Mixed Race Studies

UMASS Recognizes Growing Interdisciplinary Study of Black Germans in Academia

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2013-08-12

Jamal Watson

AMHERST, Mass.—In an effort to recognize a relatively young academic discipline that many in the academy have never heard of before, nearly a hundred students and scholars gathered at Amherst College over the weekend to discuss their research and ideas for how to grow Black German Studies.

This marks the third year that the Black German Heritage & Research Association sponsored the international conference, which highlighted a variety of interdisciplinary topics ranging from Black Germans during the Third Reich to their ongoing presence in German theater.

Like African American, Women and Queer studies, Black German Studies has an admitted social justice focus, says Dr. Sara Lennox, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an early founder of the Black German Studies movement in the U.S.

“We’ve made the field legitimate. You can now do this work and get tenure,” says Lennox, who was chiefly responsible for jumpstarting the Black German Studies concentration at UMASS Amherst. “It’s kind of a burgeoning field and movement. The other thing that’s really cool is there is a pretty strong connection between activism and scholarship and a really strong connection with the experimental … Black Germans talking about their stories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black German culture, history highlighted at Amherst-sponsored conference

Amherst College News
Amherst College
Amherst, Massachusetts
2013-08-16

Peter Rooney, Director of Public Affairs

As more African-Americans are realizing they have German roots, and as Germans expand the notion of what it means to be German, a new academic discipline dedicated to examining the Black German experience is having its third International Conference at Amherst College this week.

Christian Rogowski, a professor of German at Amherst College, together with Sara Lennox of U Mass, helped organize this year’s conference of the Black German Heritage & Research Association Convention, which will be held from Thursday, August 8 to Saturday, August 10 and is free and open to the public.

“The conference is unique,” Rogowski said, “because it brings together researchers who work on issues of ethnicity and racial diversity and the situation of blacks in Germany with people who themselves fall into that category, people with hyphenated identities such as Afro-German, African-American German or Black German.”

One highlight of the conference is a screening of the film “Toxi”, recently released on DVD by the DEFA Library of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  The German movie from 1952 about an African-American girl who is born to a German mother after World War II, shows the impact that birth has on the girl, her family and the community that surrounds her. The film will be screened at 4 p.m. Friday in Stirn Auditorium, where Angelica Fenner of the University of Toronto will moderate a discussion about it…

Read the entire article here.

“One-Drop: Fact, Fiction, or Fate?” by Dr. Yaba Blay, April 13th at 7pm in Stirn Auditorium

Amherst College
Stirn Auditorium, Mead Art Museum
Amherst, Massachusetts
Saturday, 2013-04-13, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

What exactly is Blackness and what does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who determines who is Black and who is not? The State, the society, or the individual? On April 13th at 7pm, Dr. Yaba Blay, an Africana Studies professor at Drexel University [and artistic director and producer of the (1)ne Drop Project], will present at Amherst in Stirn Auditorium. “One-Drop: Fact, Fiction, or Fate?” provides a brief social history of the laws instituted to regulate social interactions between the races and thus outlines how it is that the United States came to adopt the one-drop rule as the specific, and seemingly quantitative definition of Black identity. This presentation highlights the lived experiences of individuals for whom the one-drop rule exacts its influence most. There will be food and drinks!

For more information, click here.

Impostors: EUST-235

Amherst College
Spring 2012

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture

Deborah R. Dizard, Visiting Lecturer in European Studies

An interdisciplinary exploration of the causes behind the social, racial, artistic, and political act—and art—of posing, passing, or pretending to be someone else. Blacks passing for whites, Jews passing for gentiles, and women passing for men, and vice versa, are a central motif. Attention is given to biological and scientific patterns such as memory loss, mental illness, and plastic surgery, and to literary strategies like irony. As a supernatural occurrence, the discussion includes mystical experiences, ghost stories, and séance sessions. The course also covers instances pertaining to institutional religion, from prophesy from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the Koran and Mormonism. In technology and communications, analysis concentrates on the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. Entertainment, ventriloquism, puppet shows, voice-overs, children’s cartoon shows, subtitles, and dubbing in movies and TV are topics of analysis. Posers in Greek mythology, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, Oliver Sacks, and Nella Larsen are examined. Conducted in English.

28. Hapa Issues: Asian Americans of Mixed Racial Descent

Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Spring 2010

Growing numbers of inter-racial marriages and the products of these marriages—children of mixed racial descent—have contributed to the increasing diversity of America in the 21st century. Reflecting this heterogeneity, the 2000 Census allowed people to claim more than one background for the first time. In this course, we will evaluate the experiences of hapas—Asians of mixed racial descent—through a historical and comparative framework. This class will explore inter-racial and inter-ethnic marriage trends in various Asian communities in the U.S. in order to highlight the complexity of the Asian American experience. Additionally, we will compare the experiences of hapas representing a range of backgrounds, including those of Asian/White ancestry as well as Asian/Black heritage. Some of the specific topics that will be covered in this course include the following: racial and ethnic community membership and belonging; the dynamics of inter-racial relationships; identity, authenticity, and choice; and the gender identities of mixed race individuals. This course highlights the simultaneous fluidity and social construction of race while marking its real impact on everyday and structural aspects of American life.

44. Afro-Latin America

Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Spring 2010

(Offered as History 56 [LA] and Black Studies 44 [D, CLA].) This course explores the historical experiences of Afro-Latin populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. The course asks how and why one might study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny. Materials include early 20th-century racialist theorizing in Latin America; historical works using census, economic, criminal, and marriage records; analysis of race in the textual and musical representations of peoples, regions and nations; as well as autobiographical works. Two class meetings per week.

College Essay Part II, Unabridged: The Undergraduate Years

Amherst College
The Amherst Story Project
Fall 2008

Brunnell Velázquez ’11

I enjoy looking at myself in the mirror. Lately, I find that the bathroom mirrors in Morrow dormitory give off the clearest reflections of my gorgeous, most handsome features. Since it is not in my nature to carry a portable mirror, I set a picture of myself as the wallpaper for my computer and my cellular phone. I developed a tradition of attaching photos of myself to thank you notes. All of my friends cannot help but notice my vanity. But I kept telling them that not enough people tell me how beautiful I am! No really!

What they don’t know, however, is that I use the mirror as a means for assurance—to remind myself that I do not look like how people usually perceive me.

I tell my reflection, I don’t get it, Brunnell. You don’t look Black. You’re Latino…

…The worst part is that people just assume that I am African-American. I get so offended; it’s like me being Korean and everyone thinks that I am Chinese. Upon meeting people, I have been asked about relations between the Black and African-American communities. I have been told, “Like wow, you’re, like, the first black guy I’ve met who’s not from Africa.” I have received caustic remarks for not being involved in the Black Student Union. A Jewish peer commented to a white friend of mine that I would get offended if she called me nigger. And he had the audacity to say it in front of me and he knew I was Latino. I apologize if the mentioning of this word offends anyone; just understand that to me it carries no emotional and historical weight…

… It is very hard for me to believe that I am Black because I grew up with a mixed-race family. I have family members (either by blood or marriage) who represent the whole white-black spectrum. Yet, there is the word Dominican that ties us together. I have never noted racism between the lighter ones and the darker ones. I never felt ugly because of my physical features.

Dominicans mix a lot; many cannot be easily categorized by a certain race. For example, my pastor has strong European features but has a kinky hair. A girl in my church is darker than me but has finer features and very fine hair. She looks Indian. Therefore, we transcend race and this is something I value as a Latino. Racially, we belong on the borderline between black and white.

The idea that we, Latinos, could be further categorized is absurd to me. What are White Hispanic and Black Hispanic? A “white” Dominican is never white in the U.S. because his culture and his identification with darker Dominicans “colors” him. A darker Dominican is never Black because he identifies with lighter skin people and because he is usually mixed. Black people seem to have the most problems with me not calling myself Black. Some of them claim I am product of racism. But really I must ask them, who told them that they were Black? I know that many African-Americans come in many skin tones. I look more Black than some of my African-American peers, but I see them as mixed race people. I will not tell them that in their face, but they cannot convince me otherwise. Now, if I were Black, then I would be denying my European roots. Part of being Latino is embracing our racial roots and our mixture because it is reflected in our physical features and our culture. I am now discovering that Black isn’t really a racial identity, but a categorization that people put on to mean “not-white.” Any mark of color means you are Black, which the definition is in of itself racist. So how am I a product of racism? Identifying myself Black for me is an act of defeat to racism. I should not let racists call me something that was never part of my identity…

Read the entire essay here.