Mixed Race Studies

2020 US Open women’s final: Naomi Osaka wins third career Grand Slam, topping Victoria Azarenka

CBS Sports
2020-09-12

Gabriel Fernandez

Naomi Osaka is once again a champion in Flushing, New York. She defeated Belarusian Victoria Azarenka in three sets, 1-6, 6-3, 6-3, to win her second US Open title in three years, and the third major of her young career…

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Lewis Hamilton attacks silence from F1 paddock over George Floyd killing

The Guardian
2020-05-31

Giles Richards

Lewis Hamilton has accused ‘some of the biggest stars’ in his sport of ‘staying silent in the midst of injustice’ after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Photograph: David Davies/PA

• Hamilton: ‘I see those of you who are staying silent’
• Driver condemns response from ‘white-dominated sport’

Lewis Hamilton has spoken out about the killing of George Floyd and offered a damning condemnation of the silence from others in Formula One, including his fellow drivers.

“I see those of you who are staying silent, some of you the biggest of stars yet you stay silent in the midst of injustice,” he wrote on Instagram. “Not a sign from anybody in my industry which of course is a white-dominated sport.

“I’m one of the only people of colour there yet I stand alone. I would have thought by now you would see why this happens and say something about it but you can’t stand alongside us. Just know I know who you are, and I see you.”

Hamilton is the only black driver in Formula One and has been outspoken on the sport’s need for greater diversity in the past. “There’s barely any diversity in F1,” Hamilton said in 2018. “Still nothing’s changed in 11 years I’ve been here.”…

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The Confederate Flag Didn’t Bother Bubba Wallace. Until It Did.

The New York Times
2020-06-19

Juliet Macur

Barry Cantrell

The only black driver in NASCAR’s top tier, he has emerged as an impassioned activist who got the flag banned at races in the largely white sport after years of putting up with it.

Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series, has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for his principled stand that got the Confederate flag banned from races in a largely white sport.

Yet, after years of often quiet acceptance of the sport’s “racist label,” as he put it, nobody was more surprised than his mother that he had become a central figure in the sports world’s upheaval regarding race.

“I was shocked,” his mother, Desiree Wallace, said in a telephone interview. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, is this my son? The one who doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving?’ I’m tripping that he’s gone from being a racecar driver to becoming a daggone activist. Who does that? Not Bubba.”

Yet a series of events, particularly the killing of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, while he was jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood in Georgia, flipped a switch in Wallace, he and those who know him said…

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Bubba Wallace emerges as NASCAR’s improbable yet ideally suited change agent

The Washington Post
2020-06-13

Liz Clarke, Sports Reporter

“I encourage people to have those tough conversations just to educate yourself,” Bubba Wallace says. (Matt Sullivan/Getty Images)

Born in Alabama and reared in North Carolina, Bubba Wallace doesn’t remember seeing a Confederate flag until he went to a racetrack. His memory isn’t tied to a particular track because the flag was a fixture in the grandstands nearly everywhere he competed as a young racer.

But that’s not what transformed Wallace into a change agent in America’s most tradition-bound sport. It was the video of an unarmed black jogger being gunned down in Georgia after he was cornered by a white father and son brandishing a pistol and shotgun.

“The Ahmaud Arbery video was the final straw for me in being silent. That shook me to the core like nothing has in the past,” Wallace, 26, said in a telephone interview Friday. “Something flipped inside of me to be more vocal and stand up for racial equality and make sure we get a hold on that and change the face of this world and get it to a better place. Creating unity and compassion and understanding of each of our brothers and sisters is so powerful. We have to preach that to the ones that don’t want to listen and understand.”…

…The only full-time African American racer in NASCAR’s Cup series, and the first since the late Wendell Scott of Danville, Va., retired in 1973, Wallace is uniquely suited to lead NASCAR into the future its executives say they want: one in which women and minorities feel welcome and fill the grandstands, pit crews and driver ranks in numbers that mirror the diversity of America.

Wallace’s father is white; his mother is black. Both are NASCAR loyalists and fans, in particular, of seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt. So Bubba, who started racing at age 9, grew up an Earnhardt fan, too…

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Mahomes’ performance leaves no doubt: Black NFL QB’s have arrived

NBC News
2020-02-04

Curtis Bunn

Patrick Mahomes, 24, of the Kansas City Chiefs became the youngest quarterback to be named Super Bowl MVP. Mike Blake / Reuters

“Mahomes’ performance was uplifting and annihilates the narrative that African American quarterbacks are somehow less capable.”

Doug Williams did it first. Russell Wilson came next. And Patrick Mahomes is now the third African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, and his explosive performance on Sunday confirmed, if anyone still questioned, that the era of the black NFL QB is upon us.

With the world watching, Mahomes brought the Kansas City Chiefs back from a 10-point deficit in the final minutes, catapulting the franchise to its first Super Bowl win in 50 years, 31-20, over the shell-shocked San Francisco 49ers.

For the first time in a week, there was an athletic performance impressive enough to distract sports fans from the tragic death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant.

“Mahomes’ performance was uplifting and annihilates the narrative that African American quarterbacks are somehow less capable,” said Clint Crawford, an engineer, after getting a haircut at his favorite barbershop in Los Angeles Monday. “He executed when it counted most and demonstrated the kind of toughness and fiery resolve we came to expect from athletes like Tom Brady and Kobe Bryant.”…

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Patrick Mahomes ushers in Era of the Black Quarterback

The Year of the Black Quarterback
The Undefeated
2020-02-02

Jason Reid

With dramatic Super Bowl win, the Chiefs star punctuates spectacular year

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. – The Year of the Black Quarterback has evolved into the Era of the Black Quarterback, because Patrick Mahomes and his contemporaries are just that good.

On sports’ biggest stage here Sunday night, Mahomes emphatically punctuated the NFL’s 100th season – the one in which African American passers shined brighter than at any time previously in NFL history – leading the Kansas City Chiefs to a 31-20 victory over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium. In only his third season and second as a starter, Mahomes added the Super Bowl most valuable player award to the long list of accomplishments in his nascent career. And for a fitting capper to it all, here’s his biggest feat to date: At only 24, Mahomes is the youngest player ever to have both a Super Bowl title and a league MVP award, having been selected the 2018 winner by the Associated Press.

Any scout, coach or player-personnel official worth their salt will tell you there’s no doubt as to who is currently the game’s top player. Mahomes is the face of the NFL and is expected to shatter the mark for the game’s biggest contract soon. Not only does Mahomes, the seventh black signal-caller to direct a team to the Super Bowl and third to win the championship, throw the game’s best deep ball and possess second-to-none improvisational skills, he’s also smart as a whip, tough and a leader beyond his years.

Any scout, coach or player-personnel official worth their salt will tell you there’s no doubt as to who is currently the game’s top player. Mahomes is the face of the NFL and is expected to shatter the mark for the game’s biggest contract soon. Not only does Mahomes, the seventh black signal-caller to direct a team to the Super Bowl and third to win the championship, throw the game’s best deep ball and possess second-to-none improvisational skills, he’s also smart as a whip, tough and a leader beyond his years.

“The best thing about it is you’re showing kids that no matter where you grow up, what race you are, that you can achieve your dream,” Mahomes said during the lead-up to the Super Bowl. “For me, being a black quarterback — having a black dad and a white mom — it just shows that it doesn’t matter where you come from.”…

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Is the Black Quarterback Revolution Going to Last?

The New York Times
2020-02-02

Elena Bergeron

Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs is part of a vanguard redefining the position. But it is a watershed only if it is widespread and persistent.

MIAMI — The N.F.L.’s longtime leading men, the ones with the pizza commercials and the Super Bowl rings, whose names adorn the league’s most-sold jerseys, showed their mortality this season in ways that were uncomfortable to watch.

Tom Brady and Drew Brees didn’t make it through the first round of the playoffs. Aaron Rodgers missed the Super Bowl, too, by losing in a later round. Eli Manning retired, usurped as the Giants’ leader after 16 years. Ben Roethlisberger played like he should be considering it, too.

Together they helmed 12 of the last 18 Super Bowl-winning teams. And all are pushing 40 years old or past it.

Yet their aging out of the game leaves no void, as these playoffs have highlighted the rise of quarterbacks whose savvy and daring have stolen our attention. Russell Wilson’s third-down scramble to survive the Philadelphia Eagles, Patrick Mahomes’s bionic touchdown run for the Chiefs against the Tennessee Titans, Deshaun Watson of the Texans’ magical escape from a sack to beat the Buffalo Bills. Everything that Lamar Jackson did…

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In the End, the NFL Proved Colin Kaepernick Right

The Atlantic
2019-12-12

Jemele Hill, Staff writer

Al Bello / Getty

In pronouncing the outspoken quarterback’s career dead, the league underscored its own unwillingness to let players exercise their own power.

When the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, declared yesterday that the league had “moved on” from the embattled quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the finality of Goodell’s tone answered the question about whether Kaepernick would ever play professional football again.

Kaepernick became persona non grata in the National Football League after the 2016 season, during which he protested police violence against African Americans by kneeling during the national anthem. The league then spent more than two years trying to make him go away, but seemed to relent by scheduling a workout for him last month in Atlanta. But that proposed session didn’t happen on the NFL’s terms, and Goodell, in his first public comments about the matter, implied yesterday that Kaepernick had blown his last chance.

“It was a unique opportunity—an incredible opportunity—and he chose not to take it. And we’ve moved on here,” Goodell said at an owners’ meeting in Irving, Texas.

But if Goodell believes that the Atlanta fiasco provided closure to this situation, he’s being horribly naive. The league’s clumsy treatment of Kaepernick only showed what the quarterback’s supporters have been saying all along: The NFL is unwilling to tolerate black athletes’ outrage, outspokenness, and desire to exercise their power—even though all three are entirely justified…

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Raptors GM draws on mixed upbringing in building team’s post-Kawhi Leonard identity

The Washington Post
2019-11-19

Ben Golliver, NBA Reporter

“I don’t think I look super Asian or white,” said Toronto Raptors General Manager Bobby Webster, who became the NBA’s youngest GM when he was appointed in 2017. “Being both was freeing.” (Chris Young/The Canadian Press/Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES — When Bobby Webster took the stage as a guest speaker at the U.S.-Japan Council’s annual conference earlier this month, the moderator introduced him as a world champion and a hapa.

The first label was self-evident: Webster is the Toronto Raptors’ general manager, a low-key strategic planner and salary cap specialist who reports to Masai Ujiri, the organization’s brash, larger-than-life president.

The second term — a Hawaiian phrase that means “part” and refers to people of mixed race — described Webster’s Japanese-American background. Webster’s mother, Jean, descended from Japanese immigrants who came to work in the stables at a Hawaiian sugar plantation around the turn of the 20th century. Webster’s father, Bob, a redheaded Chicago native, moved to Hawaii in his late 20s and never left…

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The untold story of wrestler Andrew Johnson’s dreadlocks

The Undefeated
2019-09-18

Jesse Washington

Andrew Johnson is pictured during his 120-pound bout at the Williamstown Duals on Jan. 5 in New Jersey, Johnson’s first time back on the wrestling mat since he was forced to cut off his dreadlocks or forfeit his match on Dec. 19, 2018. Andrew Mills/NJ Advance Media/Barcroft Media

How the high school athlete endured his infamous haircut

When Andrew Johnson walked into The Line Up barbershop last April, all eyes focused on him. Since that awful day in December when a referee had forced the 16-year-old Buena Regional High School wrestler to either cut his dreadlocks or forfeit his match, he felt as if the world was constantly watching him, especially in his small New Jersey town. Watching and whispering about things beyond his control.

Yo, that’s that kid who got his locs chopped by the white ref.

Andrew, who goes by Drew, sat down in Chris Perez’s chair. Perez has tended Drew’s hair since middle school. After a video of Drew’s shearing attracted a massive social media audience last December, he had reshaped Drew’s hair into shorter dreadlocks that radiated from his head.

But now Drew had a new problem. The night before, he had grabbed a pair of scissors from the kitchen and hacked at what remained of his dreads, then asked his little sister to finish the job. Drew loved his hair but was tired of it causing so much trouble. Tired of being treated differently and made into something he was not. Tired of looking in the mirror and seeing the referee, Alan Maloney, looking back.

Maloney already had a racist incident in his past before telling Drew that his hair was “unnatural” and giving him 90 seconds to cut it. What resulted was far more than a humiliating haircut for one high school student. It became a shared and painful experience for many who see how issues of identity, subjugation, power and freedom are intertwined in African American hair…

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