Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
The assumption that more racial diversity equals more racial equality is a dangerous myth. Racial diversity can function as a cloaking device, concealing the most powerful forms of White supremacy while giving the appearance of racial progress.
John Blake, “White supremacy, with a tan,” CNN, September 4, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/04/us/census-browning-of-america-myth-blake/index.html.
Phil Wang: I wouldn’t be a comic if I weren’t mixed-race
BBC News
2021-09-11
Helen Bushby, Entertainment and arts reporter
 Phil Wang says the face of “every Eurasian person I’ve ever seen sings with loneliness” |
Phil Wang, the stand-up comic you may recall for his viral video spoofing a Tom Hiddleston advert, has been baring his soul, or at least some of it, in his new book Sidesplitter.
Wang, 31, whose TV duties include Live at the Apollo, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Taskmaster, insists it’s not a memoir, as his life doesn’t merit one.
“I haven’t escaped a gulag or revolutionised an industry,” he explains, adding memoirs are a “saturated market” anyway.
What he really talks about in his book of essays is the impact of being mixed-race, of being “from two worlds at once”.
But although it has its serious moments, Sidesplitter is eloquently laced with laughs and bittersweet observations…
Read the entire article here.
Simon & Schuster
2021-01-12
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781982149109
Paperback ISBN-13: 9781982149116
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781797118819 (09:31:00)
Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this harrowing story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world.
She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.
She was raped by the owner of a notorious slave jail. Later, she inherited it.
The Washington Post
2020-02-01
Sydney Trent, Local enterprise reporter
 An engraving print of the Lumpkin Slave Jail, from Corey’s “A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary.” (City of Richmond) |
Robert Lumpkin was one of the South’s most prolific and brutal slave traders, presiding over a slave jail in Richmond so notorious that it was referred to as the “Devil’s Half Acre.”
Mary Lumpkin lived with him — and with the horror of who he was, bearing witness to the extreme punishments he meted out to enslaved people like her.
Under Robert Lumpkin’s ownership from 1844 until the end of the Civil War, the jail held thousands of enslaved men and women in its dim and cramped cells, permeated by the stench of human excrement. Many were destined for the auction block; others were captured runaways. Some had been delivered there by their masters to receive more expert punishment. The names of dead prisoners appeared on Robert Lumpkin’s insurance claims, their bodies buried in unmarked graves scattered about the property.
Described by an abolitionist minister who met her as “large, fair-faced . . . nearly white,” Mary was also Robert’s slave. She was raped and impregnated by him as a child, ultimately bearing at least seven of his children, five of whom survived. She kept house and raised their offspring within the fenced brick compound that included the jail…
Read the entire article here.
Work Of First African American Painter With International Reputation Explored
Art Where You’re At
National Public Radio
2021-09-07
Susan Stamberg, Special Correspondent
 Photograph of Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1907. Frederick Gutekunst (1831–1917)/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution |
I just met Henry Ossawa Tanner. Nice trick, since he died in 1937. Tanner was the first African American artist with an international reputation. His paintings are in many museums, but I’ve walked past them countless times. Now, preparing for this column, I got to know a bit about his life and times (as well as new revelations about his artistic thinking) and thought I’d make the introductions.
Quite the gentleman. Born in Pittsburgh, 1859. Grew up in Philadelphia. Died an expatriate in Paris. “He saw right away that he could do better in France,” says Dallas Museum of Art curator Sue Canterbury.
He was having trouble getting into the art classes he wanted — and finding teachers who’d take him on. In France, skin color didn’t matter as much. He told a magazine writer, “in Paris no one regards me curiously. I am simply M[onsieur] Tanner, an American artist. Nobody knows or cares what was the complexion of my forebears.”
The French liked his work. In 1897, the government bought one of his pieces for the state collections. With that rare honor his reputation soared. Museums started buying Tanners. By 1900, when mass reproductions of Christ’s portrait and books on his life were circulating, curator Canterbury says, “Tanner was considered the leading European painter of religious scenes…
Read the entire article here.
INGRID DINEEN-WIMBERLY. The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916.
The American Historical Review
Volume 126, Issue 2 (June 2021)
pages 797–798
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhab307
Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Associate Professor of History
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio
Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly. The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916. (Borderlands and Transcultural Studies.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. xxxi, 267.
Why were so many African American leaders in the Reconstruction era from mixed-race backgrounds? This is the question Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly’s The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 sets out to answer. Dineen-Wimberly’s argument is encapsulated in her title, reflecting her contention that although many post–Civil War Black leaders could have chosen to pass as white they instead identified deliberately as Black. This choice, Dineen-Wimberly argues, rested on their ability as Black people to achieve political power or economic success. This ability to succeed because they were Black thus constituted the “allure” of Blackness. Dineen-Wimberly contends that her study pushes against a body of scholarship…
Read or purchase the article here.
A Black-white, biracial life is one of immense alienation
The Gazette
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
2021-08-29
Nichole Shaw, Editorial Fellow
The United States bombards its constituents with stories surrounding the division between white and Black culture, livelihoods, experiences, politics, social class and economic hierarchy. Being biracial in a world that starkly contrasts the division of white and Black means being at war with oneself, never truly feeling that you belong to either group. Rather, the biracial condition can leave a person stranded in a gray continuum, a place where only those who are neither accepted or rejected are subject to ridicule, pity, envy and hate — both for their mixed color but “tainted” soul. They struggle with the weight of white privilege and systemic racism, among a continuing list of complex identities that complicate the ways in which they aim to fit into the box society constructs for stereotypical racial roles.
The condition of a Black-white biracial life is one of immense alienation…
Read the entire article here.
Op-Ed: Why did so few Latinos identify themselves as white in the 2020 census?
The Los Angeles Times
2021-09-09
Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of Southern California
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology
University of Southern California
 Under the category “white” on the 2020 census form, there were names of countries not usually associated with Latinos in Los Angeles. (John Roark / Idaho Post-Register) |
The 2020 census results made a splash in mid-August with this clear message: A declining number of people in the United States identify themselves as white, and the shift is happening faster than many had predicted. But all the justified focus on the “browning” of America obscured a second storyline: the browning of Brown America.
Strikingly, the share of Latinos who identified their race as white in the 2020 census fell from about 53% in 2010 to about 20% in 2020; the share who identified as “other” rose from 37% to 42%, and the share identifying as two or more races jumped from 6% to 33%. These are big changes — ones that cannot be explained just by intermarriage and ones that challenge a narrative that Latinos will eventually assimilate into whiteness.
So what’s going on? Partly, the census shifts reflect a change in the way the government collects data. When it asked for race, the census in 2020 added prompts under the “white” category that included countries not associated with America’s Latino population. Still, the move away from “white” is so dramatic that it could be other factors as well — such as a xenophobic political climate that has made many Latinos aware that whiteness may not be easily within their reach…
Read the entire article here.
The First Black Supermodel, Whom History Forgot
The Cut
2013-07-10
 Photo: Woodgate/Associated Newspapers/Rex USA |
Fashion has a notoriously complicated history when it comes to black models, but the past month felt particularly loaded with talking points: Prada hired their first black model for a campaign in nineteen years; Kinee Diouf became the first black model on the cover of Vogue Netherlands, months after the magazine had painted a white model in “blackface”; and then Raf Simons cast black runway models – six of them – in his Dior couture show for the first time since he arrived at the house.
It’s slow progress since Donyale Luna became the first black supermodel nearly 50 years ago. Especially since most inveterate fashion-watchers don’t even know Luna’s name…
Read the entire article here.
Tracing roots of the Chinese Jamaican diaspora
gal-dem
2021-09-04
via author
With over 50,000 Chinese-Jamaicans residing on the Caribbean island, how did such a unique community form?
When my maternal great-grandfather Baker Chung-Yu migrated from Hong Kong to Jamaica over a hundred years ago, he probably didn’t expect that a few generations later, there would be over 50,000 Chinese-Jamaicans residing in the land of wood and water. He arrived as a businessman in the 1920s, after Hong Kong was snatched by the British Empire in 1842, seeking financial comfort for his future. This move allowed him to meet my Afro and Indo-Jamaican great-grandmother May Ranger and unknowingly spark the beginning of a growing Chinese-Jamaican family that would live to continuously explain our unusual heritage.
Growing up, I didn’t fully grasp the meaning of what it meant to be a Chinese immigrant in Jamaica. I am fourth generation Chinese, mixed in heritage and Black in racial identity. Born in Jamaica, raised in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and now living in the UK, my hop-scotching residential reality had meant I was isolated from most of my extended family, a significant portion being those of Chinese descent. Now that I’m older, I crave details about my Chinese ancestry and am now exploring a cavernous story rooted in struggle and resilience that I never knew existed…
Read the entire article here.