It’s really hard to be two things at once, or at least from a Westernized perspective.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2015-11-06 16:53Z by Steven

“Being mixed race and being American is really weird because Americans, and I say this as an American, they like to do this thing where they put literally everyone into a box. We see it on the Census, we see it in schools, standardized testing, anything you could possibly label, Americans like to label. Mixed race people will present this as a cognitive dissonance. It’s really hard to be two things at once, or at least from a Westernized perspective. So when we want to check two things off it kind of becomes a little hard. So I think it’s distinctly more difficult in America to be mixed race than it is in a lot of other places.” —Julia Muhsen, Columbia College sophomore

Caroline Wallis, “Blending shades of self,” Columbia Daily Spectator, November 5, 2015. http://features.columbiaspectator.com/eye/2015/11/05/blending-shades-of-self/.

Tags: , ,

Blending shades of self

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Campus Life, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2015-11-06 02:27Z by Steven

Blending shades of self

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
2015-11-05

Caroline Wallis

At a place like Columbia, where how you identify can define the spaces you occupy and the people you interact with, being of mixed race presents an extra challenge. The balancing act between multiple cultures, communities, and colors can leave one wondering where they belong. Last year, Keenan Smith, Columbia College sophomore, founded the Mixed-Race Students Society, which created a forum for multiracial students to discuss issues that directly affect those who don’t fit in one box. The students profiled in this piece aren’t all members of the Society, but they all represent an emerging community of students bringing these conversations into our discussions of race on campus…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,