Mixed Race Studies

‘High Yella:’ A Multiflavored Family Memoir Of Race, Love And Loss

Forbes
2021-10-27

Dawn Ennis, Contributor, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Cover of “High Yella” by Steve Majors The University of Georgia Press

“I was born a poor Black child.”

Fans of writer and actor Steve Martin’s early work will recognize those words from his 1979 comedy, The Jerk. Readers of Steve Majors’ powerful family memoir, High Yella, learn early on that the author used this memorable line in a key moment of courtship; An awkward attempt to use humor to explain a childhood marked by racism, shadeism, poverty, abuse, alcoholism, homophobia and the black magic that Black women in his family called “hoodoo.”

“The fact that I was born a poor Black child was just a part of my past,” Majors writes. “The full story of how that poor Black child grew up and escaped his past is wilder and crazier than any screenplay Steve Martin could ever dream up.”

The central part of High Yella involves race, identity and family. Majors, 55, is a light-skinned, cisgender Black gay man from upstate New York who was the youngest of five children, raised Roman Catholic, and married to a cis, white, gay Jewish man. He writes how he “checked boxes” when he needed to, and is perpetually plagued by people who presume to question his identity because he is white-passing. Majors also shares his own challenges—and failings—as a parent, and recounts painful recollections of family dysfunction and strife as a child…

Read the entire interview here.

Beyond blanqueamiento: black affirmation in contemporary Puerto Rico

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 13, 2018 – Issue 2
pages 157-178
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2018.1466646

Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

Read or purchase the article here.

Born in Berkeley, California, to a white Jewish father with family in Elmont, Long Island, and a black Episcopalian mother with deep roots in Boston, where the family would settle when Zebulon was 3, Miletsky’s blended heritage and a pale complexion that sometimes gets him mistaken as white has informed each move of his life. That means personally — he’s now married (his wife, Karla, is Latina) with two young sons and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn — and professionally. The ever-echoing theme: That dividing line between black and white…

…“When I walk in to teach black studies, some students aren’t sure I’m the professor,” he says. “I get it. It’s about expectations.”

Joe Dziemianowicz, “Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom,” Newsday, February 26, 2020. https://www.newsday.com/long-island/stony-brook-professor-to-lead-black-history-month-panel-in-brentwood-1.41980672.

BBC releases first-look images of My Name Is Leon

Royal Television Society
2021-10-28

Caitlin Danaher

The BBC has released images for the upcoming adaptation of Kit de Waal’s award-winning novel, My Name Is Leon.

Adapted into a screenplay by Shola Amoo (The Last Tree) and directed by Lynette Linton, the series will star Sir Lenny Henry CBE, Malachi Kirby (Small Axe), Monica Dolan (A Very English Scandal), Olivia Williams (Counterpart), Christopher Eccleston (The A Word), Poppy Lee Friar (In My Skin), Shobna Gulati (Everybody’s Talking About Jamie) and Cole Martin, who will play the lead, Leon, in his first TV role.

Set in 1980s Birmingham, the feature film tells the uplifting and poignant tale of nine-year-old Leon, a mixed-race boy separated from his blue-eyed baby brother as he was taken into care, who is on a quest to reunite his family…

Read the entire article here.

The politics of identity: The unexpected role of political orientation on racial categorizations of Kamala Harris

Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy
22 pages
First published 2021-06-29
DOI: 10.1111/asap.12257

Debbie S. Ma, Professor of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

Danita Hohl
Department of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

Justin Kantner, Assistant Professor of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

The 2020 US Presidential election was historic in that it featured the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, on a major-party ticket. Although Harris identifies as Black, her racial identity was widely scrutinized throughout the election, due to her mixed-race ancestry. Moreover, media coverage of Harris’s racial identity appeared to vary based on that news outlet’s political leaning and sometimes had prejudicial undertones. The current research investigated racial categorization of Harris and the role that political orientation and anti-Black prejudice might play in shaping these categorizations. Studies 1 and 2 tested the possibility that conservatives and liberals might mentally represent Harris differently, which we hypothesized would lead the two groups to differ in how they categorized her race. Contrary to our prediction, conservatives, and liberals mentally represented Harris similarly. Also surprising were the explicit racial categorization data. Conservatives labeled Harris as White more than liberals, who tended to categorize Harris as multiracial. This pattern was explained by anti-Black prejudice. Study 3 examined a potential political motivation that might explain this finding. We found that conservatives, more than liberals, judge having a non-White candidate on a Democratic ballot as an asset, which may lead conservatives to deny non-White candidates these identities.

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Using black and white [media] also allowed [Rebecca] Hall to cast Black actresses in the roles. She’s not trying to “fool” anyone into thinking that Negga or Thompson is white, she’s simply trying to turn the film’s deeply metaphorical ideas into a practical experience. The audience will have “very fixed ideas about Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga’s racial identity,” Hall said, “which gives me a position from which to destabilize those ideas and point out the limits of just reducing them to that one definition.”

Kate Erbland, “‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Made One of the Year’s Best Debuts, but for Years Nobody Would Fund It,” IndieWire, October 28, 2021. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/10/passing-rebecca-hall-interview-1234674475/.

Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom

Newsday
2020-02-26

Joe Dziemianowicz, Special to Newsday

A week and a half ago, Zebulon Vance Miletsky, who will be leading a talk on African Americans and the right to vote on Feb. 27 at the Brentwood Public Library, was zipping through a PowerPoint presentation in his “Themes in the Black Experience” class at Stony Brook University.

He got to a slide with bullet points on the renowned black historian and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Miletsky, an assistant professor in Africana Studies and History, went off-script. He shared an anecdote with his students about the time a young Du Bois offered a white girl a valentine and she turned him down flat. Because he was black. It left a mark.

Du Bois went on to become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard. “Childhood things shape you,” the professor added.

Miletsky, 45, speaks from experience…

Read the entire article here.

‘Passing’: Rebecca Hall Made One of the Year’s Best Debuts, but for Years Nobody Would Fund It

IndieWire
2021-10-28

Kate Erbland

For nearly a decade, the actress-turned-filmmaker tried to get her ambitious Nella Larsen adaptation made. As she tells IndieWire, she knew there was only one way to make it happen.

Every word that first-time feature filmmaker Rebecca Hall uses to describe the genesis of her “Passing” vibrates with intensity. Her first experience reading the Nella Larsen novella she eventually adapted for the black-and-white period piece was like “being in a fever,” the pages flipping by as if she was “slightly possessed.”

More than 13 years after first reading Larsen’s book, Hall has kept up that same passion for the material, enough to propel her through years of denials from Hollywood brass and the distinct possibility that the film would never get made the way she saw it.

Much has been made of Hall’s personal connection to the material — the film, like Larsen’s seminal work, follows the fraught reunion of a pair of friends (Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga), both of whom are Black, though one of them has crossed the color line and lived her life “passing” as a white woman (Negga as Clare). Hall herself is of mixed racial heritage and her own maternal grandfather “passed” for the majority of his life. But for the long-time actress, Larsen’s slim book spoke even more deeply about much larger ideas…

Read the entire article here.