Mixed Race Studies

Jewish/Afro-Caribbean Artist Explores Mixed Race Identities

The Canadian Jewish News
2016-05-03

Kathryn Kates

Sarah Waisvisz in her one-woman show ‘Monstrous‘ CHRISTOPHER SNOW PHOTO

Jewish/Afro-Caribbean artist, performer and playwright Sarah Waisvisz, 34, will be presenting her one-woman show, Monstrous, which explores the often ignored mixed race identity based on her own personal experiences, and her work on her PhD thesis research about Francophone/Anglophone literature specifically by Afro/Caribbean women.

Monstrous made its world premiere in February in Waisvisz’s hometown of Ottawa during the Undercurrent Festival. It will make its Toronto premiere on May 5, 8 p.m. at Toronto’s Artscape Wychwood Barns as part of the 14th Annual rock.paper.sistahz – a black, indigenous and multicultural festival featuring new works based on social issues examined in new and unusual ways. The festival runs from May 3-5…

Read the entire article here.

Race identity for mixed race kids in America

The Collegian
Stockton, California
2016-04-24

Shellcia Longsworth

Being a mixed kid wasn’t easy growing up.

My mother is white and Samoan. My father is Belizean.

I was born and raised in Tracy. I was one of two black children in my elementary school.

I recall having moments of prejudice against me when I was young. I got called the “N” word so many times in my life I am numb to it.

I shouldn’t be…

Read the entire article here.

My Mixed Identity: Growing Up As A Mixed American

Odyssey
2016-03-29

Ryan McDaniel

It is 2016 and interracial marriage is on the rise. Consequently, the number of mixed Americans is on the rise. Naturally, there is a lot of controversy regarding the matter that comes in different forms. People oppose it for the false reasoning of it violating their religion. From my experience, most people with foolishness claim to be Christians.

Apparently they did not know that Romans 10:12 states: “For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him.” Other reasons include protecting the children; the children will be degraded and ostracized for being Mixed. Unfortunately, this is a possibility. However, it is also a possibility that the child will be accepted for who they are.

…In high school, my claim to blackness was challenged. This came not from the White community, but rather the community that I felt I had belonged to my entire life. For the first time, my blackness was being denied to me. I would be told, “You’re not really black, though.” or a straight up, “You’re not black.” As someone who grew up identifying as black, it was a slap in the face. How dare someone tell me how I can and cannot identify myself?…

Read the entire article here.

Navigating Racial Liminality

The Tufts Observer
Medford, Massachusetts
Issue 4 Spring 2016
2016-03-28

Conrad Young

Kindergarten was the first time my racial identity was called into question. My mom came into my class to do a show-and-tell about my family’s time in the Republic of Macedonia, where I lived from ages one to four while my mom worked for a non-governmental organization (NGO) that aided refugees fleeing from neighboring, war-torn Kosovo. During the presentation, a classmate raised his hand and asked my mom, “Is that why you’re so dark?” Another classmate asked, “Is Conrad half-Chinese?” While I was unaware of any greater pattern at the time, this story was the beginning of many social interactions throughout my childhood that would ultimately lead me to have a warped perspective of my outward appearance and racial identity.

Accordingly, I began to hate my nose when I was twelve. Looking at pictures of myself from a long-forgotten party, I realized that my nose was large and ugly in comparison to my White friends’ noses. I stopped smiling fully in order to make my nose appear smaller, and later in my teens I would daydream about getting plastic surgery. My physical appearance—my dark olive skin, my thick black hair, and my big ugly nose—became something that I was more and more aware of throughout my childhood, and through comparing myself with others, I began to think less highly of how I looked. My family rarely talked about their racial identities, as neither of my parents identify as mixed race or as people of color (POC). Unlike many POC, I was afforded the privilege of going through most of my childhood unaware of structures of racism I maintained and was affected by…

Read the entire article here.

Race isn’t just black or white

The Beacon: The Student Voice of the University of Portland Since 1935
Portland, Oregon
2016-04-13

Rebekah Markillie, Design Editor

I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, on the way to the park with my dad, when a neighborhood kid asked me if I was adopted. That was the first time someone had brought to my attention the disparity between my complexion and the one of my so-called biological father’s. Another time more recently, when my mother tried introducing me as her daughter to another woman, she paused for a moment, looked at me and laughed, “You’re not her daughter!”

We hear it all the time that race can’t be divided into nice boxes to check. But this is rarely the reality. In many well-meaning discussions about racial inclusion and racial diversity, mixed race identities are completely left out. I’ve been told countless times that I can’t talk about racial discrimination, or Asian racial issues, because I’m not brown or Asian…

Read the entire article here.

Alumni Interview: Miranda Brawn Esq

The University of Law
Future Lawyers Network
Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom
2015-04-30

Since qualifying as a Barrister, Miranda Brawn has not looked back. Currently, Director of Legal and Transaction Management at Daiwa Capital Markets and specialising in finance, she has worked with top investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citigroup. Passionate about promoting diversity within the profession she is patron for Black British Academics and a Board member for various diversity organisations such as the Black Cultural Archives and the City Women Network.

Do you believe there are greater challenges for women and people from ethnic backgrounds to succeed in law?

I think there are challenges for everyone regardless of their gender and race to succeed in law as it is one of the most competitive fields to enter which includes investment banking. I have managed to succeed in both of these fields, which have in the past been considered to be a male dominated industry. That said, being a female and from an ethnic background, I have proven that it is possible to overcome challenges with the right amount of drive, intelligence and determination…

Finally, tell us something about yourself that people might not know

I have a family history of law and politics where I am related to Sir Thomas Bellot, 2nd Bt. 1 (1651-1709), who studied at Oxford University, was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1670, succeeded to the title of 2nd Baronet Bellot in 1674 and was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Newcastle-under-Lyme from 1679 until 1681…

Read the entire interview here.

The SRB Interview: Jackie Kay

Scottish Review of Books
Volume 11, Issue 3 (2016)

Opening one of Jackie Kay’s books is like walking into a busy metropolitan bar that has accommodated within its walls the deep past, character and charm of a country pub. You know you will encounter stories comic and sad, that you will never leave thirsty, and that the mind will feel renewed with the spirit, musicality and colour of life. Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother. She was adopted at birth by Helen and John Kay, who lived, and still live, in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. Helen was a primary school teacher who was also secretary of the Scottish peace movement and John worked full time for The Communist Party. When Kay was pregnant with her son Matthew she started a search for her birth parents, and this long experience, along with her Scottish upbringing, is recounted in her memoir Red Dust Road (2010). Kay’s writing style is as varied and vivid as her life, and her ability to inhabit voices and capture them on the page was demonstrated in her first poetry collection, The Adoption Papers (1991). It incorporated themes still prevalent in her work today: ‘what is identity? Is identity a shifting, fluid thing? How much are we made up by genes, and how much by stories? How much is it possible to escape the constraints of our own DNA and invent ourselves? How much does love define us, and make things possible? Does being loved change the shape of your face, or change the look in your eyes, or change your voice, or your body?’

Kay’s output is too prolific to give but a précis. Her second poetry book, Other Lovers (1993), explored the impact of colonialism and slavery on black culture, and it was a topic she returned to in her play The Lamplighter (2008). She has a written a sequence of poems about Bessie Smith, and she also wrote a biographical portrait of the great blues singer, which was published in 1997. Jazz and blues have been a lifelong love, and her novel Trumpet (1998), republished this year as a Picador classic, is about a jazz musician called Joss Moody. Upon his death, the trumpet player is found to have been a woman, and the novel refracts Moody’s life through the lens of those who knew him and the media eye. Kay’s short story collections include Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) and Reality, Reality (2012). Her most recent poetry collections are Fiere (2011) and the pamphlet The Empathetic Store, published in 2015 by Mariscat Press. In progress is a new novel, Bystander.

Kay has lived in Manchester for the last twenty years, although she has said ‘in my mind I also live in Scotland’, and frequently is at home in Glasgow seeing her parents. Nick Major met Kay in HOME, a new arts centre and theatre space near Manchester’s old industrial centre. They sat in the upstairs restaurant beside tall glass windows that afforded a view of the sun. The room was baked in a heat that defied the cold winter’s day outside. They had a long afternoon lunch, punctuated with coffee to keep the mind fresh. The clatter of other lives, other lunches, was all around them. Small in stature, large in mind, she was wearing a red jumper that matched the city’s prevailing colour, and two silver discs hung from her ears, shimmering in the light. Kay is a fast talker, and often spoke in long looping sentences that circled every subject, always prodding and poking at it in a search for a newer, clearer understanding. As this edition of the Scottish Review of Books went to press she was appointed our new Makar.

The Scottish Review of Books: You’ve lived in Manchester for many years now, but do you still think of Glasgow as home?

Jackie Kay: I think of Glasgow as my home in the many ways that a person can think of a home. My parents live in exactly the same house I grew up in. Nobody’s been in that house except our family. It’s a Lawrence house. But Glasgow as a city is a spiritual home, and I love the robust energy of the place and all the contradictions. It’s a city of doubles and amazing contrasts. It often gets less attention because Edinburgh is like a beautiful twin sister, but Glasgow is beautiful in its own different way. It is a city that can still surprise you; you can keep getting to know it because it keeps on changing…

Read the entire interview here.

How To Identify With Your People When Your People Won’t Let You

Swirl Nation Blog
2016-03-30

Amal Gonzalez

This is very hard for me to write because I don’t know how to begin.

I’ve written about being racially ambiguous. Growing up in a predominantly white environment without real examples of people who are mixed-raced in the media made me “other”, but definitely not white, or at least not 100% white. I’ve written about my parents both being mixed-race, but because of the one-drop-rule, they were black and never were allowed, or even compelled to identify as anything other than black. My dad definitely “looks” like he has African blood flowing through his veins – full lips, coarse, kinky hair, and a slightly broader nose. My mother, on the other hand, has been identified as Latina, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Jewish. She has naturally soft hair, an angular nose, fairer skin, not pale. However, my mother grew up with 6 black sisters in a white rural town in California. Everyone knew her family and she was reminded she was black every day.

So you can only imagine, when it came to raising me and my sisters, we were told about our white relatives. We were told about our family members we will probably never meet because they decided to “pass” during a time when being white was truly a privilege. BUT we never identified with being white or bi-racial. It was always people around me that pointed out my differences, the “other”. It was society that pointed out that I didn’t necessarily fit in one category based on my physical appearance…

Read the entire article here.

What Does my Body Mean?

Mixed Roots Stories
2016-03-30

Carly Bates

Carly Bates (Photo by: Bethany Brown)

As a student of jazz at my university, I often occupy white male dominated spaces. I am the only woman of color (a black/white biracial woman) in a jazz history class, “Jazz Musicians as Composers,” a course that explores the gray areas of jazz as a concert music. Sometimes, I wonder if I can give myself permission to be a woman of color in this space. In a discussion surrounding the “Freedom Now Suite,” Max Roach’s response to the Greensboro sit ins, I have 75 minutes to say something—anything— so that my professor doesn’t think that I’m “just a shy student.” Rather, I negotiate with myself for 75 minutes what I am allowed to say, how what I say is a reflection of the body I occupy. Pressure mounts as someone questions the rigidity of jazz as a “black” art form. Pressure mounts as students discuss the auto-exoticism of African-American jazz musicians. Pressure mounts as the professor asks if anyone has ever felt that they had to represent a group of people, to act as a monolith. I scream silently: “Yes, every time I enter your class. Every time, for 75 minutes, I measure the amount of voice and the amount of blackness that I allow myself to have.”

What does my body mean here?…

Read the entire article here.

“We Called That Touch”

Boston Review
2016-03-28

Ed Pavlić, Professor of English and Creative Writing
University of Georgia

Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience

It might seem to you that I am white. Then again, depending upon how and where we meet—and upon things in your life I know nothing about—it might seem to you that I’m not white. So far, in forty-nine years here, my experience has indicated this much to me. My father came to the United States by way of Canada from what is now Croatia. My mother is a white American liberal from Wisconsin. Many in America would say that, because of the race of my parents, my identity is essentially fixed in those terms, that such matters are innate, inborn. For many on all sides of the color line, this either/or racial paradigm possesses the self-evidence of a law of nature. Yet the social and political machinery necessary to maintain the reality of this illusion proves lethal to men, women, and children everyday.

Nonetheless, contrary to this culture-bound delusion, whiteness is not a natural inheritance. People “believing themselves white” (to borrow a phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who borrowed the idea from James Baldwin) must invest in that belief continually. Whether consciously or not, they must rehearse its prohibitions and privileges all their waking days—in their dreams, even. Our world offers them a great assistance with this and, on average, the dividends paid by this pact with whiteness are real. At the same time, Eula Biss recently argued that this “believing themselves white” business accrues a cost, “White Debt.” It seems to me that she is describing shame even more than debt. Her essay tiptoes around naming the terrible price people believing themselves white pay to sustain that belief.

I confess that, even in the abstract, I have never been able to acquire a knack for honoring the supposed impermeability of American racial categories. Just where is the border in what one says, thinks, imagines, who one loves? Even more, where is the border in how one goes about these things? My racial ambiguity has not only been internal but has been reflected in—perhaps fueled by—the ways that, since childhood, my race has been so frequently “misread,” or far from self-evident. More than once in my twenties, police asked me point blank: Are you black or white? In these previews of often subtler interrogations to come, it always seemed to me that the question was the answer. Yet for years and long after I knew better, and even up until now, I have been afraid to openly analyze the dynamics that have produced these questions. I dealt with them lyrically, both in poems and in life. But in a fearful and tiresome symmetry, this silence and lyrical angularity (like Dickinson’s “tell it slant”) also forced me to treat my condition as if it were a personal psychosis, mine and mine alone, an essential and incommunicable privacy. It’s taught me how necessary privacy is but also how an incommunicable privacy narrows, collapses, becomes a trap…

Read the entire article here.