Mixed Race Studies – Page 60 – Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Indigenous or pretender?

2021-11-02

Indigenous or pretender?

CBC News
2021-10-27

Geoff Leo, Senior Investigative Journalist

Carrie Bourassa, one of the country’s most-esteemed Indigenous health experts, claims to be Métis, Anishinaabe and Tlingit. Some of her colleagues say there’s no evidence of that.

With a feather in her hand and a bright blue shawl and Métis sash draped over her shoulders, Carrie Bourassa made her entrance to deliver a TEDx Talk at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon in September 2019, where she detailed her personal rags-to-riches story.

“My name is Morning Star Bear,” she said, choking up. “I’m just going to say it — I’m emotional.”

The crowd applauded and cheered.

“I’m Bear Clan. I’m Anishinaabe Métis from Treaty Four Territory,” Bourassa said, explaining that she grew up in Regina’s inner city in a dysfunctional family surrounded by addiction, violence and racism…

Read the entire article here.
I Look White To Many. I’m Black. This Is What White People Say To Me.

2021-11-02

I Look White To Many. I’m Black. This Is What White People Say To Me.

The Huffington Post
2021-09-10

Cheryl Green Rosario, Guest Writer

The author is a fair-skinned Black woman who has been a fly on the wall when white people don’t know anyone of color is looking or listening. COURTESY OF CHERYL GREEN ROSARIO

I’ve been a fly on the wall when white people didn’t know anyone of color was looking or listening.

I am a Black woman who for most of my life has often been mistaken for white. And I’m here to tell you that for four decades white people have openly, even sometimes proudly, expressed their racism to me, usually with a wink and a smile, all while thinking I’m white too.

The incidents pile up, year after year — at a friend’s wedding, when I met a new roommate, at the grocery store, while riding in a taxi, and during innumerable other events from daily life.

As the nation begins, finally, to focus on the social injustice that takes place across this country — from the South where I grew up to the North where I’ve lived for the past 22 years ― I feel the collective pain. Even as a very fair-skinned Black woman with green eyes and light brown hair, I, too, have experienced racism. But I’ve also been a fly on the wall when white people didn’t know anyone of color was looking or listening…

Read the entire article here.
White Purity, Black Sexuality, and Their Roles in America’s History of Racism

2021-11-02

White Purity, Black Sexuality, and Their Roles in America’s History of Racism

Center for Brooklyn History
2020-12-18

In her new book, “White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History,” historian Jane Dailey places white fear of Black sexuality and interracial sex at the center of America’s history of racism.

Dailey brings into sharp relief how white focus on safeguarding purity fueled centuries of brutality and structural racism. Historian Nell Painter looks at the nineteenth and twentieth century south through an intersecting lens. Her book “Southern History Across the Color Line” brings to the surface the many ways in which the lives of southern Blacks and whites were thoroughly entangled. Join these two thinkers as they reflect on the white American psyche, the messy tangles between races in the south, and the throughline that brings us from Emmett Till, to Loving v. Virginia, to the racism that continues today.
Fifth of Blacks are Mulattoes

2021-11-01

Fifth of Blacks are Mulattoes

The Atlanta Georgian
1912-08-29 (Extra)
page 3, column 1
Source: Georgia Historic Newspapers

United States Census Shows Great Increase in Percentage of Mixed Element.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29.—A preliminary statement showing by states and geographic divisions the number and proportion of mulattoes among the negroes enumerated at the thirteenth decennial census of the United States, taken as of April 15, 1910, was issued today by Director [Edward Dana] Durand. of the bureau of the census.

The statement gives comparative figures for 1870 and 1890, no data being available for 1880 or 1900.

The term “mulatto,” as used in the census of 1910, includes all person, not full-blooded negroes, who have some proportion or perceptible trace of negro blood. The bureau of census does not regard the returns as being beyond question, since the classification of negroes as full-bloods or mulattoes was necessarily to a considerable degree dependent upon the personal opinion and conscientiousness of the enumerators. The results, however, are believed to approximate the facts for the country as a whole and for large aggregates.

How Percentage Grows.

In 1910 there were in continental United States, as a whole, 9,827,763 negroes, of whom 2,050,686, or 20.9 percent, were reported as mulattoes. In 1890 there were 1,132,060 mulattoes reported, or 15.2 per cent of all the negroes, and in 1870 a total of 584,049, or 12 per cent. Thus the figures, taken at their face value, show that about one-fifth of all the negroes in 1910 had some admixture of white blood, as against about one-eighth in 1870. It may be noted, however, that an increase in the mulatto element does not necessarily imply increasing intermixture with the whites, since the children born of marriages between blacks and mulattoes would be mulattoes, according to the census definition.

The percentage of mulattoes reported varies widely in different states and different sections of the country. In New England and in the East, North Central and Pacific divisions, about one-third of the negro population were reported as mulattoes, while in each of the three Southern divisions the proportion is only about one-fifth. In the Middle Atlantic division, for some reason, the percentage is not higher than it is in the Southern divisions. This may possibly bs due to the rapid growth of the negro population in that division through immigration from the South.
Passing review: Ruth Negga may well get another Oscar nomination

2021-10-30

Passing review: Ruth Negga may well get another Oscar nomination

The Irish Times
2021-10-29

Donald Clarke, Chief Film Correspondent

Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in Passing

Film Title: Passing
Director: Rebecca Hall
Starring: Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, André Holland, Bill Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Alexander Skarsgård
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 98 min

This delicately observed portrait of racial dynamics is worth seeing in the cinema

If you sat down unsure whether you were being taken to another time, the gauzy monochrome and 4:3 aspect ratio would go some way to alleviating any doubt. Rebecca Hall’s take on a key African-American novel shrugs off its modest budget to offer a convincingly transportive vision of Harlem in the 1920s. Marci Rodgers’s costumes capture the prohibition lines without resorting to catwalky inverted-commas. The piano-heavy score from Devonté Hynes leans ever-so-gently on the bridge between ragtime and less jaunty sounds to come.

There is, of course, no reason to set Passing at any other time. Nella Larsen’s book is hardly buried in ancient obscurity. But it is still worth pointing towards the calendar. Any contemporary study of a black woman “passing” for white would move out under very different winds. When largely sympathetic characters here twig that Clare (Ruth Negga), a Chicagoan now married to an unsuspecting white jerk (Alexander Skarsgård), has taken on a Caucasian identity, there is variously surprise, irritation, curiosity, but little sense of shock and nothing you would call outrage. That last emotion is left for the racists. Passing is no longer such an everyday business as it once was (which is not to suggest it doesn’t happen). Any film dealing with such a story in the 21st century would necessarily play at a higher temperature. Hall’s decision to cut a late, explosive use of the N-word in the journey from novel to screenplay – though another remains – confirms how the dynamics have altered…

Read the entire review here.
MIXED MESSAGES Episode 4. Vanessa.

2021-10-30

MIXED MESSAGES Episode 4. Vanessa.

MIXED MESSAGES with Sarah Doneghy
2021-10-23

Sarah Doneghy, Host

Vanessa discusses how being Mixed Race has affected her relationships with colleagues, impacted her work with the prison population, and how she’s been viewed when traveling to different countries.

Watch the entire episode (00:32:47) here.
Conservatives More Likely To See Vice President Harris as ‘White’ than Liberals

2021-10-30

Conservatives More Likely To See Vice President Harris as ‘White’ than Liberals

CSUN Today
California State University, Northridge
2021-10-26

Media Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler, Director of Media Relations

A study by CSUN researchers found that conservatives labeled now-Vice President Kamala Harris (above, with her husband Douglas Emhoff) as “white” much more often than liberals, who tended to categorize her as multiracial. Labeling Harris as “white” may be influenced by a desired to diminish the power of her biracial ancestry to attract voters, the researchers said.

As the fight for the White House heated up last year and Kamala Harris became the first woman of color on a major party ticket, California State University, Northridge researchers wondered if political ideology would influence how people perceived her biracial ancestry.

What they found surprised them. Conservatives labeled now-Vice President Harris — whose mother is South Asian and was born in India and father is Black and was born in Jamaica — as “white” much more often than liberals, who tended to categorize her as multiracial.

“There were some theories out there suggesting that conservatives were less willing to acknowledge that she is Black — she identifies herself as a Black woman and frequently references her Indian heritage — than liberals, who would be more willing to recognize her multiracial ancestry,” said CSUN psychology professor Debbie Ma…

Read the entire article here.
‘High Yella:’ A Multiflavored Family Memoir Of Race, Love And Loss

2021-10-29

‘High Yella:’ A Multiflavored Family Memoir Of Race, Love And Loss

Forbes
2021-10-27

Dawn Ennis, Contributor, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Cover of “High Yella” by Steve Majors The University of Georgia Press

“I was born a poor Black child.”

Fans of writer and actor Steve Martin’s early work will recognize those words from his 1979 comedy, The Jerk. Readers of Steve Majors’ powerful family memoir, High Yella, learn early on that the author used this memorable line in a key moment of courtship; An awkward attempt to use humor to explain a childhood marked by racism, shadeism, poverty, abuse, alcoholism, homophobia and the black magic that Black women in his family called “hoodoo.”

“The fact that I was born a poor Black child was just a part of my past,” Majors writes. “The full story of how that poor Black child grew up and escaped his past is wilder and crazier than any screenplay Steve Martin could ever dream up.”

The central part of High Yella involves race, identity and family. Majors, 55, is a light-skinned, cisgender Black gay man from upstate New York who was the youngest of five children, raised Roman Catholic, and married to a cis, white, gay Jewish man. He writes how he “checked boxes” when he needed to, and is perpetually plagued by people who presume to question his identity because he is white-passing. Majors also shares his own challenges—and failings—as a parent, and recounts painful recollections of family dysfunction and strife as a child…

Read the entire interview here.
Beyond blanqueamiento: black affirmation in contemporary Puerto Rico

2021-10-29

Beyond blanqueamiento: black affirmation in contemporary Puerto Rico

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 13, 2018 – Issue 2
pages 157-178
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2018.1466646

Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

Read or purchase the article here.
“When I walk in to teach black studies, some students aren’t sure I’m the professor,” he says. “I get it. It’s about expectations.”

2021-10-29

Born in Berkeley, California, to a white Jewish father with family in Elmont, Long Island, and a black Episcopalian mother with deep roots in Boston, where the family would settle when Zebulon was 3, Miletsky’s blended heritage and a pale complexion that sometimes gets him mistaken as white has informed each move of his life. That means personally — he’s now married (his wife, Karla, is Latina) with two young sons and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn — and professionally. The ever-echoing theme: That dividing line between black and white…

…“When I walk in to teach black studies, some students aren’t sure I’m the professor,” he says. “I get it. It’s about expectations.”

Joe Dziemianowicz, “Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom,” Newsday, February 26, 2020. https://www.newsday.com/long-island/stony-brook-professor-to-lead-black-history-month-panel-in-brentwood-1.41980672.

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