Mixed Race Studies

It’s not all black or white: reporter struggles with mixed-race identity

The Lowell
Lowell High School, San Francisco, California
2015-11-24

Rachael Schmidt

Reporter Rachael Schmidt is half white and half black. Photo by Kiara Gil.

I arrived at my cousin Angela’s fourteenth birthday party and was the first one there. Her mom is from Malaysia and her dad is German. I immediately gravitated towards her and for the rest of the evening, we exchanged gossip, played guitars and harmonized together.

Once my father’s side of the family began to arrive and attempted to interact with us, we retreated to her room. My cousin and I always laugh when we joke and scream, “Run away!” as we make our great escape. But I have always wondered why we feel so inclined to leave when our other relatives, who are mostly white, begin to show up.

I used to figure it was because of our vast age differences in comparison to our other family members’, but the more I thought about it after the party, the more I realized that I had grown uncomfortable with my father’s family when I was nine years old and my parents divorced. After my mother, who is black, became absent from family gatherings, I felt even more out of place. I am half white and half black. When one side of my background is taken away, I do not feel complete…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Passing in American Life

The Hill Center
Washington, D.C.
2016-05-10

Lisa Page, Director of Creative Writing at The George Washington University, and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, #Passing, moderates a discussion with Dr. Allyson Hobbs. Hobbs is an assistant professor of American history at Stanford University. She is the author of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.

Who gets to be Native American?

Fusion
2016-03-11

Anna Pulley

“Inhumane.” “Dishonorable.” “Genocide.” These were just a few of the dozens of Sharpied comments written on the hands of indigenous activists recently, as they launched a grassroots, social-media movement against tribal disenrollment, which is when a tribal government throws out its own members. The campaign, #StopDisenrollment, is aimed at, well, stopping disenrollment, by gathering people’s stories and asking activists to post pictures of what disenrollment means to them.

In recent years, tribal disenrollment has become increasingly routine. An Indian may be thrown out due to a clan rivalry or political in-fighting, or when a tribe trims members to consolidate casino revenues. Losing one’s tribal enrollment often means losing jobs, housing, educational benefits, and social services. It also means grappling with the identity mindfuck of being told: “You’re no longer an Indian in the eyes of the federal government.”

Meanwhile, people like Andrea Smith and Rachel Dolezal have claimed a Native identity as their own, echoing generations of white people before them. Even Senator Elizabeth Warren has claimed a Native identity because of “family stories” about her Cherokee roots. A recent Pew Research Center study showed that fully half of all U.S. adults who claimed a multiracial identity said they were white and American Indian. That’s 8.5 million people…

Read the entire article here…

The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
2016-04-06
222 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1522998952
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Dmae Roberts, Writer, Producer, Media and Theatre Artist

The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family traces four decades of what it means to be a mixed-race adult who sometimes called herself “Secret Asian Woman.” With her personal essays written over a ten-year period, Dmae Roberts journeys through biracial identity, Taiwan, sci-fi, and the trials of her interracial Taiwanese and Oklahoman family amid love, loss and letting go of past regrets and pain. Through journeys across America, Japan and Taiwan, this collection of personal stories charts four decades of racial identity. Each essay lends insights into the complexity of cross-cultural family relationships and includes photographs of the author’s family.

Stop Turning Mixed Race Girls Into a Fetish

Consented
2016-03-04

Antonia King
History graduate turned job hunter, currently living between Devon and London, spoken word artist and lover of Nicki Minaj.

I was in Sainsbury’s and a white woman who helped me reach something on the top shelf decided to ask me my ethnic background. She was well meaning and seemed kind so no immediate alarm bells rang, but she then informed me she wants mixed race kids. She laughed and stated “I’m single right now, but definitely only looking at black guys, mixed race kids are just so beautiful”.

I smiled, left and then began to despair and worry about her future children. This is nothing I haven’t heard many times before, a quick Twitter search for “mixed race kids” will reveal many people detailing how they want mixed race children to dress up and parade around like a handbag.

The major issue being that mixed race children are not handbags. Mixed race children, especially girls, are fetishized and even sexualised before they’re born. Comments about how beautiful they’re going to be, or how they’ll be just the right amount of black start disgustingly early, the media commentary on North West is a prime example of this…

Read the entire article here.

Four Questions for Sarah A. Chavez

Little Myths
2015-12-09

Daniel M. Shapiro

Sarah A. Chavez

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook All Day, Talking (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She holds a Ph.D. in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the anthologies Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts and Political Punch: The Politics of Identity, as well as the journals North Dakota Quarterly, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and The Boiler Journal, among others. Her debut full-length collection, Hands That Break & Scar, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

SC: As a kid growing up in a mobile home on the west side of Fresno, CA, when I was upset or couldn’t sleep, I read. Mostly prose, novels and the occasional short story; they were about upper class people, romance, things that take place in forests, or vampire/horror – always an escape. When I was done with a book, it felt like I was transported back against my will. My brain a little fuzzy, feeling dissatisfied closing the back cover, unhappy to come back to the life I had…

Read the entire interview here.

How My Jewish and Black Grandmothers Found Bernie

Jewschool: Progressive Jews & Views
2016-04-30

Jason Salmon

Photo above: Jason Salmon (center) and members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) at an action in New York City for police accountability. Photo courtesy JFREJ.

Both of my grandmothers, one a Black woman and the other an Ashkenazi Jewish woman, recently became ardent Bernie Sanders supporters. They don’t articulate their passion like most of the younger supporters by saying, “I feel the Bern,” but they realize that in order for their grandchildren to reap the benefits of their hard work and contributions to society, whether social or economic, systemic change must happen. They grasp that they can’t subscribe to the status quo any longer.

Like many of the older generation who came from marginalized groups, my grandmothers are weighted down by the past and the oppression they experienced first-hand, while living through the Great Depression and segregated America. We are all, to some extent, prisoners of America’s past, but they feel its impact in ways I cannot…

Read the entire article here.

Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past

The Guardian
2016-05-08

Simon Woolley

Source: Marvin Rees

The descendant of enslaved Africans is now running a former slave city. His symbolic victory gives hope – and should not be forgotten

While much has been said, rightly so, about a Muslim now leading London, we must not lose sight of the symbolism and enormous significance of Marvin Rees being elected mayor of Bristol this weekend.

Rees, the working-class son of an English mother and Jamaican father, makes history as the first directly elected city mayor in Europe of African or Caribbean heritage.

And that’s important, because the city of Bristol and its governance cannot effectively be understood without seeing it, in part, through the prism of race…

Read the entire article here.

Dying to Be Black: White-to-Black Racial Passing in Chesnutt’s “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” Griffin’s Black Like Me, and Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man

Prospects
Volume 28 / October 2004
pages 519-542
DOI: 10.1017/S0361233300001599

Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Is racial passing passé? Not according to contemporary book sales. The theme remains central to at least three recent best sellers: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Roth’s novel made it to the big screen this fall, just as Devil in a Blues Dress, the adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel starring Denzel Washington, did in 1995. Renewed academic attention is being paid, of late, to “classic” passing narratives; once-ignored ones, including Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, are being revived; and still others being reread in the context of passing.

Read or purchase the article here.

Long Time Passing

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2009-01-23

Amy Finnerty

Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

How black is Eminem? How white is our president? We can’t help asking these awkward questions as we digest “Near Black,” by Baz Dreisinger. A freelance journalist and an assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she explores cases of “reverse racial passing” — as distinct from the more conventional, black-as-white “passing,” for so long a feature of our tortured society. Presenting “narratives about white people who either envision themselves or are envisioned by others as being or becoming black,” and drawing on examples ranging from Twain’s “Pudd’nhead Wilson” to the sophomoric genre film “Soul Man,” she argues that the appropriation of black identity by whites — both literally and metaphorically — has been a potent strain in American culture for centuries.

The term “white passing” is broadly defined here. A white journalist with dyed skin infiltrating black precincts and writing about it is passing. So is a “jive-slanging” white D.J. A white immigrant sold into slavery in the early 19th century (a case of “coerced passing”) also has a place in Dreisinger’s compendium of racial mix-ups, satires and cautionary tales…

Read the entire review here.