Mixed Race Studies – Page 22 – Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Trailblazer with Amandla Stenberg

2022-04-05

Trailblazer with Amandla Stenberg

Net-a-Porter
2021-02-08

Micha Frazer-Carroll

Photography: Miranda Barnes / Styling: Karla Welch

Ever since her breakout role in The Hunger Games, Amandla Stenberg’s career has gone from strength to strength. Here, the actor talks to Micha Frazer-Carroll about her involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, how the pandemic has made her re-evaluate her life and why she’s keenly exploring other creative avenues

Speaking to Amandla Stenberg feels strikingly like hanging out with a close friend, as well as interviewing a compelling voice from Hollywood’s twentysomething cohort. As we connect over Zoom, the conversational ground quickly spans from grumbling about media depictions of Gen Z to lamenting the elitist hierarchies that have emerged at queer Zoom parties. She also laughs a lot.

The laughter subsides and Stenberg reflects on the turbulent times that 2020 brought. She’s been Airbnb-ing and short-term renting for two years now – between New York, LA, Paris and Copenhagen – and has felt constantly unsettled since the pandemic hit. “I think sometimes I forget the lens through which I’m looking at things,” she says. “I can kind of get stressed out, wondering why I have so much anxiety, or why I’m in a constant state of paranoia and fear – and then I remember the circumstances.”

There are things to be grateful for, too, of course – she stresses that she doesn’t want to sound all “the pandemmy’s been so hard”, particularly since the actor, whose father is Danish, spent three months of the past year in the rolling hills of rural Denmark. “The thing I’m grateful for is definitely the opportunity to move more slowly – like actually thinking about my habits, the way I move through each day and what my priorities are.”…

Read the entire article here.
One More Census Takeaway: The End of an Era of Counting the Nation?

2022-04-05

One More Census Takeaway: The End of an Era of Counting the Nation?

The New York Times
2022-03-12

Michael Wines, National Correspondent

A census worker takes information from a man during a promotional event in Times Square in New York City, N.Y. in 2020. Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Some experts are arguing that it’s time for the census to aggressively make use of government data and other sources to augment its own decennial count.

WASHINGTON — Beyond the reports of undercounts and overcounts in population totals, there is another takeaway from the post-mortem of 2020 census data issued on Thursday: This could be the last census of its kind.

The next census will be taken in a nation where Amazon may have a better handle on where many people live than the Census Bureau itself. For some advocates of a more accurate count, the era in which census-takers knock on millions of doors to persuade people to fill out forms should give way in 2030 to a sleeker approach: data mining, surveys, sophisticated statistical projections and, if politics allows, even help from the nation’s tech giants and their endless petabytes of personal information.

The Census Bureau itself has yet to leap very far into that new era. But it has hinted recently at a “blended” approach in which official census figures could be supplemented with reliable data from government records and other sources…

Read the entire article here.
Gregory Howard Williams

2022-04-05

Writer Gregory Howard Williams’ “Life on the Color Line”

Fresh Air with Terry Gross
WHYY FM, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1995-02-21

Terry Gross, Host

Williams spent the first ten years of his life believing he was white in segregated Virginia, and that his dark-skinned father was Italian. When his parents’ marriage ended, his father took him and his brother to Muncie, Indiana, where the boys learned that they were half black. Williams’ new memoir “Life on the Color Line” is about the struggle and repression he faced growing up between the races. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “(an) affecting and absorbing story.”

Listen to the interview (00:23:10) here. Download the interview here.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma: Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

2022-04-01

Nitasha Tamar Sharma: Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

New Books Network
2022-03-30

Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma’s analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Listen to the interview (01:48:48) here.
Performance and Identity in Adrian Piper’s Work

2022-04-01
Performance and Identity in Adrian Piper’s Work

InMedia: The French Journal of Media Studies
Volume 8, Number 2 (2020)
DOI: 10.4000/inmedia.2754
17 pages

Antonia Rigaud, Associate Professor of American Studies
Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris France

Lorna Simpson
Head On Ice #3
2016
Ink and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass
Unique
67 x 50 x 1 3/8 in (170.2 x 127 x 3.5 cm)
^©Lorna Simpson
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: James Wang

Adrian Piper’s career which spans close to 60 years illustrates the passage in American art from conceptualism to performance art at the turn of the 1970s. She uses the language of conceptualism to interrogate, through performance, the notion of identity in American culture. Confronting her viewers with racial stereotypes, or presenting strategies of retreat, her performances suggest that identity is a fluctuating notion, one which can only exist in dialogue between artist and audience. Her critique of essentialism is at the heart of artworks which are to be construed as social contracts binding artist and audiences together in the definition of the self.

Contents
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A vigorous examination of ‘Mr. NAACP,’ who passed as White

2022-04-01

A vigorous examination of ‘Mr. NAACP,’ who passed as White

The Washington Post
2022-03-25

Kevin Boyle, William Smith Mason Professor of American History
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Walter White was executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in June 1942. (Gordon Parks/Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress) (Gordon Parks /Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress

When Walter White joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s New York staff in 1918, he had a thin record of civil rights activism. But he quickly made himself into the association’s indispensable man, particularly skilled at communicating the terror of racial violence to White audiences. It was a talent built partly on his limitless courage, partly on his incessant charm, and partly on a family inheritance that set him apart from most of Black America. “I am a Negro,” he wrote late in life. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”

But the marks of slavery were. The sexual exploitation that ran through the antebellum South coiled tightly round White’s maternal line: Both his great-grandfather and grandfather were prominent White men; his great-grandmother and grandmother, enslaved women powerless to resist them. His mother was born into bondage, too, just as the Civil War was about to bring the slave system down. Over the decades of freedom that followed, she and the light-skinned man she married pulled their family into the Black middle class, where their color carried a great deal of cachet. There White was born and raised, wrapped in the Victorian virtues of turn-of-the-century Atlanta’s most prestigious Black neighborhood as Jim Crow closed in around him.

A.J. Baime centers the first two thirds of his vigorous biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret,” on the first 12 years of White’s confrontation with that brutal regime. His breakthrough came two weeks into his time as an NAACP staffer, when his boss, the incomparable James Weldon Johnson, sent him to investigate a lynching in tiny Estill Springs, Tenn. White arrived in town claiming to be a traveling salesman. In short order, he was sitting in the general store, chatting up the locals who assumed that he was as White as they were. By nightfall, he had gathered all the horrifying details that made his resulting exposé, published in the NAACP magazine, the Crisis, a sensation…

Read the entire review here.
Foreshadowing Failure: Mulatto and Black Oral Discourse and the Upending of The Western Design in Thomas Gage’s A New Survey (1648)

2022-03-31

Foreshadowing Failure: Mulatto and Black Oral Discourse and the Upending of The Western Design in Thomas Gage’s A New Survey (1648)

Hispania
Volume 102, Number 4, December 2019
pages 583-600
DOI: 10.1353/hpn.2019.0105

Monica Styles, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
Colby College, Waterville, Maine

Thomas Gage wrote A New Survey of the West Indies or, The English American his Travel by Sea and Land (1648) with the aim to convince Oliver Cromwell that the English could successfully invade Spanish held American territories. The English attempt to invade the Spanish colonies in 1655 would not garner non-Whites’ unwavering aid, which is a decisive factor in the Western Design’s failure. Although subalterns in the region rebelled against Spanish hegemony, they were by no means in constant revolt as Gage suggested. They had also carved out an integral place within Spanish American society and culture. Mulattos are subaltern agents whose defining role in the Western Design’s collapse has not been considered sufficiently. Though they were Afro-descendants, Mulattos were racially ambiguous tricksters who disturbed hierarchies. Mulattos sought autonomy by forming alliances with Europeans—be they Spanish, English, French or Dutch—as well as with Amerindian communities, to the extent that these relationships afforded them relative autonomy within hierarchical colonial power structures. Mulattos’ oral and embodied discourses within Gage’s text exemplify their agency and shifting alliances.

Read or purchase the article here.
Stories of racial passing, from the pages of Nella Larsen to Detroit’s upper class

2022-03-31

Stories of racial passing, from the pages of Nella Larsen to Detroit’s upper class

Stateside
Michigan Radio
2022-03-25

“Still’s Underground Rail Road Records,” 1886 /Boston African American National Historic Site

To escape slavery in Georgia, light-skinned Ellen Craft and her dark-skinned husband William posed, respectively, as a white gentleman traveling with his enslaved manservant in 1848.

Elsie Roxborough was born in 1914 in Detroit to one of Michigan’s most prominent Black families. When she died in New York City in 1949, her death certificate listed her race as white. She had lived there as a white woman for over a decade, working for a time as a model while aspiring to acclaim as a playwright.

“She almost immediately goes to New York City after graduation from the University of Michigan,” said Ken Coleman, a journalist who has researched the Roxborough family. Elsie Roxborough “at least professionally changed her name to Pat Rico at one point, and then ultimately, Mona Manet, and her brown, brownish-black hair becomes Lucille Ball auburn.”

Roxborough represents one of the few documented historical instances from Michigan of a Black person choosing to live nearly full-time as a member of white society. This phenomenon, known as racial passing, has received renewed popular attention through recent artistic works like Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing and Britt Bennett’s novel The Vanishing Half…

Listen to the story (00:19:36) here.
“What are you?” Reactions to American Racial Rhetoric among Mixed and Multiracial Caribbeans

2022-03-31

“What are you?” Reactions to American Racial Rhetoric among Mixed and Multiracial Caribbeans

Charisse L’Pree, Ph.D.: Media Made Me Crazy
2014-08-19

Charisse L’Pree, Associate Professor of Communications
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

Historically, the United States has had tumultuous relationship with mixed and multiracial individuals within its borders; interracial marriage was illegal until 1967, and the one-drop rule continues affect racial discourse. Combined with the hegemonic power of American culture, the effect of this rhetoric is especially evident in neighboring cultures with different social constructions of race. This paper explores the experiences of young adults in the United States and the Caribbean who identify as mixed or multiracial, and their use of social media to publicly identify and affect this conversation.

To be “mixed” is to contain different qualities or elements. Although racial categorizations can differ from culture to culture, much of the literature regarding the identity of mixed individuals has emerged from the United States and Western Europe. In these communities, multiracial individuals are less than 3% of the population and considered to be between groups. Stereotypes like the “tragic mulatto” describe the psychological stress that multiracial individuals can experience as simultaneously ostracized and exoticized anomalies. They are the targets of curiosity, resulting in the common question: “What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.
A Dialectic of Race Discourses: The Presence/Absence of Mixed Race at the State, Institution, and Civil Society and Voluntary and Community Sector Levels in the United Kingdom

2022-03-31

A Dialectic of Race Discourses: The Presence/Absence of Mixed Race at the State, Institution, and Civil Society and Voluntary and Community Sector Levels in the United Kingdom

Chinelo L. Njaka, Independent Researcher
London, United Kingdom

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”
Published 2022-02-21
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11020086

For the twenty years that mixed race has been on the United Kingdom (UK) censuses, the main story of mixed race in the UK remains one notable for its nominal presence and widespread absence in national discourses on race and ethnicity, racialisation, and racisms. The article explores reasons for this through connecting the continued presence/absence of mixed race in public discursive spheres to the role that White supremacy continues to play at systemic, structural, and institutional levels within UK society. As technologies of White supremacy, the article argues that continued marginalisation of mixed race has a direct connection to systemic, structural, and institutional aspects of race, racialisation, and racisms. Using three case studies, the article will use race-critical analyses to examine the ways that mixed race is present and—more often—absent at three societal levels: the state, institution, and civil society and voluntary and community sector. The paper will conclude by exploring key broad consequences for the persistent and common presence/absence of mixed race within race and racisms discourses as a technology of political power. Working in tandem, the paper exposes that presence/absence continues to affect mixed race people—and all racialised people—living in and under White supremacy.

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