Mixed Race Studies

Edmonton Police Under Fire For Calling Teenage Girl ‘Mulatto’ In Amber Alert

The Huffington Post Canada
2018-10-07

Sima Shakeri, Associate Editor

Alberta Emergency Alert The Amber Alert sent out on Friday, with information about the alleged victim censored for her protection.

People who received the alert were shocked by the word choice.

Edmonton police issued an Amber Alert on Friday afternoon for a missing 14-year-old girl, who had allegedly been forcibly abducted.

The girl was found safe shortly after the call was sent out, and a suspect has been charged with several offences including kidnapping with a firearm, but what caught many people’s attention was the word choice in describing the teen.

The alert said the alleged victim was “mulatto,” an outdated term for a child with one white and one black parent…

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Mixed Race Blood, Bone Marrow Donors Needed To Save Gen Y Lives

The Huffington Post-Canada
2013-01-31

Andree Lau

One of Lourdess Sumners’ most vivid memories of her childhood battle with cancer was pining for real food while hooked up to a feeding tube and watching The Food Channel on TV.

“It was horrible. I hated it,” recalls the now 14-year-old from her home in Duncan, B.C. “That would make me even more hungry. And I would draw pictures of sausages and hamburgers, whatever I felt hungry for.”

For her parents, that period was highlighted by the distressing and ultimately futile search for a bone marrow donor for their middle daughter, hampered mainly because she happens to be part of the fastest growing demographic in Canada.

Sumners, whose mother is Filipino and father is Caucasian, is among the more than 340,000 Canadian children growing up in a mixed-race family.

Only about four per cent of Canada’s couples are made up of people from different ethnic backgrounds — but they’re growing five times faster than other unions, according to data from the 2006 census.

Statistics Canada said mixed couples were most common among Canadians aged 25 to 34, followed by those aged 15 to 24 — a cohort that encompasses Generation Y, which generally refers to young adults born after 1980 (also known as millennials).

What hasn’t kept up with the growing population of mixed-race children is the registry of stem cell and marrow donors from blended ethnicities — donors that Sumners needed. She required a bone marrow transplant to fight acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow.

“It wasn’t even a consideration in my mind that finding bone marrow would be an issue,” says Orlando Sumners, Lourdess’ father. “There’s such a desperate need for mixed-race people on the registry … [but] most mixed-race adults wouldn’t have a clue what we’re talking about.”…

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