edgy, powerful, raw, and profoundly honest. Written in short, thematic vignettes, Fuse follows the experiences of a young woman of Iranian and British Isle descent growing up in a biracial and bicultural household in small-town Ontario. Ghadery is as honest as her prose is lyrical, unpacking her mental health journey and lifelong struggles with substance abuse, eating disorders, and anxiety. The memoir jumps back and forth through time as Ghadery tells powerful stories from her first (and only) night in a brothel to being unable to fluently communicate with her Farsi-speaking aunts and living with OCD. Meditating on the complexities of the biracial female body, Ghadery challenges traditional, clear-cut ideas about identity, motherhood, and family.

Ghadery studied English Literature and holds a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. For several years, she worked in freelance and corporate writing but now, as a mother of four, she devotes her time to writing creatively. Her poetry, short stories, and non-fiction have been published in various literary journals including The Malahat Review, Grain, Understorey, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, and Room. She has also written for White Wall Review, publishing a review of Anna Van Valkenber’s Queen and Carcass in April 2021 that you can read here.

We were fortunate enough to sit down with Ghadery over Zoom this summer and chat about writing authentically, navigating Biracial Identity Disorder, and defying categories. Much like her memoir, she was open and honest and so willing to share…

Read the entire interview here.

Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

Cambridge University Press
June 2020
348 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781108493017
Paperback ISBN: 9781108730310
eBook ISBN: 9781108639521

Theodore W. Cohen, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois

Highlights

• Bridges the rich historical literature on slavery and race in the colonial period with scholarship on the contemporary politics of Blackness
• Traces the long history of African-American intellectual engagements with Mexico
• Contributes to the expanding literature on the politics of racial comparison and connection along sub-national, national, and transnational lines

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.

Awards

• Co-winner, 2021 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History, Latin American Studies Association
• Honorable Mention, 2021 Best Book Award in the Social Sciences, Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association

Table of Contents

• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I. Making Blackness Mexican, 1810-1940s
  • Introduction
  • 1. Black Disappearance
  • 2. Marxism and Colonial Blackness
  • 3. Making Blackness Transational
• Part II. Finding Afro-Mexico, 1940s-2015
  • 4. Looking Back to Africa
  • 5. Africanizing “La bamba”
  • 6. Caribbean Blackness
  • 7. The Black Body in Mexico
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index