Mixed Race Studies

This year’s November celebration of African culture in Argentina is dedicated to the memory of Maria Magdalena Lamadrid — “La Pocha” — an Afro-Argentine activist who died in September. In 2002, the fifth-generation Afro-Argentine was kept from leaving the country by a customs officer who insisted there are no Black Argentines and asserted her passport was fake.

Christiana Sciaudone, “Argentine movement tries to make Black heritage more visible,” The Associated Press, November 26, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-entertainment-discrimination-migration-race-and-ethnicity-0d18920b22e0eab19f28202c591ef0ea.

The Japanese public echoed the state’s abhorrence for this population of biracial babies. Whereas Japanese enthusiastically embraced cultural mixing with the U.S., they rejected biological mixing outright, seeing mixed-race babies as a threat to their racial purity and tantamount to an assault on the Japanese race itself. Black-Japanese babies were especially despised, but all biracial mixtures encountered greater prejudice in Japan than did biracial “GI babies” in Germany and Britain.⁵ Even Sawada Miki (沢田美喜, 1901-80), who in 1948 founded an orphanage for occupation babies, defended the policy of separating Japanese and biracial orphans. Mixed-race children, she felt, possessed “mental and physical handicaps” and in any case would never be accepted into Japanese society due to “the people’s traditional dislike for Eurasian children.”⁶ By 1955, Sawada’s orphanage had accepted 468 babies and negotiated 262 adoptions in the U.S. No Japanese adoption service accepted Sawada’s children, however, and a Japanese couple who had adopted one “returned it when the neighborhood prejudice they encountered proved too strong.”⁷

W. Puck Brecher, “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). 4. https://jayna.usfca.edu/asia-pacific-perspectives/center-asia-pacific/perspectives/v14n2/brecher.html.

I urge anyone who has a mixed-race family member to check in on them. If you are a parent to a mixed-race child, please acknowledge the responsibility you have. Understand the different experiences your child will have due to their intersectional identity. Their experiences will not mirror those of either parent. Just as it is your responsibility to keep them fed, clothed and healthy, it is your responsibility to educate yourselves on how the issues of race embed themselves deep within the history of the either parents’ lives, experiences, and mentalities. If you are the white parent, you must first learn to acknowledge your white privilege and know your child will never have the same experiences as you. Learn to recognise the racist language and beliefs within your own family, and most importantly yourself, because they do exist. It’s not about people uttering racial slurs, it is the misconceptions you and the people around you have about what it means to be black as well as recognising the flaws in the system which disadvantage those who are not white.

Daniella Brookes, “We Need To Stop Leaving Mixed-Race People Out Of The Race Conversation,” Words of Integrity: Celebrating positivity and embracing the peaks and falls of life. November 25, 2021. https://wordsofintegrity.com/2021/11/25/we-need-to-stop-leaving-mixed-race-people-out-of-the-race-conversation/.

Passing Is a Film About Race from the Black Gaze

Harper’s Bazaar
2021-11-11

Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Netflix

Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Passing expertly uses the craft of cinema to explore race and colorism from a Black point of view, Imani Perry argues.

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, was part of a tradition. Writers, both Black and white, had been depicting the practice of extremely light-complexioned African Americans slipping into the white world for at least 70 years prior. Passing literature is the term critics have applied to it. In a racially segregated and stratified society, passing was powerful fodder for the literary imagination. Being discovered came with the risk of shame, violence, incarceration, and even death. In Black communities, passing itself was at once frowned upon and protected, as the secrets of passers were guarded.

Understandably, depicting passing today, when the rules of racial membership have shifted, is challenging. Members of Generation Z are skeptical of the historic “one-drop rule” of African-American membership. Initially, that rule was a way of marking Blackness as inferiority and even a sort of contagion. Over time, African Americans used it to develop an expansive idea of what it meant to belong to “the race.” But today, young people often wonder how much one can claim to belong to a group without carrying the weight of being seen as such.

Director Rebecca Hall, who adapted the 1929 novel for the screen nevertheless succeeds in making a film that brings contemporary viewers into the intimate realm of its Black women protagonists, both of whom “pass”; one completely, the other conditionally. Most impressively, Hall captures the tensions of passing in a manner that is effective in the 21st century. Whereas the novella is a masterpiece of sumptuous yet suggestive prose, the black-and-white film’s luxuriousness is found in texture, light, and gesture. Hall avoids a problem that all too often afflicts Black actors. When directors fail to shift light appropriately, bodies that are luminous too often are made muddy and shapeless. Hall’s effective light is not just visually satisfying; it is a narrative tool…

Read the entire review here.