Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Visible: Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Necessity of Black Women’s Cinema

The Criterion Collection
2021-10-15

Rebecca Carroll

There is a gloriously unaffected vibe about Gina Prince-Bythewood. Cerebral and sublime, casually beautiful and laser-focused, she has written and directed impressive television and film for the past twenty-plus years with equal parts rigor and joy. And she has achieved all this without losing her sense of self as a Black woman in America, and while continuing to fight to get personal projects made in Hollywood.

Prince-Bythewood has recently reached new heights by becoming the first Black woman to direct a major comic-book movie. That film—The Old Guard, starring KiKi Layne and Charlize Theron—premiered on Netflix in the summer of 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, to widely favorable reviews. Prince-Bythewood, though, is still best known for writing and directing her 2001 feature debut, Love & Basketball, which tells the indelibly original story of a young Black woman ballplayer. The film is not just a love letter to basketball but a paean to the complexity, ambition, and perseverance of Black womanhood. After writing for shows like A Different World and Felicity, Prince-Bythewood went on to direct for TV, including episodes of Girlfriends and Everybody Hates Chris. She returned to the big screen in 2008 with The Secret Life of Bees, and again in 2014 with Beyond the Lights, which is when we first met.

I had known and admired Gina’s work; I don’t know a single Black woman who did not obsess over the love scene in Love & Basketball set to Maxwell’s “This Woman’s Work.” But Beyond the Lights, from the opening scene, hit different. Here was the story of a young Black girl with a white mother who couldn’t see her daughter outside of her own white gaze. It echoed my own experience. I reviewed the film for an online blog and then requested an interview with Gina, which very quickly turned into a conversation that felt uncannily familiar. We were born within a month of each other, in 1969, and were both adopted into white families three weeks after being born. We had both spent our youth navigating all-white environments, desperately in search of a reflection of ourselves. We both turned to storytelling as a career path and a way to make sense of that experience.

Gina has written herself into the narrative—in the movies she’s brought to the screen, the family she’s made, and the world she’s created around her. In celebration of the new Criterion edition of Love & Basketball, we got together to catch up, reflect, and get into it…

Read the entire interview here.

The history of Afro Latinos is not taught in American schools, and the idea that someone can be Black and Latino still feels novel to some people, according to Tanya K. Hernández, a professor at Fordham University School of Law.

Blanca Torres, “‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month,” KQED News, February 18, 2022. https://www.kqed.org/news/11905454/we-are-black-we-just-speak-spanish-why-some-afro-latinos-want-more-visibility-during-black-history-month.

Growing up, as a mixed race child, with survivor grandparents

Forward
2022-03-08

Kyla Kupferstein
Oakland, California

As a child growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my younger brother David and I did everything in Manhattan: it was where we lived, went to school and played with our friends.

Except for the weekends when my parents would take us to visit my grandparents in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. Buba Fela and Zayda Hershl lived in the Amalgamated Houses on Sedgwick Avenue – a cooperative apartment complex that functioned like a reassembled shtetl, a Yiddish-speaking community of Jews from Eastern Europe who had somehow escaped or survived the Nazi genocide and lived to tell the tale.

As my brother and I (known at our grandparents’ home as Kylashi and Davittle) sat at our grandparents’ kitchen table, we were fed a steady diet of Holocaust talk. “The war,” they called it, when they spoke English, which they did only for us. Hitler, Stalin, the camps – all these were a part of their normal vocabulary. And their neighbors, some who had been my grandparents’ friends back in Warsaw, most of them Bundists ranging from agnostic to atheist, were the closest thing to an extended family that we had.

Unlike many other survivors who kept silent because they couldn’t bear to revisit the atrocities, everyone in this community told their stories openly; we waited for those stories, just as we waited for Buba’s misshapen cookies and trips to the sprinklers in Van Cortlandt Park. Countless times we heard the story of how they left: when young men were urged to leave Warsaw because of Hitler’s imminent arrival, my Zayda, Herschel, decided he couldn’t leave without his love, Fela. Her grandfather quickly married them, and they fled to Russia, innocently believing it would be safe for them as socialists. But they were arrested at the Russian border, and then jailed separately in Stalin’s prisons in Siberia…

Read the entire article here.

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda review – millennial vampire tale with bite

The Guardian
2022-03-14

Lucy Popescu

This debut novel is a surefooted, art-filled and wholly 21st-century take on bloodsucking

Claire Kohda’s debut is memorable for the refreshing perspective of her conflicted heroine: a vampire of mixed ethnicity and recent art graduate. Lydia struggles to accept the demon inside her and yearns to love, live and eat like a human. Her father, a successful Japanese artist, died before she was born. Lydia has committed her mother, a Malaysian-English vampire in declining health, to a home in Margate and accepted an internship with a contemporary London gallery known as the Otter.

Woman, Eating opens with Lydia renting an artist’s studio in a converted biscuit factory. She’s shown around by the kind and friendly Ben, to whom she is immediately attracted. At the gallery, Lydia is given banal jobs cleaning labels off bottles and adding velvet pads to coat hangers in preparation for the next opening. Largely ignored by the staff, Lydia receives the unwanted attention of the director – cold, predatory Gideon – who, she learns, had collected her father’s art. He stands in the shadows observing her, unaware that, as a vampire, Lydia can see him in the dark and the blood coursing through his veins. One day, passing on the stairs, he gropes her buttock. It’s an act he’ll later regret…

Read the entire review here.

Socioemotional wellbeing of mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and mechanisms

SSM – Population Health
Volume 5, August 2018
pages 147-159
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2018.06.010

James Nazroo
Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Afshin Zilanawala
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Meichu Chen
University of Michigan

Laia Bécares
Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Pamela Davis-Kean
University of Michigan

James S. Jackson
University of Michigan

Yvonne Kelly
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Lidia Panico
Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques, Paris, France

Amanda Sacker
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Highlights

• Mixed race/ethnicity children are thought to have poorer socioemotional wellbeing
• We find no evidence that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing in a study covering children aged 5/6 in the US and UK
• We find that mixed race/ethnicity children do have socio-economic advantage
• This socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing

Existing literature suggests that mixed race/ethnicity children are more likely to experience poor socioemotional wellbeing in both the US and the UK, although the evidence is stronger in the US. It is suggested that this inequality may be a consequence of struggles with identity formation, more limited connections with racial/ethnic/cultural heritage, and increased risk of exposure to racism.

Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (n = 13,734) and the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n ~ 6250), we examine differences in the socioemotional wellbeing of mixed and non-mixed 5/6 year old children in the UK and US and explore heterogeneity in outcomes across different mixed groups in both locations. We estimate a series of linear regressions to examine the contribution of factors that may explain any observed differences, including socio-economic and cultural factors, and examine the extent to which these processes vary across the two nations.

We find no evidence of greater risk for poor socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in both national contexts. We find that mixed race/ethnicity children experience socio-economic advantage compared to their non-mixed minority counterparts and that socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing. Cultural factors do not contribute to differences in socioemotional wellbeing across mixed and non-mixed groups.

Our evidence suggests then that at age 5/6 there is no evidence of poorer socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in either the UK or the US. The contrast between our findings and some previous literature, which reports that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing, may reflect changes in the meaning of mixed identities across periods and/or the developmental stage of the children we studied.

Read the entire article here.

Edward Telles: Afrodescendents and the Project on Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

BYU Kennedy Center
2021-03-04

Edward Telles, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

For Latin America’s 170 million people of indigenous and African heritage, questions of race, ethnicity, and perceptions of skin color impact issues of equality. Dr. Telles will address his work with PERLA (Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America), which provides an empirical examination of numerous dimensions of race and ethnicity across Latin America.

Dr. Edward Telles is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has reoriented the field of Sociology beyond the black-white paradigm prominent in the United States through his research and writings on color, race, and ethnicity globally, particularly in Latin America and for Latinos in the United States. He is the author or co-author of numerous articles and books, including Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America.

Watch the presentation (00:57:03) here.

Who is black, white, or mixed race? How skin color, status, and nation shape racial classification in Latin America

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 120, Number 3 (November 2014)
pages 864-907
DOI: 10.1086/679252

Edward Telles, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America’s Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes (Brazil), mestizoizes (Colombia), darkens (Dominican Republic), or has no effect (Panama). The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.

Read or purchase the article here.

Notes On ‘Passing’

Essence
2021-10-27

Rebecca Carroll

The upcoming drama, based on the 1929 novel, looks at the cultural self-alienation a black woman experiences when she attempts to gain the privileges that come with assuming a white identity.

When my light-skinned Black and mixed-race teenage son was little, I worried aloud to my best girlfriend about whether people would recognize him as Black—or whether, God forbid, he himself would decide to identify as even partially white. My girlfriend, who is also Black, would counter with, “Why would he want to be on that team? Seriously, have you seen that team?” Yes, I would say, all too much, for far too long. And we’d laugh, because it was funny-ish.

I was adopted by a white family and raised in a primarily white rural New England town. I then spent my life, well into adulthood, seeking out Blackness and trying to arrive at a place where I could feel unambiguous in my identity as a Black woman. My son opting to identify as white would have been the opposite of my journey. But as he grew older, I actually stopped worrying that he’d be taken as white—and became more worried that he’d be profiled by the police as Black. The irony…

Read the entire review here.

For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

The Washington Post
2022-03-11

H.W. Brands

In the late 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner lit up the historical world with his frontier thesis of American history. He asserted that American democracy owed its distinctiveness to the existence of an advancing frontier, where American institutions reinvented themselves every generation. By no means did all historians accept Turner’s views, but his approach framed debate on the subject far into the 20th century.

More recently the concept of frontier has given way to the idea of borders and borderlands, where peoples and cultures have intermingled and interacted. In “Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West,” Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border…

Read the entire review here.

Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

Cornell University Press
2022-03-15
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781501761973

Burton I. Kaufman, Dean Emeritus, School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor Emeritus, Department of History
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama’s was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy.

Following his election, President Obama’s supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system.

The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama’s greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States.

In estimating the course and impact of Obama’s full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.