Mixed Race Studies

Oklahoma cop gets life for sex crimes against the poor

USA Today
2016-01-21

Melanie Eversley, Breaking News Reporter

Former officer Daniel Holtzclaw was sentenced to 263 years in prison after he was convicted in December of 18 counts, including first-degree rape.

A former Oklahoma City police officer was sentenced Thursday to spend the rest of his life in prison after his conviction for raping and sexually abusing women in a low-income neighborhood while on the beat.

District Judge Timothy Henderson agreed with an earlier court recommendation and sentenced Daniel Holtzclaw to 263 years in prison for the attacks on black women in a low-income neighborhood between 2013 and 2014. Holtclaw, 29, had been charged with 36 counts.

After a six-week trial, a jury on Dec. 10 found Holtzclaw guilty of 18 counts. The youngest victim was 17 at the time of her attack and testified that the incident took place on her mother’s front porch, according to The Oklahoman.

The judge denied a request for a new trial made by Scott Adams, Holtzclaw’s defense attorney, who maintained that Holtzclaw was denied a fair trial because the prosecution made deliberate violations and misrepresentations in discovery.

The case drew national attention because of the race of the victims. Holtzclaw is half-white and half-Asian…

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Whites pass for black to gain empathy, experts say in wake of Dolezal case

USA Today
2015-06-13

Melanie Eversley, Breaking News Reporter

In history and in many black American families, there’s talk of black people passing for white, especially during the days of Jim Crow laws or slavery when it benefited them or even saved their lives.

But not as much has been written about the white people who pass for black or adopt black culture — from celebrities who adopt traditionally black hairstyles and vernacular, or, as social media has been abuzz with since Thursday, Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP Spokane, Wash., branch president whose parents say she is white.

English professor Alisha Gaines, who is publishing a book about white people who pass for black, says the phenomenon is rooted in a need to identify and empathize with black culture. Some people throughout history have passed for black as a way to immerse themselves in the experience, says Gaines, who teaches at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

One of the people referenced in her book, Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, is Grace Halsell, a late journalist who posed as a black woman for a few weeks in the deep South and wrote about her experiences in a book titled Soul Sister…

…The main reason people choose to pass for black is they have a need or desire to promote civil rights and racial justice, says Marcia Dawkins, author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity…

…Author and educator Nikki Khanna believes it also can be about being accepted.

“Maybe for this particular woman — it seems as if she cares about African-American issues, she heads the chapter of the NAACP in Spokane, I don’t know if she felt that was her way of fitting in,” says Khanna, who has studied how biracial Americans identify in terms of race…

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Today’s college students see no problem with multiracial relationships

College
USA Today
2014-01-08

Aja Frost
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Had Kim Kardashian and Kanye West gotten married 48 years ago, they would have probably been met with more policemen than paparazzi. That’s because interracial marriages weren’t legalized in the U.S. until 1967.

Interracial relationships are more common than ever. In 1960, just 0.4% of marriages were interracial. A recent study found that number had increased to 15% for newlyweds.

Nowhere is the growing acceptance and practice of multiracial relationships more common than on college campuses.

“Younger people aren’t tied down with all the old racial stereotypes,” says Dr. Erica Chito-Childs, a sociology professor at Hunter College in New York City and author of two books on interracial marriage. “They’re more likely to have grown up with a favorite musical entertainer [who] is African-American or of a different race. They’ve grown up watching shows or cartoon shows that are multiracial. And depending on where they live, they’ve probably gone to school with friends that are of a different race.”…

…A survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 43% of all Americans believe the rise in intermarriages has been a good thing. However, among 18- to 29-year-olds, a majority 61% approve of interracial marriage and 93% favor multiracial dating. The approval for multiracial marriages rises in accordance with college education levels.

But Dr. Chito-Childs cautions against getting too excited about the statistics surrounding multiracial relationships…

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Edward Brooke, first black elected U.S. senator, dies at 95

USA Today
2015-01-03

Natalie DiBlasio

Former Massachusetts U.S. senator Edward Brooke, the first African American to be elected to the Senate by popular vote, has died at age 95.

Ralph Neas, a former aide, said Brooke died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Coral Gables, Fla.

“We lost a truly remarkable public servant,” says Massachusetts Gov.-elect Charlie Baker. “A war hero, a champion of equal rights for all and an example that barriers can be broken, Sen. Brooke accomplished more than most aspire to.”

The only blacks to serve in the Senate before Brooke were two men in the 1870s when senators were still chosen by state legislatures.

Brooke, a liberal Republican, was elected to the Senate in 1966 and served two terms. He earned his reputation as a liberal after becoming the first Republican senator to publicly urge President Nixon to resign…

…Historian Dennis Nordin has researched and written about African-American politicians and devoted a chapter to Brooke in his book, From Edward Brooke to Barack Obama: African American Political Success, 1966-2008.

Nordin told The Greenville News that Brooke’s political career shows independence from the GOP…

Read the entire obituary here.

Wickham: Silence of NYC’s good cops widens divide

USA Today
2014-12-30

DeWayne Wickham, Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Dean
School of Journalism
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

When Mayor Bill de Blasio stepped to the podium Saturday to eulogize Rafael Ramos, one of two New York City cops killed by a black gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, five days before Christmas, hundreds of police outside the church staged a silent protest that sullied the solemn occasion.

The officers turned their backs to the large televisions set up for the overflow crowd to see Ramos’ funeral. Their pivot away from the screens was meant as a protest against the mayor, whom Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, accused of having blood on his hands for not being more supportive of the city’s police officers.

That charge and the lemming-like act of back-turning were cheap shots that came as the city grieved the death of Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were shot to death as they sat in their patrol car. The officers’ deaths came in the wake of a series of street demonstrations following a grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a white New York City police officer who was videotaped using a chokehold to subdue Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, whose death was labeled a homicide. Pantaleo and several other cops were attempting to arrest Garner for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.

In his first public comments after the grand jury’s decision, de Blasio said he could relate to the pain Garner’s father was feeling and admitted that he and his wife, who is black, have warned their son about how “to take special care in any encounters he has with the police officers, who are there to protect him.”

That’s a warning many black parents routinely give their boys — and one that de Blasio, understandably, would offer his mixed-race son. They could also have reminded him that New York has long been a petri dish for police abuse of blacks. Remember Abner Louima. Amadou Diallo. Patrick Dorismond. Sean Bell…

Read the entire article here.

Lobbying for a ‘MENA’ category on U.S. Census

USA Today
2014-08-13

Teresa Wiltz, Pew/Stateline Staff Writer

For many Americans, checking the right box on the U.S. Census form is a reflexive gesture, whether it’s marking “black,” “white,” “Hispanic,” “Asian,” “American Indian” — or all of the above.

But for Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent, or “MENA,” it’s a real head-scratcher. They come in a variety of phenotypes and shades—ranging from pale to deepest ebony, and hail from 22 different countries, from Iran to Egypt to Sudan. And yet, for the census, since the beginning of the last century, the MENA community has been lumped into the “white” category.

Back in 1909, such a designation made a lot of sense, but today, members of the MENA community are lobbying the U.S. Census to create a separate “MENA” category for the 2020 decennial count. “White,” they argue, renders them invisible in official population counts. Without correct data, advocates say, cities and states lack adequate resources to effectively handle everything from funding educational programs to battling infant mortality to tracking employment discrimination to staffing hospitals with enough Farsi translators. Census data directly impacts how more than $400 billion in federal funding is allocated across the country.

Census data also has political effects. For example, after the 2010 count, the census released a list of 248 jurisdictions across the country that now are required to provide language assistance to voters, as mandated by the Voting Rights Act. (The vast majority of those districts are for Spanish-speaking citizens.)

“This is a bread and butter issue,” said Sarab Al-Jijakli, a Brooklyn-based community organizer and the president of the Network of Arab-American Professionals (NAAP). “Education is obviously a key point; 25 percent of public school kids in Bay Ridge [Brooklyn] may be of Arab descent. Are the services being given in that school really serving the local community? These are the questions we ask.”…

…The History of ‘White’

Race is an ever shifting, ever evolving concept in America. From the 1890s through the 1930s, an African-American family with a mixed-race heritage, for example, could be classified as everything from “quadroon” to “mulatto” to “black” to “Negro,” depending on the year and who was doing the classifying. Meanwhile, the “East Asian” category morphed into separate categories for Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese and “Hindus,” or South Asians. The stakes were high: With the exception of freed slaves who were granted citizenship in 1864, for a long time, non-whites were not eligible for citizenship…

…’Check It Right, You Ain’t White’

MENA identity has evolved over the years. People descended from the earlier wave of immigrants who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, and are fourth-, fifth- and sixth- generation Americans are more likely to identify as white, according to Akram Khater, director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies at North Carolina State University. The waves of Middle Easterners who have migrated since the 1960s tend to see things differently…

Read the entire article here.

Diversity reaches new levels in Honey Maid ads

USA Today
2014-03-10

Bruce Horovitz, Marketing Reporter

Honey Maid is the latest brand to launch an ad campaign featuring interracial, gay families.  USA TODAY

America’s biggest brands are at an advertising crossroads, and the new diversity that their ads project has suddenly emerged as one of society’s most visual — if not incendiary — flash points.

And it’s about to explode.

It began with several recent, high-profile diverse TV spots from two multibillion-dollar brands: a Cheerios spot staring a biracial girl with white mom and black dad; and a Coca-Cola spot featuring minorities singing America the Beautiful in their native languages. Both went viral and left trails of social media venom in their wake.

On Monday, Honey Maid will jump on the diversity bandwagon with a far-reaching campaign by the 90-year-old graham cracker brand that raises the use of diversity in mainstream ads to a whole new level.

In one 30-second Honey Maid ad, viewers will see everything from a same-sex couple bottle-feeding their son to an interracial couple and their three kids holding hands. The ad also features a Hispanic mother and an African-American father with their three mixed-race children. And there’s even a father covered in body tattoos. This is not some shockvertisement for Benetton. It’s an ad for one of America’s oldest and most familiar brands. The people in it are not actors, but real families. The message of the ad: These are wholesome families enjoying wholesome snacks…

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After first-term caution, Obama dives deeper on race

USA Today
2014-02-27

Aamer Madhani, White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON — During his first term, President Obama waded gingerly into the issue of race, mindful of the historic nature of his presidency while at the same time downplaying its significance.

With a couple of exceptions — criticizing a police officer who arrested a prominent black Harvard University scholar as he fumbled to open the door to his home and speaking in personal terms about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin — Obama didn’t make any big headlines on the issue early in his presidency.

But deep into his second term, Obama talks about race with a frequency and frankness that has left some black policymakers and activists cautiously optimistic about the nation’s first black president’s final years in office.

In recent weeks, the president has begun to draw the outlines for the legacy he hopes to leave on race and civil rights…

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‘Belle’ breaks through the aristocratic color barrier

USA Today
2013-07-21

Bryan Alexander

British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw used to envy her classmates from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London as they moved on to perform in lavish English period dramas. But as an actress of color, she found it difficult to land such historic roles.

“I was somewhat frustrated, I have always loved period dramas and my friends were in these gorgeous-looking Jane Austen adaptations,” says Mbatha-Raw, 30. “I would be like, ‘I have all of this training, when will I get a chance to explore that side?’ ”

Mbatha-Raw, who has held roles in several TV series and was a supporting player in the 2011 Tom Hanks vehicle Larry Crowne, finally has found her opportunity in Belle (opening May 2, 2014). It’s the exceedingly rare story of a mixed-race woman who transcended the lily-white aristocracy of 18th-century England.

Belle is inspired by the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was born as the result of an affair between British naval officer Capt. Sir John Lindsay and an African slave woman who died when Belle was young. Lindsay (Matthew Goode) beseeched his uncle, the Earl of Mansfield and England’s Lord Chief Justice (Tom Wilkinson), to raise his mixed-race daughter in the manner befitting his aristocratic bloodline — unheard of in England at the time…

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More Hawaii residents identify as mixed race

USA Today
2011-02-24

William M. Welch

Hawaii, the nation’s most ethnically diverse state, has seen a big increase in residents identifying themselves as being of mixed race, according to Census data released Thursday.

Among adults 18 and older, those saying they are of two or more races rose 31% from 2000 to 2010. They make up 18.5% of the state’s adult population.

Among all ages, the increase of those citing two or more races was 23.6%. Overall, almost one in four Hawaii residents are of mixed race.

Residents citing some Asian heritage make up 57.4% of the state’s population. Their numbers grew by 11%, though other ethnic groups grew more rapidly.

Sarah C. W. Yuan, a demographer at the University of Hawaii’s Center on the Family, said the racial trends reflect growth and acceptance of multiracial marriages and an increased willingness of people to claim more than one racial identity. She said the decline in people identifying with one race only, from 78.6% in 2000 to 76.4% in the 2010 Census, was expected.

“Hawaii’s population has been more diverse over the years,” she said. “There are many multiracial marriages, so we do see two-or-more-race groups increase over the years.”

Hawaii’s overall population grew 12.3% to 1.36 million…

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