Tag Archives: mixed race

need to know more

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I have been trying to find out more info on these intended house boys all day.  I can’t find anything!! Anyone have any clues?

Also, I really like the “civil rights is colorless” part of the article.

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NAACP marks 100th anniversary, steps into new era

By Stephen Magagnini

http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/2313113.html

Recruiting at churches, schools, job fairs and community events, the Sacramento branch has nearly tripled from 323 adult members to 845 over the past 14 months, with another 45 youth members, said president Betty Williams.

“They’re white and black, Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim,” said Williams. “I think people are discovering that civil rights is colorless, whether it’s a gender issue, a religious issue, a same-sex issue.”

Jeanette Flowers Kimmons, who’s recruited more than 100 new members herself, added, “I always say don’t wait until something happens to be part of the solution.”

The Sacramento chapter – formed in 1916 in response to lynchings and kidnappings of mixed-race children who were to be raised as house boys – will mark the NAACP’s100th anniversary Nov. 14 with a fundraiser.

duboisnaacp2smlAn image from 1929 of W.E.B. Du Bois with a chapter of the NAACP, Image courtesy of Americanrenaissance.com

keith bardwell, please read this article

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Just to catch you up to speed.  By the way, don’t worry about us.  We are doing just fine.  Thank you for your grave concern.  That you would go to such lengths as interfering with God’s blessing of love and devotion (I know, I know- only to certain couples) just to spare us a lifetime of confusion and exclusion is sweet.  But no thank you.  Times have changed, my friend.  I mean, you do seem to think of yourself as a kind of a friend of the mulattos.  A really ignorant and misinformed friend.  I see how it could happen.  For years (white)people were taught that race-mixing was wrong.  And if those people were desperate not to feel really racist, that belief was justified with feigned concern for the “spurious issue” which would result from interracial couplings.  That coupled with the “tragic mulatto” propaganda that has been bandied about the country since way back in the day… Well, I can see how you may have been lead astray.  I hope you can open your mind now.  After the couple of weeks I imagine you’ve been having, you really have no excuse.

w onesie

Are Mixed-Race Children Better Adjusted?

By JOHN CLOUD Saturday, Feb. 21, 2009

That Americans like answers in black and white, a cultural trait we confirmed last year when the biracial man running for President was routinely called “black”.

The flattening of Barack Obama’s complex racial background shouldn’t have been surprising. Many multiracial historical figures in the U.S. have been reduced (or have reduced themselves) to a single aspect of their racial identities: Booker T. Washington, Tina Turner, and Greg Louganis are three examples. This phenomenon isn’t entirely pernicious; it is at least partly rooted in our concern that growing up with a fractured identity is hard on kids. The psychologist J.D. Teicher summarized this view in a 1968 paper: “Although the burden of the Negro child is recognized as a heavy one, that of the Negro-White child is seen to be even heavier.”

But new research says this old, problematized view of multiracial identity is outdated. In fact, a new paper in the Journal of Social Issues shows that multiracial adolescents who identify proudly as multiracial fare as well as — and, in many cases, better than — kids who identify with a single group, even if that group is considered high-status (like, say, Asians or whites). This finding was surprising because psychologists have argued for years that mixed-race kids will be better adjusted if they pick a single race as their own.

The population of multiracial kids in the U.S. has soared from approximately 500,000 in 1970 to more than 6.8 million in 2000, according to Census data quoted in this pdf. In the early years, research on these kids highlighted their difficulties: the disapproval they faced from neighbors and members of their extended families; the sense that they weren’t “full” members in any racial community; the insecurity and self-loathing that often resulted from feeling marginalized on all sides. That simple but harsh playground question — “What are you?” — torments many multiracial kids. Psychologists call this a “forced-choice dilemma” that compels children to claim some kind of identity — even if only a half-identity — in return for social acceptance.

But the new Journal of Social Issues paper suggests this dilemma has become less burdensome in the age of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama. The paper’s authors, a team led by Kevin Binning of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Miguel Unzueta of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, studied 182 multiracial high schoolers in Long Beach, Calif. Binning, Unzueta and their colleagues write that those kids who identified with multiple racial groups reported significantly less psychological stress than those who identified with a single group, whether a “low-status” group like African-Americans or a “high-status” group like whites. The multiracial identifiers were less alienated from peers than monoracial identifiers, and they were no more likely to report having engaged in problem behaviors, such as substance use or persistent school absence.

The writers theorize that multiracial kids who choose to associate with a single race are troubled by their attempts to “pass,” whereas those who choose to give voice to their own uniqueness find pride in that act. “Rather than being ‘caught’ between two worlds,” the authors write, “it might be that individuals who identify with multiple groups are better able to navigate both racially homogeneous and heterogeneous environments than individuals who primarily identify with one racial group.” The multiracial kids are able to “place one foot in the majority and one in the minority group, and in this way might be buffered against the negative consequences of feeling tokenized.”

In short, multiracial kids seem to create their own definitions for fitting in, and they show more psychological flexibility than those mixed-race kids who feel bound to one choice or another.

Fortunately, all these questions of racial identity are becoming less important, as we inch ever closer to the day when the U.S. has no racial majority. One of these days, after all, we will all be celebrating our multiracial pride.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1880467,00.html#ixzz0W2BxqzTZ

conditioned to the method of white superiority

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I’d love to see the show that this article details.  All whites are racist!?  I have a hard time buying that.  Prejudiced or biased, maybe.  I think all people are no matter the color.  Anyway, it upsets me greatly that the black father of the mixed-race girl doesn’t want to expose her “secret.”  Um…. how is she supposed to form a positive, all-encompassing identity if her black father is hiding from her white friends?  I wonder if this will be on BBC America.

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TEACHER: ‘ALL WHITES ARE RACIST’

29th October 2009 by Peter Dyke

DailyStarUK

A Bombshell new television show will tonight claim that all white people are racist.

An American schoolteacher and anti-race campaigner will conduct an experiment for Channel 4 to prove how prejudiced Britain is.

Jane Elliott, 76, whose nickname is The Bitch, travelled to the UK for the test.

Part of the show features former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made up as a black person and US President Barack Obama as a Chinese.

Elliott is given a group of 30 volunteers, of mixed age and race, and splits them into two teams based on their eye colour.

Those with brown eyes are treated well, but those with blue eyes are ridiculed, humiliated and insulted.

Her aim is to create a mock “apartheid regime” to make the blue eyed people experience prejudice, discrimination and racism.

However at the end of the experiment, set in an old warehouse and lasting several hours, the white and black volunteers end up in a bitter row.

Some even walk out. Many of the white volunteers claim that black people do not have the monopoly on discrimination.

A middle aged white woman says: “They think racism is just for black people. I’ve had comments made about me because I’m blonde and white.”

However one dad, who is black, reveals how he never picks his daughter up from school because her mum is white and he doesn’t want anyone to know she is mixed race in case she is taunted.

At the end of the experiment, Elliott claims the white volunteers have shown their true colours.

She tells the C4 documentary tonight at 10pm: “White people should feel guilty about their behaviour.

“You don’t do things because you’re white, you do things because you’re ignorant.

“We are conditioned to the method of white superiority from the moment of birth.”

stop-racism

sophie okonedo- that can’t possibly be your mum

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Jewish Actress Sophie Okonedo Explores Biracial Identity

BY NAOMI PFEFFERMAN

“I’m a North London, working-class, black, Jewish girl,” actress Sophie Okonedo said. “I love my upbringing because it had so many different colors; it’s given me the equipment to play lots of diverse roles.”

In 2005, the tall, striking actress burst into the international spotlight when she was nominated for an Oscar for her harrowing turn as the wife of a hotel manager who hid more than 1,200 refugees from genocidal militias in “Hotel Rwanda.” As the unexpected new toast of Hollywood — Newsweek described her performance as a “revelation” — she went on to portray an emotionally disturbed young woman in civil rights-era South Carolina in “The Secret Life of Bees.”

Now she has tackled her first leading role in “Skin,” based on the true story of Sandra Laing, a biracial girl born to white parents — unaware of a black ancestor in their family tree — in 1950s South Africa. The film chronicles the parents’ battle for Sandra to be classified as “white,” her rebellion and marriage to a black man and subsequent struggle to be reclassified as “colored” to keep her children. At one point in the film, Laing’s parents learn the 10-year-old Sandra cannot continue to live in their home unless she is documented as a household servant.

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The script stunned Okonedo when it arrived at her North London home not long after her Oscar nomination. “The story was so extraordinary I almost couldn’t believe it was true,” she said from the flat she shares with her 12-year-old daughter.

And then there was the personal connection for Okonedo, 40, who was raised by her Ashkenazi mother and Yiddish-speaking grandparents after her father, a Nigerian civil servant, abandoned the family when Sophie was 5.

“I could relate to being black and brought up in a white family,” she said. “Of course being raised in North London in the 1970s was much kinder than South Africa in the ’50s. But it was helpful to understand what it is like to have a family that is a different color than you — and to question your heritage when people say, ‘That can’t possibly be your mum.’”

…Okonedo was the only black congregant at the liberal synagogue she attended with her grandparents, although she refuses to discuss previous remarks she reportedly made about encountering discrimination from both blacks and Jews.

…“My grandparents kept a fairly Jewish household,” Okonedo said. “They celebrated all the holidays, and they spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want me to understand the conversation. I feel sad I didn’t learn Yiddish as a child,” she added. “It’s such a fantastic language, so expressive. And now my grandparents are too old to teach me.”

Now that her grandparents are in their 90s, the family holiday celebrations have ceased. “But culturally I’m still very Jewish,” Okonedo said. “It’s all in my blood.”

Over the years, her mother has remained Okonedo’s staunchest champion — encouraging her to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art after she dropped out of school at 16, and later traveling with her to theater and movie sets to attend to her hair. “I’m not very good at the whole dressing-up thing,” Okonedo said.

Premiere+Secret+Life+Bees+Arrivals+TIFF+2008+5dLjEN-0oOwl

Read the entire article here.

i was like, ‘are you serious!?’

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Yet another disheartening story of hatred in the form of racism.  Maybe instead of naivety it’s because of who and what I am that I find it shocking that so-called “racial purity” is an obsession for some.  A crusade.  A cause to kill and die for.

Harrowing Story of Racism

Staff
Charleston

http://www.wvmetronews.com/index.cfm?func=displayfullstory&storyid=32733

Meredith Harris is white.  Her husband is black.  She has white friends and black friends.  She says the color of their skin has never really mattered to her, but she says it does to some… Harris, 22, has what some may call an unbelievable story about racism. But it is true,  and it happened in Charleston, WV. The story ended with a man named Darrell Fierce pleading guilty to violating Harris’ civil rights.  Fierce was never sentenced because he died after shooting himself on the day of  his sentencing hearing.

It began in late June 2007 when Harris found a house to rent. Next door was Fierce and his partner, both older white men.  After signing a lease with Fierce’s partner, it was move in day for Meredith. Her white friends were there to help.

“That was actually the first day I met Darrell. I was carryin’ stuff in and out of the house.  He came up and walked over in the yard and introduced himself. He actually gave me a bottle of champagne with like a red ribbon and everything. (He) told me ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ (and) if there was anything I need to let him know…  He was just really friendly to me the first day….he was very friendly. Ben had always been friendly. Darrel was friendly. So, I thought everything was going to be fine.”

But everything wasn’t fine.  Two days after moving in Meredtih Harris brought a young mixed-race girl to the house along with who is now her father-in-law, a black man.

“My goddaughter…she’s mixed.  And she was over there and as soon as they saw her the next chance they got they confronted me in the front yard.  (They) called my goddaughter some very inappropriate things.  (They) said that they weren’t having a day care for ‘mixed monkeys.’  (They) said they didn’t like my kind and that I was going to have to leave. (They) pretty much called me white trash. At that point, that was when they tried to evict me. ”

Harris says that after a wonderful initial reception things had changed suddenly.

“When they first said it I didn’t believe them. I was like ‘are you serious?’  But once it like clicked to me that they were being serious -that they were really that racist and this wasn’t like a joke- that’s when I called my dad. He came over and he confronted them. Once he got there they pretty much said the same thing to him. ‘We know why you don’t want her. She’s white trash. We know you’re probably ashamed of her. I’d be ashamed of her too.’  (They) just said things like that that were really inapproriate.  At this point i didn’t want to live there anymore.”

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Having been given an eviction notice by the men for what they called “incapability” Meredith began looking for a new place to live. Then came the night of July 15th, 2007. As she often did, Meredith went to bed late. Her wake up call on July 16th was scary.

“It was about five o’clock in the morning when I woke up and my dog woke me up. By the time she did, the smoke was so thick in my room I could hardly see,” Harris said. “I usually sleep with my door closed, but it was actually open that night. As soon as I woke up I knew it was him (Fierce) that did it.”

“He made like a little brush pile with trash and flammable stuff,” she remembered. “They started the fire right outside my bedroom and at the front and backdoor, I guess, to try and trap me in there.”

Harris would later find her and her boyfriend’s cars had slashed tires and sugar-filled gasoline tanks.

That was her last night in the house, but she kept her belongings there as she looked for a new place to live. She says within a week the house was empty and when she returned she says Fierce reminded her what he had said before that he was going to evict her.

“I walked inside the house and everything that I owned was gone. Everything from by shower curtain, to my toothbrush, to my hairdryer, everything was gone,” Harris said.

“After he said those things about me and my goddaughter I knew he was crazy, but I never thought my life would be in danger for staying there until I found another place,” Harris recently said in an exclusive interview with MetroNews.

Harris was waiting for Fierce to go to trial and she admits today she was surprised when he agreed to plead guilty to the charges. He did so earlier this year, although when the plea hearing began before a federal judge he made up a story about why he set the house on fire. Before the hearing was over, Harris says Fierce told the truth, but she could tell he wasn’t sorry.

“Even after the fact he felt no remorse,” Harris said. “He didn’t think there was anything wrong with what he did.”

The 69-year-old Fierce was scheduled to be sentenced in late July, but he didn’t show up for his hearing. Federal marshals soon discovered he had shot himself in the stomach in a Kanawha City motel room. Fierce was hospitalized for several days, before passing away.

“I didn’t want him to die. I would have much rather seen him go to jail to be honest,” Harris said. “I guess everybody else thought I would feel safer. I just felt bad and it made me feel worse.”

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marriage license refused

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I guess it’s not really a big deal seeing as he’s let a black person use his bathroom and all.  Of course I do not mean that at all and I am appalled by this.  Especially because his reason is to prevent the creation of miserable people like me.  Good God!  I think when this man sees and interracial couple he sees (in his mind) something like this:

white woman black horse

rather than this:

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No Marriage License for Interracial Couple

By MARY FOSTER, AP

HAMMOND, La. (Oct. 15) – A white Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

“I try to treat everyone equally,” he said.

Bardwell estimates that he has refused to marry about four couples during his career, all in the past 2 1/2 years.

Beth Humphrey, 30, and 32-year-old Terence McKay, both of Hammond, say they will consult the U.S. Justice Department about filing a discrimination complaint.

Humphrey, an account manager for a marketing firm, said she and McKay, a welder, just returned to Louisiana. She is white and he is black. She plans to enroll in the University of New Orleans to pursue a masters degree in minority politics.

“That was one thing that made this so unbelievable,” she said. “It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”

…”It is really astonishing and disappointing to see this come up in 2009,” said American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana attorney Katie Schwartzmann. She said the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 “that the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry.”

The ACLU sent a letter to the Louisiana Judiciary Committee, which oversees the state justices of the peace, asking them to investigate Bardwell and recommending “the most severe sanctions available, because such blatant bigotry poses a substantial threat of serious harm to the administration of justice.”

“He knew he was breaking the law, but continued to do it,” Schwartzmann said.

…”I’ve been a justice of the peace for 34 years and I don’t think I’ve mistreated anybody,” Bardwell said. “I’ve made some mistakes, but you have too. I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

yay, corbin bleu

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and his dad!

Emmy_Suite-3

Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith – Oct 12th, 2009

via

Twenty-year-old “High School Musical” cutie Corbin Bleu is more than glad that his character’s family in his new “Free Style” movie is biracial, just like his own family. He made a point of seeing to it that casting was done that way.

He tells us that, with himself and his father two of the producers on the feature, opening tomorrow (10/9), “It was one thing we definitely wanted to play to. So many times in films, you’ll have interracial kids, but they’ll still have two black parents. At this time, right now, where we are now, you’re seeing many more interracial families. So many people are mixing and it’s wonderful and that needs to be portrayed more in our films.”

Corbin notes that, being a producer, “This is the first time I got to take hold of some of the reins and I’d like to do more. I was involved in locations and casting and wardrobe and all that.”

free_style03

Synopsis: (via)

In the film, Bleu takes center stage as Cale Bryant, a biracial, Pacific Northwest teen whose father left his mom, Jeanette (Penelope Ann Miller), years ago when Cale’s young sister Bailey (Madison Pettis) was born. Regardless, Cale’s a polite, well-raised young man who, when not busy at the electronics store, delivers pizzas, takes care of sis while Mom waitresses, and races alongside his bud Justin (Jesse Moss), dreaming of turning pro.

Cale briefly gets angry with his mom, who turns out to have known the whereabouts of the kids’ deserter dad (David Reivers, Bleu’s real-life father and a producer of this film), and suffers taunts from rich-boy rider Derek (Matt Bellefleur).

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the first lady’s mix

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New York Times

In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

Fraser Robinson III and his wife, Marian, with their children, Craig and Michelle, now the first lady.

By RACHEL L. SWARNS and JODI KANTOR Published: October 7, 2009

WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolinaestate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Mrs. Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said. During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Mrs. Obama’s roots were a mystery.

Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors — including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.

The findings — uncovered by Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist, and The New York Times — substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear.

While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

barack like me

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BarackLikeMe.small

David Alan Grier: Is beige the new black?

Comedian writes about how Obama has made being multiracial cool

excerpt from chapter 2

Every pundit from Larry King to Atlantic magazine agrees: black is in. All shades of black. Which is good for most people, because so many of us are of mixed race. Myself included. It’s mind-boggling that we have ended up here, at this point in our history. There was a time, only a few generations ago, that being of mixed race was not so cool. In fact, it was illegal to try to pass yourself off as a different race. If the authorities found out, you lost everything — your position, your home, and all your possessions. You’d be separated from your family and often lynched.

President Barack Obama has changed all that. People now want to be mixed. Bi-racial, tri- racial, quad- and quinti-racial, how many you got? The more the better. Multiracial is the hot new facial, the best look in the book. Mixed race is the new superrace. If you look too black, people seem disappointed. They look at you and say, “You’re just black. Oh. That’s too bad. Are you sure? Anything else in there?”

They’re looking for the Obama mix. It’s like a new kind of coffee. “We just came up with it. Try this. The new Obama roast. It’s the perfect blend. Strong, but not sharp. Seductive. Bold. Sweet. Smooth. And not too dark. Not like that Dikembe Mutombo roast they’re brewing across the street.”

And why not be black like Barack? He’s the coolest guy on the planet right now. He’s bigger than any rapper, more popular than any rock star. He’s huge. We admire him and kids aspire to be like him.

…It’s still hard to get my head around this, though, the idea of acceptance that comes with the Barack Obama presidency. There is a part of me that acknowledges — and remembers, historically — that people of color who tried to deny any part of themselves were suspect. They would have to make a decision and stick with it. If it was found out that they were denying a part of themselves, they would be accused of running away from themselves and be rejected by their own. We’re looking at a whole new playing field as of right now. You can embrace all the parts of you. You can say, forthrightly, “I am who I am. I am all my parts,” or even, “I am all my parts, but I am embracing this particular one. This is who I am.” And we, as a people, will embrace it as well.

Excerpted from “Barack Like Me” by David Alan Grier with Alan Eisenstock. Copyright (c) by David Alan Grier.

i like my coffee like my presidents'