Mixed Race Studies

Before People Called Me A Spic, They Called Me A Nigger

Medium
2016-03-11

Pablo Guzmán

It was a throwaway line I used. Deliberately. Speaking to mostly Latino and African-American audiences. Back in the day.

“Before people called me a spic, they called me a nigger.”

And it hit the mark.

The hoots, applause, whistles and laughs let me know. I’d found a nerve. And I intended to probe. When I felt that arrow’s reverb, I launched it again. Aimed squarely at calling out what separates us. Latinos/African-Americans. Even what separates Latinos from ourselves. And. What also ties us together.

Drawing from all my observations. And, experiences (through the ripe old age then of 19. Worldly motherfucker)…

…THE SLAVE SHIP.

Square One. For a good many Latinos, African-Americans, and people of the Caribbean, that is our link. To music, dance, cuisine, religion, history. And, a politics to build upon. We may be different shades of black. But we be Black. African. That one drop thing has truth. Now, we are a New World Black. I mean, we ain’t African. Proud of Africa. But we gone through the looking glass. Among Latinos we’re also Spanish and Indigenous. In some Latinos, the impact of slavery is much more pronounced. Among others in the New World, the European blend could be French, or Dutch, or British or Portuguese. The Indigenous element might be Mayan, or Taino, or Incan, or Muscogee, or Carib or scores of others. But the African element. Is like no other.

My parents and I were born in New York City. My grandparents are from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Except for my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother we are all dark-skinned. “Obviously” of African descent. But that guaguancó gene is lying within practically all Latinos with raíces in Africa. So, you might be light-skinned, and you might marry a light-skinned Latina, but hello! One of your babies might be a nappy-headed rhumbera. Took my people a while to figure out genetics. There was a lot of fighting at first about where that baby came from…

Now, yeah, I’m joshing a bit. But the truth is that in some families, the dark-skinned ones sometimes caught hell. Yeah, that racist self-hate thing permeated everywhere. But the moms and grandmoms especially, circled protectively. Bien conmigo, negrita. Ten cuidao con mi negrito. As Pedro Pietri said in his epic poem Puerto Rican Obituary

“Aqui to be called Negrito/Means to be called LOVE”…

Read the entire article here.

“Kiss me, my slave owners were Irish”

Medium
2015-03-16

Liam Hogam

As many of you already know, I have engaged with the “we were slaves too!” narrative on multiple forums and platforms for the past few months. Now I plan to explore some of the uncomfortable truths that this mythology tends to obscure. This Saint Patrick’s Day essay will briefly review Ireland’s anti-slavery history before focussing on the more representative and troubling issue of slave ownership among those of Irish descent. What could be more appropriate?

Ireland has a rich anti-slavery history.

Beginning in the fifth century, a former slave to the Irish, Patricius aka Saint Patrick, sent a now famous letter to the Romano-British warlord Coroticus. In this letter, Patricius condemned and excommunicated the soldiers of Coroticus for enslaving his new Christian converts in Ireland and for selling them to non-Christians. This document is one of the earliest anti-slavery texts in existence.

1700s

In the early-eighteenth century, the Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson was one of the first to break with Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” by declaring that natural liberty was a natural right that belonged to all. This ever increasing dissemination and development of enlightenment thought, such as Hutcheson’s, helped to influence the rise of a formidable anti-slavery movement in Ireland, particularly in Dublin and Belfast…

…(i) The ‘Irish’ Slaves

Upon reviewing the various colonial laws pertaining to anti-miscegenation, it is reasonable to conclude that there were voluntary courtships between enslaved black men and free or indentured white women. But the remarkable case of Eleanor Butler illustrates why these unions were rare.

Maryland 1681

Eleanor “Irish Nell” Butler, was an Irish indentured servant who was brought to Maryland by Lord Baltimore in 1661. In 1681 (by then “well free of her indenture”) she choose to marry Charles, who was a black chattel slave. Her punishment for such an indiscretion was that she was to be a slave as long as her husband was alive and that their children were to be slaves. We find that the descendants of Eleanor and Charles were suing for their freedom 100 years later.

But why was Butler punished in this manner? The colonists in Maryland (as in all the other colonies) created racial laws to discourage marriages between white and black, and their 1664 laws stated that

“divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicon and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves”

Lord Baltimore’s remarks to Nell about her fateful decision are revealing of the racism of this era. It is difficult to say if there was anger, concern or bemusement in his voice when he reportedly asked her

“how she would like to go to Bed to a Negro.”

Either way, her defiant reply would have stung..

“I would rather go to Bed to Charles than your lordship.”

Evidently Nell Butler broke the racial line and law out of love not coercion, and it is thus clear that there were rare cases of chattel slaves of Irish descent on their mother’s side.

Conversely, we find that there were many slaves, just like R.R. Madden’s relatives, who had ‘Irish blood’ on their father’s side, i.e. they were the progeny of an Irish slave-master (or his friends or relatives) and his female slave. This is a disturbing chapter that needs to be explored. The rape and sexual abuse of slaves was an infamous practice. Slaves, who were treated as livestock by their white masters and their white supremacist laws, were offered no protection by the State or polity. Slave breeding had become an important consideration for slave owners once the slave trade was banned. Coerced slave breeding between slaves and the rape of slaves by their owners was thus further motivated by the wish to increase the slave population; these slave breeders wanted to extract future capital from present chattel…

Read the entire article here.

Why I Created #ObamaAndKids

Medium
2016-02-21

Michael Skolnik

(Pete Souza/White House)

THURSDAY, February 18, 2016. The White House. Washington, DC. President Barack Obama was about to enter the room, when I noticed a young boy standing next to me, dressed in a jacket and tie, looking to get to the front of the crowd. This would be the last Black History Month celebration at The White House during the presidency of the first African-American in the history of The United States to hold the highest office in the land. When I asked the young boy if he needed help, he turned to me, and with a smile, he kept it moving, with his mother behind him, he led her around the various adults in his way, ultimately disappearing into the crowd in front.

Historical, this event would become. Not because of any major announcement the President or The First Lady would make from the podium, but because of a photo of that young boy, dressed in a jacket and tie, that would capture the attention of the world. They ultimately got to the front, standing against the rope that separated, by only a few feet, the audience from Barack and Michelle.

When the President finished his speech, he came down to the rope-line to greet the invited guests, and eventually arrived at the feet of the young boy. The President reached out to touch the boy’s face, and the remarkable White House photographer Pete Souza, did what he does best; snapped another iconic photograph of President Obama and a child who innocently knows nothing of the importance of that moment…

Read the entire article here.

Photographing Multiracial Families In Scotland: Celebrating mothers, daughters and diversity through portraits

Medium for Pixel Magazine
2015-12-17

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

Portrait photographer Kim Simpson began her Exottish project after her daughter, who is of mixed heritage, experienced a series of racial insults in her primary school in Scotland.

Kim says she hopes her portraits — which feature families with some “visual differences” between their members — will encourage viewers to revisit their engrained ideas of what it looks like to be Scottish.

For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with Kim about the work and her experience as a parent in a multiracial family.

Emily von Hoffmann: “Girls and Their Mothers” is one part of the larger Exottish project. What does “Girls and Their Mothers” entail? Who are these women?

Kim Simpson: “Girls and Their Mothers” is a collection of portraits of mixed race girls, of all ages, with their mothers — 48 portraits featuring 16 different families in a mix of individual and group portraits.

Instead of questioning their ancestry or scrutinizing their appearance, I chose to photograph girls and women of mixed heritage and their mothers with an intent to question social perception. These images display their relationships, linking these girls and their mothers together while at the same time respecting their disparity…

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

…EvH: What sort of national dialogue, or vocabulary even, around race and appearance exists in Scotland? Is it discussed in school, for instance? I’m interested in thinking about this in comparison to the current Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., and the greater mainstream attention to identity issues of multiracial individuals.

KS: Black Lives Matter is extremely relevant in Scotland, especially at the moment. We have had an awful tragedy that saw the senseless end of Sheku Bayoh’s life at the hands of police officers as he was suffocated during an arrest in Fife, Scotland. Justice has not been served in this instance and it echoes all the hallmarks of what has been going on across the water with concerns of interactions between police officers and members of the black community…

Read entire the interview here.

Obama: A Nation Divided

Medium
2016-01-14

Delonte Harrod

I was at grad school during the time President Obama campaigned for and eventually was elected to the highest office in this country. I remember listening to people talk about the potential of him becoming president. Some of my white friends complained, and were genuinely confused, about some black people’s fidelity to a biracial man, who is part African, running for president. I remember sitting across a table listening to some of my black friends talk about how some of their relationships with their white friends had become strained because of Obama’s popularity and the possibility of him becoming president. The obvious is clear, for various reasons, some of their white friends did not like it — and they let their blacks friends know it.

I listened and thought…

Read the entire article here.

A note on race and racism

Medium
2016-01-08

T.O. Molefe

This week in South Africa has made it clear there are many people who have a limited understanding of race and racism — two very different things. Either that or they are working with different definitions (and moral theories) and don’t know it, or lack the diligence and honesty to reconcile their definition with those of others.

This note outlines a few points on race and racism that guide my thinking and writing. I’m committing it to the internet in the hopes it might help others think through the issues and let readers of my work understand some of its underpinnings.

1. Race is meaningless. The categories (race groups) of human it creates are based on characteristics that are largely superficial and often not exclusive to that group. If the borders of the categories are porous and the categories don’t tell you anything essential to the being of what is categorised, then the categories are meaningless.
2. Race was conjured into existence from virtually nothing, and backed with military might and untruthful intellectual projects, to perpetuate slavery, justify European imperialism and colonialism, and defend white supremacy — ideologies all founded in a belief in the individual’s right to property to the denial of others. Without the individual’s right to property, no person could own another. No person could land upon a shore and lay claim to it as theirs alone. No law could be enacted and enforced denying people this right…

Read the entire article here.

My white father and Black mother both encouraged me to be Black, to embrace Black, both as a label and as a way of being part of the world. To claim the Black community as my own. To them this was an act of resistance against a society that would devalue Black people and Blackness as a concept. But it was also an act of love for me, a gift to be part of this incredible community that fuels phenomenal intellectual and artistic culture all over the world.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Hold Fast to Blackness,” Medium, July 29, 2015. https://medium.com/@chanda/hold-fast-to-blackness-3e4fa529917d.

What’s Really Going On at Yale

Medium
2015-11-08

Aaron Z. Lewis, Senior
Yale University

Dean Jonathan Holloway; Photo credit: Yale Daily News

By now, you’ve probably seen the video of a Yale student yelling at a professor, the Facebook post about a “white girls only” party, or the email about offensive Halloween costumes. Unfortunately, the short YouTube clips and articles I’ve seen don’t even come close to painting an accurate picture of what’s happening at Yale. I’m a senior here, and I’ve experienced the controversy firsthand over the past week (and years). I want to tell a more complete story and set a few facts straight.

For starters: the protests are not really about Halloween costumes or a frat party. They’re about a mismatch between the Yale we find in admissions brochures and the Yale we experience every day. They’re about real experiences with racism on this campus that have gone unacknowledged for far too long. The university sells itself as a welcoming and inclusive place for people of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, it often isn’t…

Read the entire article here.

Mulattoes like Sally Hemings have been both weaponized and victimized in a complicated racial structure designed to protect white supremacy while satisfying the sexual fetishes of white, slave-owning rapists. Light skinned slaves were often given better positions on plantations, treated better. Sometimes they became enforcers over other, darker people. Sometimes they were freed upon the death of their masters/fathers. But, the success of the Haitian Revolution was predicated in part on the ability of mulattoes, quadroons and octaroons to overlook these light skinned privileges and see the white supremacy behind them so they could join in arms with darker Black people to throw off their French masters and become the first free, European-style democracy in the western hemisphere. Around the same time, laws defining whiteness and the rights of white people in the United States were being more clearly and cleverly delineated, to prevent indentured Irish from joining with Black slaves in a similar fashion.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Hold Fast to Blackness,” Medium, July 29, 2015. https://medium.com/@chanda/hold-fast-to-blackness-3e4fa529917d.

Hold Fast to Blackness

Medium
2015-07-29

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies
University of New Hampshire

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Nederland

This is not another essay about how hard it is to be light skinned in a dark man’s world. Why? Because the suggestion that this is a dark man’s world is ridiculous. Unless you’ve had your head up your butt, we quite clearly do not live in a version of the universe where overall it is better to be dark. The reality is that 2Pac was speaking in opposition to mainstream logic when he rapped, “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker the flesh, the deeper the roots.”

I’m sure there are many light skinned people including those with bi- and multiracial/ethnic families who would complain that 2Pac spoke words of erasure. But to make this complaint is to not acknowledge, plainly, that in fact he is speaking against erasure. To be light skinned, in reality, is to have a choice about what role we play in this process, for or against, constructive or destructive.

I have a Black Caribbean momma and a white Jewish father. My mom’s family hails from Barbados, vaguely of “West African Origin.” We don’t really know where or if maybe we come from somewhere else because identity and language are one of the many things European slave traders and slave owners stole from kidnapped Africans and their descendents. My dad’s family was chased out of the Ukraine and Russia by anti-Jewish pogroms and were Yiddish speaking until it became clear that looking like them and being English speaking was better.

When I was born, my parents were scared to introduce me to my dad’s maternal grandfather. It wasn’t clear whether he would accept a “nigger baby.” This is the first story I know of that clearly delineates the difference between my white father and me. My white father lives in the tent of whiteness: he is accepted as white and is treated as such on the street, in airports, by the police, by shop clerks, by everyone who speaks to and everyone who sees him. My dad lives in a version of the world where who he is is the default and where no one ever had to ask whether he would be excluded by members of his family simply because of his skin color.

It is true that my father has a different experience with the tent of whiteness than his father did in his early years. Born in 1917 in Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn, my Grandpa Norman would have been a dirty Jew to many white non-Jews. But when he died in 1988 Los Angeles, my Grandpa was white with the rest of them. The tent of whiteness expands as people sufficiently European-looking become broadly accepted as, “not-Black, not heading toward Black or any of the other darker kinds.” This expansion is predicated somewhat on the fundamental belief that the darker people are, the more dangerous, deficient and less human they are.

I am dark enough to not live within the tent of whiteness, but I am light enough that many people experience significant confusion when trying to class what level of “not-white, maybe heading toward-Black, deficient” I am. Depending on the year and location, I am a “dirty Arab/Muslim,” a fellow Latina, a Mulatto, a Mizrahi Jew, a half-white person who suspiciously may not be down with Black folks…

Read the entire article here.