Mixed Race Studies

Brown Girl with Bubblegum

Longreads
2018-08-17
11 minutes (2,676 words)

Lisa W. Rosenberg

Illustration by Loveis Wise

As a mixed-race kid with free-form hair, Lisa Rosenberg believed learning to blow bubblegum bubbles would be her ticket to an idealized (white) American girlhood.

My fifth birthday was approaching, and I had one goal: to blow big, beautiful, pink bubbles out of real Bazooka bubble gum. I’d seen it done many times in person as well as captured in storybooks and on television. Bubble-blowing, I understood, was a critical marker of American girlhood — alongside hopscotch, Barbie dolls, and long hair with bangs you could flick out of your eyes with a toss of your head. I remember one image from a magazine: two girls riding bicycles up a tree-lined suburban street, their long, blond hair streaming out behind them in the wind, heads thrown back to relish the dappled sunlight. From the lips of each girl floated a pale pink bubble-gum bubble, half the size of her head. The girls were white, of course. In the ’70s, magazines didn’t show many little brown girls like me — with wild, free-form, biracial hair. I remember gazing and gazing at the picture, admiring those perfect girls with their flawless, pink bubbles. Somehow, someday, that would be me…

Read the entire article here.

Growing Up Biracial In America: One Woman’s Story

think
KERA
Dallas, Texas
2018-08-21

Ted Conference/Flickr

Julie Lythcott-Haims is a hero to many of the parents who read her book “How to Raise an Adult,” which became a bestseller. She joins us to talk about her own upbringing as the child of a black father and white mother, during which she always felt part of “the other.” Her memoir is called “Real American” (Henry Holt and Co.).

Download the episode (00:48:38) here.

Beyoncé in Her Own Words: Her Life, Her Body, Her Heritage

Vogue
September 2018 (2018-08-06)

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
Tyler Mitchell, Photography

Pregnancy & Body Acceptance

After the birth of my first child, I believed in the things society said about how my body should look. I put pressure on myself to lose all the baby weight in three months, and scheduled a small tour to assure I would do it. Looking back, that was crazy. I was still breastfeeding when I performed the Revel shows in Atlantic City in 2012. After the twins, I approached things very differently…

…Ancestry

I come from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust. Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship. Connecting to the past and knowing our history makes us both bruised and beautiful.

I researched my ancestry recently and learned that I come from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave. I had to process that revelation over time. I questioned what it meant and tried to put it into perspective. I now believe it’s why God blessed me with my twins. Male and female energy was able to coexist and grow in my blood for the first time. I pray that I am able to break the generational curses in my family and that my children will have less complicated lives…

Read the entire article here.

If you ask me what I am

The Daily Californian
Berkeley, California
2018-08-11

Jasmine Tatah, Senior Staff

Mixed Feelings

I used to welcome personal questions about race and identity. Where is my family from? What’s my ethnic background? Where does my last name come from? However ambiguously or indirectly they were phrased, they all came across as equally amusing. If someone was curious about my heritage, that was fine with me. I considered the attention to be flattering.

There was one day in my senior year of high school when my biology teacher wanted to illustrate the scope of human genetic variation. She pulled up a National Geographic article on mixed-race Americans, scrolled through the various faces pictured and remarked, “Aren’t they beautiful?” The idea that mixed people were considered beautiful wasn’t new to me, but in that moment, her remark made me want to vomit. Was that all she had to say?

Moments like that made me question what others really thought about me. Could I ever be uncoupled from my racial identity? Could my internal connection to my roots ever be uncoupled from my external appearance? Was my race always the first thing people wondered about me and the primary way people identified me?…

Read the entire article here.

What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

The Financial Times
2018-05-30

Rianna Croxford

Rianna Croxford

Trailblazer discovers confidence sought by top universities can be learned

I am the first in my family to go to university and faced a lot of the obstacles students of colour encounter when aiming for Oxford and Cambridge.

Educated at state school, I graduated from Cambridge last year as one of only seven women of mixed white and black heritage in my year of 3,371 undergraduates.

As one of the first black students to read English at Trinity Hall college, I had to deal with different degrees of racism day to day, as well as cultural challenges that my background had not prepared me for.

I want to help make it easier for other students like myself to enter elite institutions that can offer a fast track to a successful career…

Read the entire article here.

What It’s Like Being an “Other”

College Magazine
2018-06-19

Mailinh McNicholas

Mailinh McNicholas

I’ve remained on the fringes of two different and separate Anchorage, Alaska communities. I have a Caucasian father and Vietnamese mother. My high school friends often talked about my ethnicity and attempted to place me into a defined racial category. Some of my peers pegged me as an Asian immigrant, some have asked if I am Native Alaskan, and others simply asked ‘What are you?’

Unfortunately, my hopes did not match my reality. A few months into my freshman year at GW [George Washington University] I found that my college peers also cast me as “the other.” Although I’m equal parts Asian and White, to my white friends I’m Asian and to my Asian friends, I’m white. My bi-cultural heritage once again left me excluded from being included in ether community…

Read the entire article here.

Blinking in the Light

Cinnamon Press
2016-02-01
28 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1910836057

Louisa Adjoa Parker

A collection of confessional poems which, in starkly telling a story about a fraught pregnancy and the suicide of a man very close to the speaker’s family, evokes with powerful images and unadorned language a raw sense of contemporary life.

Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself

University of North Carolina Press
June 2018 (Originally published in 1849)
156 pages
6 x 9, 18 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-4758-6

Henry Bibb (1815-1854)

A DocSouth Book, Distributed for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library

Henry Bibb (1815-1854) was born to an enslaved woman named Mildred Jackson in Shelby County, Kentucky. His father was a state senator who never acknowledged him. His narrative documents his persistent attempts to escape to freedom, beginning at age ten, offering an insider’s view of the degradation and varieties of slavery as well as its bitter legacies within families. Having finally settled in Detroit in 1842, Bibb joined the abolitionist lecture circuit and lived the rest of his days as a well-known African American activist who believed that Canada might offer a haven for the formerly enslaved.

Bibb’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, was published in 1849. Scholars have pointed out that Bibb’s narrative has several distinguishing features among the larger body of slave narratives. Unusually, Bibb survived enslavement in the Deep South and later described it, and his narrative offers documentation of African folkways including conjuring and an account of Native American slaveholding practices as well. Henry Bibb was above all resilient and determined to achieve freedom for himself and others. Unwilling to abandon those he loved, he risked recapture several times to free them from enslavement, too. In the small span of his thirty-nine years he would live to be reunited with three of his brothers who had fled to Canada.

Adventures in Black and White

2Leaf Press
2018-05-28 (originally published in 1960)
324
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-940939-77-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-940939-89-6

Philippa Duke Schuyler (1931-1967)

Edited and with a critical introduction by:

Tara Betts, Lecturer
University of Illinois, Chicago; Chicago State University

Adventures in Black and White, a memoir-travelogue, was first published by world-renown child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler in 1960. In this first revised edition of Adventures in Black and White since its initial publication, scholar Tara Betts provides a critical introduction to this updated volume, including minor edits, and annotations of the original text. Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, Schuyler was heralded as America’s first internationally-acclaimed mixed race celebrity. Her father, a conservative African American journalist, and her mother, a white Texan heiress, dedicated Schuyler’s development to the cause of integration with the claim that racial mixing could produce a superior hybrid human, a claim that Schuyler resisted, but would nonetheless hurl her into a destructive identity crisis that consumed her throughout her life. When the transition from child prodigy to concert pianist proved challenging in America, like many black performers before her, she went abroad during the 1950s for larger audiences. Schuyler’s witnessing first-hand the dissemblage of European colonies in Africa and the Middle East, is the focus of Adventures in Black and White. Luckily, this narrative connects the twenty-first century to right after the Harlem Renaissance, and the prelude to the forthcoming Civil Rights Movement at a time when interracial identity was just becoming part of a public conversation in America. As Schuyler begins to write about Africa—”the homeland of her ancestors”—readers can begin to understand how the young musician would eventually find her way as an author and a journalist, and the books that followed.

Pondering My Black, Biracial and Multiracial Identity Post Hurricane Maria

Multiracial Media: Voice of the Multiracial Community
2018-05-27

Sarah Ratliff

I have been writing from the Biracial and Multiracial perspective since I co-authored the book, Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide in 2015. Being Biracial is an anthology of essays from either Multiracial people or parents of mixed race kids.

In my essay I wrote about being the product of a Black and Japanese mother and a White (German, Dutch and Irish) father who were married in New York City in 1960.

I wrote about my experiences being “light, bright and clearly half White” while being raised to self-identify as Black, and of course, having to explain for the elevendy millionth time why I self-identified this way. I shared moments of complete vulnerability and isolation because I grew so frustrated trying to explain that being Black isn’t just about complexion but lived experiences as well…

Read the entire article here.