Mixed Race Studies

Why Kamala Harris’ biracial identity upsets Donald Trump so much

MSNBC
2024-08-01

Sarah E. Gaither, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Samuel R. Sommers, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Acknowledging the existence of multiracial identities completely scrambles Trump’s stereotypes.

Early in Donald Trump’s meltdown at this week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, the former president offered unsolicited commentary on the racial identity of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. “She was Indian all the way,” Trump said of his presumptive opponent, “and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person. Somebody should look into that.”

There is a multitude of problems with Trump’s comments, from his presumption that he has the expertise and jurisdiction to judge someone else’s identity to his argument that Harris lacks the racial bona fides to merit the Black audience members’ allegiance. But the former president’s ramble offers another important conclusion: Trump simply doesn’t understand race. When Trump asks for somebody to “look into that,” the truth is that for years researchers have looked into that. What they’ve found is that overly simplified perspectives on race like Trump’s are not only misplaced, but they are counterproductive and dangerous.

Scholars of race have long argued, and demonstrated, that race is a socially constructed category that still has very real outcomes. We, as members of society, constantly construct, deconstruct and reconstruct what race means.

Even the basics of how race is measured in America have evolved over time. The 1850 U.S. census was the first to acknowledge people of multiracial descent, with the category “Mulatto” used as a way to exclude them from having full political rights. Not until the 2000 census were multiracial Americans able to formally mark more than one racial identity. In fact, the multiracial population is the fastest growing racial group in the United States, with a 276% increase between 2010 and 2020…

Read the entire article here.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio serves as a brown face of white supremacy

MSNBC
2022-03-15

Julio Ricardo Varela, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

White supremacy will always attract nonwhite believers.

It should come as no surprise that there are several Latino male white nationalists who have gotten disproportionate attention in recent years, but in a country that keeps misunderstanding why the U.S. Latino community is nowhere near close to being a monolith, it is critical to examine how this notion of Latino white nationalists still feels strange to some.

Last week’s news that Enrique Tarrio, the former Afro-Cuban leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested on federal charges surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has sparked some interest in an apparently paradoxical reality: nonwhite Latino men worshiping at the altar of American white supremacy and providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.

As a journalist who’s been covering Latino communities for years, I know that this supposed paradox has never existed and that the country’s estimated 62.1 million Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other. American whiteness is a prize; it is where the power lies, and people like Tarrio would rather bask in that whiteness than fight against it and appear too “woke,” even it means tearing down democracy.

Non-Latino media have long been obsessed with proving the claim that more and more Latinos are longing to become white, which ignores the fact that being Latino is not just a sole racial construct but more of a messy combination with ethnicity. Voices from within the U.S. Latino community have responded by diving into the complexities of what it is to be Latino in modern-day America. While it is apparent that the country has become more multiethnic and multiracial, the quest for what Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness” will always have an appeal in our community…

Read the entire article here.

Pardon for Plessy v. Ferguson’s Homer Plessy is an overdue admission of his heroism

MSNBC
2022-01-05

Keisha N. Blain, Associate Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In rejecting Plessy’s argument that the Jim Crow law implied Black people were inferior, the Supreme Court upheld the notion of “separate but equal.”

Homer Plessy, a Creole shoemaker from New Orleans and the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, was pardoned by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday, 130 years after Plessy challenged a Louisiana law that required Black passengers and white passengers to use separate train cars. The case sanctioned the “separate but equal” doctrine and validated state laws that segregated public facilities along the lines of race. The decision effectively legalized Jim Crow segregation for the next 60 years.

As historian Blair L.M. Kelley explains in “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019“: “Plessy v. Ferguson was the manifestation of the African American opposition to segregationist attempts to shame and degrade Black train passengers.”

The decision to pardon Homer Plessy is a welcome one, an effort to clear his name and raise national awareness to his story. It is also a symbolic gesture to acknowledge a wrong that took place so long ago. In the proclamation Edwards signed Wednesday, he praised “the heroism and patriotism” of Plessy’s “unselfish sacrifice to advocate for and to demand equality and human dignity for all of Louisiana’s citizens.”…

Read the entire article here.

Morning Joe finally admits GOP ‘radicalization’ is ongoing racist backlash to Barack Obama

Raw Story
2021-12-07

Travis Gettys

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has finally come around to admitting that Republicans’ radicalization was a racist backlash against the election of Barack Obama.

The “Morning Joe” host, a former Republican himself, said he had long been skeptical of that notion, but he said the evidence had become too obvious to deny.”I have been a skeptic for quite some time that the election of Barack Obama was such a shock to so many white Americans that they just never got over it,” Scarborough said.

“I was always a skeptic of that. I saw his election, even though they didn’t agree with him ideologically on a lot of things. I saw that as a moment that all Americans — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals — could stop and go, ‘Wow, okay, the United States of America is the first majority white country that elected a Black man as their leader,’ something to celebrate.”…

Read the entire article here.

Thank You, Melissa Harris-Perry

The Nation
2016-02-29

Dave Zirin

Melissa Harris-Perry (You Tube)

The most diverse, intellectually bracing show on network news was treated as expendable, and its host would not have it. She and her show will be sorely missed.

This weekend, a show that mattered to its audience as few programs on the vanilla ice-milk buffet that passes for news do, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, was canceled, and it’s a tragic as well as angering turn of events. “Ties were severed,” as an MSNBC executive put it, after Melissa, who I am proud to count as a colleague, sent an email to her staff explaining why she would not be hosting her show this past weekend after several weeks of having the program pre-empted for election coverage. The “scorching” email, now public, is being cherry-picked in articles, particularly the part where Melissa wrote, “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head.”…

Read the entire article here.

MSNBC severs ties with Melissa Harris-Perry after host’s critical email

The Washington Post
2016-02-28

Paul Farhi, Media Reporter

MSNBC has parted ways with host Melissa Harris-Perry after she complained about preemptions of her weekend program and implied that there was a racial aspect to the cable-news network’s treatment, insiders at MSNBC said.

Harris-Perry refused to appear on her program Saturday morning, telling her co-workers in an email that she felt “worthless” to the NBC-owned network. “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” wrote Harris-Perry, who is African American. “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by [NBC executives] or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”

The rebuke, which became public when it was obtained by the New York Times, has triggered discussions involving the network, Harris-Perry and her representatives about the terms of her departure, said people at MSNBC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Harris-Perry’s departure has not been formally announced…

..All of the changes carry a potential perception risk that MSNBC — known as the most liberal among the three leading cable-news networks — is diminishing the contributions of its minority personalities, network officials acknowledge. In addition to the issues with Harris-Perry and Diaz-Balart, the network’s new emphasis on news during the day has led to the demotion of two African American hosts: the Rev. Al Sharpton and Joy Reid, both of whom have been moved from daily shows to lower-profile weekend slots. (Reid assumed Harris-Perry’s hosting duties on Saturday.)…

Read the entire article here.

Melissa Harris-Perry Walks Off Her MSNBC Show After Pre-Emptions

The New York Times
2016-02-26

John Koblin, Television Reporter

Melissa Harris-Perry said she had received no word about whether her MSNBC show had been canceled. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Melissa Harris-Perry said she was refusing to go on the MSNBC show she hosts this Saturday, following several weeks of pre-emptions and what she described as a loss of editorial control.

In an email sent to people she works with this week, which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Harris-Perry said that her show had effectively been taken away from her and that she felt “worthless” in the eyes of NBC News executives.

“Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”…

…Ms. Harris-Perry is black, and Mr. Lack and Mr. Griffin are white. In the phone interview on Friday, Ms. Harris-Perry clarified her remarks and said she did not think race played a role in her recent absence from the air.

“I don’t know if there is a personal racial component,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.”…

Read the entire article here.

How should a dancer look? Ask Misty Copeland and Stella Abrera

The Melissa Harris-Perry Show
MSNBC
2015-07-18

Melissa Harris-Perry, Host

Dancers Misty Copeland and Stella Abrera discuss their pioneering work as, respectively, the first African American and Filipino American principal ballerinas at the American Ballet Theater.

Watch the video (00:07:46) here.

What President Obama’s historic week means for his legacy

MSNBC
2015-06-28

Benjy Sarlin, Political Reporter

Every occupant of the White House experiences more than one presidency. There’s their actual time in office, an experience characterized by constant political conflict, a drumbeat of unanticipated crises large and small, and a trudging slog towards policy goals. Then there’s the version of their presidency that comes after they leave, as memories fade and history chisels away the various minor dramas until eventually all that remains for most Americans is an ultra­-condensed summary. This is the version passed down through generations, to those who never experienced that president’s tenure themselves and whose sense of history stems from one or two paragraphs in their high school textbook.

More than any other period in his presidency, the past week’s rapid succession of once­-in-­a-­lifetime moments closed the gap between President Obama’s day­ to ­day travails and his larger place in history.

“Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens,” as Obama put it in his response to the Supreme Court’s same sex marriage ruling Friday. “And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

For a few days in June, change was dizzying in pace and so real it could be touched. Universal health care, as one conservative put it, is forever, thanks to the Supreme Court knocking down the Affordable Care Act’s last significant remaining challenge. Marriage equality is forever. This week’s bipartisan exorcism of the Confederacy’s 150­-year old demons is forever.

The avalanche of news sparked a discussion of two emerging views on Obama’s legacy – one focused on his policy accomplishments, the other as a symbol of underlying changes in the country that will long outlive his presidency…

…Obama’s election as the first black president – powered by landslide margins with black and Latino voters and historic turnout by younger voters – was hailed as a historic moment, but it was eclipsed almost immediately by the massive challenges that landed on his desk and the intense backlash his policy responses provoked on the right. The scope of this achievement came jarringly back into picture on Friday, however, when, as the Associated Press described it, ”America’s first black president sang [Amazing Grace], less than a mile from the spot where thousands of slaves were sold and where South Carolina signed its pact to leave the union a century and a half earlier.” It will move more and more to the forefront once there’s a new president dealing with the 24/7 reality show that is the White House and Obama settles into the more non-partisan, ceremonial role his surviving predecessors occupy today…

Read the entire article here.

The problems with Rachel Dolezal and the social construction of race

Nerding Out with Dorian Warren
MSNBC
2015-06-17

Dorian Warren, Host and Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs
Columbia University, New York, New York

Christina Greer, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

Joseph Lowndes, Associate Professor of Political Sciences
University of Oregon

Dorian Warren talks with professors Allyson Hobbs, Christina Greer, and Joseph Lowndes about what the social construction of race does and does not mean in the case of Rachel Dolezal. Plus, writer and advocate Parker Molloy speaks on what the media gets wrong when it compares the experiences of the transgender community to those of Rachel Dolezal.

Watch the interview (00:50:52) here.