Mixed Race Studies

How To Talk To Your Kids About Race

Roundhouse Radio, 98.3 FM
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Thursday, 2016-07-14, 17:00-18:00Z (10:00-11:00 PDT)

Live Call-in: How to talk to your kids about race

With author and educator Sharon Chang, author of “Raising Mixed Race” and host Minelle Mahtani

It’s been a tough news week. The media has been full of stories about police shootings, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and violence. As a parent you know that your kids are not immune to these stories. They are discussed on the playground just as surely as they are discussed in the office. So how can you talk about race with your kids during these turbulent times? When your children ask you what Black Lives Matter is, what’s your answer? How do you explain the spate recent police shootings? To get some tips on how to tackle these difficult topics, tune into Sense of Place on Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM, www.roundhouseradio.com Thursday at 10 am. Minelle Mahtani hosts Sharon Chang, author of the book Raising Mixed Race. Together – they’ll be answering your questions about how to talk to children about issues related to race…

For more information, click here.

Expat Mom Maria Tumolo On Raising A Multicultural Family In England

The Voix: Diverse Narratives. Native Insights
2016-07-07

Although she was happy and content with her life as it were back in Trinidad, Maria Tumolo was at a crossroad regarding her professional and personal development. She had received a firm offer of admission from Edinburgh University with the intention of pursuing a masters degree in publishing, but she had never been away from home. At the age of 27, she finally made the decision to move to England.

“I came to England on a working holiday visa. On arrival I lived and worked in Cambridge for a few months,” Tumolo says. “I eventually moved to London because at the time, I was living with the family of an English work mate who I met in Trinidad. When she decided to move back to Cambridge, I moved to London so she could be with her family. It was also easier to travel around Europe from London.”

Today, Tumolo lives in Surrey, England with her husband and children – Angelo and Valentina who are five & three years old respectively – where she is a children’s book author and the founder of a Trini-British Parenting & Lifestyle Blog that explores parenting as an expat, family experiences as a mixed heritage family, fashion and food.

Tumolo shares her journey to England and tells us more about raising a multicultural family…

Read the entire interview here.

My mixed-race sons look white, but that doesn’t mean racism stays away

She Knows
2016-07-09

Fahmida Rashid

My mixed-race sons can ‘pass’ for white, and that creates its own pile of issues

The first time was when Jake was in kindergarten. He was showing off the drawing of our family: father, mother, baby brother and himself. He’d even drawn the cat. I was perplexed that he’d colored three of the stick figures brown and one pink. I pointed to one, ignoring the names he’d written over each, and asked, “Who is that?”

“That’s me!” he said, with that mix of exasperation and long-suffering that only 6-year-olds can pull off and still be adorable.

“But why are you brown?” I pressed, ignoring his father’s “don’t go there” look.

Jake and his brother Sam are light-skinned. Not as pale as their father, who hails from the South and can his trace ancestry back to Colonial America, but still light enough that they get asked if they are Greek or Italian. Nothing close to my brown, the one who hails from the subcontinent, the land of spice and tropical sun. Yet he’d colored all three of us the same brown and couldn’t figure out why his mother was asking dumb questions…

Read the entire article here.

Becky and Mia – Belonging and Not Belonging

The Listening Project: It’s surprising what you hear when you listen
BBC Radio 4
2016-06-03

Fi Glover introduces a conversation about the surprising challenges facing a mixed race family at home and abroad. Another in the series that proves it’s surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation – they’re not BBC interviews, and that’s an important difference – lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject.

Producer: Marya Burgess.

Listen to the story here.

Dancer, painter, soldier … Tottenham brothers on their way to the top

The Guardian
2016-05-28

Jessica Elgot

From left to right, Solomon, Kidane and Amartey … ‘We are fiercely proud – we didn’t feel like these institutions were worlds away.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Maryam Golding’s three oldest sons – an artist, a soldier and a ballet dancer – are all on the way to the top. Much of that, they say, is due to their parents, who brought them up to be fiercely proud of their mixed race heritage

Maryam Golding rarely gets her three eldest sons together round the dinner table at her small west London flat. Her boys have extraordinary reasons to be busy. The last time the whole family was crowded into the living room, her middle son was celebrating winning the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, his younger brother was between performances with the Royal Ballet and his older brother, an artist, was back from a sell-out residency in Dubai…

Read the entire article here.

Raising mixed race kids

Special Broadcasting Service Corporation
Melbourne, Australia
2016-04-27

Ian Rose

The prospect of a family holiday has Ian Rose reflecting on the pleasures of bringing up mixed-race children, and the responsibility to keep them in touch with both cultures.

Let’s get this out there straight away. I am a pom. An unreconstructed, unapologetic, dyed-in-the-wool Englishman. I take tea in the morning, consider any code of football using a non-round ball to be knuckle-headed frippery, and I will automatically apologise if you stand on my foot.

Eight years and counting down-under has not made the slightest dent in my pomminess.

I was brought here by the love of an endlessly patient Vietnamese-Australian woman, a love that has borne hybrid fruit in the form of two children, now aged an exhausting five and six. They’re Aussie. But they’re English, too. And Vietnamese.

So this year, to connect them with that side of their heritage, we’ve decided to take a family holiday to Vietnam.

“Hey, kids,” I announce at the dinner table, partly to distract the boy from his greens.

“Guess where we’re going on holiday? To Vietnam! Yaaaaay!”

My daughter’s face falls into a gurn of displeasure.

“Awww,” she laments, “why can’t we go to England?”…

Read the entire article here.

That awful moment parents of interracial children will probably face

The Washington Post
2016-04-26

Nevin Martell

“Is that your son?” the man suddenly asked, without any preamble, and with an aggressive edge to his tone.

I was sitting in the dining area of a local Whole Foods after finishing the weekly shopping with my 3-year-old son, Zephyr. We were both eating and laughing about something silly, simply enjoying a Saturday morning together.

The unexpected question was from a 30-something African American man who had been giving me odd, furtive glances since we sat down. I figured that he thought he recognized me and was trying to jog his memory. I was certain we hadn’t met, so I was bracing myself for one of those semi-awkward, “No, sorry, I’m not who you think I am” conversations.

“Yes, this is my son,” I answered, a little warily.

“Hmph,” he snorted. “I didn’t think so.”

Now my defenses were fully up. “Why not?” I shot back.

He scrunched up his face, like he had just taken a bite of something distasteful. “There’s just something off about you two,” he said.

Frankly, I wanted to knock him senseless, but I restrained myself. Who says that to a complete stranger? How could he not see — for any number of reasons — that Zephyr and I were related? In my mind, there was only one reason why he would draw that conclusion.

“Is it because we don’t have the same skin color?” I challenged.

You see, I’m white and my Ghanaian wife is black, so our mixed-race son is golden brown…

Read the entire article here.

Our love was colour blind… but our families weren’t

The Daily Mail
London, United Kingdom
2016-02-05

Diana Appleyard and Clare Goldwin

Deeply moving, and exposing tensions that still blight Britain today, mixed-race couples from four generations tell their stories

‘MY FATHER THREW ME OUT OF THE HOUSE’: 1940s MARY AND JAKE JACOBS

Mary, 81, is married to Jake, 86, and lives in Solihull in the West Midlands. They have no children. Mary is a former deputy head teacher, and Jake worked for the post office before retiring. Mary is white and Jake is black, originally from Trinidad.

MARY SAYS: When I told my father I was going to marry Jake he said, ‘If you marry that man you will never set foot in this house again.’

He was horrified that I could contemplate marrying a black man, and I soon learned that most people felt the same way. The first years of our marriage living in Birmingham were hell — I cried every day, and barely ate. No one would speak to us, we couldn’t find anywhere to live because no one would rent to a black man, and we had no money. …

Read the entire article here.

Raising mixed-race kids who feel secure in their identity

NewsWorks
WHYY
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2016-04-11

Lori L. Tharps, Assistant Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I’m black American. My husband is from Spain. Before we started a family, the race of my future children never gave me cause for concern or worry. I guess I just assumed that since we lived in the United States, they’d be black like me. I did spend a lot of time researching the most successful ways to raise bilingual children. I actually thought the fact that my children were going to speak two different languages was going to be the biggest difference between us. I was wrong.

My children aren’t just black. They have a Spanish father. So that makes them biracial. And while finding the perfect label or identity box to check off on government forms is hardly a critical issue in my parenting routine, raising children who are secure in their ethnic identity often feels like a struggle.

Living in a country as race obsessed as the United States makes identity politics a necessary evil to explore when family members in the same household are different races. Please note, I firmly believe there is only one human race and that the false construct of race that was invented in the 18th century with intentions of creating a hierarchy of man, is complete and utter hogwash. Unfortunately, because as a nation we subscribe to said hogwash, I would be a bad parent if I did not address these issues with my children who will face questions and challenges about their racial identity. But the questions they face will be and are different from mine. These aren’t the kind of things they teach you how to deal with in a Parenting 101 class…

Read the entire article here.

Toward building a conceptual framework on intermarriage

Ethnicities
Volume 16, Number 4, August 2016
pages 497-520
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638402

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmö University, Sweden; Sophia University, Japan

Nahikari Irastorza, Marie Curie Research Fellow
Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare
Malmö University, Sweden

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Increasing migration worldwide and the cultural diversity generated as a consequence of international migration has facilitated the unions of people from different countries, religions, races, and ethnicities. Such unions are often celebrated as a sign of integration; however, at the same time as they challenge people’s idea of us and them, intermarriages in fact still remain controversial, and even to some extent, taboo in many societies. Research and theorizing on intermarriage is conducted predominantly in the English-speaking North American and British contexts. This special issue includes empirical studies from not only the English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, and the UK, but also from Japan, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Spain and demonstrate the increasingly diverse directions taken in the study of intermarriage in regards to the patterns, experiences, and social implications of intermarriages. Moreover, the articles address the assumed link between intermarriage and “integration.”

Read or purchase the article here.