Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Movie of the Week: Lost Boundaries

    Movie of the Week: Lost Boundaries

    LIFE
    1949-07-04
    pages 64-66


    THE DOCTOR’S SON, who has just learned he is part Negro looks at the half-moons on his nails for telltale shadows–a widely believed but completely inaccurate test of Negro blood.

    Film tells real-life story of Negroes “passing” as whites

    Dr. Albert Johnston (below) of Keene, N.H. is a prosperous New England physician who was a Negro for the first 28 years of his life, lived as a white man for 20 more and became a Negro again when the U.S. Navy, having investigated his past, refused him a commission for “inability to meet physical requirements.” The story of what Negroes call his “passing” is not too different from that of thousands of other technically “colored” Americans who have passed over the invisible boundary to the white race. Told by William L. White in a widely read Reader’s Digest article in 1947,  it has now been made into an honest and affecting movie by Louis de Rochemont. Using the documentary technique he popularized in Hollywood (The House on 92nd Street, Boomerang!), De Rochemont filmed Lost Boundaries against the real background of New England towns. As fictionalized for the screen, it tells of a light-skinned Negro couple (played by white actors) driven to cross the color line by poverty and the advice of friends, and of the vexations of discrimination. They build a happy but insecure life in a small town, gaining the respect and friendship of their neighbors and bringing up children in ignorance of their past. Their lives are disrupted when they have to admit the truth, but finally patched together again by tolerance and courage and good sense. Related without melodrama, acted with conviction and force, Lost Boundaries is a direct and honest account of one shadowy sector of American life where unknown thousands live today in secret conflict of loyalties and fears…

    Read the entire article here.

  • White America’s Obama-era freakout: What research can tell us about racial animus since 2008

    White America’s Obama-era freakout: What research can tell us about racial animus since 2008

    Salon
    2016-04-17

    Sean McElwee

    The election of America’s first black president somehow led even more conservative whites to change parties

    Racism may be the single most important feature of contemporary American politics and the key to understanding the Obama Presidency. This is not to say that other things don’t matter: class, gender, religion, region all certainly affect political views. But if you want to understand the broad contours of American politics today, you need to examine race. Previously, I’ve argued that whites are rapidly leaving the Democratic Party because of racism. But in his new book, “Post-Racial or Most-Racial,” political scientist Michael Tesler makes a powerful argument that race has affected even seemingly non-racial parts of American society…

    Read the entire article here.

  • With ‘Keanu,’ Key & Peele Break Into Feature Films — With Kittens in Tow

    With ‘Keanu,’ Key & Peele Break Into Feature Films — With Kittens in Tow

    The New York Times
    2016-04-20

    Dave Itzkoff, Culture Reporter

    There is no longer “Key & Peele,” the razor-sharp Comedy Central sketch series that ended in September. There are only Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the comic actors and writers who used the five seasons of that show to shine a satirical spotlight on racial stereotypes and injustice (not to mention the increasingly distinctive names of college football players). And so the two men started pursuing their individual career paths.

    A few months later, those paths have brought Mr. Key and Mr. Peele back together on their first movie, “Keanu,” which Warner Bros. will release on Friday, April 29. In this comedy, they star as cousins in Los Angeles who take in an adorable kitten they name Keanu. (It can mean “cool breeze,” too, you know.) But, unaware that Keanu once belonged to a notorious drug lord, the strait-laced pair must navigate the city’s criminal underbelly to reclaim Keanu when he is stolen from them.

    …There’s a running idea in “Keanu” about black men who don’t fit traditional stereotypes having to navigate a world of stereotypical characters. Is that drawn in any way from your real-life experiences?

    PEELE Part of it is a commentary on the lack of representation in movies. Certainly, there’s an overwhelming amount of stereotypes in movies. We’ve placed ourselves in a more typical world of Hollywood stereotypes.

    KEY African-American culture’s not a monolith. You could take 56 pictures, and there’s one picture where you make this face [contorts his features], and that’s the picture they pick. “He loves to make that face!” No, dude, you didn’t look at the other 55 pictures. If we’re black nerds, we write from a point of view being black nerds. But we’re still African-American. In my life, it’s been frustrating when someone says, “You’re not black enough.” And I’m going: I’m black enough to not get that cab you also didn’t get. They didn’t pick me up either…

    Read the entire article here.

  • How poet Ariana Brown became the Afro-Latina role model she needed

    How poet Ariana Brown became the Afro-Latina role model she needed

    Poetry
    PBS NewsHour
    2016-02-08

    Corinne Segal, Online Arts Reporter/Producer


    Poet Ariana Brown. Photo by Christopher Diaz

    Poet Ariana Brown is the role model she needed.

    Growing up in San Antonio, Brown said she struggled to find other representations of herself — an Afro-Latina woman from a working class family — both in her community and literature.

    “I remember reading books and being so invested in the characters and the story, and then I would get to a certain line in the story where it would describe what the character looked like. And then I would realize, this book is not talking about me,” she said. “Part of my work is to always go back for little girl Ariana and figure out what it is she needed that she didn’t get.”

    In high school, Brown picked up the autobiography of Malcolm X. He was “someone who was also working class, from a poor family, a family of color, who didn’t have access to opportunities, who came from a neighborhood where you weren’t expected to excel,” she said.

    Reading about the way Malcolm X used language to command attention gave her a road map for her own future, she said…

    …Brown’s poem “Inhale: The Ceremony” speaks to her relationship to her ancestors, a history that she said is often unacknowledged or disrespected. “I’m never racialized as Latina. I’m always racialized as black. My whole identity isn’t acknowledged [and] I’m assumed to be an outsider in almost every space I enter. That is a very isolating feeling,” she said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Colorism

    Colorism

    The Podcast
    Stuff Mom Never Told You
    2016-04-13

    Cristen Conger, Co-host

    Caroline Ervin, Co-host

    Why does lighter skin improve women’s chances of getting through school, getting a job and getting married? Cristen and Caroline explore the historical roots, repercussions and cross-cultural shades of colorism around the world.

    Listen to the episode (00:48:48) here. Download the episode here.

  • Our love was colour blind… but our families weren’t

    Our love was colour blind… but our families weren’t

    The Daily Mail
    London, United Kingdom
    2016-02-05

    Diana Appleyard and Clare Goldwin

    Deeply moving, and exposing tensions that still blight Britain today, mixed-race couples from four generations tell their stories

    ‘MY FATHER THREW ME OUT OF THE HOUSE’: 1940s MARY AND JAKE JACOBS

    Mary, 81, is married to Jake, 86, and lives in Solihull in the West Midlands. They have no children. Mary is a former deputy head teacher, and Jake worked for the post office before retiring. Mary is white and Jake is black, originally from Trinidad.

    MARY SAYS: When I told my father I was going to marry Jake he said, ‘If you marry that man you will never set foot in this house again.’

    He was horrified that I could contemplate marrying a black man, and I soon learned that most people felt the same way. The first years of our marriage living in Birmingham were hell — I cried every day, and barely ate. No one would speak to us, we couldn’t find anywhere to live because no one would rent to a black man, and we had no money. …

    Read the entire article here.

  • Shade∙ism

    Shade∙ism

    London South Bank University
    K2-VG10 Keyworth Street
    London, SE1 6NG, United Kingdom
    Thursday, 2016-04-21 17:30 BST (Local Time)

    Join us for this Black History Event organised by EquiNet, a network for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff at LSBU. This event is supported by the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Unit.

    This event brings together three speakers who will explore the social impact of gradations in skin tone. Skin colour is a potent signifier of both racial difference and sameness with the desire to have lighter skin evidenced by the increasing use of bleaching products across the globe. Shade∙ism or colourism is experienced intra-racially and is described as discrimination based on (darker) skin tone. The speakers take up the complexity of colourism by exploring skin bleaching and its relationship to shade∙ism. Can the colour complex be dealt with effectively or is it an age-old problem that won’t go away?

    Programme

    Skin Bleaching: is colourism to blame?
    Shirley Tate, Associate Professor in Race and Culture, Leeds University

    Shade∙ism: the age old issue that won’t go away
    Yvonne Robinson, Senior Research Fellow, Weeks Centre, LSBU

    The Colour Complex
    Kavyta Raghunandan, Commonwealth Institute

    Followed by a reception on the Mezzanine, Keyworth Centre

    For more information, click here.

  • The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle

    The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle

    Journal of Black Studies
    Published online before print 2016-03-21
    DOI: 10.1177/0021934716638802

    Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor in Sociology
    Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Critical Whiteness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades. Central to this project is the idea that if the processes of Whiteness can be uncovered, then they can be reasoned with and overcome, through rationale dialogue. This article will argue, however, that Whiteness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is beyond any rational engagement. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the two only British big budget movies about transatlantic slavery, Amazing Grace and Belle, the article argues that such films serve as the celluloid hallucinations that reinforce the psychosis of Whiteness. The features of this discourse that arose from the analysis included the lack of Black agency, distancing Britain from the horrors of slavery, and downplaying the role of racism.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • About Latino Whiteness…

    About Latino Whiteness…

    The NiLP Report on Latino Politics & Policy
    The National Institute for Latino Policy
    2016-04-10

    CONTENTS

    • “A Response to Linda Martín Alcoff’s ‘Latinos and the Category of Whiteness’” By Manuel Pastor (April 10, 2016)
    • “Reply to Manuel Pastor” by Linda Martín Alcoff (April 10, 2016)

    Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity
    University of Southern California

    Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
    City University of New York

    Read both essays here.

  • Mexican-Punjabis relation through dance

    Mexican-Punjabis relation through dance

    NewsGram
    2016-04-17

    Megha Sharma


    the performance held on 10th and 11th april credits: kalw.org

    Mexican-Punjabi is a vanishing tribe

    The United States had always been an open land to possibilities. It is visited by a huge number of immigrants every year. California which is not only a land of renowned universities, it consists of various fertile farmlands which gave opportunity to numerous Indians who wanted to have a hand in the agricultural field.

    It is recorded that through Canada many people from Punjabi communities came here to grow peach and plums. However, restrictive immigration stratagem didn’t allow these outsiders to find a wife in their countries. As a result, what came out were interracial marriages of these refugees and the native Mexican women who used to work in the farms.

    This gave rise to cultural amalgamation and this intermixing is now at the end of its league as the generations of this sub-culture are reaching the end of their lives. To overcome such a drastic loss a new dance series “Half and Halves” has been organised…

    Read the entire article here.