Mixed Race Studies

The untold stories of Japanese war brides

The Washington Post
2016-09-22

Kathryn Tolbert, Deputy Editor

Hiroko and Bill with Kathy, left, Sam and Susan. The video is the trailer to a short documentary film, “Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides,” which features Hiroko and two other war brides.

They married the enemy, then created uniquely American lives

I thought she was beautiful, although I never understood why she plucked her eyebrows off and penciled them on every morning an inch higher. She had been captain of her high school basketball team in Japan, and she ran circles around us kids on a dirt court in our small town in Upstate New York. I can still see this Japanese woman dribbling madly about, yelling “Kyash! Kyash!” That’s how she said Kath, or Kathy.

She married my American GI father barely knowing him. She moved from Tokyo to a small poultry farm just outside Elmira, N.Y., and from there she delivered eggs all over the county and into Pennsylvania. My sister describes her as having a “core of steel.” She raised us as determinedly as any mother could, and yet, looking back, I barely knew her.

Some people think the film I co-directed, “Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides,” is a paean to loving Japanese mothers. When one interviewer suggested as much to me and fellow director Karen Kasmauski, we exchanged a look that said, “Shall we tell him the truth?” The film, titled after a Japanese proverb, is about strong women, for sure. Warm and loving mothers? No.

So who are these women and what do we, their children, know about them?…

Read the entire article here.

Virginia’s Indian tribes clear another hurdle toward federal recognition

The Washington Post
2016-09-15

Jenna Portnoy, Reporter

A House committee has advanced a bill that would give federal recognition to six Indian tribes in Virginia, bringing them one step closer to the end of a multi-year fight for acknowledgment of their place in the nation’s history.

Legislation granting federal recognition of the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Monacan and Nansemond tribes can now go to a full vote in the House and Senate, where it has stalled in the past.

The House Natural Resources Committee voted 23 to 13 last week to recognize the Virginia tribes as part of a package of bills that, if successful, will give Congress the ultimate authority to recognize tribes. The executive and judicial branches currently hold that authority…

There are more than 500 federally recognized Indian tribes, and many had to navigate an expensive and time-consuming administrative process through the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Federal recognition confers certain benefits on tribes; they become eligible for housing, education and health-care funding. Indian tribes need to meet several criteria and must rely on historical documentation…

Read the entire article here.

‘An offer of my heart’: A story of black love after the Civil War

The Washington Post
2016-09-08

DeNeen L. Brown, Reporter

One hundred and forty-four years after they were written, the civil rights advocate found the letters in the bottom of an old suitcase, stacked in thin envelopes and tied together by a faded, baby-blue ribbon.

Somebody had preserved them with such care. Laura W. Murphy opened a letter, looked at the date and gasped.

“Who has anything [written] from 1871 in their possession?” she thought.

The handwriting was exquisite, penned by her great-grandfather in ink that flowed from a quill. In all, there were 12 letters, capturing a courtship between a black man and a black woman six years after the end of the Civil War…

Laura W. Murphy reads through letters between her great-grandparents, Mary Rebecca Lee and James W. Hughes, which were exchanged during Reconstruction. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Read the entire article here.

Looking For Participants For Washington Post Podcast On Mixed-Race Identity

Alexandra Laughlin
2016-09-01

I’m a journalist at The Washington Post and I am working on a podcast about mixed race identity in the United States. This is going to be a highly produced, narrative-driven podcast that explores these complex issues through storytelling.

Now, I am now looking for your stories to tell!

The best stories will have a beginning, middle, and end, and they will involve you or someone you know experiencing a problem/conflict/hilarious situation involved with being mixed race. Here are some questions to get you started:

• Who do you want to bring home to your parents?
• Have you ever felt fetishized? How and why?
• Have you ever dated someone who didn’t realize your race/ethnicity? Did it change things when they found out?
• Was there ever a time when you didn’t feel accepted in a certain racial group?
• Do you remember a time when people interpreted your identity in a way that wasn’t consistent with the way you feel?
• Has your identity changed throughout your life?
• How has your family/parents communicated your racial identity to you?

These are just some rough questions, but I would love to hear anything you have to share! Bonus points if you’re in Washington, D.C. or on the east coast. If you’d like to chat, shoot me an e-mail with a few sentences about your story at Alexandra.laughlin@washpost.com.

I’m excited to hear from you!

Alex

Two-hundred forty years after the first Independence Day, Americans still live by the same color codes established before the nation’s birth. We mark each other by complexion. We assign meaningless stereotypes to people according to skin color. We adore and fear and hate people on the basis of how light or dark they are.

Race, as many scientists will tell you, is not real, but racism is.

Darryl Fears, “Racism twists and distorts everything,” The Washington Post, July 8, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/racism-twists-and-distorts-everything/2016/07/08/d0f03364-4542-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html.

Racism twists and distorts everything

The Washington Post
2016-07-08

Darryl Fears, National Enviromental Reporter

For three straight mornings, I’ve eaten breakfast sprinkled with madness. Throughout this week that started with July 4, I’ve woken to horrible news that was tough to swallow.

Like everyone else, I watched videos that captured the nation’s racial angst — two black men shot by police officers for no apparent reason, and a peaceful demonstration to protest those slayings that dissolved into the revenge murder of five police officers.

The details of what happened this week are still being pieced together by investigations in three cities, but what is clear nearly eight years after the election of the first black president is that the idea of a post-racial America was a fantasy.

I covered racial trends and demographics for The Washington Post for eight years ending in 2009, crisscrossing the country to write about segregated schools, crowded prisons and huge immigration marches, and I left the beat thinking that President Obama’s election in 2008 might bring at least a margin of the hope and change he embraced.

But America hasn’t changed…

Read the entire article here.

Nothing is black and white in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s ‘An Octoroon’

The Washington Post
2016-06-06

Peter Marks, Theater critic

Jon Hudson Odom, left, as George, Maggie Wilder, center, as Dora and Kathyrn Tkel as Zoe in “An Octoroon.” (Scott Suchman)

“Hi, everyone, I’m a black playwright!” the actor Jon Hudson Odom exclaims at the outset of “An Octoroon,” Branden Jacobs-­Jenkins’s acerbically virtuosic skewering of America’s perpetually festering racial anxieties.

Before long, Odom, shedding the guise of the dramatist — who goes by the initials “BJJ” — is applying white-face makeup to portray the roles of both the altrustic heir to a broke Southern plantation and his racist archnemesis, in the “black playwright’s” new version of a 19th-century slavery melodrama. “I couldn’t find any more white guys to play the white guys’ parts,” BJJ confesses, explaining that white guys have qualms these days about embodying people who own other people. He’s unapologetic, though, about having his assistant (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) put on blackface to play house slave Pete, while the white Irish author of the original melodrama (James Konicek) materializes to smear on garish red makeup to become the Native American character, Wahnotee.

Jacobs-Jenkins, a Washington-born playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist this year for his tragicomic workplace drama “Gloria,” is looking with a jaundiced eye in “An Octoroon” at the mechanics of “The Octoroon,” the 1859 “sensation drama” by Dion Boucicault that inspired Jacobs-Jenkins’s play. Simultaneously he’s highlighting the collective skittishness of our time over labels and racial identity and who has permission to say what about whom. By pla­cing black actors in whiteface and Latino actors in blackface and white actors in redface, he’s for­cing the rest of us to consider in the starkest terms the impact of society’s relentless color-sorting — conscious or otherwise…

Read the entire article here.

How psychologists used these doctored Obama photos to get white people to support conservative politics

The Washington Post
2016-05-13

Max Ehrenfreund

American politics always has surprises, but things have been especially unpredictable since President Obama took office. First, few observers were prepared for the tea party movement, which ousted several veteran GOP lawmakers, replaced them with more radically conservative newcomers, and helped the Republican Party win control of the House of Representatives in 2010.

“That left a lot of analysts slack-jawed, wondering: What was this latent force that drove the emergence of this movement?” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University.

Then, of course, there was Donald Trump.

Willer speculates that one thing connecting these two political earthquakes might be white voters’ unconscious racial biases. In a series of psychological experiments between 2011 and 2015, he showed how hostility toward people with darker skin and perceived racial threats can influence white support for the tea party. He and his colleagues published a draft of a paper on their findings online last week — some of the most direct evidence of the importance of race to the conservative resurgence during Obama’s presidency.

First, the researchers randomly sorted subjects into two groups and showed them a series of pictures of celebrities, including digitally altered images of the commander in chief. One group saw a version in which Obama’s skin had been lightened, while in the other version, his skin had been darkened…

Read the entire article here.

Why does the Misty Copeland Barbie doll look so … white?

The Washington Post
2016-05-03

Sara L. Kaufman, Dance Critic

The new Misty Copeland Barbie doll. Photographer Dennis Di Laura
Stylist Sheryl Fetrick

On Monday, Mattel rolled out a Barbie doll modeled on ballerina Misty Copeland, who broke the color barrier at American Ballet Theatre last summer when she was promoted to the top rank of principal dancer, a first for an African American woman.

So why doesn’t the Barbie look like her?…

Read the entire article here.

That awful moment parents of interracial children will probably face

The Washington Post
2016-04-26

Nevin Martell

“Is that your son?” the man suddenly asked, without any preamble, and with an aggressive edge to his tone.

I was sitting in the dining area of a local Whole Foods after finishing the weekly shopping with my 3-year-old son, Zephyr. We were both eating and laughing about something silly, simply enjoying a Saturday morning together.

The unexpected question was from a 30-something African American man who had been giving me odd, furtive glances since we sat down. I figured that he thought he recognized me and was trying to jog his memory. I was certain we hadn’t met, so I was bracing myself for one of those semi-awkward, “No, sorry, I’m not who you think I am” conversations.

“Yes, this is my son,” I answered, a little warily.

“Hmph,” he snorted. “I didn’t think so.”

Now my defenses were fully up. “Why not?” I shot back.

He scrunched up his face, like he had just taken a bite of something distasteful. “There’s just something off about you two,” he said.

Frankly, I wanted to knock him senseless, but I restrained myself. Who says that to a complete stranger? How could he not see — for any number of reasons — that Zephyr and I were related? In my mind, there was only one reason why he would draw that conclusion.

“Is it because we don’t have the same skin color?” I challenged.

You see, I’m white and my Ghanaian wife is black, so our mixed-race son is golden brown…

Read the entire article here.