Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

In Judaism, one’s mother must be Jewish in order to be ‘officially recognized’ as Jewish. Because it was my father who was Jewish, I didn’t count. And although I was born in Japan, I was not granted citizenship because only my mother was Japanese. From both sides, stranded. When I was 18, I decided to convert to Judaism. My mother was supportive, but she insisted that if I were to have a mikvah I must also start taking Japanese lessons. I’m not sure why she though these two things went together, or that they somehow balanced each other out. Balance was something both my parents strove for. Balance was important, they explained.

Naomi Angel, “On the Train,” in Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010): 143.

Real American: A Memoir

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2017-11-20 02:50Z by Steven

Real American: A Memoir

Henry Holt and Co.
2017-10-03
288 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781250137746

Julie Lythcott-Haims

A fearless debut memoir in which beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a biracial black woman in America.

Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called “micro” aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person’s inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims’s path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered “the other.”

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Ace of Spades, A Memoir

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, United States on 2016-11-19 16:41Z by Steven

Ace of Spades, A Memoir

Henry Holt and Co.
2007
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0312426316
Ebook ISBN: 978-1429905039

David Matthews

A take-no-prisoners tale of growing up without knowing who you are

When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege.

While his father, a black activist who counted Malcolm X among his friends, worked long hours as managing editor at the Baltimore Afro-American, David spent his early years escaping wicked-stepmother types and nursing an eleven-hour-a-day TV habit alongside his grandmother in her old-folks-home apartment. In Reagan-era America, there was no box marked “Other,” no multiculturalism or self-serving political correctness, only a young boy’s need to make it in a clearly segregated world where white meant “have” and black meant “have not.” Without particular allegiance to either, David careened in and out of community college, dead-end jobs, his father’s life, and girls’ pants.

A bracing yet hilarious reinvention of the American story of passing, Ace of Spades marks the debut of an irresistible and fiercely original new voice.

Read an excerpt here.

Tags: Baltimore, David Matthews, Henry Holt and Co., Maryland

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Mixed Race Studies

Real American: A Memoir

Ace of Spades, A Memoir

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