CVK
(Thanks to Asian Dude for this one!) Blog Purifying Flames questions the double standard of media coverage surrounding the Princeton attacks on Asian women. Why is it that these attacks are described merely as “lewd behavior,” when an almost-identical case involving all white female victims is referred to as “assault” and involves much harsher punishment?
As […]

CVK
The New York Times reviews the new film “Face”:
“Face” takes a conventional culture-clash theme and gives it the kick (and hop) of a good music mix tape. In the 1970’s, a young woman in New York’s Chinatown (Bai Ling, who has the demure beauty of Audrey Hepburn) is date-raped and forced to marry her assailant […]

JC
Deborah Santana, wife of Carlos Santana, discusses her experiences, relationships, and mixed identity in new memoir, Space Between the Stars.
Born Deborah King in San Francisco in 1951, Santana is the daughter of a biracial marriage. Her father, African-American blues pioneer, guitarist, and distinguished tenor, Saunders King, cut the first significant electric blues record, 1942’s “SK […]

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 […]

JC
New York Times reviews Rachel Factor’s one-woman-show, J.A.P. Through song and monologues, Rachel explores the journey she has taken from Hawaii, to being a rockette at Radio City, to converting to Orthodox Judaism and moving to Israel. She talks about how she assumed that her opportunities in the entertainment industry would be limited once […]

CVK

I’m probably one of the only people in the world who didn’t watch the Superbowl, so I’m only catching onto this now. Apparently a new iTunes/Pepsi commercial made its debut during the show, and people are going crazy over one of the girls in the ad. So crazy in fact, that one guy has dedicated […]

CVK
The LA Times reviews renowned black film historian Donald Bogle’s new book Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood:
Heavyset and dark-skinned, with a beatific smile and nurturing demeanor, Louise Beavers forged a career playing domestic servants in such films as “Imitation of Life” (1934) and the 1950s TV show “Beulah.” But the real […]

CVK
Apparently, the public’s fascination with the tragic mulatto archetype is not just an American phenomenon (thanks Zak, for the tip!). The Guardian columnist Helen Kolawole asks why it is that mixed race women must always be tragic:
Confused, miserable, and in perpetual limbo, we are now apparently abundant in the world of celebrity. There is the […]

CVK
New York’s Whitney Museum has a new exhibit by Ellen Gallagher called “60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman.” (Thanks for alerting us to it, Lee Swift!) Here’s what the New York Times had to say about Gallagher and her work:
“Ms. Gallagher was raised in Providence, R.I. Her mother was white, her father black. […]

CVK
The Hartford Courant ran a great column for Martin Luther King Day celebrating black role models from the earlier days of television. The article talks specifically about how Martin Luther King himself encouraged black actress Nichelle Nichols to stay on “Star Trek.” Nichols shared the first-ever interracial kiss on television with William Shatner, who played […]

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
Ugh. I don’t even know where to start with this one. A columnist on the Electronic Urban Report has written an opinion piece called “Black Women–The Dead Breed?” It’s the typical “not that I’m against black men dating outside their race, but…” article, only this one is on OVERDRIVE.
This is not to imply that it […]