JC
The Los Angeles Times reviews “Tea“, the new production by Velina Hasu Houston about war brides and their lives and families. The show is currently running at the International City Theater in Long Beach, CA. This reviewer doesn’t have many nice things to say and seems to think that it is all done in a […]

CVK
Personally I’m sick to death of the whole Strom Thurmond / Essie Mae Washington-Williams thing, but it is my duty to report that yet another book is coming out soon on the topic later this month. Dateline Alabama reviews Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond by Jack Bass and Marilyn W. […]

CVK

There’s a good article on UC Berkeley’s NewsCenter that explores what it’s like to be a mixed student at that school, where 22.9% of undergrads self-identified as mixed in a 2004 survey. (Across the UC system, the average was 25.8 percent. ) The article details the divergent experiences of four students, but also does a […]

CVK
Tragic mulattos, of course! The last segment of Ego Trip’s Race-O-Rama aired on VH1 last night and it was very funny, and really quite good. The episode was titled “In Race We Lust” and explored all the taboo and stereotypes surrounding interracial couples and their mixed-race offspring. People in the mixed community probably wouldn’t have […]

CVK
Reuters reports that Raven Symone will star in the Lifetime TV movie “For One Night.” She will play a black teenager who, with the help of a newspaper reporter, braves decades of segregation to stage the first interracial high school prom in the history of their small town. “For One Night” (working title) is set […]

CVK
The Charlotte Observer has an article by Jim Morrill about the revelation that he had black ancestors, and his quest to find out more about his family history:
When I was about 30, my mother confided a secret: My great-grandmother — the mother of my dad’s father — was black.Growing up with blond hair and blue […]

CVK
The New York Times was pretty harsh on Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ memoir “Dear Senator,” but today’s Washington Post review is even more damning.
“Dear Senator” shows no concern about Thurmond’s inappropriate, abusive appropriation of a vulnerable young household servant; instead, it offers only the hearts-and-flowers version of the story. (The corner of each page is adorned […]

CVK
The New York Times reviews “Dear Senator,” the new memoir by Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the illegitimate biracial daughter of the late segregationist Strom Thurmond. The review does little to offset the widespread impression of Ms. Washington-Williams as…how do I put this…a total pushover?
Now she also has a ghostwriter: William Stadiem, who recently made himself […]

CVK
Vermont publication Out in the Mountains profiles Phyl Newbeck, who has written a book called Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving. Her interest in the subject was piqued by the film Mr. And Mrs. Loving, and when she found that there was no book on […]

CVK
The Indianapolis Star reviews “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the earliest known novel by an African-American woman. Reviewer Frederick McElroy argues that the unedited manuscript can be disconcerting at times, revealing that classism and “colorism” among African-Americans existed even back then:
[Writer Hannah Crafts] describes herself as a biracial, whose “complexion was almost white, and the obnoxious descent […]

CVK
The Detroit Free Press profiles Arbelia Wood, possibly the world’s oldest woman at age 119. Wood is biracial, and has a familiar, but still sad family history:
According to family lore, in the mid-1880s in Mississippi a white farmer gave an ultimatum to a sharecropper and daughter of former slaves: Sleep with him or leave. Muggie […]

CVK
USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham proclaims that Tiger Woods should support the campaign for getting a presidential pardon for turn-of-the-century boxing champ Jack Johnson (the subject of a Ken Burns documentary “Unforgivable Blackness” that will air January 17th and 18th on PBS). He argues that Tiger was able to wed Swedish model Elin Nordegren last […]