Mixed Race Studies

Who Is Jamaica?

The New York Times
2012-08-05

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

DURING last week’s independence festivities, I took out my prized commemorative plate. It was a gift from the mother of a long-ago boyfriend who, incomprehensibly, complained constantly that his mother loved me more than him. Needless to say, he didn’t last.

Source: Wikipedia

The plate has a little chip, but it’s the spirit that counts: a little bit of tactile history. It features the Carolyn Cooper. There is an Amerindian woman bearing a basket of pineapples and a man holding a bow. At school we were taught they were Arawak. These days, they are called Taino. But the distinction is academic.

The native people of Xaymaca, as the island was once called, are extinct. In their culture, the pineapple symbolized hospitality. Genocide was their reward for the welcome they gave Christopher Columbus. They survive only in the coat of arms and in the modest museum that is dedicated to their history. Perched above the man and woman is a crocodile. The reptile has fared better; its descendants live on.

Jamaica was one of the first British colonies to receive its own coat of arms, in 1661. The Latin motto grandly declaimed: “Indus uterque serviet uni” (Both Indies will serve one). From East to mythic West, colonial relations of domination were inscribed in heraldry. When we gained our independence from Britain, 50 years ago today, the motto was changed to “Out of many, one people.”

Though this might appear to be a vast improvement on the servile Indies, the new motto encodes its own problematic contradictions. It marginalizes the nation’s black majority by asserting that the idealized face of the Jamaican nation is multiracial. In actuality, only about 7 percent of the population is mixed-race; 3 percent is European, Chinese or East Indian, and 90 percent is of African origin.

It was my high school English teacher, Miss Julie Thorne, who first brought the fraudulence of the motto’s homogenizing racial myth to my attention. “Out of many, one people?” she asked the class. “Which one?”

In the highly stratified Jamaica of the 1960s, the white and mixed-race elite were the “one” who ruled the “many.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mixed Messenger
The New York Times
2008-03-23

Peggy Orenstein

A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

Most Americans watching Barack Obama’s campaign, even those who don’t support him, appreciate the historic significance of an African-American president. But for parents like me, Obama, as the first biracial candidate, symbolizes something else too: the future of race in this country, the paradigm and paradox of its simultaneous intransigence and disappearance.

It’s true that, over the past months, Obama has increasingly positioned himself as a black man. That’s understandable: insisting on being seen as biracial might alienate African-American leaders and voters who have questioned his authenticity. White America, too, has a vested interest in seeing him as black it’s certainly a more exciting, more romantic and more concrete prospect than the “first biracial president.” Yet, even as he proves his black cred, it may be the senator’s dual identity, and his struggles to come to terms with it, that explain his crossover appeal and that have helped him to both embrace and transcend race, winning over voters in Birmingham, Iowa, as well as Birmingham, Ala…

…But the rise of multiracialism is not all Kumbaya choruses and “postracial” identity. The N.A.A.C.P. criticized the census change, fearing that since so few in the black community are of fully African descent, mass attrition to a mixed-race option could threaten political clout and Federal financing. Mexican-Americans, a largely mixed-race group, fought to be classified as white during the first half of the 20th century; during the second half, they fought against it.

Among Asians, Japanese-Americans in Northern California have argued over “how Japanese” the contestants for the Cherry Blossom Queen must be (the answer so far: 50 percent, which is less rigid than San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown U.S.A., whose father must be Chinese, but more strict than the 25 percent Chinese required to be Miss Los Angeles Chinatown)…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests

The New York Times
2012-07-30

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.

Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.

The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch…

…The findings come as more and more Americans are discovering their own mixed-race heritage. Elizabeth Shown Mills, a former president of the American Society of Genealogists, said the Internet, coupled with the ease of DNA testing and heightened interest among both amateur and professional genealogists, was helping to reveal the extent of racial intermingling over the centuries…

…The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis to make the connection, and it also combed through marriage and property records to trace Mr. Obama’s maternal ancestry to the time and place where Mr. Punch lived. The company said records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham…

…The Ancestry.com team spent two years examining Mr. Obama’s mother’s past, focusing on the mixed-race Bunch line. The researchers said that over time, as the Bunches continued to intermarry, they became prominent landowners in colonial Virginia and were known as white.

“We sort of stumbled across it,” said Anastasia Harman, the lead researcher. “We were just doing general research into the president’s family tree, and as we started digging back in time, we realized that the Bunch family were African-American.”

There is no evidence that Ms. Dunham had any inkling that she might have had African-American ancestry, said Janny Scott, her biographer. By the mid-1800s, according to a 2007 article in The Chicago Sun-Times, one of Ms. Dunham’s Bunch ancestors had a son who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

The Ancestry.com group traced two major Bunch family branches, one that lived as white and stayed in Virginia for generations and another that left for the Carolinas. In North Carolina, the Bunches were recorded as “mulatto” in early records, and their descendants are also the president’s cousins…

Read the entire article here.

Lives: A Final Message From My Mother

The New York Times
2012-07-20

Josiah Howard

The first note I ever wrote for my mother wasn’t very special, but she seemed to think it was. It said: “Hi Mom! Have a nice day! Love Skip!” (her nickname for me). My message was scribbled on a scrap of paper and tucked discreetly into her change purse. At the time I wrote it, I was 12. My mother worked as a key-punch operator — a profession now obsolete — at the Piscataway, N.J., offices of Phillips Van Heusen, the clothing company.

When my mom was working, she ate her lunch while smoking her unfiltered Pall Malls in the Van Heusen cafeteria. I knew that when she purchased her meal, she would have to rifle through her purse for change, so that’s where I placed my note. I didn’t know that she would keep that note, laminate it and always carry it with her…

…My mom’s name was Gail Ann Blackmer. She was an unwed mother. I am her only child. The challenges we faced together, first in New York City and then in New Jersey, were, as it turned out, largely a result of the difference in our skin colors, a fact that meant little to me. My mother told me that once when I was very young, she asked if I noticed that she and I were different colors. My response was delivered with flat, round-eyed authority: “Mothers don’t come in colors.”

But they do. And my mother’s being white and my being black presented many challenges. She didn’t often speak about our early years together (or her experience of them), but whatever she revealed was indelibly stamped in my mind. The indignities stand out: once while entering a bus, a white man spied us and snarled, “What’s the matter, couldn’t you get a white one?” On another occasion she rented an apartment and then, when she showed up with a black child, was turned away. I often wonder about my mom’s unconventional (pre-Civil Rights) life choices, and I wonder how she came to make them. It was a topic that she never discussed…

Read the entire article here.

A Mulatto Area Gets Own School

The New York Times
1962-09-16
page 73

Hedrick Smith, Special to the New York Times

Desegregation Moves Roi Louisiana Caste System

BURAS, La., Sept. 13—Freda’s Hi-Lo Bar sits just off State Highway 23 as the road chases the Mississippi River on its last 100 miles from the suburbs of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.

It is a white-frame building only slightly larger than the small cottages that surround it on the west bank of the river.

For the last week, workmen have been refurbishing it and improving its lighting and plumbing. For the second time since World War II It is being transformed into a school for mulattoes, or, as they are sometimes called here, Hi-Lo’s.

The bar, long patronized exclusively by mulattoes, is a symbol of one of the most extensive caste systems of the South.

In the life, of Plaquemines Parish (County), and particularly of the town of Buras, there are not just two, but three, racial groupings. At the top of what one writer has called a “layer cake of color” are the whites. At the bottom are the dark Negroes. In between are lighter-skinned Negroes, or mulattoes, whose ancestry is racially mixed.

500 Families in Parish

The mulattoes are sprinkled throughout the parish. Local officials estimate there are about 500 families. The largest group of them lives just north of Buras, in the houses surrounding the Hi-Lo Bar and a Roman Catholic school for mulattoes.

Their faces have a Latin appearance. Many have straight hair, sharp noses, thin lips and freckles. Within families, their color can range from a rich mahogany to a tawny yellow.

Who determines whether they are mulattoes or Negroes?

“They determine it themselves.” say the whites.

Some Negroes assent with bitterness.

“They try to be something: they are not.” said Mrs. Joseph Powell, a Negro woman who tried last year to send her daughter to the Catholic mulatto school but was turned down.

The mulattoes’ presence in this marshy delta territory antedates slave times. Old parish records note a number of slave owners who were “freemen of color.” Some of these are believed to have come here from Santo Domingo…

…Archdiocese Desegregates

The move toward a public school for mulattoes followed the decision of the Archdiocese of New Orleans to desegregate its parochial schools this fall.

Five Negro children went to the white parochial school here on Aug. 29. A white boycott followed, and the parish priest, the Rev. Christopher Schneider, closed down the school briefly because of “threats of physical Violence and economic reprisals.”

Some white students have since returned, but the five Negroes have never been back. Two of them, however, began attending the school for mulattoes.

Luke Petrovich, Commissioner of Public Safety, said that because of this the county was converting the bar into a public school for mulattoes. “Some of the mulatto parents contacted us concerning public school facilities for them” he said.

Others think, however, that the new public school may be an attempt to lure mulattoes away from the parochial school where some racial distinctions are being erased. They think that whites want to keep mulattoes as a buffer between them and the darker Negroes.

But there are indications that the bitterness and” jealousy between the dark Negroes and the mulattoes may be dissolving. Some mulatto parents say they will refuse to take their children out of the Catholic school just because Negroes are there.

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Olympic Swimmer Neal Built Her Dream in Brooklyn

The New York Times
2012-07-15

William C. Rhoden, Sports Columnist

Lia Neal (Al Bello/Getty Images)	Rome and Siu Neal with their grandson Rome Jin, their son Rome Kyn and his wife Ziggy (Victor J. Blue for The New York Times)

Rome Neal walked up to the microphone last week at the Paris Blues in Harlem and was just about to sing “I Worry About You” when he decided to share some great news with his audience. In his 12 years of performing a one-man show about Thelonious Monk, Neal had come to appreciate the importance of exquisite timing.

“My daughter’s name is Lia Neal and she just made it to become an Olympic swimmer, and she’ll be swimming in the Olympics in 2012 in London, England, the 4×100 relay,” Neal said.

The audience applauded and cheered enthusiastically. “Lia is 17 years old,” he said, “the second African-American female swimmer to make it to the Olympics.”

More applause, and for a story Rome Neal could finally tell.

Lia Neal qualified for the Olympics earlier this month by finishing fourth in the 100-meter freestyle, putting her on the relay team. In the weeks and months leading to the Olympic swimming trials, her mother, Siu Neal, had admonished her husband of 38 years not to put the cart before the horse, to rein in his flair for the dramatic and generally be cool.

Now Rome was free to spread the word and the joy: his baby girl was an Olympian…

…But the commitment is not just by the athlete.

“Any parent would do what I do,” Siu Neal said. “They all spend lots of time with their kids, take them to swimming practice, bringing them to competitions and meets. I don’t consider it giving up anything. I enjoy watching her swim; I even loved to watch her practice.”

Siu and Rome Neal are each 59, and their relationship reflects a deep-seated belief in possibility. They were brought together by poignant variations of the American dream. Their journeys to New York — and each other — underline the complexities and contradictions of a nation conceived in liberty. Their daughter symbolizes the powerful, positive force of that union.

When he was a year old, in 1953, Rome (his given name, Jerome, was shortened by his mother) moved to New York City from Sumter, S.C., as his family sought relief from the suffocating racial oppression in the South.

Siu and her family immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong when she was 18 to join her grandfather. “We were looking for a better life,” she said.

Rome’s family settled in Harlem before moving to Brooklyn. Siu’s family initially moved to the Bronx before also heading to Brooklyn. They met at New York City Community College, married and had three sons: Rome Kyn, Smile and Treasure.

On Feb. 13, 1995, the Neals had the daughter they had long hoped for. Rome wanted to name her Kujichagulia in honor of the second principle of Kwanzaa, self-determination. He was voted down. They settled on Lia. She speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin…

Read the entire article here.

Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’

The New York Times
2012-07-15

Jason Deparle

Also see the video, “Single and Unequal” by Shayla Harris here.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they run might get them confused.

They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages…

Read the entire article here. Watch the video by Shayla Harris  here.

Fostering Mixed-Race Children in Ukraine: ‘Family Portrait in Black and White’

The New York Times
2012-07-13

Neil Genzlinger, Television Critic

“Family Portrait in Black and White,” a documentary by Julia Ivanova, leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is frustrating, but it gets high marks for honesty.

It would have been easy for this film, which is about a woman in Ukraine and the more than 20 adopted and foster children she has taken in, to be a hagiography, but instead it’s a portrait of an imperfect solution in a country that seems to have a lot that needs solving.

The woman’s name is Olga Nenya, and she has made it her particular mission to provide a home for mixed-race children who have been abandoned by their parents. That is a brave thing for her to do because such children are shunned by many in Ukraine, which has a virulent skinhead movement. We don’t learn much about Ms. Nenya, like why she got into this work or what financial resources she is drawing on to put food in all those hungry mouths…

Read the entire review here.

Mixed Blessing

The New York Times
2008-06-18

Francis Wilkinson, Executive Editor
The Week

Being from an interracial marriage has shaped Obama’s political stance.

Far from the storied hollows of Appalachia, and well before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright lit up the cable news channels or the “elitist” label was fixed to Barack Obama’s lapel right where his flag pin ought to have been, a group of older white voters drew a firm line on his candidacy. On Feb. 5, Mr. Obama prevailed by just 10,000 votes in Missouri, a general election swing state. His victory margin was cramped by the fact that he lost white voters over age 60 by nearly 40 percentage points, 67 percent to 28 percent. And it had nothing to do with bowling.

It’s possible that older white people just don’t know where Barack Obama is coming from. Then again, perhaps the problem is they do. One useful gauge of racial tolerance over the years has been the percentage of Americans who approve of interracial marriage. In 1961, when Mr. Obama’s African father and white mother were married, they joined an exceedingly small and extremely unpopular minority. According to the 1960 census, of more than 40 million married couples living in the United States that year, a mere 51,000, or 0.1 percent, consisted of a black and a white. A Gallup poll from 1958, just three years before Mr. Obama was born, found that only 4 percent of white people approved of such marriages, one point greater than the poll’s margin of error.

Both racial attitudes and the frequency of interracial marriage have changed significantly since then. But approval is far from universal. A 2007 Gallup poll found that among whites over age 50, less than two thirds, or 64 percent, approve of marriage between a black person and a white person. Subtract a few points for those who were reluctant to appear intolerant on the survey, and you wind up with roughly 4 in 10 white people over age 50 refusing to support interracial marriage. It hardly seems far-fetched that voters who oppose black-white unions in the first place might have some difficulty supporting the product of such a union as their president…

As a young man, Mr. Obama recognized that he would have difficulty functioning as half white, half black in a racially polarized society. He made a choice, one predetermined to a significant degree by the color of his skin. If the wounds from that painful process and from his racially complicated youth seem to have magically healed, it’s not because he has rolled away the heavy stone of prejudice and ushered in a post-racial morning in America. It’s because Mr. Obama views public denial of his own life experience as a political imperative. To succeed, he has trained his formidable will not just on changing the future, but the past.

Read the entire essay here.

Playing the Interracial Card

The New York Times
2012-07-12

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

“The Miscegenation Ball” Source: Smithsonian Museum of American History (1864) Color print of a dance occuring at the Lincoln Central Campaign Club in New York Sept. 22, 1864. A portrait of Lincoln hangs on the wall. Black women fashionably dressed dance and converse with white men.

What is the most reliable way to destroy a political career? Financial shenanigans, criminal records or college antics are all reliable showstoppers, but it’s usually the salacious sex scandal that brings the house down. Jack Ryan, who ran for the Senate against Barack Obama (for a while), brought us Parisian sex clubs. Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, famously hiked the Appalachian Trail. And former senator John Edwards offered a scorching mess of “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.”

Add race to the question — particularly interrace — and political prurience goes into overdrive. The confluence of miscegenation and politics speaks to America’s fundamental anxiety about racial boundaries. It’s been a rug-puller of careers as long America has been a republic.

When the candidate is one race, and the spouse/partner/“friend” is another, opponents find a combustible cocktail to stir voter insecurities. Ask the ghost of Thomas Jefferson, who weathered decades of criticism about his relationship with “Dusky Sally” [Sally Hemings], his mixed-race slave who bore six mixed-race children. Consider Richard Johnson, vice president under Martin Van Buren, whom the press condemned for taking a “jet-black, thick-lipped, odiferous negro wench” as his common-law wife. Fast forward to Harold Ford Jr., who was maligned during his 2006 Senate campaign in Tennessee as a white woman-loving playboy. For these figures — just a few of many — the color line drew rings around their reputation.

Why would an interracial relationship become a dangerous political liaison? For most people, sex and relationships are private actions, but for public figures, intimate life turns into news. Add race to the mix, and it raises eyebrows. Obama had a white girlfriend in college? Sarah Palin may or may not have dated a black athlete? There are European royals of black and Asian descent? (Lichtenstein and Denmark.) At minimum, such pairings are imaginatively interesting. But why does it matter?…

…Miscegenation is the original race card. Accusations have affected all political persuasions and races, to a point where the fixation becomes the candidate’s defining element. Jefferson is certainly not alone in the accusations against him. Abraham Lincoln’s opponents published a campaign cartoon, “The Miscegenation Ball,” that lampooned an interracial regime where white men and black women freely dance, flirt and carouse. And Strom Thurmond, who infamously denounced integration of homes, schools and pools, was ultimately revealed to have a mixed pool of his own…

Read the entire essay here.