Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • ‘Belle’: Romance, Race And Slavery With Jane Austen Style

    ‘Belle’: Romance, Race And Slavery With Jane Austen Style

    National Public Radio
    Tell Me More
    2014-05-29

    Michel Martin, Host

    British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw was brought up on Jane Austen adaptations. “You know, the Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle was something I watched on a weekly basis with my mum at home in Oxfordshire,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

    But as the biracial actress completed her training at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, she watched her peers win roles in “the Downton Abbeys of this world” and realized those period dramas weren’t calling her. It made Mbatha-Raw ask: “Why can’t I be in something like this?”

    Now she is. Mbatha-Raw plays the title character in Belle, a film based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a captain in the Royal Navy and an enslaved African woman. When she is a child, Dido’s father entrusts her to his uncle, one of the most powerful men in the country.

    “She goes on this massive journey to become a woman who has the courage to stand up for who she is and what she believes in,” Mbatha-Raw says…

    Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview here (00:12:53). Read the transcript here. Download the audio here.

  • China Turns To Africa For Resources, Jobs And Future Customers

    China Turns To Africa For Resources, Jobs And Future Customers

    Fresh Air, WHYY-FM Philadelphia
    National Public Radio
    2014-05-27

    Terry Gross, Host

    Dave Davies, Senior Reporter

    China’s economic engagement in Africa can be measured in dollars — for instance, the $71 million airport expansion contract in Mali, funded by American foreign aid, that went to a Chinese construction firm.

    More remarkably, it can be measured in people: More than a million Chinese citizens have permanently moved to Africa, buying land, starting businesses and settling among local populations.

    Journalist Howard French, who spent years reporting on Africa and China for The New York Times and The Washington Post, has a new book that looks at these trends. In China’s Second Continent, French draws on interviews with Chinese and African businesspeople, government officials and ordinary citizens to explore China’s presence in 15 African countries.

    He says there’s a debate about the long-term consequences of China’s push into the African continent: Will it create development and prosperity, or will it lead to exploitation reminiscent of 19th-century European colonialism?

    French tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies that African citizens, for their part, would like Chinese businesses to be more open and transparent. He also explains that when Chinese leaders look at Africa, they don’t just see arable land and natural resources — they see a potential market for Chinese products…

    …DAVIES: You spent some time in Mozambique with a Chinese immigrant, Hao Shengli – is that – am I getting close to his name?

    FRENCH: Hao Shengli.

    DAVIES: Hao Shengli. Just tell us a little bit about how he got there and what kind of farming business he established.

    FRENCH: So Hao Shengli had a been sort of a moderately successful businessman back in China who had a peculiar marital history. He had taken on several wives in succession, but after each divorce, had maintained an intimate and financial relationship with the past wife, even as he took on a new wife. And so this led to a need for him to continually amass more and more money. And this drove him eventually to seek opportunity outside of China.

    He initially tries to open some businesses in the Middle East. They don’t succeed. And he went to a trade fair in southern China where, for the first time, he’s exposed to talk about opportunities in Africa. And he decided to try his hand there, and this leads him to go to Mozambique where he believed, because it was a Portuguese-speaking country, he wouldn’t find any Chinese people. He -Hao Shengli was driven by this very common motive that we’ve talked about before, where, you know, he wants to get to a place where there’s not going to be any competition from other Chinese people. And so he goes to Mozambique, and I meet him in the capital, Maputo. And he very generously drives me to his farm.

    DAVIES: And how is he able to buy so much arable land?

    FRENCH: So Hao had come with a certain amount of savings. He was a businessman. In China, he had had a reasonable success. He had saved up – I don’t know – over $100,000, which he had arrived with. And he described a process to me where he sort of makes his way from county to county ingratiating himself to local officials. And in the county where he finally settled, he had apparently helped in the construction of some local roads there. And this had won him great favor with local officials. And he ends up using these relationships to secure interest in this land.

    He made a payment for the land, and then he settles on the land. He begins farming Stevia, which is a plant that produces sweeteners that are used in diet sodas. And his scheme is to become a giant Stevia producer and to export to the likes of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, etc. Hao very quickly, though, runs into trouble with residents of the surrounding villages around his land who are resentful of the fact that he secured this very rich and irrigated valley, which had been years earlier owned and run by Portuguese colonials.

    And so he develops this scheme to bring his sons to Mozambique – teenage sons, one of them about 17, one of them a few years younger. And his idea that he comes up with is that if he marries off or at least has his sons procreate with local women, that the children of these couplings will become part of his clan. And as Mozambican citizens, they will be able to own the land legally in perpetuity. And his hold on this rich valley then can’t be challenged.

    DAVIES: Well that’s – that’s an entrepreneurial spirit to family building, isn’t it?

    FRENCH: Absolutely.

    DAVIES: This immigrant, Shengli, who had bought this land and was bringing his sons over and had big plans, how exactly did he figure his son would get African wives? I mean, what would they do to get them? Is it a matter of dating? Is it a matter of visiting their parents?

    FRENCH: Very good question. I mean, so the exact details are a bit hazy here. But as I began to talk through these questions with Shengli, it emerges that he himself may have had something of a relationship with the girl who ends up being the girlfriend of his first son—either that or he had a relationship with a friend of the girl who becomes the girlfriend of his son.

    As we talk these things through, he tells me that through a variety of payments made to essentially the family members of the clan of eligible girls—eligible in his view—girls, he had been able to secure relationships with various local girls. And he exhibited a great deal of impatience for his younger son, who he called Little Fatty. This is a prepubescent – I don’t know – I want to say 14-year-old, who had just arrived very recently from China and really had no sort of native interest in girls yet. And Hao was deeply irritated by this, saying, you know, we’ve got to get on with this, we’ve got to get on with this. You know, he’s thinking about building his clan, and he’s paired off the older son with a girl and – who knows? – but they may have had children by now. And he’s very anxious to see this happen with the younger boy as well…

    Read the article here. Listen to the interview (00:26:23)  here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

  • China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

    China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

    Knopf
    2014-05-20
    304 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0307956989
    9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches

    Howard W. French, Associate Professor of Journalism
    Columbia University

    An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa—a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people.

    A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting—conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages—French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China’s economic, political, and human presence across the African continent—and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.

    We meet a broad spectrum of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner–cum–brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China’s intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts’.

    French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition—exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties—to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.

    Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political exposé, French’s keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future.

  • Presentation on ‘African Heritage in Classical Music’ followed by the screening of ‘The Black Mozart in Cuba’

    Presentation on ‘African Heritage in Classical Music’ followed by the screening of ‘The Black Mozart in Cuba’

    Marcus Garvey Library
    Tottenham Green Centre
    1 Phillip Lane
    Tottenham, London N15 4JA
    Saturday, 2014-06-14, 17:00-20:00 BST (Local Time)

    Black History Studies in association with the Marcus Garvey Library presents ‘Sankofa Saturdays’

    African Heritage in Classical Music

    Music is an important part of our cultural heritage. In this presentation, Black History Studies will uncover the hidden contributions of musicians and composers of African descent to the genre of classical music.

    The Black Mozart in Cuba

    Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier de St George, was a Black classical composer and violin virtuoso born in Guadeloupe in the mid 18th century. The son of a Senegalese enslaved African and a French nobleman, he achieved enormous success as a musician, fencer, and military man. Yet, when he died in 1799, he was all but erased from history due in part to Napoleon’s efforts.

    The Black Mozart in Cuba is the latest act in the rehabilitation of the memory of this extraordinary human being. The film skillfully combines biographical information with performances of his works. In this documentary, Cuba dedicates a week of cultural activities to his memory and welcomes Saint Georges as “a great hero of the Caribbean.”

    In French, English and Spanish with English subtitles…

    For more information, click here.

  • “You Just Said ‘We’”: The complexity of not being White and not being a person of color.

    “You Just Said ‘We’”: The complexity of not being White and not being a person of color.

    Nick Franco
    May 2014

    Nick Franco, Coordinator for the Student Affairs/SOLES Collaborative
    University of San Diego

    This past Tuesday night, I did a mock presentation of my dissertation proposal for my dissertation seminar course. It went fairly well, and feedback from the professor and my colleagues was really, really helpful.

    During the Q&A/debrief portion of my presentation, I talked about White people and said “we,” suggesting that I was a White person speaking on behalf of my fellow White people. A colleague pointed it out, and I really wasn’t surprised or upset about it. I simply responded with, “Well, my own racial identity is a separate dissertation.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Color Of Health: Skin Color, Ethnoracial Classification, And Discrimination In The Health Of Latin Americans

    The Color Of Health: Skin Color, Ethnoracial Classification, And Discrimination In The Health Of Latin Americans

    Social Science & Medicine
    Available online: 2014-06-01
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.05.054

    Krista M. Perreira, Professor of Public Policy and Associate Dean Office for Undergraduate Research
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
    Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

    Highlights

    • Uses newly collected data on 4921 adults from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru
    • Examines multiple measures of race/ethnicity and their associations with health
    • Finds significant skin-color gradients in self-reported health.
    • Finds significant skin-color gradients in class-based discrimination and low SES.
    • SES and class-based discrimination largely account for disparities in health by skin color.

    Latin America is one of the most ethnoracially heterogeneous regions of the world. Despite this, health disparities research in Latin America tends to focus on gender, class and regional health differences while downplaying ethnoracial differences. Few scholars have conducted studies of ethnoracial identification and health disparities in Latin America. Research that examines multiple measures of ethnoracial identification is rarer still. Official data on race/ethnicity in Latin America are based on self-identification which can differ from interviewer-ascribed or phenotypic classification based on skin color. We use data from Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru to examine associations of interviewer-ascribed skin color, interviewer-ascribed race/ethnicity, and self-reported race/ethnicity with self-rated health among Latin American adults (ages 18-65). We also examine associations of observer-ascribed skin color with three additional correlates of health – skin color discrimination, class discrimination, and socio-economic status. We find a significant gradient in self-rated health by skin color. Those with darker skin colors report poorer health. Darker skin color influences self-rated health primarily by increasing exposure to class discrimination and low socio-economic status.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mo Asumang: Confronting racism face-to-face

    Mo Asumang: Confronting racism face-to-face

    BBC News Magazine
    2014-05-13

    Mo Asumang is the daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother.

    As a well-known TV presenter in Germany she became the target of racist extreme right-wingers and neo-Nazis, who based their attacks on Asumang’s “non-Aryan” background.

    So she decided to look into the racist ideology and to find out more about those who consider themselves “Aryan“.

    In her new documentary, The Aryans, she confronts racists, both in Germany and among the Ku Klux Klan in America.

    Mo Asumang spoke to BBC News about her experiences making the film…

  • What is Luring a Million Chinese to Africa?

    What is Luring a Million Chinese to Africa?

    OZY
    2014-05-15

    Jacob Kushner

    Like immigrants the world over, the million Chinese who’ve landed in Africa are plucky, hugely ambitious and have an eye for opportunity. They’re also helping make China a big player on a continent once dominated by the West.

    You’ve seen the headlines: China is taking over Africa, and the United States and Africa’s former colonizers in Europe have lost sway.

    Mostly, it’s true. Throughout Angola, Ghana and the Congo, some of China’s largest companies are building roads and railways. They’re backed by Chinese banks, and they’ll pay off their loans in kind through mining and oil deals. All the while, small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs are moving to Africa, opening pharmacies, trading furniture or buying land to farm, much as earlier generations did in Southeast Asia and North America. African governments are welcoming them with open arms, and for the most part, so are Africans themselves.

    Earlier literature on China’s rise in Africa pushed us past the easy — and flawed — paradigm of China as Africa’s latest “colonizer.” But in his forthcoming book, China’s Second Continent, Howard French argues the Chinese who migrate to Africa do so as individuals motivated by simple, familiar dreams of opportunity.

    A former China bureau chief for The New York Times and veteran Africa correspondent, French traveled the African continent, speaking Mandarin with Chinese men and women who had grown weary of the daily grind in their homeland. The characters French encounters are risk-takers: sometimes foulmouthed, often lucky and universally ambitious.

    OZY: What has lured a million Chinese people to Africa?

    French: Many Chinese people came here in the first wave because they were part of a work crew that built a big project somewhere. They typically came with absolutely no idea of what they were going to find on the ground, what Africa would be like. Some people that thought this place would be horrible, [with] hostile people or dangerous animals and diseases, find out it is also fairly pleasant: “I feel comfortable navigating in this society. And most importantly, everywhere I look, there are opportunities to make money.” They come and see opportunity everywhere they look…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia by Eva Sheppard Wolf (reweiw) [Watkins]

    Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia by Eva Sheppard Wolf (reweiw) [Watkins]

    Journal of the Early Republic
    Volume 33, Number 3, Fall 2013
    pages 575-577
    DOI: 10.1353/jer.2013.0062

    Andrea S. Watkins

    Wolf, Eva Sheppard, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012)

    The tenuous status of free blacks within antebellum Virginia is examined by Eva Sheppard Wolf through the life of Samuel Johnson, a slave who purchased his own freedom and struggled over the course of the rest of his life to free his family and keep them together. His attempts to work within the legal framework established by the state and his own connections to powerful Virginia citizens illustrates the nebulous place free blacks held within antebellum society, as well as the role of personal relationships between black and white residents in achieving freedom and prosperity.

    Wolf, associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, has pieced together a story of Johnson’s adulthood and family life through local court records and Virginia legislative petitions. The specifics of Samuel Johnson’s birth are not known, but his identification as “mulatto” in records indicates he had a slave mother and white father. Wolf suggests that Johnson’s white father may have found his mulatto slave son work in Norris Tavern in Warrenton, Virginia, the county seat for Fauquier County. As a tavern servant Johnson had the opportunity to forge relationships with white members of the community who came to Warrenton for court business and to save tip money to purchase his freedom. Johnson entered an agreement with his owner Edward Digges in 1802 to purchase his freedom for five hundred dollars. Virginia law regarding manumission of slaves changed in 1806. The new law established that freed slaves must leave the state within one year of liberation. Johnson had a choice to either continue to save and purchase his freedom with the knowledge he must leave or remain enslaved. The decision was not an easy one as he was married with two children by 1811, when he had collected the five hundred dollars.

    Johnson’s choice demonstrates the importance of personal relationships in understanding race relations in the antebellum period. Over time Johnson had established ties with important white men within Warrenton, Fauquier County, and beyond. He was known as a hard-working slave and was viewed by many as an asset to the community. To leave Fauquier County, or Virginia, was to face a life of uncertainty. Would he find such valuable work in another state or find a place in a new community equal to the one he had in Warrenton? Thus, Johnson chose to petition the state legislature to allow him to remain in Virginia and he enlisted the help of various white citizens as witnesses to his character. His petition was passed by the legislature, and eventually Samuel Johnson became a free man on August 25, 1812. The fact that Johnson called on white slave owners to attest to his hard work, character, and value to the community reveals how often the relationships between blacks and whites in the early nineteenth century do not match the rhetoric of speeches and legislation critical and fearful of the presence of free blacks.

    Wolf recounts how in the following years Johnson purchased his wife and two children, but their position was precarious as they could be sold for payment of Johnson’s debts, and he could not free them without fear that officials would expel them from the state one year after manumission. Johnson submitted petition after petition to the state’s authorities requesting that his family be allowed to remain with him when freed, and again and again those petitions failed to pass. Wolf successfully portrays the frustrations of trying to navigate the legal system of the time, but also the high stakes for Johnson and his family if he acted without legal provision. Johnson’s resourcefulness in garnering support throughout the white community is evident in his 1826 petition for his daughter Lucy that had the signatures of 226 people including white women and two U.S. congressmen. Johnson successfully purchased a home and land on the edge of Warrenton, and the family established a comfortable lifestyle until his death in 1842. At that time only his daughter and her children were still living. Johnson had already freed Lucy, taking the chance that his own standing and her ties to the local community would forestall any attempts to have…

  • Mixed Remixed Festival Reveals 2014 Schedule

    Mixed Remixed Festival Reveals 2014 Schedule

    Mixed Remixed Festival
    March 2014

    Heidi Durrow

    (Los Angeles, CA) The Mixed Remixed Festival will take place at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles (100 N. Central Avenue), June 14, 2014.

    The Festival celebrates stories of the Mixed experience and stories of multiracial Americans, the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. A free public event, the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial and multicultural families and individuals for workshops, readings, performances, and film screenings…

    …The event is free and open to the public; however, pre-registration is strongly encouraged. The complete Festival schedule can be found online at www.mixedremixed.org.

    Read the entire press release here.