Mixed Race Studies

The Kidnapped Child Who Became a Poet

The New York Times Magazine
2023-07-27

Wyatt Mason

At age 3, Shane McCrae was taken from his Black father by his white grandparents — a rupture he explores in a new memoir.

“The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” Shane McCrae, the 47-year-old American poet, told me in his melodious, reedy voice one rainy afternoon in May, “is if it happens early enough, there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.”

There was no reason for McCrae to have known. What unfolded in McCrae’s childhood — between a June day in 1979 when his white grandmother took him from his Black father and disappeared, and another day, 13 years later, when McCrae opened a phone book in Salem, Ore., found a name he hoped was his father’s and placed a call — is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity. It loops through the American landscape, from Oregon to Texas to California to Oregon again, and, even now, wends through the vaster emotional country of a child and his parents. And because so much of what happened to McCrae happened in homes where he was beaten and lied to and threatened, where he was made to understand that Black people were inferior to whites, where he was taught to hail Hitler, where he was told that his dark skin meant he tanned easily but, no, not that he was Black, it’s a story that’s been hard for McCrae to piece together.

“My grandparents,” McCrae explained in a somewhat gloomy, book-laden office at Columbia University, where he teaches poetry in its M.F.A. program, “were so actively keeping my father away from me — they didn’t want me to investigate him at all — it was just normal.” Normal, McCrae explained, because the story he had been told by his grandparents was that McCrae’s father, whose name he didn’t even know, abandoned him before he was born. “They had been doing it my whole life,” McCrae said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t think of it as, Oh, this is pretty strange.”…

Read the entire article here.

André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

The New York Times
2023-07-14

Javier C. Hernández

One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.

André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.

Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.

“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”

“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”.

Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color…

Read the entire obituary here.

As N.F.L.’s Quarterback Guard Changes, Patrick Mahomes Wins Second M.V.P. Award

The New York Times
2023-02-09

Kris Rhim, Sports Reporter

Mahomes, Kansas City’s quarterback, won football’s top honor for the second time, establishing his place atop a new generation of passing talent.

PHOENIX — Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback, won his second Most Valuable Player Award on Thursday night, for his work in perhaps the most challenging season of his career, cementing himself as the leader of a new wave of talented young quarterbacks.

Mahomes is the first Black quarterback to win the league’s highest individual honor twice, having previously won the award after the 2018 season, his first as a starter.

In the past 20 seasons, the award has been won by the generation-defining quarterbacks Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers 12 times, with no other player repeating as M.V.P. With the retirements of Manning, in 2016, and Brady this season, Mahomes leads an emerging class of young passers defining the N.F.L...

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Ruth Ann Koesun, Versatile Ballet Theater Dancer, Dies at 89

The New York Times
2018-02-14

Anna Kisselgoff

Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.

Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.

Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert…

…Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent…

Read the entire obituary here.

Doubts Over Indigenous Identity in Academia Spark ‘Pretendian’ Claims

The New York Times
2022-10-15

Vjosa Isai

Some Canadian universities now require additional proof to back up Indigenous heritage, replacing self-declaration policies.

Since announcing discoveries of evidence last year that hundreds of Indigenous children were likely buried in unmarked graves at church-run residential school sites, Indigenous groups in Canada have captured more national attention.

So, too, has a growing group of Canadian public figures, mostly within academia, who have been accused of falsely claiming to be Indigenous.

Earlier this week, an investigation published by Canada’s national broadcaster, the C.B.C., found that the claims to Cree ancestry of a prominent scholar and former judge, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, did not align with historical records and interviews…

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June Shagaloff Alexander, School Desegregation Leader, Dies at 93

The New York Times
2022-04-06

Clay Risen

She helped Thurgood Marshall prepare for his Supreme Court fight and later took on de facto school segregation across the North and West.

June Shagaloff Alexander, whose work for the N.A.A.C.P. and its legal arm in the 1950s and ’60s put her at the forefront of the nationwide fight for school integration and made her a close confidante of civil rights figures like Thurgood Marshall and James Baldwin, died on March 29 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 93…

…Although she was white, her dark complexion sometimes led people to assume she was Black, to the point of barring her from certain whites-only public spaces, an experience that she said shaped her early commitment to civil rights.

But this ambiguity proved to be an asset in her work. When investigating a segregated school district, she would visit a white school pretending to be a prospective white parent, then do the same at a Black school, pretending to be a prospective Black parent — a ruse that gave her a unique, unvarnished view of the district’s education inequities…

Read the entire obituary here.

One More Census Takeaway: The End of an Era of Counting the Nation?

The New York Times
2022-03-12

Michael Wines, National Correspondent

Some experts are arguing that it’s time for the census to aggressively make use of government data and other sources to augment its own decennial count.

WASHINGTON — Beyond the reports of undercounts and overcounts in population totals, there is another takeaway from the post-mortem of 2020 census data issued on Thursday: This could be the last census of its kind.

The next census will be taken in a nation where Amazon may have a better handle on where many people live than the Census Bureau itself. For some advocates of a more accurate count, the era in which census-takers knock on millions of doors to persuade people to fill out forms should give way in 2030 to a sleeker approach: data mining, surveys, sophisticated statistical projections and, if politics allows, even help from the nation’s tech giants and their endless petabytes of personal information.

The Census Bureau itself has yet to leap very far into that new era. But it has hinted recently at a “blended” approach in which official census figures could be supplemented with reliable data from government records and other sources…

Read the entire article here.

Colin Kaepernick Campaigns for N.F.L. Return With Pop-Up Workouts

The New York Times
2022-03-27

Emmanuel Morgan

As teams snatch up quarterbacks in free agency, Kaepernick has been quickly organizing workouts around the country and posting them to social media.

LOS ANGELES — In the five years since he last played in an N.F.L. game, Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who ignited an international debate on athletes’ right to protest, has only sporadically surfaced in public. Accepting an award here, or rolling out a Netflix series there, Kaepernick has in those calculated appearances always affirmed that he was “staying ready” for a return to football.

This month, he has taken a new approach, organizing pop-up workouts that are often scrapped together in less than 24 hours in cities across the country. On Friday at U.C.L.A.’s practice facility, most of the receivers who fielded his passes were still in high school or enrolled in junior colleges. Last week in a workout posted to his Instagram account, Kaepernick threw to Seattle Seahawks receiver Tyler Lockett in Arizona, after plotting to meet via Twitter.

In workouts in Atlanta, New Orleans and three other cities, he corralled workout partners with a range of experience through previous connections and word of mouth using the sessions as a public forum to showcase his talents and potentially solicit an N.F.L. audition…

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How Are We Still Debating Interracial Marriage in 2022?

The New York Times
2022-03-25

Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist

“You would be OK with the Supreme Court leaving the question of interracial marriage to the states?”

“Yes,” said Senator Mike Braun of Indiana while fielding questions from local media on Tuesday. “If you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be able to have your cake and eat it, too,” he said. “That’s hypocritical.”

Braun walked this back, of course, undoubtedly aware of the damage it could do if he let it stand. “Earlier during a virtual press conference, I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage,” he said in a statement to NBC News. “Let me be clear on that issue — there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities or individuals.”

As damage control goes, this was unpersuasive. It’s not just that the questions he originally answered were clear; it’s that Braun’s answer was consistent with what he had said throughout the news conference. His argument to reporters was that the existence of certain rights, and the particular shape they take, was best left to the states. He used abortion and marijuana legalization as examples. It was then that a reporter asked if this applied to interracial marriage…

Read the entire article here.

Why Chinese Americans Are Talking About Eileen Gu

The New York Times
2022-02-18

Ashley Wong

The critical crossfire Ms. Gu has faced has implications that go far beyond the Olympic slopes, Chinese Americans say. And some see themselves in the duality she has embraced.

When it comes to Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old Olympic gold medalist freestyle skier who was born in San Francisco but competed for China, Chinese Americans have lots of opinions.

There are those who love her, moved by her ability to soar over treacherous slopes with ease. Others are inspired by her efforts to navigate the uneasy political tension between two countries and cultures. Some believe she chose to represent China simply to cash in on the lucrative opportunities it has afforded her.

But like her or not, many Chinese Americans interviewed in the New York region this week agreed on one thing: When Ms. Gu says, as she often does, “When I’m in the U.S., I’m American, but when I’m in China, I’m Chinese,” it resonates with them.

“I think what I’m seeing is somebody who isn’t afraid to love her identities and share that with people,” said Sarah Belle Lin, 28, a Harlem resident. “I think it’s so brave, actually, for her to speak about that on a public platform.”…

Read the entire article here.