Mixed Race Studies

On Passing and Not Trying to Pass

My Jewish Learning
2015-07-22

Tema Smith

I am black, and I am Jewish.

I’ve always found comfort in the and of my identity — that simple part of speech that joins together two disparate things: two families, two histories, two cultures, two heritages, two skin colors, two lineages of trauma, two pathways to North America. As the offspring of both, I am equally neither.

Lately, I spend a lot of time within the proverbial “walls” of the organized Jewish community. As a Jewish professional, my day-to-day life is dedicated to synagogue operations — specifically, membership and communications. While in many ways I am “at home” in the Jewish community, to this day I still feel out of place within the communal mainstream. And, contradictory as it may seem, it is the fact that I can easily pass for the Ashkenazi majority that leaves me feeling this way.

I should say: I never asked to pass. The fact that I can walk into Jewish settings and instantly fit in leaves me with a bad taste. At the same time, I remember recognizing my own thoughts when I read Katya Gibel Azoulay quote her son in her seminal book, Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity: “I’m not going to put up a sign that says I’m black just to be accepted,” she relays, writing, “as far as he was concerned, the idea of ‘learning how to act Black’ was the theater of the absurd.”…

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John Agard becomes first poet to win BookTrust lifetime achievement award

The Guardian
2021-11-09

Alison Flood

Reading charity pays tribute to ‘incredible words’ of Afro-Guyanese author, who came to Britain in 1977 where he has become a staple of English lessons

The Afro-Guyanese writer John Agard has become the first poet to receive the BookTrust lifetime achievement award.

Agard, who was born in Georgetown, Guyana and moved to England in 1977, has been a fixture on the curriculum since 2002 for poems including Half-Caste (“Explain yuself / wha yu mean / when yu say half-caste / yu mean when picasso / mix red an green / is a half-caste canvas?”) and Checking Out Me History. Winning the Queen’s award for poetry in 2012, he is the author of more than 50 books for children and adults.

“John’s incredible words have caught the imagination of a whole generation of children,” said Diana Gerald, chief executive of the reading charity, which has given its lifetime achievement award in the past to some of the biggest names in children’s literature, from Shirley Hughes to Raymond Briggs and the late Judith Kerr…

Read the entire article here.

Passing for white or the true colors of Cuban miscegenation

OnCuba News
2021-12-08

Odette Casamayor, Associate Professor of Romance Languages
University of Pennsylvania

Photo: Kaloian Santos.

The miscegenation, in addition to being fierce and magical, painful or romantic, torment, fun, depending on how you want to interpret it, is one of the most insidious phenomena that exists.

I am black, in all circumstances and scenarios. I could never pass for anything else. Perhaps that is why I have always been curious about the strategies deployed by many in what could be considered another national sport: “passing for white.”

There is abundant magic and tragedy in each link of a complicated gear that, since colonial times, has operated relentlessly in Latin American societies. In the territories colonized by the Iberian metropolises, miscegenation would go beyond its primary biological dimension to, regardless of its intensity, become an important instrument of social mobility, promoting progress as the skin whitens and the negroid features become blurred or, as is commonly said, “the race is improved.” Meanwhile, in the Anglo-Saxon north equal opportunities were not granted to the mestizo subject. That is why what many call “the race,” because they choose to consider it a reality and not a historical, political and socio-economically determined construction, cannot in appearance be “improved” in the United States.

However, miscegenation, in addition to being fierce and magical, painful or romantic, torment, fun, depending on how you want to interpret it, is one of the most insidious phenomena that exists. Miscegenation has always been a pandemic: it occurs everywhere when it is least expected and promoted. So, although much less structured than in Latin America, the mechanism of “passing for white” also has a following in the United States…

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Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers

Science
2021-12-02

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega

Field still struggles with how to accurately describe populations, study finds

Human geneticists have mostly abandoned the word “race” when describing populations in their papers, according to a new study of research published in a leading genetics journal. That’s in line with the current scientific understanding that race is a social construct, and a welcome departure from research that in the past has often conflated genetic variation and racial categories, says Vence Bonham, a social scientist at the National Human Genome Research Institute who led the study.

But alternative terms that have gained popularity, such as “ancestry” and “ethnicity,” can have ambiguous meanings or aren’t defined by genetics, suggesting researchers are still struggling to find the words to accurately describe groups delineated by their DNA, according to the study.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, many geneticists embraced the idea that there were races, such as “Negroid” or “Caucasian,” that were distinct biological groups; such “race science” helped perpetuate discrimination and inequality. (Scientists have now thoroughly demonstrated the lack of a biological basis to racial categories.)…

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I’m Black But Look White. Here Are The Horrible Things White People Feel Safe Telling Me.

The Huffington Post
2021-12-09

Miriam Zinter

“Many of these people are educated, and hold jobs or positions that give them some form of power or influence over Black people.”

I was outside my house gardening a few weekends ago when a neighbor, whom I had known for almost 30 years, stopped by so I could pet his large, fluffy dogs. I took my gloves off, squatted down to give the dogs a really good scratching around their ears and felt the sun on my back. What could be better? And then my neighbor said: “Why do you have a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign on your front lawn when all those people do is kill each other?”

My lovely day screeched to a halt.

“You know I’m Black, right?” I said, standing up as tall as my 5’4” frame would allow, the sun shining on my blond hair. I continued to pet his dogs, because I needed the comfort of petting dogs at that moment, and because I needed to keep my hands busy so they didn’t slap that man’s face…

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Brit Bennett’s novel ‘The Vanishing Half’ combines fiction, history in examining passing

The Columbus Dispatch
Columbus, Ohio
2021-12-05

Nancy Gilson, Special to The Columbus Dispatch

Brit Bennett Miranda Barnes

In Brit Bennett’s novel “The Vanishing Half,” light-skinned African American twin sisters are separated when one of them decides to pass as white, leaving her family behind.

The novel, which delves deeply into the concept of identity, was a New York Times best-seller and designated as one of the newspaper’s best books of 2020.

Bennett, 31, who grew up in southern California, attended Stanford University and the University of Michigan and now lives in New York. She published her debut novel, “The Mothers,” in 2016. She has written numerous essays, including “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People” and “Addy Walker, An American Girl,” about the Pleasant Company’s first Black doll.

These days, Bennett is working on her third novel and occasionally appears in public events, mostly virtual, such as her event Sunday presented by the Columbus Metropolitan Library. She spoke recently by telephone with The Dispatch…

Read the entire interview here.

A condensed history of multiracial identification in the United States

Source
2021-12-07

Caitlin Gilbert, Jasmine Mithani, Lakshmi Sarah, and Kaitlyn Wells

(Image by rawpixel.com / Freepik)

How to write about mixed and multiracial people, Part 1

Mixed-race identity is chic right now: Our fictionalized stories are bestsellers, and public figures such as Naomi Osaka and Kamala Harris are a regular part of the national conversation. Heck, we’ve even made the news as one of the fastest-growing populations in the 2020 United States Census. As our identities have become trendy and more journalists seek to write about our experiences, it’s important that they respect what we have to say and honor who we are.

We multiracial people reject many assumptions, generalizations and categories. We are not a monolith, and we may even disagree on the terms multiracial versus mixed. Yet this is who we are—we’re both and neither, and our identities can be fluid depending on context.

When it comes to writing about mixed-race and multiracial people, it is critical to understand the historical context behind the terms, learn how to speak to sources and write about them, and examine any bias throughout the journalistic process. To help journalists produce nuanced reporting about mixed-race and multiracial people we’ve compiled a two-part guide based on our SRCCON 2021 presentation, “When ‘Check One’ Does Not Apply: Covering and Being Mixed Race in Journalism.”

In this article, we are going to review an abbreviated history of mixed-race people in the United States. If you are looking for a reporting guide, please see our companion article: Guidelines for reporting on multiracial people…

Read the entire article here.

A Conversation with Jewell Parker Rhodes and Kelly McWilliams

PEN America
2021-10-18

Award-winning novelist and educator Jewell Parker Rhodes and her daughter, young adult author Kelly McWilliams, came together in conversation to discuss book bans and young adult literature. As individuals, it is our duty to provide the next generation of writers, teachers, journalists, activists, and readers with an education that includes all facets of life, an education that is free from unreasonable censorious threats. This discussion addressed the vital role that children’s and young adult literature plays in the process of education, and how we can work to protect our youth from the threats to free expression.

This discussion was presented in partnership with the Miami Book Fair.

Morning Joe finally admits GOP ‘radicalization’ is ongoing racist backlash to Barack Obama

Raw Story
2021-12-07

Travis Gettys

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has finally come around to admitting that Republicans’ radicalization was a racist backlash against the election of Barack Obama.

The “Morning Joe” host, a former Republican himself, said he had long been skeptical of that notion, but he said the evidence had become too obvious to deny.”I have been a skeptic for quite some time that the election of Barack Obama was such a shock to so many white Americans that they just never got over it,” Scarborough said.

“I was always a skeptic of that. I saw his election, even though they didn’t agree with him ideologically on a lot of things. I saw that as a moment that all Americans — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals — could stop and go, ‘Wow, okay, the United States of America is the first majority white country that elected a Black man as their leader,’ something to celebrate.”…

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To be sure, there are other dimensions of this adaptation that deserve discussion—for example, the downplaying of Clare’s abusive childhood, which renders her passing a little more mercenary than it is in the novel—but I’ve already gone on too long. As is by now clear, I have my misgivings about [Rebecca] Hall’s recent film, but, above all, I’m very glad that she made it. If nothing else, it is a sign of [Nella] Larsen’s growing stature, a growth evident to any scholar who has been watching the ballooning scholarly interest in her work in the last decade. Having her novel adapted for the big screen constitutes a new stage in this evolution, for it makes her only the second novelist of the Harlem Renaissance to have her work adapted for film in a major way (Zora Neale Hurston was first, with Darnell Martin’s 2005 adaptation of Their Eyes Were Watching God).

Rafael Walker, “Passing into Film: Rebecca Hall’s Adaptation of Nella Larsen,” Modernism/modernity, Volume 6, Cycle 2 (11/10/2021). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/walker-passing-film-hall-adaptation-larsen.