Mixed Race Studies

I Became So Exhausted With Proving My South Asian Identity That I Started to Ignore It

xoJane
2015-02-24

Anjali Patel

The rules of miscegenation were set long before I came along, and my self-determination to “be myself” was not going to change it.

A couple of years ago, I was at a rooftop party in New York with some of my cousins. I was too young to drink and too shy to mingle, so I hung around awkwardly while they chatted with an attractive blond man who appeared to be in his late 20s. They tag teamed as he pried them with exoticizing questions about their “home country,” flashing his white teeth in jovial approval when they played along with his racist quips. They seemed to be having a good time amusing one another, so I was shocked when pointed his glass in my direction to acknowledge me.

“And what about you?” he said. “You don’t even look Indian.”

Before I could open my mouth, one of my cousins chimed in, “Oh, she’s not. She’s half black.”

“Oh,” he said. They resumed their conversation and I resumed trying to look like I was having a good time.

This happens when I am with my cousins. I was at a St. Patty’s party with one of them about a year ago when I heard someone whisper into her ear, “Is your cousin black?” A few months later I was out to dinner with their group of friends when someone asked me, “Are you guys actually related? You look like you’re from Eritrea or Ethiopia or something.”

“I’m from Pennsylvania, and we’re first cousins. Believe it or not you don’t actually have to look alike to be related,” is what I would have liked to have said. But I was tipsy and there were too many people around, so I said something along the lines of “Yeah, we get that a lot.”

My mother tried to explain to me when I was younger that I was black, and only black, because that is how the world would see me. I resented that. In my eyes, I had an African American mother and a Gujarati father, and that is how the world would see me, because that’s what I was…

Read the entire article here.

Beautiful Aliens.

Mixed Humans ~ Reflections on occupying a space of inbetweenness. Persistently grappling with identity.
2015-01-26

Natalie Armitage

“What beautiful daughters you have!”

It happens a lot. It is a compliment, of course it is. I have green eyes, that are pretty big, and light brown skin. My sister, has the richest auburn hair, which in the light gleamed like fire. She has white skin, with pink rosy cheeks. Mum was very dark, before Vitiligo, with jet black indian hair. I remember looking at her skin against my sisters chubby white rosy flesh…she could have been adopted. I remember climbing on my Dads lap and seeing my arms with his. Well I knew he was my Dad for certain, but having my arm next to his and see the contrast of its colour, used to make me wonder, how we could be so close but never know what it feels like to look like the other. We had different sets of skins.

I am light- which contrary to what some awful skin products tell you- is not necessarily beautiful. Society seems to associate one with the other, not me. I was always envious of the Nigerian girl in my class with braids. To me, she was beautiful. She was bright, funny, could dance, sing and shook her beads at the end of her hair that made a wonderful noise and made her so much prettier. Her laugh was infectious too. I used to dream of being black like her. Femininity, seems to ooze from natural afro-carribbean girls.

My Dad, raised me on jazz. We had pictures of black people all over the house as icons. All I really thought at that age is that black people were the most creative beings of the earth. I am still not convinced that is a wrong perception. Dad would say things like “can you imagine, going through all this pain and suffering by society- just for the colour of your skin?”. Stevie Wonder helped him to illustrate to me this point, through lots and lots of music…

Read the entire article here.

Don’t Erase My Race: 4 Affirmations to Remember When Reclaiming Your Multi-Racial Identity

Everyday Feminism
2015-02-24

Aliya Khan, Contributing Writer

Source: “Navigating Two Different Cultures: A Pakistani Immigrant Girl’s Struggles,” The Brooklyn Ink, (May 16, 2013).

I was walking across campus, on my way to class, when a white man stopped me and asked, “Are you from Bahrain?”

“I’m sorry?” I asked, confused by his question.

“Bahrain? I have a friend who is studying here from there, and you look so similar to her.”

I have a lot of opinions about when and how it is appropriate to ask someone about their race, mostly formed by my early experiences watching my Pakistani father struggle to respond to questions just like that one. But that’s not what first entered my mind this time.

What first entered my mind was, “Oh, he doesn’t think I’m white.”

If I’m not being read as white, people describe me as “racially ambiguous.” Sometimes, my race is ignored completely. Other times, folks make assumptions about my origins, ranging from every continent of the world.

I never understood how or why people developed such diversely varied opinions about my race. Was it my name that gave it away? my skin tone? Did they mistake my Midwest accent for something more “exotic?”

The invalidation of my racial identity from others was confusing growing up. It was a constant reminder that I just didn’t quite fit in.

My experiences growing up with a Pakistani father did not match those of my White friends, but it was also clear that, as someone who was biracial, I didn’t fit in to any other category…

Read the entire article here.

Box Marked Black + Futility of Nicknames

Stage and Studio with Dmae Roberts: The Best of Performing, Literary and Media Arts
KBOO 90.7 FM or KBOO.FM
Portland, Oregon
2015-02-24, 11:00-12:00 PST (Local Time)

Dmae Roberts, Host

Dmae spotlights two different writers: Damaris Webb who’s performing her autobiographical play The Box Marked Black about growing up mixed race and Matt Kolbet, a writer in Newberg who’s just published his debut novel The Futility of Nicknames which is inspired by some elements of his life but is an entirely fictional story. Two varied stories: one real, one imaginary on the next Stage & Studio.

Damaris Webb is a performer, director and teaching artist who recently (re) relocated to Portland, OR after 26 years making and producing work in New York City. Ms Webb holds her MFA from Naropa’s Contemporary Performance Program, and her BFA from NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing. Her original work is often seen in non-traditional performance venues such as late night parties, warehouses and church basements, it is sometimes epic and may involve zombies, superheroes or sock puppets. Recent projects include directing Rich Rubin’s “Cottonwood in the Flood” staged reading for the 2015 Fertile Ground. In Portland, she offers Contemplative Dance Practice through Be Space and is a coach for PlayWrite, Inc. For more info: www.DamarisWebb.com.

The Box Marked Black is a tender solo performance piece, tracing the experience of growing up mulatto in the pre-Huxtable era. With only Jenny Willis from The Jeffersons as a guide, our multi-disciplinary storyteller creates narrative from the perspective of both sides of her interracial family, embodying multiple characters, childhood memories (including a Roots sock puppet re-enactment) and fantasy…

For more information, click here. Download the episode (00:32:01) here.

Black Like Me

Penguin Books
2003-05-06 (originally published in 1961)
208 pages
Paperback ISBN 9780451208644

John Howard Griffin (1920-1980)

In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

An Open Letter to the White Fathers of Black Daughters

bluestockings magazine
2015-02-23

Kelsey Henry

I have been drafting this letter since I was ten. I am twenty and tonight is the first night I will write these words outside of me. I don’t know what they will look like here. Honestly, I am scared to see them uncoiled and still damp from the sweaty palms that have enclosed them for a decade. I am so accustomed to holding fistfuls of aching, rambunctious words around you, Dad. More than anything, I wish you would ask me to open my hands, and actually listen to what you see, what I say, what you hear.

But that is not how we work, is it? I give you the words you don’t know how to ask for. We know all our scripted prompts for loving cautiously. We are used to trafficking in glass blown conversations. I will not, I cannot, do this with you anymore. I love you too much for this, so listen.

Dad, you are a white man. I know this might come as a shock because people do not tell you this too often. You are not approached on the street, in the movies, at the workplace, and ordered to explain your race so strangers can “read” you properly and treat you accordingly. You have both the privilege and the curse of living in the unmarked, white blind spot of the American racial imaginary. If you have enjoyed living there, departing only to return comfortably home to White every night, I’m afraid you have a problem.

Me. I am your problem…

…Dad, since then you have flickered. You are swallowed by whiteness and become racially inaccessible to me the moment my race comes to the fore. When I become Black Girl you become White Man and we are not each other’s anymore…

Read the entire article here.

Is it still Interracial dating when you’re mixed?

Fusion
2015-02-19

Simone Jacobson
Washington, D.C.

No matter where I live or whom I date, I will always be out of context.

Here’s how it all began: My mother and my maternal grandparents were born in Burma. My grandpa’s father was Chinese and my grandma’s father was British; both of their mothers were Burmese. Unlike many first generation Asian Americans, my mom’s first language was English. My paternal grandparents are first and second generation Americans of Eastern European ancestry with firmly established Jewish identities.

Because I was raised in the racially intolerant Southwest, the fact that I developed my own strong Asian American identity is somewhat of a miracle. After all, Phoenix, Arizona is home to the nation’s strictest anti-immigration policies and state university fraternities that host “dress like black people”- themed MLK celebrations. And unlike “majority-black” Washington, D.C., my current home of 14 years, nearly 70 percent of the Phoenician population self-identified as white as of the 2010 Census.

Fortunately for me, I was immersed in a loving community of Asian Americans as early as kindergarten. Outside of my immediate family, the most influential people in my young life were my Thai American best friend (26 years together now, and counting) and my Korean American dance teacher, a strong, handsome man who never raised his voice, showered me with love as if I were his own daughter, and taught me I should always reach across to open the car door for a man whenever he opens mine.

Fast forward to the recent present: I turned 30 last year and was single and freshly broken-hearted for the first time in ten years after investing half a decade in a relationship that did not end up in what I had hoped would be a lifelong commitment. After a decade of back-to-back monogamous relationships throughout my 20s—first with a white Frenchman (three years), then with a black Jamaican Belizean American (five years)—I went on an online dating binge to get over a bad breakup with the latter.

After many continuous, failed attempts at love in the digital space, I was left disappointed and slightly lonelier than when I began. But my yearlong experience of dating strangers (of all races) revealed something more unsettling than the process itself: I’ve never culturally aligned with anyone I’ve dated.

During the online dating binge, I met an exceptionally diverse cast of characters vying for my attention. But one gentleman in particular, a sartorial East Asian dandy, shattered my post-breakup confidence when he said abruptly one day: “I’m a romantic guy, despite what you think. I just don’t see myself falling in love with you.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Feelings

The Center for Asian American Media
1998
45 minutes, VHS

Mikko Jokela, Director/Poducer

Through interviews with five UC Berkeley students and teachers of mixed ethnic heritage, filmmaker Mikko Jokela illuminates the experience of what it is like to grow up part Asian in American society. His peers offer personal anecdotes detailing how their parents met, what it was like growing up, how they initially perceived their own cultural identities and how they see themselves today. Humorous and revelatory, this experimental documentary manages to tackle difficult issues of racial reconciliation while celebrating difference and diversity.

For more information, click here.

My Biracial Life: A Memoir

Philadelphia [Magazine]
2015-02-08

Originally published as “My Wild, Chaotic, Complex, Crazy, Ambiguous (Biracial) Hair” in the February 2015 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Malcolm Burnley

What 25 years with wild, chaotic, complex, crazy, ambiguous hair has taught me.

It’s 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday night at the barren 24-hour Melrose Diner in South Philly. I’m there alone. The hostess is hawkeyed at the cash register, as if I’m going to steal her silverware. She eventually moseys up to my booth. “Do you have a tan, or is that your natural skin color?” she asks. Natural, I tell her. “What are you?” I give her three guesses. “Hawaiian?” Nope. “Samoan?” Getting colder. At this point, a nearby server who’s been eavesdropping on the conversation decides to join in. “Puerto Rican,” he says. Wrong. “Dominican.” Wrong again. Then, five minutes after I’ve told them my ethnicity, a third member of the waitstaff comes up to me. “Hey, I like your skin color — what are you?”

Welcome to my world…

Read the entire article here.

INTERVIEW: Jason Fung, Author of ‘Beyond Eurasian and Hapa’

Hapa Mama: Asian Fusion Family and Food
2015-02-02

Grace Hwang Lynch

I recently had a chance to interview Jason Fung, author of the upcoming book Beyond Eurasian and Hapa. Fung is a 34-year-old mixed-race (Chinese and Caucasian) person who went to high school and college in the U.S. is currently living in Hong Kong. His book draws upon his own family experiences, as well as history, to examine the different terms we use to describe multiracial Asians.

HM: What are your thoughts about the terms “Eurasian” and “Hapa”? How are they good descriptors and how do they fall short?

JF: These terms are really broad, and mean different things to different people.

For example, Macau has Eurasians; India has Eurasians (aka Anglo-Indians); Hong Kong and Sri Lanka and Burma have Eurasians. There are other definitions for the term, but as far as I define it “Eurasian” means one thing: a bloodline traceable to original European colonials. Macau Eurasians, for example, see themselves as utterly distinctive. Even if you are Portuguese-Chinese mixed they still won’t accept you as “Eurasian” by their standards if you were not from the accepted colonial bloodlines.There are plenty of fascinating “Eurasian” stories, surrounded by a rich material culture but “Eurasian” is too singular and closed…

“Hapa” is a term I really want to like. I really do…

Read the entire interview here.