Mixed Race Studies

On Being Mixed Race: I am Not a Percentage or a Fraction

The Radical Notion
2016-01-12

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

I’ve noticed frequently when I’m having a conversation with someone about my racial identity, I start to feel frustrated by some of the language that comes up. To clarify my father is black Jamaican, Nigerian and white British, and my mother is white British.

My earliest memories are of being described racially as ‘half-caste’. This was an acceptable term back in the 80’s, in the UK, to describe someone whose parents are of different races. People don’t tend to use this word anymore unless they are from older generations and unaware that it is not politically correct. The word ‘caste’ originates from the Spanish/Portuguese word ‘casta’ which means ‘pure’. Describing someone as half-caste is to imply they are only half pure which has obvious racist implications. This term was my first introduction to the idea that I had an identity that could be broken down into numerical fractions…

Read the entire article here.

Loop of Jade

Chatto & Windus, part of Vintage Publishing
2015-05-07
80 pages
Paperback EAN: 9780701188696
eBook EAN: 9781448190683

Sarah Howe

• WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015
• WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015
• SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015

There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots.

With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

César Vargas: How I Became Black

Okayafrica. Giving you true notes since 247,000 BC
2016-01-08

César Vargas

This is me my Junior year of high school.

During my first day of school in the United States I was told by a fellow classmate to watch out for the morenos. I was taken aback by the warning and in my bewilderment asked how to tell them apart. As a teenager trying to find his place in a new country, race was a difficult concept. I couldn’t tell people apart based on it. This gave me a disadvantage navigating 90s pre-gentrified Bed-Stuy. My high school, I.S. 33, was an all Black school with the exception of a few American-born Latinos—mostly Nuyoricans—and the bilingual class that I was placed in.

Sosua in the Dominican Republic where I was raised is a small tourist town with a very diverse population. Back then I was already exposed to white Americans, Europeans, and Black Haitians. All who, phenotypically speaking, looked like relatives since my family fell within the spectrum of Black to White. Which might be the reason why I couldn’t tell morenos apart from the rest of my classmates and family. Some of them were the same color as those morenos they were so apprehensive of.

My bilingual class was their punching bag. We were bullied relentlessly. For being foreigners. For speaking Spanish. For being different. That all stopped when two fresh-of-the-boat Dominican brothers that were brought to our class started fighting back. Both were as dark as the African American kids they fought. These two (Santiaguero city-slickers, it should be noted) emboldened the rest of us to do the same. So it was chaos for a couple of months.

Soon enough I understood why my classmates were fearful of morenos…

Read the entire article here.

‘Here Comes Honky!’: Why I Married a White Guy

Indian Country Today Media Network
2016-01-06

Terese Mailhot

When my sister’s dates pulled into our driveway my mother would yell, “Here comes Honky!” My sister was always livid, embarrassed, but still, she went out with white men most of her adult life. I always thought she was a traitor. I thought someday my Indian prince would come: the son of an activist in braids, with a mind full of theory and a stoic wisdom. But surprisingly I fell in love with a white man, with dusty blond hair and blue eyes.

I was always told we were a dying breed. “Meet a Native man,” my mother said. Blood quantum is important where I’m from. Land rights, healthcare, housing, and assistance all deal with blood quantum and how Indian one is ‘officially.’ Besides that, marrying Native was always what I dreamed of.

For generations Native women could not govern their own bodies, because white men and officials dictated we were their wards. We were subject to exploitation, objectification, and degradation at the hands of white people. Why would I ever want to give my body or love to a white man, a man who could never understand my grief or lineage?…

Read the entire article here.

Everyone’s Problem: Adrian Piper Tackles the Complexities of Race Relations Head-On

Artspace
2015-12-30

Artspace Editors

Adrian Piper receiving her Golden Lion from the 2015 Venice Biennale

The artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s direct and subtly intellectual approach to unpacking the tangled issues of race, gender, identity, and belonging has inspired a generation of socially-conscious artists across all media, although her impact is just now being fully recognized: she was the recipient of the Golden Lion for best artist at this year’s Venice Biennale, and MoMA has recently announced plans for, in the words of Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times, “the most comprehensive exhibition to date on the conceptual artist,” set to open in 2018. In this excerpt from Phaidon’s Defining Contemporary Art, the curator Connie Butler responds to one of Piper’s most important video and installation works, Cornered from 1988.

Adrian Piper’s conceptual explorations of race and difference have made her a critical influence on subsequent generations of artists exploring race and the construction of identity. By 1988—after two decades in which she moved from a relatively traditional conceptual art practice to using her own body in her work, and to locating her subject matter in the fluidity of identity—she had begun to explore her own struggles with racial identity: namely, people’s assumptions about her race and their corresponding behavior towards her.

The pivotal video installation Cornered addresses this in the straightforward, analytical fashion common to all of Piper’s work. Viewers encounter the artist herself, a light-skinned black woman, looking out at them from a monitor placed in the corner of a room. On either side of it hang her father’s two birth certificates—one that identifies him as white, the other as black. A large table upended in front of the monitor distances us from all this, keeping Piper at a remove in space. Despite this, the artist faces us calmly and begins matter-of-factly. “I’m black. Now, let’s deal with this social fact, and the fact of my stating it, together. Maybe you don’t see why we have to deal with it together. Maybe you think this is just my problem, and that I should deal with it by myself. But it’s not just my problem. It’s our problem.”…

Read the entire article here.

Op-Ed Thomas Chatterton Williams: My black privilege

The Los Angeles Times
2016-01-03

Thomas Chatterton Williams

A couple of years ago, I participated in an Aspen Institute symposium on the state of race. During the roundtable that followed the panels, as I spoke about my experiences growing up black in the 1990s, I was interrupted by a Latino sociologist and former gang member from UC Santa Barbara. People who care about people of color, the professor instructed me, ought to focus their energies on continued systemic racism and forget about anything so nebulous and untrustworthy as observation. Like it or not, I was the victim of greater social forces. It did not matter that I had come to see my life as something of my own making — the evidence of my senses was useless.

I thought about this exchange often in 2015, a year in which the discussion of racism — always relevant — became omnipresent. This was mostly a good thing. Yet it is dismaying how hard it is now to have a serious conversation about black experience without coming across some version of the professor’s condescending remarks.

Perhaps the most influential book last year was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a jeremiad whose thesis is that black people “have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels.” The string of high-profile police killings of black men and women seemed to underscore Coates’ point, and galvanized support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which, in turn, forced an urgent critique of the very real bias plaguing the criminal justice system. That movement has also frequently veered away from the work of reforming law enforcement practices, enlisting itself in a social media-driven culture war over far more ambiguous problems, such as microaggressions and safe spaces.

Black people everywhere, many of our most audible voices seem to say, will always and everywhere be “the faces at the bottom of the well,” as Coates put it.

But the truth is more complicated than that. I am a black man of mixed race heritage, and while every black member of my family has encountered racism, we are also the ones in the family who hold graduate degrees, own businesses and travel abroad. My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else. I don’t mean to excuse the corrosive effects of his views; I simply wish to note that when I compare these two men, I do not recognize my father as the victim…

Read the entire article here.

Among The Wild Mulattos And Other Tales (By Tom Williams) [NPR Review]

NPR’s Book Concierge: Our Guide To 2015’s Great Reads
National Public Radio
2015-12-08

Michael Schaub, book critic

Produced by Nicole Cohen, Rose Friedman, Petra Mayer and Beth Novey
Designed by Annette Elizabeth Allen, David Eads, Becky Lettenberger and Wes Lindamood

Identity, both racial and otherwise, is at the heart of nearly all the stories in Among the Wild Mulattos, a manic, cutting and frequently hilarious collection from Kentucky author and academic Tom Williams. He’s an uncompromising writer with a fiercely original voice, and he has created one of the most unforgettable books of the year. The collection feels vital, essential, not only for the unexpected ways Williams talks about identity but for his brash, gutsy writing.

Read the review from 2015-08-07 here.

BEST OF 2015: Not Quite White

Madison365
Madison, Wisconsin
2015-12-29

Matthew Braunginn

Matthew Braunginn

I may never be able to truly “pass” or to be “race neutral.” I have always been and always will be “not quite white.”

I reject those terms because I have been othered on their terms. I can never fully fit in among a group of white people. And even though my pigment is closer to that of my white peers, I have always found more comfort in being around my black brothers and sisters; a sense of belonging and shared struggle that I have never felt in a room full of white people…

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, a predominantly white, liberal city that maintains egregious racial disparities. According to the Race to Equity report, Madison has one of the largest education gaps in the nation: 75 percent of its children living in poverty are black, with black children making up just 8.5 percent of its population; black unemployment is at 25 percent versus 5 percent for whites. Adult black males are 4.8 percent of its population, yet in 2011 they made up 43 percent of new prison placement.

Madison is a very different experience for blacks than it is for whites. I grew up in a bi-racial house. My mother is white and my father is black. I am fair-skinned enough so that I can “pass” at times, but times that are not of my making. My parents raised my sister and I to be racially aware, to understand the racial dynamics of this nation, and to understand the sins of its past. But I am not white. Throughout my childhood this reality created and fostered an extra layer of confusion for me. I fought through a gauntlet of anger, confusion, pain, and deep depression. Now I am experiencing an awakening, a taking back of my power of self-identification…

Read the entire article here.

The Race Relations Act at 50: Davina’s story

BBC Radio 5
In Short
2015-12-07

It is 50 years since Britain’s first Race Relations Act was passed, banning racial discrimination in public places.

Davina Looker, an English teacher and blogger from London has spoken to BBC Radio 5 live about her “desperate” search to find an identity, growing up as a child of mixed heritage. Her father Austin moved to the UK from Nigeria in 1988.

“There were struggles growing up mixed race and struggling to find an identity”, she said, adding:

“I remember going on holiday […] and being told certain children didn’t want to play with me because I was black or brown […] or going to church and no one learning my name, referring to me as ‘lighty’ rather than actually getting to know me as a person”.

Davina says she feels that things are improving now there are more mixed race people in the UK, It’s easier to understand when you’ve got people around you going through the exact same thing”.

This clip is originally from Up All Night on Monday 7 December 2015.

Watch the video here.

Black in a Foreign Land: In Defense of Dominican Identity

The Huffington Post
2015-12-17

César Vargas

I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic until I was two months shy of turning 13. The Dominican Republic has a peculiar color metric system–not necessarily on race. So it should go without saying that I wasn’t exposed to the clear cut Americentric, and very binary, concept of race in America until I set foot in the United States.

Since a very young age, I was aware of how both colorism and classism were prevalent back in the island. I noticed how people were treated and often saw how the socioeconomic standing of an individual trumped their color–up to a point if we’re to test folks by the brown paper bag. I’ve said once or twice that a Black man with money is more white than a white poor man. In a third world country where the majority of people are mulattoes, and most of the darker population would be of Haitian descent, you’d be hard pressed not to find people of most shades within families. Some of those family members were better off than others, and often, I’ve found, they could be of any shade.

Of course, like any nation of the world colonized by Europeans, power and wealth is usually concentrated with their descendants, but it would be dishonest to say that most of the power and wealth in the Dominican Republic is owned and controlled solely by its small white population. There are people of color (and visibly so), in most power and entertainment structures. A lot more, I dare say, than most Latin American countries. If we go by the one drop rule, there have been Black public figures, Black businesspeople, Black athletes, Black entertainers, Black generals, Black presidents, and so on. If you put them next to most African Americans, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…

Read the entire article here.