Mixed Race Studies

How to Talk to Multiracial Kids About Race

KQED News
San Francisco, California
2020-06-12

Lakshmi Sarah, Digital Producer

Eva Lourdes, 7 Stella Marèsol, 3, at a table in their garage filled with art and books on June 11, 2020. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

June 12 is celebrated as “Loving Day,” a day commemorating Loving v. Virginia — the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional in the United States. With this in mind, we spoke with a few Bay Area families and experts on the importance of talking about race in multiracial families.

Sarah Baltazar-Pinheiro identifies as Filipino American and works in the education field. She lives in Walnut Creek with her husband, who is Afro-Brazilian, and their two daughters, ages 7 and 3-years-old.

“What is the right way to educate a 7-year-old who’s, like, half farts, half losing her teeth? And also 10% attention span?” she said.

At home, they are doing history lessons she calls “American heroes are Black women.” Baltazar-Pinheiro calls to her daughter to see if she remembers who they talked about the last few days — Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells and Shirley Chisholm. Her daughter recounts the names, with a few small hints…

…“If you think your whiteness will protect your mixed kids from this country as it currently stands, you’re misguided,” she said. “We have words and we have language to talk about … race and class and gender — and gender fluidity and how we all want to live in this world. I just want to teach her the words that she needs so that she can always express herself.”…

…We also spoke with Mark and Kelley Kenney, who are both counselors teaching and working in academic settings. They co-authored the book Counseling Multiracial Families and led the writing of Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population.

“It’s kind of interesting to me that, on some level, things have shifted,” Kelley Kenney said, when thinking back on their years of studying the topic. “But, you know, we’re still dealing with the same inherent issue of racism and bias and lack of understanding. … I’m hoping that we’re moving forward in at least starting to dialogue more about it.”

Kelley Kenney said talking about race within family is not just a singular event. “It’s not just a one time conversation, but it’s very, very, very much a part of the whole family dynamic.”…

…“In cases where the relationship involves a white partner for whom this is perhaps their first interactions … dealing with issues of slavery, it is important to spend some time being honest with folks and really talking about what that all means in terms of how they want to proceed in a relationship and a family and all of those things.” — Mark Kenney, counselor…

Read the entire article here.

I’m a black man with white privilege. I see how it distorts America.

The Washington Post
2020-06-11

Steve Majors
Takoma Park, Maryland

A demonstrator speaks to the crowd on a bullhorn during a protest against racial inequality. (Kevin Mohatt/Reuters)

I walk a racial tightrope. It’s one I’ve struggled to balance on for my entire life. But over the past several weeks, I’ve felt myself teetering. I’m black and outraged that racism continues to kill black people like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor while burdening the lives of so many others in our country. But I know that I am not one of those people. I know the freedom of moving through a world that magically removes many barriers from my life and shields me from harm — all because of my ability to pass as white.

My skin tone has given me white privilege. For more than five decades of the journey across my tightrope, I’ve had what feminist researcher Peggy McIntosh calls an “invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.” These are the tools of white privilege, unwanted and conferred on me at birth by a white father who had a fleeting relationship with my divorced black mother. I was the youngest of five and grew up with older siblings in a large, extended black family. They were quick to remind me that what they jokingly called my “light, bright, almost-white skin” did not grant me any special advantage in our family. But they and I could see that wasn’t going to be the case in the outside world.

I want to assure my white friends that white privilege is real, because I benefit from it every day. And I want to explain to my black family that even though this knapsack that whites carry is invisible, weightless and present from birth, it’s possible to teach yourself that it’s there. I say that not so I can seek forgiveness for myself or offer absolution for any others. It’s to explain why so many claim to be blind and unfeeling to something that has been present throughout the history of this country. Even as I continue to reap its benefits, I am ashamed of the white privilege I carry around because I know it comes at the expense of others who have every right to the same opportunities, advantages and freedoms…

Read the entire article here.

Who Is Bubba Wallace?

The New York Times
2020-06-12

Victor Mather

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

He is the only African-American driver in NASCAR’s top-flight racing series, and this week got the organization to bar the Confederate flag at its events.

Bubba Wallace, who instigated NASCAR’s banning of the Confederate flag, is the racing series’ only black driver. That has put him in the spotlight in a sport whose owners, drivers, crews and fans have historically been predominantly white.

What is the history of black drivers in NASCAR?

Wendell Scott was the pioneer, driving on the circuit from 1961 to 1973. Despite regularly facing discrimination, he won a race in 1963 in Jacksonville, Fla., that remains the only one at NASCAR’s top level to be won by an African-American driver. Scott died in 1990.

Although a handful of African-American drivers got into a race or two over the years since, no other black driver had a full-time ride in NASCAR’s top series until Wallace…

Read the entire article here.

The Vanishing Half, A Novel

Riverhead Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2020-06-02
352 Pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525536291
Paperback ISBN: 9780593286104
Ebook ISBN: 9780525536970

Brit Bennett

From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

Emma Amos, Painter Who Challenged Racism and Sexism, Dies at 83

The New York Times
2020-05-29

Holland Cotter, co-chief art critic

The artist Emma Amos with her 2006 work “Head First.” Her paintings often depicted women flying or falling. Becket Logan

Early in her career she created brightly colored scenes of black middle-class domestic life. Her later work was increasingly personal and experimental.

Emma Amos, an acclaimed figurative artist whose high-color paintings of women flying or falling through space were charged with racial and feminist politics, died on May 20 at her home in Bedford, N.H. She was 83.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said the Ryan Lee Gallery in Manhattan, which represents her.

A key event in Ms. Amos’s career came in 1964. A 27-year-old graduate student in art education at New York University, she was invited to join a newly formed artists group called Spiral.

Its members, all African-American, included Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and the muralist Hale Woodruff — midcareer artists with substantial reputations. Organized in response to the 1963 March on Washington, the group was formed to discuss and debate the political role of black artists and their work…

…Emma Veoria Amos was born on March 16, 1937, in Atlanta from a lineage that was, by her own account, “African, Cherokee, Irish, Norwegian and God knows what else.” Her parents, India DeLaine Amos and Miles Green Amos, were cousins. Her father, a graduate of Wilberforce University in Ohio, was a pharmacist; her mother, who had a degree in anthropology from Fisk University in Nashville, managed the family-owned Amos Drug Store…

Read the obituary here.

‘Believe us’: Black Jews respond to the George Floyd protests, in their own words

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
2020-05-31

Josefin Dolsten, Staff Writer

Top left, clockwise, April Baskin, Anthony Russell, Yitz Jordan and Tema Smith. (Baskin: Jill Peltzman; Russell: Courtesy of Russell; Jordan: Courtesy of Jordan; Smith: Courtesy of Smith)

(JTA) — As Enzi Tanner participated in an online havdalah ceremony marking the end of Shabbat Saturday night, his city — Minneapolis — was being torn apart during a fifth night of unrest following the death of George Floyd, a black man, in police custody there last week.

Tanner, a social worker who supports LGBT families experiencing homelessness, said the ceremony — hosted by Jewish Community Action, a local social justice group, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a national organization and Edot Midwest Regional Jewish Diversity Collaborative — conveyed a powerful message for black Jews like him.

“As the Jewish community reaches in and says how do we support their cause and how do we support the black community, it’s really important that people reach in to black Jews and other Jews of color and realize that we’re here,” Tanner said. “And we need our community.”

We reached out to black Jews like Tanner to understand their feelings at this wrenching moment and what their message is for the broader Jewish community. Here’s what they told us…

Read the entire article here.