{"id":42663,"date":"2015-09-11T18:20:21","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T18:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42663"},"modified":"2015-09-11T18:20:21","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T18:20:21","slug":"grits-and-sushi-mitzi-uehara-carter-muses-on-being-black-and-okinawan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42663","title":{"rendered":"Grits and Sushi: Mitzi Uehara Carter muses on being black and Okinawan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/metropolisjapan.com\/grits-and-sushi\" target=\"_blank\">Grits and Sushi: Mitzi Uehara Carter muses on being black and Okinawan<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/metropolisjapan.com\" target=\"_blank\">Metropolis Magazine<\/a><br \/>\n2015-09-06<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bayemcneil.com\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Baye Mcneil<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/metropolisjapan.com\/grits-and-sushi\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.metropolisjapan.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/grits-01-860x480.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<small>Mitzi Uehara Carter<\/small><\/p>\n<p>Though <a href=\"http:\/\/gritsandsushi.com\/about\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mitzi Uehara Carter<\/a> was born on the opposite side of the Pacific, she\u2019s kept herself anything but distant from her hereditary home. This <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Texas\" target=\"_blank\">Texas<\/a>-native daughter of an African-American father and an <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Okinawa_Prefecture\" target=\"_blank\">Okinawan<\/a> mother is currently a PhD candidate in the anthropology department at UC Berkeley, where she has recently completed her doctoral dissertation. She\u2019s spent years doing research, including a year of field work collecting the personal stories of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Okinawa_Prefecture\" target=\"_blank\">Okinawan<\/a> families. In 2010, she started the blog <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gritsandsushi.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Grits and Sushi<\/a><\/em> to chronicle her musings on Okinawa, race, militarization, and blackness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI started the blog so I could have a place to think about my anthropological work and my personal life and experiences. It was a good way for me to merge those two worlds,\u201d Uehara Carter explains. \u201cAnthropology studies at Berkeley can be very intense and theoretical, so I wanted my blog to be a place where I could reflect on some of the field work I was doing in Okinawa, and have a landing page where I could also engage with other people dealing with similar questions about their lives, their identities, and about race.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Grits and Sushi<\/em> has since grown into a resource, an open journal, and a communal space, attracting readers from around the globe interested in things black and Okinawan, including interracial marriages, mixed-race citizens, and issues surrounding American military bases in Okinawa&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI created these forums where I brought together black military personnel, Okinawan activists, and residents of Okinawa to have a conversation, a kind of \u2018talk-story\u2019,\u201d she says, explaining the Okinawan term, \u201c<em>yuntaku<\/em>.\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/metropolisjapan.com\/grits-and-sushi\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grits and Sushi: Mitzi Uehara Carter muses on being black and Okinawan Metropolis Magazine 2015-09-06 Baye Mcneil Mitzi Uehara Carter Though Mitzi Uehara Carter was born on the opposite side of the Pacific, she\u2019s kept herself anything but distant from her hereditary home. This Texas-native daughter of an African-American father and an Okinawan mother is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,16,395,8],"tags":[21025,19701,1793,21024,586,5098],"class_list":["post-42663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","tag-baye-mcneil","tag-grits-and-sushi","tag-japan","tag-metropolis-magazine","tag-mitzi-uehara-carter","tag-okinawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42663","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=42663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42664,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42663\/revisions\/42664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}