Mixed Race Studies

The Man Striving to Be the ‘Canadian Obama’

The New York Times
2020-07-10

Dan Bilefsky, Canada Correspondent

“The abuse of power has plagued brown and Black people, and we have had enough,” Balarama Holness said. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times

Balarama Holness, 36, a law student and community organizer who once played professional Canadian football, is becoming a leading voice against systemic racism in his country.

MONTREAL — For Balarama Holness, the defining moment of his life happened four years before he was born. It was at a Bob Marley concert in Montreal, when the eyes of his Québécois mother and his Jamaican father interlocked as the singer wailed, “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!”

It was the final year of the freewheeling 1970s, and his adventurous Francophone mother and ascetic Anglophone father were strangers in a sprawling hockey arena. But Mr. Holness said barriers of language and race momentarily collapsed as the Marley anthem washed over the crowd — a rare alchemy that he said he had spent his whole life chasing.

“The music dissolved fictitious divisions in society,” Mr. Holness said, “and somewhere between the dreadlocks, the Jamaican patois and Québécois French, the seeds of my existence were sowed, along with my future as a rebel.”

Educator, broadcaster, law student and former championship-winning professional Canadian football player, Mr. Holness, 36, aspires to be a “Canadian Obama” — another “biracial lawyer,” he observes, who cut his teeth as a community organizer. His other role model is Colin Kaepernick, the Black quarterback whose kneeling during the American national anthem before N.F.L. games became a potent symbol against racial and social injustice.

Mr. Holness’s outsized swagger and ambition are perhaps inevitable — he noted that because of his parents’ respect for Hindu tradition, they named him Balarama, considered by some a god with extraordinary strength. A first cousin, Andrew Holness, is Jamaica’s prime minister.

In Balarama Holness’s case, he has grabbed Canadian headlines after mobilizing a grass-roots movement over the past two years that pushed Montreal’s City Hall to hold hearings on systemic racism. That is no small accomplishment in Quebec, a French-majority province where the government has repeatedly denied the existence of systemic racism…

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Black Britons Wonder What Took Harry and Meghan so Long

The New York Times
2020-01-10

Ceylan Yeginsu

Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, leaving St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle after their wedding last year. Pool photo by Ben Birchall

“Thank God they are free,” one Londoner said. “All of this is about her race, I know it because as a Caribbean woman who did not grow up here, I have experienced it myself.”

LONDON — When Prince Harry and Meghan announced this week that they would be stepping back from their royal duties and spending extensive time in North America, many of Britain’s minority residents said they felt a burst of relief.

At long last, many said in interviews, the couple might finally escape the abuse, much of it racially tinged, that has been heaped upon them by the British press, particularly the country’s raucous tabloids.

“Thank God they are free,” said Sanaa Edness, lifting her arms to the sky as she walked through Fordham Park in southeast London. “Nobody should tolerate bullying and abusive behavior because of the color of their skin. All of this is about her race, I know it because as a Caribbean woman who did not grow up here, I have experienced it myself.”…

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As Black as We Wish to Be

The New York Times
2012-03-16

Thomas Chatterton Williams

My first encounter with my own blackness occurred in the checkout line at the grocery store. I was horsing around with my older brother, as bored children sometimes do. My blond-haired, blue-eyed mother, exasperated and trying hard to count out her cash and coupons in peace, wheeled around furiously and commanded us both to be still. When she finished scolding us, an older white woman standing nearby leaned over and whispered sympathetically: “It must be so tough adopting those kids from the ghetto.”

The thought that two tawny-skinned bundles of stress with Afros could have emerged from my mother’s womb never crossed the lady’s mind. That was in the early 1980s, when the sight of interracial families like mine was still an oddity, even in a New Jersey suburb within commuting distance from Manhattan. What strikes me most today is that despite how insulting the woman’s remark was, we could nonetheless all agree on one thing: my brother and I were black…

…Until the year 2000, the census didn’t even recognize citizens as belonging to more than one racial group. And yet, so rapid has the change been that just 10 years later, when Barack Obama marked the “Black, African Am., or Negro,” box on his 2010 census form, many people wondered why he left it at that.

If today we’ve become freer to concoct our own identities, to check the “white” box or write in “multiracial” on the form, the question then forces itself upon us: are there better or worse choices to be made?

I believe there are. Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look…

…As the example of President Obama demonstrates par excellence, the black community can and does benefit directly from the contributions and continued allegiance of its mixed-race members, and it benefits in ways that far outweigh the private joys of freer self-expression…

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