Mixed Race Studies

What’s Radical About “Mixed Race”?

Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
8 Washington Mews
New York, New York 10003
2015-04-20

On April 20, 2015, the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU hosted “What’s Radical About ‘Mixed Race’?“. Eschewing an apolitical “celebration” of mixed race, this panel examined the movement’s implications for multiracial coalition and the future of race in the US and Canada, asking: does the multiracial movement challenge—or actually reinforce—the logics of structural racism?

Minelle Mahtani critically located how an apolitical and ahistorical Canadian “model multiracial” upholds the multicultural claims of the Canadian settler state. Jared Sexton called to task multiracial activists who leverage a mixed race identity in opposition to those who are “all black, all the time.”

A roundtable conversation moderated by Ann Morning (NYU Department of Sociology) followed.

North End Love Songs

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing
2012-03-20
108 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-897289-76-1

Katherena Vermette

Winner of the 2013 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

A self-described “tuff grrl with two ffs” there is no doubt that after poet Katherena Vermette’s first collection of poetry, North End Love Songs, she will also be known as one “tuff” poet. Chronicling several short lived affairs that follow the break-up of a long term relationship, North End Love Songs recounts a quest for love in all wrong places. In it poet Katherena Vermette pulls out all the stops with gritty stripped down lyrics about the kind of love doesn’t always talk nice, sometimes drinks way too much, smokes when it shouldn’t and winds up in bed with people it barely knows or trusts.

But North End Love Songs is more than just a poetic road trip to the wrong side of love. Described by critics as having “a complicated sense of beauty,” there is undeniable eloquence at work in Katherena Vermette’s poetry. These poems go way deeper than the usual explorations of loss and self discovery, grappling with the destructive social and cultural constructs that often keep women on the hunt for solace and stability outside of themselves instead of finding strength within.

Katherena Vermette is well known in Winnipeg for her spoken word and poetry performances. Her poems often feel like songs, sometimes country in tone, and sometimes dark, urban, and alternative. In North End Love Songs readers will find a fierce honesty, and resonant clarity that is unique to this fresh, new voice.

Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer of poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and compilations, including the upcoming Manitoapow—Aboriginal Literary History of Manitoba (Highwater Press 2012). Vermette was the 2010-2011 Blogger in Residence for thewriterscollective.org and recently begun graduate work in the prestigious Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. A member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba since 2004, Vermette lives, works and plays in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

What’s Radical About “Mixed Race?”

Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
8 Washington Mews
New York, New York 10003
Phone: (212) 998-3700
Monday, 2015-04-20, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time) | Free

Since the 1990s, mainstream media has heralded the growing population of self-identified “mixed race” people in the US and Canada as material proof of a post-racial era (a recent example: National Geographic‘s 2013 feature “The Changing Face of America,” whose title paraphrases a Time feature [at right] from two decades prior). Meanwhile, foundational multiracial activists and scholars like Maria Root claim a doubled oppression—racism via white supremacy and ostracizing from so-called “monoracial” people of color. A growing body of Critical Mixed Race Studies literature is challenging both positions, questioning the assumption that multiracial activism and scholarship is necessarily anti-racist.

Minelle Mahtani critically locates how an apolitical and ahistorical Canadian “model multiracial” upholds the multicultural claims of the Canadian settler state. Jared Sexton calls to task multiracial activists who leverage a mixed race identity in opposition to those who are “all black, all the time.”

Eschewing an apolitical “celebration” of mixed race, this panel examines the movement’s implications for multiracial coalition and the future of race in the US and Canada, asking: does the multiracial movement challenge—or actually reinforce—the logics of structural racism?.

The Challenge of Mixed-Blood Nations

Indian Country Today Media Network
2015-04-25

Duane Champagne, Professor of Sociology and American Indian Studies; Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Countries with indigenous nations usually also have mixed-blood nations composed of people of indigenous descent and other nations or races. In an increasingly shrinking world where ethnicity is a quantity in flux, it is sometimes difficult to get a handle on how they relate to one another. The two groups would seem to be natural allies. But the reality isn’t that simple.

To begin with, much depends on the relations of the mixed bloods to the larger nation state. Take Canada, where the mixed-blood community is called Métis, a French word meaning—well, mixed blood. The Métis historically have had friendly relations with Indian communities. But currently they claim their own history and culture, a hybrid of European and indigenous community. Some Métis identify and live with tribal communities, while others do not. These separatists believe themselves to be a distinct nation or ethnic group from the indigenous nations and from Canada. Métis communities in Canada have separate land claims and negotiations with the Canadian government.

Meanwhile, in Latin and South America, as well as in Africa, people of mixed blood usually do not strongly identify with indigenous nations. They tend to reject indigenous ways in favor of national culture. Mestizos, for instance, are persons of indigenous ancestry who have taken up national culture and do not live in or engage with members of indigenous tribal communities.

This disengagement, in fact, can be quite vehement. Mestizo nations like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and many others segregate their indigenous communities and maintain hostile and repressive political and cultural relations over indigenous nations. As for assimilated Mestizos, they can generally be relied on to embrace the values and lifestyles of modern market economies and broad national culture while openly rejecting their indigenous counterparts.

In the United States, the situation is particularly complex because there is no official designation of a mixed-blood nation…

Read the entire article here.

Sorry Music Journalists, Drake is Black.

Canadaland
2015-04-30

Kyrell Grant

Writers need to stop policing his blackness

It feels ridiculous to have to say this: Drake is black.

Drake, born Aubrey Graham in a city where almost one in ten people are black, is black. Toronto’s greatest civic triumphalist since Jane Jacobs is black.

He is a black man as much as any other black man. And yet Drake’s own identity – his nationality, his mixed race background that includes Jewish heritage and upbringing, the neighbourhood he once lived in, the schools he went to – is often taken to mean that his black experience is somehow inauthentic. While certainly not the first artist to have this kind of analysis imposed on him, Drake’s profile means that his art in particular has been prominently used to deny his black experience when it doesn’t conform to someone else’s narrow vision of race…

Read the entire article here.

TCK TALENT: Neil Aitken, Computer Gaming Whiz Kid Turned Award-Winning Poet

The Displaced Nation
2015-04-29

Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang

Neil Aitken (photo supplied)

Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang is back with her column featuring interviews with Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) who work in creative fields. Lisa herself is a prime example. A Guatemalan-American of Chinese-Spanish-Irish-French-German-English descent, she has developed her own one-woman show about growing up as a TCK, called Alien Citizen, which premiered nearly two years ago and is still going strong. In fact, she will soon be taking the production to Valencia, Spain, and Capetown, South Africa!

—ML Awanohara

Welcome back, readers! Today’s interviewee is poet Neil Aitken: winner of the prestigious Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his book of poems, The Lost Country of Sight and founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review. Neil and I met at the Mixed Roots Literary & Film Festival in 2009. I am so pleased to have the chance to interview him this month for TCK Talent.

* * *

Welcome to The Displaced Nation, Neil. I understand that you’re a multi-ethnic ATCK like me! Please tell us about your heritage.

My father was born in the Okanogan Valley in British Columbia, Canada, of Scottish and English descent. My mother was born on Hainan Island, south of China, in the midst of the conflict between the Nationalists and the Communists in China. Shortly after her birth, her parents—her father was a high-ranking officer in the Nationalist Army and her mother, the daughter of one of the elite island families—fled to Taiwan to escape the Communists. Despite growing up a world apart, my parents met in the middle, Hawaii, while both attending university there.

Where were you born, and where did you live growing up?

I was born in Vancouver. My father’s bachelor’s degree was in Linguistics & ESL. His first job took us to Dhuhran, Saudi Arabia, where he taught English in the oil universities. But then my mother developed severe asthma due to the extreme heat and dust, and the doctors warned her that if she stayed any longer, she would be putting her life in peril. So she took my younger sister and me (I was four, my sister two-and-half) to Taiwan to live with relatives while my father completed the last nine months of his teaching contract. While in Taiwan, my sister and I forgot all our English, switched completely to Mandarin Chinese, and attended a Chinese-speaking pre-school. When my father finally arrived to pick us up, apparently we were so frustrated in our inability to communicate with him, we refused to speak Chinese until we relearned English. By the time we returned to Canada, we’d made the switch—but lost our Chinese in the process. My father returned to school in Vancouver, concluding that it was too hard to raise a family as an ESL professor. He completed a Masters in Library Science degree at the University of British Columbia and, when I was eight, we moved to North Battleford, Saskatchewan, a small city surrounded by farmland in the northern part of the province. Later we moved to Regina, the province’s capital and a much more vibrant multicultural center, where my father took his dream job as the supervisor over a special book collection focused on local, regional, and family histories of the Central Plains and Prairie Provinces. I completed elementary school and high school there…

Read the entire interview here.

Navigating Through my Tamil-Filipino World: An Account of a Mixed First Generation Kid

Tamil Culture
2014-01-30

Shanelle Kandiah

Throughout my life, every time I have come to meet someone for the first time, I seem to always be asked about my ethnicity. Over the course of a conversation with someone, I can even anticipate the exact point that this question will be asked. The curious yet reluctant segway of “so…what’s your background?” or “where are your parents from?” gives it all away.

While these questions may be perceived as bothersome to other mixed kids, I cannot say that it ever really bothered me. I have always taken a strange sort of pride in describing my family. Having been raised by a Sri Lankan Tamil father and a Filipino mother, I have never seen my life as anything short of amazing. Growing up exposed to two rich cultures from two loving parents is something that is pretty difficult to fault.

Reflecting back on my childhood, there are certain memories that stand out as reflective of how unique my family may be perceived to the outside world. For instance, there were times growing up where my parents would host birthday parties for my brother and me, and would invite what seemed like everyone they had ever met in their lives. People of all shapes and sizes – not only Tamils and Filipinos, but Anglos, East Asians, and other mixed families – would always manage to seep into my house where they would be welcomed with open arms.

Our food at these events was often a mix of Sri Lankan catering with overwhelming amounts of pittu, hoppers and varying curries, alongside Filipino takeout trays of lumpia, chicken adobo and pansit. When coupled with the Tamil movie scores and Western music playing in the background, I would agree with outsiders who have deemed my family as not quite run of the mill. Even now, it seems overwhelming that so much cultural transactions occurred at these gatherings. Looking back, these times actually gave me some of my best childhood memories…

Read the entire article here.

MIXED Art Conference

Mixed in Canada
YMCA Central Toronto
20 Grosvenor Street
Toronto, Ontario M4Y 2V5 Canada
Saturday, 2015-05-02, 09:00-18:00 EDT (Local Time)

M.I.X.E.D.: Multidisciplinary.Intersections.Xchanging.Empowering.Dialogue

The aim of this multidisciplinary art conference is to co-create an inclusive dialogue about racialized mixed identities and lived realities through an intersectional lens. “Un-Conference” attendees and facilitators will be able to engage with one another in dynamic group discussions filled with peer-to-peer sharing and learning. The contributions of all racialized participants are encouraged to be represented, acknowledged and honoured.

• Multidisciplinary the event promises to deliver something for everyone. There will be a curated art exhibit, live artistic performances and opportunities for attendees to co-animate the space.
• Keynote Speakers M.I.X.E.D. is proud to have community activist and educator Kim Katrin Milan and professor Dr. Minelle Mahtani to deliver opening and closing remarks at our inaugural event.
• Community Building Meet the phenomenal facilitators and amazing artists representing decades of working within intersecting communities. The mixed race experience and its intersections will be featured in our breakout group discussions and the day’s performances.
• Self Care Throughout the day, information and resources will be available to assist with possible triggering. We will also be featuring a wellness group exercise lead by Zainab Amadahy for some self-care debriefing at the end of the event.
• Accessibility We would like to have as many individuals participate in the event by reducing boundaries where possible. Gender neutral bathrooms will be available and the space is wheelchair accessible. Light refreshments and lunch will be served and the event is Pay What You Can but no one will be turned away at the door. We ask all attendees to come scent-free.
• M.I.X.E.D. is meant to be as safe a space as possible for all attendees which means no forms of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, discrimination based on age, class, weight, creed, immigration status, xenophobia, transphobia, transmisogyny, cissexism, etc. will be tolerated.

For more information, click here.

Controversial ruling in Spence unlikely to apply to many other estates cases

AdvocateDaily.com: Canada’s Legal News
2015-02-24

Lisa Laredo

The court decision in Spence v. BMO Trust Company, 2015 ONSC 615 (CanLII) has led to concerns about court interference and uncertainty in estate planning.

An Ontario court judge held a will to be invalid due to a perceived intolerance, based on witness testimony, that while the testator had in his will disinherited his daughter because they were “estranged” and had no relationship, he had actually disinherited her for having a mixed-race child.

It is recognized at law that provisions of a will that are discriminatory on protected human rights grounds (race, gender, etc.) have been deemed to be against public policy and can be found invalid…

Read the entire article here.

Metis actress Tantoo Cardinal to receive lifetime achievement award

CTV News
2015-02-05

The Canadian Press

TORONTO — As Metis actress Tantoo Cardinal prepares to receive a lifetime achievement award, she remembers what originally inspired her to begin acting more than 40 years ago: anger.

“It wasn’t about a career at all — it was about having a voice,” the Edmonton-raised 64-year-old said in a telephone interview this week.

“I don’t know if people really can appreciate what that experience is — of attempted genocide, generations and generations and generations where your language is outlawed, your creativity is outlawed, anything you think or say or do is actually outlawed…

Read the entire interview here.