Mixed Race Studies

“I have some Chinese roots, I’m mestizaje [mixed]. I’m always sincere with people who know me. To be honest I never had an interest in Chinese culture before. I never wanted to get involved in the Chinese Association. But my mother always wanted to be connected to the community, to have Chinese friends,” he told me. “But what I’m trying to say is that for me I started to get involved with all this and it changed me.” —Junior Chen

Nidhi Prakash, “The forgotten history of Chinese immigrants in this Mexican border town,” Fusion, October 13, 2016. http://fusion.net/the-forgotten-history-of-chinese-immigrants-in-this-mex-1793862816.

The forgotten history of Chinese immigrants in this Mexican border town

Fusion
2016-10-13

Nidhi Prakash

Erendira Mancias/FUSION

MEXICALI, Mexico—Mexicali has all the obvious signs of being a border town: roads pointing the way to the United States, car after car lined up at crossing points from early morning through the blistering hot day and well into the night—currency exchange places dog-earing every corner.

But there’s something about this place that sets it apart in the borderlands. You might notice it first in the Chinese restaurants dotting the streets, in the elaborate pagoda that sits at the border with Calexico, or in the doorways downtown with subtle, sometimes faded, Chinese lettering.

This dusty northern Mexican city of around 690,000 was largely developed by an often-overlooked community of Chinese immigrants, whose roots here trace back to the late 1800s. Tens of thousands of immigrants, mostly from Canton (now Guangzhou), arrived to the area between the mid–1800s and the 1940s, crossing by ship from southern China, often first to San Francisco, sometimes to other Mexican cities like Ensenada and Guadalajara, before choosing Mexicali. Many stayed for generations after and helped build this city into what’s become.

The Chinese-Mexican community here remains very much a part of Mexicali—especially downtown, a historic center of the city’s rich history. There’s a stretch of several blocks called La Chinesca which, after decades of semi-abandonment and disrepair, is seeing the beginnings of a revival as newer generations reconnect, and for some, discover for the first time, their lasting impact on Mexicali culture…

…Junior Chen, 36, is a quiet, business-like man at first, who talks animatedly when we get to the subject of his plans for downtown Mexicali, where he was born and raised. He said he’s been working on projects to try to reactivate the city center since he was 16 years old. But starting a historical tour of La Chinesca, and thinking more about his Chinese heritage (his great-grandfather came to Mexico from Canton some time in the mid–1800s) has been more recent for him.

“I have some Chinese roots, I’m mestizaje [mixed]. I’m always sincere with people who know me. To be honest I never had an interest in Chinese culture before. I never wanted to get involved in the Chinese Association. But my mother always wanted to be connected to the community, to have Chinese friends,” he told me. “But what I’m trying to say is that for me I started to get involved with all this and it changed me.”…

Read the entire article here.

What the #ThankYouLovings campaign gets wrong about interracial couples and the future of America

Fusion
2016-12-09

Tahirah Hairston

FOCUS FEATURES

Last month, Loving, a biopic about Mildred and Richard Loving—the couple at the center of the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision which struck down bans on interracial marriage in 1967—was released nationwide. June 12th, 2017 will be the 50th anniversary of the historic trial.

As a way to celebrate the Lovings—and promote the movie—the Loving Twitter account began encouraging people to use the hashtag #ThankYouLovings. The hashtag has been shared across social media, accompanied by photos of interracial couples—everything from candid selfies to intimate wedding photos.

It’s important, beautiful, and in a sense almost surreal to see how much America has progressed—and how much it has failed—in one photo and one film. On one hand, there is no rule on who we can or can’t love. People of all races and, thanks to last year’s Supreme Court ruling, genders, can now marry. On the other hand, we’re no closer to ending systematic racism, sexism or homophobia, with the 2016 election being our most up-to-date example…

Read the entire article here.

On passing, wishing for darker skin, and finding your people: A conversation between two mulattos

Fusion
2015-06-15

Collier Meyerson

In 10th grade, I auditioned for the role of Julie in the musical Show Boat, one of the most famous portrayals of the tragic mulatto trope. I was cast, instead, as Queenie, the mammy. I deserved the part of Julie. I had a good singing voice. But there were no black people in my school to play the part of Queenie.

My first personal tragic mulatto moment.

Playing the mammy in Show Boat made me realize something my black mother had always told me and I never believed: the world did not see me as Julie, trying to manage two different backgrounds. It saw me as black. Specifically, white people saw me as black.

On Wednesday, I spoke with Mat Johnson, the author of Loving Day, a new novel that explores the mulatto experience—one that Johnson sees as a subset of the black experience. And one that the United States didn’t recognize until 2000, the first year the Census collected data on people of more than one race…

…CM: I don’t personally pass as white. And I’ve always wondered about others who can. Do you ever choose to intentionally pass as white?

MJ: Every single time I get pulled over by a cop. And I feel guilty as I’m doing it, but you have never met a whiter man than me pulled over by a police officer. I mean, I sound like Gomer Pyle.

When I moved to New York I wondered what would happen if I stopped playing up my black identity. And I basically just let that go. I didn’t cut my hair in a way to look blacker. Didn’t have facial hair in a way that made me look blacker. I wore clothes that were more ethnically generic, just generally bland preppy. And I went through this whole period. It was maybe like a month where I just let that disappear…

Read the entire interview here.

This web series asks black women around the world to explain what beauty means to them

Fusion
2016-06-02

Tahirah Hairston

Courtesy of Un-Ruly

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s not the impression you’d get from flipping through a fashion magazine. The images we see in mainstream media every day suggest that there’s only one way to be beautiful: white skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, thin body. Not only do these ideals exclude women of color altogether, but they also reinforce the troubling idea that you should change your hair, skin color, or body to be a part of the club.

But thanks to social media and the internet, there are new gatekeepers changing the conversation about what it means to be beautiful, practicing inclusive representation, and creating places to explore, talk, and educate. Antonia Opiah is one of them. In 2013, she started launched her hair blog and e-commerce site Un-ruly, which has everything from hair commentary, styling tips and recommendations for products to buy. It was in creating this website that Opiah became comfortable in her own skin and hair…

Read the entire interview here.

How street kids in the Bronx taught me it’s OK to be biracial and gay

Fusion
2016-05-18

Terry Blas

As a “nerdy, Mexican, gay, Mormon child of the ’80s and ’90s,” cartoonist Terry Blas had trouble figuring out his identity… until an experience in New York taught him a valuable lesson.

…

Read the entire comic strip here.

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…

For Artur Santoro, 21, identifying as black is about being honest with himself—a process similar to coming out as gay.

“I had to come out of the closet twice—once as gay, and once as black,” Artur tells me. He says growing up with a white dad and a “light-skinned black” mom made it difficult to recognize his own blackness for most of his youth. But once Artur got involved in the LGBT community, it helped him identify other forms of discrimination in his life.

“I was suffering from situations of racism and didn’t realize it before,” he said. “If you’re black, you suffer racism—it’s not a choice; black is a consequence of what I live.”

Tim Rogers, “That moment you look in the mirror and realize you’re black,” Fusion, February 28, 2016. http://fusion.net/story/274184/that-moment-you-look-in-the-mirror-and-realize-youre-black/.

That moment you look in the mirror and realize you’re black

Fusion
2016-02-28

Tim Rogers, Senior Editor

Brazil’s Black Awakening

SAO PAULO, Brazil— Jessica Moreira was 21 years old when she realized she’s black. Natalia Paiva had turned 20 before she made the discovery. And Cleyton Vilarino dos Santos is sneaking up on his 26th birthday and says he’s still not sure if he’s black, white or what.

Welcome to Brazil, one of the most racially intermixed countries in the world. Racial identity is a complex issue anywhere, but perhaps nowhere more so than here, where the difference between black and white is not so black-and-white.

Generations of interracial marriages have led to a rich tapestry of phenotypes and skin tones in every conceivable hue. But it can make racial identity an evolving or fluid situation that can change as a person gets older, learns more about the world, and their relationship to it.

As a result, it’s not uncommon for young people to spend the first 20 years of their lives looking in the mirror without fully understanding the race of the person staring back at them…

Read the entire article here.

Mexico ‘discovers’ 1.4 million black Mexicans—they just had to ask

Fusion
2015-12-15

Rafa Fernandez De Castro

For the first time in its history, Mexico’s census bureau has recognized the country’s black population in a national survey that found there are approximately 1.4 million citizens (1.2% of the population) who self-identify as “Afro-Mexican” or “Afro-descendant.”

The survey found that more women identify as black than men, by about 705,000 to 677,000. It also found that most Afro-Mexicans live in the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz, which is not entirely unsurprising given Mexico’s history.

Miguel Cervera, director general of sociodemographic statistics for the country’s census bureau (known as INEGI), told Fusion the 2015 survey is a preliminary effort to register demographic changes in preparation for the 2020 national census. He says Afro-Mexicans have always been included in past surveys, but were never given the option to identify themselves as such…

Read the entire article here.