Mixed Race Studies

Albanez: Exploring my mixed-race identity at NU has been invaluable experience

The Daily Northwestern
2017-05-09

Andrea Albanez, Op-Ed Contributor

In 2011, The New York Times published an article about how many young Americans were no longer defining themselves as one single race, but rather beginning to cast themselves under multiple races or calling themselves “mixed-race.” According to the article, “the crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”

I identify as a mixed-race American. I encompass an array of nationalities that define who I am biologically: Filipino from my mother’s side and Mexican, Portuguese, French and German from my father’s side. I have met many students and peers just within my first year at Northwestern that share this commonality of mixed-race background along with me. Yet though identifying as mixed is so common now, how a mixed-race individual can identify themselves in society is still a difficult feat to overcome.

As I am a makeup of 5 different races, I myself have only identified closely with two out of my five races: Filipino and Mexican, which makes up 75 percent of my overall racial identity. This is prominently because my parents shared those two ethnicities’ cultures and practices more so than those of French, Portuguese and German, which they had lesser affinities with. Because of this, I have solely defined Filipino and Mexican as my ethnicities. Yet even so, I still do not feel as strong of a connection to my ethnicities as I wish or hope to be…

Read the entire article here.

The debate over who counts as ‘American’ is nothing new

The Washington Post
2015-05-04

Alex Laughlin

(Illustration by Chris Kindred for The Washington Post))

Virginia Matsuoka was 10 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

She was playing tag football with her older brothers when her mother came outside and told them what had happened.

“And I remember my father came up behind me there,” Matsuoka said. “He put his arm around me and he said, ‘This is so bad, Ginger. This is bad.’”

Matsuoka’s mother was American and white, but her father was Japanese. By April 1942, her family was torn apart. Her father was working in Colorado, spared a stint in the internment camps because he had helpful law enforcement connections. He taught martial arts to police officers there. Two of her brothers were serving in the U.S. Army. And Matsuoka and two of her other brothers were in the Tanforan Assembly Center, an internment camp built around a racetrack near San Francisco.

Despite being displaced and separated, Matsuoka and her family remained patriotic. She recalls asking her father what it was like for her: “He said, ‘You know, Ginger, this was my country. I came here, they gave me the opportunity to make a name for myself, and then the war came along so you do things that you’ve got to do.’”

Hear Matsuoka recall her experiences in Tanforan and talk about what it was like returning to school after being separated from her friends and family…

Listen to the podcast (00:15:59) here.

I speak, therefore I am: Meus idiomas

Varsity
Cambridge, England
2017-02-10

Eduardo Baptista

“But who am I to patronise them? I seem to have developed a tendency to shout mata (literally ‘kill’ in Portuguese) whenever I or my teammates execute a play under high pressure.” Bianca Bueno

Eduardo Baptista talks about identity at the crossroads of swearing in Portuguese, struggling with Korean fluency, and sounding like a History student in English

It’s no news that we use language everyday to convey knowledge, ideas, and emotions of the most diverse kind. But it’s more intriguing how language directs us as much as we direct language, kind of like a stubborn GPS that doesn’t adjust to the driver’s every whim. It is often difficult to be self-aware of just how much language affects our personality and how we express it.

In my case, this self-awareness came about naturally, a consequence of being a mixed-race international student in Cambridge, spending holidays in Portugal, skipping Korean school as a kid, and experiencing some other fantastic cultures along the way…

Read the entire article here.

Race is more than just black and white. This new podcast explores some of that middle ground.

The Washington Post
201-04-24

Alex Laughlin

(Illustration by Chris Kindred)

There’s this literary theory called the “mulatto canary in the coal mine.”

It holds that the treatment and depictions of mixed-race people in art and culture is a reflection of the broader state of race relations in America at that moment. The theory has been applied to works throughout American history, from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” to Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia” in 1999.

These multiracial characters, their very bodies providing evidence of racial lines crossed, are marked by confusion and betrayal, jealousy and cowardice, and most frequently, a tragic ending.

Well, it’s 2017 — 50 years since the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision invalidated anti-miscegenation laws across the country. It’s been legal to cross these racial lines for five decades now, almost two full generations. What does it mean to be mixed race in America today?

I suppose I should tell you a little about myself and why I’m so interested in this topic…

Read the entire article here.

Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide, a Plea For Help From the Multiracial Community

Multiracial Media: The Voice of the Multiracial Community
2017-04-23

Sarah Ratliff

Bryony Sutherland

Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide

Eighten months ago I published my first non-ghostwritten book called Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide. Being Biracial is an anthology of essays written by parents of Mixed Race kids and/or Multiracial adults. (We have one essay written by an adult that was dictated by a 13-year-old girl.)

It is a co-author venture I did with a close friend of mine who’s White and married to a Black man. Together they’re raising three Biracial sons and they live in England. Bryony Sutherland is an editor, author and ghostwriter—for more information, please visit her website.

I am Black, Japanese and White and Being Biracial was my first non-ghostwritten book.

The 30-second Elevator Speech for Being Biracial

“Good, bad, ugly and illuminating—everyone has an opinion on race. As Biracial people continue trending, the discussion is no longer about a singular topic, but is more like playing a game of multi-level chess. The anthology, Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide, cites the experiences of twenty-four mixed-race authors and parents of multiracial children of all ages and backgrounds, from all over the world. It blends positivity, negativity, humor, pathos and realism in an enlightening exploration of what it means to be more than one ethnicity.”…

Read the entire article here.

Stealth sisterhood: I look white, but I’m also black. And I don’t hate Rachel Dolezal

Salon
2017-04-23

Alli Joseph

A photo of the author with her mother.

I am white, I am black, I am Native American. And I know what it’s like for people not to see all of who I am

On a hot, humid New York City morning in 1980, I stood with my mother in the checkout line of an A&P supermarket near our home. As she pushed our groceries along the cashier’s belt with me trailing behind, mom realized she had forgotten her wallet at home, but she had her checkbook. Leaving me standing alone in the line for a moment while she saw the manager to have her check approved, the clerk refused to bag our groceries and hand them to me. She was black, and I was white. “These groceries belong to that woman over there,” the woman nodded towards my mother. “They ain’t yours.” Confused, I said, “But that’s my mother. I’ll take them for her.” She looked me up and down. “No,” she said, her voice cold.

The clerk refused to believe that indeed I belonged to, and came from, my black mother, until mom returned to find me choking back tears. She gave the clerk a tongue lashing, which was not her style, and we left the market. Later, mixed Native American and black children threw stones at me near my home on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation as I rode my bike. They yelled, “Get off our land, white girl!” These painful and strange experiences gave me my first taste of racial prejudice, and they have stayed with me all these years.

I am a child of many nations. I am white, I am black, I am Native American. I am West Indian, German, Irish. Brown and light together — integrated, not inter-racial, because race means nothing when you come from everywhere…

Read the entire article here.

The paradox of the multiracial identity

Adolescent
2017-04-18

Sarah Racker, Graphic Designer
Portland, Oregon

I am a multiracial American; my mother is Okinawan, my father is German and Australian. My grandparents came from four different continents. I identify as both Asian and Caucasian, and although I am often identified on the outside as not quite white and not quite “ethnic,” I easily pass for white in a world obsessed with color and race.

Multiracial people face a perplexing paradox. We are not fully white, and yet not fully “not white” enough to be considered a person of color (POC). Growing up biracial, I identified strongly with Spock (yes, from Star Trek). Spock is half Human and half Vulcan, and is ostracized by both halves of himself for not quite belonging to either culture.

Teresa Williams-León, a professor of Asian-American studies at California State University, Northridge, uses Spock as an object lesson in her class, “Biracial and Multiracial Identity.” She sees the parallels between Spock’s inner conflict between his Vulcan and Human identity. “He had to subdue his emotional side to become more cerebral and logical,” she said. “So that’s problematic. But it’s an interesting way of looking at how biracial people have had to suppress aspects of themselves, or one part of themselves.”…

Read the entire article here.

Are You Mixed? A War Bride’s Granddaughter’s Narrative of Lives In-Between Contested Race, Gender, Class, and, Power

Information Age Publishing
2016-02-05
192 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781681233871
Hardcover ISBN: 9781681233888
eBook ISBN: 9781681233895

Sonia E. Janis, Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Theory and Practice (Social Studies Education)
University of Georgia

In Are You Mixed?, Sonia Janis explores the spaces in-between race and place from the perspective of an educator who is multi-racial. As she reflects on her own experiences as a seventh grade student up to her eventual appointment as a school administrator, she learns of the complexity of situating oneself in predetermined demographic categories. She shares how she explores the intricacies of undefined spaces that teach her to embrace differences, contradictions, and complexities in schools, neighborhoods and communities.

Exploring the in-betweenness (Anzaldua & Keating, 2002; He, 2003, 2010) of her life as a multi-race person problematizes imbedded notions of race, gender, class, and power. The power of this memoir lies in its narrative possibilities to capture the contradictions and paradoxes of lives in-between race and place, “to honor the subtleties, fluidities, and complexities of such experience, and to cultivate understanding towards individual … experience and the multicultural/multiracial contexts that shape and are shaped by such experience” (He, 2003, p. xvii). This memoir creates new ways to think about and write about in-between experience and their relevance to multicultural and multiracial education.

Janis challenges educators, teachers, administrators, and policy makers to view the educational experience of students with multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual backgrounds by shattering predetermined categories and stereotyped classifications and looking into unknown and fluid realms of the in-betweenness of their lives. This challenge helps create equitable and just opportunities and engender culturally responsive and inspiring curricular and learning environments to bring out the best potential in all diverse schools, communities, neighborhoods, tribes and societies.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• CHAPTER I: One-Half Polish, One-Quarter Russian, One-Quarter Japanese
• CHAPTER II: My (Non-White or White?) Friends
• CHAPTER III: Three States and Six Schools
• CHAPTER IV: Relocating to the Segregated South
• CHAPTER V: Culturally Clueless
• CHAPTER VI: Multirace Stories as Curriculum
• Epilogue
• Reference
• About the Author

A Conflict of Race and Religion

Atlanta Jewish Times
2017-04-13

Patrice Worthy

As a Jew of color, your identity and loyalty are constantly questioned.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was laid off from my job for poor work performance. Weeks before, I went to HR regarding a co-worker who attacked my Jewish identity by asking another co-worker, “What does she want to be Jewish?” followed by “She thinks she so cute” because I asked for the first day of Pesach off.

Her sister, who worked in the same department, questioned my Judaism in front of the entire office, and when the daily harassment was too much for my body to handle, I was hospitalized and forced to tell my diagnosis to my supervisor, who encouraged the discrimination, and the HR rep…

…Being black and Jewish, at least from my experiences in the South, is a precarious position. Especially in a socially segregated city like Atlanta, where you are forced to choose between being Jewish and being black, whatever that means…

Read the entire article here.

Please Select One

City On A Hill Press
Santa Cruz, California
2017-04-12

Savanna Heydon

I was in third grade when I realized I was biracial. “Please Select One,” I was instructed as I stared down at the race identity section of the STAR test, the tip of my pencil hovering back and forth over circles marked “Asian” and “White.”

The divide of my identity had never before been presented to me so blatantly. Deciding to leave both bubbles blank was no solution to the conflict that would become a personal obsession throughout my life. Biologically, I am both. Racially, I am neither. Culturally, I am confused…

Read the entire article here.