Mixed Race Studies

My President

Abernathy: for gentlemen of culture
2015-02-09

Brian Kamanzi
Cape Town, South Africa

Barack Hussein Obama.

Let me start this off by an admission. The man is my hero. But, let me assure you that this has little to do with who he actually is. This isn’t about his foreign policy or about his commitment to his promises. It’s about how many of us see him as if we are holding a mirror in front of our faces.

Barack Hussein Obama.

He has a poise and a presence that he carries whenever he is called to address the world. He is one of the few black men in history to have an audience of this magnitude. His is a tone that with the sheer sound of the steadiness of his voice, brings me a sense of pride as if he somehow represents me. There is a sense of expectation when he speaks. The stream that often follows his announcements speaks directly to this. We want him to be more decisive. We want him to challenge the global economic structure. We expect him to be the voice of black consciousness in the White House. I know I’ve caught myself passively-actively drowning out the details of his positions; ones that I would not hesitate admonish a white man of his stature for uttering.

In fact, I am uncertain I am able to separate this man from what I want him to be; from what I hoped he would be. I keep my eyes closed when I look at him. Perhaps in fear that he is an obstacle of what I’d call “progress.” Perhaps in fear that he, much like me, is a contradiction unto himself…

Read the entire article here.

Part Asian-American, All Jewish?

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-02-10

Rachel Gross, Editor
Moment Magazine

I was five years old when my mother threatened to give me away to journalist Connie Chung.

Chung and her husband, Maury Povich, had just announced their intention to adopt a half-Chinese, half-Jewish child. At this, my mother, watching on TV in our living room, did a double take. She looked at the screen. Then she looked at me, her half-Chinese, half-Jewish, fully-misbehaving daughter. “How would you like to go live with that woman?” she said.

It was then that I had a startling realization: I was special. Not special in the way that everyone’s kids are special — I mean really special. I, with my chubby Chinese cheeks and frizzy Jewish hair, was a unique snowflake, shaped like the Star of David, dusted with matcha green tea powder.

“I’m special!” I announced. “Famous people want to adopt me!”

Mom rolled her eyes as if to say, oy vey.

Only later would I learn the truth: Not everyone was as thrilled about my heritage as I was. The problem was mainly on the Jewish side. As I grew up, announcing I was Jewish often felt “like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials,” in Joan Didion’s words. “But you don’t look Jewish!” came the incredulous reply. Some even implied that the union that produced me was nothing less than a threat to the Jewish people — that I was what was wrong with Judaism today…

Read the entire article here.

Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-century Western Australia

University of Western Australia Publishing
2002-08-31
246 pages
207 x 139 mm
ISBN: 978-1876268732

Penelope Hetherington

Settlers, Servants and Slaves documents the exploitation of both Aboriginal and European children by the settler elite of nineteenth-century Western Australia. In a struggling colony desperately short of labour, early settlers relied on the labour of children—their own and other people’s.

Convicted and neglected children from the poorest sections of this divided society were placed in institutions, where they were trained to become a useful part of the work force. Education services developed only slowly, and there was no system of secondary education provided by the government in the nineteenth century.

From the 1870s, Aboriginal children were widely ‘employed’, in a complex web of contract and apprenticeship law, in the pastoral and pearling industries in the North West. Often kidnapped by ‘blackbirders’, these children received no wages and had no opportunity to attend school.

Settlers, Servants and Slaves also shows how concern over ‘the problem’ of children of mixed descent in the last decade of the nineteenth century was to provide the rationale for infamous twentieth-century ‘solutions’: the removal of children from their parents and the establishment of Aboriginal Reserves.

Connecting the Dots in Suicide Prevention

Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly
Poughkeepsie, New York
Spring/Summer 2014

Eric Marcus ’80

Rebecca Hyde ’92

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for Americans. Christine Yu Moutier ’90 wants to do something about that.

Last fall, following two decades of working as a professor of psychiatry and assistant dean for student affairs and medical education at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Moutier was named chief medical officer for AFSP, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding and preventing suicide.

From its headquarters in New York City, she manages a wide range of the organization’s work, including research funding ($5 million for current research), grant selection, and the dissemination of findings. She also oversees programs for survivors of suicide loss and coordinates educational efforts focused primarily on suicide prevention…

…While dedicated to her work as an academic, Moutier has always carved out time for clinical work. She considers her work with San Diego’s Asian refugee population a particular privilege.

“As a mixed-race person growing up in a town that was mostly Slavic and working class, I was teased, so I have special empathy for people who look and feel different. Also, because of mental illness in my own extended family, I grew up seeing how Western medicine wasn’t always trusted,” she says…

Read the entire article here.