Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-race Britons – we are of multiple heritages. Claim them all

The Guardian
2022-04-19

Natalie Morris

With my father’s death I lost the link to my Jamaican lineage, and I needed to address that. It is vital to embrace all sides of yourself

Losing a parent is profoundly destabilising. It takes the world as you knew it – the certainties, the constants, the safety nets – and whips it out from under you. In addition, as I have discovered over the past two years, there is an extra layer of complexity that comes with being mixed-race and losing the person who connects you to half your heritage.

My dad, Tony, was Black. He was a quite well-known figure here from his work as a journalist with ITV and the BBC, particularly in northern England. And in the months after he died one sunny day in August 2020, I began to question everything about myself…

Read the entire article here.

Colin Kaepernick’s New Children’s Book Encourages Black Children To Embrace Their Identities

Mademenoire
2022-04-11

Natasha Decker

Colin Kaepernick’s I Color Myself Different is a new children’s book based on the football player’s true and inspiring journey as a child learning the value of embracing and celebrating their Black identity “through the power of radical self-love” and knowing their inherent worth.

In the book, illustrated by Eric Wilkerson, a young, adopted Colin goes on a journey of unpacking his identity and its uniqueness.

“When I was 5-years-old, I was given an assignment in school: ‘draw a picture of yourself and your family.’ I drew my white adoptive family with a yellow crayon and then picked up a brown crayon to draw myself,” the former San Franciso 49ers player told PEOPLE.

Highlighting that assignment’s impact, the 34-year-old athlete said the “revelatory moment taught me an important lesson about embracing my Black identity through the power of self-love and eventually helped me to understand how my brown skin was connected to my Blackness.”

“Above all, I hope that I Color Myself Different can inspire young people to embrace their power, love themselves and walk in the truth of their own path,” the activist continued…

Read the entire article here.

For Colin Kaepernick, Writing Is Another Form of Activism

Publishers Weekly
2022-03-29

Nathalie op de Beeck, Associate Professor of English
Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington

Colin Kaepernick, at 34, presides over a multimedia platform for Black and brown people’s empowerment. In 2016, inspired by civil rights heroes, the then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback rocked the NFL by taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality, sparking protests and backlash. That fall, he and his partner Nessa (known by her first name only) established Know Your Rights Camp, a youth-focused organization with principles that echo the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program for communities, along with a downloadable set of educational resources, Colin in Black & White: The Kaepernick Curriculum. He went on to found Kaepernick Publishing, for which he edited a collection of essays by social justice leaders, Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing or Prisons.

Kaepernick Publishing and Scholastic have teamed up to publish Kaepernick’s debut picture book (as part of a multibook deal), the autobiographical I Color Myself Different, with illustrations by Eric Wilkerson, an artist known for his high-energy fantasy illustrations. Wilkerson’s paintings grace the covers of Nic Stone’s Shuri books and Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong series, and Kaepernick was familiar with his work; the author and illustrator spoke back and forth to fine-tune the images of a young Colin in I Color Myself Different. Kaepernick corresponded with PW about writing as a form of activism, recognizing the many elements that make up our identities, and finding strength in the history of social justice movements…

Read the entire interview here.

I Color Myself Different

Scholastic
2022-04-05
40 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1338789621

Colin Kaepernick, Eric Wilkerson (Illustrator)

An inspiring story of identity and self-esteem from celebrated athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick.

When Colin Kaepernick was five years old, he was given a simple school assignment: draw a picture of yourself and your family. What young Colin does next with his brown crayon changes his whole world and worldview, providing a valuable lesson on embracing and celebrating his Black identity through the power of radical self-love and knowing your inherent worth.

I Color Myself Different is a joyful ode to Black and Brown lives based on real events in young Colin’s life that is perfect for every reader’s bookshelf. It’s a story of self-discovery, staying true to one’s self, and advocating for change… even when you’re very little!

Writer Gregory Howard Williams’ “Life on the Color Line”

Fresh Air with Terry Gross
WHYY FM, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1995-02-21

Terry Gross, Host

Williams spent the first ten years of his life believing he was white in segregated Virginia, and that his dark-skinned father was Italian. When his parents’ marriage ended, his father took him and his brother to Muncie, Indiana, where the boys learned that they were half black. Williams’ new memoir “Life on the Color Line” is about the struggle and repression he faced growing up between the races. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “(an) affecting and absorbing story.”

Listen to the interview (00:23:10) here. Download the interview here.

I’m Biracial, But Rejected My Blackness For Years. Here’s Why I Stopped Passing For White.

The Huffington Post
2022-03-24

Eleanor Beaton, Guest Writer

“Unknowingly, I started to reject all of the parts of myself that were Black.”

The school bus screeched to a halt. My mother, a Black Fijian woman who proudly embraced her natural ’fro, was waiting for me at the bus stop.

“Bye, n***a,” another kid said loudly, as I got up from my seat.

As an adult, due to my mixed heritage, many people describe me as “white-appearing” or racially ambiguous. But in Nova Scotia in the 1980s — with my tanned skin and thick curly hair in a sea of whiteness — I was reminded on a daily basis that I was different. I was an other. No matter how hard I tried, I would never blend in.

I asked my white father to fetch me from the bus stop going forward…

Read the entire article here.

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

Sarabande Books
2020-05-05
112 pages
5.3 x 0.6 x 8.4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-1946448545

Kiki Petrosino, Professor of Poetry
University of Virginia

• Winner of the 2021 UNT Rilke Prize
• Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee
• Library of Virginia Literary Awards Finalist
• Winner of the 2021 Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice

In her fourth full-length book, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots, while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South. From a stunning double crown sonnet, to erasure poetry contained within DNA testing results, the poems in this collection are as wide-ranging in form as they are bountiful in wordplay and truth. In her poem “The Shop at Monticello,” she writes: “I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies/ into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me/ of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common wealth.” Speaking to history, loss, and injustice with wisdom, innovation, and a scientific determination to find the poetic truth, White Blood plants Petrosino’s name ever more firmly in the contemporary canon.

Being Mestiza

Enchantment Learning & Living Blog
2020-09-22

Dr. Maria DeBlassie, Professor, Writer, Bruja
Albuquerque, New Mexico

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about what I mean when I say I’m mestiza. That fact is always one of the first pieces of information in all my author bio and that’s intentional. Although the term has been around for a long time, I specifically use the definition from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which focuses on developing a new mestiza consciousness. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, mestiza or mestizaje means a person of mix-raced decent.

Being mestiza is different for everyone—everyone’s mix is a little different and, in many cases, few of us know everything about the mix that is our cultural background. This is because we are, in one way or another, products of colonization. And as a result of colonization, histories of the colonized sometimes get lost, erased, or suppressed. So it is important to remember that, like the wider Hispanic and Latinx communities, the mestizaje community is not a monolith. Our mixed heritage and our relationship to it are as complex and diverse as our backgrounds…

Read the entire article here.

MIXED MESSAGES episode five – Steve

Mixed Messages
2022-03-20

Sarah Doneghy, Host

Steve [Majors] discusses his book, “High Yella.” He tells what it was like growing up in a Black family and being told he was Black, to being white assumed as an adult while raising two Black daughters. In his search for identity, Steve discovers being Black is not only skin deep.

A Daughter’s Quest: On Anne Liu Kellor’s “Heart Radical”

Los Angeles Review of Books
2021-11-12

Amy Reardon

GROWING UP ASIAN AMERICAN in Seattle, Anne Liu Kellor struggled to understand the ache she carried inside. Her debut memoir, Heart Radical, tracks the author’s journeys to China and back home again in the late ’90s and early 2000s in search of her true self.

We meet Kellor after college, having become consumed with the need to learn the Chinese language and live in China. What she can’t seem to get her hands around is why. “All I knew was — I was filled with an intense longing and sorrow. Sorrow for the magnitude of suffering in the world, in China and Tibet, and within myself. Sorrow which I felt so clearly, but couldn’t understand why I felt so deep.”

There are clues. First among them, a general sense of opacity in her relationship with her mother, who immigrated from China as a girl, married a white man, and had two daughters. Also, there is this: “[N]or had anyone ever talked to me about what it was like to grow up multiracial — neither white nor fully Chinese, nor yet invited into a wider inclusivity as a person of color. Instead, everywhere I went, even at family reunions, I was simply reminded of my difference.”…

Read the entire review here.