Mixed Race Studies

Black (Or Not) Like Me: Thoughts on CNN’s Black in America 5

The Huffington Post
2012-12-10

Smokey Fontaine, Chief Content Officer
Interactive One

I know who my colleagues think I am. I’m pretty sure they’ve accepted me as the lightest Black dude in the office. My job demands that I constantly engage co-workers around racial issues, so I have opportunities to represent my Black experience all the time which I’m sure gains me some points.

But it’s different in the street. My what-is-he? scorecard for strangers who pass me by in New York City is as follows:

• 60 percent think I’m Latino
• 25 percent think I’m Black or interracial
• 15 percent think I’m White

Pretty good percentages for me because I’m only comfortable when my see-me-as-a-person-of-color index is above half. That was my problem in Baltimore. Living there for a few years to teach sixth grade at Booker T. Washington Middle School made me vulnerable to mis-identification in a southern environment without a significant Latino population. My white quotient jumped to above 50…

…CNN’s latest installment of their top-rated Black In America series handles these complex issues of identity, asking young African-Americans of various shades and backgrounds to discuss their experience. First, I’m surprised that it took them so long to address this topic (especially given series hostess Soledad O’Brien’s interracial heritage), but I was most struck by how the young people’s experiences were so similar to mine and those of my (not all-Black) friends 20 years ago. It was like I was watching a video of a college I-Pride meeting from 1995.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Every generation’s naivete drives their passion to figure out the world and clearly the show’s goal is to raise more questions than it answers. But as cultural critic Stuart Hall liked to say, “cultural identity is one of becoming as well as being. Like everything which is historical… [identities] undergo constant transformation” and I didn’t feel that in the show.

There is a cultural upheaval going on in our country that is expanding ideas about Blackness. Latino, Asian and even white identity are also being affected (don’t get it twisted: the identity of caucausian culture is as dependent on people of color as the other way around). But this shift was not loudly represented by all the great young folks in Black In America talking about how they see and socialize themselves…

…What I’ve learned is that when there is a gap between how someone feels about themselves and how they’re perceived by others, you get conflict. Even within my own interracial family, there are darker-skinned folks who take on their Italian maiden name as an homage to the white mother that raised them (and a dis to the Black father who didn’t), and lighter-skinned folks who refuse to ever straighten their hair to avoid any more obvious connections to a European heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness in the Age of Obama

The Huffington Post
2012-11-26

Jedediah Purdy, Professor of Law
Duke University

Recall the numbers: 59 percent of white voters supported Romney. More dramatically, 88 percent of his votes came from whites. One simple but plausible analysis suggested that Obama won a majority of white votes only in New England, New York, and Hawaii. His national share of the white vote fell by several points after four years in which Republicans, especially the Tea Party, worked relentlessly to be the party of whiteness.

As I’ve noted before (and so have lots of others), this was the barely-concealed meaning of Tea Party claims that Obama was not American, not constitutionally the president, somehow deeply alien. These ideas are so unmoored from reality that they have to be approached as symptoms, not positions. Race was also much of the meaning of tying Obama to food stamps, and of (barely less public) assertions that health care reform was a giveaway from white taxpayers to black dependents.

Those notorious maps showing the overlap between Romney states and the old Confederacy take on a grim extra plausibility when you consider that Obama seems to have taken less than 20 percent of the white vote in the core states of the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. I’m reminded of the friend in West Virginia who told me, back in 1988, that one reason to support Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary was that he could pick out his solitary vote when the local newspaper printed the results.

But consider: whiteness, like any other racial category, is a made-up thing. It is a matter of what people do, not what they are. (Social construction is the clunky academic name for this.) Like other made-up things, it changes. Obama’s share of the youth vote in swing states like Virginia, Florida, and Ohio was so high that clearly, somewhere around age 30, a majority of white people started supporting the president. Romney’s success with old people isn’t just a matter of the fact that America used to be much more white. It’s that white people used to be much more white—in the Mitt Romney sense of white. Whiteness, too, is changing. What might it become?…

…Race in the age of Obama

There are many ways to look at Barack Obama, a fact that has been both a strength and a weakness in his political career. One of those, one he invites and seems to believe, is that he is a man who made a pair of deliberate choices: to be black and to be American, to identify with both those traditions and to braid their hopes more tightly together. This is the conclusion of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and it has rippled through a good deal of what he has done and said as President.

That American identity is open to this kind of choice is one of the best things about it. That Obama’s claim to stand at the center of American identity has inspired so much resistance is a sign of the value of that central place, of its being—sometimes tragically—worth fighting over.

All of us who live in Obama’s age are, more or less explicitly, engaged in the same problem: how to orient ourselves to an American identity that no longer has its old center. The change, the beginning of overcoming the America-is-whiteness myth, is overdue and entirely right.

Maybe that identity will be more comfortably hybrid. American civic myth has always involved the fantasy of purity. The Pilgrims were righteous, goes the myth. So were the Revolutionaries. The Founders were wise and beneficent. The Constitution is full of moral truth. Our wars are good wars.

There is a strange half-rhyme between that fantasy of purity and the fantasy of race, especially the bad old idea that whiteness contains something special, rare, and pure—an idea few will say in public anymore, but which still echoes in our racially divided politics. These myths had many victims, most obviously those whom they defined as not quite, or not at all, American. More subtly, they mutilated history itself. They cost everyone the chance at an honest start to understanding the present by appreciating the past…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama Reelection Signals Rise Of New America

The Huffington Post
2012-11-07

Howard Fineman

NEW YORK—President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.

Obama, the mixed-race son of Hawaii by way of Kansas, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, won reelection in good part because he not only embodied but spoke to that New America, as did the Democratic Party he leads. His victorious coalition spoke for and about him: a good share of the white vote (about 45 percent in Ohio, for example); 70 percent or so of the Latino vote across the country, according to experts; 96 percent of the African-American vote; and large proportions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The Republican Party, by contrast, has been reduced to a rump parliament of Caucasian traditionalism: white, married, church-going—to oversimplify only slightly. “It’s a catastrophe,” said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt. “This is, this will have to be, the last time that the Republican Party tries to win this way.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Future Is Now: What PR Pros and Marketers Need to Know About the “Mixed Mindset”

The Huffington Post
2012-10-17

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Don’t believe the hype! Multiracials are not new. They are the products of racial blending of various groups—beginning with Native Americans and European settlers–throughout US history. Multiracial identities have been leveraged for social and anti-social purposes since the dawn of print media. Even in today’s networked world we are still figuring out how this “full color” demographic fits into a historically black-and-white racial context.

Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century and to the era of the “Mixed Mindset,” which is highly mediated, intensely personal, and increasingly political. On one hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step backward – into the history of mixing that predates a black-white only mentality. On the other hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step forward—it’s about everyday contact and practical encounters that acknowledge racial categories, disturb racial common sense, and create a mindset within which it is okay to name and question racial meanings. The logical end of the mixed mindset is a space where many racial categories and meanings can exist simultaneously, even if they’re contradictory, making it more difficult to maintain neat and independent groupings.

Here’s how that works. The Mixed Mindset is about answering questions like “who are you?” and “what do you need?” Here are a few facts about who today’s multiracials are based on how they answered the 2010 US Census.

But to keep things moving, let’s turn our attention to what today’s multiracials are saying they need. I call these needs the three As: Adaptation, Acknowledgment and Affection…

Read the entire article here.

Family Portrait in Black and White: A Talk With Julia Ivanova

The Huffington Post
The Blog
2012-07-12

E. Nina Rothe, Global Culture Explorer

The upcoming documentary by Julia Ivanova, titled Family Portrait in Black and White features a Ukrainian foster mother, Olga, and her brood of 27 foster kids. Ranging in ages between grade schoolers and legal adults, Olga’s children are for the most part the beautifully unique result of relationships between African students—attending the affordable universities of the former Soviet country — and Ukrainian women. In a national environment that presently leans more on the side of intolerance and bigotry, where neo-Nazi demonstrations can be the found on any given day in Kiev, Olga should be called a heroine.

Yet the beauty of Ivanova’s insightful film lies in her cinematic portrayal of the woman behind the mother. Olga turns out to be a flawed, overbearing, opinionated result of the former Soviet regime, who loves by the rules and teaches by the book: her book. In other words, perfectly human.

I caught up with Ivanova about her touching film and she shared her insightful views on the film’s imperfect heroine, as well as the future of these biracial children in a world that is increasingly partial to what is standard and un-unique.

Your film tells the story of a woman who is human, not just a heroine. How did you become aware of this particular story?

This particular story was very dear to me because for a number of years I wanted to make a film about biracial citizens of Eastern Europe and especially children who were born in Eastern Europe and don’t have a second identity other than the identity of the nation they feel they belong to. But the society sees them as different, so I was looking for a story that would allow me to explore this topic in its whole complexity. I was filming in Moscow in 2004 when I saw an article in the local newspaper of this woman in Ukraine with photos. Immediately I thought it was an excellent, excellent story and I got in touch with her a year or two later and then came to meet her…

Read the entire interview here.

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.

Is Obama Now Black (Enough) Because He’s White?

The Huffington Post
2012-08-02

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

With the November election less than 100 days away, the Obama campaign continues to come up against questions about the president’s racial identity. Most recently, reports that the president is “passing,” or claiming that he’s representing himself as a member of a different racial group than the one(s) to which he belongs, have resurfaced. For instance, actor Morgan Freeman recently told NPR, “America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.” The logic I see behind such claims is twofold. First, the president is not really African American because his American mother is white (and, by extension, his ancestors were not enslaved). Second, that “mixed-race” and “black” are mutually exclusive ways of being…

…The revelation that the president and his mother are descendents of the “first slave” provides us all with an opportunity to acknowledge racial relationships with all their problems and awkwardness. Perhaps now, rather than merely questioning the president’s racial identity, we can pose bigger questions about the meanings of race. Questions like: Is slavery still the defining experience of African American identity? If so, who says so? Is any racial identity—multiracial, African American, white—better understood as an idea that can change over time? Wouldn’t it be real progress to admit that an increasing number of people who identify with monoracial identities like black and white might also be mixed? How do we deal with the too often painful history of racial mixing in African American communities? How many families that we know as white might actually come from a history of racial mixing and passing?…

Read the entire article here.

Is the Tanning of America Only Skin Deep?

The Huffington Post
2012-05-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

It’s official: The United States is officially “tan.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s first population estimate by age, race, ethnicity, and sex since the 2010 Census, “50.4 percent of our nation’s population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken April 1, 2010. The population younger than age 5 was 49.7 percent minority in 2011, up from 49.0 percent in 2010.”

As expected, media flurry ensued. The Associated Press was among the first outlets to pick up the story reporting, “For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S.” USA Today noted the nation’s changing complexion and described the Census Bureau’s report as “a sign of how swiftly the USA is becoming a nation of younger minorities and older whites.” And according to the New York Times, “such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive.”

Now that the moment is here we must reckon with it. Today’s Census statement marks a social milestone for a nation that has struggled with issues of diversity, privilege, and power. But, as I suggest in my forthcoming book Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, the tanning of America might be only skin deep. Or, putting it differently: Is the U.S. passing as “tan”?…

…Here’s why you should care. Because looking at tomorrow’s “tanning” generation in demographic terms only subtly promotes them as the chosen ones who can and will dismantle racism that took centuries to build. When we take this perspective we are shifting the responsibility of solving institutional and structural racism off those of us who were born before July 1, 2011 and off our legal and social histories. This is not only unfair — it’s unrealistic. Predicting the demise of racism by the rising number of nonwhite births is probably not the best way to fulfill our desire for a more just society. Wouldn’t the present-day elimination of disparities in income, employment, health care, education, crime, punishment and family structure for this new generation (as well as their parents) be more accurate measures?…

Read the entire article here.

For A Century, The First Underground Railroad Ran Slaves South To Florida (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post
2012-03-18

Bruce Smith, Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. — While most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape north before the Civil War, the first clandestine path to freedom ran for more than a century in the opposite direction.

Stories of that lesser-known “railroad” will be shared June 20-24 at the National Underground Railroad Conference in St. Augustine, Fla. The network of sympathizers gave refuge to those fleeing their masters, including many American Indians who helped slaves escape to what was then the Spanish territory of Florida. That lasted from shortly after the founding of Carolina Colony in 1670 to after the American Revolution.

They escaped not only to the South but to Mexico, the Caribbean and the American West.

And the “railroad” helps to explain at least in part why the lasting culture of slave descendants – known as Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Florida and Georgia – exists along the northeastern Florida coast.

“It’s a fascinating story and most people in America are stuck – they are either stuck on 1964 and the Civil Rights Act or they are stuck on the Civil War,” said Derek Hankerson, who is a Gullah descendant and a small business owner in St. Augustine, Fla. “We have been hankering to share these stories.”…

…Slaves likely started fleeing toward Florida when South Carolina was established in 1670, said Jane Landers, a Vanderbilt University historian who has researched the subject extensively. The first mention of escaped slaves in Spanish records was in 1687 when eight slaves, including a nursing baby, showed up in St. Augustine.

Spain refused to return them and instead gave them religious sanctuary, and that policy was formalized in 1693. The only condition is that those seeking sanctuary convert to Catholicism.

“It was a total shift in the geopolitics of the Caribbean and after that anyone who leaves a Protestant area to request sanctuary gets it,” Landers said.

Read the entire article here.

Marvel’s Mixed Race “Ultimate Spider-Man”

The Huffington Post
2011-08-03

Marcia Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

As a kid from Queens, NY it’s not hard to understand why Spider-Man has always been my favorite superhero. Aside from a shared geographical location Spider-Man reflected many of the qualities of urban youth. He came from a working class background. He lived with extended family. He was open-minded. Sometimes unsure of himself, he struggled to make sense of the bustling world around him and his place in it.

And now there’s a new chapter to the story. Today we meet Miles Morales, a younger multiracial and multiethnic Spidey. Morales, of mixed black and Latino descent, is described by TIME Magazine as a gangly teen “that fights crime and hurls spiderwebs, just like Peter Parker used to do.” The similarities between Morales and Parker don’t stop there. They share alliterative names and Miles was bitten by a powerful spider too. I guess that makes them both multiracial spider-men…

Read the entire article here.