{"id":56788,"date":"2018-08-22T03:32:27","date_gmt":"2018-08-22T03:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56788"},"modified":"2018-08-22T03:32:27","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T03:32:27","slug":"brown-girl-with-bubblegum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56788","title":{"rendered":"Brown Girl with Bubblegum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brown Girl with Bubblegum<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Longreads<\/a>
\n2018-08-17
\n11 minutes (2,676 words)<\/p>\n

Lisa W. Rosenberg<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nIllustration by Loveis Wise<\/a><\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

As a mixed-race kid with free-form hair, Lisa Rosenberg believed learning to blow bubblegum bubbles<\/a> would be her ticket to an idealized (white) American girlhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

My fifth birthday was approaching, and I had one goal: to blow big, beautiful, pink bubbles out of real Bazooka bubble gum<\/a>. I\u2019d seen it done many times in person as well as captured in storybooks and on television. Bubble-blowing, I understood, was a critical marker of American girlhood \u2014 alongside hopscotch<\/a>, Barbie dolls<\/a>, and long hair with bangs<\/a> you could flick out of your eyes with a toss of your head. I remember one image from a magazine: two girls riding bicycles up a tree-lined suburban street, their long, blond hair streaming out behind them in the wind, heads thrown back to relish the dappled sunlight. From the lips of each girl floated a pale pink bubble-gum bubble, half the size of her head. The girls were white, of course. In the \u201970s, magazines didn\u2019t show many little brown girls like me \u2014 with wild, free-form, biracial hair. I remember gazing and gazing at the picture, admiring those perfect girls with their flawless, pink bubbles. Somehow, someday, that would be me…<\/p>\n

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

As a mixed-race kid with free-form hair, Lisa Rosenberg believed learning to blow bubblegum bubbles would be her ticket to an idealized (white) American girlhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,20],"tags":[19827,19826,28936],"class_list":["post-56788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-lisa-rosenberg","tag-lisa-w-rosenberg","tag-longreads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56788","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=56788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56790,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56788\/revisions\/56790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}