Mixed Race Studies

The 97-Year-Old Park Ranger Who Doesn’t Have Time for Foolishness

Glamour
2011-11-02

Farai Chideya
Photographs by Shaniqwa Jarvis

Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis  “History has been written by people who got it wrong. But the people who are always trying to get it right have prevailed,” says Reid Soskin, photographed at Rosie the Riveter Park. “If that were not true, I would still be a slave like my great-grandmother.”

As the oldest career National Park Service ranger, Betty Soskin is unabashed about revealing all of America’s history—and her optimism about our future.

What gets remembered is determined by who is in the room doing the remembering,” Betty Reid Soskin likes to say. So she’s made it her singular purpose to always be in the room.

Today that room is the auditorium at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, where—at 97—she’s the oldest person now serving as a permanent National Park Service ranger. She packs the theater three times a week with talks about the Rosies and the typically white narrative about the women who served the war effort, but interweaves her experience as a young black woman in segregated America.

There are a few things you should know about my friend Betty. Barely five feet three inches tall, she is sylphlike and strong. When she walks, she leans slightly forward, as if facing a headwind, and strides with speed and purpose. Betty never planned to be a ranger. She got the job at the young age of 85, after working as a field representative for her California assemblywoman, Dion Aroner. Aroner asked her to sit in on planning meetings for what would become the park, and Betty quickly saw that, if she didn’t speak up, the park would portray a whitewashed version of history. “There was no conspiracy to leave my history out,” she says. “There was simply no one in that room with any reason to know it.” So she sparked additions to the formal narratives: the 120,000 people of Japanese descent placed in internment camps by the government; the 320 sailors and workers, 202 of them black men, who died in the explosions at nearby Port Chicago. “So many stories,” Betty muses, “all but forgotten.”

Working at an all-black union hall during World War II and then briefly in an all-white branch of the Air Force (they didn’t realize she was black when they hired her), Betty saw stories like these firsthand, becoming, as she puts it, “a primary source” from the time. Tom Leatherman, the park’s superintendent, says Betty motivated organizers to bring more people to the table: “Because of Betty, we made sure we had African American scholars review our films and exhibits, but we also made sure we were looking out for other, often forgotten stories—Japanese American, Latino American, American Indian, and LGBTQ narratives—that were equally important.”…

Read the entire article here.

In An Election Defined By Race, How Do We Define Race?

FiveThirtyEight
2016-11-06

Farai Chideya, Senior Writer

When I was younger, I had an idea for a satire in which a group of rogue genealogists would get blood samples from racially incendiary white politicians. They’d run DNA tests on them to see if they were part black, then publish the information on those who were.

This was way back before you could order DNA tests online and watch television shows about celebrities seeing their results. I don’t write satire, and wisely abandoned the idea. But the broader concept of bloodlines and our construction of political identity popped into my head during a recent discussion about the election.

Donald Trump’s supporters, 90 percent of whom are white, have measurably less positive feelings about African-Americans and several other groups than other Republicans or the public at large. But how many of his voters are “black,” not by our current categorization but under the “one-drop rule” saying that no matter how white they looked, anyone with a drop of black blood was categorized as such? Variations of the one-drop rule persisted in law until 1983 in Louisiana, after a mixed-race woman unsuccessfully sued to become legally white, and legislators overturned the law in response to the fractious case. Some argue that the one-drop rule had already been eroded by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case on interracial marriage, now the subject of a new movie…

Read the entire article here.

Viewing Los Angeles Through a Creole Lens

The New York Times
2016-01-21

Farai Chideya

The pulse of the train on the tracks sets a rhythm as its passenger cars seem to skim over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. These six miles of nothing but sky above and water below are the gateway into the city by rail. Next come the cemeteries at the edge of New Orleans, and all of a sudden, a day and a half of travel ends at the Amtrak terminal in the business district. I had just completed the first leg of my cross-country journey by sleeper train, starting in New York, and was beginning the second: a foray into the cultural ties between the Crescent City and California.

This trip had been inspired partly by the travel writer and blogger Greg Gross, who grew up in New Orleans and California. “I had a great-uncle who ran away at 15 to become a Pullman porter,” he said. These black men served a predominately white customer base as sleeping-car porters, often simply called “George” by their customers. Their union became a powerful force during the civil rights movement. Mr. Gross’s great-uncle Ellis Pearson worked on the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

He was something like an usher for Mr. Gross’s family, which is full of cross-country transplants, including his parents and a deceased uncle who played jazz trumpet. When black New Orleans families like his moved to California, “They brought their food with them, their music,” he said. “They brought an energy, an attitude with them. ‘We survived there; we can make it here.’ They brought it to their churches and their neighbors.” It’s a refrain I hear many times as I speak to members of this diaspora.

The Grosses weren’t the only ones. The migration of black and Creole families moving to California from Louisiana began as a trickle in 1927, in the wake of that year’s great flood, and grew to a mass migration from the 1930s to 1960, years that encompassed the Depression, World War II and the growth of employment opportunities for blacks, and Jim Crow. While many families went from the South to the North, the train lines led many in New Orleans to the West instead. The better part of a century after its start, some migrants resettled in California after Hurricane Katrina. I wanted to follow the path that others had, to trace a thread of our cultural lineage, however faint. I wanted to see both cities through a black Bayou and Creole lens, to see if they’d drifted apart or were overlapping, remixing culture in the same way that Creoles originally had…

…Once in Los Angeles, I headed to the venerable Creole restaurant Harold and Belle’s on Jefferson Boulevard to meet up with Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor, writer and producer, and the actor and musician Mark Broyard. The dining room — scheduled to reopen next month after a renovation — was filled with locals wearing fleur-de-lis T-shirts or other symbols of their fealty to Louisiana. Mr. Broyard and Mr. Smith have known each other since childhood, and collaborated on a play called “Inside the Creole Mafia,” staged several times over the course of two decades. I got a taste of their razor-sharp banter over my gumbo.

Mr. Broyard explained how his family left Louisiana during the Jim Crow years because, “as my mother said many times,” he said, “she was not going to fight the civil rights movement with her children. We, the Creole kids, the light-skinned kids, we had been integrating schools for a lot longer because we weren’t dark. So we had been in and out of all these white institutions for years, with a tacit understanding that these people were colored, but it was O.K. that they were here because maybe they had half of one drop or something.”…

Read the entire article here.

44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the Election of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States

Third World Press
2011-03-29
319 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0883783177

Edited by: Lita Hooper, Sonia Sanchez, and Michael Simanga

To give voice to the historic election of President Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, this anthology of essays, poetry, and creative non-fiction documents the conversation on President Obama’s campaign within the African American community, and the dialogue after his election and since he has taken the Oath of Office. Included are perspectives on the historical moments during President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, the finale of the 2008 general election, and Obama’s new plans and policies since he took office in January 20, 2009. Editors Lita Hooper, Michael Simanga, and Sonia Sanchez have assembled an impressive list of forty-four contributors to capture the energy and excitement, the expectation and hope. Featured are works from Lita Hooper, Michael Sigmanga, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Askia Toure, Quincy Troupe, Chuck D, Pearl Cleage, Natasha Trethewey, Tony Medina, Jessica Care Moore, Nathan McCall, Jasmine Guy, Farai Chideya, Keith Gilyard, Opal Moore, Sharan Strange, and Tina McElroy Ansa.

The Color of Our Future: Race in the 21st Century

HarperCollins
1999
288 pages
6.125 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 0 (d)
Paperback ISBN: 780688175801

Farai Chideya

Two years ago, Newsweek named Farai Chideya to its “Century Club” of a hundred people to watch as we approached the year 2000. Beautiful, savvy, and wired for sound, she’s an ideal guide to the new, multiracial America that’s emerging as the next generation grows up and begins to shape our society. From coast to coast, from urban ‘hoods to Indian reservations to lily-white small towns, she talks to young men and women about their views on race, painting a vivid portrait of a notion in transition, as America ceases to be defined by the black/white divide and enters a more complex multiethnic era. Most of all, she allows the voices of the next generation — black, while, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial — to ring out with truth and clarity.

Since the Civil Rights movement, most Americans have thought of race as a black and white issue. That won’t be the case for long. By the year 2050, there will be more nonwhite than white Americans, and most of the nonwhite population will be Asian and Latino, not black. Increasingly, America is becoming a multiracial society. Americans in their teens and twenties are at the forefront of this cultural revolution. In The Color of Our Future, young journalist Farai Chideya explores how members of the next generation deal with race in their own lives and how the decisions they make determine America’s ethnic future.

From urban hoods to Native American reservations to lily-white small towns, Chideya talks to young men and women about their personal views of race, painting a vivid portrait of a nation in transition. In clear, compelling language, she describes young people dealing with the complexities of diversity in their everyday lives. She writes of a young interracial couple pitted against their community in the South and of the white teens in Indiana, birthplace of the Klan, who get their black, hip-hop aesthetic from MTV. She interviews a Native American who wants to be the next Bill Gates, bringing computer access to his reservation in Montana, and a Mexican-American woman, working for the border patrol in El Paso, who catches the destitute Mexicans who flock into the United States to work for affluent white Texans. All these young people have clear, strong ideas about the impact of race on everything from education to pop culture. They are honest, sometimes brutally so, about their own prejudices. Their moving stories are the blueprint for the future of America. With a discerning ear and sharp insight, Chideya allows the voices of the next generation — black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and multiracial — to ring out with truth and clarity and guide us to the kaleidoscope of our future.

The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America?

Oxford University Press
January 2011
336 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199735204; ISBN10: 0199735204

Edited by

Gregory Parks, Assistant Professor of Law
Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, North Carolina

Matthew Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

The United States has taken a long and winding road to racial equality, especially as it pertains to relations between blacks and whites. On November 4, 2008, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the forty-fourth President of the United States and first black person to occupy the highest office in the land, many wondered whether that road had finally come to an end. Do we now live in a post-racial nation?

According to this book’s contributors, a more nuanced and contemporary analysis and measurement of racial attitudes undercuts this assumption. They contend that despite the election of the first black President and rise of his family as possibly the most recognized family in the world, race remains a salient issue-particularly in the United States. Looking beyond public behaviors and how people describe their own attitudes, the contributors draw from the latest research to show how, despite the Obama family’s rapid rise to national prominence, many Americans continue to harbor unconscious, anti-black biases. But there are whispers of change. The Obama family’s position may yet undermine, at the unconscious level, anti-black attitudes in the United States and abroad. The prominence of the Obamas on the world stage and the image they project may hasten the day when America is indeed post-racial, even at the implicit level.

Features

• Draws on a growing body of scholarly literature on implicit racial bias.
• Discusses the implications of the entire First Family’s rise to prominence, not simply the President’s.

Contents

• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Measuring Racial Progress in America: The Tangled Path of Race – by Matthew W. Hughey (Commentary: Constraint and Freedom in the “Age of Obama” – by Kenneth Mack)
• Chapter 2: Implicit Bias: A Better Metric for Racial Progress? – Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Robert Livingston and Joshua Waytz (Commentary: The Erasure of the Affirmative Action Debate in the Age of Obama – by Ian Ayres)
• Chapter 3: Black Man in the White House: Ideology and Implicit Racial Bias in the Age of Obama – by Kristin Lane and John Jost (Commentary: Black Man in the White House: A Commentary – Marc H. Morial)
• Chapter 4: Obama-nation?: Implicit Beliefs about American Nationality and the Possibility of Redefining Who Counts as “Truly” American – by Nilanjana Dasgupta and Kumar Yogeeswaran (Commentary: As American as Barack Obama – by Lawrence Bobo)
• Chapter 5: Does Black and Male Still = Threat in the Age of Obama? – by Jennifer A. Richeson and Meghan G. Bean (Commentary: Threat, Fantasy, and President Obama – by Eddie Glaude, Jr.)
• Chapter 6: Michelle Obama: Redefining Images of Black Women – by Shanette C. Porter and Gregory S. Parks (Commentary: First Lady Michelle Obama: Getting Past the Stereotypes – Julianne Malveaux)
• Chapter 7: Barack, Michelle and the Complexities of a Black “Love Supreme” – Clarenda M. Phillips, Tamara L. Brown and Gregory S. Parks (Commentary: The Obamas: Beyond Troubled Love – by Jenée Desmond-Harris)
• Chapter 8: Malia and Sasha: Re-envisioning Black Youth – by Valerie Purdie-Vaughns and Rachel Sumner (Commentary: Re-envisioning Black Youth: A Commentary by Marc Lamont Hill)
• Chapter 9: Obama and Global Change in Attitudes about Group Status – by George Ciccariello-Maher and Matthew Hughey (Commentary: Commentary on Obama and Group Change in Attitudes about Group Status – Michael Dawson)
• Chapter 10: The Role of Race in American Politics: Lessons Learned from the 2008 Presidential Election – by Thierry Devos (Commentary: The State of the Post-racial Union – by Farai Chideya)
• Chapter 11: Obama’s Potential to Transform the Racial Attitudes of White Americans – by Jack Dovidio, Samuel L. Gaertner, Tamar Saguy and Eric Hehman (Commentary: Black Behavior and Moral Dissonance: Missing Mechanisms in Theorizing the Obama Effect – by Richard O. Lempert)
• Chapter 12: New Bottle, Same Old Wine: The GOP and Race in the Age of Obama – by Russell J. Webster, Donald A. Saucier and Gregory S. Parks (Commentary: New Bottle, Same Old Wine: A Response – by Melissa Harris-Lacewell)
• About the Editors, Contributors, and Commentators
• Index

Ladies Remember Elizabeth Taylor, Weigh Modern Beauty Standards

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-03-23, 14:00-15:00 EDT (WAMU, 88.5 FM, Washington, D.C.) For other broadcast times, click here.

Farai Chideya, Guest Host

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor has died at the age of 79. The screen icon became a 12-year-old sensation in the movie, “National Velvet”. She went on to star in 53 films, winning two Oscars for her work. In Tell Me More’s occasional “Beautyshop” conversation, guest host Farai Chideya looks back on the Taylor’s life and discusses a new survey on changing notions of beauty in America. Weighing in are Latoya Peterson, editor of Racialicious.com; Galina Espinoza, editorial director of Latina magazine, and Marcia Dawkins, visiting scholar at Brown University.

See: Marcia Alesan Dawkins. “Mixed Race Beauty Gets a Mainstream Makeover,” TruthDig, March 7, 2011.

Listen to the episode here. (00:17:49)