Mixed Race Studies

Danielle Evans, an author straddling racial divides

Washington Post
2010-10-07

DeNeen L. Brown, Staff Writer

It is the tale of a biracial girl who is sent by her mother one summer to visit her white grandmother. But the grandmother immediately disapproves of her daughter’s child with the brown skin and long, curly hair. “If I thought my grandmother would like me better when my mother wasn’t around, our reunion quickly disabused me of the thought… ,” [Danielle] Evans reads.

The grandmother greets the girl, whose name is Tara, with an obligatory kiss, then tentatively touches her hair, which is twisted into tight cornrows.

“Did your mother do this to you?” Evans reads, standing in a black sweater dress in front of a stack of her books. A small crowd spills attentively before her into the aisles.

” ‘My hair?’

” . . . ‘Mommy can’t do my hair,’ I said. ‘A girl from her school did it for her.’

” ‘I swear, even on a different continent, that woman — When you go upstairs, take them out. You’re a perfectly decent-looking child, and for whatever reason your mother sends you looking like a little hoodlum.’

” ‘I am wearing pink,’ I said, more in my own defense than in my mother’s.”

The crowd laughs nervously. Evans continues to read. Some attendees will say later that they were astounded by the maturity of Evans’s voice as a writer, by the telling of stories of characters who seem so familiar. Depending on who is listening, the characters in the collection—titled “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self“—could be a best friend or that girl down the street, but many of them are “outsiders,” says Evans, black or biracial people who are wrestling with race and the legacy of race in a so-called post-racial era…

…”Right now we have a moment with a lot of language about post-racialism and yet a lot of evidence that we are clearly not post-anything,” she says, “and there’s a lot of room for complication, contradiction and ambiguity, which is good territory for fiction.”…

Read the entire article here.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Riverhead Books an Imprint of Penguin
2010-09-23
240 pages
9.25 x 6.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594487699
eBook (Adobe reader) ISBN: 9781101439470
ebook (ePub Ebook) ISBN: 9781101443477

Danielle Evans

Introducing a new star of her generation, an electric debut story collection about young African-American and mixed-race teens, women, and men struggling to find a place in their families and communities.

When Danielle Evans’s short story “Virgins” was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a bold new voice. Written when she was only twenty-three, Evans’s story of two black, blue-collar fifteen-year-old girls’ flirtation with adulthood for one night was startling in its pitch-perfect examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence.

Now this debut collection delivers on the promise of that early story. In “Harvest,” a college student’s unplanned pregnancy forces her to confront her own feelings of inadequacy in comparison to her white classmates. In “Jellyfish,” a father’s misguided attempt to rescue a gift for his grown daughter from an apartment collapse magnifies all he doesn’t know about her. And in “Snakes,” the mixed-race daughter of intellectuals recounts the disastrous summer she spent with her white grandmother and cousin, a summer that has unforeseen repercussions in the present.

Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one’s sense of identity and the choices one makes.

The social ambiguity of race and ethnicity

Campus Times
Serving the University of Rochester since 1873
2010-09-30

Victoria Massie

One of the reasons why I fell in love with anthropology is because I realized that race isn’t an inherent part of who we are. Through careful socialization, via standardized tests and my parents, I had always known that when asked my race, the appropriate answer was Black/African-American/Non-Hispanic.

But lo and behold, this year as I attempt to “naturalize” myself —  either by attempting to lose the weight that I have been hiding behind for so many years or cutting my hair to respect and appreciate the natural curls bestowed to me (in spite of mainstream society’s warped ideas about beauty, particularly Black beauty) — my physical transformation, seems to constantly dismantle my assigned racial category…

Read the entire article here.

Saint Augustine’s College senior’s documentary wins award at film festival

Saint Augustine’s College, Raleigh, North Carolina
Press Release
2010-10-19

LaToya Sutton, Communications Specialist

Eric Barstow’s short documentary, “Bi/Racial Me,” won the “Best Short Documentary” award at the Urban Mediamakers Film Festival, held October. 14-17, [2010] in Norcross, Georgia The film was an official film selection festival. Barstow is a senior theatre and film major at Saint Augustine’s College.

Barstow’s documentary offers a glimpse into what life is like for those who are racially mixed and explores the issues they face. The film’s trailer is available online here.

The Urban Mediamakers Film Festival places an emphasis on showcasing work produced by or featuring people of African, Asian and Latin descent. The three-day festival gives actors, writers, filmmakers, musicians and graphic designers an opportunity to learn from and network with other industry professionals.

Read the entire press release here.