Mixed Race Studies

VIFF honours B.C. filmmakers Ann Marie Fleming, Kevan Funk, Julia Hutchings, Jessica Parsons, and Jennifer Chiu

The Georgia Straight
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2016-10-11

Charlie Smith

Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses won the prize for Best Canadian Film as well as the B.C. Film Award at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.

The Vancouver International Film Festival continues until Friday (October 14), but it has already handed out some major awards to Canadian filmmakers.

One of the big winners at a weekend gala was B.C. director Ann Marie Fleming for Window Horses. She took home the B.C. Film Award, which came with a $10,000 bursary from the Harold Greenburg Fund and a $15,000 credit in postproduction services from Encore.

Fleming was also honoured for Best Canadian Film, which was accompanied by a $10,000 award. It was presented by the Directors Guild of Canada…

Read the entire article here.

Where is the love: How tolerant is Canada of its interracial couples?

The Globe and Mail
2016-10-03

Zosia Bielski

Minelle Mahtani, an associate professor in human geography and journalism at the University of Toronto Scarborough, wrote the book Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality in Canada. (Jennifer Van Houten)

Is love the last frontier of racial bigotry in Canada?

It’s a question that intrigues Minelle Mahtani, who has dared to ask whether interracial couples and their families still test the limits of tolerance in this country.

In her recent book Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality in Canada, Mahtani, an associate professor in human geography and journalism at the University of Toronto Scarborough, questions whether we’ve not just put rose-coloured glasses on our multiculturalism, especially where mixed-race families are concerned.

While interracial relationships are on the rise in Canada (we had 360,000 mixed-race couples in 2011, more than double the total from 20 years earlier), the numbers remain slim. Just 5 per cent of all unions in Canada were between people of different ethnic origins, religions, languages and birthplaces in 2011, the last year Statistics Canada collected such data. That figure rises only marginally in urban areas: Just 8 per cent of couples were in mixed-race relationships in Toronto, 10 per cent in Vancouver.

How do people in interracial relationships experience that multiculturalism on the ground, when they introduce their boyfriends and girlfriends to family, or hold hands on a date? How do mixed-race families and their children feel about it, in their communities and in their schools?

Mahtani was the keynote speaker at last month’s Hapa-palooza, an annual festival celebrating mixed heritage in Vancouver, and she will present at the next Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in California in February. She spoke with The Globe and Mail about the daily realities of mixed-race families…

Read the entire interview here.

Mixed Match documentary explores difficult search for multi-ethnic donors

CBC Radio-Canada
2016-10-01

Emotional documentary about mixed-race patients seeking bone marrow, stem cell donors, a call to action

It means a lot to film maker Jeff Chiba Stearns to have his new documentary Mixed Match showing at the Vancouver International Film Festival, a multi-cultural city he calls home.

Stearns ancestry includes people from a variety of European countries as well as Japan and while that ethnic diversity makes for a rich history, there is a medical downside — people of mixed ancestry have a much more difficult time finding matches if they need bone marrow or stem cells…

Read the entire article here.

Canada’s racial divide: Confronting racism in our own backyard

The Globe and Mail
2016-09-26

Tavia Grant, Reporter

Nova Browning Rutherford, who is half black and half white, and has lived in Ontario, Alberta and Los Angeles, poses for a photo at her home in Mississauga, Ont. on Friday. (Michelle Siu for The Globe and Mail)

Growing up in Jacksonville, Fla., Rhonda Britton experienced occasional moments of racism. As the only black girl in her junior-high class, she was once told by a white friend that she wasn’t allowed to come over and play.

But it was when she moved to Canada as an adult that she felt racism more overtly: In 2011, she discovered a historic plaque in front of her church in Halifax spray painted with the words: Fuck All Niggers.

It was a shock, and not the only one: She’d expected Canadians would be kinder and more welcoming than Americans.

But in Nova Scotia, where a large, historic black community has long faced racial discrimination, racist acts are both subtle and blatant…

…Like Dr. Britton, Nova Browning Rutherford has lived in both countries. She was born in Chatham, Ont., to a black father and white mother, and raised in Edmonton and London, Ont., before spending five years in Los Angeles.

She says that a big difference in the U.S. is the separation of people based on race or ethnicity. She often felt pigeonholed. “Black people don’t do that,” she was told when she’d mention to colleagues she was going hiking, or out to a Korean restaurant.

She feels relieved to now live in Toronto. But any notion that Canada is morally superior vanishes when she thinks of the deep disparities in living conditions of indigenous peoples…

Read the entire article here.

Hapa-palooza Festival 2016

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2016-09-23 through 2016-09-25

CELEBRATING MIXED HERITAGE

The sixth annual Hapa-palooza Festival runs for the month of September 2016, including a month long Hybrid Identity Art Exhibit at the Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch, and three days of free community programming welcoming all from Sept. 23-25th:

For more information, click here.

‘You look like the help’: the disturbing link between Asian skin color and status

Fusion
2016-08-25

Mari Santos
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Outside a hotel lobby in Toronto earlier this year, an elderly Asian woman stopped my mother and me to ask what time a tour bus would be arriving. Then, the woman asked in broken English: “Are you Philippine?”

“Yes,” my mom replied.

“Ahh, you look Korean!” the woman exclaimed. My mother graciously thanked her.

I darted my eyes, offended and confused at the implication that looking Korean over Filipino should somehow be taken as a compliment. Later I asked my mother: “Why did you thank her?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted sheepishly…

Read the entire article here.

Between places and spaces

The McGill Daily
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2016-03-21

Francesca Humi

Articulating my identity as a mixed-race woman

“Who are you?” I am a woman of colour. No, I’m a mixed-race woman of colour. My identity is constantly gendered and racialized. While I have come to be very comfortable with my gender identity as a cis woman, my racial identity is different.

My identity as a mixed-race person is constantly changing, felt with different strength according to time and place.

Growing up in Paris, I knew I was not white and not French. Both of these facts were made very clear to me in social interactions, starting at school, where my non-French, non-white sounding name was frequently mispronounced in French mouths and misspelt in French writing. It was picked apart and made fun of, from maternelle (kindergarten) to lycée (high school). It was other and alien, just as I was…

Read the entire article here.

Half-Asian Tattooers Use Art To Confront Mixed Race Stereotypes

Konbini
2016-08-04

Morgan English

Five Asian-Canadian artists (some female, some genderqueer) have joined forces for a new exhibit that explores what it means to be half-Asian in the west.

Of the crew, four are also tattooers: Nomi Chi, Mandy Tsung, Shannon Elliott and Katie So. Their fifth, Lauren Ys, has made a name for herself in street art, among other things. Their tattoo work often serves as an outlet to push back on stereotypes, express individualism, and even heal the wounds of other people of colour…

Read the entire article here.

Painful but necessary: Why I stopped putting off the racism talk with my daughter

CBC News
2016-07-01

Samantha Kemp-Jackson
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Demonstrators stand in front of the East Baton Rouge Parish City Hall doors on Monday. (Reuters)

Talk opens door to a world where ignorance is not bliss and racism must be confronted head-on

“There are people who will not like you because of the colour of your skin.”

As a woman of colour raising biracial children, I have always been very aware that their reality will one day include the experience of being discriminated against solely for the way they appear. It’s an uneasy truth that I’ve not wanted to address, because who wants to think of anyone hurting their children?

And so I muddled through. Tomorrow, next week, next month — that’s when I’ll talk to them.

Then Alton Sterling was killed. Five gunshot wounds to the chest and back from a pair of Baton Rouge, La., police. Philando Castile the next day in suburban St. Paul, Minn. Five Dallas police officers killed by a sniper two days later as they worked to protect protesters who had gathered to demand justice for the deaths of Sterling and Castile…

Read the entire article here.

How To Talk To Your Kids About Race

Roundhouse Radio, 98.3 FM
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Thursday, 2016-07-14, 17:00-18:00Z (10:00-11:00 PDT)

Live Call-in: How to talk to your kids about race

With author and educator Sharon Chang, author of “Raising Mixed Race” and host Minelle Mahtani

It’s been a tough news week. The media has been full of stories about police shootings, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and violence. As a parent you know that your kids are not immune to these stories. They are discussed on the playground just as surely as they are discussed in the office. So how can you talk about race with your kids during these turbulent times? When your children ask you what Black Lives Matter is, what’s your answer? How do you explain the spate recent police shootings? To get some tips on how to tackle these difficult topics, tune into Sense of Place on Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM, www.roundhouseradio.com Thursday at 10 am. Minelle Mahtani hosts Sharon Chang, author of the book Raising Mixed Race. Together – they’ll be answering your questions about how to talk to children about issues related to race…

For more information, click here.