Mixed Race Studies

Telling Multiracial Tales: An Autoethnography of Coming Out Home

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 20, Number 1 (January 2014)
pages 51-60
DOI: 10.1177/1077800413508532

Benny LeMaster
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one “side” of the family over another, I experiment with a concurrent telling. That is, multivocality in one body. To help anchor the telling, I use the academy as an assemblage of meaning. In the end, I find that my White family resists and rejects my queer masculinity because of my pursuit of higher education while my Asian family embraces my queer masculinity because of the same pursuit. These stories can only be known when told and processed concurrently; never alone, and never separate.

Read or purchase the article here.

(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

BLACKprint Press
2013-11-29
284 pages
75 full-page photographs
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-9896645-0-9

Yaba Blay, Ph.D., The Daniel T. Blue Endowed Chair of Political Science
North Carolina State University

Noelle Théard, Director of Photography

• Independent Publisher’s 2014 “Multicultural Non-Fiction Adult” Gold Medal Winner

What exactly is Blackness?
What does it mean to be Black?
Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness?
Who determines who is Black and who is not?
Who’s Black, who’s not, and who cares?

In the United States, a Black person has come to be defined as any person with any known Black ancestry. Statutorily referred to as “the rule of hypodescent,” this definition of Blackness is more popularly known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that one solitary drop of Black blood is enough to render a person Black. Said differently, the one-drop rule holds that a person with any trace of Black ancestry, however small or (in)visible, cannot be considered White. A method of social order that began almost immediately after the arrival of enslaved Africans in America, by 1910 it was the law of the land in almost all southern U.S. states. At a time when the one-drop rule functioned to protect and preserve White racial purity, Blackness was both a matter of biology and the law. One was either Black or White. Period. One hundred years later, however, the social and political landscape has changed. Or has it?

(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race sets out to explore the extent to which historical definitions of race continue to shape contemporary racial identities and lived experiences of racial difference, particularly among those for whom the legacy of the one-drop rule perceptibly lingers. Featuring the perspectives of 60 contributors representing 25 countries and combining candid narratives with simple yet striking portraiture, this book provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. Although contributors use varying terms to self-identify, they all see themselves as part of the larger racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to as Black. They all have experienced having their identity called into question simply because they do not fit neatly into the stereotypical “Black box”—dark skin, “kinky” hair, broad nose, full lips, etc. Most have been asked “What are you?” or the more politically correct “Where are you from?” numerous times throughout their lives. It is through contributors’ lived experiences with and lived imaginings of Black identity that we are able to visualize multiple possibilities for Blackness above and beyond the one-drop rule.

The inspiration behind CNN’s Black in America: “Who is Black in America?” and featured on CNN Newsroom, (1)ne Drop continues to spark much-needed dialogue about the intricacies and nuances of racial identity and the influence of skin color politics on questions of who is Black and who is not.

(1)ne Drop takes the very literal position that in order for us to see Blackness differently, we have to see Blackness differently.

Contents

• Author’s Note
• Intro
• Introspection
• Mixed Black
• American Black
• Diaspora Black
• Outro
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About

Why Do You Call Yourself Black And African?

New African
2009-04-30

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

A little over a year ago I received an email with the subject line “Ok I wonder why you call yourself ‘black’ and ‘African’” from a self-described longtime New African reader.  Even if subsequent emails have been less direct in their articulation of the same underlying sentiment, they all point in a similar direction: some people are confused about my racial background and about the way I racially identify myself.  Their need to seek clarification suggests that being able to label me is important to the way in which they understand the content of my columns.

I was perplexed at first by this seemingly sudden preoccupation with my race.  After all I’d been writing for New African for several years and never had anyone raise the subject before. It then occurred to me that these racial enquiries started happening almost immediately after my picture began running with my column.  Obviously there was a disconnect in the minds of some readers between my appearance and my writing, especially when I refer to myself as both Black and African, and use the collective “we” to talk about the past, present, and future of Black people worldwide.

Indeed, the fact that I claim my place in the global African world annoyed one reader so much that he asked, “Why do you keep on writing ‘we’?” Just in case he hadn’t already made his point clear he added, “You are not black in my eyes. You look much more Italian or Spanish. I can assure you, if you go to Africa you will be called ‘white’.” I always find it amusing that people seem to forget the proximity of southern Spain and Italy to Africa.  There is a reason after all that Spaniards and Italians from the south look a lot like North Africans—centuries of exchange between the two regions certainly wasn’t limited to material goods.

Ironically, however, the reader was partially right.  I am ¼ Italian, but I don’t look anything like my blond hair and blue eyed Italian paternal grandmother who came from Turin in the far north of the country.  Nor do I look anything like my paternal Irish grandfather.  The reader wasn’t off the mark either when he guessed I might be Spanish.  My mom is part Spanish. She is also Taíno Indian and African, most likely of Yoruba ancestry, as were many of the enslaved Africans who worked the sugar plantations on the island of Puerto Rico where my mom was born.  So there you have it: Taíno, Spanish, Northern Italian, Irish, and yes, African too.  Why, you might ask, if I am so thoroughly mixed race do I identify as Black and African?

Let me begin by providing the context necessary to understand the particularly unique way in which Black is defined in the United States, where I was born and raised. Black, as a legal-cum-racial category, was historically constructed in the broadest possible way in order to expand the number of people who could be enslaved and to limit the legal right of racially mixed people to claim their freedom.  Known as the “one-drop rule“, the idea that a person with even the slightest trace of African ancestry is Black has long outlived slavery in America.  What was once a legal construction became a socially constructed category that has and continues to encompass a broad range of very phenotypically diverse Black people.  While the racial landscape of the U.S. is home to Black people of all hues, hair textures, body shapes and sizes, and facial features, we do not all experience our blackness in the same way—far from it. Phenotype, class, gender, and geography all play major roles in shaping our individual experiences as Black people in America. Hierarchies based on skin tone, alone, have been at the root of painful divisions within the black community, and are often the basis for preferential treatment within the dominant white society. It has not been lost on African-Americans that if Barack Obama was the complexion of his father he would likely not be our president today…

Read the entire article here.

Being Black: It’s not the skin color

Philadelphia Weekly
2013-11-13

Kennedy Allen et al.

Drexel prof Yaba Blay’s striking new photo book “One Drop” explores how a wide range of different skin tones affects Americans’ personal identities. In  this PW excerpt, eight Philadelphia-area residents of mixed heritage concur: However light they may be, they’re still most certainly Black. Our own Kennedy Allen agrees…

Growing up in Mt. Airy, an ethnic and economically diverse neighborhood, instilled within me a level of acceptance and tolerance regarding my fellow man that, confoundingly, many didn’t seem to share. I was one of seven Black kids in a class of 42. Because I spoke English properly and preferred rock to rap, I was deemed “White girl” by my racial peers—a label that haunted me for what felt like eons. I knew I wasn’t White, nor did I ever have the urge to be, outside of wishing my hair would blow in the wind like some of the girls in my class. Flash-forward to my final years of high school, in a black school where I was the “light-bright girl who talks White.” Dark-skinned people still sneer at me, somehow assuming that I believe myself to be “better” than they are because of my buttered-toffee skin tone.

When all is said and done, racial or ethnic identity rests upon the individual and their experiences. I identify myself as a black woman who happens to have Irish and Cherokee lineage. What of all the others who identify as black, but appear otherwise? Scholar and activist Arturo Schomburg, whose extensive collection of books and historical records of African people’s achievements eventually became the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, N.Y., identified as an Afro-Puerto Rican. (In fact, his passion for gathering all those documents was born after a grade-school teacher told him that black people had no history, heroes or accomplishments.) Would Schomburg’s experience be less valid because it fails to meet some homogenous notion of Blackness? Who has the right to determine these standards in the first place? And in an age of global interconnectedness and the instant, worldwide exchange of information and ideals, why does it still even matter?

Dr. Yaba Blay wondered some of the same things. A first-generation Ghanian-American and the co-director of Drexel’s Africana studies program, Blay has spent the past two years gathering vibrant portraits and intimate stories from nearly 60 individuals across the country in an attempt to shine some light upon questions of racial ambiguity and legitimacy. Those portraits now comprise a new book that she’s edited and published, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race—as well as an exhibit of the same name, currently on display at the Painted Bride Art Center…

Read the entire article and eight subject profiles from the book here.

The Five Stages of Being Biracial (If You’re Me)

The Toast
2013-10-21

Jaya Sexena

1. Denial

It wasn’t that the idea of being biracial frustrated me, it was just that I didn’t think I was it.

Yes, I finally learned to write “Jaya Saxena,” but to a blank-slate of a five-year-old that combination of letters was just as random as any of my friends’ names. “Judith” looked weird too, right? “Denisa”? “Fiona”? I figured it was all arbitrary.

My family did not act like other immigrant or biracial families. Those kids had parents who spoke of siblings and childhoods in foreign countries with thick accents. They always seemed to be returning to those countries, or filling their households with decorations and music to make it feel like they had never left. They had kids who actually knew something about a “home country.” My house never felt like Talia’s house, where she’d switch between speaking to her dad in Hebrew, her mom in English, and then playing Aladdin on Sega Genesis with me.

My dad, who moved to Newark when he was 8, had long ago adopted a Jersey accent and demeanor, his actions indistinguishable from those of his Italian and Jewish neighbors. He cooked pork chops and pasta with meat sauce, and played country fiddle. He lit incense sometimes but so did lots of hippie parents. He hadn’t been back to India since before I was born.

My mom, with her freckles and red hair, was often mistaken for my Irish nanny. We can trace our first ancestor’s arrival to 1635, and by about 1740 everyone on her side had officially come over. She grew up on a farm and wasn’t afraid of killing the roaches that sometimes skittered around our apartment, and the only time she was called “exotic” was when she went to Scotland. Together, they were just my parents.

So I wasn’t biracial. I was a New Yorker, as if being both weren’t an option. I ate bagels and played handball and wore pants. My dad taught me how to play guitar and played me songs by Danny Kaye or The Muppets. Yes, sometimes my “dress up” outfits contained brightly colored silk and bangles, but those were just decorations. Yes, my grandma would make potatoes that came out yellow and were flecked with seeds, but she’d save a plate of spaghetti and slices of American cheese for me. They were Indian, not me, and that was normal…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed messages

The Queen’s Journal
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Volume 141, Issue 16, 2013-10-22

Olivia Bowden, Assistant News Editor

Many mixed race people, myself included, have trouble defining our ethnic identity.

As a child, I’d put on my mother’s makeup and be confused as to why her dark brown foundation didn’t blend with my pale skin. A family reunion with my dad’s side felt strange as I looked nothing like the blonde hair, blue-eyed bunch.

Both sides of my family, South Asian and Anglo-Saxon, have thoroughly accepted that I don’t reflect either side in my appearance. But, the question remains, where do I belong?…

…It’s sometimes unsettling when people ask me where I’m from. While it might seem like an innocent question, it makes me feel like I have to accept a racial label. I’ve completed many surveys where I’ve had to state my race as “other”.

It’s especially sickening when I’ve been told that I am “lucky” to pass as white. Some people feel comfortable saying racist comments in reaction to my appearance. I’ve been told that I’m “pretty, for a brown girl”.

Looking “white” does not mean I am okay with racism…

Read the entire article here.

The Fluidity

Neither/Both: my mixed-race experience
2013-10-19

Lola Osunkoya

I went to the skating rink on a night I don’t usually go, and found myself to be the only female of color there.  It was unusual to me because on my regularly night, it’s a predominantly Black crowd.  In this stage of my identity development, I’m very conscious of my racial surroundings when I am one of the few.

Today I identify primarily as Mixed, but also as Black.  That has changed over the years as Mixed identities are inherently fluid… if we choose that route – static is another choice.  I have been militantly Mixed, not White enough, begrudgingly Black.  All of them had a certain frantic energy on them because I felt like they were dependent on outside validation.  Today I feel more at peace with my chosen identity.  Will it remain this way now that it feels peaceful?  Maybe.  But the fluidity could push me in a new direction sometime in the future…

Read the entire article here.

Growing Up Black in American Apartheid – Ford Pt1

Reality Asserts Itself
The Real News Network
2013-10-23

Paul Jay, Host

Glen Ford, Executive Editor
Black Agenda Report

On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay: Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, tells his story as a red-diaper baby, growing up facing racism in the North living with his white activist mother, and living in the Deep South with his black deejay father.

Coming Out as Biracial

Human Parts
2013-10-21

Stephanie Georgopulos

A few months ago, I not-so-subtly asserted myself as biracial while having dinner with a new coworker. “I’m a Capricorn,” she’d said. “Yeah…my mom’s black,” I responded (not verbatim, but the exchange was similar). Whoa. What? Immediately after I injected that part of my identity into the conversation, I had a Come-to-Jesus moment. What was I doing? Did I always do this when I met new people?

The answer, if you’re wondering, is yes. (Although the timing and context are usually a bit more appropriate.) I’ve been coming out this way since I was a teenager. First, my friends would do it for me, whenever one of our peers said something racist in front of me (which was often). “Dude. Steph’s mom is black!” The requisite retort was always, “Oh, sorry Steph. Are you half-offended?” (No, but I am wishing tired ass jokes qualified as hate crimes.)

Here it is: My mother is black. My dad is white. Two of my siblings look like my mom, and two of us look like my dad. Of the two who favor my dad, only one is biracial — that’d be me, the pigmentally challenged Michael Jackson of our troupe. Are you confused yet? Good. Welcome to what it’s like to be biracial…

…That’s not to say I understand the black experience. For starters, I have white privilege. Olive skin with curly hair, fine and versatile. Police don’t see me. No one follows me around stores (but they’re confused as hell when I come in to shop with my mother and sister). No one assumes I’m uneducated or that my father left me. No one calls me her token black friend or asks why I talk so white (though I can imagine my mother, sister, and brother have heard that one a bit)…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Love: Finding the Love in the One-drop Rule through Documentary Storytelling and Performance

California State University, Los Angeles
May 2013
84 pages

Fanshen DiGiovanni

A Project Report Presented to The Faculties of the Departments of Television, Film & Media Studies, and Music, Theatre & Dance In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval is a solo-play incorporating filmed images, photographs and animation to examine how ‘race’ came to be in the United States, and how it influences the relationship between a father and daughter. The show journeys from the 1700s to the present, to cities throughout the United States, and to East and West Africa where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots. This project report chronicles and evaluates Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni’s process as a playwright, producer and actor in developing One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.