Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
What is particularly interesting about the high percentage of multiracial children is that children do not fill out census forms. Children are being identified as multiracial by their parents, or by the parent who fills out the census form as the head of the household. This tends to corroborate the claim that the multiracial movement has been fueled by parents of multiracial children. But it also underlines the instability of this category, not to mention the other categories as well. We do not know, for example, if these children will continue to identify as multiracial when it is their turn to fill out the census form. Lee suggests that the “number of people who identify with more than one race is likely to increase as interracial marriages increase.” This may be so, but we also know that many people who could report themselves as multiracial choose not to. We also know that how people report their identity depends on the prevailing discourse of race and the options available at any given time. Current multiracial children, and multiracial adults for that matter, may in the future decide not to identity themselves as multiracial. They may decide to identify with a single minority race, or they may decide to identify themselves as white. When these multiracial children are grown, the categories will undoubtedly have changed, just as they have every year since 1790, and with them, the debate about race and identity. What is clear is that “the parameters of self-definition have never been open-ended, for the state has always furnished the range of available, credible, and reliable-that is, of licensed and so permissible-categories in which self-definition could occur.”
WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton was called the first black president because he crossed racial lines so easily, a distinction he lost when Barack Obama became the first actual black president. But for decades, some Americans claimed that the nation’s first black president was really Warren G. Harding.
It turns out that he wasn’t, really. At least that is the result of new DNA testing that according to scientists showed for the first time that Harding almost certainly had no recent ancestors with African blood, despite assertions that were spread far and wide a century ago in efforts to sabotage everything from his marriage to his political career.
The finding was overshadowed last week by the determination through the same testing that Harding did father a child with a mistress, Nan Britton. But the conclusion about Harding’s racial ancestry likewise addresses a mystery that had puzzled historians for many years and provides a seemingly definitive resolution of a subplot that played out during his lifetime…
Mr. Bond was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He was the committee’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination as the committee challenged legal segregation in the South’s public facilities.
He gradually moved from the militancy of the student group to the top leadership of the establishmentarian N.A.A.C.P. Along the way, Mr. Bond was a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer and college teacher, and a persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy…
…Horace Julian Bond was born Jan. 14, 1940, in Nashville, to Horace Mann Bond and the former Julia Washington. The family moved to Pennsylvania five years later, when Mr. Bond’s father became the first African-American president of his alma mater, Lincoln University.
Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer. Julian’s grandfather James Bond, one of Jane Bond’s sons, was educated at Berea and Oberlin Colleges and became a clergyman. His son Horace Mann Bond expected his own son Julian to follow in his footsteps as an educator, but the young man was attracted instead to journalism and political activism…
Jordan Peele, left, and Keegan-Michael Key in a scene from the final season of “Key & Peele.” Credit Comedy Central
The scene is a hauntingly familiar one: A white police officer stalks an unarmed black man in a dark alley and slams the man’s head into the open door of his patrol car.
But then, rather than being taken into police custody, the man is led through a magical door to the sunlit, upbeat streets of a utopia called Negrotown, whose black populace serenades the visitor about its city, where “you can walk the street without getting stopped, harassed or beat” and “you can wear your hoodie and not get shot.”
This comic sketch is one of many that have made “Key & Peele,” the Comedy Central series created by and starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, a television program that is uniquely calibrated to the current American moment, when real-life examples of racial polarization and conflict are ubiquitous, but opportunities in pop culture to process these divisions are rare.
It will be a bittersweet moment when this sketch comedy series concludes its final season on Sept. 9, after three years of fixing its satirical lens on stereotypes and social injustices. In its absence, there may be no alternative that so frankly addresses these enduring prejudices and disparities, especially at a moment when America’s racial divide has taken center stage in the national discourse…
…Mr. Key, 44, and Mr. Peele, 36, who are biracial, say they are ending the show by mutual agreement for the least complicated of reasons: They want to pursue other projects…
…“When Obama was elected, there was this mythology that, O.K., we’re over the racist thing — this is a postracial world,” Mr. Peele said. “And now, obviously, we’ve uncovered why that’s not true.”…
WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.
Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books.
The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated…
…The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood.”…
I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union. …” It’s a cruel irony that the words that set our democracy in motion were used as part of the so-called literacy test designed to deny Rosanell and so many other African-Americans the right to vote. Yet more than 70 years ago, as she defiantly delivered the Preamble to our Constitution, Rosanell also reaffirmed its fundamental truth. What makes our country great is not that we are perfect, but that with time, courage and effort, we can become more perfect. What makes America special is our capacity to change…
…I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts. Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act. Our state leaders and legislatures must make it easier — not harder — for more Americans to have their voices heard. Above all, we must exercise our right as citizens to vote, for the truth is that too often we disenfranchise ourselves…
We finally have the president we thought we elected: one who talks directly and forcefully about race and human rights.
When President Obama took the podium at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P. in Philadelphia last month, he sounded like the leader I’ve been waiting to hear since his first inauguration in 2009. It was almost as if Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” and the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. had hacked his computer and collaborated on his speech.
Many of Mr. Obama’s admirers and critics have hungered for straight talk on race since he his election. But since taking office, the president had been skittish on the subject and had mostly let it lapse into disturbing silence.
As we prepare to mark the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this country continues to grapple with what feels like an onslaught of black death.
But now we are doing it with a president — our first African-American president — who has found a confident voice on race…
But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people…
Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?
A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?
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Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigration activist. His new documentary “White People,” which airs tonight on MTV, follows Mr. Vargas as he travels the country speaking to young people about issues of race, particularly what it means to be white and experience white privilege. Because, Mr. Vargas said, “You cannot have a conversation about race in this country and not include white people in it.”
The documentary is part of MTV’s Look Different campaign, which aims to erase hidden gender, racial and anti-LGBT bias and uses data from a 2014 MTV survey of 14- to 24-year-olds that found that people in this age group are more tolerant and diverse than previous generations but are uncomfortable talking about race and adhere to the ideal of color blindness.
Mr. Vargas spoke about the controversy surrounding the documentary, Donald Trump’s comments about immigration and Rachel Dolezal. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:…
…Q. What is your definition of white privilege?
A. I think people get tripped up by the word “privilege.” I’m talking about systematic institutionalized differences. I had a lot of people writing me emails saying, I’m not privileged. For example, this weekend I was with Martin O’Malley in front of progressive liberal activists. Responding to the “Black Lives Matter” protest at the conference, he said: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” And the audience, which was diverse, gasped. They actually booed him. Because institutionally, if you look at incarceration rates, if you look at the criminal justice system, black people are at a disadvantage. So the moment he said that, he took it back and apologized. And some people took offense to that. Why did Martin O’Malley have to apologize for saying white lives matter? And this woman on Twitter was genuinely hurt; her tweet to me was, “My white life matters.” And I tweeted back at her and I was like, “Of course it does.” Of course it does, but your life mattering has been a given…
…Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?
A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?
Q. What do you think about Rachel Dolezal?
A. For me, that’s an example of what white privilege is. She can pass. There are many black people who can say that they are white as much as they can but who will never look physically white…
