Mixed Race Studies

What it’s like growing up mixed race in Scotland

The Social
BBC
2020-07-15

Aleisha Omeike, The Social contributor

Aleisha details her experience of growing up as a mixed-race person in Glasgow.

I grew up in an overwhelmingly white neighbourhood. I hated being different. Throughout my childhood, I would navigate and shape my racial identity based solely on my white Scottish heritage, often dismissing or denying my Black African roots.

I remember the first time I experienced racial abuse. I was around 5 years of age and I was at school. I had come out into the playground after lunch. Some girls in the year below me were pointing directly at me, shouting and dancing, calling me “blackie”. Turns out, that was just the start.

Since then, I have been labelled almost every racial slur in the book. The most common of these slurs is “half caste”. People do not realise how offensive “half caste” is. Calling someone half of anything is dehumanising and derogatory.

Throughout my childhood, I have been asked where I am from and people would not accept my answer. I grew up in a small town in North Lanarkshire. People found that fact hard to believe because of my skin colour…

Read the entire story here.

Unsung hero: As a pioneering attorney and judge, Elreta Alexander-Ralston left indelible mark on civil rights, criminal justice reform

The News & Record
Greensboro, North Carolina
2021-12-19

Nancy McLaughlin

GREENSBORO — Former attorney and District Court Judge Elreta Alexander-Ralston was known for the sheer force of her personality and style.

Outspoken. Flamboyant. Fierce. Unforgettable. Bold. She had an air of authority about her that left no doubt who was in charge.

And oh the stories, said historian and UNCG fellow Virginia Summey, the author of a new biography of the history-making judge.

“I can’t imagine I will have as much fun on another book,” Summey said.

Summey was watching an oral-history interview with Alexander-Ralston when she heard the judge say she hired legendary attorney F. Lee Bailey to defend her over a judicial complaint.

“She would say something in her oral history and I could say, that could not be true,” Summey said. “But it was.”

With Bailey, it was the drama of her driving to Massachusetts and showing up at his front door, Summey said.

“I called him right before he died and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, Elreta…,” Summey said, of the story he would go on to tell about her hiring him.

“The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts” is available through pre-order from the University of Georgia Press and includes her years at Dudley High School and N.C. A&T. Alexander-Ralston built her legal reputation as Elreta Alexander.

Alexander-Ralston died in 1998 and is remembered for an unusual career pioneering legal reform among an impressive list of firsts, including the first Black woman in the nation to sit on the bench who was elected by voters…

Read the entire article here.

Ijoma Mangold: “I was a Wagner fan already at 15”

Exberliner
Berlin, Germany
2022-01-06

Alexander Wells

Photo: Christian Werner

Ijoma Mangold is a man who speaks his mind. One of Germany’s top literary critics, he currently lives in Berlin as the culture and politics correspondent for Die Zeit, while featuring regularly on German television and on literary prize juries. Late last year, DAS Editions published his memoir about growing up biracial in 1970s Heidelberg, The German Crocodile, in an award-winning English translation by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. This compelling work covers Mangold’s relationship with his single mother, his burgeoning passion for German literature, the belated appearance of his father and formative visits he made to both Nigeria and the USA. The narrative is shaped throughout by Mangold’s subtle literary touch, his understated wit – and a fierce intellectual independence.

What led you to write a book about your youth?

The catalyst was the death of my mother in 2010. That triggered a lot of beautiful, even idyllic memories of my childhood, including ones I didn’t know I had. So I began writing about that. But then I realised that the reader would be wondering, with all this talk about a mother and child – where is the father? I would have to explain that. It became clear that this was the essential story of the book: what it means to grow up in a completely idyllic German setting when you look different, have an unusual first name, and don’t have a father around. I also quickly realised I was bringing some tonalities and perspectives that aren’t exactly typical for this genre. Which is to say that my book isn’t one of accusation, or of trauma. On the contrary, I had an extraordinarily happy childhood. And I wouldn’t say that I really experienced racism. Still, as a child, I had this growing consciousness of being different that I carried around with me…

Read the entire interview here.

An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World

University of Georgia Press
2022-01-15
272 pages
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6076-8
Paperback ISBN: 9-780-8203-6078-2

Andrew N. Wegmann, Associate Professor of History
Delta State University, Cleveland, Mississippi

For decades, scholars have conceived of the coastal city of New Orleans as a remarkable outlier, an exception to nearly every “rule” of accepted U.S. historiography. American only by adoption, New Orleans, in most studies, serves as a frontier town of the circum-Caribbean-a vestige of North America’s European colonial era along the southern coast of a foreign, northern, insular United States. Beneath that, too, many have argued, a complex algorithm of racial mixtures was at work well into the nineteenth century, a complexity of racial understanding and treatment that almost every scholar to date has claimed simply did not exist within the more “American” states further north and outside the bounds of the Caribbean’s bizarre socioracial influence.

The reality, as An American Color explains, is that on the surface, New Orleans did have a racial and social system that confounded the more prudent and established black-white binary at work in the social rhetoric of the British-descended states further north. But this was not unique, especially within the United States. As Andrew N. Wegmann argues, New Orleans is representative of a place with different words for the same practices found throughout the North American continent and the Atlantic world. From New Orleans to Charleston and Richmond, the social construction of race remained constant and Atlantic in nature, predicated on a complex, socially infused, multitier system of prescribed racial value that challenged and sometimes abandoned preordained definitions of “black” and “white” for an assortment of fluid but meaningful designations in between. New Orleans is thus an entry point for the study of color in an Atlantic United States.

Black Indians and Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816-1916

University of Illinois Press
December 2021
256 pages
6 black & white photographs, 2 maps, 3 tables
6 x 9 in.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-04421-2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-08625-0

Christina Dickerson-Cousin, Assistant Professor of History
Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut

The union of Native Americans and a black church institution

Often seen as ethnically monolithic, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in fact successfully pursued evangelism among diverse communities of indigenous peoples and Black Indians. Christina Dickerson-Cousin tells the little-known story of the AME Church’s work in Indian Territory, where African Methodists engaged with people from the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles) and Black Indians with various ethnic backgrounds. These converts proved receptive to the historically black church due to its traditions of self-government and resistance to white hegemony, and its strong support of their interests. The ministers, guided by the vision of a racially and ethnically inclusive Methodist institution, believed their denomination the best option for the marginalized people. Dickerson-Cousin also argues that the religious opportunities opened up by the AME Church throughout the West provided another impetus for black migration.

Insightful and richly detailed, Black Indians and Freedmen illuminates how faith and empathy encouraged the unique interactions between two peoples.

Racial Passing in Early Modern England

Online- via Zoom
2022-01-20, 17:30-19:00Z (12:30-14:00 EST)

Lubaaba Al-Azami, Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Lubaaba al-Azami (@lubaabanama) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Liverpool, funded by the AHRC NWCDTP. Her research project is a decolonial and feminist consideration of early modern English encounters with Mughal Indian imperial femininity, exploring English theatrical and travel literature alongside Mughal royal memoirs. She is founder of Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs), an AHRC NWCDTP-funded collaborative digital resource on early English encounters with the Islamic worlds.

All welcome. This event is free but booking is required.

For more information and to register, click here.

How Pearl Hobson became the most popular African-American dancer and singer in Imperial Russia in the 1900s

Face2Face Africa
2021-07-15

Mildred Europa Taylor, Head of Content

Pearl Hobson poster, 1909. Public domain image

Pearl Hobson was among a number of African-American performers who left the United States in the 1900s to somewhat escape racism. At the time, groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers were making waves abroad due to the popularity of African-American culture through performance art. Hobson also wanted to profit from the situation. And so she did as she became the most popular African-American dancer and singer in Imperial Russia.

The “Mulatto Sharpshooter,” as she was known, wowed elite audiences from St. Petersburg to Moscow by 1909 while living much of this period in Odessa, Ukraine in Southern Russia, as stated by one account. Not much is known about Hobson’s background. Born on July 7, 1879 in Lisbon, Bedford County, Virginia — even though some say she was born in Roanoke, Virginia — she worked as a maid before becoming a member of the Fencing Musketeers (also known as the Fencing Octoroons and Les Mousquetaires Noirs) which consisted of 11 Black women…

Read the entire article here.

The German Crocodile: A Literary Memior (Das Deutsche Krokodil)

DAS Editions
November 2021 (originally published in 2017)
366 pages
Hardcover 978-1838221508
eBook ISBN : 978-1838221515

Ijoma Mangold (Translated into English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp)

In this compelling memoir of growing up different, Ijoma Mangold, today one of Germany’s best literary critics, remembers his youth in 1970s Heidelberg and the new Federal Republic, and momentous visits in early adulthood to the USA and Nigeria.

His own story is inextricably linked with that of his mother, a German from the eastern province of Silesia, forced to escape as a refugee in the expulsions from 1944, and to start afresh in utter poverty in West Germany. His Nigerian father came to Germany to train in pediatric surgery but returned before Ijoma was old enough to remember him. His reappearance on the scene forces a crash collision with an unknown culture, one he grew up suspicious of, and a new complex family history to come to terms with. Mangold explores many existential questions in this lively narrative; How does a boy cope with an absent father? What was it like to grow up ‘bi-racial’ in the Federal Republic? Was he an opportunist, a master adaptor who had over-assimilated? What is the relationship between race and class? And what is more unusual in Germany: having dark skin or a passion for Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner? Ijoma shares his story with its dramatic twists and turns, not forgetting the surprises he uncovers about himself along the way.

Passing: A Film Discussion with Director/Writer Rebecca Hall and Actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga

National Museum of African American History and Culture
Thursday, 2022-01-13 19:00-19:40 EST (Local Time); (Friday, 2022-01-14, 00:00-00:40Z)

Join us in the New Year for a virtual discussion with Netflix film Passing screenwriter and director Rebecca Hall, alongside actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. Based on Nella Larsen’s novel of the same name, Hall’s directorial debut explores not just racial identity but gender, class, the responsibilities of motherhood and the performance of femininity from the perspective of two Black women who choose to live on opposite sides of the color line in 1929 New York. For Rebecca Hall, creating Passing was a deeply personal journey, stemming from the discovery of her own family history. NMAAHC Curator Aaron Bryant will moderate the discussion. This program will be pre-recorded, and there will be no live Q & A. Passing is available now on Netflix.

Watch the discussion here.

Passing for Racial Democracy

The Baffler
2021-12-06

Stephanie Reist

The complexities of the color line in the U.S. and Brazil

A CENTRAL POINT OF TENSION between Irene Redfield (played by Tessa Thompson) and her husband Dr. Brian Redfield (André Holland) in Rebecca Hall’s Passing, based on the Nella Larsen novel of the same name, is whether their family should remain in the United States. While Irene can pass for white out of convenience, the same is not true of her darker sons and her husband, who routinely informs his children about lynchings and white violence. Irene disapproves of this talk, despite her work for the Negro Welfare League. In one pivotal scene, she drives her tired husband home after a long day of visiting patients, and the couple discuss going to South America, specifically mentioning Brazil. The issue returns when the couple fights over the consuming role that Clare (Ruth Negga)—who has chosen to pass as white to the point of marrying a bigoted white husband and having a daughter with him—exerts in their lives and marriage.

In Larsen’s novel, Brian’s longing for Brazil, which becomes conflated with what Irene perceives as his desire for the effervescent, delightfully dangerous Clare, is even more pronounced: Brazil is the one that got away, Brian’s lost hope for a society where he and other black members of the talented tenth could be judged by their merits, not lynched because they failed to stay in their place. Irene even implicitly sanctions an affair between her husband and Clare to assuage her guilt for denying her family the chance to be truly “happy, or free, or safe”—a state she laments as impossible when speaking to Clare about her choice not to pass…

Read the entire article here.