Mixed Race Studies

Theater; On Hearing Her Sing, Gershwin Made ‘Porgy’ ‘Porgy and Bess’

The New York Times
1998-03-29

Barry Singer

In his tragically short life, George Gershwin knew only one Bess, and this bittersweet fact has framed Anne Wiggins Brown’s life. She was that Bess in the original production of Gershwin’s operatic masterwork based on Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s theatrical adaptation of Heyward’s novel “Porgy.”

More than 60 years have passed since Gershwin’s death in 1937 from a brain tumor. Though singers of every race and nationality have by now assayed the role, Ms. Brown will always be the first, the Bess Gershwin himself chose in 1934.

“Bess is slender but sinewy; very black,” wrote the Heywards. “She flaunts a typical but debased Negro beauty.”

At 85, Ms. Brown still possesses the vibrancy and unaffected elegance that must have first inspired Gershwin. She is not, however, “very black.” For Gershwin that was never a problem. “I don’t see why my Bess shouldn’t be cafe au lait,” he told Ms. Brown before offering her the role.

Yet color has haunted Ms. Brown’s career. In the segregated America of the 1930’s and 40’s, where could a classically trained African-American soprano hope to have a career? The only answer was abroad…

…She was born Annie Wiggins Brown in Baltimore in 1912. Her father, a doctor, was the grandson of a slave; her mother’s parents were of Scottish-Irish, black and Cherokee Indian descent. At 23, Ms. Brown was introduced to the world as an opera singer and an African-American in “Porgy and Bess.” Thirteen years later, in 1948, after more than a decade of concertizing and frustrated ambitions, she left America for Norway…

…”To put it bluntly, I was fed up with racial prejudice,” she explained, her English accented with Scandinavian inflections. “Though there is no place on earth without prejudice. In fact, a French journalist wrote an article during one of my tours there asking: ‘Why does she say she is colored? She’s as white as any singer. It’s just a trick to get people interested.’ Can you imagine? Of course I was advertised as ‘a Negro soprano.’ What is ‘a Negro soprano’?”…

…When the show’s closing notice was posted after 124 performances, the producers announced a tour with stints in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago, to be followed by a week at the National Theater in Washington. Ms. Brown was livid. The National Theater, she knew, was a segregated house.

“I told them: ‘I will not sing at the National. If my mother, my father, my friends, if black people cannot come hear me sing, then count me out.’ I remember Gershwin saying to me, ‘You’re not going to sing?’ And I said to him, ‘I can’t sing!’ ”

After protracted negotiations, the National, for one week only, became an integrated house. When the curtain came down on the final performance of “Porgy and Bess,” segregation was reinstated…

Read the entire article here.

Anne Brown, Soprano Who Was Gershwin’s Bess, Is Dead at 96

The New York Times
2009-03-16

Douglas Martin

Anne Brown, a penetratingly pure soprano who literally put the Bess in “Porgy and Bess” by inspiring George Gershwin to expand the character’s part in a folk opera that was originally to be called “Porgy,” died Friday in Oslo. She was 96.

Her daughter Paula Schjelderup announced the death.

“Porgy and Bess” burst onto the American scene in 1935 as a sophisticated musical treatment of poor blacks. Critics could not make out whether it was a musical comedy, a jazz drama, a folk opera or something quite different. Time told: it became part of the standard operatic repertory, including that of the Metropolitan Opera.

Drawing from the gritty experiences of South Carolina blacks, “Porgy and Bess” introduced songs that came to be lodged in American culture. Ms. Brown was the first person Gershwin heard singing the part of Bess, a morally challenged but achingly human character who was relatively minor in the original 1925 DuBose Heyward novel and the 1927 hit stage play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward.

As he composed the opera, often with Ms. Brown at his side, Gershwin added more and more music for her. Her voice was also the first he heard singing several other parts in the opera…

Read the entire obituary here.

Standing Up at an Early Age

The New York Times
2012-09-14

Adam Himmelsbach

Views on Gay Rights of Ravens’ Ayanbadejo Are Rooted in Upbringing

In recent weeks, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo has been praised in many quarters for supporting the legalization of same-sex marriage. His stance is not new, but it reached a wider audience after a Maryland legislator urged the Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to silence him.

For Ayanbadejo, 36, it was a comforting shift from 2009, when he became one of the first athletes from a major American professional sports team to speak out in support of same-sex marriage. That year, he found gay slurs directed at him on Internet message boards. In the Ravens’ locker room, players made crude remarks and asked him when he would reveal his homosexuality, he said.

“If I was walking by, and they wanted to be immature and make comments, I’d keep walking,” said Ayanbadejo, who has a 1-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter with his longtime girlfriend. “If they wanted to be real men and have conversations, I would have, but no one did.”

If those players had heard Ayanbadejo’s story, they would have learned how his views were shaped. His father is Nigerian, and his mother is Irish-American, and he was given the first name Oladele, which translates to “wealth follows me home.” But for much of his childhood, that did not ring true…

…Ayanbadejo began going by his middle name, Brendon, to fit in. He starred for Santa Cruz High School’s football team, but he was also active in theater, rode a skateboard and befriended many openly gay students. He had been accepted as a biracial boy from a Chicago housing project, so he accepted everyone else’s differences, too, he said…

Read the entire article here.

The Third Musketeer

The New York Times
2012-09-14
 
Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus
Harvard University

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7.

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom ­Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography.

Despite Reiss’s extensive research, the count remains a somewhat remote figure, since his contemporaries usually described him in conventional superlatives. The chief source of information is a highly romanticized memoir by his son, who was not yet 4 when he died, and who idealized him, in Reiss’s words, as “the purest, noblest man who ever lived.” Still, such language seems deserved. General Dumas was majestically tall (“his proportions were those of a Greek hero”), a crack swordsman and horseman (“looking like a centaur”), utterly fearless, generous to subordinates and a loving husband and father. He was also exceptionally good-looking, though the portraits that survive are less spectacular than the majestic Adonis depicted in the book’s cover illustration.

Dumas was born in 1762 at the western end of Saint-Domingue, the colony that is now Haiti. Remarkably, the French Empire guaranteed protection and opportunities to people of mixed race, and when the boy’s father brought him to France at the age of 14 he was able to receive a first-rate education and later to join the army. He never cared much for his feckless father, however, and took the name Dumas from his slave mother, about whom very little is known…

Read the entire review here.

Stir Builds Over Actress to Portray Nina Simone

The New York Times
2012-09-12

Tanzina Vega

In the digital age Hollywood casting decisions leaked from behind closed doors can instantly become fodder for public debate. And when the decision involves race and celebrity, the debate can get very heated.

The online media world has been abuzz with criticism for nearly a month now over the news — first reported by The Hollywood Reporter — that the actress Zoe Saldana would be cast as the singer Nina Simone in the forthcoming film “Nina” based on her life.

Few have attacked Ms. Saldana for her virtues as an actress. Instead, much of the reaction has focused on whether Ms. Saldana was cast because she, unlike Simone, is light skinned and therefore a more palatable choice for the Hollywood film than a darker skinned actress.

“Hollywood and the media have a tendency to whitewash and lightwash a lot of stories, particularly when black actresses are concerned,” said Tiffani Jones, the founder of the blog Coffee Rhetoric. Ms. Jones wrote a blog post titled “(Mis)Casting Call: The Erasure of Nina Simone’s Image.”…

…Recently an online petition was circulated to protest the casting of the light-skinned actress Thandie Newton in the film based on Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Half of a Yellow Sun,” which centers on the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70); there was some criticism of the casting of the biracial Jaqueline Fleming as Harriet Tubman in the film “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”…

…Casting an actress who does not look like Simone is troubling, said Yaba Blay, a scholar of African and diaspora studies and the author of a forthcoming book called “(1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race, and Identity.”

“The power of her aesthetics was part of her power,” Dr. Blay said. “This was a woman who prevailed and triumphed despite her aesthetic.” Dark-skinned actresses, she added, are “already erased from the media, especially in the role of the ‘it girl’ or the love interest.”…

Read the entire article here.

When Family Trees Are Gnarled by Race

The New York Times
2012-09-08

Brent Staples

My paternal grandfather, Marshall Staples (1898-1969), was one of the millions of black Southerners who moved north in the Great Migration. Those of us in the family who were born Yankees in the years just after World War II were given an earful about our place in 19th-century Virginia — and specifically about Marshall’s white grandfather, a member of a slaveholding family who fathered at least one child with my great-great-grandmother, Somerville Staples.

Stories like this are typical among African-Americans who have roots in the slave-era South and who have always spoken candidly about themselves and their relationships with slaveholding forebears. In some cases, the Negro second families carried the names of their masters/fathers into Emancipation and settled in the same areas.

This was inconvenient for the white progenitors and their families, who feared the taint of blackness so much that they often declined to acknowledge or speak to their darker relatives on the street. In nullifying these family connections, they embraced the fiction of racial purity that has dominated how white Americans see themselves for hundreds of years…

Read the entire article here.

Alexander Saxton, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 93

The New York Times
2012-09-01

Paul Vitello

Alexander Saxton, who would go on to become a prominent historian of race in America, summed himself up in a blurb on the dust jacket of his first novel, “Grand Crossing,” published when he was 24.

“At various times,” he said, he had worked as “a harvest hand, construction gang laborer, engine-wiper, freight brakeman, architectural apprentice, assistant to the assistant editor” of a union newspaper, railroad switchman and columnist for The Daily Worker.

Unmentioned were his upbringing on the East Side of Manhattan in a household where Thornton Wilder and Aldous Huxley were frequent dinner guests, and his schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard.

But in his biographical blurb, the young Mr. Saxton accomplished the first of many self-transformations. They included passage from upper-income childhood to working-class adulthood; from Harvard student to Chicago laborer; from novelist to union organizer and Socialist; from activist to academic…

…His contributions as a cultural historian are considered his most enduring.

Mr. Saxton’s first historical book, “The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California,” became a landmark of labor history, describing how 19th- and 20th-century labor unions used racism against Chinese immigrants as a tool for unifying and organizing white union members.

“It challenged one of the foundational stories of the labor movement,” said Eric Foner, a Columbia University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “Instead of the story of solidarity and democracy usually told, Saxton showed how racism was one of labor’s most important organizing tools.”

The critical success of the book helped Mr. Saxton establish one of the first Asian-American studies program in the United States at U.C.L.A. in the early 1970s. 

His 1975 paper “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” [March 1975] tracing the links between blackface minstrelsy and the ideology of white supremacy, is considered one of the early texts in black history studies; and a 1990 book, “The Rise and Fall of the White Republic,” is known as one of the foundations of “critical whiteness studies,” an academic field that examines the assumptions underlying “whiteness” as a racial designation and political organizing principle….

Read the entire obituary here.

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities

The New York Times
2012-08-30

Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s government has enacted one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws, requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country.

The law, signed Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff, seeks to reverse the racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of Africa. Despite strides over the last decade in lifting millions out of poverty, Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.

“Brazil owes a historical debt to a huge part of its own population,” said Jorge Werthein, who directs the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies. “The democratization of higher education, which has always been a dream for the most neglected students in public schools, is one way of paying this debt.”…

…But while affirmative action has come under threat in the United States, it is taking deeper root in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country. Though the new legislation, called the Law of Social Quotas, is expected to face legal challenges, it drew broad support among lawmakers.

Of Brazil’s 81 senators, only one voted against the law this month. Other spheres of government here have also supported affirmative action measures. In a closely watched decision in April, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the racial quotas enacted in 2004 by the University of Brasília, which reserved 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race students…

…Brazil’s 2010 census showed that a slight majority of this nation’s 196 million people defined themselves as black or mixed-race, a shift from previous decades during which most Brazilians called themselves white…

Read the entire article here.

Hopes Spring Eternal: ‘Three Strong Women,’ by Marie NDiaye

The New York Times
2012-08-10

Fernanda Eberstadt

Americans have a curiously limited vision of France. We may be wild about Chanel sunglasses, Vuitton handbags, Champagne or Paris in the spring, but when it comes to the kinds of contemporary French culture that can’t be bought in a duty-free shop, most of us draw a blank. Luckily, this veil of benign ignorance is being lifted as publishers in the United States introduce American readers to a new generation of hugely gifted French writers who are reworking the boundaries of fiction, memoir and history (Emmanuel Carrère, Laurent Binet, the American-born Jonathan Littell) or of high art and snuff lit (Michel Houelle­becq). Among the recent crop of writers just reaching the top of their game, Marie NDiaye, born in 1967 and now living in Berlin, is pre-eminent.

NDiaye’s career has been stellar. When she was 18, the legendary editor Jérôme Lindon (best known as Samuel Beckett’s champion) published her first novel to high critical acclaim. Her subsequent fiction and plays have won numerous prizes and distinctions. (NDiaye’s “Papa Doit Manger,” or “Daddy’s Got to Eat,” produced in 2003, is the only play by a living woman to have entered the repertory of the ­Comédie-Française.) “Three Strong Women” — NDiaye’s most recent novel — won the Prix Goncourt when it appeared in 2009 and made her, according to a survey by L’Express-RTL, the most widely read French author of the year…

…The expectation — whether menacing or well meaning — that NDiaye should “represent” multiracial France, or be considered a voice of the French African diaspora, has often dogged her. In fact, as NDiaye is at pains to make clear, she scarcely knew her Senegalese father, who came to France as a student in the 1960s and returned to Africa when she was a baby. Raised by her French mother — a secondary school science teacher — in a housing project in suburban Paris, with vacations in the countryside where her maternal grandparents were farmers, NDiaye describes herself as a purely French product, with no claim to biculturalism but her surname and the color of her skin. Nonetheless, the absent father — charismatic, casually cruel, voraciously selfish — haunts NDiaye’s fiction and drama, as does the shadow of a dreamlike Africa in which demons and evil portents abound, where the unscrupulous can make overnight fortunes and, with another turn of the wheel, find themselves rotting in a jail cell…

Read the entire review here.