Mixed Race Studies

Girl in need of bone marrow highlights shortage of mixed-race donors

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-13

Vikki Ortiz Healy

When doctors told Michelle Trujillo in July that her 6-year-old daughter would need a bone marrow transplant to save her life, the Crystal Lake mother didn’t want to wait another minute before getting her only child back to health.

But months later, Sophia — who has aplastic anemia, a rare disorder that impairs her immunity — is still waiting for a donor match. Meanwhile, Trujillo says she lies in bed at night making mental lists of places to try to find a donor with similar multiracial heritage to her daughter’s — a group with a strikingly low match rate.

“I don’t sleep at night. I think of, ‘What can I do now? Who can I contact now?’ ” said Trujillo, whose daughter is half Filipino, as well as Irish, Spanish and Italian. “One match is all we need, but it’s like a needle in a haystack.”

The Trujillos’ predicament highlights a nationwide paradox that has troubled medical experts and families awaiting transplants for years: despite the ever-growing diversity in the United States, there are not enough minority and multiracial donors registered and available for patients in need…

Read the entire article here.

Suit filed over mix-up at Downers Grove sperm bank is dismissed

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-03

Clifford Ward

A judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by an Ohio woman against a west suburban sperm bank whose clerical error resulted in the birth of her mixed-race daughter.

DuPage County Judge Ronald Sutter tossed the suit after lawyers for Midwest Sperm Bank argued that the woman’s claims lacked legal merit. But the judge said Jennifer Cramblett of Uniontown, Ohio, could refile her lawsuit under a negligence claim.

Cramblett, who did not attend Thursday’s hearing, filed suit last year against the Downers Grove-based sperm bank alleging wrongful birth and breach of warranty following the birth of her daughter, who is of African-American ancestry.

Cramblett and her same-sex partner purchased sperm with the understanding that it was from a Caucasian donor, but later discovered that the sperm bank had sent material from an African-American donor. The mistake was caused by a clerical error, and the bank later issued an apology and a partial refund…

Read the entire article here.

Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 661, Number 1, September 2015
pages 8-22
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215591476

W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

In August 2012, nine months after being artificially inseminated using a sperm donation from the Midwest Sperm Bank of Downers Grove, Illinois, a white Ohio woman named Jennifer Cramblett gave birth to a racially “mixed” and healthy baby girl named Payton. Despite the triumph, the woman soon filed a “wrongful birth” suit in Cook County Circuit Court, alleging that the sperm bank gave her sperm vials from an African American donor instead of a white donor, which in turn caused “personal injuries . . . pain, suffering, emotional distress and other economic and non-economic losses” (Circuit Court 2014, 8). The lawsuit states “that they now live each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton’s future” (Circuit Court 2014, 6).

The supposed racial mismatch between parent and child in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank reveals the presence of two powerful belief systems that haunt both the popular imagination and stalk the scientific landscape: the notions of “biological determinism” (that race is genetically inherited) and “racial essentialism” (that group-based biology maps to basic social behaviors). Together, biological determinism and racial essentialism form the “ideological double helix” that intertwines to shape beliefs about race and inequality and influence the theoretical approaches, analytic strategies, and interpretations taken by scholars conducting biomedical and social scientific research. The suit turns on the assumption that varied racial groups have bounded and characteristically unique arrangements of genetic material: as the complaint contends, “Their desire was to find a donor with genetic traits similar to both of them” (Circuit Court 2014, 2–3). Such devotion to racial essentialism motivates a belief that the two white parents in this case are more similar to each other (because of their shared “whiteness”) than they are to their child (because of an unknown “black” father), even though the…

Read or purchase the article here.

5 black Chicagoans who passed for white

The Chicago Sun-Times
2015-06-16

Kim Janssen, Staff Reporter

A baseball player who broke baseball’s color line decades before Jackie Robinson was born.

A pioneering politician who has a West Side school named after him.

An Emmy-winning “blonde bombshell.”

A poet at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.

And a brilliant novelist who wrote a noted novel on “passing.”

Unlike Rachel Dolezal — the white Spokane, Washington, NAACP head who has become the U.S.’s biggest viral news story after she was exposed for lying about her past to pose as a black woman — all five of these sometime Chicagoans were black. But just like Dolezal, they spent at least part of their lives pretending to be something they weren’t, historians now suspect.

Baseball player William Edward White, politician Oscar DePriest, bandleader Ina Ray Hutton, poet Jean Toomer and writer Nella Larsen all at times passed as white, it’s believed.

It’s part of the history that makes Dolezal’s masquerade so fascinating to many Americans: for centuries, African-Americans were far more likely to attempt to pass as white than the reverse. Writing in “Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life” in 1927, one of Dolezal’s predecessors at the NAACP, William Pickens, vividly described how both the violent threat of racism and the lure of white privilege exacted a powerful pull toward passing for black Americans who were able:

“If passing for white will get a fellow better accommodations on the train, better seats in the theatre, immunity from insults in public places, and may even save his life from a mob, only idiots would fail to seize the advantage of passing, at least occasionally if not permanently.”

Passing, which had mostly died out by the latter part of the 20th century, also came with a series of heavy costs: families broken by one relative’s denial of their ties to another; the constant fear of exposure; and the psychological damage of denying one’s true identity. But for these five Chicagoans, it may have been a compromise they felt forced to make…

Read the entire article here.

Chicago’s Jazz Age still lives in Archibald Motley’s art

The Chicago Tribune
2015-03-20

Howard Reich

Where does Chicago’s Jazz Age still live? In the paintings of Archibald Motley, on view in a new exhibition

Trumpets blared, saxophones thundered, singers belted and dancers swayed from nighttime to past sunup.

Walk along “the Stroll” — a very hot stretch of State Street from 31st to 35th streets — and you could hear and feel the music without so much as stepping inside any of the clubs, saloons, cafes, cabarets, theaters and whatnot. Nearby boulevards shook with the music, as well, for no place on Earth swung harder than the South Side of Chicago during the Jazz Age.

Roughly speaking, the epoch when Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Joe “King” Oliver and other jazz immortals lit up Chicago began in 1910, when Morton arrived from New Orleans, and extended into the 1950s.

Few of us around today were there in the Roaring ’20s heyday, but we’re fortunate that Archibald John Motley Jr. walked “the Stroll,” heard the music, ogled the dancers, treasured the proceedings and captured the scene for all time — on canvas. That glorious fact radiates from every corner of a newly opened exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” (curated by Richard J. Powell and running through Aug. 31)…

…And though the subject is music, the theme surely is the meaning of race.

“In all my paintings where you see a group of people you’ll notice that they’re all a little different color,” Motley once said in an oral history interview. “They’re not all the same color, they’re not all black, they’re not as they used to say years ago, high yellow, they’re not all brown. I try to give each of them character as individuals.”

That respect for humanity issues from all of Motley’s jazz paintings and, of course, from the music itself. Like the range of complexions in Motley’s work, jazz emerged at the turn of the previous century as a heady mix of African-American and Creole cultures in New Orleans, these societies rubbing up against one another in church, in street parades and in the city’s Storyville vice district. The shuttering of that collection of brothels and other nightspots in 1917 drove Crescent City musicians north to Chicago, where Motley — who similarly was born in New Orleans and came to Chicago in his youth — was ready to see and hear them…

Read the entire article here.

Jewish tent widens as diversity grows

The Chicago Tribune
2014-12-16

Bonnie Miller Rubin, Reporter

Ellen Zemel (left) lends a hand for a symbolic lighting of a menorah for Hanukkah during a party for parents and children of Project Esther: The Chicago Jewish Adoption Network of the Jewish Child & Family Services, at the Elain Kersten Children’s Center in Northbrook. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)

‘The tribe’ expands to include children of many ethnicities

Meira and Tyler Burnett look forward to their family’s annual Hanukkah party, when they will light the menorah and enjoy traditional potato pancakes, called latkes.

The siblings, ages 11 and 14, respectively, also will sing in the children’s choir at B’nai Yehuda Beth Shalom, where four of the eight participants are African-American — just like them.

“When I tell friends at school that I’m Jewish, they don’t believe me,” said Meira, at the Homewood synagogue. “But that’s what I am.”

The American Jewish population has always been overwhelmingly white, with Central or Eastern European roots — synonymous with matzo ball soup, bagels, Maxwell Street pushcarts and “Seinfeld” — and it’s common to hear Jewish people refer to themselves as members of “the tribe.”

But today, as Jews prepare to celebrate Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday that begins Tuesday, the tribe looks different, because of interracial marriages, adoptions and conversions. And while the white majority still holds true, experts say more racial and ethnic diversity can be found across the spectrum of Judaism.

“There’s more variety of narratives than ever before,” said Chava Shervington, president of The Jewish Multicultural Network. The Philadelphia-based organization started in 1997 with 20 families and has grown to more than 950 members and almost 3,000 Facebook followers, she said. Its tag line: “Because Jews come in all colors.”

The increase in diversity is difficult to quantify. The Chicago Jewish Population Study, conducted every decade by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, first asked about race in 2010. It found that 4 percent (or 5,600 Jewish households) are multiracial, including black, Hispanic, Asian and biracial members…

Read the entire article here or here.

Lawsuit: Wrong sperm delivered to lesbian couple

The Chicago Tribune
2014-10-01

Meredith Rodriguez, Tribune reporter

A white Ohio woman is suing a Downers Grove-based sperm bank, alleging that the company mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor, a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter in an all-white community.

Jennifer Cramblett, of Uniontown, Ohio, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court that Midwest Sperm Bank sent her the vials of an African-American donor’s sperm in September 2011 instead of those of a white donor that she and her white partner had ordered.

After searching through pages of comprehensive histories for their top three donors, the lawsuit claims, Cramblett and her domestic partner, Amanda Zinkon, chose donor No. 380, who was also white. Their doctor in Ohio received vials from donor No. 330, who is African-American, the lawsuit said.

Cramblett, 36, learned of the mistake in April 2012, when she was pregnant and ordering more vials so that the couple could have another child with sperm from the same donor, according to the lawsuit. The sperm bank delivered vials from the correct donor in August 2011, but Cramblett later requested more vials, according to the suit…

…”On August 21, 2012, Jennifer gave birth to Payton, a beautiful, obviously mixed-race baby girl,” the lawsuit states. “Jennifer bonded with Payton easily and she and Amanda love her very much. Even so, Jennifer lives each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton’s future.”

Raising a mixed-race daughter has been stressful in Cramblett and Zinkon’s small, all-white community, according to the suit. Cramblett was raised around people with stereotypical attitudes about nonwhites, the lawsuit states, and did not know African-Americans until she attended college at the University of Akron…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial couples now part of mainstream

The Chicago Tribune
2013-10-23

Dawn Turner Trice, Reporter

Mixed-race relationships becoming more common in Chicago — and everywhere else

Stephen Blessman and Patricia Jones Blessman met in the mid-1990s and fell in love. It didn’t matter to either of them that he’s white and she’s African-American.

They have a lot in common. They are both Roman Catholic and deeply involved in the church. They came of age in the 1960s and are socially conscious.

“But we didn’t get married to prove a point,” said Blessman, 57, who lives with his wife of 14 years and their 5-year-old son in Chicago’s South Loop. “I fell in love with her because she’s funny, beautiful, smart and principled and we’re of the same generation and have the same values.”

As an interracial couple in America, the Blessmans are a relatively rare pairing — but such couples are not nearly as rare as they used to be. A study by the Pew Research Center found that in 2010 about 15 percent of all new marriages in the U.S. were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity — more than double the 6.7 percent in 1980.

The surge has brought the percentage of all current U.S. marriages that are interracial to 8.4 percent. In Chicago, about 7.4 percent of marriages in 2011 involved mixed-race couples, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies at Northern Illinois University…

…Even in politics, where for many years it was considered a drawback to be in an interracial relationship, there’s been a shift. In New York City, Bill de Blasio, a white man married to a black woman, is the front-runner in the mayoral race. In Illinois, two prominent white political figures, Gov. Pat Quinn and former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, are dating black women. And of course, President Barack Obama is the product of an interracial marriage.

Even so, experts say modern mixed-race relationships, like the country’s racial past, can be complicated.

“When I research in white communities across the class division and the country, people say they’re fine with interracial relationships,” said Erica Chito Childs, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center.

“But they also say, ‘Why do it? Marriage is difficult enough. Why make it more difficult?’ You hear about young people growing up in a more multiracial world and being so much more accepting, but the majority says dating is fine, marriage is not.”

She said that many young people still live in racially homogenous neighborhoods and their first pool of partners tends to reflect that. In addition, first marriages are often more closely tied to the expectations of family and community members…

…The Pew Research Center study released last year, using 2010 data, is the most recent major look at interracial relationships. It found that among new marriages in 2010, Asians were the group most likely to intermarry, at 27.7 percent. Hispanics were next at 25.7 percent, then blacks at 17.1 percent and whites at 9.4 percent. For the Pew study, marriages between two people who are mixed-race weren’t considered interracial.

In Chicago, the most common interracial marriages in 2011 were between Asians and whites. Those types of pairings were about four times more likely than black-white marriages, according to data compiled by the Center for Governmental Studies, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

Laura Kina, 40, is Japanese-American and white. For the past 16 years she has been married to Mitch Aronson, 54, who’s white and Jewish. She grew up as an evangelical Christian in a small Seattle suburb of Norwegian immigrants, and converted to Judaism after marrying. She said she’s always identified as a person of color…

…Online dating has made it easier for people who want to date interracially but don’t work together or hang out in racially diverse circles.

“It provides a safe space for people who are afraid of rejection and don’t feel comfortable walking up to someone of a different race and asking them out,” said Hunter College’s Childs, the author of “Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture.”…

Read the entire article here.

2nd Story’s “Cruel Summer” Ends Up Sweet

Gapers Block
Chicago, Illinois
2013-08-01

Ines Bellina

The night’s theme may have been “Cruel Summer: Stories of Learning the Hard Way,” but 2nd Story‘s first-ever appearance at City Winery last Monday gave audience members the giddy feeling of a summer fling. Combining storytelling and live music against the backdrop of the gorgeous City Winery stage, the event was perhaps one of the most carefully crafted storytelling soirees of the season. Director and curator Jess Kadish turned a mundane Monday evening into one hell of a summer bash…

…Take the second storyteller, Khanisha Foster. Her heartbreaking (and often laugh-out-loud funny) account of trying to make it as an actor despite her ethnically ambiguous looks showcased her chameleon-like ability to imitate everyone from a shady theater director to Gilda Radner. Foster’s performance was easily the most bittersweet of the night. Her vulnerability was palpable as she described the struggles of wanting to be seen as a talented thespian while being obscured by her “Latina” looks. (Foster’s mother is white and her father is black.) Her versatility as an actor allowed her to easily transition from one character to another, making the piece even more poignant…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race teens talk about identity

The Mash: For teens, by teens
2012-11-15

Kaylah Sosa
Homewood-Flossmoor High School, Flossmoor, Illinois

Chris Pieper
Whitney Young Magnet High School, Chicago, Illinois

Megan Fu
Buffalo Grove, Buffalo Grove, Illinois

Rosemary Anguiano
Whitney Young Magnet High School, Chicago, Illinois

The Mash is a weekly newspaper and Web site that is here to serve you, the Chicago-area teenager.

The paper is distributed for free each Thursday at Chicago-area high schools and is written largely by high school students. Our student contributors influence most of the paper’s coverage, so it’s a publication and Web site created for you, about you and, most important, by you.

Mixed-race teens share their personal perspectives on how they view themselves—and how others view their mixed-race heritage. These essays were part of the cover story, “Outside the box,” about how mixed-race teens identify themselves on college applications in the Nov. 15, 2012 issue of The Mash.

I get two common questions in my life. One: “Are you related to Sammy Sosa?” And two: “You’re mixed, right?” The former is annoying, and I would like to make a public plea for people to stop asking.  The latter is a bit more complicated. Yes, I’m –mixed. I know I don’t look it. You don’t need to point it out.

My dad’s Mexican and my mom is black. The color of my skin could fool you, but the defined curls of my shiny, long hair might give it away. My dad calls me a chameleon. I went to a mostly Hispanic elementary school, and when I was around his side of the family, I looked Mexican. But when I was over with my mom’s family, or in a mostly black school like I am now, I look black. It’s kind of fun being able to play both fields.

When someone asks the oddly worded question, “What are you?” I reply with “Black and Mexican.” That ruffles a few people’s feathers. “You look black,” people sometimes tell me. “If you look black, you are. None of that mixed garbage.”

But by embracing my Latina heritage, I’m not shirking my African American heritage. I grew up with a Mexican father in a Mexican neighborhood. As far as I know, that qualifies me to be on the Latina team. Apart from the ignorance of everyday encounters, I’ve found my ethnicities coming heavily into play while filling out college apps. Race? Black/African American. Hispanic or not? Hispanic. I could put “mixed” and go through the whole song and dance, but I’d rather not. If they ask about Hispanic heritage, I just say I have it…

Read the entire article here.