Mixed Race Studies

My family had never seen a Kenyan: The Chinese making a new life in Africa

BBC News
2018-05-10

Rajeev Gupta
BBC World Service, Nairobi, Kenya

Xu Jing and Henry Rotich fell in love a decade ago

“We fell in love but it was very difficult at first,” Xu Jing explains from the courtyard of the Fairmont Hotel in Nairobi.

“My family didn’t know much about Africa at all. They hadn’t even seen a Kenyan before so they were very worried.”

Henry Rotich – the Kenyan in question – was just as concerned.

The pair had fallen for each other after Henry was sent to China to learn Mandarin as part of his government job.

It took him many weeks to get his language skills good enough to meet Jing’s father over a nerve-filled lunch, at which he asked for his blessing.

“Her father didn’t say much so I was really worried about what he was thinking, whether or not he even liked the food we were serving him,” Henry recalls.

Apparently his mastery of Mandarin was enough: a decade later, the couple are living in the Kenyan capital, proud parents to two children.

Jing now teaches Mandarin at the Confucius Institute based at the University of Nairobi, one of an estimated 10,000 Chinese nationals who have moved to the East African state.

Their family provides one snapshot of the growing links between Chinese and Kenyans – propelled somewhat by China’s massive investment in the country…

Read the entire article here.

Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir

BookThug
2018-04-01
132 pages
5 x 1 x 8 inches
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1771663908

Chelene Knight

From Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative nonfiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Using a variety of forms including letters, essays and poems, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry and fragmented non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home.

Peering through windows and doors into intimate, remembered spaces now occupied by strangers, Knight writes to them in order to deconstruct her own past. From the rubble of memory she then builds a real place in order to bring herself back home.

Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California

Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 East Union Street
Pasadena, California 91101
(626) 568-3665
2018-04-04

2018-06-17 through 2018-10-07

Bridget R. Cooks, Curator; Associate Professor of Art History and African American Studies
University of California, Irvine

Grafton Tyler Brown, Grand Canyon and Falls, 1887. Oil on canvas. 30 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art. Photo ©John Wilson White Studio

Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California is organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Bridget R. Cooks Ph.D.. The exhibition is supported by the PMCA Board of Directors, PMCA Ambassador Circle, and the California Visionary Fund.

Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) was a painter, graphic designer, and lithographer in the 19th century. A talented artist and entrepreneur, Brown was the only documented African American in his field in the western United States at the time.

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Brown learned about lithography while working for a printer in Philadelphia at the age of fourteen. The gold and silver mining boom in the 1800s encouraged him to venture West to establish a business and home. In 1865, Brown founded his first lithography business in San Francisco, where he served the emerging business communities in the area, designing stock certificates for a wide variety of companies ranging from ice to mining corporations, as well as admission tickets, maps, sheet music, advertisements, and billheads…

Read the entire article here.

My name is Joseph Boyden

Maclean’s
2017-08-02

Joseph Boyden

Joseph Boyden (Photograph by Jacob C Boynton)

Being Indigenous isn’t all about DNA. It’s about who you claim, and who claims you.

My name is Joseph Boyden. Late last December I had a hard time wrapping my head around what a Cree Elder I’ve known and respected for 25 years told me when we spoke about the firestorm that questions concerning my ancestry had sparked in Canada over the holidays. This elder told me that I was experiencing a rite of passage. I wanted to tell him that I’d not long ago turned 50, and weren’t rites of passage something geared more toward the teenage years? But I knew to listen and not interrupt. He told me that what I was experiencing was actually a gift.

A gift? People I did and didn’t know were questioning my family’s history, our creation stories, our ancestry. People were questioning me as a fiction writer and a journalist and a vocal activist for Indigenous rights in our country as an honorary witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Now, from these months of hindsight, I understand it was the perfect storm brewing. Last October I’d spoken up publicly to demand accountability by a university and its conduct in the treatment of a friend—and the complainants— embroiled in an ugly and horribly mishandled controversy that ended up sending shockwaves beyond literary Canada…

Read the entire article here.

The Evolution of Jurnee Smollett-Bell

Shondaland
2018-05-04

Rebecca Carroll

Jurnee Smollett-Bell GETTY/BRIANNA ELLIS-MITCHELL

I’m always in serious awe of really skilled child actors, because contrary to what a lot of folks likely think, it’s not just about playing make-believe. Sure, there is an element of pretending, but even that, I think, is a really courageous thing to do as a kid — to go deeply into your imagination, and stay there for hours upon hours. What if you forget who you really are? And, of course, a lot of child actors, especially those who find success, do end up forgetting who they really are. But one instance of a child actor who legit held it down as a young talent and then grew up to be straight fire: Jurnee Smollett-Bell.

Most striking of Smollett-Bell’s childhood cinematic oeuvre, to my mind, is her star turn in Kasi Lemmon’s gorgeous beyond belief breakout independent film “Eve’s Bayou,” which the late Roger Ebert named the best film of 1997. The story takes place over the course of a thick, blistering summer in rural Louisiana, and Smollett-Bell gives a searingly vivid performance as 10-year-old Eve Baptiste, whose daddy (Samuel Jackson), even though he’s a doctor, is no-count as hell, and the rest of her Creole family is kind of a hot mess, too. There’s a lot that can be said about the film on it’s own according — including Lemmons’ fierce command as a first-time filmmaker, the fine and brittle performance by Lynn Whitfield (Queen) as Eve’s mother, the sinewy depth of the cinematography, and set production, and just all the glistening, damaged, and glorious black skin in every single scene. But it’s Smollett-Bell, in her little denim overalls and mile-high Eve attitude that has stayed with me all these years.

Smollett-Bell, who comes from an entire constellation of stars — her brother Jussie is on a little show called “Empire,” and there’s also brothers Jojo, Jocqui, and Jake, and sister Jazz — grew up in New York City, where she and her siblings all began acting very young. All six siblings starred in the short-lived ABC sitcom “On Our Own.” They’ve remained close and recently published a cookbook together called “The Family Table.” The sitcom led to a handful of film roles for Smollett-Bell, among them “Eve’s Bayou,” also “Beautiful Joe” with Sharon Stone, and later, “The Great Debaters” with Forest Whittaker and Denzel Washington (who also directed). Smollett-Bell went on to work consistently in television, appearing as a series regular on “Friday Night Lights,” “The Defenders,” “True Blood” and the black folk family favorite, “Underground” (hootie hoo!), which earned her two Outstanding Actress nominations from the NAACP Image Awards…

Read the entire article here.

All Mixed Up: Our Changing Racial Identities Film Screening
Sie FilmCenter
2510 East Colfax Avenue
Denver, Colorado 80206
Wednesday, 2018-05-09, 19:00-21:30 MDT (Local Time)
Rebekah E. Henderson, Creator

World Premiere of the film project All Mixed Up: Our Changing Racial Identities. AMU is a short film that examines the experience of multiracial Americans and their families through a series of interviews. This project is intended to be the start of many more conversations about how we think about race. Following the film there will be a Q&A session with the project creators and some of the participants. This screening will be in honor of the late Dr. Gregory Diggs who provided the creative spark that launched this project last spring.

For more information, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

Race and Class in Rural Brazil: A UNNESCO Study (2nd Edition)

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
1963
158 pages

Edited by:

Charles Wagley (1913-1993), Professor of Anthropology
Columbia University, New York, New York

Photographs by: Pierre Verger (1902-1996)

Read the entire publication here.

The Myth of Brazil’s Racial Democracy

aperture
2018-04-18

Amelia Rina
Brooklyn, New York

Jonathas de Andrade, Eu, mestiço, 2017–18 Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

In a new exhibition, Jonathas de Andrade confronts his country’s complicated past and present.

“Brazil is renowned in the world for its racial democracy,” begins anthropologist Charles Wagley in the 1952 study Race and Class in Rural Brazil. Produced by Columbia University and UNESCO, the text describes ethnographic studies performed by Wagley and his colleagues in four regions of Brazil. In each region, men and women from what they determined to be the four major racial groups—caboclo (indigenous and Afro-Brazilian), preto (Afro-Brazilian), mulato (Afro-Brazilian and white European), and branco (white European)—were shown photographs of other Brazilians from these categories and then asked to assign them different traits, such as most/least attractive, best/worst worker, most/least honest, most/least wealthy, et cetera. This binary restriction was one of the study’s major flaws that first intrigued Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, and inspired his recent project, Eu, mestiço, currently on view at Alexander and Bonin…

Read the entire review here.

‘A dirty deed’: Fort McMurray Métis demand apology after historic eviction of an Indigenous settlement

CBC News
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
2018-04-25

David Thurton, Mobile Journalist
Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada

Moccasin Flats is the unresolved story of how at least 12 Indigenous families were evicted or relocated from a Fort McMurray riverside community in the late 1970s to make way for a city expanding feverishly to accommodate oilsands growth.

That history still pains Fort McMurray Métis president Gail Gallupe.

“It was really a dirty deed,” Gallupe said. “To be ignored and to be treated so shabbily in those days. There was so much discrimination and so much racism.”

On Monday, the Fort McMurray Métis local announced it will commission an academic study that aims to clarify details of the contentious removal of the predominantly Métis settlement for oilsands development…

Read the story here.

I’m Not My Mother’s Cleaning Lady

narratively: Human Stories, Boldy Told
2018-04-30

Lisa W. Rosenberg

Loveis Wise

People see an elderly white woman and her middle-aged black daughter and assume I must be the hired help.

“Who do you work for?” the maintenance man wants to know, eyes narrowed slightly. I register his accent just as he’s appraised my brown skin. English is not his first language. We’re alone in the laundry room of my mother’s condo, where I’ve been folding sheets. He’s just walked in, toolbelt at his hips, and stumbled upon an unfamiliar woman of color. I reason that, to him, brown skin plus housework means Help. Either I work for someone in the building, or else I’m an interloper from the housing project across the street.

As I consider the best response, my gaze takes in the name-tag pinned to his front pocket. “Tony.”

He’s subjugated me with his question, but I know his name. Should I use it and answer directly? With snark?

“I’m self-employed,” I might respond, telling the truth but playing dumb. “I have a private psychotherapy practice in New Jersey.” I could add, “I’m very fortunate. My work schedule allows me to visit my mother and do her laundry from time to time.”

“I’m visiting my mother,” I say benignly. “Just helping her out.” I smile as if it’s a quaint indulgence to do a loved one’s chores, as if I’ve sent the servants back to their families to enjoy a day of rest…

Read the entire article here.