Mixed Race Studies

Existing Across Boundaries: A Conversation with Community Journalist and Editor Sharon Ho Chang

The Seventh Wave
2021-10-15

Sharon Ho Chang knows her way around community journalism. She is the managing editor at the South Seattle Emerald, a digital news and culture publication run by and centering the BIPOC people and communities who live, work, create, and are experiencing displacement due to gentrification in the city’s Central District and South End. The Emerald is a beacon of thorough, complex, and vital reporting for the immediate area, as well as an example of how journalism can embrace multifaceted local stories that have regional, national, and even global importance. In addition to editing the Emerald, Chang is also a writer, artist, and documentarian with a lot of storytelling under her belt, including the publication of two nonfiction books — Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (Routledge, 2015) and the memoir Hapa Tales And Other Lies: A Mixed Race Memoir About the Hawai’i I Never Knew (self published in 2018) — both of which explore in academic and personal ways the experience of being mixed race. She is also a photographer and videographer, and is dedicated to documenting underrepresented and underreported stories of the people and places in her community in Seattle, her family and elders in Taiwan, and her own multiracial transnational experience.

Chang spoke with Interviews Editor Sarah Neilson over Zoom about her many, many journalism projects past and present; her experiences with feedback and creative inspiration over time; voting in her first Taiwan presidential election; and what Economies of Harm means to her…

Read the entire interview here.

Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

The Atlantic
2022-02-03

Adam Serwer, Staff Writer

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks…

Read the entire article here.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

University of Washington Press
December 2021
304 pages
4 b&w illustrations
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780295749488
Paperback ISBN: 9780295749495

Edited by:

Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Assistant professor of English and International Indigenous Studies
University of Calgary

Darryl Barthé, Visiting professor of History
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, San Diego

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.

With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

‘The Chevalier’ team is eager to burnish the legacy of Joseph Bologne

Experience CSO
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association
Chicago, Illinois
2022-02-01

Kyle MacMillan

A champion fencer, gifted athlete, high-ranking officer and violin virtuoso, Joseph Bologne was all those things in 18th-century France, but the classical world has only belatedly come to recognize him as well as a prolific and talented composer.

While he achieved considerable musical success during his lifetime, he nonetheless faced discrimination and was ultimately all but forgotten after his death in 1799, in no small part because he was mixed race. Bologne was born in the French Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, the son of a white plantation owner and his wife’s African slave.

Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, along with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, will present the Midwest premiere Feb. 18-20 of The Chevalier, a concert theater work about the life and music of this fascinating and unfairly overlooked historical figure. (Bologne took the title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges after graduating from France’s Royal Polytechnical Academy of Fencing and Horsemanship in 1766.) One performance will occur at 8 p.m. Feb. 20 at Symphony Center, with additional dates of 7:30 p.m. Feb. 18, Kehrein Center for the Arts, 5628 W. Washington, and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 19, North Shore Center for the Arts in Skokie.

“We’re absolutely ecstatic that the launchpad for the tour is in three different neighborhoods in Chicago during Black History Month. It is the perfect way to start us off, and I’m just so grateful for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra organization to be platforming it,” said Bill Barclay, writer-director of and an actor in The Chevalier. Now the artistic director of Concert Theatre Works, he was director of music in 2012-19 at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Read the entire article here.

Rebecca Hall says directing ‘Passing’ helped ‘unlock’ Black family history

theGrio
2021-11-10

Mariel Turner, Senior Editor

“It really gave me an access point into the history of my family that otherwise would have remained hidden,” the first-time director says

Writing and directing Passing has given Rebecca Hall a host of things: critical acclaim, first-time directing experience and award season buzz. One thing she didn’t expect, however, is the deep dive into her family’s own history that the film spurred.

The 39-year-old actress-director told theGrio exclusively that reading the 1929 novel on which Passing is based, and directing the film itself, helped her to uncover her own family’s history of passing and white assimilation. Hall, the daughter of Detroit opera singer Maria Ewing and Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall, confirmed that her grandfather was Black and white-passing…

Read the entire article here.

S2E10 Black Feminist Physics: A Conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Cite Black Women
November 2020

Christen Smith, Host

In this episode Cite Black Women podcast host Christen Smith sits down with theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss Black feminist physics, the intersections between the matrix of violence against Black women and science, her radical Black feminist upbringing and her forthcoming book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred (March 2021, Bold Type Books).

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. Using ideas from both physics and astronomy, she responds to deep questions about how everything in the universe got to the be the way it is. She also does research in Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. Essence magazine recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.” She has been profiled in several venues, including TechCrunch, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Nylon, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives. A cofounder of the Particles for Justice movement, she has received the 2017 LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics, as well as the 2021 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award for her contributions to particle cosmology. She divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Listen to the interview (01:11:29) here.

Nadia Owusu Examines Her Ghanaian-Armenian Identity In ‘Aftershocks’

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2021-01-16

NPR’s Scott Simon speaks to Nadia Owusu about her memoir, Aftershocks.

Listen to the interview (00:07:02) and/or read the transcript here.

More than a century later, the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor plays on

Experience CSO
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association
Chicago, Illinois
2021-02-05

Kyle MacMillan

It’s kind of a musical game of names. In November, a group of Chicago Symphony Orchestra members performed Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1 (Calvary) (1956), as part of CSO Sessions, a series of small-ensemble virtual concerts on the CSOtv video portal.

In an installment of CSO Sessions debuting Feb. 11, another group of CSO musicians will perform the Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 10, a work written 61 years earlier by Perkinson’s namesake: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. These two composers with overlapping names were from two completely different generations, but they nonetheless have several important characteristics in common. Both were of African descent and racial bias kept them from attaining the recognition and standing they deserved.

Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), who had an English mother and Sierra Leone Creole father, gained considerable respect in England during his short life, including early support from Edward Elgar. In part because of the success of The Song of Hiawatha, a trilogy of cantatas, Coleridge-Taylor made three tours to the United States and was received in 1904 at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented an aria from the first and most famous of the cantatas, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, in 1900 when Coleridge-Taylor was just 25 years old; it was the first music by a Black composer performed by the orchestra…

Read the entire article here.

Así son los cubanos: narratives of race and ancestry

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 44, 2021 – Issue 11
pages 2135-2153
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1823447

Elizabeth Obregón, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology
University of Illinois, Chicago

This paper will focus on the ways in which conceptualizations of race are (re)produced through Cuban genealogical narratives in Western Cuba. Ethnographic interviews collected among eleven Cubans in Havana were collected during summer 2017 and are described here. My ethnographic data argue that despite Cuba’s colourblind racial democracy – where race “does not matter” because all races are “treated equally” – the familial narratives of ancestry actively reinforce the complex racial landscape and illustrates the superiority of whiteness that belie this ideal. These same family narratives ultimately highlight the various ways interlocutors negotiate racial self-identities and narrate family ancestry across lingering gendered and racial hierarchies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Seattle-based Coast Guard cutter’s journey through the Arctic: No ‘ice liberty’ in changing waters

The Seattle Times
2021-10-20

Hal Bernton, Staff Reporter

They call it “ice liberty,” a tradition during the Coast Guard’s maritime missions in Arctic waters. At a thick ice floe, the crew gets to disembark for a brief moment of freedom from the vessel confines. Some play touch football, or bring hockey gear for the occasion. Others just take a stroll.

This year, there was no suitable ice to be found during the Coast Guard Cutter Healy’s northern journey off Alaska and Canada. So the event was canceled.

“A lot of the floes had melt ponds with holes in them like Swiss cheese,” said Capt. Kenneth Boda, commander of the Seattle-based icebreaker. “We couldn’t get the right floe.”

Boda spoke via telephone during a port call in Boston. The vessel is deep into a marathon voyage that began July 10 as the 420-foot ship pulled away from its berth at the Coast Guard base in downtown Seattle and traveled into Arctic waters off Alaska. After a jog south, the Healy headed north again and through the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic…

…Arctic shipwreck found

During the voyage, the Healy crew traversed some of the waters cruised more than a century ago by their vessel’s namesake, “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy, captain of the wooden-hulled U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear from 1886 to 1895.

Healy, who was born into slavery, is a legendary figure in U.S. maritime history. He was the first person of African American descent to command a U.S. government ship, and embarked on annual patrols off Alaska, which covered 15,000 to 20,000 miles.

Healy was a kind of maritime sheriff who helped enforce the law as he acted as “judge, doctor and policeman to Alaska Natives, merchant seamen, and whaling crews,” according to a U.S. Coast Guard history, and also led the Bear on a historic 1884 rescue of starving survivors of an Arctic expedition under command of Army 1st Lt. Adolphus Greely…

Read the entire article here.