Mixed Race Studies

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi review – serious issues, fairytale narrative

The Guardian
2015-10-04

Anthony Cummins

Oyeyemi, Helen, Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Press, 2014)

Oyeyemi’s fifth novel finds her treating the horrors of racism in 1950s America with gentle, magical style

Helen Oyeyemi, a Granta best of young British novelist, was born in Nigeria, grew up in London and has lived around Europe and North America. She specialises in unorthodox, freewheeling plots, rooted in myth and narrated in an innocent-seeming style. Her fifth novel is a historical narrative of American racism set in the 1950s and 60s.

At the start a woman named Boy Novak tells us how she ran away aged 20 from New York to escape her rat-catcher father, Frank, a drunk who beat her (her mother was absent). She pitches up in a small town in Massachusetts to marry a widowed jeweller and former historian, Arturo, who has a seven-year-old daughter, Snow, whose mother died after complications in childbirth.

The central crisis of the novel comes when Arturo has another daughter, with Boy – named Bird – and she is born dark-skinned. Arturo’s family accuse Boy of being unfaithful but the truth, as they all know, is that they have been passing for white. What follows is the painful background to that decision, as Arturo’s family recount the horrors of life in the south and their disappointed hopes for how things might improve when they moved north…

Read the entire book review here.

“I remember a mom of a friend of mine in the suburbs made some comment about a black person and – I had to be 12, about 60 pounds – and I said something and she said: ‘Oh no, not you. You are not black. You are great.’ It was real. That fucking happened. And she meant it. And she meant it sincerely and sweetly. She was paying me a compliment.” —Jesse Williams

Jana Kasperkevic, “Jesse Williams: ‘Celebrity culture? I am not going to participate in that’,” The Guardian, October 1, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/oct/01/jesse-williams-greys-anatomy-celebrity-culture-civil-rights.

Chi-chi Nwanoku: ‘I want black musicians to walk on to the stage and know they belong’

The Guardian
2015-06-02

Chi-chi Nwanoku

Chi-chi Nwanoku: ‘I feel sure that bringing a group of people together to play incredible music is a creatively powerful and positive thing.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi

For 30 years, double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku has enjoyed a successful career and as a classical musician and never felt the colour of her skin has held her back. So why is she now embarking on and ambitious plan to form Europe’s first professional black orchestra? She explains all

Perhaps I was one of the lucky ones? I somehow slipped through the net. I’m a classical musician, an all too rare black face on concert platforms among what are usually all-white orchestras. My Nigerian father and Irish mother brought me up believing that I could do anything I wanted. They never doubted me for a second, and I was surrounded by people who supported and encouraged me.

We were the only black family at my primary and secondary schools, and I didn’t think at all about being the only black student at the Royal Academy of Music…

Read the entire article here.

Chris Harper Mercer: details emerge of Oregon college killer

The Guardian
2015-10-02

Ben Jacobs and Nicky Woolf

Chris Harper Mercer, the alleged gunman in the Oregon shootings. He had captioned this photo: ‘Me, holding a rifle.’ Photograph: Myspace

Umpqua college shooter, who was born in England according to media reports, had a varied online presence that indicated support for the IRA

The Umpqua shooter has been named as Chris Harper Mercer, a 26-year-old who lived with his mother at an apartment only a few miles from the college.

American media reports said he was born in England and moved to the US at a young age: his stepsister, Carmen Nesnick, told CBS Los Angeles that he travelled to the US as a young boy. Other accounts report that Nesnick specified that Harper-Mercer was born in England…

Read the entire article here.

Jesse Williams: ‘Celebrity culture? I am not going to participate in that’

The Guardian
2015-10-01

Jana Kasperkevic

The Grey’s Anatomy star is back on screen as TV pin-up Jackson Avery, but for the former teacher it’s his civil rights work he wants people to talk about

There is a heatwave making its way through Los Angeles. It’s the second week of September yet temperatures remain at 32C (89F). At 8am, most of the city is still asleep or just waking up, while surfers at Venice Beach have already spent hours searching for the perfect wave. About 5,000 of the city’s residents will wake up to no power as demand on the power grid has triggered blackouts.

On South La Brea Avenue, the street seems deserted except for Jesse Williams, who has seemingly appeared out of nowhere – with no car in sight or handlers in view as he casually strolls up the street. It’s a surprisingly low-key entrance into the world of a man millions of viewers watched when Grey’s Anatomy returned to ABC for its 12th season. On average, about 8.22 million viewers tuned in every Thursday night during its 11th season…

..Being biracial – his mom is white and his dad is black – Williams has been able to experience both sides of the spectrum. “I have access to rooms and information. I am white and I am also black. I am invisible man in a lot of these scenarios. I know how white people talk about black people. I know how black people talk about white folks. I know I am there and everyone speaks honestly around me,” he says.

“I remember a mom of a friend of mine in the suburbs made some comment about a black person and – I had to be 12, about 60 pounds – and I said something and she said: ‘Oh no, not you. You are not black. You are great.’ It was real. That fucking happened. And she meant it. And she meant it sincerely and sweetly. She was paying me a compliment.”…

Read the entire article here.

I’ve experienced a new level of racism since Donald Trump went after Latinos

The Guardian
2015-09-09

Tina Vasquez

I have never been asked the type of questions I’m now fielding from white people – and I’m not the only one

Donald Trump’s hate speech against Latinos seems to be emboldening white Americans’ racism. For many, it may be hard to wrap their minds around the fact that that a reality TV star and failed businessman who characterized Mexican immigrants as the “most unwanted people,” calling them “criminals, drug dealers,” and “rapists”, was not only running for president, but is now polling well.

I can’t say I’m surprised…

Read the entire article here.

Louise Erdrich on her fiction: ‘I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures’

The Guardian
2015-09-05

Bridey Heing

Receiving the Library of Congress prize for American fiction, Erdrich spoke of how her writing emerged from the ‘great loss’ of Native Americans

Novelist Louise Erdrich was presented with the Library of Congress prize for American fiction on Saturday in recognition of her three-decade literary career.

In the Q&A at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, that followed, Erdrich – the author of Tracks, Love Medicine and The Round House and a key voice in contemporary American literature – offered insight into the worldview from which she writes, one heavily influenced by her own experiences as a mixed-race Native American.

“It is where I’m from; literally there’s no other way than this that I can write. I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures,” she said. “Knowing both sides of my family really infused my life with a sense that I lived in many times and in many places as many people. It was never just me. I was always filled with the stories, the humor, the loss. Because, of course, we are all part of this great loss that occurred.”…

Read the entire article here.

My baby will be mixed race. So why did I automatically think of him as ‘black’?

The Guardian
2014-10-14

Victoria Bond

I picked a black baby to represent my unborn child on a cake because of my own adherence to the ‘one-drop rule’

My 87-year-old grandmother has a very specific way of saying the word black: she drags out the a and makes the k extra hard for an effect that drowns the c. “Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is an admonishment, not a color. “Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth travels a step beyond being a pejorative to having the hair-raising resonance of a word that damns as well as describes damnation itself.

“Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is a curse…

Read the entire article here.

Mark Duggan: mother of man shot dead by police in 2011 calls for urgent inquiry

The Guardian
2015-08-04

Diane Taylor

Pamela Duggan claims police could have done much more to track down the man who supplied a weapon to her son. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Call for new inquiry comes as demonstrators prepare to march to Tottenham police station close to where Duggan was shot by police four years ago

The mother of Mark Duggan, whose fatal shooting by police led to the 2011 London riots, is calling for an urgent inquiry by the home secretary into the events that led to her son’s death four years ago.

Demonstrators are due to march to Tottenham police station later on Tuesday close to where Duggan was shot by police on 4 August 2011, shortly after collecting a firearm from gun supplier Kevin Hutchinson-Foster.

The jury at the inquest into Duggan’s death found that police could have done more to take the gun off the street in the days before he picked it up. Photograph: Rex Features

A demonstration outside the same police station a few days after Duggan’s fatal shooting was followed by the biggest riots in the UK for years…

Read the entire article here.

Tony Robinson’s mother files civil rights lawsuit over fatal police shooting of son

The Guardian
2015-08-13

Zoe Sullivan

Andrea Irwin alleges officer Matt Kenny violated 14th amendment equal protection rights and fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches

The mother of a biracial man killed by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over her son’s death in March.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by Tony Robinson’s mother, Andrea Irwin, alleges that officer Matt Kenny violated the equal protection rights guaranteed by the 14th amendment as well as Robinson’s fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches.

At a rally Wednesday afternoon outside the state capitol, Robinson’s mother told the small crowd gathered that the lawsuit was part of an effort to end needless deaths of black men at the hands of police. “This will stop. If this is the only way that we can start to do this, then by God, this is how we will do this.”

Robinson was shot on 6 March during an altercation with Kenny, who told investigators that he thought he heard a disturbance in an apartment recently entered by Robinson…

Read the entire article here.