Mixed Race Studies

Matthew McConaughey Can’t Stop Being a Badass White Savior in The Free State of Jones

The Stranger
2016-06-22

Ijeoma Oluo

Watch the magical negroes heal Matthew McConaughey from his wounds that he received while badassing his way into exile.

Ever since the end of the first season of True Detective I’ve really been wanting more Matthew McConaughey in my life. That charming half-smile. That creepy, hyper-intense stare. That unmistakable yet unplaceable southern drawl. I don’t care if it’s laid-back, bongo drumming alright-alright-alright McConaughey, or if it’s riddle-speaking, indecipherable, slightly creepy, brooding McConaughey. I need more Matthew McConaughey.

You know what else I need? Black pain and suffering. I need another movie focused on the brutalization of black bodies filtered through a Hollywood lens. I need the only faces on the screen that look like mine to be crying, screaming, or slack from the noose.

It used to be that I’d have to separate these much-needed experiences of McConaughey and black pain. Dazed and Confused on Monday, The Help on Tuesday. Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past on Wednesday, 12 Years a Slave on Thursday.

But what if you could have it all? What if you could have slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, black pain, black murder, black suffering – and more Matthew McConaughey than you ever thought imaginable?

Dreams can come true. And they have come true in this 139 minute masterpiece of McConaughey-ness: The Free State of Jones…

Read the entire review here.

The controversy has stirred up fresh debate about the divisive issue of biracial self-identification—a divisiveness I, and many other mixed-race people, have experienced firsthand. Personally, as a biracial American, I prefer to be identified as such. But my Establishment colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, who is also biracial, prefers to identify as black.

Neither of us are wrong.

Jessica Sutherland, “Taye Diggs Isn’t Wrong (Or Right) About His Son’s Biracial Identity,” The Establishment, November 20, 2015. http://www.theestablishment.co/2015/11/20/taye-diggs-isnt-wrong-about-his-biracial-identity-and-neither-are-you/.

Taye Diggs Isn’t Wrong (Or Right) About His Son’s Biracial Identity

The Establishment
2015-11-20

Jessica Sutherland, Marketing Director

In October, Taye Diggs released Mixed Me! as a followup to his first children’s book, 2011’s Chocolate Me! While Chocolate Me! was inspired by Diggs’ experiences as a black child in a predominantly white neighborhood, Mixed Me! focuses on the hope he has for his biracial son.

While doing press for the book this month, Diggs (aka my most famous Twitter follower, and probably yours too) enraged a lot of people by choosing to describe his 6-year-old son Walker as biracial, rather than black, in order to acknowledge both of his parents’ cultures (Walker’s mother is the actress/singer Idina Menzel, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent)…

…The controversy has stirred up fresh debate about the divisive issue of biracial self-identification—a divisiveness I, and many other mixed-race people, have experienced firsthand. Personally, as a biracial American, I prefer to be identified as such. But my Establishment colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, who is also biracial, prefers to identify as black.

Neither of us are wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Maybe White People Really Don’t See Race — Maybe That’s The Problem

Scenarios USA
2015-07-08

Ijeoma Oluo
Seattle, Washington

It started with a simple question: “When is the first time you became aware of your race?” But as answers from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers started to roll in, the question came to represent more of a challenge about what I thought I knew about race relations today.

The idea started with the Rachel Dolezal fiasco. Like many people of color, I was completely baffled by the fervent defense many white people gave — people who had made it very clear that they didn’t want to be black were now arguing for the white Rachel Dolezal’s right to be black. “Race is just a construct,” they argued, “if you’re really anti-racist, you’ll recognize that people can be any race they want to be.”

Had the world gone mad? If people could really be “any race they wanted to be” there wouldn’t have been an NAACP for Rachel Dolezal to scam in the first place. I am, as are many of my friends, acutely aware of how definitive and unrelenting my blackness is. I tried to imagine any scenario where I could stop being black and even factoring for Halloween, I came up with nothing…

…As a Black woman myself, I used to always laugh at white people who claim to “not see color” as I imagined them running red lights and walking around in hilariously mismatched clothes; it’s impossible to be able to see the color of your shirt and not the color of someone’s skin. What I’ve begun to suspect after this survey is that when people say “I don’t see color” what they mean is “I don’t see race” – or, at least, they don’t see it accurately. My race as a Black woman doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it exists in relationship to and interaction with whiteness. Like so many POC, I know whiteness as a race – I know it from our media, our holidays, our government and our police. Whiteness is the measurement of success, the goal we’ll never obtain. Every day we have to be aware of whiteness. It is a matter of survival. For us, there is no place in the Western world where it can be escaped…

Read the entire article here.