Mixed Race Studies

‘Blasian Narratives’ struggles with the question: Black enough? Asian enough?

Kore Asian Media
2016-08-16

Tae Hong

“Blasian Narratives” performs inside Stanford Theatre. (Harrison Troung/Courtesy photo)

Teaching third graders in an underserved area of Brooklyn, Cenisa Gavin often looks out at her mostly black and Latino students and is reminded of the failings of her own teachers when it came to discussions about race and identity.

Gavin, 23, is black on her father’s side, and Korean Eskimo on her mother’s side. She has long, thick hair and, by her own description, slanted eyes. Growing up as a mixed-race child in Anchorage, Alaska, was one thing – she could never, for one, converse with her Korean great-grandmother because of a language barrier, and that was always the way it had been for her family – but coming across the term “Blasian” as a high schooler, and then joining a group of them to talk about her heritage as black and Asian on a theater stage at Spelman College years later, was another.

“I think my teachers did us a disservice by not discussing what it is to be colorblind, and how being colorful is greater than that,” Gavin said. When she told her students about her mixed race last year, she said, and when they saw her black father, the kids were surprised: “They said, ‘Ms. Gavin’s dad is black? You’re black?’”

This is one of the themes carried in the stories told by the seven-member group with which Gavin has now starred in a film project, “Blasian Narratives,” started by Cambodian American director Omnes “Canon” Senmos and looking toward release this fall…

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The face of change: Census racial categories aren’t so black and white

The Dallas Morning News
2016-08-19

Jill Cowan, Staff Writer

Gloria Fortner, 13, says she values all of the influences of her parentage. Her father, Bruce Fortner, is a black pastor, and her mother, Florencia Velasco Fortner, is a Mexican immigrant who heads a nonprofit. (Ting Shen/The Dallas Morning News)

When Gloria Fortner was a little girl, a classmate of black and white parentage claimed to be a “better mix” than her. It was a jarring experience — one that has stayed lodged in her mind over the years.

But now, Gloria, the daughter of a black pastor and a Mexican immigrant who heads a nonprofit, said she’s forgiven if not forgotten.

“It’s OK,” the lanky violinist said on a recent afternoon. “We follow each other on Instagram now, so it’s fine.”

Gloria is 13…

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“I identify as a black woman”

Kings Review
King’s College, Cambridge
2016-08-09

Tanisha Spratt
Department of Sociology
Cambridge University

Rachel Dolezal poses with her interracial family in 2013 Source: Facebook.

In the United States race transcends physicality. A black person can look physically white but identify as black if he or she is supported by the right credentials, and a white person who looks racially “other” can pass as black or white if he or she “acts the part.” Racial passing requires a great deal of work. In order to pass successfully the subject has to not only diligently maintain their physical appearance and actively form relationships with people from outside of their race but also, often, deny their families and other close acquaintances because their presence threatens his or her fabricated racial identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries numerous blacks who were light-skinned enough to pass as white did so in order to evade the social and legal barriers that blacks of all shades faced.

One of the primary incentives to pass was the prospect of living a life that was not conditioned by their inferior racial status. By passing they were given greater access to social, educational, and economic opportunities. Conversely, today there are many benefits of passing as black in the United States. A person who does so is given access to affirmative action programs, social networking groups such as Jack and Jill of America, Inc.,[1] and job opportunities that are race specific.[2] In their 2010 study “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans” Nikki Khanna and Cathryn Johnson note that the majority of their biracial respondents “have, at one time or another, passed as black and they do this for several reasons – to fit in with black peers, to avoid a [white] stigmatized identity, and/ or for some perceived advantage or benefit.”[3] Too dark to pass as white in a white setting, respondents often claimed to “pass as black [in order] to find a place with their black peers” and, thus, avoid complete social isolation. Passing has been, and continues to be, orchestrated by many biracial Americans in order to navigate the strict and seemingly impermeable borders governing “blackness” and “whiteness.”…

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