Mixed Race Studies

Black Sheep Boy

Rare Bird Books
2016
208 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1942600374
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1947856066

Martin Pousson

• PEN Center USA Fiction Award Winner
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Winner
• Simpson Family Literary Prize Finalist
• Los Angeles Times Literary Pick
• NPR: The Reading Life Featured Book
• The Millions Best Summer Horror Selection
• Book Riot Must-Read Indie Press Book
• On Top Down Under Book of the Year Finalist
• Best Gay Fiction Selection
• Best Gay Speculative Fiction Selection

Meet Boo, a wild-hearted boy from the bayou land of Louisiana. Misfit, outcast, loner. Call him anything but a victim. Sissy, fairy, Jenny Woman. Son of a mixed-race Holy Ghost mother and a Cajun French phantom father. In a series of tough and tender stories, he encounters gender outlaws, drag queen renegades, and a rogues gallery of sex-starved priests, perverted teachers, and murderous bar owners. To escape his haunted history, Boo must shed his old skin and make a new self. As he does, his story rises from dark and murk, from moss and mud, to reach a new light and a new brand of fairy tale. Cajun legends, queer fantasies, and universal myths converge into a powerful work of counter-realism. Black Sheep Boy is a song of passion and a novel of defiance.

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

Copper Canyon Press
2019-05-21
80 pages
5.9 x 0.3 x 8.9 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-1556595615

Keith S. Wilson, Poet, Editor, Game Designer

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

“Additionally, because I pass as a white Jew, I am able to walk into communal spaces and challenge some of the assumptions of who the Jewish community insiders are. My very existence often breaks down stereotypes of who we imagine to be a committed or engaged Jew.” —Tema Smith

Ruth Abusch-Magder, “Three Things the Jewish Community Can Do Better, According to a Mixed-Race Jewish Professional,” My Jewish Learning, May 23, 2018. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/jewish-and/three-things-the-jewish-community-can-do-better-according-to-a-mixed-race-jewish-professional/.

Yet government’s ambivalence towards the “brown babies” remained. The children were not white and therefore not truly “British”, since Britishness assumed whiteness. In addition, a mixed-race GI baby stood out as a visual marker of the black soldier having indeed, as the comedian Tommy Trinder was well-known for quipping, been “over-paid, over-fed, over-sexed and over-here”.

Lucy Bland, “Thousands of mixed-race British babies were born in World War II – and adoption by their black American fathers was blocked,” The Conversation, May 16, 2019. https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-mixed-race-british-babies-were-born-in-world-war-ii-and-adoption-by-their-black-american-fathers-was-blocked-116790.

I’m Darker Than My Daughter. Here’s Why It Matters.

NYT Parenting
The New York Times
2019-05-21

Norma Newton

Norma Newton and her daughter at their home in Los Angeles. Carolina Adame

Breaching colorism with my little girl sent me reeling back into my childhood shame.

Our bedtime routine that night started off like so many others, harried but mostly sweet. After making our way through brushing teeth and getting into pajamas, my daughter and I lay down on her bedroom floor to sing songs, the final step before crawling into bed.

When I tried to curl up next to my 4-year-old, though, I sensed her hesitation. She wiggled her little body away from mine each time I inched closer. “Do you not want mommy close to you, sweetie?” I asked, assuming she was initiating a game to extend our nighttime ritual. Her light-brown eyes locked in on me as she brushed her honey-colored locks aside with her hand.

In a casual on-the-edge-of-sleep voice she cooed, “Your skin is dark. I don’t want you to touch me.”

My brown Indigenous Latina body stiffened; I labored to breathe, outraged and confused. She rendered me speechless…

Read the entire article here.