Mixed Race Studies

How I Learned to Love My Natural Hair

The Walrus
2019-07-30

Chelene Knight

The Walrus

I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to turn my hair into anything but what it is: black and curly

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

When I was fifteen years old, I remember going to one of the many hair salons inside what was then called the Metrotown Centre mall, located in Burnaby, British Columbia. I wanted somebody to fix my amateur, home-dyed, white-blond hair. I’ll never forget the way the stylist looked me up and down like she was assessing the situation, assessing the damage. She paused for a millisecond with her white hand on her hip before blurting out that they couldn’t “do my kind of hair” at this salon and that I might want to try something across the street. Before she even said which salon, I assumed she meant I should go to Abantu, a salon that specialized in braids, weaves, and fades—or, as the stylist put it, “the Black salon.”

I froze. Shouldn’t I be able to go to any salon I wanted? Why was she trying to make this choice for me? My reaction in that moment consisted of a blank stare, disappointment, and confusion. At first, I assumed she was reluctant to fix my homemade hair mistake because maybe it was unfixable. But that didn’t make sense. Her words cut deep. When she said, “My kind of hair,” it was the word kind that punched me in the stomach. My thoughts raced. I never heard of someone turning away a customer—a paying customer—for not having the right type of hair. I decided that I wasn’t going to take no for an answer…

Read the entire article here.

The Biracial Identity: Being Grey in a Black & White America

Her Campus at UCD
2018-03-05

Adrien York, UCD Contributor
University of California, Davis

Image courtesy of the author

With Black History Month — the shortest month of the year — being over, I find myself reflecting even more than usual on my racial identity. I have a white mom and a black dad; I’m black and white, or white and black, or mixed, or whatever the heck I’m supposed to call it.

I wish I could call it grey and have people know what I mean, because being mixed paradoxically feels like being both and neither at the same time. It always feels like I’m not “black enough” or not “white enough” to be accepted by either. For a long time this was a weight on my existence, but I’ve recently come to the conclusion that being black and being white are not mutually exclusive.

And I love living in the middle…

Read the entire article here.

If anything, the public debate around race and science has sunk into the mud. To state even the undeniable fact that we are one human species today means falling afoul of a cabal of conspiracy theorists. The “race realists,” as they call themselves online, join the growing ranks of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers in insisting that science is under the yoke of some grand master plan designed to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. In their case, a left-wing plot to promote racial equality when, as far as they’re concerned, racial equality is impossible for biological reasons.

Angela Saini, “The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience,” Scientific American, July 29. 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience/.

Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man’s Widow

2Leaf Press
July 2019
250 pages
6 x 9
Print ISBN: 978-1-940939-78-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-940939-87-2

Dedria Humphries Barker

Introduction by:

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Professor of English; Professor of Asian/Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

Mother of Orphans is the compelling true story of Alice, an Irish-American woman who defied rigid social structures to form a family with a black man in Ohio in 1899. Alice and her husband had three children together, but after his death in 1912, Alice mysteriously surrendered her children to an orphanage. One hundred years later, her great-grand daughter, Dedria Humphries Barker, went in search of the reasons behind this mysterious abandonment, hoping in the process to resolve aspects of her own conflicts with American racial segregation and conflict.

This book is the fruit of Barker’s quest. In it, she turns to memoir, biography, historical research, and photographs to unearth the fascinating history of a multiracial community in the Ohio River Valley during the early twentieth century. Barker tells this story from multiple vantage points, frequently switching among points of view to construct a fragmented and comprehensive perspective of the past intercut with glimpses of the present. The result is a haunting, introspective meditation on race and family ties. Part personal journey, part cultural biography, Mother of Orphans examines a little-known piece of this country’s past: interracial families that survived and prevailed despite Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting mixed-race marriage. In lyrical, evocative prose, this extraordinary book ultimately leaves us hopeful about the world as our children might see it.

Passing: A Family in Black & White

Blackstar Film Festival
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Saturday, 2019-08-03, 10:00 EDT (Local Time)

United States
2019
(00:48:00)

Robin Cloud, Director

After years of hearing the story of her Nebraska cousins, who, unbeknownst to them, were passing for white, filmmaker Robin Cloud reaches out to the lost cousins in an attempt to bring them back into the family. We follow Robin as she travels through the South and Midwest.

For more information, click here.

The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience

Scientific American
2019-07-29

Angela Saini

Credit: Getty Images

The author of Superior: The Return of Race Science knows this from firsthand experience

Last month, I temporarily deactivated my Twitter account following a colossal dump of racist abuse into my feed, including a man in Texas whipping up his followers to phone into an NPR radio show on which I was a guest to ask about “white genocide.” Others played a guessing game around my skin color in the belief this would help them gauge my IQ. On YouTube, one of the editors of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscientific journal founded after the Second World War to argue against desegregation and racial mixing, imitated me by dressing up in an “Indian shirt” (I am British; my parents were born in India). The comments underneath said I should I go back to where I came from.

It’s just another day online.

The abuse I’ve seen isn’t unusual. Others receive worse, especially if they are in the public eye. My particular crime was to have written a well-reviewed popular science book about why racial categories are not as biologically meaningful as we think and how, in fact, they have been used to justify slavery and the Holocaust. These are ideas so widely accepted in mainstream academia that it should be blandly uncontroversial to repeat them. Yet to read some of the comments I’ve received, one might imagine I was hopelessly deluded…

Read the entire article here.

As more people claim a multiracial identity, and it subsequently becomes more mainstream, I have been disturbed to also see a lot of mixed-race work rewrite white supremacist ideologies of old (e.g. postracialism, excluding non-white mixed people, not naming race, anti-blackness, etc.). Same oppression, different era, under somewhat changed circumstances. Racism is a clever shapeshifter. I have been looking for a while for a mixed community that resists, holds fast to a hard edge, refuses to re-inscribe, and pushes forward transformative dialogue.

Midwest Mixed is that community.

Sharon H. Chang, “Midwest Mixed: Taking the lead on antiracist conversations about multiraciality,” Sharon H. Chang, author | photographer | activist, July 25, 2019. https://sharonhchang.com/2019/07/25/4943/.

The ability to pass oneself off as white—to choose between living with their existing identity or adopt the dominant racial identity—is the most extreme colorism privilege. It’s not an option to which the vast majority of black Americans has access. In an ethnic group in which “selling out” or being an “Uncle Tom” are major taboos, it’d be understandable if the discussion of passing focused on the supreme selfishness of the act. Passing is, at its essence, abandonment of the group to better the individual. And yet, the intra-community discussion about passing tends to avoid the question of the morality of the act. Instead, within the black community, family passing stories often serve other purposes: as a way of emphasizing the absurdity of race; as an example of a family’s access to the privileges of colorism; as a trickster performance of the ultimate racial transgression.

Mat Johnson, “Passing, in Moments,” Topic Magazine, Issue Number 25: Journeys (July 2019). https://www.topic.com/passing-in-moments.

Midwest Mixed: Taking the lead on antiracist conversations about multiraciality

Sharon H. Chang, Author, Photographer, Activist
2019-07-25

Sharon H. Chang

Me and Alissa Paris

“There is colorism in this work. There is shadeism in this work. There is anti-blackness in this work. And we are here to critique that.” —Alissa Paris, Executive Director and Co-founder, Midwest Mixed

Heat bounces off the parking lot pavement, blazes bright off light beige walls of the church where the conference is being held. It’s a typically warm, humid morning in Minneapolis. Summer glimmers across a yellow Black Lives Matter banner, bold against the south wall. Inside, the air is comfortable and cooled. Organizers and volunteers in deep purple T-shirts, “Midwest Mixed” written in turquoise, mill about, preparing. More attendees drift through doors, queue up, write their pronouns, hang lanyards from their necks.

Volunteers hand us beautiful 29-page, full color programs. Workshops include reflective writing, creative movement, dialogue and panels. I appreciate right away that there is an emphasis in the workshops on healing, parenting, mental wellness, and healthy families. There is note taking space in the back of the program and a worksheet entitled “A Deep Dive On My Identity” to help attendees think on the different intersections of our whole selves (e.g. geography, nationality, ethnicity, language, race, religion, socioeconomic status, ability, sexual orientation, gender ID, etc.).

In the marketplace, vendors sell social justice buttons, cards and shirts, jewelry from Africa, Corage Dolls to build self-love and confidence in girls of color. Posters display Maria P. P. Root’s Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, a history of the multiracial movement, definitions of terms like intersectionality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender pronouns. Multi-medium works by local artists fill social rooms and hallways, including Within, Between, and Beyond: a multi-layered interactive installation on mixed race and transracial adoptee stories…

…And by the end of the weekend, I realize I’ve just attended one of the best race conferences I’ve ever been to…

Read the entire article here.

Passing: A Family in Black & White

Topic Magazine
Issue Number 25, Journeys (July 2019)

Directed by Robin Cloud

For decades, African American comedian and filmmaker Robin Cloud had heard tales about the “Nebraska cousins,” a branch of her family that moved away from the East Coast to pass for white in the rural Midwest. In this six-part series, Cloud attempts to find and understand the motives of the relatives who left everything and everyone else behind, and documents how their progeny grapple with the revelation that they aren’t who they thought they were.

Watch the series here.