Mixed Race Studies

Brown Girl In The Ring

Riposte: A Smart Magazine for Women
2019-07-24

Lou Mensah, Writer, Photographer and co-founder of Shade Podcast

Maya Series Cenote IV. Aubrey Williams, Copyright Aubrey Williams Estate

Charting parallels between childhood and motherhood by Lou Mensah.

My mother, English and late father, Ghanaian. My partner is Irish and my nieces and nephews, Jamaican and Turkish.

Summer 2009. It was 5.30am as we were packing up the car at the stairwell of our flat to emigrate from Hackney to Ireland, when a local Zimbabwean Indian man, Jack, offered help with the baby as we loaded the car. I could have cried at his kindness. As I handed her over, he said in the most gentle tone “come here, my little joy of bundle” and that was it, I wanted to stay in the place we called home, in the flat where my only child was born, by the flower market where I walked during labour, where the stall holders kissed me and wished me luck with the birth.

I grew up in suburban England during the 70’s, when the National Front lads would chase family members for a, “fucking kicking in”; a time when my parents marriage and my very existence as a mixed race child would have been illegal in South Africa under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, under the apartheid regime later to be supported by the British Government…

Read the entire article here.

Passing, in Moments

Topic Magazine
Issue No. 25, Journeys
July 2019

Mat Johnson

The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white.

When I was 12, my Aunt Margaret told me, “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don’t know you’re colored, don’t tell them.”

Aunt Margaret was black, but if you said “black” and not “colored,” she would go off on you. I was black too—still am—but I look white. Or I look whitish; it depends on the viewer. My father’s white and my mother is black, but high yellow and racially ambiguous. Though my mom insisted I was black too, I found a strong argument against that every time I looked in the mirror. And I grew up cut off from my extended black family, which just added to that feeling of disconnection. Sometimes I’d tell other kids I was black, and until they saw my mom, they wouldn’t believe me.

One time I told Aunt Margaret, “Nobody at school knows I’m black—”

“Colored.”

“Nobody at school knows I’m colored.”

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. That’s when she said it, holding one of my flaccid brown curls in her hand like it was a piece of gold. “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don’t know you’re colored, don’t tell them!”

At 12 years old, I thought Aunt Margaret was confused. I thought her response was antiquated, ridiculously old-fashioned, like how she insisted on using the word “colored” instead of “black.” I thought it was cute. I thought it was funny.

At 19, radical as all undergraduates should be, I thought that, despite how much I loved Aunt Margaret, that she was a color-struck sellout for telling me to live my life as a white man. That, in essence, she was encouraging me to abandon my roots, to reject the black community, in exchange for complete access to white privilege.

At 49, I think she told me what she told me because she loved me. Because she’d been black in America for 80-some years and she didn’t want me to have to endure the way she did. That she wanted the safety of whiteness for me. That she wanted me to thrive, but also to have the full force of America’s wind at my back, instead of getting hit with it head-on.

That Aunt Margaret was expressing what generations of black mothers sometimes told white-appearing children, particularly boys: escape from blackness for your survival.

(And, also, she was color-struck.)…

Read the entire article here.

Trying To Recognize People Like Me

The Margins
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2017-06-16

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

(from left to right) T Kira Madden, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Violet Kupersmith

Writers Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Violet Kupersmith, and T Kira Madden speak to each other about mixed-race identities in life and literature

February 28 isn’t too cold. I hurry through sharp sunlight to a café in Lincoln Center. It is the official launch day of my novel, Harmless Like You, in the USA. I feel woozy and anxious. I’ve been avoiding bookshops, because I’m too scared to know if it’s in stock. I’m meeting two dear friends who are also writers. T Kira Madden is the Editor in Chief of No Tokens Journal, with her memoir forthcoming. Violet Kupersmith’s collection of stories The Frangipani Hotel was published by Speigel & Grau, and her novel is forthcoming. They are both dear friends of mine, and it has been too long since I’ve seen their faces. The other thing we have in common is that we are mixed-race. Specifically, we have one Asian parent and one white parent. I’ve been told that equals accessible exotic. I want to ask Violet and Kira how they deal with this and how it affects them as writers.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: I never know what to call myself. At readings, people laugh at me when I get introduced as British-Japanese-Chinese-American, like it’s a punchline. I think, hey it’s not a joke. But I laugh too because I’m nervous. In Japan, I called myself hafu which is the accepted word there. I know lots of Americans say hapa—but I’m nervous about my right to take something from Hawaiian Islander culture. I grew up saying halfie, which I worry is too cute—but it is at least mine. So these days, I go back to halfie.

Violet Kupersmith: I’m half-Vietnamese and half-white. My mother’s family came to America on a boat in the seventies. My father’s side is all mixed European potato genes. I remember being really excited when the term “hapa” first started getting circulated, because it was finally a real label I could apply to myself after growing up having to just check the “other” box on all my paperwork. But I still feel a little squirmy referring to myself as hapa out loud because, like you said, it’s from Hawaiian Islander culture.

T Kira Madden: I am Hawaiian so I’m used to “hapa! hapa haole!”…

Read the entire interview here.

I Was a Black Nazi Skinhead

Narratively
2018-11-12

Story by Leo Oladimu [Leo Felton], as told to Shawna Kenney

Illustration by Ben Passmore

When I went to prison I was black. By the time I got out 11 years later I was crazy, fascist and white.

A framed photo of American fascist Francis Parker Yockey glared down at me from a wall in my two-room studio in Boston’s North End. Next to me was a 50-pound bag of ammonium nitrate and other materials that I planned to make into package bombs and hand deliver to the offices of a short list of organizations I felt were at war with my culture.

Below me was the naked, athletic body of my 21-year-old comrade in arms. We’d just had sex, and I was as consumed by the tattoo covering her back as I was with the girl herself. Four black hatchets, bound together at the handles, formed the most beautifully rendered swastika I’d ever seen.

I hadn’t told her I was black. In a few months, though, she would learn my secret — along with the rest of the world — and I would begin my trip out of the most batshit-crazy ideological corner anyone has ever painted themselves into…

Leo Oladimu in prison. (2014-04-18)

Read the entire article here.

Chris Abani: Face Value in Brooklyn

Restless Books
Brooklyn, New York
2014-05-19

We were thrilled to welcome our friend and contributor Chris Abani to New York this weekend to participate in Lit Crawl NYC. Chris came to discuss his forthcoming contribution to our series, The Face, and to read from his work-in-progress…

…When I tell people that my mother was a white English woman and my father Igbo, they look at me skeptically. It’s a pause that really means; are you sure? You’re so dark. It’s a pause that I’ve heard only in the West. In Nigeria most people know on meeting me that I’m not entirely African. Nigeria has a long history of foreigners coming through—the Portuguese in the 14th century, North Africans as far back as the 12th century, Tuaregs and Fulani to name just a few. In fact in the late 80’s and early 90’s the civil war in Chad caused the very light skinned Chadians to pour into Nigeria as refugees. It was a disturbing sight to see hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of homeless Arab looking people begging for food in the streets and markets. The public outcry was so severe that the military government began a program of forced repatriation. Army trucks rolled into markets and soldiers would round up these refugees an, with no thought of separating families, after all they all looked alike, and drive them back to the border. I once found myself being pushed into one such truck but my fluency in several Nigerian languages saved me. I was often confused for being Lebanese, Indian, Arab, or Fulani. But not in England or America. In these places I am firmly black, of unknown origin…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Up: ‘I worry about unspoken discrimination. Have you judged me before I’ve even said a word?’

METRO.co.uk
2019-06-12

Natalie Morris, Senior lifestyle reporter

‘Most of my class called me an “Oreo” and bullied me mercilessly for years’ (Picture: Jerry Syder for Metro.co.uk)

Marie Farmer is a mother and founder of a family nutrition app. She has Jamaican and Scottish heritage, but she doesn’t identify as either black or white. In fact, she hates being asked to choose.

‘There were only a handful of non-white children in my primary school, which did lead to certain issues in the playground,’ Marie tells Metro.co.uk.

‘Whenever we pretended to be the Spice Girls, I always had to be Scary because I was “brown” – even though I was clearly the best Posh.

‘When I was a bit older I remember reading the poem “Half-caste” by John Agard in a class.

‘I clearly didn’t understand the message as I was really pleased I had a name to identify myself with. I told my mum and she explained why it was a racist term, so I quickly switched to saying I was mixed.

‘That was the first time it occurred to me that being mixed could be controversial. I don’t remember anyone before that pointing out that I was different and that it was a bad thing.’…

Read the entire article here.

Looking white and being Aboriginal

CBC News
2017-06-21

Regan Burden

Regan Burden is from Port Hope Simpson, but now lives in St. John’s. (Evan Smith)

It was a beautiful summer day in downtown St. John’s; my friend was working a food truck and on my way to work, I’d often stop to say hello, maybe grab a poutine to eat on my way to work.

One day, he had a friend with him; he was tall, handsome, had dark hair and a nice smile. He told me he had seen me at a show before, but I couldn’t quite remember talking to him. I met a lot of people that night.

We got to talking about ourselves and he asked me where I was from.

“Port Hope Simpson. It’s a tiny town in Labrador that I promise you haven’t heard of.” I was right about that. I always am.

He told me he was from Gander, but had spent some time in Stephenville. His mother was a judge and she got asked to go to Labrador but didn’t want to.

“Stephenville was bad enough, all those f—ing jackytars stealing everything and sniffing gas. Can you imagine what it would have been like in Labrador?”

I grew up in Labrador and I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t even know what a jackytar was and whatever he thought about whatever they were, I certainly didn’t. I had to get him to explain. “You know, Indians.”

I explained to him that I was an Aboriginal person and I found what he was saying to be really offensive. He just looked confused.

“Come on. You can’t be thaaaat Aboriginal, look at you.”…

Read the entire article here.

Escaping Culture – Finding Your Place in the World

TheBookPatch (an imprint of Wilshire Press)
2019-04-05
168 pages
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1092860482

Frederico Wilson
Sumner, Washington

Freedom is a mindset more powerful than any assemblage, faction or group.

Born to a Mexican/Yaqui Indian mother, and Mexican/Anglo father, the author shares life-altering events and the people that shaped his mixed-race “American” experience.

For as long as he can remember, identity by choice or force has wrought conflict and contradictions. Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? Where does he belong? Where is he going?

His surname implies he’s white, but his brown skin begs to differ. Is he Mexican? His Mother’s family tree most certainly is, but his Father’s Celtic, Iberian branch bears his Anglo surname. Is he more culturally white European than ethnically Latino? Is he a Native American, rooted in his beloved Yaqui Abuela? To which ethnic tribe does he belong?

The author asks readers to think of this book as explanatory theater; as a three-act play providing racial and cultural context, commentary, and value to the social interaction paradigms we all share, but often fail to recognize in ourselves and one another.

His essays testify, an authentic telling of naivety, consequence, rebellion, and evolutionary awareness. And of life discovered, marinated in an introspective stew of love, fear, indulgence, compassion, humility, and redemption.

He intends to affirm and provoke, and open our eyes to a world seen through an independent and different colored lens. Let your guard down. Consider his
observations a handshake between friends. Relax in a comfortable chair, have a glass of wine and peruse. He won’t bite. Well, maybe, a little.

Visual Pleasure and Racial Ambiguity

University of New Orleans
August 2018
54 pages

Ruth M. Owens MD

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Fine Arts

I struggle to present work that reflects a psychological expressivity which at the same time conveys intellectual concepts that are of concern to me. It seems that the fluidity of an image can communicate a certain pathos, and correspond to the fluid nature of one’s identity. Drippy paint, distorted bodies, and vertiginous video clips can give an indication about what a body feels like from within. Depictions of these bodily feelings help to communicate ideas about what it means to be alive in general, and a mixed race woman, in particular.

Read the entire thesis here.

Tia Mowry Talks Adjusting To The Racism She Experiences With Her Black Husband Vs Growing Up With A White Father

MadameNoire
2019-05-31

Veronica Wells, Culture Editor

I don’t think it’s any secret that Tia Mowry (and Tamera) are biracial. While it was a minute before we saw their parents, their mother, Darlene Mowry, is Black and their father, Timothy Mowry, is White. You might imagine that growing up in that household was a bit different than living in the household she does now. And it is. On her YouTube channel, Tia Mowry’s Quick Fix, she shared the racism her parents experienced when they were initially dating, the racism her mother experienced that her father didn’t, and how it’s different having a White father vs. a Black husband in terms of racial treatment.

See what Tia had to say about all of this below…

Read the entire article here.