Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Anne Brown, Soprano Who Was Gershwin’s Bess, Is Dead at 96

    Anne Brown, Soprano Who Was Gershwin’s Bess, Is Dead at 96

    The New York Times
    2009-03-16

    Douglas Martin

    Anne Brown, a penetratingly pure soprano who literally put the Bess in “Porgy and Bess” by inspiring George Gershwin to expand the character’s part in a folk opera that was originally to be called “Porgy,” died Friday in Oslo. She was 96.

    Her daughter Paula Schjelderup announced the death.

    “Porgy and Bess” burst onto the American scene in 1935 as a sophisticated musical treatment of poor blacks. Critics could not make out whether it was a musical comedy, a jazz drama, a folk opera or something quite different. Time told: it became part of the standard operatic repertory, including that of the Metropolitan Opera.

    Drawing from the gritty experiences of South Carolina blacks, “Porgy and Bess” introduced songs that came to be lodged in American culture. Ms. Brown was the first person Gershwin heard singing the part of Bess, a morally challenged but achingly human character who was relatively minor in the original 1925 DuBose Heyward novel and the 1927 hit stage play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward.

    As he composed the opera, often with Ms. Brown at his side, Gershwin added more and more music for her. Her voice was also the first he heard singing several other parts in the opera…

    Read the entire obituary here.

  • Anne Wiggins Brown (1912-2009)

    Anne Wiggins Brown (1912-2009)

    Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music
    2012-01-29

    Randye Jones

    Soprano Anne Wiggins Brown was born on August 9, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland. (This year, rather than 1915, was confirmed by the singer herself.) Her father, Dr. Harry F. Brown, was a prominent physician and grandson of a slave. Her mother, Mary Wiggins Brown, was of African, Cherokee and Scottish-Irish ancestry. She and her three sisters were active in the musical and theatrical life of the racially segregated community. Brown described her early musical training:

    I was always with music. My mother played and sang and she taught her four daughters very much about music. She was my first vocal teacher. In those days there was not much that an African-American could do in the theatre, except roles as a servant or something. I thought about being an opera singer but there also was the same difficulty. In those days the Metropolitan didn’t have any African-American singers.

    Brown’s parents tried to enroll her in an area Catholic school, where they hoped to foster her musical talents. However, the school refused to admit an African American. After confronting similar discrimination years later when she applied to the Peabody School of Music, Brown was admitted to Morgan State College in Baltimore and attended Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She continued her classical vocal studies with Lucia Dunham at the Institute of Musical Art at the Juilliard School. Brown became the first African American to win Juilliard’s prestigious Margaret McGill scholarship…

    …The song Anne Brown sang for Gershwin, “City Called Heaven,” became a standard of the soprano’s concert repertoire. Gershwin, hearing Brown’s performance of the spiritual, decided that she should be his Bess. The composer often invited Brown to sing not only Bess’s lines as they were written, but other characters’ parts. As work on the opera progressed, Bess’s role grew to the point that Brown suggested to Gershwin that the character’s name be added to the title  [“Porgy and Bess”]…

    …Brown discussed the effects her skintone had on her career:

    “We tough girls tough it out,” she said with a wry grin. “I’ve lived a strange kind of life—half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color. On the other hand, many black folks have said, ‘Well, she’s not really black.’ … Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn’t consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, it they couldn’t take me as I was—the hell with them.”

    Determined to escape the racism so prevalent in America, Brown travelled overseas in 1946…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘I don’t believe in Negro symphony conductors’

    ‘I don’t believe in Negro symphony conductors’

    On An Overgrown Path
    2011-07-25

    John McLaughlin Williams

    ‘Oh, come in, young man. I’m reading these reviews. They are out of this world. You really have something. But I might as well tell you, right now, I don’t believe in Negro symphony conductors. No, you may play solo with our symphonies, all over this country. You can dance with them, sing with them. But a Negro, standing in front of a white symphony group? No. I’m sorry.’

    That is the impresario Arthur Judson discussing career opportunities with African American conductor Everett Lee, seen above, [also here (1948)] in the early 1950s. Judson headed Columbia Artists Management Inc and for twenty-five years was the power broker of musical America with a stable of artists that included Eugene Ormandy, Jascha Heifetz and African American contralto Marian Anderson, and at the time of the discussion he also managed the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

    In 1940, together with fellow African American Dean Dixon and Canadian Benjamin Steinberg, Everett Lee attempted to circumvent the institutionalised racism in American classical music by forming an orchestra of black musicians. But the project failed for financial reasons and both Lee and Dixon went on to pursue their careers outside America, although Steinberg succeeded in establishing an orchestra of predominantly black players when he formed the New World Symphony in 1964…

    …History was made in 1953 when Lee became the first black musician to conduct a white symphony orchestra in the south of the States, this happened at the concert in Louisville, Kentucky see in the photo below. There was another milestone in April 1955 when he became the first musician of colour to conduct a major opera company in the US with a performance of La Traviata at the New York City Opera in April 1955…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Why Affirmative Action Remains Essential in the Age of Obama

    Why Affirmative Action Remains Essential in the Age of Obama

    Campbell Law Review
    Volume 31, Issue 3 (2009)
    pages 503-533

    Reginald T. Shuford, Senior Staff Attorney, Racial Justice Program
    American Civil Liberties Union Foundation

    With the election of Barack Obama to the most powerful position in the world, the presidency of the United States of America, many opined that America finally conquered her racial demons, some trumpeting the term “post-racial” as though it were a fait accompli. That an African-American man-much less one with such a nontraditional name-could ascend to the highest office in the land, they argue, clearly signals that America’s racist history is a thing of the past. Gone. Over. Kaput. Slate wiped clean. Concomitant with their notion of a post-racial America is the strong belief that complaints of racism lack merit, and measures to remedy past and current exclusionary practices are no longer necessary. But saying it is so does not make it so. There can be no doubt that Obama’s election represents a singular moment in American history and demonstrates significant and welcome progress in America’s notoriously fraught racial relations. That said, claims that America is truly post-racial are decidedly premature. Indeed, during this very election season, some voters conceded that Obama’s race was an issue impacting whether they would vote for him.

    It also bears noting, at the risk of stating the obvious, while it is true that Obama’s victory shattered the ultimate political glass ceiling, he, black or otherwise, is not your “Average Political Joe.” As such, whether his election portends a future where African-American candidates, and other candidates of color, will be elected to the highest office in the land with any degree of regularity is debatable. For generations, African-American parents preparing their children for the harsh realities of racism have told them that they are required to be twice as good and work twice as hard as everybody else, just to stand a fighting chance at leading successful and productive lives. President Obama may personify that concept better than most. Among his many notable accomplishments, Obama is the graduate of two Ivy League schools, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude. At Harvard, he served as the first African- American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama is also the author of two best-selling books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. He was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. His well-known political successes include his career-defining delivery of the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which catapulted him onto the national and, perhaps, international stage. During his tenure in the Senate, Obama was the sole African-American.

    Beyond his academic and professional accomplishments, President Obama possesses a combination of personal traits-powerful oratorical skills, discipline, equanimity, self-confidence, and the ability to connect with and inspire a broad range of people-that undoubtedly have contributed to his phenomenal success and uniquely qualified him to be the right person for the job at this particular moment in our history. Even Obama’s biracial background advantages him, for example, with the ability, evident in his Speech on Race, to speak credibly from both sides of the racial divide. His background might also have benefited him in another way: Perhaps, he was not “too black” for certain skittish voters. In light of his eminent qualifications, many wondered whether Obama’s racial background at least partly accounted for the relative closeness of much of the race between him and John McCain…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Brendon Ayanbadejo, Baltimore Ravens Linebacker, Talks Gay Marriage And LGBT Rights

    Brendon Ayanbadejo, Baltimore Ravens Linebacker, Talks Gay Marriage And LGBT Rights

    The Huffington Post
    2012-09-12

    Michelangelo Signorile

    Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is going “full steam ahead” after his battle with Maryland legislator C. Emmett Burns Jr., who last week wrote a letter calling on the team’s owner to silence Ayanbadejo regarding his public advocacy of gay marriage, only to back down amid a national uproar. (Listen to the full interview below)

    “The Ravens reached out to me,” Ayanbadejo said. “[Ravens president] Dick Cass and [Ravens] owner Steve Bisciotti said, ‘Brendon, you’re a great person. Keep doing your thing. We believe in you. This is not a team that believes in discrimination in any way, shape, or form. You have this tremendous platform here. Use it. And go ahead and continue to be you, and grow and shape and change the world while you have the ability to do it.’”…

    …Discussing what motivates him to take up the cause of LGBT equality and gay marriage, Ayanbadejo pointed to his upbringing.

    “I’m a product of two biracial parents — so actually, I’m not biracial, but I’m a product of it,” he said, laughing. “My dad is Nigerian. My mom is Irish-American. So I kind of never really fit in. From the black community, I was considered white. From the white community, I was considered black. And then from my own Nigerian community, I wasn’t considered Nigerian. I was considered a black American. I kind of never fit in, kind of had to find my own niche and find my own way. So I’ve experienced discrimination at a young age, and it’s made me the person who I am today.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Creating the Covers of Our Own Books: A Look at Multiracial Identity Communication

    Creating the Covers of Our Own Books: A Look at Multiracial Identity Communication

    Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington
    December 2011
    63 pages

    Helyse Sina Turner

    A Thesis Presented to the Faculty in Communication and Leadership Studies School of Professional Studies Gonzaga University, In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Communication and Leadership Studies

    Today’s world is diverse. Different races, ethnicities, and cultures increasingly intermingle and the population of multiracial people has increased. What is increasingly clear is that first-glance judgments about a person’s racial background can no longer be made with presumption of guaranteed accuracy. And socially, multiracial people are burdened with explaining who they are racially to others. To better understand this situation, this study examined the ways in which multiracial people communicate their backgrounds. Four research questions were posed, targeting nonverbal communication of race, reasons behind decisions to racially self-identify in a specific way, effect of the increasing multiracial population in the United States, and racial identity revision. Data was gathered through a survey and focus groups. The data was then examined using various identity, racial, biracial, and multiracial theories as lenses. The results of the study shed light on multiracial communication, nonverbal expressions of race, comfort and self-identity. Also significant is the adaptation of Root’s biracial theory and Renn’s multiracial college student theory to form another theory regarding multiracial identity development. Suggestions and recommendations for future research are also provided to help better understand multiracial communication and multiracial self-identification.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Standing Up at an Early Age

    Standing Up at an Early Age

    The New York Times
    2012-09-14

    Adam Himmelsbach

    Views on Gay Rights of Ravens’ Ayanbadejo Are Rooted in Upbringing

    In recent weeks, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo has been praised in many quarters for supporting the legalization of same-sex marriage. His stance is not new, but it reached a wider audience after a Maryland legislator urged the Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to silence him.

    For Ayanbadejo, 36, it was a comforting shift from 2009, when he became one of the first athletes from a major American professional sports team to speak out in support of same-sex marriage. That year, he found gay slurs directed at him on Internet message boards. In the Ravens’ locker room, players made crude remarks and asked him when he would reveal his homosexuality, he said.

    “If I was walking by, and they wanted to be immature and make comments, I’d keep walking,” said Ayanbadejo, who has a 1-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter with his longtime girlfriend. “If they wanted to be real men and have conversations, I would have, but no one did.”

    If those players had heard Ayanbadejo’s story, they would have learned how his views were shaped. His father is Nigerian, and his mother is Irish-American, and he was given the first name Oladele, which translates to “wealth follows me home.” But for much of his childhood, that did not ring true…

    …Ayanbadejo began going by his middle name, Brendon, to fit in. He starred for Santa Cruz High School’s football team, but he was also active in theater, rode a skateboard and befriended many openly gay students. He had been accepted as a biracial boy from a Chicago housing project, so he accepted everyone else’s differences, too, he said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Young Barry Wins

    Young Barry Wins

    The New York Review of Books
    2012-08-16

    Darryl Pinckney

    Barack Obama: The Story. By David Maraniss. Simon and Schuster, 641 pp.

    A white friend told me recently that he heard someone complain that he’d voted for the black guy last time around, did he have to do it again—as if Obama’s election had been a noble experiment we weren’t ready for. Only the big boys can deal with the global economy, so hand the keypad to the White House back to its rightful class of occupants, those big boys who helped to make the mess in the first place. President Obama got little credit from Wall Street for bailing out the financial system. Imagine the criticism had he not or had he tried to institute even more reform at that moment. It was an early display of his administration’s hope to lead by consensus.

    Obama’s hold on the middle ground frustrates old liberals and engaged youth. But it remains one of his great assets that the Republicans can’t shove or provoke him from the middle ground. His entrenchment is perhaps why his opponents cannot make him lose his cool, his own understated black swagger. Think of the fierce need among Republican congressmen to try to insult him as chief executive. More so than his record, the accomplishments of his first term, his cool is his campaign’s best remedy for the negative messages that will get under the floorboards of the nation’s consciousness, placed there by Citizens United, the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott.

    No matter what, the Republicans are promising to bring Obama’s first term to a close with another budget crisis. The first term is becoming the story, the referendum. Meanwhile, Obama’s fight for a second term has had the curious effect of making books about his rise somewhat passé. We are familiar with the exoticism of his story: the absent African father; the young white anthropologist mother in Indonesia; the basketball team in Hawaii. We know about Chicago, the discovery of the black community and the future First Lady. YouTube has him when at Harvard. And then that Speech. Moreover, we know much of this from Obama himself. Dreams from My Father is justly famous.

    Yet David Maraniss in his proudly sprawling Barack Obama: The Story presents a biography of the president that he is determined goes deeper than anything else out there. He is clearly pleased to have reached previously untapped sources. Barack Obama: The Story is well over five hundred pages and at its end the future president is just twenty-seven years old, on his way to Harvard Law School. Many share his subject, but Maraniss is the large beast come to the watering hole…

    …Occasionally, Maraniss compares the young Obama to the young Bill Clinton, whose biography he has also written. He has evidence of ambition in Clinton’s vow to his mother that he was going to be president someday, and in his thirst for student offices. Robert Caro says he could identify early on LBJ’s hunger for power and follow it throughout his career. But Maraniss can’t find in Obama’s story the scene when he revealed to someone that he possessed a sense of having an extraordinary destiny. He can’t find it, though it is in his hands: Dreams from My Father is that moment. He does see Obama’s memoir, with its admission that he experimented with drugs while in college, as a subtle maneuvering into position for a run for office. However, because Dreams from My Father is the text in his way, so to speak, Maraniss takes it on, attempts to take it down, and in doing so diminishes the importance of the story Obama tells in his book: how he became a black American…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Mosley Wotta releases new album

    Mosley Wotta releases new album

    The Bulletin
    Bend, Oregon
    2012-09-14

    Ben Salmon

    Bend hip-hop artist performs in Bend tonight

    Anyone who knows local artist, musician and educator Jason Graham—aka MOsley WOtta, leader of the hip-hop band of the same name—knows that his relocation to Bend at age 9 from Chicago’s north side has had a profound and longstanding effect on his worldview, and thus, his art.

    Get Graham, 29, talking (not a difficult task at all), and you’re likely to eventually hear about his experience as a mixed-race kid moving from an ultra-urban environment to the lily-white Bend of a decade ago. And he won’t hesitate to point out that his own stereotypes about “the country” were as deeply entrenched as those he encountered in others.

    The collision of race and culture is a subject Graham has always touched on in his music, going back to his time in the local rap collective Person People, up through his first solo album, 2010’s “Wake.”

    But tonight, Graham will celebrate the release of the second Mosley Wotta album, “KinKonK,” at the old PoetHouse Art space in Bend (see “If you go”), and at the same time, he’ll unveil a more direct, more forceful and more thoughtful set of songs on the subject than he ever has before. It’s also material that may surprise some of the folks who’ve come to love the Mosley Wotta band that, since winning Bend’s inaugural Last Band Standing competition two years ago, has dominated local festival stages with its upbeat funk-hop and positive message of unity through music…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘Thrall’ by Natasha Trethewey, the poet laureate of the United States

    ‘Thrall’ by Natasha Trethewey, the poet laureate of the United States

    The Washington Post
    2012-09-13

    Elizabeth Lund

    Thrall. By Natasha Trethewey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 84 pp.

    Natasha Trethewey’s “Thrall” is a must-read collection that equals the power and quality of her third book, “Native Guard,” which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize . “Thrall” also demonstrates why this 46 -year-old writer is worthy of her recent appointment as poet laureate of the United States.

    Trethewey, the daughter of an African American woman and a white man, explores racial attitudes and stereotypes throughout this slim volume, using both personal and historical lenses. The book opens with a gorgeous, understated poem about a fishing trip she and her father took years ago. That experience and their difficult relationship create an underlying tension that shapes the entire book. What readers notice first, though, is the poem’s engrossing imagery:

    drizzle needling

    the surface, mist at the banks like a net

    settling around us —

    everything damp

    and shining…

    Read the entire review here.