Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • ‘The Black Count:’ the epic true story behind ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

    ‘The Black Count:’ the epic true story behind ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

    The Seattle Times
    2012-11-16

    Tyrone Beason

    Tom Reiss’ swashbuckling new book, “The Black Count,” tells the true story of Alex Dumas, son of a French nobleman and an African slave, the father of author Alexandre Dumas and the inspiration for the younger Dumas’ classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

    The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss Crown, 414 pp.

    There are no statues in monument-laden France commemorating the legendary 18th century swordsman and general Alex Dumas, whose son Alexandre based literary classics like “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” on scenes from the elder’s epic life story.

    It’s a sad civic oversight, but nothing compared to the tragic decline suffered by the novelist’s heroic father as laid out in Tom Reiss’ fascinating, and dare to say, swashbuckling new biography, “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.”

    It turns out that the heroes in those classics are modeled on a black man who was born in 1762 in the French colony of Haiti. Alex Dumas was the son of a wayward French nobleman and an African slave, and it is his biracial identity that adds such rich complexity to his rise through the ranks of the French military to become one of the most beloved generals of his time, arguably even more admired than Napoleon, a fact that probably didn’t sit well with the megalomaniacal future ruler.

    It was Napoleon who tapped Dumas to command the cavalry that invaded Egypt, an enormous, and as it turns out, fateful honor.

    “The Black Count” meticulously evokes the spirit of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, but it also explains the exasperating paradox of a nation that was simultaneously a huge slaveholding empire and the pioneering exponent of the concept of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.”

    Let’s not forget the context. By the 1750s, black slaves taken to France were able to sue their masters for freedom. After the French Revolution in 1793, special schools were set up in France to educate the children of “revolutionaries of color” from the colonies. Black and mixed-race politicians were allowed to serve in the national government…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Zakes Mda: The Madonna of Excelsior

    Zakes Mda: The Madonna of Excelsior

    Muthal Naidoo: Published Books, Plays, Poems and Articles
    2011-11-01

    Muthal Naidoo

    (2002. Cape Town. Oxford University Press)
     
    The Immorality Act of 1927, which prohibited sex between Blacks and Whites, was amended in 1950 to prohibit sex between Whites and all non-Whites. Zakes Mda bases his novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, on the 1971 case in which 19 people from Excelsior were charged under the Immorality Act. He traces the lives of Niki, one of the accused, and her children Viliki and Popi, and the effects of the ‘illicit’ activities on their lives and those of the people around them.

    Niki, the Madonna of Excelsior, lives in Mahlaswetsa, the black township of Excelsior. She and several other women fall prey to circumstances of poverty and become involved with white men from Excelsior. When the women give birth to white babies, fourteen of them are arrested and put on trial with five white men. But the case comes to nothing; the Minister of Justice withdraws the charges. And there are no fathers of the white babies of black women. This attempt to wipe out the whole event and pretend it never happened may have succeeded in the rest of the country but in Excelsior it lives on in the shame that families both black and white feel, in the many ‘coloured’ children walking the streets, in the unacknowledged connections that they represent. And especially in Popi’s hatred of herself. People call her ‘boesman” and she is ashamed of her blonde hair, blue eyes and hairy legs. She has a white half-brother whom she does not acknowledge and clings to the memory of her black father…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Political Racism in the Age of Obama

    Political Racism in the Age of Obama

    The New York Times
    2012-11-10

    Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History
    University of Pennsylvania

    The white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama’s decisive re-election with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a “post-racial” era.

    But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr. Obama’s re-election last week, it has frayed over time — and may in fact have been weaker than we imagined to begin with. For close to the surface lies a political racism that harks back 150 years to the time of Reconstruction, when African-Americans won citizenship rights. Black men also won the right to vote and contested for power where they had previously been enslaved…

    …By the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in American political society and had no business wielding power over white people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr. Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts.

    The truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.

  • Indigenous Giles stands by Abbott

    Indigenous Giles stands by Abbott

    NT News
    Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
    2012-11-15

    Nigel Adlam

    TERRITORY indigenous politician Adam Giles has refused to condemn Tony Abbott.

    Mr Abbott said Alison Anderson was an “authentic representative” of ancient Central Australian culture but mixed-race MP Ken Wyatt was “not a man of culture”.
     
    Mr Giles also refused to criticise the Coalition leader for not including him in a list of the NT’s Aboriginal Members of the Legislative Assembly…
     
    But Mr Giles did warn that Aboriginality was a “sensitive subject”.
     
    “Sometimes the smallest word can get the hairs on your back going,” he said.
     
    Mr Abbott said he wanted to increase indigenous representation in the national parliament.

    But he seemed to blunder into the “who’s an Aborigine?” minefield when he then made the comparison with Mr Wyatt – calling him an “urban Aboriginal”.
     
    Mr Abbott’s office yesterday said he had not been implying Mr Wyatt was not indigenous…
     
    Mr Giles said he wouldn’t get involved in the argument about “who is more authentic”.
     
    “It’s abhorrent,” he said.
     
    “All indigenous people know who they are.”
     
    In a seeming reference to the difference between mixed-race people and full-blooded Aborigines, the Transport Minister said: “I know how many indigenous Australians have a hole in their heart in wanting for cultural enrichment…
     
    Read the entire article here.

  • biracial individuals identify as how they’re treated, not how they see themselves.

    For most of my life, I primarily identified as biracial, multiracial, or mixed, but over the last year, where I’ve encountered more racism and privilege than I have in the 40-something previous years—and that includes 18 years in Virginia—I notice that I’m more likely to identify as Black. This jives with my own dissertation findings that biracial individuals identify as how they’re treated, not how they see themselves.

    Johanna Workman, Facebook Post, November 14, 2012. http://www.facebook.com/#!/johanna.workman.96/posts/4746274822162.

  • They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.

    “I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between them?” she asked me. Her voice cracked, and I thought she was going to cry.  “It’s not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they’re willing to treat me like a person. No—it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose.  They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t be who I am…”

    “They, they, they.  That was the problem with people like Joyce.  They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.  It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street.  The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.  Only white culture could be neutral and objective.  Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasion exotic into its ranks.  Only white culture had individuals.  And, we the half-breeds and college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to?  We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suite and speak impeccable English and yet somehow have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.”

    Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 99-100.

  • racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless.

    What is most disturbing about the paradoxical use of race is the effect it may have on the trajectory of ongoing human genetic variation research. By making the moral argument that race-based therapeutics address injustice in health care, and at the same time maintaining that genetics research will ultimately eliminate the need for racial categories, racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless. Rather than serving as a way station, the use of race is allowed to become more fully embedded in the production of scientific knowledge and medical practice.

    Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, “Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparities,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 95, Number 12 (December 2005): 2137. http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.068676.

  • Strange Fruit: Dr. Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop Project; Director Kenny Leon

    Strange Fruit: Dr. Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop Project; Director Kenny Leon

    WFPL 89.3 FM
    Louisville, Kentucky
    2012-11-03

    Laura Ellis, Producer

    Who is black? That’s the question the (1)ne Drop Project seeks to answer. The project, created by Dr. Yaba Blay, features photographs of people who identify as black, African-American, biracial, and other identities—but whose physical appearances may provoke curiosity, or even disbelief, in strangers. Dr. Blay will appear on CNN’s Black in America 5 to talk about what it means to be black. But this week she made some time to talk to us about her work…

    Listen to the interview here (00:38.42). (The interview with Dr. Blay begins at 00:14:54 and ends at 00:26:01).

  • Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparities

    Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparities

    American Journal of Public Health
    Volume 95, Number 12 (December 2005)
    pages 2133-2138
    DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2005.068676

    Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Senior Research Scholar
    Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
    Stanford University

    Current practices of using “race” in pharmacogenomics research demands consideration of the ethical and social implications for understandings of group difference and for efforts to eliminate health disparities. This discussion focuses on an “infrastructure of racialization” created by current trajectories of research on genetic differences among racially identified groups, the use of race as a proxy for risk in clinical practice, and increasing interest in new market niches by the pharmaceutical industry.

    The confluence of these factors has resulted in the conflation of genes, disease, and race. I argue that public investment in pharmacogenomics requires careful consideration of current inequities in health status and social and ethical concerns over reifying race and issues of distributive justice.

    Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

  • Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 2012 and Mixed Roots Midwest

    Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 2012 and Mixed Roots Midwest

    2012-11-13

    Camilla Fojas, (CMRS 2012 organizer) Associate Professor and Chair
    Latin American and Latino Studies
    DePaul University

    Laura Kina, (Mixed Roots Midwest 2012 co-organizer) Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
    DePaul University


    Photo of Mixed Roots Midwest: Filmmakers Panel by Laura Kina.

    Presented by DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs and co-organized by Fanshen Cox, Chandra Crudup, Khanisha Foster, and Laura Kina, Mixed Roots Midwest featured three evenings of programming that explored what it means to have a mixed identity:

    • Nov 1, 2012 Selected Shorts: Silences by Octavio Warnock-Graham, Crayola Monologues by Nathan Gibbs, Mixed Mexican by Thomas P. Lopez, and Nigel’s Fingerprints by Kim Kuhteubl.
    • Nov 2, 2012 Filmmakers Panel: Fanshen Cox in conversation with Kim Kuhteubl, Jeff Chiba Stearns, Kip Fulbeck.
    • Nov 3, 2012 Live Event – featuring spoken word artists CP Chang, Chris L. Terry and Sage Xaxua Morgan-Hubbard from Chicago’s own 2nd Story along with a preview of Fanshen Cox’s solo-show-in-progress, One Drop of Love and invited Chicago writer Fred Sasaki reading from a manuscript of e-mails called “Letter of Interest.”