Mixed Race Studies

The family who never knew their father

BBC News Magazine
2015-08-28

Harry Low

Our story about the forced repatriation of Chinese sailors who had been recruited for the Merchant Navy during World War Two told of the devastation for those families left behind. Barbara Janecek shared her own tale in response.

She had read about Yvonne Foley, whose father Nan Young, a Chinese ship engineer, was sent back to the Far East following the end of the war. He was one of thousands of recruits from Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong who lived in Liverpool.

“I was always waiting for my father to come back, I was always daydreaming he would,” says Barbara, whose father John had suffered the same fate. John Ong had married Eileen Hing in 1943 when they were both aged 23. Eileen was devastated when her husband left, leaving his wife to raise three children under the age of four…

Read the entire article here.

Looking for my Shanghai father

BBC News Magazine
2015-08-25

Jody-Lan Castle

Yvonne Foley with her mother Grace

After World War Two ended, the British government forcibly repatriated hundreds of Chinese sailors who had been recruited for the Merchant Navy. Their sudden departure had a devastating effect on families left behind, like that of Yvonne Foley.

“You’re just like your father,” Yvonne’s mother exclaimed, “always arguing, trying to change the world.”

The nine-year-old was confused. That sounded nothing like her father.

“I mean your Shanghai father,” her mother insisted.

Who? Yvonne was momentarily baffled, but then put it to the back of her mind.

Two years later, in 1957, the subject came up again. This time her mother, Grace, wanted to tell her more.

The man Yvonne had been calling “Dad” was not her biological father. Instead her birth father was Nan Young, a Chinese ship engineer her mother had met in Liverpool in 1943…

Read the entire article here.

High Yellow

Poetry Foundation
October 2014

Hannah Lowe

Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible storm
swerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailors
I think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming the
white, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shore
Scottish-Englishness…

Read the entire poem here.

White on Paper

Those People
2015-08-20

John Metta

My sister opening presents while I try to steal the show. Just ordinary Black children having a birthday party, unconscionably ignoring dominant stereotypes.

In June, Rachel Dolezal, an activist and former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, was outed by her parents as being a white woman. She later left the organization. And just yesterday, Shaun King, an activist affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, was “outed” by Vicki Pate as being white on Re-NewsIt!, her blog.

Now, let me be clear: This essay is not about Rachel Dolezal pretending to be Black, nor is it about whether Shaun King is Black. This essay is about being Black, in a white world, under a white media lens.

So there are questions about Shaun King’s race based on a police report that lists him as white. This has little to do with his race, and everything to do with institutionalized racism. It’s most likely that an officer was filling out a form, and decided he was white because it wasn’t worth it to actually ask the question.

I know that can happen because it has happened to me many times…

Read the entire article here.

Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie?

Al Jazeera Magazine
2015-08-21

John Metta

“There are no qualifiers to my blackness, and I will never again be Not Black Enough. I am a black man, and I am angry.”

My father’s anger was a storm.

Like many other boys, I was carefree and careless with a thoughtlessness that bordered on stupidity. The world revolved around my desire to laugh and run in a bubble of fun and I rarely noticed the wake of catastrophe that cast out behind me. But I was always aware of my father watching me, and I was aware of the storm.

He was a giant of a man, with a voice like thunder in the distance. I was a butterfly, small and frightened, observing the horizon of his brow, watching to see if the storm clouds were coming near, waiting for the winds to blow in my direction.

Surprisingly, despite my raucous behaviour, they very rarely did.

There was a deep anger in my father, but that storm ravaged other lands. Most often, my delicate wings felt only his whisper. But the whisper of my father was still a very powerful thing.

Each of my siblings have their stories about these whispers, about the times my father sat them down to have A Talk – a proper noun that is capitalised in our childhood memories the way A Beating is for some children. A Talk was a gruelling ordeal of mental torture where your mind felt like a balloon filled with too much water.

I, the only son of his six children (and his least intelligent child by far), was often caught off guard by A Talk…

Read the entire article here.

Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story

Daily Kos
2015-08-20

Shaun King

[Shaun King] 14 years old. Sophomore in high school

Over the past 72 hours I have been attacked with lies by the conservative media, lies that have been picked up by the traditional media and spread further. I have kept silent at the advice of friends and mentors, but I will do so no longer.

The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies. My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. My mother and I have discussed her affair. She was a young woman in a bad relationship and I have no judgment. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly 20 years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it. All of my siblings and I have different parents. I’m actually not even sure how many siblings I have. It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America. I resent that lies have been reported as truth and that the obviously racist intentions of these attacks have been consistently downplayed at my expense and that of my family…

Read the entire article here.

Lacey Schwartz didn’t know she was black, but her black friends did

Fusion
2015-08-19

Collier Meyerson

With two white parents and no black family members (save for a dark Sicilian uncle a couple generations removed), Lacey Schwartz was raised thinking she was white. Growing up, Schwartz’s community was predominantly white: her friends, her classes, her summer camp.

But the few black people in Schwartz’s life struck a nerve—and poked holes in the story she told herself and in the story her family told her.

I worked on Schwartz’s documentary Little White Lie, which details her journey from white to black, of being the product of a family secret overloaded with an extramarital affair, love, and betrayal.

During that time, it wasn’t the salacious stuff I was interested in. I wanted to know about how Schwartz came into blackness and who ushered her in. When you don’t grow up with a black parent or in a black community, or even consciously knowing you are black, how do you become black?

I came to learn that the black people in her life made lasting impressions on her—from near and far—even before she had the language or knowledge of her blackness. They pushed her, listened to her, taught and accepted her.

It was black people who always knew Lacey Schwartz was black. No one had the wool over their eyes. So I asked her about it…

Read the entire interview here.

Is It Possible to Balance Two Cultures Perfectly?

Mixed Roots Stories
2015-08-06

Brittany Muddamalle, Guest Blogger

I met my husband in California during a program with our church. We were just two young kids falling in love. We were lost in our own world. The scope of our differences didn’t really come out until we were engaged. We decided to have a half Indian and half American wedding. We had this grand idea of a perfectly blended wedding, which would lead to a perfectly blended life.

We did pretty well bringing both cultures in, but the more we strived for perfection, the further away it got. I finally got to the point during all of my wedding planning where I decided to just let the pieces fall where they may. It ended up being just what we needed.

Our wedding was beautiful. I married my best friend. Afterwards, I sat there, during the reception, holding my husband’s hand. We were watching two cultures collide beautifully. Americans and Indians were dancing together to Bollywood and American music, wedding traditions from both sides were coming together smoothly, and everyone was having a great time celebrating.

Then I realized that perfection didn’t matter. All that mattered was my husband and I were bringing two cultures together into one family…

Read the entire article here.

Showtime Adapting Mat Johnson’s Novel ‘Loving Day’ As Comedy About Racial Identity

Deadline Hollywood
2015-08-17

Nellie Andreeva, TV Editor

In a competitive situation, Showtime has acquired the rights to Mat Johnson’s recently published semi-autobiographical novel Loving Day as a potential comedy series. Talks are underway with high-end writers to collaborate with the author on penning the adaptation.

Loving Day offers a satirical look at a biracial man’s experiences with race, identity and fatherhood. It tells the story of Warren Duffy, an Irish/African-American living in Wales who returns to America after his comic book store closes, his marriage falls apart and his father dies. Now in possession of his late father’s deteriorated Philadelphia mansion – which might be haunted – a new surprise emerges: Duffy learns he has a teenage daughter who thinks she’s white. Spinning from these upheavals and revelations, Duffy sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter in tow and a litany of absurdly funny moments together as they bond over their newfound relationship and discoveries of their individual cultural identities…

Read the entire article here.

Jamaican British | Raymond Antrobus | Spoken Word

Chill Pill Shorts
2015-08-18

Raymond Antrobus, Poet, Lead Educator
Spoken Word Education MA Programme; Co-founder of @ChillPillUK & @KHPoets

A poem by Raymond Antrobus about the many contradictions of a mixed race identity

Some people would deny that I’m Jamaican British.
Angelo nose. Hair straight. No way I can be Jamaican British.

They think I say I’m black when I say Jamaican British
but the English boys at school made me choose Jamaican, British?…