Mixed Race Studies

Homer Plessy: Pardon for ‘separate but equal’ civil rights figure

BBC News
2022-01-05

The governor of Louisiana has pardoned Homer Plessy, a 19th century black activist whose arrest 130 years ago led to one of the most criticised Supreme Court decisions in US history.

Plessy was arrested in 1892 after he purchased a ticket and refused to leave a whites-only train car in New Orleans.

In 1896, the top US court ruled against Plessy, clearing the way for Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South.

The pardon was spearheaded by the very office that sought charges against him.

After Plessy was removed from the train, his case – Plessy v Ferguson – wound up in front of the Supreme Court. The court ruled that accommodations can exist for different races – a doctrine dubbed “separate but equal“.

Their decision stood for decades, until the landmark 1954 Brown v Board of Education case helped begin to dismantle racial segregation laws..

Read the entire article here.

An Artist Discovers His Black Heritage Through Photography

VICE
2016-02-11

Beckett Mufson, Staff Writer

German-born photographer Zun Lee documents the special non-special moments of black family life.

In his late thirties, Zun Lee discovered that he was not the son of two Korean immigrants to Frankfurt, Germany, as he had believed for most of his life. He was the son of one Korean immigrant—his mother—and a black man he’s never met. He’s been struggling with this shift in identity ever since, most recently in the form of three documentary projects, Father Figure, Black Love Matters, and Fade Resistance. Each series examines an underrepresented facet of black culture, often actively fighting harmful stereotypes that Lee has encountered…

Read the entire article here.

When it comes to measuring race, the [United States] Census Bureau has repeatedly contorted its definitions and contradicted itself to uphold a specific image of whiteness. For instance, in 1890, “quadroon” and “octoroon” were added to the census to justify the discrimination of Black Americans, only for both to be removed in the following census and never used again. Similarly, in 1930, the census added a “Mexican” racial category, which was then eliminated in the next census, after the Mexican government lobbied to have those immigrants classified as white, therefore reinstating their eligibility for citizenship.

Jasmine Mithani and Alex Samuels, “Who The Census Misses,” FiveThirtyEight, December 13, 2021. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-the-census-misses/.

“Historically, these ideas serve to deny the presence of Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants. To say that they no longer exist, that they have been absorbed by the process of mestizaje,” says [Juliet] Hooker, who experienced this as a girl when her family moved from the Afro-Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, where she grew up, to its mostly mestizo capital. The people there rarely identified as Black, even the ones who looked like her, and repeatedly asked why she identified that way. In 2017, Hooker explored the origins and history of the mestizo myth in her book Theorizing Race in the Americas.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, “How the mixed-race mestizo myth warped science in Latin America,” Nature, December 13, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03622-z.

Sarawak’s mixed-race children struggle over ‘native’ identity

Free Malaysia Today
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
2022-01-05

Wong Pek Mei

PETALING JAYA: Alena Murang, who has mixed parentage, discovered only as an adult that she was not legally “native” in her homeland, Sarawak.

Alena, 32, a musician, songwriter and visual artist, said she and many others were oblivious to the issue. Her birth certificate said she was a Kelabit.

Her father Ose Murang, 67, is a Dayak Kelabit community leader and her mother is European.

“Only when I was an adult did I come to understand that in Sarawak, mixed children like myself are not legally native…

Read the entire article here.

Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era

University Press of Mississippi
2022-01-17
224 pages
13 b&w illustrations and 13 musical examples
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496836687
Paperback ISBN: 9781496836793

Juanita Karpf, Lecturer of Music
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

A groundbreaking rediscovery of a classically trained innovator and powerful teacher who set milestones for African American singers and musicians

In Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era, Juanita Karpf rediscovers the career of Black activist E. Azalia Hackley (1867–1922), a concert artist, nationally famous music teacher, and charismatic lecturer. Growing up in Black Detroit, she began touring as a pianist and soprano soloist while only in her teens. By the late 1910s, she had toured coast-to-coast, earning glowing reviews. Her concert repertoire consisted of an innovative blend of spirituals, popular ballads, virtuosic showstoppers, and classical pieces. She also taught music while on tour and visited several hundred Black schools, churches, and communities during her career. She traveled overseas and, in London and Paris, studied singing with William Shakespeare and Jean de Reszke—two of the classical music world’s most renowned teachers.

Her acceptance into these famous studios confirmed her extraordinary musicianship, a “first” for an African American singer. She founded the Normal Vocal Institute in Chicago, the first music school founded by a Black performer to offer teacher training to aspiring African American musicians.

Hackley’s activist philosophy was unique. Unlike most activists of her era, she did not align herself unequivocally with either Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois. Instead, she created her own mediatory philosophical approach. To carry out her agenda, she harnessed such strategies as giving music lessons to large audiences and delivering lectures on the ecumenical religious movement known as New Thought. In this book, Karpf reclaims Hackley’s legacy and details the talent, energy, determination, and unprecedented worldview she brought to the cause of racial uplift.

Their interracial romance ended painfully after college. They reunited 42 years later — and now live together.

The Washington Post
2021-10-04

Sydney Page, Freelance Reporter

When Jeanne Gustavson spontaneously booked a trip to Chicago last summer, she had no idea what to expect. She was going to visit her first love — whom she had not seen in 42 years.

The last time Gustavson, now 68, spoke to Steve Watts was in the spring of 1979. They were young and in love, but there was one persistent issue: Watts was Black, and Gustavson’s family forbade her to see him.

“They had this mentality that Blacks and Whites don’t belong together,” said Gustavson, who was raised in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and now lives in Portland, Ore. “In my heart, I knew it wasn’t right.”

So, she flouted her family’s strict rule and dated Watts in secret.

Although she did not like disobeying her parents, “I couldn’t let him go,” Gustavson said…

Read the entire article here.

White people don’t always know I’m Black. That’s when their racism is revealed.

The Lily
2021-12-10

Sarah Doneghy

(María Alconada Brooks/The Washington Post)

The jokes, comments and stereotypes always flow so freely. I speak up every time.

When I see mostly White people in a social gathering, whether it’s a class, party or presentation, I do a scan. It’s thorough but quick. Are there any Black people? Are there any people of color at all? When the answer is no, I prepare. How am I going to let them know that I’m Black? Am I going to wait until someone says something and then “surprise” them? Or will I be confrontational? Will I say, “Hey, guess what?” as if I’m kidding — but not really?

Most of the time, White people think I’m one of them. My skin is light, often as light as theirs. My lips are plump and my nose is broad, but my features aren’t a tip-off. My hair is black, big and curly. If anything, that’s the tell. But even then, it’s usually: “I thought you were Italian, Greek or Middle Eastern.” In other words, not quite White, but definitely not Black.

That’s when the racism rears. Someone says something because they feel safe. They can speak freely. And they have support…

Read the entire article here.

Who The Census Misses

FiveThirtyEight
2021-12-13

Jasmine Mithani and Alex Samuels

Sibba Hartunian
Large groups of people have always fallen through the cracks of its racial categories — often by design.

For James Harmoush of Colorado, none of the census boxes quite fit.

In 2010 and 2020, when the census asked him to select a box regarding his race, he picked “white.” But there’s one major problem there: Harmoush doesn’t — and has never — seen himself that way.

“Nobody would ever look at me or talk to me and say, ‘You’re white,’” said the 30-year-old Arab American lawyer. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Harmoush sees himself as part of a minority group, but the U.S. Census Bureau legally classifies him as a white man.

Harmoush is not alone. Many Americans we spoke with felt the census classifications — both “white” specifically as well as the other available categories more generally — do not match the way they identify. In total, we heard from over 200 people with frustrations ranging from the naming of categories (like “Asian Indian” to represent people with ancestry from India) to confusion over why some racial groups, like Japanese or Samoan, were given their own boxes, while Middle Eastern, North African, Southwest Asian and others were lumped together under a catchall “white” racial group. We also heard from some Americans who were now completely rethinking how they personally identified due to the way they saw race and politics intermingle in society today…

Read the entire article here.

The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson

University Press of Mississippi
2021-12-15
256 pages
16 b&w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496835147
Paperback ISBN: 9781496835130

Alicia K. Jackson, Associate Professor of History
Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia

The story of an enslaved man who became a Georgia state senator, helped found a church, and led his people to promise and hope

Owned by his father, Isaac Harold Anderson (1835–1906) was born a slave but went on to become a wealthy businessman, grocer, politician, publisher, and religious leader in the African American community in the state of Georgia. Elected to the state senate, Anderson replaced his white father there, and later shepherded his people as a founding member and leader of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. He helped support the establishment of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, where he subsequently served as vice president.

Anderson was instrumental in helping freed people leave Georgia for the security of progressive safe havens with significantly large Black communities in northern Mississippi and Arkansas. Eventually under threat to his life, Anderson made his own exodus to Arkansas, and then later still, to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where a vibrant Black community thrived.

Much of Anderson’s unique story has been lost to history—until now. In The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson, author Alicia K. Jackson presents a biography of Anderson and in it a microhistory of Black religious life and politics after emancipation. A work of recovery, the volume captures the life of a shepherd to his journeying people, and of a college pioneer, a CME minister, a politician, and a former slave. Gathering together threads from salvaged details of his life, Jackson sheds light on the varied perspectives and strategies adopted by Black leaders dealing with a society that was antithetical to them and to their success.