{"id":34401,"date":"2013-10-20T22:07:21","date_gmt":"2013-10-20T22:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=34401"},"modified":"2015-02-18T19:04:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T19:04:34","slug":"school-aims-to-give-biracial-kids-a-place-to-%e2%80%98be-themselves%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=34401","title":{"rendered":"School aims to give biracial kids a place to \u2018be themselves\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

School aims to give biracial kids a place to \u2018be themselves\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Japan Times<\/a>
\n2013-10-20<\/p>\n

Michael Bradley<\/strong>, Special to the Japan Times<\/p>\n

NAKAGUSUKU, OKINAWA<\/a> \u2013 Melissa Tomlinson doesn\u2019t have very happy memories of elementary school. As an 8-year-old, she \u201cnever had a chance to eat lunch normally \u2014 the other kids put something in it, or they mixed the milk and soup and orange together and told me to eat it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the three or four other mixed-race children in her class, Tomlinson was bullied on a daily basis. Now a 26-year-old high school English teacher, she still recalls how \u201cthey told me to go home to America, and they talked bad about my mom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her teachers did little to stop the abuse \u2014 indeed, some, wittingly or not, even contributed to it. Every summer, on the anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa<\/a> \u2014 the three-month assault in which around 100,000 Okinawan civilians perished \u2014 Tomlinson would become the focus of the class. \u201cThe teacher always said, \u2018Melissa, can you stand up? So, you are half-American, what do you think about this?\u2019 For me, I was like, \u2018I grew up here, I don\u2019t know about American things.\u2019 \u201d Tomlinson had no memory of her father, a U.S. serviceman who\u2019d split from her mother when she was still a baby.<\/p>\n

Tomlinson\u2019s story is far from unique. Since 1946, many children here have been born to U.S. military fathers and Okinawan mothers. Sometimes (and especially when the fathers are deployed elsewhere) the mothers are left to bring up the children by themselves, and, like Tomlinson, those children don\u2019t always have an easy time at school.<\/p>\n

When five single mothers set up a school for their own \u201cAmerasian\u201d children in Okinawa 15 years ago, they were not so much worried about bullying as concerned about getting their kids a bilingual education. The only one of the women still involved with the school \u2014 the current principal, Midori Thayer \u2014 explains: \u201cOur children needed to learn both languages because of their two different heritages. They had to be themselves.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

School aims to give biracial kids a place to \u2018be themselves\u2019 Japan Times 2013-10-20 Michael Bradley, Special to the Japan Times NAKAGUSUKU, OKINAWA \u2013 Melissa Tomlinson doesn\u2019t have very happy memories of elementary school. As an 8-year-old, she \u201cnever had a chance to eat lunch normally \u2014 the other kids put something in it, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,2895,8],"tags":[1793,16197,16196,16195,16194,5098],"class_list":["post-34401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-campus-life","category-media-archive","tag-japan","tag-melissa-tomlinson","tag-michael-bradley","tag-midori-thayer","tag-naomi-noiri","tag-okinawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}