Mixed Race Studies

Thinking in Colour: A BBC Radio Collection of Documentaries on Race, Society and Black History

BBC Digital Audio
2021-02-12
00:57:00
ISBN: 9781529143560

Gary Younge, Professor of Sociology
University of Manchester

Gary Younge Gary Younge (Read by) Robin Miles (Read by) Amaka Okafor (Read by) Full Cast (Read by) Ricky Fearon (Read by)

Gary Younge explores race, society and Black history in these five fascinating documentaries

Author, broadcaster and sociology professor Gary Younge has won several awards for his books and journalism covering topics such as the civil rights movement, inequality and immigration. In this documentary collection, the former Guardian US correspondent turns his attention to current American political and social issues, including populist conservatism, and African-American identity.

In Thinking in Colour, he examines racial ‘passing’: light-skinned African-Americans who decided to live their lives as white people. Looking at the topic through the prism of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing, Gary hears three astonishing personal stories, and probes the distinction between race and colour.

Recorded shortly after the historic 2008 election, The Documentary: Opposing Obama follows Gary as he travels through Arkansas and Kentucky, talking to people who see Barack Obama’s presidency as nothing but bad news, and hearing their hopes and fears for the future.

In The Wales Window of Alabama, Gary recounts how the people of Wales helped rebuild an Alabama church, where bombers killed four girls in 1963. Hearing of the atrocity, sculptor John Petts rallied his local community to raise money, and subsequently created a new stained glass window that has become a focus for worship and a symbol of hope.

In Ebony: Black on White on Black, we hear the history of Ebony, the magazine that has charted and redefined African-American life since its launch in 1945. But what is its place in the world today, and does it still speak to contemporary African-Americans?

And in Analysis: Tea Party Politics, Gary assesses the Tea Party movement, a US right-wing protest group that objects to big government and high taxes. He finds out what sparked this grass-roots insurgency, who its supporters are, and analyses its impact.

Beauty and the Bleach: This Issue is More than Skin Deep

Ebony
2016-06-20

Yaba Blay, Dan Blue Endowed Chair in Political Science
North Carolina Central University

Skin bleaching is a billion-dollar industry. Considering its global reach, Dr. Yaba Blay says we have to stop treating bleaching as just a matter of self-hate.

Over the past few years, social media has been abuzz with discussions of skin bleaching. In recent weeks, we’ve lamented Lil Kim’s ghostly shadow of her former self, ridiculed Ghanaian boxer Bukom Banku for denouncing his black skin, and dragged Azaelia Banks for becoming a virtual spokesmodel for Whitenicious by Dencia. While we talk amongst ourselves, a segment of a 2012 video investigating “unusual beauty trends” in Jamaica has resurfaced on Facebook. Viewed over two million times in less than one week, in that segment we see a soft-spoken blonde-haired European reporter “in the trenches” as she talks to a number of Jamaicans about their bleaching and offers requisite warnings about the dangers of the practice.

Whether from the perspectives of Black folks or from those of Whites, our communal voyeurism into skin bleaching tends to focus almost solely on the individuals who bleach their skin, and not the global institutions that make skin bleaching a viable option. And it’s a problem…

Read the entire article here.

The Race Draft Fails, Again

Ebony
2015-08-26

Damon Young, Writer

(left) Barack Obama, Mariah Carey and Shawn King

Damon Young says a recent campaign questioning Shaun King’s ethnicity is the latest in a string of attempts to take good Blacks out the gene pool

We should have seen it coming. All the signs were there. But they fooled us. Bamboozled us. Led us astray. And now it might be too late.

It started back in 2008, when birthers were so hell-bent on seeing then-Senator Barack Obama’s birth certificate. They said it was to check his citizenship; to prove if he was truly an American citizen. And we fell for it hook line and sinker. Damn truther chicanery…

…But what was really happening was far more devious. Far more lecherous. With Obama’s ascension and eventual election came a stark So they got creative. They weren’t trying to prove if he was American. They were trying to reclaim him. After 400 or so years of the one drop rule, they finally realized that if they kept allowing us to claim all people with even a teaspoon of African blood as 100% Black, their numbers would continue to dwindle…

Read the entire article here.

‘I Didn’t Want to Be a Black Man’

Ebony
2014-08-27

Ben O’Keefe

A biracial man on why he came to accept his Black identity

My name is Ben O’Keefe and I am a “Halfrican American.” It’s a term that one of my fellow mixed-race friends, Adriana, and I have affectionately come to define ourselves by. It seems like such a fitting proclamation. It serves as an ode to both “halves” of my racial identity. But, that identify is one that has been a hard fought battle to discover.

Growing up I didn’t think about being Black—I didn’t think about being White either. Coming from a bi-racial family, I was simply raised to see an absence of color. My White mother taught me that “we are all just people” and refused to allow us to identify as “Black.” To my mother we were “chocolate.” My Black father was not around to raise me with any sense of our shared racial identity. In our predominately White community, I had very little exposure to my Black heritage, or the culture that one half of my body belonged to. Or did it belong to it? And more importantly: Did I want to belong to it?

As much as my mother longed for me to live in a world free of the barriers of race, a colorblind world was not the reality. We in fact live in a society in which race very much still fuels the subconscious bigotry of many. A country in which our Black President inspires some, but terrifies others. But still in my naivety, I continued to live my life undefined by the racial descriptions of our society.

My innocence was lost the first time that I noticed that I was being followed through a store…

Read the entire article here.

‘I Hope My Son Stays White’

Ebony
News & Views
2014-09-02

Calvin Hennick

A White father of a biracial son admits his fears for what happens when his child gets older and can no longer ‘pass‘

I am a white man, and part of the privilege that comes along with that fact is this: I know, with something bordering on 100 percent certainty, how my death will not be portrayed if I am shot and killed while walking down the street unarmed.

No one will scour my social media accounts for photos of me wearing a hooded sweatshirt or flipping off the camera. No one will ignore my lack of a criminal record and decide that I’m a “thug” for unnamed reasons. It won’t matter whether I’ve smoked pot, or shoplifted, or if I was ever suspended from school.

And, especially if my hypothetical assailant turns out to be black, I can be confident that there will be no rallies to support him. His identity will not be hidden from the public for days, and no crowdfunding campaign will raise a six-figure sum to support his family through “their” difficult time.

There will be no national effort to blame me for my own death…

Read the entire article here.

African-Americans and Latinos: Conflict or Collaboration?

Ebony Magazine
2012-09-25

Eugene Holley, Jr.

As Latinos now outnumber African-Americans as this country’s largest minority, could there be a political, social and economic union with our brown brothers and sisters?

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month – which runs through October 15th – EBONY interviewed African-Americans and Hispanics about the challenges, complexities and collaborations between these two groups. 

“The Census suggested a competition,” says Miriam Jiménez Román, Executive Director of the AfroLatin@forum: a research and resource center focusing on Black Latinos and Latinas in the United States. “And it ignored a history of, not only just collaboration, but inclusion within the rubric of Blackness. We are not in competition with the African-American community. They have been at the vanguard, in terms of assuring civil rights in this country. And for that reason, all of the privileges that we have as Latinos in this country owe so much to the African-American struggle.”

The New York-born Puerto Rican, who also co-edited the book, The Afro-Latin@ Reader, also points out that there are many Hispanics of visible African descent. “Many African-Americans don’t realize that the majority of Black people in the Americas are in Latin America and the Caribbean,” she states. “Ninety five percent of all the enslaved Africans landed in those places. There are 150 million people of African descent in Latin America.”…

Read the entire article here.

What Makes you Black?

Ebony Magazine
Volume 38, Number 3 (January 1983)
pages 115-118

Vague definition of race is the basis for court battles

Imagine going to get a passport so you and your spouse can take a vacation in South America. Its all a formality, you reason; people just want to make sure you’re who and what you say you are. You fill out the form and, to your bewilderment, a clerk tells you she can’t give you the passport because you’re of a different race than what you claim to be.

It happened to 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps, who lives in Sulphur, La. She had been thinking all along that she was White, but her birth certificate indicated she was “Colored.”

“I was sick,” she later told reporters. “I couldn’t believe it.” She said she went home crying and told her husband she didn’t want to take the trip. It was the beginning of a 5-year court battle to get the State of Louisiana to change her birth certificate and the certificates of her six brothers and sisters. She also wants the states racial classification law declared unconstitutional. The law, approved by the Louisiana legislature in 1970, states that a person is Black if he or she has “1/32 Negro blood.” Louisiana is the only state with a race classification law.

So far, Mrs. Phipps has spent some $20,000 to change her racial status to White. A genealogist hired by the state has concluded she is 3/32 Black.

Mrs. Phipps’ case (Susie Smith vs. the State of Louisiana), which might be decided very soon, is the latest of a number of similar cases that have occurred over the years. A celebrated case developed during the 1920s when Leonard Kip Rhinelander failed to get an annulment of his marriage to Alice Jones, who admitted to having “some Negro blood.” Rhinelander, the son of millionaire society leader Philip Rhinelander, contended his wife deceived him about her race before their marriage. In a later case, Ralph Dupas, a prizefighter who fought and lost to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1963, was barred from fighting Whites in Louisiana in the late 1950s when word surfaced that he was Black. (Louisiana at that time didn’t allow interracial athletics). He failed in his bid to prove he was White. Earlier, another Louisiana prizefighter, Bernard Docusen, wasn’t allowed to fight Whites in Louisiana because of reports that his mother was Black. He was later recognized as White when it was discovered his mother was White.

Just what does make a person Black? The fundamental problem here, according to experts interviewed for and cited in this article, is that there is no generally accepted scientific definition of race. Another related problem is the inconsistency in the classification of people in the three traditional racial groupings — Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In current practice, Black genes define and dominate White genes. One Black ancestor, for example, makes an Anglo-Saxon or a Chinese person “Black.” But, for some strange reason, the rule doesn’t work the other way, and one Chinese or Anglo-Saxon ancestor doesn’t make a Black person Chinese or Anglo-Saxon. And it is interesting to note that if the “one-Black” rule were applied to the other races, the racial composition of the United States would change markedly. Dr. Munro Edmonson, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, says the average American White person has five percent traceable Black genes and the average American Black person has 25 percent traceable White genes…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America,” Ebony Magazine, (October 1962) 94.

America’s Oldest Negro Community

Ebony (via The History and Genealogy of the Mixed-blood Descendants of the Native Americans of the State of Delaware and parts of Eastern Shore Maryland and Southern New Jersey)
February 1952
pages 42-46

Gouldtown traces it’s history back 250 years, began with an interracial marriage

The march of history has all but bypassed Gouldtown, N.J., a sprawling farm community 40 miles from Philadelphia, but the Negro townsfolk still preserve their unique heritage and identity and are quietly proud of their past. The continuity of Gouldtown’s main families remains unbroken for 250 years and local legends still abound about how it all started. Today’s generation of Gouldtowners dwell less on tradition than their forebears did. But they know the main facts of their history, especially how their town came to be born. They are aware of Gouldtown’s origins and conversant with the picturesque personalities that shared in its development. But they have refused to be isolated by the sweep of history and the quickened tempo of modern living.

Gouldtown has been called the oldest colored settlement in America, and it may quite possibly be. The New Jersey land on which it stands was bought by its founder, John Fenwick, an English nobleman, in 1675. The community derived its name from a black man named Gould who married Elizabeth Fenwick, granddaughter of the wealthy colonist. The union caused a scandal which rocked the area for miles around and inflamed Fenwick with shame and rage. Intermarriage between Negroes and whites in those days was rare. The couple were subjected to scorn and ridicule but remained together as man and wife and raised children who became the first of a long line of hardy farmers.

All of the Goulds of present-day Gouldtown are their descendants. Today there are over 800 Goulds still living in the five square miles that comprise the community. A total of 1,000 persons bearing the name of Pierce inhabit the section, along with 300 Murrays, 200 Cuffs and 100 Wrights. These are the five principal family names of Gouldtown…

…The Civil War afforded the community of free Negroes an opportunity to show their solidarity with their enslaved brothers in the South. Anti-Confederate feeling was so strong in Gouldtown that all the men offered to fight. The community officially informed President Lincoln that it could raise a regiment of colored men burning with a great zeal to help defeat the armies of the slaveholders. When that offer was rejected by the government, the entire community felt rebuffed. Scores of Gouldtown men quietly slipped away from their homes and joined the Union Army as white men…

Read the entire article here.

Colorism: The War at Home

Ebony Magazine
News & Views
2013-02-20

Chris Williams

Dr. Yaba Blay discusses the history of ‘the color complex’ and how we can work to destroy it

The “color complex” has remains a source of great controversy and pain in the African American community and across much of the African Diaspora. As one of the leading voices and scholars on Black racial identity, Drexel University assistant teaching professor of Africana Studies Yaba Blay continues her arduous, groundbreaking work on the topic. Her (1)ne Drop Project has been featured on CNN’s Black in America series and expanded the discussion around how Blackness is defined in today’s society.

EBONY recently sat down with Dr. Blay to delve into the history behind colorism and how it has helped to shape Black racial identity in the United States.

EBONY: In the Black community, we seem to continue the tradition of lighter skin and straighter hair being ‘better.’ Why is the train of thought still prevalent in our collective mindset?

Yaba Blay: I definitely think it’s something we’ve internalized. Historically, just through observation we’ve seen that people with more European aesthetics and phenotypes were getting more privileges in this society. And again, for me, it’s really about us thinking about the framework from which we’re operating, like where are these ideas coming from and being able to acknowledge that they operate from outside of our community. These are conceptualizations that have been projected onto us and we see those things being affirmed in our society. It’s been called “the White ideal.” So—it constructs a spectrum of sorts where if I look at you and I can see that you potentially have European blood, I can assume that in comparison to someone who has darker skin, kinkier hair, and a more African phenotype that you’re better than them. It’s the idea that European genetics are your saving grace…

Read the entire interview here.