Newly Minted

Newly Minted
Right after I was hooded

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Cheerios ARE really good for the heart

When I think about all of the examples of mixed race identity and interracial families that my daughter has to follow, I get excited. One of the biggest challenges to mixed race identity has consistently been that it doesn’t “mean” anything; that there is no history or community that connects mixed race people. In spring 2013 General Mills aired a Cheerios commercial featuring a mixed race child, an aesthetically white mother, and a black father. While the commercial attracted a good deal of racist back lash, it received even more abundant celebration. The majority of the celebration came from mixed race people and families. For myself and other mixed race scholars, we breathed a sigh of relief, because finally we had proof of the mixed race community we knew existed. Mixed race families and people came out by the tens of thousands to finally be counted as a community. An online project “We are the 15% ” featured a “crowd-sourced collection of portraits of American interracial families and marriages inspired by a Cheerios ad” had mixed race families self-identifying as part of the mixed race community. This project, and other conversations and reactions to the Cheerios back lash, created a space for the United States to visualize what mixed race was and who considered themselves mixed race. Many believed this moment would come out of the 2000 Census when multi-racial individuals would be counted as such. Instead, it was many of the hateful comments about the abnormality of mixed race people and the infrequency of mixed race marriages that caused mixed race people stand up to be visually counted. If you haven't seen this amazing project please check it out and participate. The creators of the website say the follwing about the site: "The title of this project refers to the statistic that 14.6% of new marriages in America are interracial, according to the 2008 Census. This site was created by Michael David Murphy and Alyson West, an interracial family in Atlanta, GA The site can be found at http://wearethe15percent.com/ ... the pictures will make you dance, laugh, and sing... more soon...

Monday, July 1, 2013

Issues of Racial Authenticity: Authentically Mixed Race

It is in the authenticity moment that ideas, pieces, and shapes that co-mediate identity are examined and either integrated into the identity or cast away. Significant exploratory moments that represent the “that is me” or “that is what other people say ‘is’ me” and the “that is definitely not me” are preserved in the identity journey in a way that might not be evident in the current shape of the identity itself. But it is within those nuances that each individual identity, even if the identity ends up sharing a categorical title in the end, has a unique idea of what that categorical title means and a specific sense of who shares that title with them. It is in the authenticity moment that the concepts and frameworks through which an identity comes to recognize and know itself take shape and thus membership can then be determined. It is out of this authenticity moment that the identity begins to try on names and memberships and assert its unique existence against the identities around it. When issues of authentication problematize the stability of the identity, those reflective moments can become murky and in the best possible case the identity becomes fluid. Often and more frequently than fluidity, the inability to authenticate results in an identity being reorganized into a mono-racial identity or a performance of the desired mono-racial category or categories. These reorganizations and performances tend to not fit as the individual or familial experiences are not mono-racial ones. This can lead then to a new challenge to the membership and authentication of the individual or familial location in the reorganized or performed identity and so on. It is a particularly circular experience that seems to renew itself without the individual or family doing anything. One of my most vivid memories was coming home one day in a state of mind that was cloudy, at best, around my socio-racial identity and what socio-racial performance was expected from me. On this particular day I was trying to “be black”. I had chosen the grossest stereotype of blackness to perform as that was all that was available to me at the time through the media. My mother was in the laundry room doing our laundry when I walked in. I dropped a “How ya doin’ honky” on her. When I regained consciousness, I had mysteriously ended up on the floor, she helped me examine and understand that who I truly was made me no more or less black. My mother was famous for saying “you’re just Noelle”. I now understand that to mean, you are different than your black and white peers and you need to find your own ground. Even as I write this, I have never figured out how to pass that authenticity challenge. I can remember each of my children after experiences of failed authentication performing mono-racial affects. One of my young mixed race sons would suddenly come home one day with affective characteristics of blackness or whiteness. My youngest son came home with a “grill” he had fashioned from a gum wrapper one day with his pants sagging. I was middle class horrified by this demonstration because I felt like my mixed race child, raised in a white middle class community, was making fun of black people and black culture. What I later realized was that he was imitating what he understood as blackness because he was regularly being racially reorganized by others. When we later talked about it, my son told me that the other students were telling him he was white and he knew he was not white so he wanted to “act blacker”. Because my son had been raised in a mixed race family in a white middle class community, like my earlier attempts he too only had TV to guide his performance of blackness. I asked him why he didn’t just act like me, his African American parent, and he said “because you’re not black, you are mixed race at best”. All of my children eventually settled on a mixed race identity; each one faster than the one before them. My daughter, now 12, never went through the performance stage despite her experiences with authenticity challenges. I have not talked to her about it but my guess is that she has role models in our family, community, and social media to guide her through a variety of possibilities around her socio-racial identity that the rest of us don’t have. more soon...

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Human Equity Only has One Team

We cannot afford to allow the system to divide equality, equity, and social justice into winning and losing teams... or to delude us into thinking there are teams to begin with... our efforts will never reach maximum capacity if we don't pay attention. We are all, and should all be, proponets of equity/equality... there aren't two different kinds. Right after I posted my last entry, which I was very nervous about doing, a colleague forwarded me this amazing Op-Ed piece. It says everything I am feeling but so much better.

The right to marry who you love

I just wanted to check in... I have been really lost in my thinking about the Supreme Court rulings and the way I have experienced the response to two consecutive rulings, voter's rights and marriage equality, as dissonant. I am so very happy that the ruling yesterday went well. It's about damn time. I do wonder though, when we say, in our celebration of the death of DOMA, that there is finally equality for all, if folks are missing the ominous possibilities in the ruling the day before marriage equality finally advanced (thank goodness). As I have said through the marriage equality movement, this is the not the first time the right to marry who you love has been restricted. For mixed race people and families, many of our marriages would not exist if the civil rights movement had not ended anti-miscegenation. I am terrified to think that if the fundamental civil rights legislations around voters’ rights can be gutted and/or undone... what will happen to the rest? I sincerely believe everyone should have the right to marry whomever they love. Equity is a human issue. I have said from the start that marriage equality is not a solely LGBTQI issue, rather an issue every single person should be fighting for especially mixed race individuals and families. I strongly believed that if LGBTQI access to marriage continued to be restricted that my marriage would be called into question next. I guess today I want to amend that statement... Marriage equality is a human issue... so are voters’ rights... and civil rights... and affirmative action. Just like we saw a black president voted in while LGBTQI rights retrenched in California ... we have just seen LGBTQI rights move forward while the rights of the poor, elderly, and minorities have retrenched. This is intentional. If we can be distracted by what impacts us the most, the power to overcome the foundation of inequity will never reach maximum capacity. If our allies are left asking "what about us" our fight will not have the impact it needs for all people to be safe. I worry every day as the Supreme Court moves father and father away from racial equity that I will one day have to leave or be separated from members of or my whole family. No one should live in fear of prosecution for publically loving who they love. No one should suffer under the possibility that their family will one day no longer be recognized by the government as a family. Let's take care of each other around this and not let the divisive actions of a heteronormative, hegemonic system divide our efforts. Let's take every opportunity to advance equity regardless of whether we think it directly impacts us personally. If we don't advance in this way, I promise, one day it will. more soon...

Monday, May 20, 2013

That Mixed Race Membership Moment

The mixed race membership moment is more than a realization. There is intention and some participants likened the moment to a racial coming out. I, and many of my participants, articulate this moment as more of an arrival. There is careful consideration of one’s race, social position, and intimate realities that move an identity out of the normative mono-racial category that has been assigned and into this non-binary mixed race identity. Recently myself and another mixie, a term that I mixed race individuals have started using affectionately amongst themselves - a term that certainly suggests membership status, were talking to a third colleague who identified as African American. We were discussing our partners and the coincidental way that we had all ended up with intimate others from similar backgrounds. At some point in the conversation I asked the third colleague if he identified as African American or mixed race. He looked perplexed. I then asked him if he was mixed race. He did this thing with his face that I will forever associate with the mixed race moment and said, “well damn, I guess I am”. After some examination our colleague realized that his Trinidadian grandmother was mixed, it had never been a secret in his family but he really had never connected his or his family’s socio-racial identity with his white ancestors. His father, he explained, had rejected whiteness during the civil rights era, and my colleague had never thought to question his own or his father’s mixed race possibility. A piece of this moment was all three of us realizing that we were the same phenotype and that our children had all ended up blond and blue eyed. For myself and my mixie colleague, we have always had access to a mixed race identity through our white mothers. Our co-worker had been denied that access by his black father. This had produced a situation where we all had children and families that looked the same and had similar genealogical structures, yet identified differently. I understood my colleague’s identity as having been dissonant or looking for a home since his children were born. At the end of the conversation, our colleague thanked us for what he said was “membership into a space that makes sense for my family and my children. I had no idea how to make them black.” He followed that up with “I have no idea how to have this conversation with my father he is a BLACK man and nothing is going to change that”.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Mixed Race Asian

I am not going to be able to say too much about this. I am just putting some thinking out in the world... On our campus we are trying to think about the "asian" question. This question comes from administrators concerned that we are not attractive to Asian students (forget the fact that this question is a conflation of all things Asian, South Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Thai, Pilipino, Hawaiian…please fill in the ellipses) and how do we become more attractive. This conversation is happening parallel to a deep concern by "race counters" that students are more frequently not self-identifying by race. I say good for them but the "race counters" assure me that this is a problematic trend. That is another post altogether. My observation, linking these two conversations together, is that our "asian" students are overwhelmingly mixed race. I have started to think about the students that I would "visually" identify as Asian and the majority of them are mixed race. I have had amazing conversations with these students and they have self-reported not identifying on our institutional forms as "Asian/South Asian/Pacific Islander" because it doesn’t MEAN anything to their lived and intimate realities. Many report not identifying a race at all or identifying as mixed race/other. I also have a sense through these conversations that these students would be more inclined to look for programing targeting mixed race students rather than "asian" students. I also know that our last president of the Asian Pacific Island Student Union was a young woman of Indian descent who was a transracial adoptee. The other two students in that group were white and Chinese, both also adoptees. The Asian Pacific Island Student Union has folded and no students have tried to revive it. I would be most interested in finding out how to support the Asian, South Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Thai, Pilipino, and Hawaiian mixed race identities on our campus in a real and authentic way. I am also interested in becoming attractive to students from these populations as well. So much to do... ...more soon

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Marriage Equaltiy is about all of us

On this morning of momentous possibility we each must take a moment to appreciate that the marriage equality act is directly related to the history of mixed race people in the United States. Africans in America were not allowed to legally marry (and those who did had to have permission from their masters) during slavery. African Americans were not allowed to marry white people during Jim Crow. Even after the 1967 Supreme Court ruling that the anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional; many states still had the anti-miscegenation laws on their books through the late 1990s. As recent as 2010 interracial couples were being denied marriage licenses. How do we, as people who have been historically denied the right to marry who we love, dare restrict that right for any other human being? The criminalization of love and intimate relationships is not only unconstitutional it is inhumane. Every time I hear an argument against same sex marriage I immediately remember that when my husband and I married in 1999 it was still "illegal" in two states in our country. If marriage equality doesn't pass, how long will it be before my marriage becomes illegal again? Marriage equality is about all of us. This IS our fight. ...more soon

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

You don't look mixed race

But you do. What does mixed race look like? My children and I experience the "you don't look mixed race" along with its companion phrase "oh I could tell you are mixed" as racial reassignment statements. These statements serve to relocate us into categories that either make sense for people or render our power of self-naming suspended. I can remember the opening scrimmages of basketball when the boys were young. My sons started basketball after having been covered up with football gear since August. They went into pads with beautiful bronze skin and I really didn't see a lot of them out of uniform until basketball. Year after year I would sit in the stands, the team would be warming up, and I would struggle to find my child on the court. All the boys looked a lot alike with sun deprived skin and short black hair. I would have to ask the mother sitting next to me and together we would search for my child both of us thinking we surely be able to find the black kid on the court. There were some years I would have to look at the program to find out what number they were. When I finally found my child, the mother on my left and I would laugh. There he was the very pale skinned, short haired, Italian kid. Almost immediately the mother on my right, in front of me, or behind me would butt in to assure me that my black child looked nothing like her white child. Year after year someone would feel the need to tell me that THEY could tell that my child was black. One woman told me that my son did not look "mixed" to her. I am ashamed to say that one year it was so obnoxious I made my poor child hold his arm next to hers. When she saw that she was no lighter than my son, that particular mother never spoke to me again. At some point I realized it was about them, not me. I know who I am. I know who my child is. I take delight and joy in the way our skin color and hair change with the season. I love the chameleon affect of all of those converging genealogies. My sons have as much right to look Italian as they do black. Second only to the "What are you?" question, or possibly as its replacement, the "you don't look mixed race" "you don't look black" "you don't look Irish" has reinforced my sense that mixed race is a threat to the monoracial location of others around me. My daughter has her father and his mother's hair. Honey blonde, curly, thick, amazing hair that caused one mother at a soccer game to pronounce my child's head "nappy". No offense to my beautiful Black Irish child, but she didn't get a whole lot from me and she certainly didn't get my hair. The length this woman went to reassign my daughter, and her hair, was unparalleled in its insistence, forcefulness, and racism. This woman, proclaiming her expertise as a hair dresser, grabbed my daughter's silky hair and declared "this is black hair". All I could say is "it’s just hair". I know Jewish and Italian people with course rough hair and black people with silky hair. Hair is hair, skin is skin, and skin color is relative. I did an exercise in a class the other day where I mixed in pictures of my daughter and her friends. The students could not figure out a) who my daughter was and b) that there were any black people in the picture. I am not bragging that my daughter is "white", it is what it is. What is amazing to me is that I am there to talk about mixed race, I am mixed race, I have mixed race children, and they still could not figure out that there was a mixed race person in the picture. Equally alarming... the same students were SHOCKED that I identified as mixed race "because you are so dark". "You don't look mixed race" Well, what exactly does mixed race look like? And why does it matter. It matters because if someone cannot locate what my race is, or that of my children, then that puts their own race in question. If the mother at the basketball game is indistinguishable from the black kid on the team, what happens to her child's whiteness and ultimately his privilege? Worse, does that mean that my son has some privilege not meant for him because he is black and must be identifiable as black? It is a pretty amazing thing, when we don't look like what people think we are. Men who look like women, women who look like boys, black people who look Italian, and Latinos who look black all interrupt the binary that we rely on to identify other people and to recognize ourselves by virtue of not being the other. In our family we delight in our various skin colors, facial features, and hair textures. We love that some of us tan and others freckle. What we know is that none of these things make us any less human or any less family but they sure do make us, proudly, mixed race. ... more soon

Monday, March 18, 2013

It has been over a year mixed race bloggers. I have to say that I visited my site many times and just couldn't write anything. A good part of my writing energies end up in the dissertation these days as I enter my final stages. Dr. Mixed Race! I don't think that is going to stick. Anyway, I have reached out to a couple subscribers to see if they can help me continue blogging as it seems more people have been visiting this site. If you are interested in generating mixed race content, let me know! That said, one of the reasons I have not been writing is because there is simply too much to say. I am equally frustrated that for some there is a sense that the time to talk about race and mixed race has passed. Ladies and gentlepeople… breaking news… we are NOT a post-racial society. I have tried to focus directly on mixed race on this blog, but the conversation about race overall has been really occupying a large chunk of my scholarly mind (much to my committee's chagrin). I told my introduction to Africana Studies class the other day that we are in our third Reconstruction. We looked at the parallels between the first reconstruction immediately post-emancipation and now. We looked at the upward mobility of African Americans in that moment, and how we have a black president now. We also looked at the backlash of mass incarceration and violence along with legislative restriction that resulted from African Americans, and certainly mixed race Americans as well, joining the United States social and political competition (and winning). With the 2013nSupreme Court reconsidering affirmative action and voters’ rights laws IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP because the retrenchment of the rights of people of color is in progress. How might this impact mixed race identity? Let us remember that one of the products of black codes and jim crow was a reinforcement of the anti-miscegenation laws. We are already restricting the right to marry who we love for LGBTQI families. How long do you think it will take before our rights as interracial families are also restricted? Our right to identify has already begun to be squeezed back into mono-racial boxes by the federal government or so it seems. You may have encountered my rant about the NCLB tracking characteristic that restricted self-identity to mono-racial categories and disallowed choosing more than one category. Additionally, the NCLB tracking had school administrators and support staff reassigning students' races without ever contacting their families. My children were recategorized: one as white, one as black, and one as Hispanic. That was in 2006. Just the other day I found out my racial identity had been reclassified by my employing institution. I always self-identify as close to my intimate reality as possible. Mixed race, multi-racial, black, white, Native American, and finally if nothing else is available I will identify as other or abstain if the options are not there. Well don't you know I show up as African American in our staffing report? Do I deny being African American? No, I certainly do not. Do I denounce having another human being reclassify my race without even talking to me AND I AM THE DIVERSITY OFFICER... yes, yes I do. When I brought my concern forward I was told "under the affirmative action codes it is lawful to observe and document race (and gender as I asked that question too) based on what you observe". Slavery was lawful too. For those of us who have intimate realities outside of normative, binary, majority identity classifications ... it is time for us to wake up. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by two consecutive censuses that asked the multi-racial question, or college applications that ask the multi-racial questions, or even employment applications that appear inclusive. We must pay attention to every form that we are asked to fill out and follow up on what they say six months to a year later. I sound like a broken record but WE KNOW WHAT AND WHO WE ARE. We know who are intimate others are. I am running out of steam... but I really just wanted to share what head space I have been in. While stewing, steeping, and being assaulted by racial injustices via forms and categories, my mixed raceness becomes even more real. The intimate reality that allows me to be the child of black/white/Apache parents; the daughter of a white couple; the wife of my Irish husband; and the mother and grandmother to my aesthetically variant progeny... dictates a socio-racial identity that is non-binary. Period. I am all of these things and none of these things. I want to celebrate the people who love me and the people I love. I want to be in relationship with all of the communities that my ancestors have hailed from. This is not about passing, ignoring, or circumventing any part of me or any piece of my history. I am self-identifying in a way that allows me to claim all of it. I am the child of the oppressed and the oppressor. Last but certainly not least, to our allies. Your silence has gotten the best of me. When you sit in a meeting and hear other people's identities being screwed with SAY SOMETHING. Imagine if your mono-racial or normatively gendered child were told she could no longer identify THE WAY YOU TAUGHT HER TO. What would you do? How would my silence impact you? ...more soon (sooner than a year)