Category: Autobiography

  • “Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White” is an arresting and moving personal story about childhood, race, and identity in the American South, rendered in stunning illustrations by the author, Lila Quintero Weaver.

  • Mixed Emotions About My Mixed Heritage Just Analise 2015-09-02 Analise Kandasammy When you truly love yourself you are released from the chains of trying to be someone you are not. How many times have we heard – if you can’t love yourself, you can’t truly love anyone else? How many times have we heard we…

  • Three Very Rare Generations The New York Times 1992-12-13 Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History Columbia University Soul To Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. By Yelena Khanga with Susan Jacoby. Illustrated. 318 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $22.95. AMONG its other consequences, the demise of the Soviet Union has…

  • I’ve experienced a new level of racism since Donald Trump went after Latinos The Guardian 2015-09-09 Tina Vasquez I have never been asked the type of questions I’m now fielding from white people – and I’m not the only one Donald Trump’s hate speech against Latinos seems to be emboldening white Americans’ racism. For many,…

  • My Music Is My Soul, My Language Is My Armor Psychology Today 2014-12-02 Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D. Stanford University Byron’s story of identity, healing, and empowerment “One night at a pub I heard the sound of traditional Okinawan folk music, and it was like being hit in the head with a hammer. The impact was like…

  • Hapa-palooza 2015: Celebrate mixed heritage and own your identity Vancouver Observer Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 2015-09-06 Jordan Yerman Mixed-race, outsider, or ‘half-breed’: you’re not alone at Hapa-palooza. Get in on Canada’s largest celebration of mixed heritage. Tôi là người lai mỹ means “I’m an American half-breed”. Author and publisher Brandy Liên Worrall wrote it in…

  • Grits and Sushi: Mitzi Uehara Carter muses on being black and Okinawan Metropolis Magazine 2015-09-06 Baye Mcneil Mitzi Uehara Carter Though Mitzi Uehara Carter was born on the opposite side of the Pacific, she’s kept herself anything but distant from her hereditary home. This Texas-native daughter of an African-American father and an Okinawan mother is…

  • Blended Families Mixed Roots Stories 2015-09-02 Tru Leverette, Associate Professor of English University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida What does it mean to call a family blended? The term still refers to families formed after divorce and remarriage—step-parents and step-children and step-siblings pieced together in new patterns. The term can also encompass families that are…

  • Privilege And Pressure: A Memoir Of Growing Up Black And Elite In ‘Negroland’ Code Switch: Fronties of Race, Culture and Ethnicity National Public Radio 2015-09-08 Terry Gross, Host Fresh Air Growing up in the 1950s, Margo Jefferson was part of Chicago’s black upper class. The daughter of a prominent doctor and his socialite wife, Jefferson…

  • ‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson The Boston Globe 2015-09-05 Donna Bailey Nurse While a student at University High in Chicago in the early 1960s, Margo Jefferson was introduced to the essays of James Baldwin. The future New York Times drama critic and Pulitzer Prize winner was struck by passages in “Notes of a Native Son’’: “‘One…