Mixed Race Studies

The Ghost of Hendrix, and Fans Who Think I’m White

The New York Times
2021-11-03

Tom Morello

Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.

In 1965, I literally integrated the town of Libertyville, Ill., at least according to the real estate agent who helped my mom and me find our first apartment.

My Irish-Italian mom had excellent teaching credentials, but the school boards in Northern Illinois made clear that while as a single mother she was welcome to teach in their town, we would have to live elsewhere because we were an interracial family.

I was the interracial part, as my dad is from Kenya. Libertyville, however, was willing to give my mom a shot, with the caveat that the residents of the apartment complex across the street from the school approved. Our helpful real estate agent assured the neighbors that this was no ordinary 1-year-old “Negro” child entering their building, but rather an exotic East African princeling. This false tale haunted me throughout my youth, but it gave my mom and me a toehold among the locals…

Read the entire article here.

Language as a Kind of Home: Talking with Anne Liu Kellor

The Rumpus
2021-09-02

Grace Loh Prasad

Anne Liu Kellor

How far do you need to travel to unlock the truth of your own heart? This is the central question in Anne Liu Kellor’s lyrical memoir Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, forthcoming from She Writes Press on September 7. Propelled by a spiritual quest and a longing to reconnect with the language her mother spoke to her growing up, Kellor left the comfort of her Pacific Northwest home to embark on a journey to Tibet and China in her twenties. Although it wasn’t her first time there—she’d visited before in college—this time she returned to China with a stronger resolve to find a sense of purpose and renew a part of her identity that felt stifled at home.

After traveling to Lhasa, visiting a remote monastery, and almost losing her passport, Kellor set up a home base in Chengdu, a bustling metropolis in Western China that’s bigger than New York City. She found work teaching English to college and graduate students but quickly became overwhelmed with the workload and the stress of having to be a role model and tiptoeing around sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen. Without a job and determined to stay in Chengdu, she moved in with an artist friend, Yizhong, who soon became her lover.

The safe shelter of her tender relationship with Yizhong allowed her to explore more confidently, develop her vocabulary, and pursue her creative impulses to paint and write in her journal. But even as her Mandarin fluency grew and she settled into a comforting rhythm, as a mixed-race and bicultural woman living in China she ultimately decided she wanted more—choosing a life that would be expansive enough to embrace all of her various identities.

I spoke with Kellor in late July about her debut memoir, her relationship to language, her evolving impressions of China, and having the heart of a seeker…

Read the entire interview here.

Explaining My Multiracial Identity (So Others Don’t Do It For Me)

Catapult
2017-01-04

Jaya Saxena

Every time someone guesses wrong, I am the one to apologize.

My mom always laughs when remembering how she was mistaken for an Irish nanny when taking me to the park as a baby. This was back when nannies were more likely to be Irish, when interracial marriages were less common, and long before I grew up to look like her in every way but my coloring. Sometimes I try to imagine how that conversation would go—“Excuse me, ma’am, I just wanted to inquire about your race and how it relates to the child you are holding”—and how dim you have to be to not realize a redhead can birth a brunette.

They were always mistaken, and it was our job to correct them; otherwise we’d be lying. She’s American, not Irish. I am biologically hers. My mother is white and I am not. Or I am, and not, at the same time. Other people’s false assumptions about what people can and should look like, about who could possibly exist, became our burden…

Read the entire article here.

Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging

She Writes Press
2021-09-07
253 pages
5.43 x 0.94 x 8.35 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-1647421731

Anne Liu Kellor

Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey?

Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.

Finding Myself in Nella Larsen

Paris Theater
4 West 58th Street
New York, New York
2021-10-28

Rebecca Hall

Rebecca Hall’s directorial and screenwriting debut Passing is playing at the Paris theater through November 4. The film has been nominated for five Gotham awards, including Breakthrough Director and Best Screenplay for Rebecca Hall.

The elucidation of a family’s history, like the history of a nation, is never straightforward or simple. History after all is a site of struggle and even a mode of obfuscation-memories are revised, edited, doled out in fragments. The truth is stated baldly and then denied, hedged, or partially retracted. The same stories somehow become less and less clear with each repetition. Clarity is elusive, and perhaps its pursuit is even unkind-why probe something so delicate as the past? And when it comes to questions of race, what answers could ever be satisfying?

From the moment that this script I’d written in a kind of fever dream started to become something that might turn into an actual film, the first question was always: Why me? Why this story? I have been circling around the answer to that question for nearly 15 years. The shock of recognition that I felt upon reading Nella Larsen’s novella was deeply confusing to me, enough so that I sat down and wrote my adaptation almost immediately after finishing it, as a way of trying to find out why its hooks were in me so deeply. That encounter with Passing not only produced this film, it also set me off on a journey through my family’s collective memory, its history, and the long story of black people in America…

Read the entire article here.

I Look White To Many. I’m Black. This Is What White People Say To Me.

The Huffington Post
2021-09-10

Cheryl Green Rosario, Guest Writer

I’ve been a fly on the wall when white people didn’t know anyone of color was looking or listening.

I am a Black woman who for most of my life has often been mistaken for white. And I’m here to tell you that for four decades white people have openly, even sometimes proudly, expressed their racism to me, usually with a wink and a smile, all while thinking I’m white too.

The incidents pile up, year after year — at a friend’s wedding, when I met a new roommate, at the grocery store, while riding in a taxi, and during innumerable other events from daily life.

As the nation begins, finally, to focus on the social injustice that takes place across this country — from the South where I grew up to the North where I’ve lived for the past 22 years ― I feel the collective pain. Even as a very fair-skinned Black woman with green eyes and light brown hair, I, too, have experienced racism. But I’ve also been a fly on the wall when white people didn’t know anyone of color was looking or listening…

Read the entire article here.

MIXED MESSAGES Episode 4. Vanessa.

MIXED MESSAGES with Sarah Doneghy
2021-10-23

Sarah Doneghy, Host

Vanessa discusses how being Mixed Race has affected her relationships with colleagues, impacted her work with the prison population, and how she’s been viewed when traveling to different countries.

Watch the entire episode (00:32:47) here.

‘High Yella:’ A Multiflavored Family Memoir Of Race, Love And Loss

Forbes
2021-10-27

Dawn Ennis, Contributor, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Cover of “High Yella” by Steve Majors The University of Georgia Press

“I was born a poor Black child.”

Fans of writer and actor Steve Martin’s early work will recognize those words from his 1979 comedy, The Jerk. Readers of Steve Majors’ powerful family memoir, High Yella, learn early on that the author used this memorable line in a key moment of courtship; An awkward attempt to use humor to explain a childhood marked by racism, shadeism, poverty, abuse, alcoholism, homophobia and the black magic that Black women in his family called “hoodoo.”

“The fact that I was born a poor Black child was just a part of my past,” Majors writes. “The full story of how that poor Black child grew up and escaped his past is wilder and crazier than any screenplay Steve Martin could ever dream up.”

The central part of High Yella involves race, identity and family. Majors, 55, is a light-skinned, cisgender Black gay man from upstate New York who was the youngest of five children, raised Roman Catholic, and married to a cis, white, gay Jewish man. He writes how he “checked boxes” when he needed to, and is perpetually plagued by people who presume to question his identity because he is white-passing. Majors also shares his own challenges—and failings—as a parent, and recounts painful recollections of family dysfunction and strife as a child…

Read the entire interview here.

Stony Brook professor’s biracial heritage has lessons for life, classroom

Newsday
2020-02-26

Joe Dziemianowicz, Special to Newsday

A week and a half ago, Zebulon Vance Miletsky, who will be leading a talk on African Americans and the right to vote on Feb. 27 at the Brentwood Public Library, was zipping through a PowerPoint presentation in his “Themes in the Black Experience” class at Stony Brook University.

He got to a slide with bullet points on the renowned black historian and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Miletsky, an assistant professor in Africana Studies and History, went off-script. He shared an anecdote with his students about the time a young Du Bois offered a white girl a valentine and she turned him down flat. Because he was black. It left a mark.

Du Bois went on to become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard. “Childhood things shape you,” the professor added.

Miletsky, 45, speaks from experience…

Read the entire article here.

Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

Washington Independent Review of Books
2021-02-05

Alice Stephens

A transracial adoptee reveals her struggle to build a Black identity in a world of white privilege.

Rebecca Carroll, Surviving the White Gaze, A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021)

In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a position statement that took a “vehement stand against the placement of Black children in white homes for any reason.” The document eloquently and forcefully explains this stance as crucial to the child’s healthy formation of identity in a society intent on the erasure of Blackness.

Around that time, David and Laurette Carroll formally adopt Rebecca, whom they had been raising since infancy. Rebecca is the mixed-race child of Tess, a white high school student of David’s. Uninterested in Black life and culture, the Carrolls were likely unaware of NABSW’s stance. As Rebecca Carroll vividly reveals in her searing memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, her adoptive parents were woefully unprepared to raise a Black child, clueless to the challenges she faced as the only Black resident of their rural New Hampshire town.

Like many progressive people of that era who adopted outside of their race, the Carrolls, who already had two biological children of their own, “believed in Zero Population Growth, and so…didn’t want to bring another child into the world.”

They first thought of adopting a Native American child, no doubt influenced by the Indian Adoption Project, a federal program that was heralded as a beacon of enlightened adoption practices for placing brown babies with white families. But then, 16-year-old Tess offers the Carrolls the opportunity to adopt her baby, fathered by a Black man. As Tess is a friend of the family, the adoption is open…

Read the entire review here.