Mixed Race Studies

New Book Confronts Colorism in 21st Century America

NBC News
2016-12-21

Lesley-Ann Brown

“The Masque of Blackness” (1605) is an early Jacobean era “masque” — a popular form of 16th & 17th century amateur dramatic theatre — and is quite possibly the first instance in English literature where the topic of skin color is not only discussed, but where Blackness is cast in an unfavorable light.

Project Muse writes, “In The Masque of Blackness (1605) and its plot sequel “The Masque of Beauty” (1608), Ben Jonson represents the transformation of African people to Europeans when they travel to England from Africa.” The period in which it was commissioned and produced coincides with England’s expansion of her Atlantic journey into slavery, sugar and empire and so it ought not be underscored the role literature is enlisted to play in terms of the color hierarchy it was meant to entrain. The masque, commissioned by Anne of Denmark, queen consort of King James I, was also one of the first documented cases of “blackface” a practice so novel at the time that many of the English court found it disturbing…

…In “Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families,” Lori Tharps, an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University and author of “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America” and “Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain,” Tharps gives voice to a dynamic that as she notes, “…doesn’t even exist. Not officially. It autocorrects on my computer screen. It does not appear in the dictionary. So, how does one begin to unpack a societal ill that doesn’t have a name?”…

Read the entire article here.

Memoir Uncovers One Woman’s Painful Search for Racial Identity

NBC News
2016-09-08

Brooke Obie

When award-winning journalist Sil-Lai Abrams finally sat down to write her memoir, she hoped to stick to her 8-month contract. Instead, it took Abrams 3.5 years to dive into the pain of her upbringing and emerge ready to tell her story in full in “Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity” (Gallery Books/Karen Hunter Publishing, August 2016).

Born to a Chinese immigrant mother and a white American father in Hawaii in 1970, Abrams was raised as a white child. When school children in her Seminole County, Florida hometown would taunt her because of her brown skin and loose curly hair, with “nigger” and “porch monkey,” she took refuge in what her father had taught her: She had such tanned skin because she was born in Hawaii. It didn’t make sense to her, even as a young child, but in a world where Blackness was inferior, she clung to her father’s “Hawaiian” explanation with both hands.

She would be nearly 14 years old before her father would snatch the privilege of whiteness from her fingers. By this time, her mother had abandoned her, her father, and her two fair-skinned, straight haired younger siblings, and Abrams wrestled with self-worth as a result…

Read the entire article here.

‘War Brides of Japan’ To Take Focus in New Documentary

NBC News
2016-08-10

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Journalist and filmmaker Yayoi Lena Winfrey is looking for more Japanese “war brides” to interview as she completes the filming for her feature-length documentary film, “War Brides of Japan.” With many of these women in their mid-80s, Winfrey said that time is critical to document their stories. With interviews already scheduled for 11 and their adult children in eight cities and three states this month, Winfrey hopes to find more women and families to interview along the way…

According to Winfrey, approximately 50,000 “war brides” came to the United States from Japan starting in 1947. Many were disowned by their families for marrying those who had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then occupied Japan, Winfrey said. Others were rejected by their American in-laws for being foreigners. Some were abandoned by the American servicemen who married them while some were also ostracized by the Japanese-American community, only just released from the incarceration camps of World War II. Some were falsely stereotyped as prostitutes, while others were blamed for causing World War II, she said…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Korean Adoptees Use DNA to Search For Roots

NBC News
2016-03-02

Young Jin Kim

Sarah Savidakis, 55, lived in South Korea until she was nine years old, at which time she was adopted by a Connecticut family.

For Savidakis, who says she has grappled with the effects of early childhood trauma, memories of her life in Korea — including those of her birth mother — vanished around the time she arrived in the United States in 1970.

“I have some flashbacks here and there,” Savidakis, who lives in Tarpon Springs, Florida, told NBC News. “But to this day, my mother is [like] a ghost or a silhouette.”

Savidakis is among the thousands of mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the Korean War to American or U.N. soldier fathers and Korean mothers — many of whom were adopted into American families.

Seeking information about her birth parents, Savidakis in September tested her DNA through a commercial genealogy service and identified a first cousin, once removed. The relative helped her identify and connect with a half-brother and half-sister. She learned that her father — who was of Scottish and Irish descent — had passed away in 2014…

Read the entire here.

The Professors vs. The President: Has Obama Done Enough for African-Americans?

NBC News
2016-02-28

Perry Bacon Jr., Senior Political Reporter

Michael Eric Dyson and Eddie Glaude Jr., two well-respected black intellectuals and professors, make the same argument in books they have released over the last month: President Obama hasn’t done enough on policy to help fellow African-Americans and regularly uses rhetoric that is overly critical of blacks.

“Obama energetically peppers his words to blacks with talk of responsibility in one public scolding after another,” Dyson writes in The Black Presidency. “When Obama upbraids black folk while barely mentioning the flaws of white Americans, he leaves the impression that race is the concern solely of black people, and that blackness is full of pathology.”

“Obama’s reprimands of black folk also undercuts their moral standing,” he adds.

Glaude, in Democracy in Black, argues that under Obama, “black communities have been devastated.”

“And Obama’s most publicized initiative in the face of all of this, even as the spate of racial incidents pressured him to be more forthright about this issue, has been My Brother’s Keeper, a public-private partnership to address the crisis of young men and boys of color—A Band-Aid for a gunshot wound,” writes Glaude.

These books, released as Obama’s tenure nears its end, are the most comprehensive versions of a case against the president’s leadership style that a number of prominent black intellectuals have made….

Read the entire article here.

Latinos May Be More Educated, Wealthier: Here’s Why We Don’t Know It

NBC News
2016-02-24

Griselda Nevarez

U.S. Latinos may be more educated and have higher earnings than what current numbers suggest, and new research explores why.

There are individuals who have Latino ancestors, but do not self-identify as Hispanic in national demographic surveys. Therefore, these people are not included in the overall U.S. Latino population, according to Stephen Trejo, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who co-authored a research paper on the topic.

This phenomenon — often referred to as ethnic attrition — is more common among second- and higher-generation Latinos who also tend to be more educated and have higher earnings than their counterparts.

As a result “we’re probably understating the educational progress” of Hispanics in the U.S., said Trejo to NBC News Latino. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a good idea of the magnitude of this because the data that we have isn’t perfect,” he added.

While 99 percent of first-generation Latinos identify as such, it drops to 93 percent in the second generation and 82 percent in the third generation, according to Trejo’s findings. And second- and third-generation Latinos who did not identify as Hispanic were more educated than their peers – by an average of 9 months for the second generation and about 10 months for the third, the study found…

Read the entire article here.

Mom Writes Book, ‘Bad Hair Does Not Exist!’ For Daughters

NBC News
2016-02-17

Maya Chung

Bad Hair Does Not Exist/Pelo Malo No Existe! is a Children’s Book by Sulma Arzu-Brown.

“Bad Hair Does Not Exist!” is a new bilingual book that encourages young Black, Afro-Latino, and multi-racial girls to see themselves, and their hair, as beautiful.

Sulma Arzu-Brown, who calls herself a “Garifuna” woman or Afro-Latino from Honduras, was inspired to write the book after her three-year-old daughter’s babysitter commented that little Bella Victoria had “pelo malo,” which is a Spanish term for “bad hair.”

She knew then that she could either be angry or be a part of the solution, so she chose to write a book.

“The book is a tool of cultural solidarity and a tool of empowerment for all of our little girls,” said Arzu-Brown whose daughters are now 4 and 11. “The term ‘Bad hair’ or ‘Pelo Malo’ is divisive to both community and family, and can contribute to low self-esteem.”…

Read the article here.

Biracial Sons More Likely Than Daughters To Identify As Black

NBC News
2016-02-01

Aris Folley

Black-white biracial sons of interracial parents, in which one parent is black and the other is white, are more likely than their female counterparts to identify as black, according to a study found in the February issue of the American Sociological Review.

In a sample of more than 37,000 students from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey, data pooled from the 2001, 2002, and 2003 surveys revealed that 76 percent of black-white biracial women identified as multiracial, whereas only 64 percent of black-white biracial men identified as multiracial.

A graph showing surveyed respondents’ self-identification by race. Source: American Sociological Review / American Sociological Review

“I argue that the different ways that biracial people are viewed by others influences how they see themselves,” said Lauren Davenport, an assistant political science professor at Stanford University who produced the study. “Biracial men may be more likely to be perceived as ‘people of color.'”…

Read the entire article here.

Oregon’s Portland Community College to mark ‘Whiteness History Month’

NBC News
2016-01-21

Shamar Walters and Cassandra Vinograd

First comes Black History Month and then … Whiteness History Month?

A community college in Oregon has set aside April to look at “whiteness” — but not to celebrate what it’s described as a social construct which leads to inequality.

Portland Community College’s Diversity Council is behind the event, which it called a “bold adventure” to examine “race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins and heritage.”

The project is “not a celebratory endeavor” but an “effort to change our campus climate,” the school said on its website…

Read the entire article here.

Diving Into Race, Identity of Multiracial Families In ‘Raising Mixed Race’

NBC News
2015-12-31

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Sharon H. Chang’s son with a copy of Kip Fulbeck’s “Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids.” Photograph Courtesy of Sharon H. Chang

Scholar and activist Sharon H. Chang’s new book, “Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World,” published in December by Routledge, is generating excitement among reviewers and readers. More than a research study and more than a parenting guide, the book was awarded #1 New Release on Amazon before it had even begun shipping, and it sold out the first weekend it was released.

“‘Raising Mixed Race’ represents not only years of work on my end but a multitude of others’ lived racial realities; stories about and involving mixedness that are poignant, sharp, relevant and vital, and yet – remain mostly untold in America and around the world,” wrote Chang in her blog, Multiracial Asian Families, when announcing her book. “It is my sincere belief if we engage with ‘Raising Mixed Race,’ it can (will) challenge our thinking on mixedness to go deeper and contribute to moving society as a whole towards justice, healing and true transformation.”

With interviews with 68 parents of 75 young multiracial Asian children about race, racism and identity, Chang delves into history, critical mixed race studies, changing demographics, personal experiences, and includes advice for parents, families, teachers, and friends of multiracial Asian children.

NBC News spoke with Chang about her new book, her research on mixed race families, and why it’s important for parents and children to talk about identity.

Please tell us a little about your family background and how you came to this project. Why did you decide to write this book?

My father is a Taiwanese immigrant who came to America in the 1970’s, not long after the Immigration Act of 1965 lifted anti-Asian exclusionary restrictions which had been in place for decades. He met and married my white mother in that same decade which, of course, was also not long after the landmark civil rights Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia which struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. My mother is white American of fairly recent Slovakian, German, and French Canadian descent — my Slovakian great grandmother escaped Eastern Europe when she was sixteen and migrated alone through Ellis Island. [The people in] her family were farmers and she became a factory worker in the U.S.

Today I am married to a mixed race man whose mother is a Japanese immigrant, came in her 20s as well, and whose father is white of longtime white American descent, many generations back, it is thought, to colonization…

Read the entire interview here.