Mixed Race Studies

Betty Reid Soskin: The extraordinary life of the nation’s oldest park ranger

Berkeleyside
Berkeley, California
2022-04-01

Daphne White

In this 2018 interview with Soskin who retired Thursday at the age of 100, the nation’s oldest park ranger said she considers herself “an absolutely ordinary extraordinary person.”

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in February 2018. We’re resharing it because Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest active park ranger, retired Thursday at the age of 100.

Betty Reid Soskin, 96, considers herself “an absolutely ordinary extraordinary person.”

Soskin has dated Jackie Robinson, co-founded Reid’s Records in Berkeley with her first husband, served as a “bag lady” (delivering cash) for the Black Panthers, and hobnobbed with the leaders of the human potential movement as a faculty wife with her second husband.

She also served in a Jim Crow segregated union hall in Richmond during World War II, experienced redlining in Berkeley when she tried to build her first house, moved to a racially-hostile Walnut Creek in the 1950s, and accidentally catapulted to fame in her 80s, as she brought her lived experience as a non-Rosie to the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park…

Read the entire article here.

James Monroe Trotter

Thought Co.
2020-11-18

Femi Lewis

Overview

James Monroe Trotter was an educator, Civil War veteran, musical historian and Recorder of Deeds. A man of many talents, Trotter was patriotic and believed in ending racism in American society. Described as a “genteel militant,” Trotter promoted and encouraged other African Americans to work hard regardless of racism…

Read the entire article here.

How one Civil Rights activist posed as a white man in order to investigate lynchings

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2022-03-30

Dave Davies, Guest Host

White Lies author A.J. Baime tells the story of Walter White, a light-skinned Black man whose ancestors had been enslaved. For years White risked his life investigating racial violence in the South.

Listen to the story (00:42:04) and read the transcript here.

Ethnic Positioning in Southwestern Mixed Heritage Writing

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
April 2022
228 pages
Trim: 6½ x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-0790-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-0791-1

Judit Ágnes Kádár, Director of International Relations
Hungarian University of Sport Science, Budapest, Hungary

Ethnic Positioning in Southwestern Mixed Heritage Writing explores how Southwestern writers and visual artists provide an opportunity to turn a stigmatized identity into a self-conscious holder of valuable assets, cultural attitudes, and memories. The problem of mixed ethno-cultural heritage is a relevant feature of North American populations, faced by millions. Narratives on blended heritage show how mixed-race authors utilize their multiple ethnic experiences, knowledge archives, and sensibilities. They explore how individuals attempt to cope with the cognitive anxiety, stigmas, and perceptions that are intertwined in their blended ethnic heritage, family and social dynamics, and the renegotiation of their ethnic identity. The Southwest is a region riddled by Eurocentric and Colonial concepts of identity, yet at the same time highly treasured in the Frontier experiences of physical mobility and mental and spiritual journeys and transformations. Judit Ágnes Kádár argues that the process of ethnic positioning is a choice made by mixed heritage people that results in renegotiated identities, leading to more complex and engaging concepts of themselves.

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2 Multiracial Identity and the Southwest
  • 2.1 “Core and Confluence”: The Geo-Cultural Context of Mixedblood Writing
  • 2.2 From “Halfbreed” to “Crossblood”
  • 2.3 Southwestern Authors and Artists of Mixed Heritage: An Overview
• Chapter 3: Identity Negotiation in Southwestern Mixedblood Poetry: A Complementary Scope
• Chapter 4: “Blood Trails,” Hidden Histories
  • 4.1 The Beginning of Mixed Heritage Fictional Biographies: From Memoir to Postcolonial Storytelling
  • 4.2 Laguna Pueblo Postcolonial Life-Writing and The Followers: Southwestern Mixed Heritage Autobiographies
• Chapter 5: Multiracial Identity and its Narrative Formulation
  • 5.1 Four Decades of Mixed-Race Writing: Altering Visions in Selected Prose Texts
  • 5.2 A Psychological Insight into Blended Heritage Identity Construction
  • 5.3 Cultural Identity Formulation in Multiracial Narratives
  • 5.4 Narrative Identity: From Object to Subject
  • 5.5 Nanabush’s “Pandora’s Box of Possibilities”: Humor in Contemporary Multiracial Writing
• Chapter 6: Some Interesting Cognitive Patterns
  • 6.1 Grave Concerns and Nightwalkers
  • 6.2 Sharpening Sights
  • 6.3 “Restore me!”
  • 6.4 “Indigenous Shapes of Water” in Mixedblood Writing
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography
  • 8.1 Primary Sources
  • 8.2 Secondary Sources

The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico

Yale University Press
2022-04-12
296 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
9 b/w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780300258066

Danielle Terrazas Williams, Lecturer in the School of History
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

A restoration of the agency and influence of free African-descended women in colonial Mexico through their traces in archives

The Capital of Free Women examines how African-descended women strove for dignity in seventeenth-century Mexico. Free women in central Veracruz, sometimes just one generation removed from slavery, purchased land, ran businesses, managed intergenerational wealth, and owned slaves of African descent. Drawing from archives in Mexico, Spain, and Italy, Danielle Terrazas Williams explores the lives of African-descended women across the economic spectrum, evaluates their elite sensibilities, and challenges notions of race and class in the colonial period.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerade throughout the Golden Age

State University of New York Press
April 2022
326 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781438488035

Mónica García Blizzard, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Emory University, Atlantic, Georgia

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture.

This is the problem with using biracial identity as an excuse to be racially neutral. Doing so often results in ignoring both black suffering and the racist political, economic, and social structures which produce black suffering. Dak Prescott claimed that being biracial helped him in being a leader for the Dallas Cowboys because he can relate to both his black teammates and his white teammates. Yet, when it comes to the issue of kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality, Prescott opposed doing so. It turns out that Prescott’s views on the NFL protests are more in line with how the majority of white Americans feel about the protests, so on a very serious political matter which is black and white, Prescott is comfortably on the white side.

Dwayne Wong (Omowale), “Being Biracial Shouldn’t Be An Excuse To Be Racially Neutral,” Medium, January 26, 2020. https://dwomowale.medium.com/being-biracial-shouldnt-be-an-excuse-to-be-racially-neutral-a0e04242d5fc.

From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Formation of Mexican American Identities in the U.S. Southwest

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020028
21 pages

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

The racialization of Mexican Americans in northern Mexico, that is, the U.S. Southwest, following the Anglo-Americanization during the second half of the nineteenth century, is an excellent case study of the historical formations of Anglo-American and Spanish American racial orders. Both racial orders were based on a hierarchy that privileged Whiteness and stigmatized Blackness. Yet Spanish America’s high levels of miscegenation resulted in ternary orders allowing for gradation in and fluidity within racial categories, in addition to the formation of multiracial identities, including those of individuals with African ancestry. Anglo-America was characterized by restrictions on miscegenation and more precise definitions of and restrictions on racial categories. This prohibited the formation of multiracial identities while buttressing a binary racial order that broadly necessitated single-race (monoracial) identification as either White or non-White, and more specifically, as White or Black, given their polar extremes in racial hierarchy. Within this order, hypodescent applies most stringently to those with African ancestry through the one-drop rule, which designates as Black all such individuals. This article examines monoracialization through historical processes of Mexican–American identity formations. Over the twentieth century, this shifted from White to Brown, but without any acknowledgment of African ancestry.

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Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations

Cambridge University Press
February 2022
320 pages
236 x 156 x 25 mm
0.64kg
Hardback ISBN: 9781108499545
Paperback ISBN: 9781108730808

Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of Atlantic World History
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba’s radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba’s Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba’s intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago’s Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Unenclosed people, unenclosed lands: Santiago de Cuba to 1800
• 2. Foreign implants: The Saint-Domingue refugees and the limits of plantation development, 1791–1808
• 3. Keeping people put: Enslaved families, policing, and the re-emergence of coffee planting, 1810s–1830s
• 4. Manumission’s legalities: From need-based prerogatives to merit-based entitlements
• 5. ‘A freedom with further bonds’: Free people of African descent, property ownership, and color status
• 6. ‘Para levantar los negros y proclamar la República’: The beginnings of the Cuban wars of independence in Santiago de Cuba
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography

Merle Oberon: India’s forgotten Hollywood star

BBC News
2022-04-16

Meryl Sebastian, BBC News, Delhi

Merle Oberon, a Hollywood star of the black and white era, is a forgotten icon in India, the country of her birth.

Best-known for playing the lead in the classic Wuthering Heights, Oberon was an Anglo-Indian born in Bombay in 1911. But as a star in Hollywood’s Golden Age, she kept her background a secret – passing herself off as white – throughout her life.

Mayukh Sen, a US-based writer and academic, first stumbled across her name in 2009 when he found out that Oberon was the first actor of South Asian origin to be nominated for an Oscar.

His fascination grew as he saw her films and dug deeper into her past. “As a queer person, I empathise with this feeling that you must hide a part of your identity to survive in a hostile society that isn’t really ready to accept who you are,” he says. Sen is now working on a biography to tell Oberon’s story from a South Asian perspective…

Read the entire article here.