Mixed Race Studies

MASC presents The U.S. Census Data [Online Event]

Multiracial Americans of Southern California
2021-10-06 18:00-19:30 EDT, (22:00-23:30Z)

Let’s talk 2020 U.S. Census results and how they illuminate the U.S. population as more multiracial (from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020)

The U.S. population is much more multiracial and more diverse than recorded in the 2010 U.S. Census. Research and data from “2020 Census Illuminates Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Country” by Nicholas Jones, Rachel Marks, Roberto Ramirez, Merarys Ríos-Vargas showed the improvements and changes on the U.S. Census questionnaire enabled a more thorough and accurate depiction of how people self-identify, yielding a more accurate portrait of how people report their Hispanic origin and race within the context of a two-question format.

On October 6, 2021 at 3pm PDT (6pm EDT), join MASC as we present a virtual event that will bring experts from the U.S. Census, Nielsen and MASC to discuss these changes and what the results revealed.

Expert Panelists:

• Nicholas A. Jones, Director & Senior Advisor of Race and Ethnic Research & Outreach in the Census Bureau’s Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau
• Rachel Marks, Chief of the Racial Statistics Branch, U.S. Census Bureau
• Stacie M. de Armas, Senior Vice President Inclusive Insights & Initiatives, Nielsen
• Thomas Lopez, Treasurer, MASC
• Moderator: Sonia Smith Kang, President, MASC

Watch the discussion (01:28:30) here.

Book Talk-Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family

American Jewish Historical Society
2021-08-04

Author Laura Arnold Leibman discusses her new book with Gender and Jewish Studies Professor, Samira K. Mehta. Hear how family heirlooms were used to unlock the mystery of the Moses’s Family ancestors in, Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family.

Tracing an extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac Moses were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and—at times—white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived.

Watch the video (00:56:47) here.

Mariah Carey Recalls How Important It Was To Be Seen As A Black Woman On The 2005 Cover Of ESSENCE

Essence
2021-01-14

Kemberlie Spivey

Mariah Carey recently sat down with Questlove (real name Ahmir Khalib Thompson) for a new episode of his podcast Questlove Supreme during which she detailed some of her struggles growing up as a child who was racially ambiguous. Challenges, she notes, that continued to follow her throughout the ’90s, 2000s, and even to this day.

“When people years from now tell my story — hopefully that happens — they’re gonna have to use that book as a template,” Carey said of her memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey which was released this past September. “This is my actual story. I look at a lot of people that I admired who didn’t get a chance to do that. They may have told their stories through their music and people interpret their stories.”

Explaining the approach to her memoir which was written in collaboration with former ESSENCE editor Michaela Angela Davis, Carey continues, “I know some people, Ahmir, like to have everybody else’s input and their perspective. But what I wanted was to tell my actual story, which doesn’t begin with, ‘Mariah Carey put out Vision of Love in 1990.’ No, it doesn’t begin with that. It begins [with me] coloring in the ‘wrong’ crayon with a brown crayon for my father, so they all freak out at me. It begins with, ‘I don’t understand my hair because I’m [half-black]. It begins with all these identity issues, these issues of race, these struggles. Then it goes to the issues of control.”

When the five-time Grammy-award winner released her first album, Mariah Carey, at just 21 it became the best-selling album in the United States, selling more than 15 million copies. But that success didn’t shield Carey from some of the same identity issues she dealt with throughout her entire childhood…

Read the entire article here.

The Emancipation of Mariah Carey: Inside The Making Of Her ESSENCE Cover 15 Years Ago

Essence
2020-04-15

Michaela Angela Davis

As the record-breaking album “The Emancipation of Mimi” turns 15 this week, a former editor remembers why the singer wanted to speak directly to black women for the first time.

“The ESSENCE cover was a milestone in my career. I felt like I was finally being seen. It gave me a sense of belonging.” —Mariah Carey

Cast in a gentle painterly light, the content and confident face of Mariah Carey peers out from the April 2005 cover of ESSENCE. Delicately brushed with “lingerie hues” of makeup and framed by soft romantic curls, her face radiates warmth. But underneath its shimmering surface, this monumental cover took deft hoop-jumping, sharp strategy and a committed circle of sisters…

Read the entire article here.

Eurasians and Racial Capital in a “Race War”

Asia Pacific Perspectives: A Publication of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies
Volume 14, Number 2 (Spring 2017)
pages 4-19

W. Puck Brecher, Ph.D., Professor of History
Washington State University

The ubiquity of racist propaganda in Japan and the U.S. during the Pacific War and the extraordinary cruelty of the fighting have fostered the perception that Japanese and Americans harbored a deep racial hatred for each other. Indeed, historical research convincingly interprets the Pacific War as a “race war” within the contexts of military engagement and state rhetoric. We know little, however, about how resident Westerners lived and interacted with Japanese during the war and whether they became victims of racial hatred. This article explores the impacts of state ideology on Japanese citizens’ racial attitudes by examining the treatment and experiences of mixed-race individuals, and Eurasians particularly, stranded in Japan during the war. In doing so, it contextualizes and corrects harmful allegations of racism among civilian Japanese.

Read the entire article in PDF or HTML format.

Island Queen, A Novel

William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2021-07-06
592 pages
6x9in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063002845
Paperback ISBN: 9780063002852
E-book ISBN: 9780063002869
Digital Audio, MP3 ISBN: 9780063002876

Vanessa Riley

A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies.

Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom—and that of her sister and her mother—from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and planter that extended from the marketplaces and sugar plantations of Dominica and Barbados to a glittering luxury hotel in Demerara on the South American continent.

Vanessa Riley’s novel brings Doll to vivid life as she rises above the harsh realities of slavery and colonialism by working the system and leveraging the competing attentions of the men in her life: a restless shipping merchant, Joseph Thomas; a wealthy planter hiding a secret, John Coseveldt Cells; and a roguish naval captain who will later become King William IV of England.

From the bustling port cities of the West Indies to the forbidding drawing rooms of London’s elite, Island Queen is a sweeping epic of an adventurer and a survivor who answered to no one but herself as she rose to power and autonomy against all odds, defying rigid eighteenth-century morality and the oppression of women as well as people of color. It is an unforgettable portrait of a true larger-than-life woman who made her mark on history.

No Silence on Race

Be’chol Lashon
2021-10-19

Team Be’chol Lashon

No Silence on Race is a movement born of the necessity for both racial equity and inclusivity within Canadian Jewish spaces.

This month Periphery, an exhibition about Jews of Color (JOC) opened in Toronto, Canada. A collaboration between the group No Silence on Race and the Ontario Jewish Archives, Periphery shares the voices and faces of Canadian Jews who are often not seen in the mainstream presentations of Jewish life. We at Be’chol Lashon sat down with members of the No Silence on Race team to learn more about them and their work.

Team Be’chol Lashon: Tell us a little about yourselves

The No Silence on Race core team is Sara Yacobi-Harris, Akilah-Allen Silverstein and Yoni Belete. We are 3 young professionals based in Toronto, Canada…

Read the entire interview here.

A White Woman Told Me She Doesn’t ‘Think Of’ Me As Black. Here’s How I Reacted.

The Huffington Post
2021-10-16

Laura Cathcart Robbins, Guest Writer

Photo courtesy of Laura Cathcart Robbins

“Irrespective of the neighborhood in which I live, regardless of how articulate I might seem, all I am and all I ever will be to some people is Black.”

Once, as I was putting the final touches on the live auction program for my sons’ school, one of the committee moms expressed surprise when I told her that I wanted to get more Black parents involved the following year.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I don’t really ever think of you as Black. I’ve always just seen you as one of us.”

One of us…

Read the entire article here.

Love’s Perils, Trauma’s Wounds: New Story Collections

The New York Times
2021-10-15

Tracy O’Neill

THE RUIN OF EVERYTHING
By Lara Stapleton
123 pp. Paloma Press. Paper, $18.

If love conquers all, in Stapleton’s second story collection it’s not clear then whether anyone wins much of anything from it. There is plenty of sex in this book, but little is erotic. Bringing someone to bed skews more toward self-medicating. The fantasy tends to begin and end with being someone worth desiring. Careening in tone from fairy tale to social satire to grim, confessional emails, these stories center on wounded devotees of intimacy. “The way I love people is to consume them,” one narrator muses. “I didn’t want him to know that I eat with love.” But carnal enterprise fails to compensate for the disappointments of broken homes, previous demoralizing romances, artistic failure and a sense of meager privilege. To the women who love too much, heterosexuality is, predictably, a prison…

Read the entire review here.

SC senator’s ‘reply all’ disrupts unveiling of Black Reconstruction lawmaker’s portrait

The State
Columbia, South Carolina
2021-10-16

Caitlin Byrd

CHARLESTON, S.C.—In South Carolina, a state with a painful legacy of racism, a white lawmaker on Thursday fired off an email that casually challenged the complexion of a Black Reconstruction-era lawmaker, whose portrait now hangs in a place of honor inside the State House.

And, thanks to the modern-day perils of the reply-all email, now all 46 of South Carolina’s state senators, their staff and the senate clerk, know what Charleston Republican Sandy Senn thought when she saw the portrait of Stephen Atkins Swails.

“That sure is the whitest looking black guy I’ve ever seen,” the senator from Charleston wrote in a message that included an emoji symbol [🤷‍♂️] of a person shrugging…

…Swails was born in Pennsylvania to a Black father and a white mother in 1832, and made his way to South Carolina first as a military man.

He stormed Fort Wagner on Morris Island as a member of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the nation’s first Black fighting units whose story would later be immortalized in the film “Glory.”

In 1865, he became the first commissioned African American officer in the Union Army. After his military service, Swails stayed in the Palmetto State, where he worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau to help newly freed slaves in the South…

Read the entire article here.