Mixed Race Studies

Loving a Black person isn’t the same as fighting for Black lives

Mic
2020-06-12

Kim Kelly

My boyfriend and I have a game we play whenever we’re out in public. Whenever one of us spots another interracial couple passing by, we’ll give the other a little nudge and whisper, “Look, an us!” Sometimes it’s an older us; sometimes it’s a more stylish version, or a queer version, or a rebellious teen version. Every time, though, we share a smile, because it’s nice to be reminded that we aren’t alone. While interracial couples now make up more than 10 percent of all new marriages in the U.S., partnerships like ours are still uncommon enough — or taboo enough — to garner stares when we’re out in public. I’ve noticed that police tend to stare the hardest, and whenever I catch them looking, my stomach drops.

As a white cisgender woman from a rural community, my early interactions with police barely left an impression. My boyfriend, on the other hand, vividly remembers each time he was stopped and frisked on his way home from his South Brooklyn high school, and all the times he’s been arrested just because he happened to be Black in public. They see him as a threat, and me as a potential victim. I may be safe around them, but he isn’t, and even my whiteness can only offer so much protection…

Read the entire article here.

Don’t let the politics of BLM define mixed-race Americans

The New York Daily News
2021-06-19

Charles Byrd

Mixed-race Americans (Shutterstock/Shutterstock)

Prior to June 12, 1967, anti-miscegenation laws still existed in the southern United States. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned those remaining statutes of segregationist race-consciousness with its landmark “Loving v. Virginia” decision. That case did not magically eradicate racist attitudes towards interracial couples and their progeny, but it did signal yet another milestone in our country’s continuing evolution from a slaveholding society to one that extends the same civil rights and freedoms to all.

The 2020 Census allowed multiracials to again choose multiple boxes instead of being forced to identify solely with one race, yet in the throes of the current Black Lives Matter era, there is a seeming renewed effort to compel mixed Black/white Americans to look in the mirror and acknowledge that, in the face of “relentless white supremacy” particularly on the part of law enforcement, they will always be viewed and treated as Black and nothing else. That rationale runs counter to the philosophy that how one views oneself is more important than societally imposed identities, a worldview that a growing number of mixed-race Americans embrace…

Read the entire article here.

Why This Mexican Village Celebrates Juneteenth

Texas Monthly
2019-06-19

Wes Ferguson

Descendants of the Negro Mascogo people of northern Mexico gather to celebrate Juneteenth in the village of Nacimiento de los Negros. Photograph by Wes Ferguson

Descendants of slaves who escaped across the southern border observe Texas’s emancipation holiday with their own unique traditions.

The morning before Juneteenth, Corina Harrington and her sister Miriam Torralba left San Antonio shortly after sunrise and headed south to Mexico, retracing a portion of the same route their African American ancestors followed in 1850 when they escaped slavery in the United States and fled to freedom south of the border.

The sisters arrived around midday at their father’s house in the ranching village of Nacimiento de los Negros in Coahuila, about three hours south of Eagle Pass. As afternoon drifted toward evening, the blue silhouettes of the Sierra Madres were all but obscured by clouds, as siblings, cousins, extended family members, and childhood friends kept arriving in twos, threes, or fours. They strolled over to the cool and swift Río Sabinas to swim in water as clear as any Hill Country stream. They politely tasted the dried and shredded meat of a mountain lion that one of their cousins shot on their dad’s nearby goat ranch, and they laughed and reminisced and readied for one of the most important days of the year in a village whose name literally means “Birth of the Blacks.”…

Read the entire article here.

Acquanetta

Jungle Frolics
2009-10-15

Richard Beland

Acquanetta was born Mildred Davenport on July 17, 1921, and, depending on your source, was of either black or American Indian origin. A few writers have claimed she was Cheyenne Indian; possibly they’re confusing this with reports of her being from Cheyenne, Wyoming, or having been born in Ozone, near Cheyenne. However, by most accounts she was born on an Indian reservation and raised in Norristown, Pennsylvania. These conflicting reports may be due to the possibility that she had both black and Indian blood in her. (Adding to the confusion regarding her ethnic origins, some still report that she was born in Venezuela!)…

...The Arizona Republic for August 22, 2004, reported that Acquanetta’s brother, 85-year old Horace A. Davenport, was present at her funeral. A retired judge, Horace Davenport was, according to the Pennsylvania Bar Association, “the first African-American judge in Montgomery County.” Horace said that he’d never seen any of Acquanetta’s movies.

Bill Feret, in his 1984 book, Lure of the Tropix, said of Acquanetta, “She has never clarified her ambiguous origins, which over the years have varied between being an Arapaho Indian from Wyoming, a Latin from Venezuela, or a black girl from Pennsylvania…” Certainly, her exotic and sultry beauty and the ambiguity of her past added to the mystique.

Perhaps the 1940 United States Census can clear up matters: Mildred Davenport was born in 1921 in Newberry, South Carolina and was residing in Norristown, Norristown Borough, Montgomery, Pennsylvania with her parents, William and Julia, and five siblings, including Horace and Catherine (spelled “Kathryn” in a Jet article). Each member of the family is identified as “Negro” (race) and “African American” (ethnicity)…

Read the entire article here.

Study of Multiracial Women Leading in Large Organizations

Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California
2021-06-19

Michele A. Richardson (marichardson@email.fielding.edu), Doctoral Student, Human Development
School of Leadership Studies

This study examines how multiracial women leaders see themselves and how that self-concept might influence their approach to navigating tensions and complexity at work.

Now Enrolling Research Participants

Are you a woman who:

• Identifies with two distinct racial groups, with one being a minoritized racial or ethnic group (e.g., Black/African American, Latina, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native/Indigenous, etc.), and
• Holds a supervisory position in a company of 5,000+ employees?

Then, consider amplifying the voices of multiracial women in the workplace by sharing the unique insights and perspectives you bring to your everyday leadership practice.

Click here to sign-up.

What will you be asked to do?

As a research participant, you will be asked to sign an Informed Consent form and respond to a brief questionnaire to capture some basic information about you. Then, we’ll schedule a confidential, 45-minute Zoom meeting to explore how your multiracial identity may potentially influence how you lead through complex situations. We’ll have some light email exchanges after our meeting, so you can expect to invest up to an hour of time total. There is no monetary compensation to participate.

About me:

About Me: I’m Michele Richardson, a doctoral candidate pursuing a multidisciplinary human development degree at Fielding Graduate University. This research is motivated by my Black/Japanese identity and desire to see notions of diverse leadership advance beyond simplified, binary categorizations of racial identity. I currently serve as a Director, Human Resources for a global veterinary diagnostic and software company.

For more information, click here.

High Yellow (1965, trailer) [Starring Cynthia Hull]

YouTube
Department of Afro-American Research Arts Culture
2017-06-29

Cynthia Wood, a light-skinned 17-year-old girl, tries to pass as white after getting hired by wealthy movie magnate Mr. Langley, who has problems with his spoiled wife and promiscuous teenage daughter and son.

Watch the full movie (01:20:11) here.

NAACP to Tampa: For Juneteenth, find Robert Meacham, a slave who became senator

Tampa Bay Times
2021-06-12

Paul Guzzo, Tampa Bay LIfe Reporter

This portrait of Robert Meacham was taken around 1870. Meacham was an enslaved man who was later elected Florida senator. [Courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory]

He was buried in the erased College Hill Cemetery believed to be located in what is now the Italian Club Cemetery’s parking lot.

TAMPA — Robert Meacham was an enslaved man who became a Florida state senator pushing for educational opportunities for Black children.

“Robert Meacham is the type of man who deserves a street named for him,” said Fred Hearns, the curator of Black history at the Tampa Bay History Center. “Maybe even a statue.”

But he doesn’t even have a marked grave.

Meacham is among the more than 1,200 buried in Tampa’s erased College Hill Cemetery for Blacks and Cubans, believed to be located in what is now the Italian Club Cemetery’s parking lot.

June 19 is Juneteenth, the day commemorating the anniversary of when in 1865 the enslaved in Texas were freed. It serves as the day to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States…

…Meacham was born in Gadsden County in 1835. His mother was an enslaved woman. His father was her white owner.

As a child, Meacham rode alongside his father in the family buggy and was educated. But, when he turned 18, Meacham was taken to Tallahassee to “fulfill the role of a house-servant for an affluent Leon County family.” When his father died, Meacham became that family’s “property.”…

Read the entire article here.

Being mixed-race in the age of BLM

The New York Daily News
2021-06-12

Tanya K. Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law; Associate Director & Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives
Fordham University School of Law, New York, New York

Protesters march for the sixth consecutive night of protest on September 7, 2020, following the release of video evidence that shows the death of Daniel Prude while in the custody of Rochester Police in Rochester, New York. (MARANIE R. STAAB/AFP via Getty Images)

Today marks the 54th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated interracial marriage bans in the United States in 1967. Interracial marriage has been legal across the nation for nearly half a century, but the children of mixed-race marriages and other interracial unions are still subject to many other types of discrimination that their parents and ancestors faced. The persistence of such bias shows that while courts have may have remedied the bias behind interracial marriage bans, but they remain unable to blunt the continued vibrancy of white supremacy in the United States.

In my book, “Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination,” I found that mixed-race arrestees describe their experiences of racial profiling and police violence in much the same way that single-race identified non-whites do. Thus, like George Floyd, the African-American man killed in 2020, by police officer Derek Chauvin, multiracial people can also experience being viewed as so inherently suspicious that they warrant out-sized interventions based upon their non-white racial appearance…

Read the entire article here.

Ceremony

Penguin Random House
2006-12-26 (originally published in 1977)
272 Pages
5-5/8 x 8-7/16
Paperback ISBN: 9780143104919
Ebook ISBN: 9781440621826

Leslie Marmon Silko
Introduction by Larry McMurtry

The great Native American Novel of a battered veteran returning home to heal his mind and spirit

More than thirty-five years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power. The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition contains a new preface by the author and an introduction by Larry McMurtry.

Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art: The Ascendency of Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister, and Edmonia Lewis

University Press of Mississippi
2021-07-15
282 pages
30 b&w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496834348
Paperback ISBN: 9781496834355

Naurice Frank Woods Jr., Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Foreword by George Dimock, Associate Professor Emeritus of Art
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

The extraordinary struggle, achievement, loss, and reclamation of three brilliant African American artists of the 1800s

Painters Robert Duncanson (ca. 1821–1872) and Edward Bannister (1828–1901) and sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844–1907) each became accomplished African American artists. But as emerging art makers of color during the antebellum period, they experienced numerous incidents of racism that severely hampered their pursuits of a profession that many in the mainstream considered the highest form of social cultivation. Despite barriers imposed upon them due to their racial inheritance, these artists shared a common cause in demanding acceptance alongside their white contemporaries as capable painters and sculptors on local, regional, and international levels.

Author Naurice Frank Woods Jr. provides an in-depth examination of the strategies deployed by Duncanson, Bannister, and Lewis that enabled them not only to overcome prevailing race and gender inequality, but also to achieve a measure of success that eventually placed them in the top rank of nineteenth-century American art.

Unfortunately, the racism that hampered these three artists throughout their careers ultimately denied them their rightful place as significant contributors to the development of American art. Dominant art historians and art critics excluded them in their accounts of the period. In this volume, Woods restores their artistic legacies and redeems their memories, introducing these significant artists to rightful, new audiences.