Mixed Race Studies

It’s her Ferguson — and it’s not all black and white

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-11-17

Moni Basu

Ferguson, Missouri (CNN) — Stefannie Wheat carried a yard sign all the way from her Midwestern town to the nation’s capital. She visited the White House and tucked it into the guard rail.

“I Love Ferguson,” it said.

It was mid-October and her beloved city turned restive after the police shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown. Businesses were boarded up and losing money, protests had on occasion turned violent and anxiety had spread through the city of 22,000 people northwest of St. Louis.

Ferguson, the quiet community she chose to make home, had become synonymous with racism, injustice and police brutality. Wheat wanted to scream.

Her Ferguson was not what it had become in the headlines.

For this 45-year-old white woman, things were far more complex than they appeared in the news. The world that she, like many others, saw as black and white had morphed into myriad shades of gray over the years.

She has been married to Ken, who is black, for almost two decades. She adopted Christopher, a black child from a foster home. In eight years, he will turn 18, Brown’s age at the time of his death, and embark on life in a world she knows is still full of hate…

Read the entire article here.

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network (CNN)
2013-02-15

Editor’s note: CNN’s Moni Basu, a Bengali immigrant, was born in Kolkata, India.

Moni Basu

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.

“I want to go back because I want to find some sort of closure for my family, said Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience.

That Americans like Shaik, who identify as black, are linked by blood to a people on the Indian subcontinent seems, at first, improbable.

South Asian immigration boomed in this country after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire.

The first group, to which Shaik’s grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, belonged, consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s, according to Bald. They sold embroidered silks and cottons and other “exotic” wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. They eventually made their way south to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and even farther to Central America.

The second wave came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, some merchant marines.

Most were Muslim men from what was then the Indian province of Bengal and in many ways, they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians.

South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”

The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name.

They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway laborers. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s. They worked hard.

And they did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice.

A huge part of that meant marrying Latino and African-American women—there were no Bengali women around—and letting go of the world they left behind.

Unlike other immigrants of the time, they didn’t settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighborhoods of color: Harlem, West Baltimore and in New Orleans, Tremé.

By doing so, they also became a part of black and Latino heritage in America…

Read the entire article and view the photograph of “Bengalis and their Puerto Rican and African-American wives at a 1952 banquet at New York’s Pakistan League of America” here.

Black in America: It’s not just about the color of your skin

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network
2012-12-15

Moni Basu

(CNN) – What is black? Race. Culture. Consciousness. History. Heritage.
 
A shade darker than brown? The opposite of white?
 
Who is black? In America, being black has meant having African ancestry.
 
But not everyone fits neatly into a prototypical model of “blackness.”
 
Scholar Yaba Blay explores the nuances of racial identity and the influences of skin color in a project called (1)ne Drop, named after a rule in the United States that once mandated that any person with “one drop of Negro blood” was black. Based on assumptions of white purity, it reflects a history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
 
In its colloquial definition, the rule meant that a person with a black relative from five generations ago was also considered black.

Your take on black in America
 
One drop was codified in the 1920 Census and became pervasive as courts ruled on it as a principle of law. It was not deemed unconstitutional until 1967.
 
Blay, a dark-skinned daughter of Ghanian immigrants, had always been able to clearly communicate her racial identity. But she was intrigued by those whose identity was not always apparent. Her project focuses on a diverse group of people—many of whom are mixed race—who claim blackness as their identity.
 
That identity is expanding in America every day. Blay’s intent was to spark dialogue and see the idea of being black through a whole new lens…

…Black and white
 
California author Kathleen Cross, 50, remembers taking a public bus ride with her father when she was 8. Her father was noticeably uncomfortable that black kids in the back were acting rowdy. He muttered under his breath: “Making us look bad.”
 
She understood her father was ashamed of those black kids, that he fancied himself not one of them.
 
“My father was escaping blackness,” she says. “He didn’t like for me to have dark-skinned friends. He never said it. But I know.”
 
She asked him once if she had ancestors from Africa. He got quiet. Then, he said: “Maybe, Northern Africa.”
 
“He wasn’t proud of being black,” she says.
 
Cross’ black father and her white mother never married. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed Cross was raised in a diverse community.
 
Later, she found herself in situations where she felt shunned by black people. Even light-skinned black people thought she was white.
 
“Those who relate to the term ‘black’ as a descriptor of color are unlikely to accept me as black,” she says. “If they relate to the term ‘black’ as a descriptor of culture, history and ancestry, they have no difficulty seeing me as black.”
 
At one time in her life, she wished she were darker—she might have even swallowed a pill to give her instant pigment if there were such a thing. She even wrote about being “trapped in the body of a white woman.” She didn’t want to “represent the oppressor.”
 
She no longer thinks that way.
 
She doesn’t like to check the multiracial box. “It erases everything,” she says.
 
She doesn’t like biracial, either. Or mixed. It’s not her identity.
 
“There’s only one race,” she says, “and that’s the human race.”
 
“I am a descendant of a stolen African and Irish and English immigrants. That makes me black—and white—in America…

Read the entire article here.

Obama makes history, again

Cable News Network
2012-11-08

Moni Basu, CNN

(CNN) — A black man is returning to the White House.
 
Four years ago, it was a first, the breaking of a racial barrier. Tuesday night, it was history redux.
 
And more.
 
In the midst of national splintering and a time of deep ideological animosity, Americans elected President Barack Obama to a second term. And thousands rejoiced in his victory, one that seemed sweeter and, perhaps, more significant.
 
“This is affirmation that his color doesn’t matter and that his message resonated with people,” said Yale University sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, author of “Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power.”
 
“It is very important in that it will indicate that an African-American can be viewed for what he says and not what he is.”

Had Obama lost the election, he would likely have been remembered in history as the first black president, and maybe little else, Alexander said.
 
Now, he has a chance to create a legacy rooted not in his identity, but in his ideas.
 
University of Houston sociologist Shayne Lee agreed.
 
“If this country wants President Obama to have another term, I’m ready to say that it’s a significant moment,” he said.
 
As an African-American, Lee understood the power of 2008. But his excitement was measured.

He knew the nation was tired then of two costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a sinking economy and an administration that he felt excluded ordinary people. He thought Arizona Sen. John McCain was a weak candidate and that the cards were stacked in Obama’s favor. Four years later, Obama traversed a much tougher road, Lee said.
 
Americans had a strong alternative in the Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The nation, he felt, was no longer in a desperate state and voters had more of a choice. Despite that, they elected a black man. Again.
 
“They sent a message to the world that whatever racist proclivities might exist are not enough to preclude Obama from winning,” Lee said…

Read the entire article here.