Mixed Race Studies

Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave

Lushena Books
2014-02-20 (Originally published in 1849)
104 pages
0.2 x 4.9 x 7.9 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 1631820060
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1631820069

Henry Bibb (1815-1854)

Read the entire narrative, courtesy of Documenting the American South (DocSouth) here.

The Terrible Tale Of My Racist One-Night Stand

BuzzFeed
2015-10-24

Ella Sackville Adjei, BuzzFeed Contributor

Tom Humberstone for BuzzFeed

This is the tale of how I accidentally slept with a racist, and the laughably horrible things he said to me while I lay in his bed.

In July I travelled around the Cyclades with two friends, reunited after spending a year apart at different universities, and re-learning who we might have become in the time away. We’d met Australian Sam and his friend in Athens and, excited at seeing a familiar face in a Mykonos club, dragged them across the dance floor. What we took for enthusiasm at mutual recognition turned out to be more prosaic; Australian Sam and co had no memory at all of our previous meeting and clearly thought their irresistible physical magnetism was what made us pluck them out of the crowd. When you’re determined to get over an ex – even if it has been the best part of a year since the breakup – and let’s be real, prove that “still got it!” attractiveness to yourself, bad things can happen…

…A classmate I spoke to, who is of mixed black and white Southeast African origin, had slept with a white South African who insisted on discussing apartheid, her “tribe”, and his exhilaration at “breaking the rules”. The rhetoric and mentality of colonialism is so often still painfully present for so many of us – and not just in our institutions and systems. And unfortunately, racists don’t tend to wear badges to identify them: It would be a lot easier to work out who to avoid on a sweaty dance floor if they did, and whose bright blue eyes to ignore…

Read the entire article here.

“Brillo head,” “Don King,” “Sideshow Bob”: It took me years to embrace the hair that white people scorned

Salon
2015-11-28

Sarah Enelow

Growing up, everyone thought they could “fix” my hair. I believed them, and paid the price.

I was 16 and had been in the bathroom for two hours working on my hair. My tools were scattered all over the sink: a brush with bent-up bristles, a dozen barrettes and ties clogged with clumps of my torn-out hair, a spray bottle of water, loads of leave-in conditioner, and various gels and serums for “damaged” hair with names like Frizz Be Gone.

That month’s Seventeen magazine lay open to a tutorial on creating an “effortless” up-do, modeled by a cheerful blonde, but what I saw in the small mirror hanging on a nail above the sink was an ungainly afro whose tight, wiry, dark brown curls had been ripped apart. My eyes were red from crying and my skinny arms were exhausted from being held above my head so long.

I shoved the butt of my hand into the mirror—it went pop as shards of glass fell into the sink and a thin stream of blood ran down my forearm. I got myself a Band-aid, cleaned up quietly, pulled my hair back into a low bun, and retreated to my room. If I left my hair in that bun long enough, it might be semi-straight when I took it out, so long as it never got wet again, but that wasn’t feasible. When I started growing my hair out around age 8, I didn’t realize I had to de-tangle it daily in the shower, so one morning I woke up with fat dreadlocks and had to get them cut out…

Read the entire article here.

Watch This Poet Break Down His Afro-Latino Identity

Black Youth Project
2015-11-03

Jenn M. Jackson, Managing Editor

Gabriel Ramirez’s poem, “On Realizing I Am Black,” performed at the 2015 National Poetry Slam [2015-08-10 to 2015-08-15] in Oakland, CA is an eloquent oration on personhood at the margins.

There is nothing more beautiful than authenticity. But, in the face of imposition, oppression, and exclusion, that authenticity grows all the more radiant and incandescent. This poem, which creeps along the contours of Blackness and Latino-ness and Mixed-ness in the United States is the perfect articulation of how these intersecting identities have come to define a generation…

Identity Does Not Define Experiences

The Oberlin Review
Oberlin, Ohio
2015-04-24

Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura, College senior

To the Editors:

My name is Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura. I take he, him and his. I am a mixed-race Japanese American. I am cisgender and heterosexual; I am from Ohio and a strictly middle-class background. (I received a federal Pell Grant one year and not others because my family is right on the cusp of certain federal guidelines.) My father is an immigrant with no college degree, while my mother has a Master’s degree. (You might be surprised at who makes more money.) I am the oldest and only son of four children. I am graduating in May and have gained tremendously from my Oberlin education.

This introduction is meant to highlight both my social privileges and challenges. (These are in fact relative terms, which means some elements of my identity have simultaneously advantaged me and been used to discriminate against me.) Asian Americans (particularly Midwestern ones and Ohio students in general) make up a fraction of Oberlin’s student body, while students of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian descents are disproportionately represented, relative to their national populations, in American college campuses. In this country, people generally refer to me as part Asian, whereas in Japan I am overwhelmingly thought of as White. I will graduate from Oberlin with roughly $35,000 in loans (higher than the national average), yet statistics indicate I am better positioned to find a good job and start a family than my peers on this campus who come from low-income backgrounds.

There are many layers to my life story. I straddle the boundary between majority and minority, sometimes enjoying the benefits of one while enduring the hardships of the other…

Read the entire letter here.

Hapa-Palooza 2015 | Talking Hapa With Canadian Broadcaster Margaret Gallager

Schema Magazine
2015-09-17

Marissa Willcox

Hapa-palooza is here! Celebrating what Vancouver does best: mixed-heritage and blended cultural identities. Drawing from the Hawaiian origin of the word “hapa” (used by many people in Canada and U.S. who identify as being of mixed-heritage) Vancouver is a perfect venue this year’s diverse array of speakers, workshops and family events.

This festival spans over four days and features many mixed-heritage voices, including Vancouver’s much-loved broadcaster Margaret Gallager. An award winning CBC radio host, she joins Lawrence Hill on September 17th for a much-anticipated evening of stimulating conversation at the GoldCorp Centre for the Arts. Marissa Willcox had a chance to ask her a few questions about her cultural identity and work in Canada’s public broadcaster.

Marissa Willcox: As a broadcaster and community member of mixed-heritage, to what extent is Vancouver’s ethnic and cultural diversity an aspect of the stories you cover?

Margaret Gallager: As someone who works for the public broadcaster, it’s part of my job (and privilege) to reflect Canadian society through the stories I bring to air. And diversity is a huge part of who we are, especially in Vancouver. So, if you’re doing your job right, some of those stories are naturally going to come from diverse communities.

I’d say that cultural diversity is better reflected in the media these days than it was when I was growing up, whether that is in the stories that are told, or the people who are presenting them. And I think that change came about in part through a conscious effort that has taken years…

Read the entire interview here.

Diversity and Multiracial Voices

Mount Holyoke Radix
South Hadley, Massachusetts
2015-11-10

Sonia Mohammadzadah ’18, Contributing Writer

***Please note: my use of the term “cultural org” includes both cultural orgs associated with cultural houses and those that are not.

As someone who identifies as biracial, I’m never quite sure where I stand or what my role is in the discussion of race. I am half-White, and have thus benefited from certain privileges awarded to white people. However, I am also half-Afghan, and have consequently faced discrimination typically inflicted upon those of a Middle Eastern background, though I am an American-born citizen. When I try and contribute to conversations on race from both a White and non-White perspective, I often feel (and have been told) that I am “playing both sides” on a field that has been clearly divided into two distinct teams. While some may argue my position as a biracial person offers valuable insight in racial dialogue, I’ve noticed that a multiracial, multicultural point of view is not often sought. It is assumed that you are either White, or you are not White. Where is the space for individuals who are both?…

Read the entire article here.

Dolly Fernandez: Growing up in a love-filled, mixed-race family in the anti-miscegenation era

The FilAm: A Magazine for Filipino Americans in New York
2015-11-20

Cristina DC Pastor, Founding Editor

“It was a scandal, but it was also a happy marriage. They just had so much fun together.”

Dolores ‘Dolly’ Fernandez, the daughter of a Filipino valet and a Norwegian hat check girl, traveled back in time and shared fond memories of her parents’ stirring romance amid anti-miscegenation laws which criminalized interracial marriages in the 1930s to the ‘60s.

The statute was applied mostly on ‘Negro-white’ marriages, but hanged over the heads of Filipino pioneers – or ‘manongs’ — in California, who worked in plantations farms. Some of them married outside the U.S. yet they could not be seen in public with their wives because of fear of the law – which was repealed in 1967– and fear of public humiliation. By that time, the seeds of racial prejudice had been planted on the Filipino consciousness.

Dolly recalled growing up in a mixed-race family in New York City during this era where the prevailing attitude around the country was to frown on any union of different races. Filipinos were referred to as Malays. Her father, Pio Fernandez of Baybay, Leyte, and mother, Agnes Olsen, got married, made a home in Astoria, Queens and filled it with love, music, and laughter…

Read the entire article here.

Nobody Discussed It: Lacey Schwartz and “Little White Lie”

Radio Curious
Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
2015-05-11

Barry Vogel, Producer
Ukiah, California

The secret revealed in the life of Lacey Schwartz, born in 1987 to a white Jewish family in rural upstate New York, where she grew up, is that her biological father was black. The few who knew her truth remained silent until after her first year of college when she asked her mother why she looked the way she did. Lacey Schwartz is the producer and director of the film “Little White Lie,” with a website at http://www.littlewhiteliethefilm.com.

“Little White Lie” will be shown at the Mendocino Film Festival on May 29, 2015, in the village of Mendocino, California.

Lacey Schwartz and I visited by phone from her home near New York City, on May 11, 2015. First we hear a clip of Lacey’s voice taken from the introduction of the film “Little White Lie,” and later intersperse our conversation with clips from the film.

The book Lacey Schwartz recommends is “How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement,” by Ruth Feldstein.

Listen to the story (00:29:01) here.

Editorial: Biracial in the Time of Black Lives Matter

NBC News
2015-11-22

Amity Paye

I’ll never forget the first Black Lives Matter protest I attended in New York. After years of rallying against police violence in New York, this was the first night where race was the central message. As a Black woman it spoke to the deeply personal feelings I already had about police killings.

With each victim killed by the police without recourse, I feared for my life, for my family members, my friends and my future children. But I am also biracial. A Peace Corps baby, my white mother met and later married my Black father while teaching in in Liberia. When I go home to visit family almost every face at the table, most of my closest loved ones are white.

Across the country, Black people are combating institutionalized racism and demanding justice. But what happens when the very people doing this work are biracial: biologically connected to our current Black movement and also the white power systems we are searching to change?…

Read the entire article here.