Mixed Race Studies

How to Unlearn History | Ella Achola | TEDxCoventGardenWomen

TEDx Talks
2015-07-21

Ella Achola, Founder
Ain’t I A Woman Collective

From awkward school encounters to groan-inducingly offensive questions, Ella finds herself at the intersections of identity, and shares her big idea for bringing ourselves into the stories we tell.

Ella Achola is a writer and founder of the Ain’t I A Woman Collective. Born in Berlin, Ella founded the Collective as an opportunity to engage with her Afro-German heritage and extend the conversation about Europe’s black diaspora beyond the UK.

First African-American woman novelist revisited

Harvard University Gazette
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2005-03-24

Ken Gewertz, Harvard News Office

Harriet Wilson was a survivor. Now we have proof.

Wilson wrote “Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of A Free Black,” the earliest known novel by an African-American woman. It tells the story of Frado, a young biracial girl born in freedom in New Hampshire who becomes an indentured servant to a tyrannical and abusive white woman. In 1859, when the book was published, the abolitionist movement had created a vogue among Northern readers for autobiographies of escaped slaves, but Wilson’s story of a free black abused by her Northern employer did not fit the established mold, and the novel soon fell into obscurity.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, found a copy of the novel in a used bookstore in the early 1980s and was intrigued by it. Among those specialists who were aware of the book, many doubted whether it was really the work of a black writer, but Gates wondered why anyone in 1859 would identify herself as black unless she were.

He started searching for evidence of Wilson’s existence and eventually succeeded in documenting her life up to 1863. The facts he uncovered closely resembled the events in the life of the novel’s protagonist. Gates, who published his findings in a 1983 edition of the novel, concluded that Wilson must have died around the time the historical trail went cold.

Now evidence has surfaced showing that Wilson survived almost another 40 years, demonstrating in other areas of endeavor the resilience and creativity that allowed her to try her hand at writing.

P. Gabrielle Foreman, associate professor of English and American Studies at Occidental College in California, and Reginald Pitts, a historical researcher and genealogical consultant, spoke Friday (March 18) about information they have uncovered about the latter half of Wilson’s life. The event was sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Department of African and African American Studies. Foreman and Pitts have incorporated their research into an introduction to a new edition of Wilson’s novel (Penguin Classics, 2005)…

Read the entire article here.

Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

Penguin Press
2009 (First published in 1859)
176 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780143105763
Ebook ISBN: 9781440649141

Harriet E. Wilson (1825-1900)

Introduction and Notes by:

P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ned B. Allen Professor of English
University of Delaware

Reginald Pitts

For the 150th anniversary of its first publication, a new edition of the pioneering African-American classic, reflecting groundbreaking discoveries about its author’s life

First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit. This edition incorporates new research showing that Wilson was not only a pioneering African-American literary figure but also an entrepreneur in the black women’s hair care market fifty years before Madame C. J. Walker’s hair care empire made her the country’s first woman millionaire.

Read the book at Project Gutenberg here.

Not Your Post-Racial Future: Why Interracial Families Need to Talk About Race

ARMED
2015-05-17

Sophie Steains

I have this memory that’s been troubling me for a while.

I was 18 and out in Kings Cross for the night. As I was waiting to order at the bar, a man came up and offered to buy me a drink. He was in his early 30s or so, white, built. He told me it was his birthday and that he wanted to celebrate. I knew he was coming on to me, but I was young and naïve, so I let him do it. Anyway, the lady at the bar made up this special blue birthday cocktail for him. She set it on fire, everyone around us cheered. I couldn’t help but join in on the celebration too. But then, as the man motioned to pay, I noticed a photograph tucked into the front pocket of his wallet. It was a young, beautiful Asian woman holding a Eurasian baby. My blood ran cold…

…Growing up half-Okinawan and half-white Australian has left me with a lot of these unanswered questions. It’s led me to the belief that our society just isn’t equipped to discuss mixed-race, despite the fact that I’m seeing mixed-race faces everywhere I look today. Despite the fact that mixed-race people existed on this land well before white people were even a blip on the radar. Watching Japanese-Canadian Jeff Chiba Stearns’ documentary “One Big Hapa Family,” I was struck by how much his own reflections mirrored my own:

“After thinking back on some bizarre identity related experiences that I had growing up mixed, I started to wonder if interracial couples ever considered how their marriages might affect their children? I got the sense that my relatives never discussed multiracial identity with their kids. I mean, not once growing up did I tell my parents that I experienced cultural confusion.”

Often when mixed-race identities are discussed today, they are conflated with this idea of our “post-racial future.” A future where race is no longer an issue and everyone looks like Halle Berry. The kinds of people who seem to be the most vocal about mixed-race are the people who claim that, “Everyone is a bit mixed-race” or “I don’t see race, we are beyond it” etc. There is this belief that Love and its mixed-race children will help break down the barriers that have been so doggedly safe-guarded for the past several hundred years. Parents of mixed-race children often believe this too, I’ve heard it coming from their mouths many times…

Read the entire article here.

The Adoption Papers

Bloodaxe Books
1991
64 pages
21.6 x 13.9 x 0.5 cm
Paperback ISBN: 978-1852241568

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

My Name is Cool: Stories from a Cuban-Irish-American Storyteller

Familius
2013-08-05
170 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781938301568
eBook ISBN: 9781939629029

Antonio Sacre

“In 1960 my father got into a rowboat from Havana, Cuba and rowed 90 miles to the United States to start his new life. By the time I got into seventh grade, I was telling my friends that my father saved all of his family, all of his friends, piled everyone into that boat and rowed everybody over to America. By the time I got into high school, I was telling my friends that my father stole five boats from Castro’s navy, saved all of his friends, all of his family, all of his first, second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, everyone on his block, all of the pets, and everybody on his baseball team. He piled them into the boat. There was no room for him in the boat, so he tied those boats together with a big rope, put that rope around his shoulders and he swam everybody over to the United States. . .”

Born in Boston to a Cuban father and an Irish-American mother, Antonio Sacre is one of the few leprecanos on the national speaking circuit. Using his own personal history and telling the stories that audiences across the nation have found so captivating and wonderful, this award-winning storyteller and author weaves the Spanish language, Cuban and Mexican customs, and Irish humor into an unforgettable book of humor, inspiration, tradition, and family.

My Name is Cool is a classic story sure to transcend, like the author himself, cultures and boundaries.

In the Shadow of Race: Growing Up As A Multiethnic, Multicultural, and “multiracial” American

Routledge
1998
280 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0805825756

Teja Arboleda, President/Creative Director
Entertaining Diversity, Inc.

My father’s father was Filipino-Chinese…
My father’s mother was African American-Native American…
My mother’s father was German-Danish…
My mother’s mother was German…
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up in Japan…

For once it’s not just black and white. In this compelling chronicle of his journey through life as a multicultural and multiethnic American, Teja Arboleda uniquely and personally challenges institutionalized notions of race, culture, ethnicity, and class. Arboleda has presented his story around the United States through his one-man performance-lecture Ethnic Man! Now, in this book, he fleshes out the depth of his experience as a culturally and racially mixed American, illustrating throughout the enigma of cultural and racial identity and the American identity crisis.

To facilitate its use as a course text, In the Shadow of Race is offered with a Teacher’s Guide written by Christine Clark. Topics for discussion include:

• the social construction of race
• racial separatism vs. diversity
• racial, ethnic, and cultural identity development
• the politics of racial categorization
• mixed “race” peoples
• cultural identity vs. identity by heritage
• the concept of a “cultural home
• changing identities within cultures

Contents:

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Race Is a Four Letter Word
• Chapter 2: Among the Trees
• Chapter 3: Four Walls and a Cellar
• Chapter 4: Checkmate
• Chapter 5: Carrots?
• Chapter 6: Plastic Armies
• Chapter 7: Old Fence, New Paint
• Chapter 8: Paper Houses, Horses, and Swords
• Chapter 9: Squares in a Circle
• Chapter 10: Shuffle
• Chapter 11: The Connection
• Chapter 12: The Adjustable Pedestal
• Chapter 13: Hokkaido
• Chapter 14: Two Steps Back
• Chapter 15: The Official Proxy
• Chapter 16: “You’re From China, Right?”
• Chapter 17: The Awakening
• Chapter 18: This Land Is Your Land
• Chapter 19: Top of the Hill
• Chapter 20: Letting Go
• Chapter 21: Check One Only
• Chapter 22: Losses
• Chapter 23: The Testimony
• Chapter 24: One
• Chapter 25: Cool Winds Return Home
• Chapter 26: Home
• About the Author
• Ancilary Materials for Educators

The Divine Auditor

Prarie Schooner: Stories, Poems, Essays, and Reviews since 1926
Volume 87, Issue 2 (2013 Summer)

Sarah Valentine, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

It is still dark when my cell phone begins to buzz. When I flip it open, my mother’s voice comes through a connection often interrupted by the apartment building’s iron girders. We make some awkward small talk and then she says:

“I guess you want to talk about the email you sent me last week.”

“Yes,” I whisper, trying not to wake my boyfriend, Zoran, who is asleep beside me. I glance at the clock and realize it is 6:30 a.m..

“Before I say anything,” she says after a long pause, “tell me if you think we’ve always loved you.”

I begin to tear up at this, and I feel my body grow weak. I know what is coming.

“Of course,” I manage.

She too begins to cry and through sobs tells me a disconnected story about when she was at a spring break house party as a sophomore in college. Someone put something in her drink… She woke up the next day knowing something had happened, someone had taken advantage of her.

“Are you saying . . . you were raped,” I ask, trying to soften my voice as I do so. She cries and does not answer. “Was he . . .” I continue but cannot finish the sentence.

“Yes,” she says. “He was African American.”

“He was black . . .”

“He was,” she says.

“Who was it?” I ask, clambering over Zoran in my underwear, taking the phone into the hallway so as not to wake him.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember.”

Now I don’t know what to say. I want to know more, but her crying, her hurt sounds make me afraid to push. I know that I am sounding harsh when I speak again, but I can’t help it. She doesn’t know who it was, but she knows he was black. She knows that. How does she remember that? But I don’t ask her that.

“Why are you only telling me this now?” I say.

“Because you asked. I have to go, I’m going to be late,” she says.

Then she hangs up and goes to her shift at the hospital.

I stand there shivering in the dark. I cannot decide which is more shocking; that I was conceived in rape or that my father is not the man I’ve grown up with, but some black guy my mother went to school with, whose name she does not remember, who may or may not have drugged her. I have so many questions, but it is this that sticks in my head: both of my parents and my two younger brothers are white. After years of suspecting I was not, finally at the age of twenty-seven I gathered the courage to ask my mother about it. And this is how she tells me. I don’t even know if my father knows. I mean the man I have called my father for twenty-eight years. Is this a secret from him, too? Sadness mixes with anger and disbelief. But there is also a sense of resolution; so I’m not a freak of nature. There is a rational explanation for me after all. This is what I tell myself, but none of it is rational. My brain is still trying to make sense of it all…

Read an excerpt of the essay here.

Is it ’cause I’m not black?

moniquerants: Education Lover. Discoverer of Healthy Eating. Headphone Raver. Opinionated Ranter.
2015-07-06

Monique Bell

Years of mistaken identity and assumed whiteness have understandably left me with a miniature chip on my shoulder, and what better way to deal with that chip than writing to the world about it? In case you were not aware I am mixed race. Yes, half and half, not a quarter, not a distant relative, not ‘a bit of a tan’, not ‘maybe Mediterranean’, not white, not black, but actually mixed race. My mother was born in the United Kingdom and is English, my father was born in the United Kingdom too but my grandmother on my dad’s side traveled over to the UK with my great-grandmother- who we called Mama – from Trinidad to the UK, and prior to that Mama had migrated from Grenada to Trinidad. So I am half Caribbean and half English.

Ethnic identity shapes part of one’s human identity as well as the influence of one’s primary and secondary socialisation. Human identity is also shaped by how you are perceived by others; if everyone told me I was a tomato, I’d likely start believing I was indeed a giant walking talking tomato, a bit like the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson. My experience as a child was quite different to that of my peers. I grew up in an affluent predominantly White town in the Home Counties but I grew up in a far from nuclear family. Even though I regularly spent time with my dad, we were one of a few single-parent families in the town and my mum had to receive state support too. My older sister and I are different colours; in case you weren’t aware mixed race people come in a range of beautiful colours! And yes, some of us look white, some of us look black, caramel, toffee, vanilla and everything in between. This blew the shit off the heads of people in my town and even now one of the first assumptions is that we’re half sisters. Ironically, I am actually a closer skin colour to my half brother and sister who are my dads other children…

Read the entire article here.

When I Was White

The Chronicle Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2015-07-06

Sarah Valentine, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Sarah Valentine as a girl, with her two brothers (Source: Family photo)

Rachel Dolezal’s recent unmasking as a white woman living as black sparked a debate about the legitimacy of “transracial” experience. I cannot speak for Dolezal or anyone else, but I can state for a fact that racial transition is a valid experience, because I have gone through it.

While most people would look at this photo and see a black girl, two white boys, and a very surprised cat, they would be wrong. The girl in the photo is white, just like her brothers. I was raised in a white family from birth and taught to identify as white. For most of my life, I didn’t know that my biological father was black. Whenever I asked as a child about my darker skin, my mother corrected me, saying it was not dark but “olive.” When others asked if I was adopted, my mother ignored them. Eventually everyone, including me, stopped asking.

When, as an adult, I learned the truth of my paternity, I began the difficult process of changing my identity from white to black. The difficulty did not lie in an unwillingness to give up my whiteness. On the contrary, the revelation of my paternity was a relief: It confirmed that I was different from my parents and siblings, something I had felt deeply all my life.

The dilemma I faced was this: If I am mixed race and black, what do I do with the white sense of self I lived with for 27 years, and how does one become black? Is that even possible? Now, you may say that the rest of the world already saw me as black and all I had to do was catch up. True. But “catching up” meant that I had to blow the lid off the Pandora’s box of everything I thought I knew about myself and about race in America…

Read the entire article here.