Mixed Race Studies

Down Blige Road: Where There’s No Place Like Home

Richmond Hill Reflections
Richmond Hill, Georgia
Volume 10, Number 4 (September 2014)
pages 57-60

Leslie Ann Berg (Photos by Callie Beale Photography)

Richmond Hill’s history is engrained deep within the walls of its old buildings, street names, and its land. But there is another place where history runs deep in Richmond Hill. It is a living, breathing history that not only thrived centuries ago, but is still thriving today. It is a history that courses through the very veins of the Richmond Hill people: It is the history of bloodlines.

Some of us are military families that found our way to Richmond Hill because of our duty, others transferred here for a job, and still others came to Richmond Hill for its quiet, safe community and great schools. But there is a very real and permanent group of people who live in Richmond Hill because it is home in the deepest sense of the word: Richmond Hill is where their ancestors settled and where they choose to remain. This group of people is the Blige family.

Meeting a member of the Blige family is like meeting an old friend. They are warm, welcoming, and full of jovial conversation. As I sat around Albertha Blige’s dining room table with her cousin Francis, and her mother Dorothy, and Uncle Pete, both in their 80s, we discussed Blige family history, traditions, and folklore. The women were tight-lipped when it came to telling stories, but Uncle Pete opened up and let me in on who exactly the Bliges were and are.

The Bliges made their way to Richmond Hill after the Civil War in 1875, when three brothers, Andrew, Benjamin, and Rently Blige, migrated south from Charleston, South Carolina. All three bothers married and had eight, nine, and 11 children respectively and so began the large Blige family of Richmond Hill. The brothers worked for wages at the Ogeechee River plantations. As their children grew, the family purchased land from Thomas Savage Clay, a man who owned several plantations in the Richmond Hill area.

Owning land was monumental for the families of emancipated slaves like the Bliges, yet life wasn’t easy. Uncle Pete, Benjamin Blige’s grandson and one of 20 children, recalls what life was like when he was a boy: “[My father] worked about 60 miles from [Richmond Hill]. He left on Sunday evenings and didn’t come back for 2 weeks. My mother was here taking care of the farm. The kids worked… that’s why they had so many kids. Kids carried the farm and my mother did the housework and watched the kids.”…

…Uncle Pete’s accounts of his family may sound like a typical African American ancestral history in the southeastern United States, but beneath the commonalities lies a forgotten history, a history that never made its way into the history books.

The Blige’s African American ancestry is vibrant and evident, yet they are also of Cherokee Indian decent. African-Native Americans? Yes, and in fact, African-Native Americans made up a significant percentage of Native Americans living in the South in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Yet their existence is not widely accounted for in history.

The American history that most of us are familiar with is one that paints a picture of segregated ethnic groups, depicting Whites as slave owners, Africans as slaves, and Native Americans as tribe members. In most of our minds, all three groups were separate and played a very specific and hierarchical role in history. Yet, before North America was widely colonized, distinct segregation did not exist, and the interaction between Africans and Native Americans was somewhat frequent. Enslaved Africans escaped to Native American tribes (some tribes even hosted stops on the Underground Railroad), some Native Americans were enslaved by Europeans alongside Africans, and some Native Americans had African slaves. Often times, the two groups worked alongside each other, lived together, and shared recipes, myths, legends, and herbal remedies. Africans and Native Americans intermarried and had children. In fact, relations were so frequent that when a census was taken in the early 1800s, 10% of the Cherokee Nation was of African descent; 100 years later, this number increased to 50%.

As interaction between the Africans and Native Americans increased, colonists felt a need to break their alliance and issue laws that secured the land and property the Europeans had acquired. Once the American government was established and began to thrive, such laws were carried out. Only then did the rights ot slave owners gain tremendous strength, while the rights of Africans and Native Americans fell to the wayside. In order to enforce the new laws and segregate the two ethnic groups, a census was taken to categorize all individuals as African or Native American. Categorization was based solely on skin color; consequently, much of the African-Native American history, culture, and ancestral lines were erased. Fast forward 300 years and most Americans know very little, it anything, about this fascinating ethnic group.

The Blige family shares in this incredible story of the African-Native Americans. Their bloodline is unique and in many ways, we wall never truly uncover the rich culture ot the African-Native American due to the lack ot documentation. But the Blige family has main tained a connection to their African-Native American ancestors in their ability to live off the land and their lifelong practice olt faith and spirituality…

Read the entire article here.

Medical Racism

The New York Times
2014-10-13

Brent Staples

The worst racial atrocities that took place in the Jim Crow South were carried out by the medical establishment, not by night riders cloaked in sheets. Indeed, many more African-Americans were killed by racist medical policies than by all the lynch mobs that ever existed. Until the late 1960s, the American Medical Association tacitly endorsed rules that denied membership to black physicians in the South, thus depressing their numbers in specialties such as surgery and ensuring that black patients would continue to receive dangerously substandard care — or no care at all.

This subject is rarely discussed in film or on television. The director Steven Soderbergh deserves praise for taking it up in “The Knick,” an absorbing, visually lush medical drama on Cinemax set in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The show centers on the self-obsessed, drug-addicted Dr. Thackery — compellingly played by Clive Owen — who leads a surgical team at the Knickerbocker, a hospital whose wards are awash in the immigrant poor. Known to his comrades as Thack, the junkie surgeon plans to carve his way to immortality, one bloody patient at a time, while lecturing to the rapt audience of doctors who crowd in to view his handiwork in the operating theater.

A racist, he is repulsed when a wealthy hospital patron forces him to accept the services of a talented black surgeon, Dr. Algernon Edwards — André Holland — even though Edwards has trained abroad and mastered techniques that his white betters have yet to learn…

…Critics who wonder about the real-world antecedents of the Dr. Edwards character should look to Dr. Charles Drew (1904-1950). A towering figure in medical history, Dr. Drew helped to make blood banks possible by developing efficient ways to process and store vast amounts of blood plasma. He began his career in the 1930s when surgical residencies at white hospitals in New York — even those that treated black patients — were officially closed to black physicians. Charming and urbane, Dr. Drew wrangled what a contemporary later described as a “bootleg” residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, thanks to a white doctor who took an interest in him. The fact that he was light-skinned enough to be mistaken for white was clearly an asset; it made it easier for him to find acceptance with white colleagues and patients…

Read the entire article here.

What It’s Like To Be Half-Japanese

Thought Catalog
2014-10-08

Michelle Reimann

Eurasian, half-Japanese, bi-racial, mixed race, hafu, hapa, double, hybrid, dual culture, TCK (third culture kid,) the axis of evil (yeah, yeah: I am German and Japanese, get over it.) However you choose to describe me my lineage is often one of the most frequently asked questions when I meet new people. I have been asked if I am Brazilian, Italian, Middle Eastern, Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, and basically every nationality under the sun. I can’t keep up with the flavor of the day in terms of political correctness anymore so for the purpose of this article I am going to refer to people like myself as halflings.

I mean this as a term of endearment, and also as a tribute to one of my favorite TV series coming to an end this week. True Blood had me going for seven strong seasons and I am already mourning the loss. The series explored the halfling protagonist Sookie Stackhouse’s (played by Anna Paquin) struggles with being half fairy, half human. Now, I admit what I am is not nearly as exciting as being half fairy but I can relate to many of Sookie’s trials and tribulations of being being caught between two worlds.

I am not speaking out on behalf of all halflings everywhere, but simply want to share with you my experiences of being what I am in Japan. I have never experienced racism but rather the us versus them concept — not discrimination but differentiation. I don’t have any painful memories. If anything, we halflings get special treatment in Japan. We are often viewed with a mixture of curiosity, awe, envy, admiration, adoration, sometimes suspicion or confusion and a barrage of other emotions…

Read the entire article here.

Civil War memorial to honor Toolesboro brothers

The Cedar Rapids Gazette
Iowa City, Iowa
2014-09-23

Alison Gowans, Features Reporter

LOUISA COUNTY, Iowa — When the six Littleton brothers of tiny Toolesboro set off for war, their sisters had no idea they would never welcome their brothers home.

The young Louisa County men all sacrificed their lives fighting for the North in the Civil War.

Their story, which was lost to history until a few years ago, is remarkable in many ways, said Tom Woodruff, a member of the Louisa County Historical Society.

“As far as we know, it’s the largest loss of life in one immediate family in any U.S. war,” he said. “It’s pretty significant.”

Woodruff stumbled on the tale in a scrapbook of Louisa County newspaper clippings dated 1846 to 1906. Brothers Thomas, William, George, John, Kendall and Noah all enlisted and died from wounds, disease or other calamities during the war.

Woodruff and other members of the Historical Society have been working to research and honor the brothers’ stories, starting with a booklet they published in 2012.

Now, the Louisa County Board of Supervisors has donated a plot of vacant land in Toolesboro, on the Great River Road adjacent to the Toolesboro Indian Mounds, as a site for a permanent memorial to the Littleton family’s sacrifice.

“It’s very close to where these boys were raised,” Woodruff said. “It’s a great spot, an appropriate spot.”…

…In the 1860 census, they are listed as mulatto, a term used at the time to indicate mixed race. Records show mother Martha was white and father James was mulatto. They settled in Iowa with the help of abolitionists, Woodruff said. The Littleton brothers joined all-white units when they enlisted.

“Iowa knows how to accept a family into their midst regardless of race, regardless of background, and those people in turn contribute to the freedoms we have in the United States,” Woodruff said. “They were ordinary boys who sacrificed their lives for us. Iowa raised those boys and they gave back a lot.”…

Read the entire article here.

Iowa memorial for six brothers who died as Union soldiers

The Washington Post
2014-05-07

Linda Wheeler

A site was approved Tuesday for a memorial to honor six brothers of an African American farm family of Toolesboro, Iowa, who died as Union soldiers during the Civil War.

The Louisa County Board of Supervisors choose a site near the tiny crossroads community where the brothers were raised in southeast Iowa on the Illinois border.

In 1840, James and Martha Littleton moved from Maryland, via Ohio, to Iowa where they raised their nine children including three girls. In the1860 census, the family is identified as mulatto, a term used during that time period to mean they were of mixed race. Research determined Martha was white and her husband, James, was mulatto.

The men served in white military units, volunteering between 1861 and 1862. By 1864, all had died—some in battle and others from disease– and were buried far from home…

Read the entire article here.

Kaine pushes for Indian recognition

Sulfolk News-Herald
Suffolk, Virginia
2014-10-02

Tracy Agnew, News Editor

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is making another push to recognize six Virginia Indian tribes, including the Nansemond, through his support of a proposed rule that would bring more flexibility to the process.

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs governs the process by which tribes in America can gain recognition from the federal government, and the benefits that come along with it…

…Its stringent criteria require, among many other things, documentation of the tribe’s existence and lineage from 1789 to the present, according to comments Kaine made in support of the rule change.

But at least six Virginia tribes — the Nansemond, Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock and Monacan — have found the administrative process unavailable to them because of the historical destruction of records.

Five of the six courthouses that held the majority of the tribes’ records were burned during the Civil War, Kaine noted in a letter to Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn.

Beyond this accidental destruction, a eugenics movement and fear of interracial marriages prompted officials at the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics to systematically destroy the vital records of Virginia’s tribes beginning in 1912.

In 1924, Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act codified the existence of only two races: “white” or “colored.” The law remained intact for nearly 50 years, forcing Indians to choose one or the other.

Officials even went so far as to retroactively change records to list Native Americans as “colored,” Kaine noted in his letter. This phenomenon is known today as “Pleckerism,” after Walter Ashby Plecker, the first registrar of the bureau, who was among the main officials who pushed to eliminate the Indian race in Virginia, at least on paper…

Read the entire article here.

11 ways race isn’t real

Vox
2014-10-10

Jenée Desmond-Harris

It was surprising — and, to many, annoying — to learn that Raven Symoné, the brown-skinned girl who played the adorable youngest character on TV’s seminal black sitcom, The Cosby Show, doesn’t consider herself “African-American.” (In a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, she said she thought of herself as “a colorless person.”)

Symoné ultimately responded to those who’d called her comments misguided or tone deaf, clarifying in a statement to theGrio.com, “I never said I wasn’t black.” But the most fascinating thing about the whole story is that, even if she’d flat-out rejected that label, none of us could, with any authority, tell her she was wrong.

The discussion surrounding the actress’s identity is just the latest example of how there’s no consensus when it comes to who should be called what — black, white, Asian, or Latino — in the United States. It’s a reminder that race is a social and political construct.

Most people have heard that concept by now. But what does it actually mean?

It means that racial categories are not real. By “real,” I mean based on facts that people can even begin to agree on. Permanent. Scientific. Objective. Logical. Consistent. Able to stand up to scrutiny.

This, of course, does not mean that the concept of race isn’t hugely important in our lives. Although race isn’t real, racism certainly is. The racial categories to which we’re assigned, based on how we look to others or how we identify ourselves, can determine real-life experiences, inspire hate, drive political outcomes, and make the difference between life and death. But these important consequences are a result of a relatively new idea that was based on shaky reasoning and shady motivations. This makes the borders of the various categories impossible to pin down and renders today’s debates about how particular people should identify futile.

If you have any lingering belief that the racial categorizations we use make any real sense, read this and change your mind:…

Read the entire article here.

“I am a culturally mixed woman searching for racial answers.”

—Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

Kelundra Smith, “Preview: Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni questions race and identity in “One Drop of Love”,” ArtsATL: Atlanta’s source for arts news and reviews, September 21, 2014. http://www.artsatl.com/2014/09/preview-fanshen-cox-digiovanni-questions-race-identity-one-drop-love/.

Another example of the challenges associated with the use of population descriptors can be found in the frequent use of the terms European, African, and Asian. These continental terms are tremendously broad in scope. At the Tokyo meeting, for example, it was noted that even among the Japanese researchers, there was no unitary understanding of what populations should be considered “Asian.”

More importantly, these terms can, in some contexts, be interpreted as referring to white, black, and Asian, the three classic, and socially constructed “races.” There continues to be a great deal of academic work that highlights the degree to which these broad “racial” categories are, in reality, social constructs. Although we should not overlook the correlation between “race” and socio-economic inequality involving factors such as health care and medical care, such discussion has usually arisen within the context of some North American and European societies. However, outside of these societies, the divergence between samples and population descriptors is also problematic. When the actual samples in the name of “European”, “African”, and “Asian” are taken from certain limited groups, without taking into account significant diversity within each region, it is unlikely that such broad terms have any scientific meaning, at least from the perspective of genetics on the global level. Moreover, the research results may be taken as supporting the classic “racial” categories, with any discovered “differences” misinterpreted as genetically determined “racial differences.”

The importance of the distinction between race and ethnicity cannot be overemphasized as the latter pays close attention to (presumably) shared cultural factors such as language, diet, and religion. When considering the contribution of environmental as well as genetic factors to diversity within each continental region, the scientific validity of the use of such broad terms to describe samples becomes even more questionable.

Yasuko Takezawa, et. al., “Human genetic research, race, ethnicity and the labeling of populations: recommendations based on an interdisciplinary workshop in Japan,” BMC Medical Ethics, (Volume 15, Issue 1, December 2014). p2-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6939-15-33.

Tangled Roots: A Performance of Real-Life Stories Celebrating Mixed Race Families

Trinity Centre
Trinity Road
Bristol, England BS2 0NW
2014-10-19, 14:00-20:00 BST (Local Time)

Free life-writing workshop and performance with Dr Katy Massey – part of our Black History Month programme

On Sunday 19 October, Tangled Roots are staging a live workshop and performance event at The Trinity Centre. The event is in two parts: a free life-writing workshop in the afternoon led by Dr Katy Massey PhD will then be followed by a live performance staged by the Tangled Roots writers and actors.

Workshop attendees will also have the opportunity to hear their own life experiences dramatised on stage as some of the life-writing produced in the workshop will be adapted by the team becoming part of the live performance.

In addition, attendees can browse an exhibition of photographic portraits of mixed race writers, specially commissioned by Tangled Roots.

Bristol-based poet Katie Grant is a high-profile supporter of the Tangled Roots project. She is part of a mixed race family herself and, last year, presented a documentary ‘The Brown Camp’ about mixed families on Radio 4. “I am thrilled to be representing the Tangled Roots Project in the South West. The history and experiences of mixed race families has a direct relevance and resonance in my life – both as a writer and as a mother” says Grant. “The photographs commissioned by Tangled Roots really reflect the nature of this diverse new population.”

“Bristol’s history at the centre of the UK slave trade is well-known, what isn’t so well documented is the huge mixed population who call Bristol ‘home’. 16% of our city’s population^* belongs to a black or minority ethnic group, but among under 15s the figure is 28%^*. Rising numbers of people are forming relationships across different racial and ethnic groups. As a result, more families than ever before comprise of more than one race. These families – families like mine, in fact – never see their stories represented in the mainstream media. It is the experiences of mixed families in Bristol and the South West that the Tangled Roots project wants to highlight” Grant explained.

Workshop & Performance information

The writing workshop (2pm-5pm) is open to adults who wish to learn how to write about their own life experiences or anyone else’s. You do NOT have to be mixed race to attend! The workshop theme will be “Home” and you must book your place in advance.

The evening performance (7pm- 8pm) is open to young people and adults (please note the performance is not suitable for under 12s). It is free and lasts approximately one hour…

For information, click here.