Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Like Us: How to Support Biracial Children and Their Shifting Identities

Literatigurl
2015-12-01

Kimberly Cooper

The year was 2002. I’d just landed in Tucson, AZ to present my graduate school research on the “Social Perceptions of Multiracial Children” at the first-ever National Conference on the Multiracial Child in the United States. Hundreds of teachers, mental health professionals, social workers, student organizations, academics, authors and families from all over the U.S. and abroad met for two days of workshops specifically celebrating multiracial children and their histories. Organized by the two largest multiracial advocacy organizations in the U.S. – AMEA (The Association of MultiEthnic Americans) and The Mavin Foundation, we convened to share resources, strengthen collaboratives and then return to our respective fields to expand discussions on diversity and multiculturalism to include those of us strongly identifying with two or more distinct racial backgrounds.

Growing up biracial, I’d learned that negative social perceptions of biracial, multiracial and transracially adopted children were largely impacting the growth, well-being, and resources available to members of our own community at home and in schools. Asserting that biracial children were more “mixed-up” than mixed-race only served to further perpetuate negative stereotypes about us.

But what if mixed-race and biracial children were supported for an identity which embraced both parents?…

Read the entire article here.

Kansas City Artist Shane Evans, Co-Author Taye Diggs Demystify Mixed-Race Families In New Book

KCUR 89.3
Kansas City, Missouri
2015-12-04

Laura Ziegler, Special Correspondent

Shane Evans at KCUR studios to talk about illustrating new children’s book (Laura Ziegler KCUR)

Kansas City artist Shane Evans was raised by a mother and father whose racial and cultural backgrounds were different from one another. But to Evans they were just mom and dad. He’s also raising a mixed-race daughter.

That’s why Evans was eager to collaborate with his friend, actor Taye Diggs, on a children’s book that takes on the complex issues of growing up in a mixed-race household. Diggs has a six-year-old son with actress and singer Idina Menzel, who is white.

The book, Mixed Me, came out in October. Evans is the illustrator…

Listen to the interview (00:30:46) here.

Parents (of multiracial kids) Just Don’t Understand

AsAmNews
2015-12-03

Alice Wong

Talking about race is complicated enough but how do parents of multiracial Asian American children talk to their kids about race and racial identity? What are the experiences of multiracial Asian American children? What’s missing in the media representations of multiracial kids?

Writer, scholar and activist Sharon H. Chang talked with AsAmNews about her multiracial family and the findings from her research on multiracial Asian American children from her new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World. Below are some edited excerpts from their conversation.

You and your husband are both multiracial Asian Americans—describe your family’s cultural mash-up.

Our collective family ancestry is Japanese, Taiwanese/Chinese, Slovakian, German, French Canadian, British, Welsh – American. But culturally we feel multiethnic, mixed, 2nd gen Asian American.

How do you and your husband talk about your child about being multiracial in America?

We talk pretty openly about systemic racial inequities in front of him. We don’t hide those struggles and even encourage him to participate in the conversations when he’s interested. Then regarding his own identity (i.e. relationship to those racial struggles) we don’t tell him he’s white. Because he’s not. He’s certainly asked, “Am I white?” And we’re very clear, “No.” Instead we offer Asian, Asian American, and mixed…

Read the entire interview here.

Love in the face of racism: Being an interracial family

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-11-25

Jareen Imam, Social Discovery Producer

CNN)—When Karen Garsee picked her 5-year-old daughter up from kindergarten in September, she wasn’t prepared for what Kaylee had to say.

The kids at school wouldn’t play with me today.

Why?

Because I’m brown.

Those words struck Garsee right in the heart. Being white, she didn’t know what she could say to make her daughter feel better. At that moment, they simply embraced.

“I didn’t think kids at that age really thought about other kids being different,” Garsee says.

That wouldn’t be the last time the schoolchildren didn’t want to play with Kaylee.

“We live in the South and racism is loud and it’s still out there,” Garsee says.

A CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll on race found that about half (49%) of Americans say racism is a big problem in our society. Compare that to 2011 when 28% said racism was a big problem. And in 1995, shortly after the O.J. Simpson trial and a couple of years after the race riots in Los Angeles, 41% of people said racism was a big societal problem…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race marriages a reflection of multicultural Blacktown

The Daily Telegraph
Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
2015-12-01

Nick Houghton

Joanne Vella, Editor
Blacktown Advocate

• Quakers Hill one of Blacktown’s most livable suburbs
• Iranian migrant calls ‘multicultural tolerant’ Australia home

WHEN Stephen Zahra went on a four-week holiday to Vietnam in 2006, little did he know how life changing the trip would be.

His love for Vietnam inspired him to quit his job and move permanently to the southeast east Asian nation.

It was a decision which would lead him to the love of his life, his wife Dao Nguyen, and the start of his present day life back in Australia as a happily married father of daughter Hayley.

Stephen, a second generation Maltese, and Vietnamese Dao are the changing face of Australian families and the multicultural melting pot which is Blacktown.

“Our wedding day in Ho Chi Minh City was probably the biggest reminder how big the mix of cultures is between Dao and myself,” Stephen said.

“My family flew over for the wedding and despite having no ability to speak Vietnamese with Dao’s family found a way to communicate and make the day truly memorable…

Read the entire article here.

Love and hate: interracial couples speak out about the racism they’ve faced

The Guardian
2015-11-26

Nell Frizzell

‘I asked them to share any negative comments they’d overheard about themselves.’ All photographs by Donna Pinckley

A couple stand by a flower bed. Her arm is wrapped about his waist like a rose climbing a tree. He rests his cheek on the top of her head. They stare down the lens, their bodies pressed together from thigh to neck in the late afternoon sun. “They are disgusting”, reads a handwritten caption below the image – as jarring as a rock to a toe.

This shot is one of US photographer Donna Pinckley’s ongoing series Sticks and Stones, which pairs interracial couples with the abuse they’ve received, sometimes directly, sometimes overheard. A southern girl at heart (she tells me that she could never move further north than Little Rock, Arkansas, where she lives), Pinckley works in black and white and the couples she depicts include a wide range of ethnicities and sexualities…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Why I want my interracial son to play with Legos

The Washington Post
2015-11-27

Nevin Martell

“Come build with me,” says my 2-year-old son Zephyr, beckoning me to join him on the living room floor next to a giant bin full of Lego bricks.

He pats the finished wood next to him, smiles widely and then turns back to his tinkering.

Who could refuse? I plunk down and take a look at his creation, a multicolored spaceship that he swoops through the air while energetically “whooshing.”

“That’s awesome,” I tell him, before digging in the mix of bricks to start building my own starfighter. Mixed in are a slew of minifigures, some assembled just like the picture on the package, but my little Dr. Frankenstein has reimagined many of them as completely new characters: a lightsaber wielding alien, a knight sporting a pirate’s tricorn hat and a gargoyle with an astronaut’s helmeted head.

Some have specialized heads with a variety of human skin tones, while others mimic more fantastical characters. However, the majority of them are bright yellow. That’s one of the things I love about the Danish toys: the original minifigures were designed with yellow heads and hands so they would be completely inclusive.

Many people incorrectly believe that this sunny skin tone is intended to represent a Caucasian cast, but that’s not the case. In fact, it’s the opposite. The unnatural shade is intended to set Lego minifigures apart from a specific segment of humanity. “They’re designed to be citizens of the world,” says Michael McNally senior manager of brand relations for Lego. “The intent is for kids to project their own stories and identity into this figure.”

In other words: use your imagination, kids!…

Read the entire article here.

Taye Diggs Isn’t Wrong (Or Right) About His Son’s Biracial Identity

The Establishment
2015-11-20

Jessica Sutherland, Marketing Director

In October, Taye Diggs released Mixed Me! as a followup to his first children’s book, 2011’s Chocolate Me! While Chocolate Me! was inspired by Diggs’ experiences as a black child in a predominantly white neighborhood, Mixed Me! focuses on the hope he has for his biracial son.

While doing press for the book this month, Diggs (aka my most famous Twitter follower, and probably yours too) enraged a lot of people by choosing to describe his 6-year-old son Walker as biracial, rather than black, in order to acknowledge both of his parents’ cultures (Walker’s mother is the actress/singer Idina Menzel, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent)…

…The controversy has stirred up fresh debate about the divisive issue of biracial self-identification—a divisiveness I, and many other mixed-race people, have experienced firsthand. Personally, as a biracial American, I prefer to be identified as such. But my Establishment colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, who is also biracial, prefers to identify as black.

Neither of us are wrong…

Read the entire article here.

When society sees my mixed race children as merely “a lighter shade of black”, it does them a disservice

The Independent
2015-11-24

Dawn Jarvis

My daughter says to me, “Nobody has ever said to me ‘Do you feel white?”

I am a divorced black woman with two mixed race children. Do I want my mixed race children to identify with me as a black woman, or their white father – or both?

The actor Taye Diggs caused a media storm in an interview last week on the website Grio by saying that he teaching his mixed race son to identify with the races of both his parents and he would like him to be identified as mixed and not black. He has been accused of self-hate and being ashamed of being black, which he has refuted in a recent Instagram post.

I shared an article about this on my Twitter feed and got a mixed response which surprised me. Most were positive but, one gave me cause to pause it: “I reckon he should identify with the human race given that’s what he is part of.”

While agreeing that race is a social construct and we are all indeed part of the human race, I didn’t think that response showed any understanding of where Taye was coming from…

Read the entire article here.

On Taye Diggs and Reckoning with the Changing Realities of Race in America

For Harriet
2015-11-24

Shannon Luders-Manuel

My father was a proud paralegal for the NAACP back in the 80s and 90s. He marched in rallies for race equality and was actively involved in uplifting the Black community. When I was growing up, he often had me watch the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize,” which documented the events of the Civil Rights Movement. Nestled inside my baby book is an autograph from Black Panther leader Huey Newton.

When I was a little girl, my dad said, “People will want to label you as only black, but you’re biracial.” My dad wasn’t ashamed of his blackness. Just like many fathers, he loved that I resembled both of my parents. My dad knew the world would see me as more black than white, but he wanted me to identify in a way that honored both sides of my genealogy. This was true even after my parents split up when I was three-years-old…

Read the entire article here.