Mixed Race Studies

These NYC kids have written the history of an overlooked Black female composer

National Public Radio
2021-12-02

Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR Arts Desk

For decades, it was almost impossible to hear a piece of music written by Florence Price. Price was a Black, female composer who died in 1953. But a group of New York City middle school students had the opportunity to quite literally write Florence Price’s history. Their book, titled Who Is Florence Price?, is now out and available in stores.

The kids attend Special Music School, a K-12 public school in Manhattan that teaches high-level music instruction alongside academics. Shannon Potts is an English teacher there.

“Our children are musicians, so whether or not we intentionally draw it together, they bring music into the classroom every day in the most delightful ways,” Potts says. “So if you’re talking about themes and poetry, immediately a child will qualify it with the way that a theme repeats in music.”

Potts assigned her sixth, seventh and eighth grade students to study Florence Price — a composer born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She was the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in 1933 and her Piano Concerto in One Movement the next year. In 1939, at her famed Lincoln Memorial concert, the contralto Marian Anderson included Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black Brother, Black Brother

Little, Brown Young Readers
2020-03-03
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780316493802
Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 9780316493796
eBook ISBN-13: 9780316493819
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549102202

Jewell Parker Rhodes

From award-winning and bestselling author, Jewell Parker Rhodes comes a powerful coming-of-age story about two brothers, one who presents as white, the other as black, and the complex ways in which they are forced to navigate the world, all while training for a fencing competition.

Framed. Bullied. Disliked. But I know I can still be the best.

Sometimes, 12-year-old Donte wishes he were invisible. As one of the few black boys at Middlefield Prep, most of the students don’t look like him. They don’t like him either. Dubbing him “Black Brother,” Donte’s teachers and classmates make it clear they wish he were more like his lighter-skinned brother, Trey.

When he’s bullied and framed by the captain of the fencing team, “King” Alan, he’s suspended from school and arrested.

Terrified, searching for a place where he belongs, Donte joins a local youth center and meets former Olympic fencer Arden Jones. With Arden’s help, he begins training as a competitive fencer, setting his sights on taking down the fencing team captain, no matter what.

As Donte hones his fencing skills and grows closer to achieving his goal, he learns the fight for justice is far from over. Now Donte must confront his bullies, racism, and the corrupt systems of power that led to his arrest.

Powerful and emotionally gripping, Black Brother, Black Brother is a careful examination of the school-to-prison pipeline and follows one boy’s fight against racism and his empowering path to finding his voice.

Who is Florence Price?

Schirmer Trade Books (an imprint of Wise Music Group)
2021-11-18
48 pages
5.75 x 0.4 x 8.25 inches
Hardback ISBN: 9781736533406

Written and Illustrated by Students of the Special Music School at the Kaufman Music Center, New York, New York.

Young musicians tell the story of a girl and her music

Florence [Price] loved her mother’s piano playing and wanted to be just like her. When she was just four years old she played her first piano concert and as she grew up she studied and wrote music hoping one day to hear her own music performed by an orchestra.

The story of a brilliant musician who prevailed against race and gender prejudices to become the first Black woman to be recognised as a symphonic composer and be performed by a major American orchestra in 1933.

In Hip-Hop and Academia, Mystic Defines Her Own Success Story

KQED
San Francisco, California
2021-12-01

Nastia Voynovskaya, Associate Editor

Mystic sits in her backyard on the kind of warm, autumn afternoon that makes people remark at how good it is to live in Oakland, California. Dappled light shines through a lush canopy of persimmon, fig and guava trees. Her pet lovebird chirps in the distance, and she’s snacking on almonds between Zoom calls with young musicians she mentors.

This is the veteran hip-hop artist’s little oasis, away from the unruliness of the city, where she ponders the changing seasons of life, love and art.

It’s a good time for reflection. The recent loss of her longtime close friend and Digital Underground collaborator, Shock G, shook her deeply. That, and the grief of living during a global pandemic, prompted her to listen inward and ask herself what would fulfill her soul right now.

“I mean, shouldn’t we be doing what we love? Isn’t it the time now?” she asks in her naturally poetic cadence, lowering her voice into a near-whisper. Then, she starts to get louder and more passionate, as if proclaiming a manifesto: “If we’re artists, and art is part of our healing journey, then we should all be making art right now, right? There should be art flooding our speakers and our museums and our buildings, right? Public art.”

And for Mystic, one of the roles of hip-hop as a public art form is to bring traumas out of darkness and into the light, where they can be examined and processed—maybe even let go—in communion with others. That’s the power of her classic album Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom, whose 20th anniversary Mystic is celebrating this year. She recently took ownership of the master recordings and put out a podcast series looking back at its creation. Now, she’s gearing up for a vinyl rerelease in December.

From the outside, it might look like Mystic is recommitting to her art after years of focusing on her other loves: academia and teaching. After Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom was released to great acclaim, she walked away from a record deal and took a different path that brought her to UC Berkeley and, eventually, the University of Oxford for her master’s degree in education. For years, she spent more time in kindergarten classrooms than on stage in front of fans. But to Mystic, these multiple pursuits are all part of one continuous quest to create, express and be of service.

“It takes life to make art,” she texts me after one of our conversations. “There are times of input and times of output. I take my time for input, and that includes healing, living, loving, working with children, school and community. When my art is ready to be born, that is output. That is all 😉.”…

Read the entire article here.

New Children’s Book Tells the Story of Florence Price

Wise Music Classical
2021-10-08

A classroom exploration and discovery led students to create an illustrated biography of a composer whose music is being widely celebrated around the world today. Their book Who is Florence Price? will be published by Schirmer Trade Books, part of Wise Music Group, on November 18th 2021.

Florence Price became the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in 1933. The new children’s book Who Is Florence Price? tells the story of a brilliant musician who prevailed against race and gender prejudices to achieve this important milestone. The book was written and illustrated by 45 middle school students at Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School, New York City’s only K-12 public school that teaches music as a core subject. The project began when English teacher Shannon Potts realized that there were no materials about Price’s life at the lower school reading level. The students studied Price’s biography and mapped out her life story on a wall, discussing which elements were most important to the narrative for their intended audience: children at approximately the third-grade reading level. After collaboratively writing and revising the text, the students created the illustrations, beginning with backgrounds of cut paper. The book was originally self-published as a classroom project shortly before the [COVID-19] pandemic shut down NYC in the spring of 2020 and has been revised for the 2021 release…

Read the entire article here.

Passing into Film: Rebecca Hall’s Adaptation of Nella Larsen

Modernism/modernity
Volume 6, Cycle 2 (2021-11-10)

Rafael Walker, Assistant Professor of English
Baruch College, City University of New York

Director Rebecca Hall’s recent adaptation of Nella Larsen’s exquisite second novel, Passing (1929), is visually stunning. I had the pleasure of seeing the film on the big screen, during its limited theatrical run and before its Netflix release. It was the ideal atmosphere for absorbing this cinematic rendering of Larsen’s eerie, anxiety-ridden plot: ensconced with a sparse audience (my companion and I comprising two of the four patrons for the 5:10pm showing) in a small independent theater in Manhattan, just a few miles from where the story is set, and with Halloween everywhere looming on this late-October evening.¹

These qualities of the novel were only enhanced by Hall’s decision to film it in black and white, a daring choice that she, a first-time filmmaker, had to fight for, as Alexandra Kleeman of the New York Times reports. On the one hand, this artistic decision conjures all the nervous palpitations that Hitchcock made synonymous with black-and-white mise-en-scène, maintaining the unshakable uneasiness one experiences while reading Larsen’s novel. On the other, it hurls the either-or terms of Jim Crow racial binarism into conflict with a predominating grayscale—an all-pervading sign of the fictionality of the dichotomizations structuring American culture. Nothing could be more in the spirit of Nella Larsen’s novel. I suspect, however, that Hall’s departures from the source text will attract the attention of modernists far more than her convergences…

Read the entire review here.

Prince Charles, Meghan Markle and the power of racist microagressions

NBC News
2021-12-01

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Something that may seem innocently ambiguous can in fact leave an incredibly powerful mark.

Imagine that upon your engagement, instead of congratulations, you hear that your future father-in-law has begun musing about your future son or daughter’s complexion. Now imagine how that would feel if you were biracial and the first Black-identified person to marry into the modern British royal family, and none other than the next king of England was allegedly speculating about the race of your hypothetical children.

According to the new book “Brothers and Wives: Inside the Private Lives of William, Kate, Harry, and Meghan,” written by Christopher Andersen, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, didn’t have to imagine how that might feel — she lived it. Among other tidbits, royals expert Andersen claims Prince Charles discussed the potential melanin levels of his future grandchildren over breakfast with his wife, Camilla.

Read the entire article here.

“Colin in Black & White” writer on Kaepernick’s parents & awakening: “They didn’t see him as Black”

Salon
2021-11-28

D. Watkins, Editor-at-Large

Michael Starrbury appeared on “Salon Talks” to discuss how he wants to increase awareness of privilege and reality

Back in 2016, the superstar NFL quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, Colin Kaepernick, had become so fed up with racism, police violence against Black and Brown people, and the many injustices woven into the fabric of America, that he decided to begin his own silent protests, by taking a knee during the singing of the National Anthem.

Since then, Kaepernick, 34, has been allegedly blackballed from the NFL, with every team refusing to sign him, even though he is arguably better than half of the quarterbacks in the league. He filed a lawsuit against the NFL for discrimination and won an undisclosed amount of money and then smoothly transitioned toward his second act as an activist. He started Kaepernick Publishing company, donated to grassroots organizations all over the world and launched the Know Your Rights Camp so that young people from improvised areas can get the resources they need to learn about the many types of racial injustices in America, challenge the system and become the next generation of leaders.

Taking a knee during the anthem has bought Colin Kaepernick more hate than any of us could have probably imagined – from him being a constant target for conservative media to President Donald Trump calling him and other NFL anthem protestors who followed his lead a “sons of a bitch” just because they wanted to use their platform as a vehicle for raising awareness. Michael Starrbury, who was a writer on Netflix’s Emmy-nominated series “When they See Us,” had the difficult job of not only researching the impact of Kaepernick’s protest, but tying his decision to do so with some of the most traumatic incidents from Kaep’s childhood in the new Netflix series “Colin In Black and White.”…

Read and/or watch the interview here.

‘Passing’ filmmaker Rebecca Hall shares the personal story behind her movie

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2021-11-30

Terri Gross, Host

Actor/filmmaker Rebecca Hall had what she describes as a “real gasp” moment when she first read Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing.

The book centers on two light-skinned African American women who run into each other after not having seen each other for many years. One of the women is an active member of Harlem’s Black community. The other is married to a white man and is passing as white.

Reading the story of these fictional women, Hall realized that her maternal grandfather had also passed as white.

“Suddenly, aspects of my family life that were tinged with so much mystery and obfuscation, there was a reason for that,” Hall says.

Hall’s mother, acclaimed opera singer Maria Ewing, also passed as white, though not necessarily by her own volition. Instead, Hall says, Ewing tended to “be whatever people chose to see” — which sometimes meant being described as “exotic” by members of the opera community.

Hall was so moved by Larsen’s novel that she drafted a script for a film adaptation — and then she put it away until she felt ready to do something with it. Now, 13 years later, her adaptation of Passing is available on Netflix…

Read the entire interview here.