Mixed Race Studies

It’s time to recognize Sally Hemings as a first lady of the United States

The Los Angeles Times
2019-01-04

Evelia Jones

A man reads a plaque about Sally Hemings at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday, June 16, 2018. (Steve Ruark / Associated Press)

It is now widely understood that my ancestor Sally Hemings, an enslaved black woman, was the intimate companion of Thomas Jefferson for nearly four decades.

Monticello, the Virginia plantation operated as a museum by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, acknowledged as much with a new exhibit last year: Hemings’ living quarters. The exhibit presents as fact that Hemings gave birth to at least six of Jefferson’s children.

Much about their relationship remains lost to history. We know that Hemings was Jefferson’s property, and that in America she did not have the right to refuse sexual advances from her owner. We also know that Hemings was able to negotiate freedom for her children and “extraordinary privileges” for herself, and that she occupied a central place in Jefferson’s life…

Read the entire article here.

They married in 1968 as a nation fought for civil rights. 50 years later an interracial couple looks back

The Los Angeles Times
2018-05-29

Colleen Shalby, Community Engagement Editor

Charles and Janice Tyler are photographed in a hallway lined with family photographs including their wedding day photo, at right, at their Huntington Beach home. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Their wedding day was bookended by the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June. The Vietnam War raged abroad as a fight for civil rights continued at home.

For many, 1968 was marked by violence, bloodshed and protest. For Janice, a white woman, and Charles, a black man, 1968 marked the unlikely beginning of a 50-year marriage filled with four children and 11 grandchildren.

Interracial marriages were by no means a societal norm the year the Tylers wed. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down the remaining laws that banned such unions, was handed down just one year before. Charles and Janice were not directly affected by the case – Illinois wasn’t one of the remaining 16 states. They did face prejudice, nonetheless.

“Back then, you just didn’t see black and white,” Charles said about the racial divide…

Read the entire article here.

What does it mean to be of mixed race in America? A new book and exhibition aim to answer

The Los Angeles Times
2018-04-06

Bonnie Tsui

Artist Kip Fulbeck continues his Hapa Project, begun in 2001, photographing people who identify as being of mixed race. His original portraits are paired with new pictures of the same individuals. (Kip Fulbeck)

Natalie Coughlin and Nathan Adrian are best known as world swimming champions — Coughlin as a 12-time Olympic medalist and the first woman to swim the 100-meter backstroke in under a minute, and Adrian as an eight-time Olympic medalist and a top freestyle sprinter for the U.S. national team. On a recent Saturday morning, they dropped those identities for a lesser-known one.

“Being hapa — that’s a big part of my identity,” Coughlin said, as she and Adrian each sat for a portrait by photographer Kip Fulbeck at a makeshift studio in Oakland.

Fulbeck started photographing people of mixed racial heritage in 2001. Hapa, a Hawaiian word for “part,” has been adopted by some as a way to describe themselves. After each sitting, Fulbeck asked participants to hand-write responses to the question: “What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Painter Ellen Gallagher’s tragic sea tales: How African slaves went from human to cargo on the Atlantic

The Los Angeles Times
2017-11-17

Carolina A. Miranda

An installation view of Ellen Gallagher’s painting “Aquajujidsu” at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. (Fredrik Nilsen / Hauser & Wirth)

On first glance, the painting that greets visitors to the South Gallery at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles looks like a crab quietly resting on the bottom of an ocean floor. But look again and that crab morphs into the fragmented face of a person, its myriad pieces coming undone in a watery deep.

In her first solo show in Los Angeles, painter Ellen Gallagher broaches the history of the Middle Passage in ways that are both poetic and surprising — rendering underwater scenes that seem perfectly innocent at first glance, but that on second, third and fourth viewing, quietly evoke the terrible tragedies that occurred in the Atlantic Ocean during the roughly four centuries of the slave trade.

“These are history paintings,” she says thoughtfully, as she settles into a sleek chair in a small lounge at Hauser & Wirth. “It’s this portrait of this space in between, this space where you are dead and alive at the same time.”

Artist Ellen Gallagher. Ellen Gallagher / Hauser & Wirth

The artist, who divides her time between New York and Rotterdam, and whose work resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, has long explored questions of history and power in works that straddle the gray area between figurative and abstract…

Read the entire article here.

One of the most stubborn aspects of America’s racial imagination is the insistence on having a term to separate and identify people of Latin American descent.

It’s a minefield of geography, color and language since we can be of any race and have few things in common beyond some degree of adherence to the Spanish tongue. This is why U.S. Latinos generally prefer to self-identify by their family’s country of origin — Mexican, Colombian, Salvadoran, etc.

Non-Latinos, though, have always needed an umbrella term for labeling us as one. It was French colonists who first dubbed us “Latin” Americans, as a way of distinguishing their colonial project from Anglo colonization in the Western Hemisphere.

Daniel Hernandez, “The case against ‘Latinx’,” The Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2017. http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hernandez-the-case-against-latinx-20171217-story.html.

The case against ‘Latinx’

The Los Angeles Times
2017-12-17

Daniel Hernandez

“Latinx,” is has been argued, is a less determinist and more inclusive term than “Latino” for males and “Latina” for females. (Illustration by Wes Bausmith / For The Times)

This year, Fusion and MiTú each posted videos earnestly explaining to their millennial viewers why “Latinx” is the new term everyone should use to refer to people of Latin American descent.

The argument is that “Latinx” is a less determinist, more inclusive form of the words it replaces — “Latino” for males and “Latina” for females. These gendered identifiers, the thinking goes, impose a binary, give preference to the male over the female, and leave out those who don’t consider themselves either.

Although the target audiences for the MiTú and Fusion videos were mainstream consumers in their 20s — a demographic thought to be on board with “Latinx” — the comment sections of both videos were flooded with negative reactions, with some calling the term “ridiculous,” “stupid” and “offensive” to the Spanish language. “Please stop trying to force feed some millennials hipster buzzword,” one commenter said.

Not everyone is on board with the term. And yet “Latinx” — pronounced “La-teen-ex” in English — continues its march into more news outlets and magazines amid our growing public awareness of transgender and non-binary gender identities. The term is even used officially at some UC campuses and is being considered for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Like many of its awkward predecessors, “Latinx” does not work. Its experimental “x” opens too many linguistic floodgates. And why is this kind of label necessary at all?…

Read the entire article here.

Op-Ed: When the Nazis wrote the Nuremberg laws, they looked to racist American statutes

The Los Angeles Times
2017-02-22

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law
Yale Law School

James Q. Whitman is a professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale Law School. He is the author of “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law”

The European far right sees much to admire in the United States, with political leaders such as Marine le Pen of France and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands celebrating events — such as the recent presidential election — that seem to bode well for their brand of ethno-nationalism. Is this cross-Atlantic bond unprecedented? A sharp break with the past? If it seems so, that’s only because we rarely acknowledge America’s place in the extremist vanguard — its history as a model, even, for the very worst European excesses.

In the late 1920s, Adolf Hitler declared in “Mein Kampf” that America was the “one state” making progress toward the creation of a healthy race-based order. He had in mind U.S. immigration law, which featured a quota system designed, as Nazi lawyers observed, to preserve the dominance of “Nordic” blood in the United States.

The American commitment to putting race at the center of immigration policy reached back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which opened citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.” But immigration was only part of what made the U.S. a world leader in racist law in the age of Hitler.

Then as now, the U.S. was the home of a uniquely bold and creative legal culture, and it was harnessed in the service of white supremacy. Legislators crafted anti-miscegenation statutes in 30 states, some of which threatened severe criminal punishment for interracial marriage. And they developed American racial classifications, some of which deemed any person with even “one drop” of black blood to belong to the disfavored race. Widely denied the right to vote through clever devices like literacy tests, blacks were de facto second-class citizens. American lawyers also invented new forms of de jure second-class citizenship for Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and more…

Read the entire article here.

That Asian mom is not the nanny. Why do so many people assume she is?

The Los Angeles Times
2017-03-10

Jessica Roy

If you’ve been on the Internet at all today, you’ve probably already seen this video.

A white professor became the star of a viral video when his two young children wandered into the room while he was being interviewed by the BBC about relations between North and South Korea. An Asian woman dashed in and dragged the kids away before crawling back to close the door behind him.

It’s charming and relatable. Kids don’t care about your Skype interview or the carefully arranged tableau of books and maps behind you. Anyone who’s ever been around a young child can relate…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal: Can you be black without actually being biologically black?

The Los Angeles Times
2017-03-08

Patt Morrison

LA Times columnist Patt Morrison sits down with Rachel Dolezal to discuss race and identity.

In June 2015, a few days before Donald Trump declared that he was running for president, the news cycle was dominated by a different person: Rachel Dolezal. She was the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, an artist, a teacher of black-themed subjects – and, as it turned out, the daughter of white parents. She said she identified as black, and was living the life she felt was authentically her own. Her critics, and there were many, believed she had been living a lie, letting people assume she was black, when years before she had filed a lawsuit as a Howard University graduate student, alleging that the university had discriminated against her because she was a white woman.

Long divorced from her African American husband, Dolezal is bringing up three black sons, the youngest a year old. And she is still living as she was when she decided to “be black without any explanations, reservations, apologies or room for negotiation.” Her new autobiography, “In Full Color,” strikes the same tone: the wrongs in her story belong to a race-obsessed society that doesn’t permit people like her to be who they really feel themselves to be…

Listen to the interview here.

Kamala Harris sworn in as first Indian American senator and California’s first black senator

The Los Angeles Times
2017-01-03

Sara D. Wire, Congressional Delegation Reporter

Before friends and family in a packed chamber, Kamala Harris was sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator Tuesday morning. She became the first black woman the Golden State has sent to the Senate and the first Indian American to ever serve in the body.

Harris, 52, a Democrat from Los Angeles, was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden shortly after 9 a.m. PT as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her new Senate colleagues looked on. Harris’ husband, Los Angeles attorney Doug Emhoff, her stepchildren, brother-in-law Tony West, sister Maya Harris, extended family as well as several state officials from across the country who traveled to celebrate with the now former state attorney general watched from the gallery.

“Whatever advice she wants, all she has to do is ask,” Feinstein said. “I have said to her that I would like to have a close relationship.”

Feinstein and Harris met repeatedly in the weeks since the election, with Feinstein sharing advice on how to set up the largest Senate office in the country, including how to deal with the up to 100,000 emails, letters and phone calls that can come into a California senator’s office in a given week.

Harris, one of seven new senators, replaces Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who retired after 24 years in the Senate…

Read the entire article here.