American Sons & Daughters: Mixed Race, Identity in Southern CaliforniaPosted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2013-12-05 18:32Z by Steven |
American Sons & Daughters: Mixed Race, Identity in Southern California
KCET Television
Burbank, California
2013-12-04
Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside
This is how we began. I looked out at the 300 faces before me and said, “How many of you in this classroom are often asked, in a bar or a store or at a party, What are you?” Maybe a hundred young people raised their hands, and they couldn’t believe that’s what we would spend ten weeks talking about.
“People will guess, all the time, and they’re never right,” one young woman said.
“People think I’m black because of my hair. But I’m Ashkenazi Jewish,” a young man said.
“People think I’m Asian because of my eyes,” someone else said.
“My son is really light, because he’s Mexican-Irish,” said Arely, who is Mexican-American, standing in front of the class and showing her children from a cell phone photo onto the screens. “But my daughter is darker, since she’s Mexican-Colombian, and everyone talks about that. I already know how hard that’s going to be for her.”
The class is “The Mixed Race Novel and the American Experience.” But of course we didn’t talk only about books — we talked about who we are, how America sees us, how our families see us, and most importantly, how we see ourselves. We talked about America’s ongoing obsession with hair and melanin, about what it means to be undocumented, what it means to be a mother, what it means to witness a murder or to lose a dog. But all those discussions began with what it means to be of mixed racial and cultural heritage, and many students in this class at UC Riverside say this was their first time ever talking about these very personal things in an open forum…
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