Mixed Race Studies

How To Be A Black Girl

Thought Catalog
2014-12-03

Carmen Molina
Chicago, Illinois

I will always feel a little strange calling myself a black girl.

Whenever I am at a party or somewhere where there are new people to meet, the question that every mixed girl gets asked at least once a week, every week, for all of her life comes up.

“What are you?”

This question doesn’t offend me like it offends others of mixed race. I don’t necessarily see it as ignorant, like others do. The person doing the asking most likely thinks that I am interesting looking and I usually take it as a compliment of sorts.

What is irritating about the question is that I never know quite how to answer it. It always causes anxiety. I stammer my way through what I hope is a passable response, finish with a nervous smile and then immediately ask them where they got their shoes to distract them so that I don’t have to talk about it anymore.

This tactic works almost every time… but every once in a while someone calls my bluff and asks me to explain.

And how can I? It’s very difficult to explain it to a stranger when no one ever really explained it to me.

Here is what I know…

Read the entire article here.

When You Grow Up Mixed Race

Thought Catalog
2015-12-11

Evicka Chang

Growing up mixed-race is confusing. It wasn’t until my third year of University when the theory of hybridity was introduced in a Lit Theory class that I even began to consider the complexities of my own existence. It was also then that I started to realize that much of my own experience was not unusual for those of us who exist in the in-between.

The biggest struggle is exactly that: not fitting into either space. With a White mother and a Chinese father, neither will ever understand my experience. My mother sees me as White; never will she understand the struggles I have and will continue to face as a non-White female. My father sees me as Chinese, only with the benefit of being able to ‘pass’ when needed. My Chinese extended family only knows me as the White member of the family, the Westerner who is not quite Chinese. My White extended family continuously ‘others’ me, pushing me back into the margins because I do not look like them…

Read the entire article here..

Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?

Hopes&Fears
2015-12-15

Jeremy Gordon

The author with his parents, Mary and Dennis Gordon.

Jeremy Gordon on growing up multiracial, assimilation and “whiteness” in post-Obama America.

Every Christmas, when the dishes have been cleaned, when the presents are exchanged and the photos snapped, my cousins and I book it out of my aunt’s house in the suburbs for the comfort of the city, where we spend the rest of the night in each other’s company—playing video games, getting drunker, eating a second meal to close the holiday. Last year, we drove to a dim sum restaurant in Chicago’s Argyle neighborhood, which my Chinese family has patronized for my entire life.

Times had changed, though. We assumed we’d be seated right away, but the restaurant was full. As far as I could remember, it was the first time we’d ever had to wait for a table—and this time, we noticed that most of the diners were white. As we waited for our names to be called, my cousin couldn’t help but gripe. “I can’t believe we’re stuck behind all these white people!” she said. “Can’t they go somewhere else?”

My cousin is not a facetious woman, so the comment didn’t register as a joke. Nevertheless, her brother and I managed a laugh. It was true—the restaurant was filled with white people, whose grannies had never used Mandarin to order from the sullen teenagers pushing the dim sum carts around. But the complaint was a little awkward because of an incontrovertible fact: My cousins and I are half-white, each of us the offspring of a Chinese woman and a Jewish man…

We look about half-and-half—not quite white, not quite yellow, definitely a little something. White people might see us as Chinese—or, failing their ability to pinpoint our race, an ever-ambiguous “person of color”—but there are plenty of Chinese who might insist we were white. Joking about “white people” when that might be us—it’s an easy laugh, but ultimately disingenuous. Wondering what to identify as—white, Chinese, or something else—is something I, my cousins, and many multiracial people have struggled with for our whole lives, to no definite conclusion…

…Multiraciality is a young identity, one that didn’t formally come into existence until the 1980s. G. Reginald Daniel is a sociology professor who’s taught a class on multiracial identity at the University of California, Santa Barbara for nearly three decades, and even he can’t identify its first usage. He points to television shows like Oprah and Sally Jessy Raphael, where panels on multiracial experiences featuring multiracial people were hastily conceived. “The first time I heard the word multiracial used was on The Phil Donahue Show in 1988,” he tells me. “I was pretty shocked because I’d never heard that word before. Prior to that, nobody was talking about this, surely not in public.”..

Read the entire article here.

Vienna to London: Black to Mixed-Race

Afropean: Adventures in Afro Europe
2015-03-19

Annina Chirade

I was born in Vienna, a place which has historically been a frontier between Eastern and Western Europe. I was primarily brought up in London, a city whose population reflects the reaches of the British Empire. It is also the place my parents forged new homes having left their respective homelands. My father is from Ghana and ethnically Asante (one should really say he is Asante first and foremost). My mother is a child of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and my grandmother’s post-war exile from Sudetenland – her homeland. I’m mixed-race, even though the term never seems to capture the overlapping cultural and personal narratives that exist inside of myself and my family. As a child in the ‘90s, I went back and forth between being black in Vienna and mixed-race in London…

Read the entire article here.

Free at Last?

Commentary
1992-10-01

Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences; Professor of Economics
Brown University

A formative experience of my growing-up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960’s occurred during one of those heated, earnest political rallies so typical of the period. I was about eighteen at the time. Woody, who had been my best friend since Little League, suggested that we attend. Being political neophytes, neither of us knew many of the participants at this rally, which had been called to galvanize the local black community’s response to some pending infringement by the white power structure. Although I no longer remember the offense, I can still vividly recall how very agitated about it we all were, determined to fight the good fight, even to the point of being arrested if it came to that. Judging by his demeanor, Woody was among the most zealous of those present.

Despite his zeal, it took courage for Woody to attend the meeting. Though he often proclaimed his blackness, and though he had a Negro grandparent on each side of the family, he nevertheless looked to all the world like your typical white boy. Everyone assumed as much and I had, too, when we first began playing together nearly a decade earlier, after I had moved into the middle-class neighborhood called Park Manor where Woody’s family had been living for some time.

There were a number of white families on our block when we first arrived; within a couple of years they had all been replaced by aspiring black families like our own. I often wondered why Woody’s parents never moved. Then I overheard his mother declare to one of her new neighbors, “We just wouldn’t run from our own kind.” The comment befuddled me at the time, but somewhat later, while we were watching the movie Imitation of Life on television, my mother explained to me how someone could be black even if he looked white. She told me about people like that in our own family—second cousins living in a fashionable suburb on whom one would never dare simply to drop in because they were “passing for white.” This was my earliest glimpse of the truth that racial identity in America is inherently a social and cultural, not simply a biological, construct—that it necessarily involves an irreducible element of choice.

From the moment I learned of the idea of “passing” I was intrigued (and troubled) by it. I enjoyed imagining my racial brethren surreptitiously infiltrating the citadels of white exclusivity. The fantasy allowed me to believe that, despite all appearances and despite the white man’s best efforts to the contrary, we blacks were nevertheless present, if unannounced, everywhere in American society. But I was also disturbed by the evident implication that for a black, denial of one’s genuine self was a necessary prerequisite to “making it” in American society. What “passing” seemed to say was that it was necessary to choose between racial authenticity and personal success. Also, to my adolescent mind it seemed grossly unfair that, because of my own relatively dark complexion, the option was not available to me!…

Read the entire article here.

White Dads

Mixed Roots Stories
2015-12-16

Sarah Gladstone

Being brown and having a white dad means something, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. Right now, I’m working on an anthology project—“WHITE DADS: Stories and experiences told by people of color, fathered by white men.” I’ve been loving the ways people are taking this idea, supporting it, and helping it grow. Thing is, though, absolutely none of us have the same story to tell about what it’s like being brown, raised by a white guy in a society that ranks validity based on melanin and race. This is a part of my story and the story behind WHITE DADS.

Answers are never just black and white–but in the case of biracial identity, sometimes, that’s exactly what they are…

Read the entire article here.

History Matters: Nanticoke tribe seeks to sustain its identity

Delaware Public Media: Delaware’s source for NPR News
WDDE 91.1, Dover
WMPH 91.7, Wilmington
2015-06-26

Anne Hoffman, Youth Producer and General Assignment Reporter

History Matters examines the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware’s fight to maintain its identity.

They’re called Delaware’s Forgotten Folks.

In the second part of a two-part History Matters – produced in conjunction with the Delaware Historical Society, we continue our in-depth look at the Nanticoke Tribe.

“My name is William Daisey. And my Native American name is Thunder Eagle. And I’m chief of the Nanticoke Indian Tribe of Delaware.”

Chief Daisey was born in 1931 in Millsboro. Back then, he says, transportation was just “Model T’s” and “horse and buggies.” So the farming town in Southern Delaware where he grew up felt a million miles away from bustling Wilmington or even Dover.

“We were taught how to hunt, fish make bow and arrows, rabbit traps. We were taught which berries to pick, which fruit was edible,” said Daisey.

Families back then passed on what are called lifeway traditions, curing illnesses with old remedies and using Native American ways to gather more food than just that year’s harvest. From the time he could walk, Chief Daisey was learning…

Read or listen to the story here. Download the story here.

Play means to help people of mixed race find sense of belonging

MPR News
Minnesota Public Radio
2015-12-15

Marianne Combs, Arts and Culture Reporter

“Purple Cloud,” written by Jessica Huang and directed by Randy Reyes, looks at three generations of hapa, or mixed race, Chinese immigrants as they search to find a place where they belong. Courtesy Keri Pickett | Mu Performing Arts

“What are you?” It’s a question that people of mixed race get all the time.

“Purple Cloud,” a new play produced by Mu Performing Arts, explores what it means to be of mixed race. It’s inspired by playwright Jessica Huang’s own experiences growing up mixed race, and it tells the story of one family’s journey of self-discovery.

“For most of my life I had been struggling with feeling outside, because I’m not white and I’m not Chinese, and I didn’t really know where I belonged,” she explained. “But there was a theater director in town … and she saw me across the room and she pointed at me and said, ‘You — you’re hapa.’

“And I had no idea what that word meant.”…

Read or listen to the story here.

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

Scribner (in imprint of Simon & Schuster)
2009
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780743292917
eBook ISBN: 9781439159378

Staceyann Chin

No one knew Staceyann’s mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother’s house in Lottery, Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann’s mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive.

It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and uncommon intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world.

Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.

Let’s Talk Internalised Racism

Zusterschap: A blog for women who want to challenge social norms.
November 2015

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

All women have to check themselves for internalized misogyny because we live in a patriarchal society. Similarly, all people of colour have to check themselves for internalised racism due to living in a structurally racist society. While looking at internalised misogyny can be difficult, as a woman of colour I’ve noticed I find it much harder to talk about internalised racism – something about it feels more painful and taboo.

I’m scared of being judged about it by white people and people of colour and I feel ashamed of it in a way I don’t about internalised misogyny. I think this may be to do with the level of dehumanisation the black race has faced through slavery and colonisation so maybe there is something protective there about wanting to avoid the hurt that can come with digging up the topic. It’s quite possible after all that my Jamaican ancestors were slaves as Jamaica was a country which was colonised by the British. Also, I feel more vulnerable as a person of colour discussing internalised racism because I’m in a minority and minorities have to be strong in many ways to survive; it’s not easy to show how we’ve been wounded when we can feel precarious in society anyway. I think for many, part of the issue is not having the vocabulary to discuss the problem. In fact, I only learned the phrase ‘internalised racism’ a few years ago…

…As I got older I did start to accept my identity more – or at least I thought I did. I experienced more subtle racial oppression in upper school which centred mainly round my hair and sometimes my mixed race identity specifically. Some of this bullying came from not just white students but black students too. The stereotype that mixed race kids are cute and special in some way possibly buffered me from some suffering but I did not fit the stereotype of being mixed race and attractive. I had big frizzy hair, braces, glasses and my features were seen as more typically ‘black.’ Eventually, as a young woman, I ditched my glasses and braces and I managed to fit the stereotype of being mixed race and attractive more comfortably. However, what many people don’t realise is that if you embrace that stereotype to prop up your self-esteem in the face of racism it can have a nasty fallout for you. I know this because after years of hating my appearance and thinking I was ugly it seemed quite appealing to buy into the idea that being mixed race was somehow intrinsically beautiful…

Read the entire article here.