Mixed Race Studies

Two halves, one American whole

The Columbia Spectator
2016-11-16

Luciana Siracusano

Halfie. That’s the endearing term I use to explain my ethnic and cultural heritage when people don’t know what to make of my facial features. My father is a third-generation Italian-Irish-American, and my mother is Korean and immigrated here in her 20s, so I’m half-Korean and half-Italian-American. While some people can tell right away, others have no idea—they think I’m either completely white or completely Asian, or they’ll ask. Their guesses about my heritage fall all over the ethnic, racial, and geographic map—which is to be expected, I suppose, when you’re the product of diverse genes.

Being half has put the quest for self-discovery and definition at the forefront of my life. People’s efforts to categorize me can be frustrating, since I have difficulty categorizing myself. It often involves sifting through labels and historical and political rhetoric that confuse my sense of identity. But ultimately, my mixed heritage has shaped how I define not only myself, but also what it means to be American.

People tell me, “You could never pass as an American,” or “You’re not really Korean.”…

Read the entire article here.

“Please select one”: Growing up with a multiracial identity

The Seattle Globalist
2016-11-31

Jaya Duckworth, Senior
Garfield High School, Seattle, Washington

Jaya Duckworth (second from right) and friends hold signs showing pride in multiracial identities at a school district-wide walkout in protest of the election of Donald Trump. (Photo courtesy Jaya Duckworth.)

Race: Please select one”

It’s an instruction mixed-race people are all too familiar with. These days, surveys have become more nuanced, and usually read “select all that apply.” But growing up, I faced dozens of surveys, questionnaires, and tests that all made me choose one race.

As a half-white, half-Nepali child, I never knew what to select. Do I select white because I act like white kids and talk like white kids, go to school with white kids and have been raised like a white kid? Or do I select Asian because I look brown, because I eat curry, because on Christmas morning I always had to wait until puja was over at my Nepali grandparents’ house before I could open presents? White kids don’t do that, do they?

I usually ended up choosing “Other,” as if instead of being human, I was a stray dog; some lost object or animal that no one could categorize. Sometimes surveys also listed “multiracial,” which didn’t sit well with me either. The label feels like a message: here, these are the important races, and anyone who doesn’t fit these categories can be lumped together under the “mutt” category…

Read the entire article here.

Half and Half

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2007-02-11

Bliss Broyard

David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007).

Twenty minutes into David Matthews’s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he is. When Matthews doesn’t answer, they trail him down the hallway — “as though I were a reprobate head of state ambushed by reporters outside a lurid hotel” — shouting out their guesses: “Black! White! You crazy?! He(’s) too light/dark to be black/white!” One jokester suggests he’s Chinese.

One possible response is that Matthews is mixed: his father is African-American, actually a “prominent black journalist” who counted Malcolm X and James Baldwin among his friends, and his mother is Jewish, although she disappeared to Israel shortly after Matthews was born. But this scene takes place in 1977 in a Baltimore public school that sits between a “Waspy enclave of tony brownstones” and a “world of housing projects, roaming street gangs and bleating squad cars,” and the difference between black and white seems too vast to allow for any unions — or their byproducts — across the conceptual divide. (Although we learn that Matthews needn’t look any further than his own life for exceptions: his best friend, his stepbrother and his half brother are also mixed, though none of them quite so indeterminately as he is.) In the lunchroom, Matthews heads to the table of students he resembles most — in skin color, yes, but also in character. The white kids, with their “nerdy diction” and “Starsky and Hutch” lunchboxes, are similarly introverted and unthreatening, while the black kids, playing the dozens and double Dutch on the playground, are “alive and cool,” and frightening. When a white boy assigned by the homeroom teacher to be Matthews’s buddy for the day makes room for him to sit down, this small, serendipitous gesture sets the dye of his racial identity for the next 20 or so years…

Read the entire review here.

Ace of Spades, A Memoir

Henry Holt and Co.
2007
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0312426316
Ebook ISBN: 978-1429905039

David Matthews

A take-no-prisoners tale of growing up without knowing who you are

When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege.

While his father, a black activist who counted Malcolm X among his friends, worked long hours as managing editor at the Baltimore Afro-American, David spent his early years escaping wicked-stepmother types and nursing an eleven-hour-a-day TV habit alongside his grandmother in her old-folks-home apartment. In Reagan-era America, there was no box marked “Other,” no multiculturalism or self-serving political correctness, only a young boy’s need to make it in a clearly segregated world where white meant “have” and black meant “have not.” Without particular allegiance to either, David careened in and out of community college, dead-end jobs, his father’s life, and girls’ pants.

A bracing yet hilarious reinvention of the American story of passing, Ace of Spades marks the debut of an irresistible and fiercely original new voice.

Read an excerpt here.

Being Blackanese: The Evolving Embrace of Self and Community

College of San Mateo
CSM College Center Building 10, Room 193
1700 West Hillsdale Boulevard
San Mateo, California 94402 USA
Friday 2016-11-18, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Being Blackanese: The Evolving Embrace of Self and Community brings together an award winning literary artist, a scholar activist, and an independently published author in an examination and affirmation of Black Japanese American life. The “Blackanese” experience – of a world where divisiveness remains common and cultural ambiguity can equate to invisibility within one’s own communities – will be exposed through readings, presentations and Q&A.

Featuring readings and presentations by:

• Alyss Dixson will read from “The Club”, her short fiction piece about Ai, a determined Black Japanese girl who decides to sneak a ride on her father’s old Harley until an encounter with a thief puts her between fear of the stranger and fear of her dad’s punishment.
• Fredrick Cloyd will read selections from his memoir, Dream of the Water Children: Memory and Mourning in the Black Pacific, covering his struggles as a half-Black Japanese boy born of an African American military father and that of his mother who was looked down upon for having a child by an American, as well as his life as an Amerasian after migrating to the United States.
• Ramon Calhoun will read excerpts from his independently-published novel, Blackanese Boy, the coming of age story of Rafael Halifax. Raised by a single mother, Rafael tries to cope with and understand the complexity of his mixed-identity, born of his Japanese American mother and Black father, an infrequent yet powerful presence in his life.

The readings will be followed by a Question & Answer session facilitated by Dr. Frederick Gaines, Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies, College of San Mateo.

For more information, click here.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, Critical Edition

Yale University Press
2016-10-25
264 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
7 b/w illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780300204711

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)

Edited by:

John R. McKivigan, Mary O’Brien Gibson Professor of History
Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis

Peter P. Hinks

Heather L. Kaufman, Research Associate
The Douglass Papers

A new edition of one of the most influential literary documents in American and African American history

Ideal for coursework in American and African American history, this revised edition of Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his life as a slave in pre-Civil War Maryland incorporates a wide range of supplemental materials to enhance students’ understanding of slavery, abolitionism, and the role of race in American society. Offering readers a new appreciation of Douglass’s world, it includes documents relating to the slave narrative genre and to the later career of an essential figure in the nineteenth-century abolition movement.

Can We Talk

Mixed Roots Stories
2016-11-02

Chelene Knight

Please check one of the following boxes:

Black

White

Asian

Indigenous

Métis

Other

In my younger days I remember filling out a job application and staring at that question about race for so long. Do I check the ‘Black” box? What the hell is “Other?” My hand hovered over the question for a long time …

The more I write about life as a mixed-race person, and what this means to me as a mother, woman, writer etc, the more the writing itself tends to be less about race and more about missing pieces, and figuring out the order of these pieces and how to put them together. And not only the pieces I’ve never had, but re-working and making do with the ones I do have…

Read the entire article here.

‘You don’t see many of them round here’: being black in the white, rural West Country

gal-dem
2016-09-05

Louisa Adjoa Parker

My parents met when my dad came to the UK from Ghana in the 1960s to train as a nurse. He married my mum, and I was born in Doncaster in 1972. I don’t think he had a clue before he came how racist Britain was then, and both my parents were naïve in their own ways. Their turbulent marriage was unsuccessful, not, as my grandparents had feared, as a result of two different cultures colliding, but because of two very different personalities colliding (and my dad’s fists colliding with parts of my mum’s body).

Many people of mixed heritage talk of the difficulties of belonging to two cultures. I didn’t have that problem – my dad rarely offered anything in the way of Ghanaian culture. We didn’t eat Ghanaian food, listen to Ghanaian music, or have contact with any of our Ghanaian relatives. In fact, Ghana has always seemed to me, a far-off, mystical, hot and dusty land, peopled by unknown relatives. My dad wanted to become English; he looked up to them, liked their ways. I’ve not yet visited, although I hope to soon, and am grateful to my brother for flying out there and finding our long-lost family…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Strange

The Common
2016-11-04

W. Ralph Eubanks

All thinking Southerners, at some point, find their minds at war with their hearts, a battle that often ends with the heart claiming victory. It is this triumph of the heart that landed me, a black expatriate Mississippian, back in my home state again. Yet returning to Mississippi after nearly forty years, albeit temporarily, as a visiting professor, has left me torn somewhere between acceptance and separateness. In some ways, the longer I am in the South, the less I try to maintain my distance from the place.

One way my divide from the South has been bridged is in the way I speak when I am here. When I left Mississippi I scrubbed away any outward sign that would mark me as a native son, even succeeding at losing my accent as well as the elongated vowels of my youth. But these days a decided twang has begun to creep into my voice. And rather than correcting my linguistic lapses, I’m reclaiming this part of my Southern background.

But there is one thing I have had difficulty accepting: people thinking I am a white man…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union

ELIZAN Publishing
September 2016
300 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780995526808

Elizabeth N. Anionwu, CBE, Emeritus Professor of Nursing
University of West London

Memoirs of Professor Elizabeth N Anionwu CBE FRCN

Foreword by Malorie Blackman OBE, Writer & former Children’s Laureate

It’s 1947 and a clever, sheltered Catholic girl of Liverpool Irish working class heritage is studying Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the first one in her family to go to university – and then she discovers that she’s pregnant. The father is also a student at Cambridge, studying law. And he is black.

The fallout from their affair is dramatic, but despite pressure to give up her baby for adoption, the young woman has other ideas. Their daughter Elizabeth grows up to be a Professor of Nursing at the University of West London – but there are many twists and turns along the way. What does it mean to be mixed race in Britain? Who are you when told that your origins are ‘half Nigerian, half Irish’? Who are you, growing up as a child in care for nine years and without knowing your father?

This incredible story charts a roller coaster journey from the English Midlands to Nigeria, and from suburban health visiting to political activism and radical nursing. At the same time it brings social history to life – think ‘Philomena meets Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father’! This is a heart-warming and inspiring book about childhood, searching for identity, family, friendship, hope and what makes us who we are.