Mixed Race Studies

President, Not Preacher, but Speaking More on Race

The New York Times
2013-08-27

Peter Baker

WASHINGTON — Sitting in the Roosevelt Room with prominent African-American religious leaders, President Obama on Monday mused about how far the nation had come in the 50 years since the March on Washington led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how far it still had to go.

A president who often shies away from talking about race is set to deliver his own speech on Wednesday from the Lincoln Memorial. One thing he knew, he said, was that he could not fill Dr. King’s shoes. “He was discouraging us from comparing him to Dr. King,” said the Rev. Alvin Love of Chicago, one of the preachers who were there.

For Mr. Obama, Dr. King has been an idol, a role model and a burden since he assumed the presidency. He keeps a bust of the civil rights leader in the Oval Office along with a framed program from the 1963 march, and some of his favorite lines have been adopted from Dr. King. But as the nation’s first black president, Mr. Obama has found that no matter how much supporters may want to compare them, he cannot be a latter-day Dr. King…

…Outside events have also forced race back into the spotlight, and onto the Obama agenda. After the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. went to court seeking to use other elements of the law to challenge a Texas statute. The Trayvon Martin case in Florida led Mr. Obama to make a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room to talk about the sting of being trailed in stores as a young black man…

Read the entire article here.

Making it Last: A Couple Who See Race Clearly

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Erika Allen

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more.

Christopher and Laura Castoro met when she asked him to tutor her in German. They didn’t realize they were of different race till their first date, and when they decided to marry, “We knew it was going to be us against the world,” she said.

Christopher and Laura Castoro celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary on June 8. In 2000, he retired as the director of transportation for a chemical and technology company. She is an author (also writing under her maiden name, Laura Parker) who writes, among other things, romance novels, including “Love on the Line,” “Rose of the Mists,” “A Rose in Splendor” and “The Secret Rose.” The couple lives in Fort Worth. They have three adult children and nine grandchildren. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.

You met in college?

Christopher: Yes, I went to Howard University to study chemistry. As a high-schooler in Brooklyn I’d taken a test that secured me a scholarship — a full ride to Howard. I was studying German during my junior year and this girl with very fair skin and curly blond hair shyly asked me to tutor her.

Laura: I was on scholarship, too. I had to make Bs in all of my classes. But six weeks into the year I was getting a C+ in German. Money and pride were at stake so I asked a boy from the front row to tutor me.

First impressions?

Laura: He was cute and professional, but he was older and I thought he had a girlfriend.

Christopher: Even though we were at Howard I assumed that Laura was a white girl. As it turned out, she’d assumed that I was African-American and we both had it wrong.

How did you sort things out?

Laura: The tutoring went on for a while before we decided to go out and the first place we went was a German restaurant. Halfway through the meal he mentioned being Italian and I said, “Oh, you have Italian in your family?” and he said that yes, his whole family was Italian.

Your reaction?

Laura: I was stunned. I am from the segregated South. At the time one in six people at Howard was not African-American, but I assumed he was black. I was out with a white person and I had not done this intentionally. And he was out with a black woman and didn’t know it. The schools in my town in Arkansas were just being integrated, but I graduated from an all-black high school. I just did not know white people. And even though I am very fair, everyone knew my family and they knew I was black. This was the first time I realized that it wasn’t obvious that I was black.

Christopher: I was surprised, but I had been at Howard for two years and she wasn’t the first black woman I dated…

Read the entire interview here.

Tom Christian, Descendant of Bounty Mutineer, Dies at 77

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Margalit Fox

Tom Christian, known as the Voice of Pitcairn for his half-century-long role in keeping his tiny South Pacific island, famed as the refuge of the Bounty mutineers, connected to the world, died at his home there on July 7. Mr. Christian, Pitcairn’s chief radio officer and a great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, the mutiny’s leader, was 77.

With his death, Pitcairn’s permanent population stands at 51.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his daughter Jacqueline Christian said.

Though Mr. Christian was the world’s best-known contemporary Pitcairner, word of his death — reported in the July issue of The Pitcairn Miscellany, the island’s monthly newsletter — reached a broad audience only this week, when it appeared in newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

“It takes awhile for news to get out,” Ms. Christian said by telephone from Pitcairn on Thursday…

…Britain’s only remaining territory in the Pacific, the Pitcairn archipelago lies roughly equidistant between Peru and New Zealand, about 3,300 miles from each. It comprises four small islands: Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno. Only Pitcairn Island, named for the sailor who sighted it from a British ship in 1767, is inhabited.

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about two square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is about 24 square miles.) Most of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them…

…Though Pitcairn today has some trappings of 21st-century technology — electricity 14 hours a day and a country code, .pn, on the Internet — it still maintains a striking degree of isolation. The island has no airstrip: it can be reached by flying to Tahiti and taking a once-a-week plane from there to Mangareva Island, in the Gambier Islands, followed by a two- to three-day sea voyage.

There are no automobiles on Pitcairn, and the island’s rocks and cliffs bear names redolent of long-ago tragedies: “Where Dan Fall,” “Where Minnie Off,” “Oh Dear.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Haji, an Actress Featured in Cult Films by Russ Meyer, Dies at 67

The New York Times
2013-08-17

Daniel E. Slotnik

Haji [Barbarella Catton], a voluptuous actress who played one of three homicidal go-go dancers in Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” died on Aug. 9 in Southern California. She was 67.

Her death was confirmed by the dancer and actress Kitten Natividad, a friend, who said she did not know the cause. She said Haji had high blood pressure and heart problems in recent years and was taken to a hospital after falling ill at a restaurant in Newport Beach.

Haji, a brunette of Filipino and British descent, met Meyer, the celebrated B-movie director, in the mid-1960s while she worked in a strip club in California. He cast her as the lead in his biker movie “Motorpsycho” (1965) even though she had no acting experience…

Read the entire obituary here.

A Blunt Chief Justice Unafraid to Upset Brazil’s Status

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their vast plantations.

But when the chief justice, Joaquim Barbosa, strides into the court, the other 10 excellencies brace themselves for whatever may come next.

In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a hired thug.

In one of his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”

“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak my mind so much.”

His acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound political power and the subject of popular fascination.

The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher education…

…In a country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration and a fair amount of resistance.

As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the Baltic Sea.

Sensing that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr. Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English, French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris…

Read the entire article here.

Fix the Census’ Archaic Racial Categories

The New York Times
2013-08-21

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University
Also former director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001 and author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton University Press, 2013)

Starting in 1790, and every 10 years since, the census has sorted the American population into distinct racial groups. Remarkably, a discredited relic of 18th-century science, the “five races of mankind,” lives on in the 21st century. Today, the census calls these five races white; black; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

The nation’s founders put a hierarchical racial classification to political use: its premise of white supremacy justified, among other things, enslaving Africans, violent removal of Native Americans from their land, the colonization of Caribbean and Pacific islands, Jim Crow subjugation and the importation of cheap labor from China and Mexico…

…Fast-growing population groups — mixed-race Americans, those with “hyphenated” identities, immigrants and their children, anyone under 30 — increasingly complain that the choices offered by the census are too limited, even ludicrous. Particularly tortured is the Census Bureau’s designation, since 1970, of “Hispanic” as an ethnicity or origin, thereby compelling Hispanics to also choose a “race.” In 2010, Hispanics were offered the option to select more than one race, but 37 percent opted for “some other race” — a telling indicator that the term itself is the problem.

Indeed, anyone who filled in “some other race” that year was allocated to one or more of the five main groupings. Many absurdities have resulted.

America has about 1.5 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa — some 3 percent of the nation’s black population. Like President Obama’s father, who was Kenyan, their experience differs vastly from that of African-Americans whose ancestors were enslaved, yet they are subsumed into the same category — one that, until this very year, continued to include the outdated term “Negro.”

The census considers Arabs white, along with non-Arabs like Turks and Kurds because they have origins in the Middle East or North Africa. Migrants from the former Soviet nations in Central Asia are lumped in as white along with descendants of New England pilgrims…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Scholar Saw a Multicolored American Culture

The New York Times
2013-08-19

Mel Watkins

Albert Murray Dies at 97; Fought Black Separatism

Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray’s estate, confirmed the death.

Mr. Murray was one of the last surviving links to a period of flowering creativity and spreading ferment among the black intelligentsia in postwar America, when the growing force of the civil rights movement gave rise to new bodies of thought about black identity, black political power and the prospects for equality in a society with a history of racism.

 As blacks and whites clashed in the streets, black integrationists and black nationalists dueled in the academy and in books and essays. And Mr. Murray was in the middle of the debate, along with writers and artists including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Romare Bearden and his good friend Ralph Ellison.

One of his boldest challenges was directed toward a new black nationalist movement that was gathering force in the late 1960s, drawing support from the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and finding advocates on university faculties and among alienated young blacks who believed that they could never achieve true equality in the United States.

 Mr. Murray insisted that integration was necessary, inescapable and the only path forward for the country. And to those — blacks and whites alike — who would have isolated “black culture” from the American mainstream, he answered that it couldn’t be done. To him the currents of the black experience — expressed in language and music and rooted in slavery — run through American culture, blending with European and American Indian traditions and helping to give the nation’s culture its very shape and sound…

…Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

‘Mixed Kids Are Always So Beautiful’

Motherlode: Adventures in Parenting
The New York Times
2013-08-19

Nicole Soojung Callahan

Like many other people of color, I am no stranger to awkward conversations about race. Strangers have complimented my English, remarked on how tall I am “for an Asian” and — more times than I can count — asked where I am really from. Since becoming a parent five years ago, I’ve had to learn to field a whole new set of questions and comments regarding my multiracial children.

“Korean, Irish and Lebanese is such a unique combination,” a friend exclaimed after my eldest daughter was born. “She’s like a poster baby for the U.N.!”

Several people in our diverse suburb of the District of Columbia have asked if I am my daughters’ baby sitter, presumably because they cannot spot the resemblance between us. At a party last year, a white woman asked if I was surprised when my children were born: “Did you expect them to look, you know, less white?” (No, I was pretty sure who their father was, so I wasn’t really shocked.)

Another person wanted to know if I thought the girls’ “coloring” would stay the same or “get darker” over time. Then there was the mother at the park who looked at my girls on the swing set and said bluntly: “What are they, exactly?”

The girls have even received compliments for not looking fully Korean. “Your daughter is so pretty,” a Chinese friend said to me last month. “Have you thought about having her model?”

“No,” I replied (possibly the truest thing I have ever said)…

Read the entire article here.

De Blasio Takes His Modern Family on the Campaign Trail

The New York Times
2013-08-07

Michael Barbaro

As his S.U.V. sped down the West Side Highway a few days ago, 30 minutes late to a campaign stop, Bill de Blasio, a Democratic mayoral candidate, proposed a simple solution: let his wife do the talking instead of him.

“Is Chirlane there?” he asked an aide, as he began placing a call on his cellphone to his wife. “I already warned her she should be prepared to speak.”

For the next five minutes, Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, and his wife, Chirlane McCray, traded talking points while she prepared to address an angry crowd of hospital workers in Brooklyn.

It was a small but telling glimpse into a candidacy that, to a remarkable degree, has thrust family into a starring role — in campaign literature and debate preparation sessions, at political rallies and at subway meet-and-greets…

…In a city where white residents are becoming a minority of the voting population, the family-centric strategy has allowed Mr. de Blasio, who is Italian-American, to portray himself as a paragon of modern, middle-class, multicultural New York: Ms. McCray is black and the couple has two children, Dante and Chiara, 18…

…In the most powerful moment of the new ad, Mr. de Blasio’s son takes aim at Mr. Bloomberg’s reliance on police stops and searches, which have had an outsize impact on young black men. Looking into the camera, Dante de Blasio promises that his father will be the “only one who will end an era of stop-and-frisk that unfairly targets people of color.”…

Read the entire article here.

Colleges Help Ithaca Thrive In a Region Of Struggles

The New York Times
2013-08-04

Jesse McKinley

ITHACA, N.Y. — In many ways, this city is not so special. It has a nice lake, some attractive houses with lawns, and a couple of colleges. But many places in upstate New York have lakes and lawns and places of high learning.

What most sets this city of 30,000 apart from many of its neighbors these days is what is absent: fear for its future.

Led by a young mayor with an inspiring back story and an idealist’s approach — he talks about sidewalks in philosophical terms — Ithaca is the upstate exception: a successful liberal enclave in a largely conservative region troubled by unemployment woes, declining or stagnant population, and post-Detroit talk of bankruptcy.

“It’s like a little San Francisco,” Nicole Roulstin, 32, an Ithaca resident, said recently, “or the Berkeley of the East.”

Much of that optimism comes from a reciprocal relationship with two institutions — Cornell University and, to a lesser degree, Ithaca College — which have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy and created thousands of jobs for everyone from professors to landscapers, and also fostered new companies. Ithaca and its home county, Tompkins, regularly post the lowest unemployment rate in the state. In June, Ithaca’s was 5.7 percent, tied with another college city, Saratoga Springs, where a racetrack drives an annual summer boom.

Ithaca’s model of education as an economic engine is one that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has made a priority this year as a strategy for all of upstate, where there are dozens of universities. In June, he signed into law a bill that would allow State University of New York branches and some private schools to offer tax-free zones for new businesses that open on or adjacent to campuses.

Ithaca’s mayor, Svante L. Myrick, who was invited to speak alongside the governor when he promoted the plan in May, playfully challenged other leaders of Ivy League cities in the Northeast to come to his. “And I’ll show you how we built in Ithaca the lowest unemployment rate in the state,” he said, adding that the city had been successful “because our universities have partnered with our private industries,” and did not just rely on businesses selling “sandwiches and beds” to visitors and students…

…Soft-spoken and slyly funny, Mr. Myrick is a striking success story. Living in the tiny town of Earlville, N.Y., he overcame a childhood that included stints living in shelters and sometimes sleeping in a family car. His father struggled with drug abuse, and his mother raised him and his three siblings on minimum-wage jobs, with help from his grandparents.

Mr. Myrick, whose mother is white and whose father is African-American, said he vividly remembers reading about Barack Obama as a teenager. “I thought, ‘Holy moly,’” Mr. Myrick said. “Here’s this guy, he’s mixed race, he’s got a funny name, he’s just like me. And it made me think I could go to a good school. I could do something.”…

Read the entire article here.