Mixed Race Studies

Talking About Race – An Essay

Ms. Food Queen: Cooking Across Difference
July 2014

Christine Gregory

In the Korean language, “heug–in sa ram” means “black person.” The word “heug” also means dirt. I realized this when I was in high school and confronted my mother about it. She bristled, and said that I was too sensitive. I looked to my father for back up, but he would provide none. Though he was African American and born in rural South Carolina, he never spoke of his experiences with prejudice or bias. I recall once on a visit home from college, hoping to inspire a conversation about the cultural and racial differences in his and my mother’s relationship, I asked him how he felt about being in an interracial marriage with a Korean woman. He replied, “What are you talking about? Your mama ain’t white.”

Growing up, we never talked about race– and it drove me crazy. From my perspective, our lives revolved around our identity, yet we never discussed what it meant to be black, Korean, or mixed. Among my mother’s Korean friends, co-workers and acquaintances, my brother and I were black. They were shocked at our taste for Korean food beyond mainstream kimchi and bulgogi; and equally astounded by my ability to speak Korean so well! Out of sheer ignorance, they excluded us from church activities meant only for “full-blooded” Korean parishioners, not realizing that they were replicating, in Jim Crow-like fashion, the racism of prior decades.

To black folks, we were mixed. Not quite African American, but brown enough to be included in social networks and friend groups that gave us a sense of community and belonging. Almost all of my friends were black or biracial. With several military bases nearby, mixed race children were not uncommon in our neighborhood. Yet our Korean heritage was still a subject of fascination. Why didn’t we own a grocery mart or dry cleaners? No. We don’t know Karate (and it’s Tae Kwon Do, thank-you-very-much). No. We don’t eat dogs and kimchee is not spoiled cabbage…

Read the entire article here.

Northern Ireland’s most (un)wanted

Media Diversified
2014-07-28

Jayne Olorunda

Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast has had many songs written about it. The lyrics of one Belfast song resonates in my ear as I think of the reputation the city now has. The lyrics of the song always stood out to me, but now they are more ironic than ever. The song goes, ‘Belfast, Belfast a wonderful town it doesn’t matter if your skin is brown’ I wonder if this was ever true? It certainly wasn’t in my time or even in my parent’s time. The outside world knows Northern Ireland as a country dominated by sectarian strife where Catholic and Protestant people have for decades been at war. This is of course true, but within Northern Ireland other hate based dynamics exist, recently they have come to the fore. Today’s Northern Ireland has a serious problem with racism and it is fast becoming a problem that can no longer be brushed aside…

…I am Northern Irish, but I am also black and this is not a comfortable position to be in, at times it has felt like a disastrous combination. My story came to public attention when I wrote ‘Legacy’ a book about my families experiences in Northern Ireland. It documents the difficulties we faced with identity and of course the sometimes impossible realities of assimilation. I was born and bred in Northern Ireland and I imagine that I am among a small handful of people of colour who can say that. It is sad that even now in my thirties black faces in Northern Ireland still stand out in the crowd. As such we have become targets to those elements in our society determined to keep their society white, those intent on living in bitterness.

Growing Up

Growing up my sisters and I have became used to being the only blacks and being identified not on our merits but as ‘the black girls’. Northern Irish racism for us began in the womb, with comments such as ‘how dare you bring another black bastard into the world’ being levelled at our mother. Our story began when my father, originally from Nigeria, was offered a job in Belfast on his graduation. Like any student fresh from university he was delighted at the opportunity in his chosen field and seized it. Whilst here he met my Mum who is from Northern Ireland. As all romances go the pair fell in love and got married, they had a family consisting of three children, I was the youngest. Not everything was perfection and it goes without saying that my parents encountered racism, they met in the 1970’s after all. Yet they were a strong couple and as long as they were together they coped…

Read the entire article here.

Multi-Racial In Wisconsin…And The “What Are You?” Question

Wisconsin Public Radio
Central Time
2014-06-02

Rob Ferrett, Host

Jennifer Patrice Sims
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

A sociology researcher looks at multi-racial identity in Wisconsin–and how people deal with the questions “what are you?” and “where are you from?”

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here (00:10:45).

‘Everything I Never Told You’ Exposed In Biracial Family’s Loss

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-06-28

Arun Rath
All Things Considered

It’s May, 1977, in small-town Ohio, and the Lee family is sitting down at breakfast. James is Chinese-American and Marilyn is white, and they have three children — two girls and a boy. But on this day, their middle child Lydia, who is also their favorite, is nowhere to be found.

That’s how Celeste Ng’s new novel, Everything I Never Told You, begins.

It’s soon discovered that Lydia has drowned in a nearby lake, in what looks like a suicide. The incident pulls the family into an emotional vortex and reveals deep cracks in their relationships with each other.

This all takes place an era when interracial marriages are only recently legal (the Supreme Court struck down interracial marriage bans in 1967). Lydia’s death forces members of the Lee family to confront their individual insecurities and grapple with their identity as a biracial family in the Midwest.

But would it be very different for them today? Ng answered that question for NPR’s Arun Rath, host of All Things Considered.

Ng, who is a first-generation Asian-American Midwesterner, also spoke about her own experiences growing up and about the state of the American conversation on race…

Read the article here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

After the ‘White Lie’ Implodes, a Rich Narrative Unfurls

The New York Times
2014-08-01

Felicia R. Lee

‘Little White Lie,’ Lacey Schwartz’s Film About Self-Discovery

Lacey Schwartz, a 37-year-old Harvard Law School graduate turned filmmaker, moves with ease in circles in which her identity as both black and Jewish seems unremarkable. What makes her biography striking is that Ms. Schwartz, a woman with light brown skin and a cascade of dark curls, grew up believing she was white.

How and why that happened is the subject of her film, “Little White Lie,” which has its premiere on Sunday at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, its first stop on the festival circuit before being broadcast on PBS next year. With Ms. Schwartz narrating, the camera travels to a funeral, girlfriend gab sessions and even her therapy appointments. At each stop, in raw conversations with family and friends, Ms. Schwartz asks over and over, how and why did she pass as white?

“I come from a long line of New York Jews,” she says early in the film, as photographs of her white relatives flash across the screen. “My family knew who they were, and they defined who I was.”

Ms. Schwartz was an only child who grew up in the mostly white town of Woodstock, N.Y. Her parents, Peggy and Robert Schwartz, told her that she favored her father’s swarthy Sicilian grandfather. It was not until she went off to college that she learned the truth.

Before starting college, “I was already questioning my whiteness because of what other people said and because I was aware that I looked different from my family,” she said in a recent interview. Then, based on the photograph accompanying her application, Georgetown University passed her name along to the black student association, which contacted her.

The university “gave me permission” to explore a black identity, Ms. Schwartz said…

…Bliss Broyard explored similar territory in a memoir about her father, the book critic Anatole Broyard, a black man who passed as white. She has said she was raised white but learned the truth about her father on his deathbed. But Ms. Broyard, unlike Ms. Schwartz, grew up with her biological father.

Jenifer L. Bratter, director of the Program for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Culture at Rice University, said the film’s twisting tale was part of “a larger story about race in America.”

“Biological race trumps cultural race,” she added. “Race is something we’re really invested in validating or comprehending. It’s about how we understand race as a marker of difference, something that a story about ancestry can’t resolve.”..

Read the entire review here.

I’m Not White, But Nobody Can Ever Tell What Race I Am

xoJane.com
2014-07-25

Casey Walker
Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts

I have to go through a “coming out” moment in every new relationship to explain my ethnicity.

My skin is pale olive in the winter and a soft brown in the summer, and my hair is a thick, dark mess of curls. I have eyes that are deep brown and almond-shaped. My maternal grandparents are immigrants who left their small village and came to America with the hope of creating a better life for future generations. They lived in California and worked in agriculture, and my mother was the first person in her family to attend college.

Chances are, the thought of my ethnicity has crossed your mind by this point—race is one of the most basic descriptors, so it’s normal to try and come to a conclusion in order to construct a basic identity for me. However, in my case, people are usually wrong—I have lived my entire life experiencing instances of racial misidentification. I am not Mexican, Italian, Puerto Rican, or black (some of the most common assumptions). People have projected various stereotypes onto me, spoken to me in languages they assumed I understood, and thrown around various racial comments in reference to their assumptions.

So… what am I?…

Read the entire article here.

Little White Lie

OTB Productions LLC
2013
66 minutes

Lacey Schwartz, Producer/Director

Mehret Mandefro, Producer

James Adolphus, Co-Director

What defines our identity, our family of origin or the family that raises us? How do we come to terms with the sins and mistakes of our parents? Lacey discovers that answering those questions means understanding her parents’ own stories as well as her own. She pieces together her family history and the story of her dual identity using home videos, archival footage, interviews, and episodes from her own life. Little White Lie is a personal documentary about the legacy of family secrets, denial, and redemption.

Little White Lie tells Lacey Schwartz’s story of growing up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity — despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family’s explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different.

At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but a black man named Rodney with whom her mother had had an affair. Afraid of losing her relationship with her parents, Lacey doesn’t openly acknowledge her newly discovered black identity with her white family. When her biological father dies shortly before Lacey’s 30th birthday, the family secret can stay hidden no longer. Following the funeral, Lacey begins a quest to reconcile the hidden pieces of her life and heal her relationship with the only father she ever knew.

Little White Lie, formerly called Outside the Box, is a feature documentary produced by Truth Aid in association with ITVS. The film will enter the festival circuit in 2014 and be broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS in 2015.

Not So Black and White

Tree Spirit Publishing
2012
210 pages
9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0615568249

Alexis Wilson

Mixed marriage, abandonment, a mother’s secret, same sex parents, Broadway, the Ballet, and AIDS all make up a multi-colored tapestry of this author’s valiant journey towards a strong and clear passage; leaving the reader uplifted and wanting more.

It is the early 60’s in Europe, when a breathtakingly beautiful interracial couple dance great ballets together and fall passionately in love.  She is a Dutch ballerina and he is an African-American international ballet star.  They come to America and create a family and a new life.  While their daughter Alexis grows up dancing before she can walk, the marriage grows angrily apart.  Her father soon becomes one of the few celebrated black choreographers on Broadway, while her mother turns toward a shockingly desperate existence of survival.

At age eleven, Alexis’s world comes crashing.  Her mother abandons her and her brother and they are shuttled off to New York City to live with their adoring larger-than-life father, the footlights that beam on the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Chita Rivera, and the other man in her father’s life.

When Dad Wiped Away My Tears: Accepting a Child’s Vulnerability

Psychology Today
2014-06-15

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Ed.D.
Stanford University

I thought summer camp would be endless fun. My two best friends were going and I wanted to go with them so badly I asked my dad to lie about my age so I could get in. I was seven and you were supposed to be eight. Dad liked my spunk, so he changed my birthday on the application and I got to go to the two-week overnight camp. On Father’s Day I always remember this story with gratitude and want to share it with you.

Camp Russell wasn’t quite what I had dreamed about. It wasn’t a rich kids’ camp, but the Boy’s Club camp and was full of tough kids from all over the city. I was scared and tried not to be noticed, but as the only Asian kid there I stood out everywhere I went. Kids would whisper to each other when I walked by or shout from a distance, “Hey Jap” or “Ching, Chong, Chinaman!” and everyone would laugh or pretend to speak Chinese. I didn’t know what to do. There were too many and they were too big to fight. So I pretended not to hear anything and no one approached me or threatened me. I was big for my age and I heard them joking that I knew karate…

Read the entire article here.

Divided Loyalties

BBC Radio 1Xtra’s Stories
BBC
2014-05-04 (Available until 2014-05-09)
Duration: 1 hour

DJ Semtex, Host

DJ Semtex has a black mother and a white father and, as a mixed race kid, had both negative and positive experiences.

The latest national census showed that the mixed race population is the fastest growing in Britain, so what does that mean in 2014? Semtex talks to young people from a range of backgrounds and across the UK, including Jordan from Rizzle Kicks, model Rob Evans, comedian Michelle De Swarte and playwright Sarah Lee.

Are loyalties divided or is society beyond categorising by skin colour?

Listen to the program (until 2014-05-09) here.