Mixed Race Studies

Becky and Mia – Belonging and Not Belonging

The Listening Project: It’s surprising what you hear when you listen
BBC Radio 4
2016-06-03

Fi Glover introduces a conversation about the surprising challenges facing a mixed race family at home and abroad. Another in the series that proves it’s surprising what you hear when you listen.

The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they’ve never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation – they’re not BBC interviews, and that’s an important difference – lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject.

Producer: Marya Burgess.

Listen to the story here.

Mixed Student Union Hosts Fourth Annual Heritage Conference

Pacific Ties
University of California, Los Angeles
2016-05-13

Ayesha Sheikh

UCLA’s Mixed Student Union (MSU) hosted their fourth annual Mixed Heritage Conference on April 30 in the James West Alumni Center. The organization’s goal for hosting the conference on campus, according to the organization’s co-director Ariel Pezner, was to spread awareness of mixed identity among student audiences within UCLA as well as circles of mixed groups outside UCLA.

The reach of the organization’s efforts go well beyond the campus, with its connections to several other student organizations such as those at the University of Southern California. Chelsea Strong, co-director of MSU alongside Pezner, shared that the conference was the biggest event hosted by the organization to attract students, staff, and faculty of all backgrounds “to get a chance to learn critically about mixed heritage.” To manifest the appropriate space for this exchange of ideas and learning, prominent speakers from various mixed backgrounds were invited to speak.

The keynote Speaker Dr. Velina Hasu Houston, who wrote her senior thesis at UCLA and received her doctorate from USC, is recognized locally and internationally for her analytical playwriting on genres of mixed heritage, a topic often overlooked as “too uninteresting” for the arts.

The conference brought into projection the importance of using art as a medium to communicate beyond the subjects of the composition itself. Among Dr. Houston’s most renowned works is “Tea, with Music” and “Cinnamon Girl.” She is a leadership force for many organizations such as HapaSC, a mixed heritage organization at USC, and Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC), whose mission statement is “to advocate for and foster multiracial community and identity.”….

…Some of the other organizations’ representatives in attendance included Dr. Chandra Crudup, from One Drop of Love and the co-director of Mixed Roots Stories (MRS), who sponsored the conference. In addition to teaching at Arizona State University, Dr. Crudup is also a social worker. She said, “Race is in the face a lot more than in the past,” and that there needs to be a healthy way to deal with social justice issues. She spoke on what a healthy lifestyle looks like, a survival guide to not getting “jaded out by issues that affect life at work and socially.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interview with 39.4 Editor, Chelene Knight

Room: Literature, Art, and Feminism Since 1975
May 2016

Interview by Rebecca Russell

Chelene Knight

The Room Collective is very excited to have you on board as the new Managing Editor. How are you adjusting to the new role?

I was super excited when I was asked to step up as Managing Editor at Room. The mentoring I received from the previous Managing Editor, Rachel Thompson, has been the most amazing experience. She is one talented woman, and has done a lot to make Room such a great place for women to raise their voices. The entire Room Collective has been super supportive and I can honestly finally say I am doing what I love. This transition isn’t easy, that’s for sure! It’s been a big learning curve for me but there are also certain aspects of the job that are pretty darn rewarding, like working with such a talented group of women who all share a passion for the literary arts. The role itself is all encompassing and I feel like a huge tree with a million branches shooting out in multiple directions, and I am finally being challenged—this is a good thing…

…What can you tell us about the collection you’re currently working on, Dear Current Occupant?

It seems as though Dear Current Occupant has been in the works all my life. I had what you could call a “tough childhood,” and I wanted to write about it as a way of healing and as a way of setting things free into the world. It turned out to be a mixed-genre compilation of sonnets, prose, short story, erasure, and more. My first book, Braided Skin (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2015), told a story of race and the struggles of being of mixed-ethnicity, and focused on belonging and place in the racial/family sense, whereas Dear Current Occupant tackles the need for “home” and “place” in terms of the physical house. In the book, the narrator is a young adult looking back on the thirty homes she’s lived in as a child. She writes to the “current occupants” of these places to reflect on her own experiences when she was living there. She learns a lot about her “self” through this process. She opens doors, she unlocks and digs up things that were buried. The book also includes photos of the actual houses in various perspectives. The photography was done by Jade Melnychuk, and Rich Riordan. I am happy to say the manuscript is in my publishers’ hands as we speak…

Read the entire interview here.