Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

In many ways, Obama’s story provides a possible model for black descended multiracial people in that racial acceptance and success depends on an identity that is closely tied to blackness. In the larger sense, Obama reconciles the tensions between what G. Reginald Daniel has called “multigenerational multiracials,” that is to say, the category that most African Americans fall into as a racially mixed people, and “first-generation” multiracial people who have one parent that identifies as monoracially white and another that identifies as monoracially black. The question is: does this require an African American identification or can it simply be a multiracial identity that affirms one’s connection to the African Diaspora and the black experience? Had Obama identified more with the white side of his parental lineage, or even more strongly as a mixed race person, many Americans might not today know the name Barack Obama. The important point to take away from this memoir is that in the end, the protagonist, the hero, does not choose a mixed race identity but, rather, an African American one. To do otherwise would surely have antagonized and alienated African American support and acceptance. Anything less than full and absolute acceptance of an African American identity would have cost Obama severely.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, “Mutt like me: Barack Obama and the Mixed Race Experience in Historical Perspective,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 149-150.

What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that we are wrong for ballet.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2023-01-23 15:56Z by Steven

“What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that we are wrong for ballet. Again, I had the ideal body when I joined American Ballet Theater. Of course, I went through puberty — and like a lot of dancers who become professionals between the ages of 16 and 18 … my body did change. But once I became a professional, that’s when people started to really see me as a Black woman in a company where there weren’t any. And that’s when the language started to change around me fitting in.” —Misty Copeland

“‘It chips away at you’: Misty Copeland on the whiteness of ballet,” Fresh Air (National Public Radio), November 14, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136026492/misty-copeland-ballet-raven-wilkinson-wind-at-my-back.

Tags: American Ballet Theater, Fresh Air, Misty Copeland, National Public Radio, NPR

Comments Off on What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that we are wrong for ballet.

Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Biography, Media Archive, United States on 2023-01-23 15:35Z by Steven

Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

The New York Times
2018-02-14

Anna Kisselgoff

Ruth Ann Koesun with John Kriza in Michael Kidd’s “On Stage!” in 1947.

Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.

Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.

Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert…

…Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent…

Read the entire obituary here.

Tags: American Ballet Theater, Anna Kisselgoff, ballet, dance, New York Times, Ruth Ann Koesun, The New York Times

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Mixed Race Studies

Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

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