Mixed Race Studies

Sunday Stew: Unsolicited Advice For A Black Girl Too Light To Be Heavy But Too Heavy To Be White

South Seattle Emerald
2015-04-12

Nikkita Oliver

Painting by Tarra Louis-Charles

In the Style of Jeanann Verlee

Unsolicited Advice for a Black Mixed Girl

Too Light to be Heavy, but too Heavy to be White:

When the girl in your class fixes her lips

to call your mother a “nigger lover”

Fix her face

So next time she thinks twice

Before fixin’ her lips around anyone’s mama

When the kids on the playground start to sing

“Jungle Fever”

Join them

You must live

to fight another day…

Read the entire poem here.

Lacey Schwartz Unearths Family Secrets in ‘Little White Lie’

KCRW 89.9 MHz FM
Santa Monica, California
2015-04-13

Kim Masters, Host

Kaitlin Parker, Producer

Lacey Schwartz grew up thinking she was white. When her college labeled her a black student based on a photograph, she knew she had to get some explanations from her family. Those conversations formed the foundation of her new PBS documentary Little White Lie. She shares how she convinced her parents to talk about tough topics on camera and why documentaries like hers are in danger of being pushed out of primetime on some PBS stations.

Listen to the episode (00:29:07) here. Download the episode here.

How I Learned to Stop Worshipping Whiteness While Growing Up Biracial

For Harriet
2015-04-08

Joleen Brantle

I haven’t always been very racially aware. When I was a child Pokémon cards, cartoons, and school were of vastly greater importance to me. I was raised in a very diverse city with a strong Latino presence. I had friends of every race. Why would one’s skin color matter? It certainly didn’t to me.

That naivety ended abruptly in 5th grade. Two significant factors came to a head. I began attending an all-white conservative Church, and my African-American father died; which catalyzed my process of rejecting him to appease the pain he had caused me, the effects of which I’m still working to undo.

Until I started attending this Church, I really hadn’t been in many, if any, racially segregated spheres. So it was a bit of a culture shock when I met people who referred to me as a “little colored girl” and told me interracial marriage, which I am proudly the product of, is a sin. But I loved these white people! As a child I always sought to please and generally took everything an adult said as the infallible truth (that actually began changing around this time). These people looked just like my mother and were very kind to me with the exception of the occasional offhand, casually racist, remark. What was I supposed to think?…

Read the entire article here.

In Confessions of a Peppermint Pattie, a ‘Whiteblack’ Girl Asks if She’s Black Enough

The Root
2015-03-24

Hope Wabuke, Media Director
Kimbilio Center for African-American Fiction

From the way she speaks to the color of her skin, a former TV personality explores the ways in which she does and doesn’t fit society’s conceptions of blackness.

When Barack Obama arrived on the national political stage and emerged as a presidential contender, more than one observer asked whether the young, biracial, Ivy League-educated U.S. senator was black enough to be the first African-American president. And this kind of authenticity challenge isn’t new: Many other black Americans—upwardly mobile and highly educated—are sometimes seen as “not black enough.” There’s a sense that to be black, one must fit into a narrow box of stereotypes rather than embrace the many-faceted experiences and identities of black people.

So what does it mean to be black—and to be black enough?

These, ostensibly, are the questions that former TV host and news anchor Donna Davis poses in her debut nonfiction book, Confessions of a Peppermint Pattie: Why I Really Am Black Enough Already, Y’All. This journey begins when Davis’ 14-year-old son tells her that she is “not a real black person” but “so white until you’re not even an Oreo anymore.” He calls her a “York Peppermint Pattie.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Sharp White Background

Renegade
2015-04-02

Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence (aka the Blazian Invasion)

how I learned what race feels like

Just Words

I am riding home from middle school in Washington, D.C. one day when a white man gets on my bus full of black faces and calls us nigger. My stomach drops. The boys at the back of the bus rise. This is the first time I will hear that word exit the mouth of a real-life white person, not in the movies, but here, on my bus, on this bus full of blackness. As I walk home from the bus stop that day, I struggle to make sense of the feeling this man has left with me, the smallness, the brokenness, the shame slowly growing inside me. I will not hear this word shouted by a white man into a crowd of black and brown for another eight years, and eight years later I will still not know what to do.

In the basement cafeteria of my black elementary school, I am teased for the musubi I bring in my lunchbox, white rice wrapped in nori, pressed into pyramid in the salty palm of my mother’s hand. “Ewww, what is that smell?” “Seaweed,” I answer. The word feels foreign and wrong on my tongue, but I push it out anyway, attempting awkward translation. “Seaweed??” They crinkle their noses and I feel I am foreign, I am wrong, I do not fit into this landscape of lunchables, gushers, and frozen fishsticks. I go home. I ask my mother to pack me a sandwich. I miss musubi.

When my classmates pull their eyes into slits, contort their mouths into ching chong chinaman talk, and call our volunteer chess teacher Mr. Tsunami though that is not his name, my cheeks flash hot again. Do my eyes look like that? Are they talking about me? Somehow I know I am tied to this taunting, that I am target though they’re not looking at me, the words still clinging to my skin as if sensing the yellow beneath the brown. I look at my eyes in the mirror, turn my head to the side, search for slits. Who is this they’ve made of me?…

Read the entire article here.

The Perfect Struggle: MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry On Being Okay With Making Mistakes

Vibe
2015-03-27

Shenequa Golding

Melissa Harris-Perry

In the history of high school drama, nerds tend to get the short end of the stick. While preferring to keep their noses buried in books, the academically zealous usually opt out of Mean Girl gossip and make social sacrifices to land 4.0 GPAs and clock in for extracurricular endeavors.

But geniuses nationwide re-upped on cool points when Melissa Harris-Perry, host of the wildly popular The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, boldly and unapologetically claimed to be of the same ilk. While the Virginia-raised author, professor and public speaker is warm, funny and personable, MHP is no fool, often diving deep into topics of politics, art, race and whatever else the mother of two feels demands attention.

And while Melissa proudly lets her nerd flag fly, she’ll also show off her cool side while dancing in her seat to hip-hop, R&B and other smooth tunes as the show goes to commercial break. VIBE called up MHP to discuss race, balancing life in North Carolina and New York, and the one thing women shouldn’t fear.

Shh, enough talking. Class is in session…

…On realizing my race and gender:

So I’m African-American. My mother is white and my father is black and both my parents were married before they met and had me. I have one sibling who has two white parents and three siblings where both parents are black, so we’re truly a mixed race family. It was something that I was always aware of, but specifically when I was 14 and I was a freshman in high school. Two very different things happened. I was a cheerleader and I loved being one. I went to a public high school in central Virginia where football is king. It was very clear to me that there was a cap for how many black girls could be on the team and that no matter how many black guys were on the football team, people in the stands didn’t want to see more than a few African-American girls as part of the cheerleading squad. So I not only learned about being black and a woman, but also being light-skinned because one of my girlfriends who was dark-skinned and was equally good, did not make the team when I did. The other thing is I’m a sexual assault survivor and that was the year I was assaulted. The perpetrator is an African-American man, who was my neighbor. I didn’t tell [anyone] for about 10 years. One of the reasons I didn’t tell [anyone about it] was about race, [from] experiencing the worst kind of vulnerability as a girl and as a woman, and suddenly understanding what it means to be a girl and victimized in this way, and then for [the perp] to be someone who was in the [same] race group…

Read the entire interview here.

Little White Lie

Apple iTunes
2015-03-31
USA
01:06:00

Lacey Schwartz

Also available via Amazon.

Filmmaker Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical upper middle class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her identity, despite occasional remarks from those around her who wondered how a white girl could have such dark skin. As a child she always believed her family’s explanation — that her appearance was inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather — but as a teenager, after her parents abruptly split, her gut begins to tell her something else. Lacey’s suspicions intensify when she attends a more diverse high school, where she suddenly doesn’t quite fit any racial profile, and her classmates are vocal about noting it. At the urging of her boyfriend, who is of mixed race, she begins to question her true identity and the validity of her parents’ explanation. At 18, Lacey finally confronts her mother and learns the truth about her biological father. As Little White Lie shows, both the bonds and the lies told between family members can run deep. Lacey strives to reconcile her newfound African American heritage with her Jewish upbringing, and discovers that in order to define herself, she must first come to terms with her parents’ choices and how much she is willing to let their past affect her future. Piecing together her family history and the story of her dual identity using home videos, archival footage, interviews, and episodes from her own life, Lacey discovers that answering those questions means understanding her parents’ stories as well as her own.

For more information, click here.

The Undertaker’s Daughter

University of Pittsburgh Press
October 2011
104 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 9780822962007

Toi Derricotte, Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

View the Table of Contents here. Read a selection from the book here.

The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey

W. W. Norton & Company
June 1999
208 pages
5.1 × 8 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-31901-9

Toi Derricotte, Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Black Notebooks is one of the most extraordinary and courageous accounts of race in this country, seen through the eyes of a light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet. It challenges all our preconceived notions of what it means to be black or white, and what it means to be human.

Race In The Jewish Community: A Mischling’s Perspective

The Jerusalem Post
2015-03-30

Ella Bennett

Introduction

As a person of mixed-race black and maternal Jewish heritage, I am a mischling and feel highly motivated to stand equally against racism and anti-Semitism.  When I go out and about in the Jewish community people naturally see my colour first, and depending on whether I’m wearing my hair as an afro or in the way Anne Frank wore her hair, some people in the Jewish community do not automatically assume that I’m Jewish.  Although some say I look Israeli, I’ve learned that there’s a belief in small sections of the community that you can’t be Jewish if you’re black, a subject I wrote about in an earlier blog called “How Can I Be Jewish When I Am Black?”  There is also a belief that the presence of Ethiopian Jews in Israel is incontrovertible proof that there is no racism in the Jewish community, either towards mischlinges and black Jews or anyone else of colour.

The concern I express in this blog is that when I want to talk to some of my favourite Jewish friends and associates about my life, my experiences of racism and my efforts to tackle it, I find myself isolated, slightly ostracised, and sadly in two extreme cases, cut off completely.  By reading between the lines I have learned that racism in the community or at large is neither admitted nor discussed openly as to do so is perceived as negative and liable to attract anti-Semitism…

Read the entire article here.