{"id":48759,"date":"2016-08-21T21:35:23","date_gmt":"2016-08-21T21:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=48759"},"modified":"2016-08-21T21:35:23","modified_gmt":"2016-08-21T21:35:23","slug":"blasian-narratives-struggles-with-the-question-black-enough-asian-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=48759","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Blasian Narratives\u2019 struggles with the question: Black enough? Asian enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Blasian Narratives\u2019 struggles with the question: Black enough? Asian enough?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Kore Asian Media<\/a>
\n2016-08-16<\/p>\n

Tae Hong<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n“Blasian Narratives” performs inside Stanford Theatre. (Harrison Troung\/Courtesy photo)<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Teaching third graders in an underserved area of Brooklyn<\/a>, Cenisa Gavin<\/a> often looks out at her mostly black and Latino students and is reminded of the failings of her own teachers when it came to discussions about race and identity.<\/p>\n

Gavin, 23, is black on her father\u2019s side, and Korean Eskimo on her mother\u2019s side. She has long, thick hair and, by her own description, slanted eyes. Growing up as a mixed-race child in Anchorage, Alaska<\/a>, was one thing \u2013 she could never, for one, converse with her Korean great-grandmother because of a language barrier, and that was always the way it had been for her family \u2013 but coming across the term \u201cBlasian\u201d as a high schooler, and then joining a group of them to talk about her heritage as black and Asian on a theater stage at Spelman College years later, was another.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think my teachers did us a disservice by not discussing what it is to be colorblind, and how being colorful is greater than that,\u201d Gavin said. When she told her students about her mixed race last year, she said, and when they saw her black father, the kids were surprised: \u201cThey said, \u2018Ms. Gavin\u2019s dad is black? You\u2019re black?’\u201d<\/p>\n

This is one of the themes carried in the stories told by the seven-member group with which Gavin has now starred in a film project, \u201cBlasian Narratives<\/a>,\u201d started by Cambodian American director Omnes \u201cCanon\u201d Senmos and looking toward release this fall…<\/p>\n