Mixed Race Studies

Three Very Rare Generations

The New York Times
1992-12-13

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University

Soul To Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. By Yelena Khanga with Susan Jacoby. Illustrated. 318 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $22.95.

AMONG its other consequences, the demise of the Soviet Union has released an emigration of foreign-born leftists and their descendants. Along with Spanish Loyalists and exiled third-world socialists now returning to their countries of origin, this little-noticed diaspora includes Yelena Khanga, the granddaughter of a black American who had moved to the Soviet Union in 1931, along with his Polish-Jewish-American wife. “Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992” tells the remarkable story of Ms. Khanga’s family, shedding light into unfamiliar corners of both the Soviet and American pasts. Its title derives from a Russian expression for close friendship. In an American context, it also suggests encounters among blacks, and the book’s most interesting chapters recount the story of the black side of Ms. Khanga’s family tree.

Her great-grandfather, Hilliard Golden, born a slave, served on the board of supervisors in Yazoo County, Miss., during Reconstruction, and managed to become one of the areas’s largest black landowners (Ms. Khanga is not sure how). The restoration of white supremacy abruptly ended his political career, but Golden clung tenaciously to his property until 1909, when, like many other farmers in the New South, he succumbed to debt and lost his land…

…In 1931, with 15 other Americans — black agricultural specialists and their families — Ms. Khanga’s grandparents sailed for the Soviet Union to help develop cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan. The poverty and backwardness of the region, where polygamy still flourished, reinforced the Goldens’ sense of socialist mission. When their daughter, Lily, was born, they decided to remain in the Soviet Union “because they did not want to raise a racially mixed child in America.” The agricultural experiments succeeded, and Stalin then decreed that Uzbekistan should concentrate exclusively on cotton, transforming the area, ironically, into a one-crop economy bearing some resemblance to the South of Golden’s youth…

Read the entire review here.

Police Tactics in Harsh Glare After Arrest of James Blake

The New York Times
2015-09-10

Benjamin Mueller, Al Baker and Liz Robbins

A New York Police Department officer was stripped of his gun and badge as Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton issued swift apologies on Thursday for the rough arrest of James Blake, the retired tennis star, after he was misidentified as a suspect in a fraudulent credit card ring.

Criticism swirled over the possibility that Mr. Blake, who is biracial, had been racially profiled in the episode on Wednesday. But it was Mr. Bratton’s acknowledgment that Mr. Blake may have been treated too aggressively when an officer threw him to the ground that put a renewed focus on the everyday arrest tactics long criticized by the city’s minority residents.

The incongruity of a Harvard-educated professional athlete being manhandled by six white plainclothes officers on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan quickly became an embarrassment for the Police Department and a headache for Mr. de Blasio, exposing the kind of unprovoked aggression that he and elected leaders across the country have sought to stamp out.

The officer’s decision to throw an unarmed, compliant man to the ground added to the sense that black people are often roughed up by the police out of view, with few resources to bring attention to their grievances. Mr. Bratton said the officers had failed to report the arrest, as they were required to do.

In a sign of the shifting discourse on race and policing, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton moved with unusual speed to contact Mr. Blake to apologize. But the gestures also raised questions about whether they would have moved so swiftly if the encounter had not involved a well-known figure…

…“I do think most cops are doing a great job keeping us safe, but when you police with reckless abandon, you need to be held accountable,” Mr. Blake, whose mother is white and whose father was black, said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”…

…Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers shove Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk.

Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers shove Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk….

Read the entire article here.

Chosen by Mississippi Democrats, Shy Trucker Is at a Crossroad

The New York Times
2015-09-07

Campbell Robertson, Southern Correspondent

Robert Gray (Photo source: WLBT-TV)

JACKSON, Miss. — Only three people who had ever met this man, Robert Gray, knew that he was running in the primary for governor of Mississippi.

There were the two volunteers who took his $300 filing fee and qualifying papers several months ago at the state Democratic Party office and the candidate for agriculture commissioner who happened to be in the headquarters at the same time.

Otherwise, no one — not even Mr. Gray’s mother, with whom he lives.

At least she voted for him when she saw his name on the Aug. 4 ballot. Mr. Gray, 46, a round-faced, soft-spoken long-haul truck driver who lives on a quiet country road south of Jackson, was too busy working on his rig to vote himself. He would, nonetheless, go on to win, taking 79 out of Mississippi’s 82 counties.

Mr. Gray beat two other candidates, who unlike him spent money and campaigned. Democratic Party officials were stunned. The news media was stunned. Mr. Gray, now Mississippi’s Democratic nominee for governor, gave some interviews and then set off with a truck full of sweet potatoes for a potato chip factory in Pennsylvania…

…No one there had met Mr. Gray, but Gary Downing, who was getting a little off the ears, offered a thought on the state of politics: “Can’t do no worse than what we’ve got.”

This may be the central plank of the Gray campaign, such as it is. His campaign staff for now consists mostly of his sister, Angela Gray, 45, who works in real estate in Georgia, and Dwight Utz, 57, an engineer who moved here three years ago from Idaho. Mr. Utz, who is white, sees the campaign as the stirrings of a new civil rights movement.

Mr. Gray does not talk much about race. He cites no specific issue that prompted him to run for governor. He emphasizes a more general conviction that the state has been foundering for too long and that it could be thriving if only the governor would expand Medicaid and spend more on infrastructure and education…

Read the entire article here.

Poet’s Muse: A Footnote to Beethoven

The New York Times
2009-04-02

Felicia R. Lee

Haydn almost certainly encountered him as a child in a Hungarian castle, where the boy’s father was a servant and Haydn was the director of music, and Thomas Jefferson saw him performing in Paris in 1789: a 9-year-old biracial violin prodigy with a cascade of dark curls. While the boy would go on to inspire Beethoven and help shape the development of classical music, he ended up relegated to a footnote in Beethoven’s life.

Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton). The narrative, a collection of poems subtitled “A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play,” intertwines fact and fiction to flesh out Bridgetower, the son of a Polish-German mother and an Afro-Caribbean father.

When he died in South London in 1860, his death certificate simply noted that he was a “gentleman.” Ms. Dove imagines, as she writes in her poem “The Bridgetower,” that “this bright-skinned papa’s boy/could have sailed his fifteen-minute fame/straight into the record books.”…

Read the entire review here.

Psychologists Welcome Analysis Casting Doubt on Their Work

The New York Times
2015-08-29

Benedict Carey, Science Reporter

The field of psychology sustained a damaging blow Thursday: A new analysis found that only 36 percent of findings from almost 100 studies in the top three psychology journals held up when the original experiments were rigorously redone.

After the report was published by the journal Science, commenters on Facebook wisecracked about how “social” and “science” did not belong in the same sentence.

Yet within the field, the reception was much different. Along with pockets of disgruntlement and outrage — no one likes the tired jokes, not to mention having doubt cast on their work — there was a sense of relief. One reason, many psychologists said, is that the authors of the new report were fellow researchers, not critics. It was an inside job.

“It’s like we’ve come clean,” said Alan Kraut, the executive director of the Association for Psychological Science, which publishes one of the journals analyzed in the new report. “This kind of correction is something that has to happen across science, and I’m proud that psychology is leading the charge on this.”…

Read the entire article here.

Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says

The New York Times
2015-08-27

Benedict Carey, Science Reporter

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior – also because of concerns about fake data.

A University of Virginia psychologist decided in 2011 to find out whether such suspect science was a widespread problem. He and his team recruited more than 250 researchers, identified 100 studies that had each been published in one of three leading journals in 2008, and rigorously redid the experiments in close collaboration with the original authors.

The results are now in: More than 60 of the studies did not hold up. They include findings that were circulated at the time — that a strong skepticism of free will increases the likelihood of cheating; that physical distances could subconsciously influence people’s sense of personal closeness; that attached women are more attracted to single men when highly fertile than when less so.

The new analysis, called the Reproducibility Project and posted Thursday by Science, found no evidence of fraud or that any original study was definitively false. Rather, it concluded that the evidence for most published findings was not nearly as strong as originally claimed…

Read the entire article here.

On the use of “Slave Mistress”

AAIHS: African American Intellectual History Society
2015-08-21

Emily Owens

The passing of the great civil-rights leader Julian Bond earlier this week ignited a firestorm of activity on Twitter. Historians of African American women’s history noticed and commented on something suspect in Bond’s obituary, a brief line embedded within: in the obituary, Julian Bond’s great grandmother, Jane Bond, was described as “the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer.”

The conversation that followed this revelation offers a glimpse into some of the most challenging questions within the history of African Americans. The history of sex and slavery remains both difficult to approach and critical to our understanding of the full, complex, and violent lives of enslaved African American women. And around the phrase “slave mistress” converges some of the key issues that make that history difficult to tell.

What is particularly exciting about this confluence of historians of African American women’s history collectively riffing on the problematic of “slave mistress” is the extent to which their public conversation maps the contours of the historiographic debate on sex and slavery. (It is also a mark of the power of this conversation that the New York Times issued a statement of regret about their language yesterday). Rather than rehearse their conversation here, I have reproduced it in Storify form, and will spend the duration of these comments pulling out what I see as key moments that cite the wider debate…

Read the entire article here.

Times Regrets ‘Slave Mistress’ in Julian Bond’s Obituary

The New York Times
2015-08-20

Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor

After Julian Bond’s death on Saturday, The Times published a lengthy and well-written obituary summing up the life and work of the civil rights champion. But many readers were bothered by a single sentence in the front-page article:

“Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer.”

Many readers wrote to me to protest the phrase, on the grounds that a slave, by definition, can’t be in the kind of consensual or romantic relationship that the word “mistress” suggests. One of them noted it wasn’t the first time the phrase had appeared in a Times obituary…

Read the entire article here.

In Questions Over Shaun King’s Race, Activists See Challenge to Black Lives Matter Movement

The New York Times
2015-08-21

Katie Rogers, Senior Staff Editor

A prominent Black Lives Matter activist who has been accused of lying about his race was forced to discuss deeply personal issues after reporters pointed out that the father named on his birth certificate is white.

The controversy surrounding the activist, Shaun King, has become a proxy for a wider culture war over race and policing.

Supporters of Mr. King say that conservative bloggers who first questioned his race are using it to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement.

His critics compare him to Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist who was discredited after her parents said she was lying about being black.

Mr. King declined on Wednesday to discuss the accusations against him with The New York Times, referring a reporter to his response on social media.

But after conservative bloggers and journalists at The Daily Beast reported that a white man was listed on his birth certificate, Mr. King wrote an extraordinary blog post admitting that he doesn’t know who his father is.

“Until this past week, never has anyone asked me who my father was during these 35 years of mine,” he wrote on the website Daily Kos. “It occurs to me now that I’ve never asked anyone that question either.”

Mr. King, who has long identified as black, said that he had been told for most of his life that his father was a light-skinned black man…

Read the entire article here.

Tony Gleaton, 67, Dies, Leaving Legacy in Pictures of Africans in the Americas

The New York Times
2015-08-18

Bruce Weber

Tony Gleaton, a photographer who turned his back on a career in New York fashion and embarked on an itinerant artistic quest, documenting the lives of black cowboys and creating images of the African diaspora in Latin America, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 67.

The cause was oral cancer, his wife, Lisa, said.

Mr. Gleaton made his photographs in the American West and Southwest, and then, most prominently, in Mexico, where he lived among little-acknowledged communities of blacks — descendants of African slaves brought to the New World centuries earlier by the Spanish — in villages on the coastal plains of Oaxaca, south of Acapulco.

An exhibition of those photos, “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico,” which appeared in galleries around the country for more than a decade beginning in the 1990s, was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.

Mr. Gleaton specialized in black-and-white portraits, their subjects — children and adults, alone or in groups — almost always in direct engagement with the camera and usually in tight frames that suggest but do not explore a specific setting, like a workplace or a barroom. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2007, he called his pictures “abstractions from daily life,” saying “they may look natural but they are extremely crafted, very calculated.”…

Read the entire obituary here.