Mixed Race Studies

Sense of Place with Guest Sharon H. Chang

Sense of Place
Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
November 2015

Minelle Mahtani, Host

Minelle Mahtani and Sharon H. Chang (Source: Facebook)

Author, scholar, sociologist, and activist Sharon H. Chang discusses her new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World.

Listen to the interview (00:36:17) here.

The day my daughter realized she isn’t white

The Washington Post
2015-11-03

Lisa Papademetriou

“Mama,” my 4-year-old daughter said. “Did you know that darks and lights didn’t used to be able to go to the same places?”

“What?” I asked. It was bedtime, and I was tired. I wondered vaguely how Zara knew so much about laundry.

“There are some people who have dark skin color,” she said. “Lights would go one place, and darks would go another,” Zara went on, indignant. “There were signs saying the darks couldn’t go into where the lights were!”

“Who told you about that?” I asked, and she explained that a special visitor had come to her classroom to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She very earnestly explained the Civil Rights movement and Dr. King’s message to me. “He said that everyone should be able to go into the same places. He said people should take down the signs that kept the darks out.” Growing more passionate, Zara cried, “Kylie and I agreed that we wouldn’t go anywhere if there was a sign that said, ‘Lights Only!’ We would rip up that sign and say, ‘Everyone can go here!’” Kylie has blue eyes and curly blond hair.

“Zara, honey, I’m so glad you feel that way,” I told her. “But do you realize that you’re not white?”

Stunned silence.

And then: rage. “I am white!” she shouted. “You’re white!”

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m white, so you are part white. But Daddy is from Pakistan. He’s brown. And that means that, in those times, you would have been considered brown, not white.”

“I am white!” Zara wailed. “I’m everything!” And she burst into tears…

Read the entire article here.

Williams: A positive among the attack ads in the Gecker-Sturtevant race

Richmond Times-Dispatch
Richmond, Virginia
2015-11-02

Michael Paul Williams, Columnist

During the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, John McCain was the target of a whisper campaign that he’d fathered a black child out of wedlock. McCain, who in reality had an adopted Bangladeshi daughter, suffered a pivotal loss to eventual nominee George W. Bush.

Fifteen years later, with control of the Virginia State Senate in the balance, the Republican and Democratic candidates — both white — are showcasing their black children in televised campaign ads…

…No politician places his children before the camera with the idea that it will cost him votes. But we must never become so cynical, so suspicious of motivation, that we lose the capacity to acknowledge positive change when we see it.

“It’s hard to call this anything but good news,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I remember the 1950s and 1960s, when Virginians would openly decry racially mixed marriage or the adoption of children of another race. And the Senate race is in the Richmond area, once one of the most resistant to change.

“Today,” Sabato said, “a mixed-race family is a political plus. Without saying a word, you project an image of progress and modernity.”

Of course, it’s hard to imagine a mixed-race family as part of a political master plan, given the love, commitment, energy and money required to raise a child. And what happens if you lose the election?

But evidence abounds that Sabato is on to something.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray, are the parents of college-age daughter Chiara and son Dante, who wears a prodigious Afro hairstyle. And south of the Mason-Dixon Line in Kentucky, Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin and his wife have run ads including their four adopted Ethiopian children…

Read the entire article here.

Professor Minelle Mahtani on ‘Raising Mixed Race’ in Canada

Multiracial Asian Families
2015-10-29

Sharon H. Chang

Following are closing remarks given by Minelle Mahtani after the premiere of my new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World at Hapa-Palooza Festival 2015, Vancouver B.C. Minelle Mahtani is Associate Professor of Human Geography and Journalism at University of Toronto-Scarborough. Currently she is on sabbatical to host new show ‘Sense of Place‘ on Roundhouse Radio. She is also author of the recent book ‘Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality.’

My book ‘Raising Mixed Race’ will be released December 11, 2015.

Hi everybody. I’m going to keep this really short and sweet because I just think that we’ve heard so many really important things. But I just want to say thank you, Jeff, for that really warm introduction. And I just want to thank Sharon and Professor Wei Ming Dariotis for the extraordinary contribution they made here tonight.

For me being in this room really means a lot. I think it’s really rare that so many mixed people come together to have these conversations… I think it’s really valuable to remember that you’re not alone in this and that there’s other people around who want to share in these conversations. I grew up as a person of mixed race identity. I’m [of] Indian, Iranian, Muslim, Hindu background. And that was a really complicated identity to have in the suburbs of Toronto, mostly white area, that I grew up in…

Read the entire article here.

Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America

New York University Press
October 2013
244 pages
17 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814717226
Paper ISBN: 9781479892174

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children.

Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: International Adoption Nation
• 1 Race and Rescue in Early Asian International Adoption History
• 2 The Hong Kong Project: Chinese International Adoption in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s
• 3 A World Vision: The Labor of Asian International Adoption
• 4 Global Family Making: Narratives by and about Adoptive Families
• 5 To Make Historical Their Own Stories: Adoptee Narratives as Asian American History
• Conclusion: New Geographies, Historical Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Rescuing Discarded Images of Everyday Black Life

The New York Times
2015-10-20

David Gonzalez, Side Street Columnist

Who throws away family photos? How do faded, blurry squares that chronicled weddings, ballgames and goofy moments at home end up abandoned, tossed to the curb or in boxes bought sight unseen at storage auctions?

Zun Lee has been wondering about this ever since he stumbled upon a dozen Polaroids scattered on a Detroit sidewalk. He had gone to Motown as part of his work on “Father Figure,” his book about African-American fatherhood. The sight of those images — children playing in a yard — stopped him. He asked around, but no one knew who was in the pictures. And while someone didn’t want these images, Mr. Lee did: They showed an ordinary beauty. Their fate hinted at hard times. Yet, in a frozen moment, they showed their subjects with love.

Mr. Lee was hooked. He started to haunt flea markets, yard sales and eBay in search of more of these images, to the point that he now has some 3,500 of them, ranging from the 1970s through the 2000s. Taken in a time before Instagram or Everyday Black America, they accomplish the same thing: to show African-American life as it was lived…

…The idea itself is also, for him, a response to how African-American communities have been depicted, something he cares about as the son of a Korean mother and an African-American father. Tired of the conventional wisdom that African-American fathers were absent, he set out to show a contrary reality. Similarly, his interest in collecting family pictures and turning them into a project was a response to “Found Pictures in Detroit,” a project and book by two Italian photographers who also showcased discarded images, with many of them showing crime scenes, suspects and victims…

Read the entire article and view the slide show here.

Defying the Stereotype of the Broken Black Family

The New Yorker
2015-10-12

Lucy McKeon

For his series “Father Figure,” begun in 2011, the photographer Zun Lee created quiet and tender portraits of black fathers with their children: one kisses the tiny hand of his baby while riding the subway; another goofs around at bedtime, his daughter’s feet pressed up against his cheek. The project was, in part, a response to Lee’s own personal history: he grew up, in Frankfurt, Germany, nurtured by African-American military families who were stationed there; in his thirties, he discovered that his biological father was not the Korean dad he’d grown up with but a black man he’d never met. “Father Figure” is an homage to the surrogate black father figures he’d found growing up, and an exploration of alternatives to the stereotype of the black absentee father.

Lee’s latest project, the found-photo series “Fade Resistance,” continues to challenge racist assumptions of black family dysfunction, this time with Lee acting not as a photographer but as a curator…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Counseling the Multiracial Population: Couples, Individuals, and Families

Microtraining Associates
2003
01:15:00

Kelley Kenney

Mark Kenney

This film presents the worldview experiences of interracial couples, multiracial individuals, and multiracial families including trans-racial adoptive families. It also makes clear suggestions for action in the interview.

Six live demonstrations showcase typical issues such as concerns and challenges faced by the multiracial population, acceptance and respect by society and family, questions of identity, positive identity development, and navigating cultural worldview differences.

Read the leader guide here.

Multiethnic Adults Grapple With Questions of Identity

KQED News
San Francisco, California
2015-10-14

Adizah Eghan

In his 1964 Nobel Prize lecture, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described humanity as a “world house,” filled with family of all backgrounds who must somehow learn to live with each other.

Within the borders of our countries, cities and states, our own homes are increasingly becoming multi-ethnic, multiracial microcosms of the greater world house to which King refers.

Today, nearly one in six newlyweds marries across racial or ethnic lines. If we continue in this direction, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that the multiracial population will triple by 2060…

On the most recent episode of So Well Spoken, we dove into the complex world of multiethnic families, interracial marriages and cross-cultural adoptions. How do families handle racial issues and celebrate who they are?

Read the entire article here. Listen to the episode (00:51:26) here.

Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray are now empty nesters as daughter goes to college

The New York Daily News
2015-09-17

Jennifer Fermino, City Hall Bureau Chief

Chiara de Blasio, seen here with her mom, First Lady Chirlane McCray, left for college on Thursday. David Wexler/New York Daily News

The city’s First Family is officially empty Gracie Mansion-ers.

Chiara de Blasio left for college Thursday, marking the first time in 21 years that Mayor de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, won’t have one of their kids living under their roof.

Chiara’s younger brother, Dante, left for his freshman year at Yale in late August.

“In a few hours, I will be experiencing the empty nest for the very first time,” a bittersweet de Blasio told the Daily News.

He said it’s the first time they haven’t had a child at the house since Dec. 6. 1994 — Chiara’s birthday…

Read the entire article here.