Category: Autobiography

  • AM NOT WHITE. I am not Black. I am mixed. I am one half Polish, one quarter Russian, and one-quarter Japanese. I was born, raised, and educated in public schools in the suburbs of Chicago, and then abruptly transitioned to public schools located in north Alabama when I was an adolescent.

  • “I’m not half, I’m whole!” Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu 2013-04-27 Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Stanford University “I hate the word ‘half,’ which is used to designate people like me. I always wanted to be someone who is ‘whole.’” The young man raised his eyes to the evening sky and gazed upon the rising moon. It suddenly struck me that…

  • This, That, Both, Neither: The Badging Of Biracial Identity In Young Adult Realism The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults The official research journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association 2013-04-22 Sarah Hannah Gómez, Graduate Student School of Library and Information Science Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts Editor’s Note: “This, That, Both, Neither”…

  • Oona King: My family values The Guardian 2013-04-19 Roz Lewis The Labour peer talks about her parents, growing up as the only mixed-race child in her class, and being an adoptive parent I was born in Sheffield. My father, Preston King, is African American; my mother, Hazel, is a Jewish Geordie. I have a brother,…

  • Richard Pryor’s Daughter on Growing Up Biracial WNYC Radio New York, New York WNYC News 2013-04-07 Soterios Johnson April 7, 2013 – Richard Pryor, one of the most influential comedians of all-time, gained pop star status in the 1970’s with his incisive storytelling about issues including race.  Now, his daughter Rain is sharing her take…

  • Blue Skies and Thunder: Farm Boy, Pilot, Inventor, TSA Officer, and WW II Soldier of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team iUniverse 2009-12-21 296 pages E-Book ISBN: 978-1-44018-258-7 Virgil W. Westdale with Stephanie A. Gerdes In 1942, Virgil Westdale was a successful young flight instructor when the government ousted him from the Air Corps and demoted…

  • It’s Not Always Black And White: Caught Between Two Worlds Outskirts Press 2013-01-18 100 pages Paperback ISBN: 9781478716693 John Reed, Ph.D. John Reed knows from experience how difficult the life of a biracial person can be. He was born in Germany after World War II to a German-Caucasian mother and an African-American father. The difficulty…

  • When two sources of water come together to form one body, it is called a confluence. This is a place where two distinct sources of water crash and tumble over each other, churning and frothing. Here, a new river is born that cuts through the terrain as a single system. Some of these amalgamated rivers…

  • “Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany,” republished in a new annotated edition, recounts Ika Hügel-Marshall’s experiences growing up as the daughter of a white German woman and an African-American man after World War II.

  • It was the New Graduate Student Reception for my class, the first social event of my first semester in the best graduate department in my field in the country. I was full of myself, as we all were, full of pride at having made the final cut, full of arrogance at our newly recorded membership…