Mixed Race Studies

I Am a Descendant of James Madison and His Slave

Zora
Medium
2020-03-17

Bettye Kearse

Illustration: Sophia Zarders

My whole life, my mother told me, ‘Always remember — you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.’

President Madison did not have children with his wife, Dolley. Leading scholars believe he was impotent, infertile, or both. But the stories I have heard since my childhood say that James Madison, a Founding Father of our nation, was also a founding father of my African American family.

In my childhood, whenever I whined or squirmed or got into trouble, my mother repeated the refrain: “Always remember — you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.” This is my family’s credo, the statement that has guided us for 200 years.

Though many in our family have heard we descend from President Madison and his slaves, only the griots — the one-in-a-generation oral historians in the family — know the full account of our ancestors, White and Black, in America. Gramps had told me many stories, but the detailed family history was Mom’s responsibility to convey to me when I became the next griotte.

The night my mother passed those stories on to me, I understood for the first time why some of the details of our family history were passed only from the griot of one generation to that of the next. Not only were some of the stories intimate, but this tradition safeguarded their accuracy, truth, and longevity. I sank into the sofa with my mother and listened with a new awareness of the significance of her words and what they meant to me. She began…

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“It’s really hard for administrations to catch up,” says G. Reginald Daniel, PhD, professor and vice chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One of the key areas lagging behind in universities is student counseling. “There are special kinds of microaggressions that come with multiracial identity,” says Daniel. “Our society is racially illiterate in general, and the greatest illiteracy is to be in the presence of a multiracial person.”

Kristal Brent Zook, “Universities Are Still Struggling to Provide for Mixed-Race Students,” Zora, September 23, 2019. https://zora.medium.com/universities-are-still-struggling-to-provide-for-mixed-race-students-d291d89c5b60.

Universities Are Still Struggling to Provide for Mixed-Race Students

Zora
2019-09-23

Kristal Brent Zook, Professor of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

Photo courtesy of the author

Coming from a multiracial background can leave some students feeling isolated

“As a person of color…” Phoebe Vlahoplus, 20, a history major at Wesleyan University pauses.

“Or… half a person of color.”

“It depends,” she says carefully when I ask if she’s uncomfortable using the phrase. She is East Indian and Greek, but her parents were born in the United States. “I can’t speak for immigrants.” She weighs the considerations, then adds, “But my skin color is Brown.”

Meiko Flynn-Do is Japanese, Vietnamese, and White but before attending Stanford University, where mixed-race students made up 11% of undergraduates in 2012, she never saw herself as a “person of color. That wasn’t on my radar.” It wasn’t until college that she started “wrestling with those things. Ethnic studies classes kind of opened up those questions for me.”

Mariko Rooks attended Yale University’s Cultural Connections, a pre-orientation program for minorities, prior to starting her first year on campus. “It was so unapologetically Black and Brown,” she recalls. “So overwhelming and enlightening.” The experience “revolutionized her thinking,” says Rooks. Her friend Adia Klein, a junior at Yale agrees. “Going to college opened me up. I saw that being multiracial was a global thing… It was eye-opening.”

Like many college students, Vlahoplus, Flynn-Do, Rooks, and Klein all found that in college, questions of racial identity moved to the front and center of their consciousness for the first time…

……“It’s really hard for administrations to catch up,” says G. Reginald Daniel, PhD, professor and vice chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One of the key areas lagging behind in universities is student counseling. “There are special kinds of microaggressions that come with multiracial identity,” says Daniel. “Our society is racially illiterate in general, and the greatest illiteracy is to be in the presence of a multiracial person.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Shifting Definition of Mixed-Race in America

Zora
2019-09-23

Kristal Brent Zook, Professor of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

Radical changes in U.S. demographics are reinventing what it means to be multiracial

“Raise your hand if you would see me on the street and think I’m Black?”

Several hands went up in an auditorium full of college students.

“Okay. What about biracial?”

More hands.

“Hmm… And what if I wore my hair in an Afro?”

Still more hands flew into the air.

What are you?

Multiracial people field that question daily.

Not long ago — before, during, and just after the civil rights era — there was often an unspoken understanding that those of us who are biracial should answer to only one race. One reality. One allegiance. Even today, a majority of adults who are multiracial choose not to identify that way.

But others are beginning to question that arrangement…

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After Years of Searching, I Finally Found My Black Indian Community

Zora
2019-08-19

Shonda Buchanan, Literary Editor
Harriet Tubman Press

The blood of two peoples runs in us, and we want everyone to know we are still here

Dropping off a book at the Hampton Public Library, I glance at the counter and see a licorice-red flyer that says, “Come Join the Weyanoke Association: African Americans Honoring Our American Indian Heritage.” I look around. Is someone playing a joke on me?

In August 2004, my daughter and I moved to Hampton, Virginia, for my job at a Historically Black College. Our first year was hard and lonely, and we desperately missed our communities back in Los Angeles and in the Los Padres National Forest.

“I hate it here,” Afiya said at least once a week as she tried to make friends in the ninth grade. I tried to placate her with the proverbial “give it time” talks, but I had moved her away from her friends at 14, just as she was about to start high school. We had many “I hate it here” fights, but the truth was I was having a hard time finding my people, too. I missed the African American, African-centered communities, and the American Indian groups that had become my family over the years. This flyer seemed to be a sign: Little did I know I was about to find a space where both sides of my heritage combined…

Read the entire article here.