Mixed Race Studies

The homogenous representation of Latinos on the big screen stems from a larger issue, says Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He describes a longstanding ideology in Latin America that emphasizes pride in building a mixed-race society. “It’s attached to this idea of what’s called mestizo, which is, as the word describes, the phenomenon of racial mixture in Latin America and how it’s different from the United States,” Morales says. Black Latinos’ ancestors were brought to South America and the Caribbean by the same transatlantic slave trade that delivered enslaved people to the U.S., but after emancipation, U.S. law forbade interracial marriages, whereas Latin-America did not. “Latinos in the U.S. grew up with this idea that Latinos are mixed-race and so are incapable of racism. And that allows them to sort of marginalize and ignore Afro-Latinos who are often the victims of overt or subtle discrimination.”

Andrea Marks, “How ‘In the Heights’ Casting Focused a Wider Problem of Afro-Latino Representation,” Rolling Stone, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/in-the-heights-casting-colorism-afro-latino-1184945/.

The accusation of colorism in the light-skinned casting choices illuminates a problem regarding whom Hollywood presents as “Latino,” and whom it excludes, according to Tanya K. Hernández, author of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination. “There is often a complete erasure of Afro-Latinos, and a frozen, overly romanticized picture of indigenous peoples as only historical figures from a Mayan past,” she says. Any viewer of American TV or movies can observe that mainstream media typically highlights light-skinned Latinos, even though a 2014 Pew Research Center survey showed nearly one in four Latinos identifies as Afro-Latino.

Andrea Marks, “How ‘In the Heights’ Casting Focused a Wider Problem of Afro-Latino Representation,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/in-the-heights-casting-colorism-afro-latino-1184945/.

How ‘In the Heights’ Casting Focused a Wider Problem of Afro-Latino Representation

Rolling Stone
2021-06-16

Andrea Marks, Research Editor

MELISSA BARRERA (center) as Vanessa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “IN THE HEIGHTS” Macall Polay/Warner Bros

A prevalence of light-skinned actors demonstrates Hollywood’s — and Latin America’s — history of colorism

When the musical In the Heights debuted in 2008, it was considered a triumph of Latin American story-telling. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, it brought the barrio to Broadway and centered Latino immigrants building a community in New York “north of 96th street” so their children could chase the American Dream. The plot is centered around Usnavi (originally played by Miranda himself), the son of Dominican immigrants, who runs the family bodega but dreams of something bigger.

The movie version of the Tony Award–winning show hit theaters and HBO Max last week to largely positive reviews and praise for its three-dimensional portrayals of Latin-American characters, not to mention its ambitious full-cast musical numbers. A majority-Latino cast carries the film, starring actors like Anthony Ramos, a star of Miranda’s other Broadway blockbuster, Hamilton, who is of Puerto Rican descent, playing Usnavi; Mexican TV actress Melissa Barrera; and Bronx-born bachata singer Leslie Grace, who is of Dominican descent. At the same time, many viewers have expressed disappointment at a lack of Afro-Latino representation in the cast, especially among lead characters…

Read the entire article here.

Soledad O’Brien Isn’t Holding Back Anymore

Rolling Stone
2020-03-03

EJ Dickson, Reporter

After leaving CNN, the veteran journalist started Soledad O’Brien Productions. Leeor Wild for Rolling Stone

After a new executive pushed her out at CNN, the veteran journalist became one of mainstream media’s most fiery critics

Soledad O’Brien likes to tell a story: Eleven years ago, a senior employee at CNN — “my boss’s boss’s boss” — called her into his office to upbraid her about a comment she had made while promoting her multipart series Black in America. At a panel, O’Brien had said she had interviewed black parents from various socioeconomic backgrounds, all of whom said they had conversations with their sons about how to navigate interactions with police. The superior, who was white, told her this experience was not specific to people of color, and that white parents had this discussion with their sons too. He requested that she stop publicly speaking about young black men and police brutality.

O’Brien was stunned. “I’d spent 18 months working on that doc,” the veteran journalist recalls in the office of her company, Soledad O’Brien Productions. “But the idea that I would come back with something that challenged his belief was just not acceptable.” Nonetheless, she wanted to keep her job, and she knew that speaking out would be career suicide. “I didn’t tell that story,” she says. “Until I was telling it on Twitter.” And once she started telling stories, she found she couldn’t stop.

Read the entire article here.

Makaya McCraven Isn’t Interested in Saving Jazz

Rolling Stone
2018-10-25

Natalie Weiner, Reporter

Makaya McCraven in Chicago in October. Lyndon French for RollingStone.com

Chicago-based drummer and bandleader on how he’s marrying the energy of intimate club performances with 21st-century electronic thinking

“‘Is jazz dead?’ is a stupid question,” says drummer and bandleader Makaya McCraven over beers at a Lower East Side bar that is, fittingly, playing a selection of 1930s and ’40s-era jazz cuts. “If you have to ask the same question for 50 years, it becomes a rhetorical question. When did it die?”

Those who know McCraven’s work would likely reach a similar conclusion. Critically acclaimed releases like In the Moment (2015) and Highly Rare (2017) — both made up entirely of live material — put the heat and vitality of an intimate jazz club into a distinctly 21st century mode of brainy beat music, edited down to their searching, abstract highlights. They gave McCraven the kind of jazz-vanguard cred also recently assigned to artists like Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings, all of whom have earned some degree of crossover success over the past decade thanks in part to their ability to tap into hip-hop and R&B audiences. Despite the fact that these artists emerged at different times and with different aesthetics, each has been presented as the face of a jazz “revival” or “resurgence” — a necessary spark to an otherwise moribund genre. But McCraven, 35, would prefer that listeners don’t call it a comeback…

..In many ways, global jazz culture is the story of McCraven’s life. His father, jazz drummer Stephen McCraven — a Connecticut native who was mentored by avant-gardists Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef and Sam Rivers — and his mother, Hungarian folk singer Ágnes Zsigmondi, met in Paris, where McCraven was born. The family later moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, finding an intimate artistic community in the college town…

Read the entire interview here.

What Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem Protest Tells Us About America

Rolling Stone
2016-08-29

Morgan Jerkins

When black athletes choose to point their aggression towards larger, systematic inequalities, there’s always backlash

The role of the famous black athlete has been a polarizing one for as long as sports have dominated American headlines, going all the way back a century to when Jack Johnson beat white boxer Jim Jeffries in 1910. During Johnson’s time, he was regarded as a “bad nigger,” not only because he was articulate and handsome, but also because he beat his white rivals. It was a direct representation of black masculinity as a threat to white supremacy. In recent times, however, this kind of resistance has evolved. From track and field medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists as a Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics to WNBA players wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, black athletes are expanding their sportsmanship into political activism.

Last Friday, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the National Anthem during a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers. By Saturday morning, what should have been a meaningless football game was dominating the national news…

Read the entire article here.

See Logic Talk Biracial Identity, Anime Influence

Rolling Stone
2016-04-20

Brittany Spanos, Staff Writer

Rapper discusses prejudice, upcoming albums and ‘The Incredible True Story’ ahead of co-headlining tour with G-Eazy

“When it comes to being black and white, and the things that I’ve experienced, it was just a personal journey to look in the mirror and be happy with who I am,” Logic told Rolling Stone during a visit to the office. The 26-year-old biracial rapper has been hit with criticism during the course of his career given his fair complexion, but he’s using the claims of inauthenticity to speak not only to his own narrative and background but to those of many others, as well. He has two potential albums in the works, including one where he spits rhymes from varying perspectives.

“I feel the Aryan in my blood is scarier than a Blood/Been lookin’ for holy water, now I’m prayin’ for a flood/Feel like time passin’ me by slower than a slug,” he teased from a song he’s recently begun writing from the perspective of a mixed-race person like himself. “But my beautiful black brothers and sisters wanna act like I’m adopted/Go back in time when my ni**a daddy impregnated my cracker momma and stopped it.” Later, Logic says, “My skin fair, but life’s not.”…

Read the entire artcile here.