Mixed Race Studies

An Artist Stands Before Her Fun House Mirror

The New York Times
2016-01-06

Amanda Fortini

Genevieve Gaignard, “A Golden State of Mind” installation, 2015. Credit: Eric Minh Swenson, via The Cabin LA and Diane Rosenstein

LOS ANGELES — On a recent Friday afternoon, Genevieve Gaignard, a photographer, collagist and installation artist, was sitting on her bed in the room she rents in the Echo Park neighborhood. For the last year, Ms. Gaignard, who takes self-portraits costumed as various alter egos she imagines, then builds fictional domestic spaces for them, has lived in this nondescript, book-filled and thoroughly carpeted apartment with a professional couple in their late 20s, their chatty lime-green parrot and three cats.

Ms. Gaignard, who is 34, with strawberry-blond hair and long, acrylic nails painted the matte pastel colors of Jordan almonds, had decorated her bedroom with charmingly girlish touches, like a white net canopy befitting a fairy-tale princess and a Felix the Cat clock with a pendulum tail. On every surface were snowdrifts of stuff: piles of clothing, toiletries, plastic sunglasses. On her desk, a bra and a half-eaten granola bar shared space with an assortment of wigs. “This is what happens; this is how involved I get in the artmaking,” she said, waving a manicured hand around at the clutter. “Everything else sort of falls apart.”

A 2014 graduate of Yale’s photography M.F.A. program, Ms. Gaignard does work that reclaims everyday items: hair curlers, curling irons, plastic party favors, costume jewelry, towels. These she finds at thrift shops, dollar and beauty supply stores, or via her mother, who, she says with affection, “is kind of a hoarder.” A forest of Vanillaroma air fresheners dangles from a pair of yellow knee-high boots. A collage made to resemble the faux-wood paneling of a suburban basement is appended with miniature knickknacks. “It’s not like, ‘Hmm, can I make something out of nothing?’” Ms. Gaignard said. “It’s literally like, ‘What do I have access to?’”…

Her recent show, “Us Only,” at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in the Venice neighborhood, featured a variety of pieces that blurred the lines between highbrow and vernacular, unraveling stereotypes of gender, race and class in the process. Her photos are often likened to those of Cindy Sherman, arguably our most famous costumed self-portraitist. But this comparison takes into account neither the animating impulses of her art — Ms. Gaignard is biracial, and her background forms an essential through line in her work — nor the decades of intervening culture since Ms. Sherman began taking pictures in the late 1970s. Third-wave feminism, online dating, even the ascent of the selfie: All are likely influences on a female artist photographing herself today. (Ms. Gaignard told me that Diane Arbus, not Ms. Sherman, was her seminal artistic inspiration, in part because she feels like “one of the people she photographed.”)…

…Sarah Lewis, a professor of history of art and architecture and African and African-American studies at Harvard, said that Ms. Gaignard’s art explores “the often undiscussed subject of racial indeterminacy.” It is, Professor Lewis notes, a topic well covered by 20th-century writers — Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Danzy Senna — but by few contemporary visual artists. Ms. Gaignard’s approach is not narrative, didactic or overtly political; she wittily employs symbols a viewer understands on a visceral level, even as a more explicit meaning remains elusive.

“Her work avoids any easy answers about race or identity,” said Gregory Crewdson, the director of graduate studies in photography at Yale. “I don’t think it’s in any conventional sense a critique. It’s more ambiguous than that. And that’s part of its power.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Black Indians Formed the First American Rainbow Coalition

The New York Times
1991-03-17

To the Editor:

“Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian” (front-page, March 5) discusses whites who now assert their Indian blood, but fails to mention African-Americans who can claim longer and more legitimate ties to America’s Indian heritage. Many in the New York area are pursuing their biracial heritage through such organizations as the National Alliance of Native Americans and radio stations such as WLIB.

The African-native American connection came to light in 1503, when Gov. Nicolas de Ovando of Hispaniola complained to King Ferdinand that African slaves “fled among the Indians . . . and never could be captured.” His words announced our first rainbow coalition. Today almost every African-American family — from Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Alex Haley to Alice Walker, Jesse Jackson and L. L. Cool J — has an Indian branch in its family tree. The statistics are much lower for white Americans…

…William L. Katz
New York
March 6, 1991

The writer, a scholar in residence at N.Y.U., is the author of “Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage” (1986).

Read the entire letter here.

Many of the Indians who now strongly assert their identities are the children or grandchildren of Indians who “passed” as white. Others were adopted into white families, and later sought to reclaim their heritage. John Homer, for example, was born 44 years ago to Indian parents in Hugo, Okla., but was adopted by a white couple. As a child growing up in Arkansas, he knew that he was Indian and was bothered that he could walk comfortably in whites-only neighborhoods because of his adopted parents but that other Indian boys could not.

Dirk Johnson, “Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian,” The New York Times, March 5, 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/05/us/census-finds-many-claiming-new-identity-indian.html

Another Win for a Player Getting in Touch With Her Japanese Roots

The New York Times
2016-01-21

Ben Rothenberg

Naomi Osaka signed autographs after her 6-4, 6-4 victory over 18th-seeded Elina Svitolina at the Australian Open on Thursday. Credit Issei Kato/Reuters

MELBOURNE, Australia — Naomi Osaka (大坂 なおみ) liked to think she had a universal appeal to the crowd that watched her 6-4, 6-4 win over 18th-seeded Elina Svitolina at the Australian Open on Thursday afternoon.

“Maybe it’s because they can’t really pinpoint what I am,” said Osaka, who will play the two-time champion Victoria Azarenka in the third round. “So it’s like anybody can cheer for me.”

Osaka, 18, is coached in the United States by her Haitian-born father, Leonard Francois. She spends little time in her mother’s homeland of Japan, the country she represents in tennis, but received strong support from Japanese fans as she pulled off the upset on Show Court 2.

“I always think that they’re surprised that I’m Japanese,” she said. “So like the fact that there was like Japanese flags and stuff, it was like really touching.”…

Read the entire article here.

Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian

The New York Times
1991-03-05

Dirk Johnson

For the first 43 years of her life, Barbara Anderson did not talk about her ethnic background. But now it is a matter of pride — and record. On the latest census form, Mrs. Anderson, now 48, checked a different box: American Indian.

“I no longer had to pretend,” she said.

Census officials are finding a sharp increase in the number of people who identify themselves as American Indians. Tribes are swamped with applications for enrollment. And a large wave of urban Indians now takes part in traditional Indian practices, like the “vision quest,” a time of spiritual reflection spent alone in the wilderness.

As American society becomes more accepting and admiring of the Indian heritage, and as governments set aside contracts and benefits for tribe members, an increasing number of Indians, like Mrs. Anderson, feel freer to assert their identities.

“There were many people who were ashamed of their Indian past, so they hid it,” said Russell Thornton, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “But a lot of people who went the assimilationist route have come back. And the tribes have been enjoying a renaissance.”

Since 1960, the Government count of American Indians has tripled, to an estimated 1.8 million. The Census Bureau has so far released ethnic data from 38 states and the District of Columbia showing a 38 percent increase in the last 10 years. Some of the biggest increases came in states without large Indian populations: Alabama rose 118 percent, New Jersey 78 percent. In Wyoming, which had an overall population loss of more than 3 percent, the number of Indians grew by more than 33 percent…

…Many of the Indians who now strongly assert their identities are the children or grandchildren of Indians who “passed” as white. Others were adopted into white families, and later sought to reclaim their heritage. John Homer, for example, was born 44 years ago to Indian parents in Hugo, Okla., but was adopted by a white couple. As a child growing up in Arkansas, he knew that he was Indian and was bothered that he could walk comfortably in whites-only neighborhoods because of his adopted parents but that other Indian boys could not…

Read the entire article here.

“Of all the places I’ve lived, there’s only one where I felt uncomfortable being black. It was where I am from: the United States.” —Nicholas Casey

Nicholas Casey, “Moving to Venezuela, a Land in Turmoil: Q&A: Race and Racism in Venezuela,” The New York Times, January 21, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/reporters-notebook/moving-to-venezuela/race-racism.

Moving to Venezuela, a Land in Turmoil

The New York Times
2016-01-21

Nicholas Casey, a New York Times correspondent, is sharing moments from his first 30 days living in Caracas, a city in the midst of great tumult and change. Follow Nick on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Q&A: Race and Racism in Venezuela

Q. I’d like to hear your impressions on race and racism, since everyone seems to be mixed race in Venezuela.

—Silvia Rodriguez, Illinois

A. Race is something that has preoccupied me in my past reporting assignments, in which I’ve had a chance to watch not only how people treat each other, but how I’m received.

With a Afro-Cuban father and a white mother, I was never confused for a local during my five years reporting from Mexico. More often, I was confused for a pop singer named Kalimba. He seemed to be the only man in that country who had hair like mine and wore similar glasses…

…Of all the places I’ve lived, there’s only one where I felt uncomfortable being black. It was where I am from: the United States.

Read the entire article here.

Viewing Los Angeles Through a Creole Lens

The New York Times
2016-01-21

Farai Chideya

The pulse of the train on the tracks sets a rhythm as its passenger cars seem to skim over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. These six miles of nothing but sky above and water below are the gateway into the city by rail. Next come the cemeteries at the edge of New Orleans, and all of a sudden, a day and a half of travel ends at the Amtrak terminal in the business district. I had just completed the first leg of my cross-country journey by sleeper train, starting in New York, and was beginning the second: a foray into the cultural ties between the Crescent City and California.

This trip had been inspired partly by the travel writer and blogger Greg Gross, who grew up in New Orleans and California. “I had a great-uncle who ran away at 15 to become a Pullman porter,” he said. These black men served a predominately white customer base as sleeping-car porters, often simply called “George” by their customers. Their union became a powerful force during the civil rights movement. Mr. Gross’s great-uncle Ellis Pearson worked on the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

He was something like an usher for Mr. Gross’s family, which is full of cross-country transplants, including his parents and a deceased uncle who played jazz trumpet. When black New Orleans families like his moved to California, “They brought their food with them, their music,” he said. “They brought an energy, an attitude with them. ‘We survived there; we can make it here.’ They brought it to their churches and their neighbors.” It’s a refrain I hear many times as I speak to members of this diaspora.

The Grosses weren’t the only ones. The migration of black and Creole families moving to California from Louisiana began as a trickle in 1927, in the wake of that year’s great flood, and grew to a mass migration from the 1930s to 1960, years that encompassed the Depression, World War II and the growth of employment opportunities for blacks, and Jim Crow. While many families went from the South to the North, the train lines led many in New Orleans to the West instead. The better part of a century after its start, some migrants resettled in California after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to follow the path that others had, to trace a thread of our cultural lineage, however faint. I wanted to see both cities through a black Bayou and Creole lens, to see if they’d drifted apart or were overlapping, remixing culture in the same way that Creoles originally had…

…Once in Los Angeles, I headed to the venerable Creole restaurant Harold and Belle’s on Jefferson Boulevard to meet up with Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor, writer and producer, and the actor and musician Mark Broyard. The dining room — scheduled to reopen next month after a renovation — was filled with locals wearing fleur-de-lis T-shirts or other symbols of their fealty to Louisiana. Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith have known each other since childhood, and collaborated on a play called “Inside the Creole Mafia,” staged several times over the course of two decades. I got a taste of their razor-sharp banter over my gumbo.

Mr. Broyard explained how his family left Louisiana during the Jim Crow years because, “as my mother said many times,” he said, “she was not going to fight the civil rights movement with her children. We, the Creole kids, the light-skinned kids, we had been integrating schools for a lot longer because we weren’t dark. So we had been in and out of all these white institutions for years, with a tacit understanding that these people were colored, but it was O.K. that they were here because maybe they had half of one drop or something.”…

Read the entire article here.

Staceyann Chin Worries About Money, and Selling Out

The New York Times
2016-01-14

Laura Collins-Hughes

The day she traded in her little two-door convertible for a crossover S.U.V. — “a mom car,” she calls it — the performance poet Staceyann Chin went home and cried. It wasn’t enough that pregnancy had forever altered her body. Now, as she saw it, motherhood was taking away her sex appeal, too.

“But those are the ways it changes your life,” said Ms. Chin, 43, who has a curly, deep-red mohawk, a Jamaican lilt to her speech and, at her throat, a pair of silver necklaces, one of which is emblazoned with a single word: BadAss.

“And then you meet a whole bunch of other people who think moms are sexy,” she added cheerfully over dinner on Lafayette Street before a performance of her latest solo show, “MotherStruck!,” at the Culture Project. “Very strange, but true. They’re everywhere.”

The play tells the story of Ms. Chin’s determined quest to have a child in the face of considerable obstacles, such as being a cash-strapped, single, lesbian artist-activist with paltry health insurance. (In vitro fertilization? Definitely not included.) When at last she does get pregnant, it’s a victory, but a fragile one. At 14 weeks, she begins to bleed. And bleed…

Read the entire article here.

The Other Obama Legacy

The New York Times
2016-01-14

Charles M. Blow

On Tuesday, I spoke to a room full of beaming high school and middle school boys — about 150, a vast majority of whom were black — at the St. Petersburg College Allstate Center in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The talk was sponsored by the Cross and Anvil Human Services Center as part of the heritage lecture series that seeks to present historical, political and educational conversations that honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The group targets “at-risk” boys in the community.

I didn’t sugarcoat things for these boys. I gave them the unvarnished truth, the same way I would for my own boys. For me, it is very important to help children place themselves historically, even when that history is painful, because within that truth they can anchor themselves and from it they can aim themselves.

When my speech was over, we had a question and answer period, and President Obama came up…

…I thought of some of the amazing pictures that the White House has released of the president meeting with black folks in the Oval Office, like 5-year-old Jacob Philadelphia touching the president’s hair because, as he put it, “I want to know if my hair is just like yours.” I thought of all the boys being reached by the president’s “My Brother’s Keeper” program.

These things register in a way that should never be underestimated. As a child, I couldn’t name many politicians, but I knew that P.B.S. Pinchback had been the first and only black governor of Louisiana, my home state; that Thurgood Marshall was a sitting Supreme Court Justice; and that Ed Bradley was one of the most respected journalists on television.

Obama is the first black president — and may well be the last, who knows — and that alone has a historical weight and impact on this generation that will play out for generations to come…

Read the entire article here.