Mixed Race Studies

The Book of Colors: A Novel

Unbridled Books
280 pages
May 2015
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
ISBN: 978-1-60953-115-7
EISBN: 978-1-60953-116-4

Raymond Barfield, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Christian Philosophy
Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

How can a 19-year-old, mixed-race girl who grew up in a crack house and is now pregnant be so innocent? Yslea is full of contradictions, though, seeming both young and old, innocent and wise. Her spirit is surprising, given all the pain she has endured, and that’s the counterpoint this story offers—while she sees pain and suffering all around her, Yslea overcomes in her own quiet way.

What Yslea struggles with is expressing her thoughts. And she wonders if she will have something of substance to say to her baby. It’s the baby growing inside her that begins to wake her up, that causes her to start thinking about things in a different way.

Yslea drifts into the lives of four people who occupy three dilapidated row houses along the train tracks outside of Memphis: “The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty.”

She becomes an integral part of this little community, moving in with Rose who is old and dying. As her pregnancy progresses, everything changes within the three houses.

Q. What have you learned about race while working on this documentary?

A. That the conversation has just started. And a lot of the time it’s framed as black and white. Well, where do Latinos and Asians fit in that conversation? Where do biracial people fit into that conversation? Where do multiracial people fit into that conversation? Where do the Rachel Dolezals of the world, of this country, fit into that conversation?

Jonathan Wolfe, “Jose Antonio Vargas on Donald Trump, Rachel Dolezal and His MTV Documentary, ‘White People’,” The New York Times, July 22, 2015. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/jose-antonio-vargas-white-people-interview.

The colour black, Mixed-race people

Thinking Allowed
BBC Radio 4
2015-07-22

Laurie Taylor, Host

Black: the cultural and historical meaning of the darkest colour. From the ‘little black dress’ which epitomises chic, to its links to death, depression and evil, ‘black’ embodies many contrasting values. White Europeans exploited the negative associations of ‘black’ in enslaving millions of Africans whilst artists & designers have endlessly deployed the colour in their creative work. Laurie Taylor talks to John Harvey, Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, about his new book which explores how ‘black’ came to have such ambiguous and varied meanings. They’re joined by Bidisha, the writer and broadcaster.

Also, the last 20 years has seen a major growth in the number of people of mixed racial heritage. Miri Song, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, talks about her research into the ways that multiracial parents with white partners talk to their their children about race and identity.

Producer: Jayne Egerton.

Listen to the episode (00:27:58) here. Download the episode here.

As A White Mom, Helping My Multiracial Kids Feel At Home In Their Skin

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-07-24

Kristen Green

Last year, after months of watching — and re-watching — the movie Frozen, my daughter Selma, who is 6, announced she didn’t want to be brown. “I wish my skin was white,” she told me one day in our living room, where we were hanging out after school.

I knew she idolized the film’s alabaster-skinned heroines, and it made my heart ache. Our daughters started picking up on the differences in our family’s skin color at a very young age — I’m a white-skinned woman raised in the South, my husband, Jason, is part-white, part-American Indian, with medium-brown skin, and, depending on the season, both of our girls look more brown than white. There’s research showing that children can recognize differences in race as early as infancy, and can develop racial biases as early as 3.

Knowing all this, we’ve tried to raise our daughters to be comfortable in their skin, making sure they’re in schools with other black and brown children, searching out books and movies with black and brown main characters. I had even tried, unsuccessfully, to steer her away from the snowy princesses.

But our attempts clearly weren’t foolproof. “You’re beautiful the way you are,” I told Selma, stroking her long hair and trying to mask my sadness. “I love your brown skin.” She wasn’t convinced. “I wish it was like yours,” she told me…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Dolezal Has Hijacked what It Means To Be Mixed-Race In America

ARMED
2015-07-05

Sophia Softky

Since the Rachel Dolezal trainwreck began unfolding, each day has brought ever-weirder allegations to light. From her upbringing, days at Howard University, involvement in the NAACP, and position as an Africana Studies professor – along with the predictable flood of hot takes and twitter memes. This week’s interviews with Matt Lauer and Melissa Harris-Perry have only compounded the public outrage. Dolezal’s claims that she “identifies as black” and that presenting herself as a Black woman is a matter of “survival” are breathtakingly audacious, obtuse, and bizarre.

I spent the last several years studying, thinking, and publishing opinions about race in America–even writing a thesis about racial performance and the history of “passing”. So, for me, this scandal should have been low-hanging fruit. Dolezal has been roundly condemned and ridiculed by progressives, and rightly so, but the more I learn, the more I have felt a deeply personal sense of discomfort and anxiety.

Of course, whatever her self-justifications, a white woman deliberately misrepresenting her racial background for personal and professional gain is indefensible, and plenty of ink has already been spilled on dismantling the absurd notion of “transracial”. But I have not been able to avoid drawing uncomfortable parallels between Rachel’s situation and my own life. The Dolezal scandal erases experiences of those who actually experience not ‘feeling’ like the race people assume, and I worry that the public outcry threatens to drown out and delegitimize the voices of people like myself, who exist in complicated racial borderlands and who struggle with social scrutiny and suspicion of our identities…

Read the entire article here.

Meet the black woman raised to believe she was white

The Telegraph
2015-07-12

Jane Mulkerrins

Schwartz believes that racial identity is “fluid and contextual” Photo: Nicholas Calcott

Growing up, Lacey Schwartz always felt different. It wasn’t until her late teens that she discovered the truth about her parentage – and her race

“Throughout my life, people have asked me why I look the way I do,” says Lacey Schwartz. “I would tell them that my parents were white, which was true. I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t. I grew up being told, and believing, that I was the nice, white, Jewish daughter of two nice, white, Jewish parents.”

But Schwartz, a 38-year-old film-maker, has brown skin, curly hair and full lips. It was only when she was 18 that her mother admitted the truth: that she had had an affair with a friend and former colleague who was black. And that, in all likelihood, he was Lacey’s biological father.

The revelation not only shook her relationship with her mother to the core, but also led Schwartz to question everything she had believed about who she was, and eventually inspired her to make a documentary about the experience, called Little White Lie.

“I started out wanting to make a film about being black and Jewish, because I was really struggling with my dual identity,” she says. “But I was living in a racial closet at the time that was all about my family secret. So I decided to use the film as a way to fully uncover the secret.”…

Read the entire article here.