Category: Autobiography

  • Mixed Blessings from a Cambridge Union Camden Review 2016-09-15 Angela Cobbinah Elizabeth Anionwu THE early years of one’s life normally follow a predictable path with any unexpected twists and turns suitably documented for posterity. But it was not until she was in her 60s that Elizabeth Anionwu, one of the country’s most senior nurses, was…

  • ‘You look like the help’: the disturbing link between Asian skin color and status Fusion 2016-08-25 Mari Santos Toronto, Ontario, Canada Outside a hotel lobby in Toronto earlier this year, an elderly Asian woman stopped my mother and me to ask what time a tour bus would be arriving. Then, the woman asked in broken…

  • Memoir Uncovers One Woman’s Painful Search for Racial Identity NBC News 2016-09-08 Brooke Obie When award-winning journalist Sil-Lai Abrams finally sat down to write her memoir, she hoped to stick to her 8-month contract. Instead, it took Abrams 3.5 years to dive into the pain of her upbringing and emerge ready to tell her story…

  • In front of his friends and girlfriend, he criticized my mother for divorcing him and called her, multiple times, “a whore”; then he called her mother—my grandmother—”a nigger.” To prove his point, he slurred, with a knowing tone, as if he were somehow enlightening me, “Your grandmother had nigger lips.”…

  • SIL LAI ABRAMS HAD HER SUSPICIONS about her race as a very young child. Her brown skin was much darker and her hair much curlier than her fair-skinned, straight-haired younger sister and brother. When she would walk down the street with her Chinese mother and White father, her White neighbors would stare and whisper.

  • My mother loved our actual blackness and African-ness, not just the artistic representations of them — the hair and the clothing and the food. She loved the history, the music, the language. And she wanted it FOR US.

  • Five Queers Of Color On What Connects Us To Our Complicated Or Mixed-Race Identities Autostraddle 2015-01-02 Hannah Hodson There is a sense of community that comes with being a person of color, but for some of us, settling into that community isn’t always comfortable. Because we don’t get a membership card along with our birth…

  • Looking For Participants For Washington Post Podcast On Mixed-Race Identity Alexandra Laughlin 2016-09-01 I’m a journalist at The Washington Post and I am working on a podcast about mixed race identity in the United States. This is going to be a highly produced, narrative-driven podcast that explores these complex issues through storytelling. Now, I am…

  • It’s the summer of 1998 and I’m at the mall with my mom and my sister Anna, who has just turned 5. I’m 7. Anna and I are cranky from being too hot, then too cold, then too bored. We keep touching things we are not supposed to touch, and by the time Mom drags…

  • Voices of Slavery: ‘They Were Saving Me For a Breeding Woman’ This Cruel War: An Evidence-Based Exploration of the Civil War, its Causes and Repercussions 2016-08-25 Virginian Luxuries, artist unknown. c1825. During 1929 and 1930, an Africa-American scholar named Ophelia Settle Egypt, conducted nearly 100 interviews with former slaves. Working then at Fisk University, she…