Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Vietnamese Orphans Tell Their Stories in ‘Indochina: Traces of a Mother’

Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University, Bloomington
2012-04-25

A new(er) documentary film by Idrissou Mora-Kpai follows the stories of Afro-Vietnamese orphans born of Vietnamese mothers and West African fathers – tirailleurs sénégalais – brought by the French to fight la sale guerre, mostly in today’s Viet Nam. The synopsis:

Through the story of Christophe, a 58-year-old Afro-Vietnamese man, the film reveals the little known history of African colonial soldiers enlisted to fight for the French in Indochina. Christophe was one of seven Afro-Vietnamese orphans adopted by one of those soldiers when he returned to Benin after the war. The film explores the long lasting impact of bringing together two populations who previously had no ties and sheds light on a frequent practice within colonial history, that of using one colonized people to repress the independence claims of another colonized people.

Told in Vietnam and Benin, the film gives space for the grown Afro-Vietnamese orphans to tell their stories, but also to explore the contradictions of the colonial order…

Read the entire article here.

Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-02-14
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington-Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina‘s Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt “completely free.” Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one…

Read the entire article here.

A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-08-29
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

If Tiger Woods lived in Brazil he would not have had to coin the word “Cablanasian” to describe the multiracial mixture of caucasian, black, and Asian that makes up his lineage nor face derision from those of us who thought he was trippin’ (being silly, unreal). As my husband and I saw on a recent trip, in Brazil race-mixing is the rule, not the exception, with the majority of its 170 million people being visible incarnates of the slogan that officials like to tout: “We’re a multiracial democracy. We’re not white, or black, or Indian, we’re all Brazilians.”

Skeptical, but being swept along by the stunning beauty of the country and its people, I did begin to wonder if (contrary to learned opinion) Brazil had solved its race problem by just mixing everyone up. British scholar Paul Gilroy recently said that Brazil and South Africa – a country that I also visited recently and will invoke later – present “a new paradigm of race” that is more subtle and flexible than the U.S.’s old “one drop” (of black blood makes you black) rule that equates whiteness with mythical purity…

Read the entire article here.