tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38547453438016714462024-02-20T15:29:05.236-05:00Examining Mixed Race IdentityExaminations of mixed race, non-binary identities, race, racelessness, post-raciality and multiculturalism. The author is a critical race theorist teaching in Africana Studies and functions as a diversity officer for a higher education institution. The author and her family identify as mixed race. "Intimate reality is what shapes who we are - it is who we love and who loves us"Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-85121906865124263992014-10-14T11:13:00.000-04:002014-10-14T11:13:02.815-04:00LOOKING is not SEEINGhttp://www.diversityinc.com/news/racial-profiling-black-teen-pepper-sprayed-police-house/
This article resonates with me deeply. I didn't realize until giving a speech recently how deeply impacted I have been by peoples', willfully unchallenged peoples', inability to recognize me as my parents' child. This young man was pepper sprayed because he doesn't look like his family. This is an extreme example but the harm and violence the rest of us feel each time someone doesn't see us as part of our intimate relationship is equally if not more damaging. It is a silent and deep harm that continues to happen even in what we think are safe spaces. The scars I bear from years of misidentification as the "fresh air child" or the "nanny" are irreparable. "Is that your 'real' mother" is still the most painful question that I and others like me get asked. Yes, these people raised me, love me, and hold me when I cry. They are my 'real' parents. No, I don't want to find my 'real' family. One family is enough for me (not shaming or discouraging those who do search for biological parents just challenging the assumption that all adoptees must search). I think one of the most vivid memories of the misidentification based on perceived race and belonging came from a second grader. This little girl sauntered up to me and asked "are you Olivia's mommy" (Olivia was a darker skinned mixed race child whose mother was blond and blue-eyed like my child). I told her no, that I was my daughters mommy. This little girl looked at me, looked at my daughter, and then announced "that's just weird and gross". We are not weird and gross, we are mother and daughter. There was also that time when I was accused of wet nursing my daughter. How could a person in 2001 confuse an act of love and nurturing with a slave practice? It is time for our society to broaden our framework of belonging and familial intimacy. Families no longer look like they did in 1950 (and haven't since 1950). Adoption, interracial families, LGBTQAI families, intimate others from a spectrum of possibilities have created a landscape where one might have to work a bit harder to identify who belongs to whom. We are no longer color coded. We are no longer garanimals. One of these things DOES belong to the other. Common sense, a world view that is educated, and a tiny bit of intentionality ... not pepper spray... is all that is needed.
...more soonMixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-47188144512401812652014-09-25T11:33:00.000-04:002014-09-25T11:33:48.288-04:00Mixed Race: Still a ThingFor those who continue to doubt mixed race "as a thing", this post is for you.
After a decade of this work I am still surprised by the comments I get from those who immediately identify themselves AS mixed race and then suggest that I have forgotten that I am black. One comment suggested that I should stop complaining because "you are not easily recognized as 50% black and 50% white" and suggested I go ahead and get a genealogy update from some website. Perhaps I am lying about being mixed race? Not to mention having not gotten my "recipe" correct. Apache Grandmother, Black/Apache Mother, White Father... Another comment suggested that I had lost touch with the 1/16th rule, the one drop rule, which makes us all African American. I do not identify as African American, I am black mixed race. Someone simply said "haha".
If one reads my research, what I am claiming is more than a racial categorization. I am not invoking, nor ignoring, the racist system that negates large parts of individual and familial genealogy. I know my genealogy and I am demanding the right and access to all of it. I won't pretend that it doesn't hurt a little bit more when a fellow mixed race person tries to enforce the vary structures of domination and oppression that keep them, us, hierarchically suppressed. The other interesting piece of these comments is the reflection of intimate identity. Thank you for proving my point. Clearly something in my research and socio-racial identity has triggered something, albeit potentially unexamined, in theirs as well. We are who we are told we are. Not just by a completely racist structural hierarchy which depends on everyone from the African Diaspora remaining "all black" and thus enslaveable. We must be identifiable at a glance and mixed race pushes against that, although; apparently not in my case. We are also identified by those who love us and call us their own. Our ethno-cultural experiences and political beliefs factor into how we identify as well. We must broaden our understanding of the intersections that create identity and embrace the humanity of allowing others to name themselves.
I also wonder if the commenters would make the same argument for my daughter who has a very white aesthetic but is also clearly from the African Diaspora. Oh, yeah, we are ALL from the African Diaspora... FYI. But would this person decide she was black or white. The reality, intimate, genealogical, and lived is that she is mixed race. That is also my intimate, genealogical and lived reality. I have never been black enough and as the commenter points out I am also not white. If my daughter have the same genealogical line AND the same lived experiences (like facing these kinds of conversations almost daily) are we both not similarly socio-racially located? We must challenge then how a person decides, especially since we are mother and daughter, to name us other things. Didn’t naming others end with emancipation? We must be mindful of what we are activating in these moments and who’s narrative and history we are really defending.
Finally, I want to reiterate that my research and assertion of a mixed race identity, lived experience, and community does at no point suggest that some mixed race people are not part of the African Diaspora (see snarky comment above...). This tension, these comments, the devaluing of differences in the black/brown population only serves the capitalist hierarchy. Stop it. And to the commenter that suggested I get a genealogical reality check... my friend... perhaps you should do this work yourself. And what will you do then, with your whiteness, asianess, and worldness? Will you ignore them as you have asked me to do?
Shout out to the students in my keynote address last night who cheered... CHEERED... when I identified as a black mixed race transracial adoptee. They all looked just like me. Mixed Race: Still a Thing.
I know who I am. I have done the research. I'm good, but; thank you for weighing in.
...more soon
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-5308268053518012032014-06-03T17:21:00.000-04:002014-06-03T17:21:04.198-04:00The role of Intimate Realities in Socio-Racial IdentityIt is one thing to write theories but I am still always amazed when I experience those possibilites in real life. I had an online conversation today with a member of our facebook group where she suggested that she felt guilty invoking a mixed race identity because she had been raised to identify mono-racially. But, she shared, that she really related to much of what she had read on my blog. I have problematized the catagorization of socio-racial identity as it often misrepresents lived and intimate realities. What I haven't spent time thinking about, although I encountered those who acknowledge a mixed race genealogy while invoking a mono-racial identity, is the emotional connection to the socio-racial identity that one acquires through their intimate realities. Many mixed race writers weave the dissonance between genealogical reality and intimate reality in their writing but it wasn't until this conversation that I really thought about an emotional connection. My own experience has been one of searching and now I am thinking about the experience of having a reflection of something that shakes you causing guilt or shame. Perhaps it is a sense of betraying who your intimate others said you were. I also wonder if intimate reality also has a way of nullifying or negating the fluidity of identity. I have spent a lot of time, and much of the scholarship I have been steeping in during the dissertation supported, issues of self-naming and representation. I am hard pressed to identify discourse that talked about the emotional connection to one's socio-racial identity. There is plenty of evidence that socio-racial, cultural, and ethnic identity elicits emotional responses - anger, hatred, voilence, etc. - but what about loving, longing, guilt and shame. I am so excited about this facebook group (see yesterday's post) and the conversations that it is already generating. Join us! This is going to be a great summer. More soon...Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-39475740717568025122014-06-02T20:33:00.001-04:002014-06-02T20:35:10.049-04:00Examining Mixed Race in Higher Education new Facebook Group!!!!! Join us and spread the word!<a href="http://https://www.facebook.com/groups/EMRinHigherEducation/members/#!/groups/EMRinHigherEducation/1605356419690199/?notif_t=like"></a>
Please spread the word and join our facebook group Examining Mixed Race in Higher Education!!! Let's join the Critical Mixed Race conversation!Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-35114955582133254382014-06-02T17:55:00.001-04:002014-06-02T17:55:08.968-04:00Introducing Mixed Race PhDI did it. I defended my dissertation and was granted my PhD (no revisions, fyi). I wanted to share my opening statement as it really sums up the journey that has led me to being a Mixed Race PhD. Please keep reading, responding, and commenting! Thank you for your support over the last few years. I am excited about the next steps which include a book project "Examining Mixed Race" and then my book that comes from my dissertation. I think I am going to sleep for a month... but I will be back! More soon...
"I remember my first time trying on a mixed race identity. I was around 9. I remember thinking I am bi-racial… I am not black, or white, or Indian…. I am all of those things. This early assertion of my right to self-naming was the commencement of a life long journey, sometimes battle, to find a space where: I was allowed to self-name; where it was assumed that I knew who and what I was; where people respected my version of me and later that of my family and children; where my assertion of an identity outside of the binary racial construction was not reframed as confused or avoidant; where my identity as a mixed race person was not read as adversarial to or in opposition to other socio-racial identities; and where I could find a place to be who I truly was – as my 9 year old self said, all of those things.
Mixed race has been a piece of my socio-racial self-understanding and disciplinary motivation. As soon as I stepped in to my undergraduate human development program, I understood that there was a gap in how we did, understood, taught, and engaged race. The oppositional and binary framing of race is one that we had already problematized in critical race theories yet we backed away from or circumvented conversations that support that problematization when that support came from mixed race identities and lived experiences.
One of my first understandings of this gap in the critical race discourse where mixed race occurs, was that it was due in large part to the way that African Americans are hegemonic to the race conversation. That western theory frames “the African American” experience as the “authentic black experience” has created a tension between that experience and the parallel experience of black American mixed race. This tension seems to silence all mixed race identities in an effort to authenticate the black African American experience. With this as a basis for examination, I started to appreciate that the failings of the binary racial construct were much farther reaching than just those of us who were both black and white. In a lot of ways critical race theory was feeding the failings of the binary racial construct and I had a sense that this was where my own struggle to gain the right to self-name was coming from. I wanted to tease out the critical mixed race theory that I knew had to exist in the gaps and shadows of critical race theory.
When I first began articulating mixed race as an identity for myself and others, the push back came from African-American academics. I had professors, classmates, and conference participants suggest that I simply didn’t want to be black. At this point I started to understand non-binary identities as diasporic identities and this was the first iteration of my graduate school work. I spent a good deal of time thinking about mixed race identity as a diasporic identity but was still not satisfied with this framing, it was still missing something. During this time I started to encounter millennials in the classroom and realized that they were not articulating a sense of alienation like I was. The students in my classrooms, while still having some similar experiences to my mixed race journey, were expressing a totally different sense of their socio-racial location. More, they were locating their mixed race genealogies and identities as “a given”, a matter of fact. For some this made their mixed race identity inarguable; it was something they did not feel they needed to argue for or explain to others. For others, they felt that their multi-raciality transcended a need to identify with any one thing at all. But it was through this population that I came to my major assertion, that mixed race identity was a product of intimate reality.
What I recognized in my conversations with millenials, including my children and their friends, was that their access to self-naming and mixed race identity came directly from those who loved them, their intimate others. Student after student asked me the same question: “If that is my mother, and that is my father (parents of different races), then what else could I be but mixed race”.
Additionally, and this might not be as prominent in the dissertation, I came to appreciate that race and mixed race identities and self-naming were not always tied to blood/genealogical relations. In 2006 I put out a call for participants which requested self-identified families of mixed race. It was the first time that I realized that my thinking and work were tied to the binary racial construction. I really expected black/white and maybe black/asian mixed race people to respond. The people who actually responded validated my emerging thinking about intimate realities. It really was in the families that were not genealogically related that intimate realities seemed most apparent. Transracial adoptees, step parents, and other familial compositions who identified as mixed race families because of one member who was a different race, and not usually mixed race, caused me to rethink my focus for the dissertation.
The stories of transcendent thinking and behaviors through the love of another who is a different race made mixed race identity something that held hope and direction. I am not saying that mixed race identity, as it is still predicated on race and probably binary racial construct, is the answer to racial tension but it does point towards the power of intimate reality in at least connecting race if not bridging it. I think the power of self-naming also speaks to the power of intimate reality as it takes a familial consensus to shift, reframe, and rename a shared socio-racial identity and that is also an intimate behavior as that shift is seemingly predicated on wanting to include an identity because of intimate relation.
The other factor that really drove my examining mixed race identity theories was, especially in 2006, that there weren’t many theorists doing this work. In the last two years, I have come to realize that even those doing critical mixed race theory were still not doing the work of connecting identity to intimate reality. I understood in an organic and deeply intuitive way that critical race and critical mixed race theorists were not talking about me or my family, or that of my students, in any way.
As a theorist I try not to assume sameness so I was really startled when so many of the people I talked to over the last six years had such similar stories around self-naming, authenticity, and the intimate realities that shaped their socio-racial identities and experiences. In my work I have tried my best to represent those similarities which are notable, in particular, because they occurred across what we understand to be racial categories. Asian, South Asian, Black, African, Latino, whatever composition of race you can think about, people were telling me that they were experiencing the same things. Not only were they suggesting they were experiencing the same things, they were suggesting that these experiences, including those of intimate reality, were what was shaping their socio-racial identities. Within rich ethnographies, I was also able to see how aware the people I spoke with were about how they were forced to identify in ways that were not true to their intimate realities.
In Chapter III I offer: If a person wakes up every morning and her mother is White and her father is Black, how does she locate her socio-racial identity? The preceding chapters have problematized the location and function of socio-racial identity through examinations of authenticity, self-naming, re-designation, and membership. These examinations have included a sense of intimate realities as a central characteristic of the mixed race socio-racial identity. Intimate realities move in and out of the ways one navigates authenticity, self-naming, re-designation, and membership. Much of how we figure out where and to whom we belong is through our intimate realities, which is a reflection of what has been shared with me and what occurs in my own auto-ethnography. My foundational premises have always been this and why the intimate reality reflected here hasn’t been reflected in theories about socio-racial identity, especially mixed race identities.
The suppression and oppression of mixed race identities and their intimate realities is a harm that needs to be corrected. My work serves to start offering the evidence that has been demanded from me every time I raise this issue in the academy. The ethnographies shared in this work offer the evidence of unique lived experiences, the relevance of intimate realities, the power of naming, and the organization of communities of people who identify as mixed race. The suppression of mixed race identity becomes clearer when you spend time with narratives of survival, like that of African American Slaves and Vietnamese orphans, where there is regular mention of mixing of races and the emergence of new identities and demands for self-naming.
I wish to close by sharing with you that my experience with the refusal and denial of access to a socio-racial identity that reflects my intimate realities has been painful and at times violent. It always seems a simplification, but not being allowed to identify as my Irish daughter’s mother or my dying father’s heir solely for the purpose of fitting my lived experience into a narrow space that we call race, is an injustice. I, and people like me, deserve to be able to shape and express identities that represent our genealogical and intimate journeys without editing. Mixed race identities create a space where the narrative is written by the subject and not the observer and where that subject is believed to be the expert on their own lived and intimate realities.
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-2972964663896043872014-03-31T10:45:00.000-04:002014-03-31T10:45:21.145-04:00Reflections of Mixed Race and the Possibility for a Critical Mixed Race CommunityAs I turn in my dissertation to the committee this week, I have been reflecting on the last six years. The reflections of mixed race are all around me, vivid, alive, shifting and changing. At the end of the dissertation I am not able to say whether mixed race is ever going to really be a stand-alone category of race. I am not even sure if that is my recommendation over all. I cannot predict whether the socio-racial construct will be deconstructed or re-worked. What I can say is that mixed race identity is, at its core, a deep expression of the intimate realities of the people who have shared their narratives of family, love, loss, and the impact of socio-racial location. Regardless of how many times one is told that mixed race isn't a "thing"... or "you are just black get over it"... or asks, "what about the children", there still remains the singular guiding question I started with six years ago, "If a person has a parent who is Black and a parent who is Asian, and is intimately connected to both parents, what is their socio-racial location." I have learned that across a genealogical continuum, mixed race families never let go of their mixed raceness no matter what they are legislated to identify as. The narratives of intimate reality and lived experience are truly stronger than the one-drop rule. I hope to publish my dissertation so that it can be added to the emerging critical mixed race community. I am excited, as a critical mixed race theorist, and as a mixie, that we have a journal now dedicated to critical mixed race theory and thinking. I am honored to be in the company of theorists who are no longer willing to allow mixed race genealogies, histories, and intimate realties to be suppressed or erased from the halls of academe. This emerging community of scholars follows a strong and impactful community of advocates and I hope that those two groups speak to each other in a way that the scholarly and the lived experiences are equally valued and made visible. In the end, I am exhausted. I am nervous having shared my work with my committee and still having the shadow of rejection, for my mixed raceness and for my mixed race scholarship, hanging over my head. I am excited that this is the doorway through which I will step and contribute to the greater race discourse in the near future. I am thankful to all those who shared their stories with me, gave me feedback, read and commented on this blog, and kept the voices of the mixed race intimate realities alive in my head every day. I am most grateful for my patient children, my mixed race babies, who have made space in my mothering world to do this work. I deeply appreciate them every day, and it was for them, a matter of their survival, that this work began. I wanted a space, socially, physically, and metaphorically, for them to be who they are... my children and their father's... black/brown/white/Irish... all of these things and not have to dissect or bisect their intimate realities to be something they will never be... singular... stagnant... mono... invisible... undone.
More soon...
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-82472102975544193622014-02-05T11:12:00.002-05:002014-02-05T11:16:23.004-05:00The Role of Stories in Social Racial Identity Emma Brockes closes her review of <i>The Triple Package: What Really Determines Success<b></b></i> with the following paragraph:
<i>It also reaffirms something we intuitively know – that origin stories matter, and that, despite the vast influence of external factors, the story you are permitted to tell about yourself has a lot to do with how that story unfolds.</i> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/05/the-triple-package-what-really-determines-success-book-review
While the article itself is a book review, what Brockes offers in her closing is impactful and resonates with my consideration of my critical mixed race identity work. Origin stories... what a beautiful framing of the articulation of intimate reality. Who and how we know ourselves to be come from the stories we have been told, and then retell, our whole lives.
Often I am asked if I have ever, will ever, look for my "biological family". My answer is always no. I have no desire to shatter my understanding of who I am. There has been a very long journey to this place, many stories that frame my self-understanding and actualization, and I have no intention of disrupting it beyond what life will already do. I am not stagnant, I simply value the process by which I arrived at who I am today and who I might be tomorrow.
I am one of those people who, while believing in the powers of foresight, intuition, and regression, will never ask to see anything beyond what I can experience in this body/space/time. For me, understanding and valuing the journey, intimate realities, and our origin stories are as important as the scientific and philosophic archeological experiment. I have no desire to dig.
I also think that Brockes identifies a very important, if not privileged, piece of the role of origin stories and the stories we tell about ourselves. Brockes talks about permission, and for me, that is where mixed race people lose connection with our genealogical selves. We have not been permitted to tell the story of our racial/ethnic/cultural multiplicitous richness. We have been forbidden to tell our stories of two-ness or three-ness. We have been restricted from telling the stories of our white mothers, black fathers, Asian grandmothers, and indigenous sisters. Those stories have been suppressed to keep us from rightful inheritance, to pin us down in one immoveable social-racial location. Those stories have been suppressed to maintain our ability to be oppressed. We must disrupt this practice, of editing other people's origin stories - especially those of our children.
The other day in class one of my students was sharing that she and her cousins refer to themselves as "half-ricans". I bristled. I have spent so much time on linguistics and the power of naming that for a moment I forgot myself. I wanted to offer more "preferable" naming options. But then I thought of Brockes’ words and realized that this student had the right to name herself whatever was reflective of her intimate reality. For her "half-ricans" was akin to comfort food; it is how she and her cousins recognized each other as family. What I realized later was, had I corrected her (as I am often want to do), I would have been in effect denying her permission to tell her story of herself and thus altered her identity journey and potentially that of her cousins. That is a lot of power I simply don't want. Lesson learned.
Carving out space for origin stories is my next project. What I anticipate is that these stories will bounce off of each other, contradict, and potentially offend. What I think the gift in creating this space might be is a better understanding of the ways folks comes to understand themselves and potentially each other through the telling and re-telling of origin stories. Thank you Emma Brockes.
...more soon
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-80181554563156122192014-01-04T13:13:00.001-05:002014-01-04T13:13:51.912-05:00#IStandWithMHP "One of these things is not like the other" I was searching for inspiration that would cause me to blog daily. Who knew it would be Twitter. As we know Melissa Harris-Perry made the unexamined choice to ridicule the grandson of Governor Romney. The child, an infant, is a transracial adoptee. So he was pretty much ridiculed for being black and adopted. During an exchange that lasted only a few minutes, Harris-Perry and guests not only point out the child's adoption (who does that?) but sing the Sesame Street Song "one of these things is not like the other". I am immediately triggered. When I was a little girl there were two things that the children used to sing at me that brought me to tears. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and "One of these things". To have this blast from my childhood on a national stage surprised and alarmed me.
In these instances of injustice I always wrongly assume that other people are going to immediately understand the issue from my perspective and stand in solidarity with me. I am almost always wrong.
I rush to Twitter. My newly found "black feminist" community must be on fire with this. I am excited to engage. I am in need of validation as a transracial adoptee. I need to know that other people are going to hold Harris-Perry accountable for her unexamined bias against transracial adoptees. I KNOW that I will finally, after 39 years, be vindicated by the masses.
Nah.
The "black feminist" community is indeed on fire and, it would seem, they have missed the point. #IStandWithMHP is trending. The general sentiment of #IStandWithMHP is, as I understand it, that the "right-wingers" have called for Harris-Perry to be fired. This call for firing is understood as the right wing attempt to "get back at us" for all the times we have called for Palin, Limbaugh et.al to be fired for their racist comments and commentaries. Ok. I get it. What plays out, however, is a "he did it first" piss shoving contest that really does nothing to resolve the issue. Harris-Perry apologized to the Romney family AND PEOPLE ARE PISSED. I cannot even begin to process why modeling good behavior around this is a bad thing. What I am upset about is that Harris-Perry doesn't seem to be apologizing for the damage that is done to black transracial adoptees that have been part of her loyal fan base.
Ok. You were insensitive and made fun of the Romney’s because you think that behavior is acceptable. In this unfortunate, immature, ridiculous political climate... it seems to be. What about all of the transracial adoptees, real people, real children and adults, who have had their worth as family members disrespected, devalued, and ridiculed on national TV by one of our black role models. REALLY? No one besides me sees a problem with this?
Transracial adoptees are people too. We are complex, multicultural, multiracial, wildly intersectional people who (for those that it applies to) experience the world as raced and othered in relationship to the dominate population as well as those in non-dominate positions. We are on an island ... we are a diasporic people inside a diasporic people... and we often feel like the "thing that doesn't belong".
It makes me think of the journey of Baynard Rustin who was closeted and silenced in order to be a part of the black civil rights movement. In his memoirs he shares how he was told not to "distract" people from the "bigger picture" with his call for gay rights. #IStandWithMHP does a similar thing. Those of us who see what Harris-Perry did as biased and hateful are expected to be silent and fight to keep her from being fired. The bigger cause here is keeping a black female anchor on the air not that this anchor has clear unexamined biases against transracial adoptees that manifested ON AIR.
So yes, I get that people like Palin and Limbaugh suck. Does that mean that other people get to suck too? This defense strategy is reminiscent of the racist apologies we are used to. The "well they use that word" and "they call each other that" type of response to clearly racist behavior. Often, we do not recognize harmful actions when they are carried out by people in our own skin.
One person, only one person, responded to my tweets today. For her I am grateful. She talked about really understanding the harm that was done to transracial adoptees. She also pointed out Harris-Perry's mixed race intimate reality (she believes Harris-Perry to have a white parent). This is the perfect reminder that, in reality, we are all products of the same racist system and we can and do reproduce racist harms. Period.
Well, here I am. I am trapped between two worlds and struggling through. But at least I am writing #thanksforthat
...more soon
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-78674149559947144412014-01-03T19:44:00.000-05:002014-01-03T19:44:03.847-05:00#mixedraceisathingHappy New Year. 2014 promises to be a busy year. Twitter is alive with race discourse. My dissertation gets defended. I continue to work on how to help people see their own socio-racial location as well as how that location might intersect with others. I think my big goal, broadly, is to really work on helping people understand their impact. I was part of a pretty aggressive and highly contested twitter trend #WhatIsBlackPrivilege which led to other trends like #solidarityisforwhitewomen and #reclaimintersectionalityin2014. I am excited to suggest that social media is the new frontier for race discourse. I am disappointed to report that mixed race is not a part of that discourse in a real and substantive way. Again.
During the #WhatIsBlackPrivilege trend, black folks started to share with the world what they experience as black folks in the US. The trend was in direct response to far right-wingers who claim that black people are the benefactors of black privilege. Black folks felt strongly that this was a misrepresentation of their actual lived experiences. As all good black discourse is want to do, in short order, folks started to call out each other on skin tone and hair texture. And of course, "people who can't come to terms with being black", followed closely behind.
Are there people who cannot cope with being black? I am certain there are. If you follow the #WhatIsBlackPrivilege trend you could come up with some truly traumatic reasons why being black is really hard. But this is a symptom of race and racism. Mixed race is not a symptom of race, it is an intimate reality. In 2014 children born to interracial couples will have access to up to three generations of familial experience. Those experiences will be diverse and representative of at least two different racialized realities. Those children will be loved by those familial relations as family, children, nieces, nephews, sons, daughters, and not as confused symptoms of racism. To say that a child whose mother is black and father is white is something other than mixed race is to perpetuate the worst of inheritances of slavery and Jim Crow. The mixed race community must call out these instances of ugly accusation and misrepresentation from all communities. We are not confused. We are owning our intimate others and our intimate realities.
Does claiming mixed race keep me from understanding and experiencing the world as black? Nope. It does, however, recognize me as the daughter of my black Apache mother and my white father. It also allows me to be the mother of my mixed race Irish daughter rather than her babysitter. It has nothing to do with not wanting to black. It has everything to do with being a piece of this biracial family and the multiracial landscape that is my intimate life.
#WhatIsBlackPrivilege? Deciding who is black? Deciding what is black? Deciding who is black enough? It is time for mixed race people and families to stand up and let folks know that #mixedraceisathing
Happy New Year... more soon
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-16794716778201871702013-07-02T18:46:00.002-04:002013-07-02T18:46:50.065-04:00Cheerios ARE really good for the heartWhen 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...Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-87195036151170530692013-07-01T18:32:00.002-04:002013-07-01T18:32:27.548-04:00Issues of Racial Authenticity: Authentically Mixed RaceIt 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...
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-81707152869082983862013-06-27T15:31:00.001-04:002013-06-27T15:38:49.756-04:00Human Equity Only has One TeamWe 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.
<a href="http://http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/opinion/blow-joining-together-in-justice.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130627&_r=0"></a>Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-46998800878576191132013-06-27T13:38:00.000-04:002013-06-27T13:38:33.579-04:00The right to marry who you loveI 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...
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-47498155311333192832013-05-20T08:38:00.003-04:002013-05-20T08:38:56.640-04:00That Mixed Race Membership MomentThe 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”.Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-49184059668372020932013-03-30T15:14:00.003-04:002013-03-30T15:14:48.803-04:00Mixed Race AsianI 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
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-86094158666236149462013-03-26T06:58:00.000-04:002013-03-26T06:58:57.480-04:00Marriage Equaltiy is about all of usOn 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
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-78978343329690131882013-03-19T20:50:00.000-04:002013-03-19T20:50:19.811-04:00You don't look mixed raceBut 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
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-4222699827631113892013-03-18T14:37:00.001-04:002013-03-18T14:37:35.875-04:00It 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)
Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-13013117974158587102012-02-25T10:05:00.001-05:002012-02-25T10:13:31.617-05:00The fine art of culture switching...If you are hoping to get a lesson or some insight on culture switching, if there were such a thing, you can stop reading here...<br />
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I gave a talk at the institution of higher education that employs me on Thursday. I read a bit of my dissertation. I was scared to death. I had forced my class to come and several colleagues were in attendance. It was actually a nicely filled room.<br />
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I read, shared a Kip Fulbeck clip, and opened the floor to questions. Our research librarian asked a lovely and thoughtful question about my research and findings. and then... well...<br />
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From my left comes a question that made time freeze. I had just spent 20 minutes talking about the unique location and identity of mixed race millenials in the United States. My colleague asks, with a deep and thoughtful expression on her face as she rises from her chair, "did you find that the participants in your project struggled with the code switching?" She prefaced this question with a long narrative on how she "was listening to, what I thought was, a black preacher on the radio. Only in the last few sentences was I able to recognize the speaker as President Obama". Really? <br />
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Blank stare....which always elicits further explanation and no self-reflection....<br />
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"You know African Americans speak (air quotes) black English (end air quotes) and not (more fricking air quotes) so called white English..."<br />
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Blank stare... (seriously???)<br />
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awkward silence...<br />
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Finally I was able to speak. I let my colleague know that this never came up in my work and that the participants were more concerned with being recognized in multiple contexts as the children of their parents and family. I went on to say that language and code switching, while a very important conversation, were not part of this projects' question...I also took the time to mention that the beauty and utility of the mixed race conversation is at a minimum a deconstruction of abstractionist views on race, racial identity, and stereotypes. I also stated that I felt like this was a very weird space to be assuming that all African Americans spoke any particular language or that they all code switched. I also pointed out that my own experience was one where I had a singular cultural language and thus had no other code to switch to.<br />
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Blank stare...<br />
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My (really quite brilliant) response was lost in the fervor of figuring out how mixed race kids handled code switching (which I imagine is like how any other bilingual person switches languages...by the way). Person after person reasked the question and it was clear that they were trying to get me to take a position on code-switching in African Americans. I did not. Perhaps they felt that I could code-switch and was hiding it from them trying to fool them into believing that African Americans can speak "so called white English".<br />
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The whole time I was thinking what is it about my body that causes people to think I code switch. I know the answer but what I am confused about in this particular situation is a) these folks know me; b) they just suffered through 20 minutes of a talk that went into detail about my family background and upbringing - none of which included living in a community where African American Vernacular English might have been used - my parents would have had to buy me tapes; and c) I have been working with this community for three years on assumptions of sameness and abstractionist thinking... wth?<br />
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I was relieved when I returned to my office that my boss and colleagues had experienced the moment like I did. Of course now I have to endure jokes about "what code should we have our meeting in". But we are all baffled at what happened. <br />
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Of course it did make me wonder. I never asked a question about "code-switching" but there were strong themes of culture switching and racial identity fluidity. Many participants talked about being "white with my white family and black with my black family and mixed race in my house. This isn't passing... these are the spaces I have a natural right to. This is who I am." One person at the talk offered "is it like when a Spanish person goes back to the Caribbean and speaks a different kind of Spanish"? Again, not my question but it is a closer representation of what the participants in my project talk about when going from one side of the family to the other. <br />
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The only language conversation my participants and I had was about naming... creating a lexicon that framed mixed race lived experience and intimate reality accurately. But there was never a sense of code switching... which for me is moving from ones organic language to a language that has to be learned and cultivated. For my participants, that was not the case. If there was a difference in language between one familial space to another, my sense of the experience of shifting from one language to another was a) about shifting from one space to another - which may or may not have a different language; and b) the language in both spaces BELONGED to the mixed race individual. In my mind that is about being bilingual and bicultural not about switching codes to access education and capital. <br />
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The direction my colleagues took during my talk was really useful for me (now three days later when I am no longer mortified) because I have been able to recognize the power of the binary here. Unconsciously (I am certain) my colleague was trying to re-polarize mixed race back into diametrically opposed positions, positions that we in the United States are comfortable with. This was more about keeping black and white separate, moving against my work and my claims that mixed race - while connected and intersecting with monorace - is a unique and separate identity, lived experience, and intimate reality.<br />
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...more soon...Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-86925243381180605472012-02-12T19:37:00.001-05:002012-02-12T19:37:32.637-05:00Burnt Orange GiraffesEvery picture I created as a child was burnt orange in color. The only one my mother kept was the burnt orange giraffe. She drags it out every holiday, on its old hardened kindergarten paper, as a testament to my unruliness. She tells the story of how I never colored in the lines and ate paste, which tasted like peppermint by the way. And then she turns to her strongest piece of evidence, the burnt orange giraffe. My mother pronounces it ‘non-art’ which translates for me as ‘non-person’, and says “it wouldn’t have been this color if she hadn’t tried to use all the paints at the same time and mixed them all together.” What is truly striking about the repeated assault on my five year old visual artistic abilities is that its designation as ‘non-art’ has nothing to do with the fact that the figure looks nothing like a giraffe, which it certainly does not, but because of its COLOR. As I finish my dissertation, I have come to appreciate this story as a great metaphor for my journey towards a mixed race identity.<br />
If you are an ordered individual you may not know about the phenomenon that occurs when compulsive kindergartners feverishly apply every single color in the finger paint tray to their artwork. The politically correct term is burnt orange; my mother called it baby poop brown. The deeper conversation is that it was not the RIGHT color. This speaks to the inflexibility in the aesthetic expectation and order of color. As a mixed race person, I am the baby poop brown giraffe. Non-conforming, unidentifiable, uncategorical, I am a burnt orange giraffe.<br />
This metaphor was one that helped me create the framework through which I define my own racial identity or at least that space that allows identities like mine, non-binary and fluid, to take shape. As my research continued, the more paint colors were applied to the socio-racial canvas. Like my art, socio-racial identity started to become very messy and disordered and very opposite the clean orderly structure that race seemed to be before I started. I have no objection to the direction this artwork has taken. I am only concerned that I will be left with something unrecognizable like my giraffe. I am concerned that the narratives of people of mixed race will like my artwork be misinterpreted as unintentional, and compulsively created. <br />
What I can tell you is that I painted those pictures on purpose. It wasn’t impulse; I simply wanted to use all the colors because I thought the use of all the colors produced an exceptional result. When I used every single color, it didn’t produce a rainbow like I had been lead to believe, it produced an exceptional color. The color produced ended up being the exact same color as me.Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-69093253590731551932012-01-17T12:38:00.001-05:002012-01-17T12:43:09.033-05:00Dumb things people say day...rant...no educational value at all... :)Hey! It is dumb things people say day!!!! Yay!<br />
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My karma must be off. I apparently am attracting, again, people who have dumb things to say about mixed race. These are well meaning people who, under the guise of education, have decided to put my family on trial for "mixed race authenticity". There is a little twist, mixed race is not being contested, our membership to the mixed race club is...<br />
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We have moved, and we love where we live. I have a great job as a professor and diversity professional. I somehow imagined that the people I worked with would have a better sense of what you might say to a diversity professional ... diversity etiquette if you will... Nah.<br />
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In the past week I have been told: you are too dark to be mixed... you are soooooo dark... your daughter couldn't have "white hair" it has to be nappy like yours (paws through my child's hair to find a nap). Sigh...<br />
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It has been a long time but I am starting to feel like a zoo animal, my skin, my children's skin, and our hair has been touched, felt, pawed...while people who know perfectly well this is unacceptable look on.<br />
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I know I am whining but COME ON PEOPLE... turn on a television, read a BOOK... Ask before touching. And yes, my child IS blond... nature is a beautiful thing....<br />
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I don't think I have anything educational to say about this. I will say that when we engage in these behaviors, asking questions that are founded in no research of our own first, we are performing or re-performing a racialized harm. Should we learn from each other? Yes. Should we make people feel like I feel right now, like not wanting to teach anyone a blessed thing; well that might be counterproductive. <br />
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Three different people this week challenged my mixed race identity based on how dark I am. I realized that they had never really bothered to SEE the differences in skin tone amongst people of color. We aren't ALL THE SAME COLOR. Stupidly I tried to redirect these folks attention by telling them that my students of color always know that I am mixed race because they see me in a different context. THESE PEOPLE REFUSED TO STOP TALKING AND ARGUED WITH ME ABOUT MY OWN GENEOLOGY. "my biological father is white"... "HE CAN'T BE" "my children are light because I am mixed, they are second generation, really third because my biological mother was mixed too" "you aren't mixed you are too dark"... Actually, I am tooooooo pissed.<br />
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I am upset because I erred on the side of diplomacy and preserved relationships and really I just wanted to hit someone. I wanted to ask why they were so obsessed with my genealogy. I wanted to ask if they had ever heard of Google. I am saddest about the fact that my daughter had to experience this. She had her hair picked through (did I mention that I got asked this week if I got things lost in my afro?) and her arms compared for color (she was lighter). I had one young woman looking at family pictures proclaim "oh see, your boys get dark, I KNEW they had to get dark". WHAT DOES THAT MEAN!!!!<br />
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Folks: If you are curious, do some research, Google, READ A BOOK... Then approach someone with a specific conversation in mind that will advance your relationship, and the topic as a whole, forward. We are not freak shows... we are people with rich histories, genealogies, and lived experiences to share. Believe that we know who and what we are and where we are from. If you don't understand it... that is on you. And while we are at it... your sense that you can negate what I tell you about myself is the epitome of PRIVILEGE and POWER unchecked. <br />
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The best part of this week was when my 10 year old daughter looked at me and said "seriously? That girl is obsessed with color? What is UP with THAT?" What IS up with that?<br />
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more soon...Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-65444072489397025102012-01-02T14:06:00.001-05:002012-01-02T14:06:47.410-05:00Black like me...The articulation of identity, for me, is the product of individual, familial and communal intention and cultural will. The expression of mixed race identity in its purest form was provided for me by my sons in the back seat of my Dodge Durango in 2005. In 2005 my oldest son was 15 and it was the last year that I drove him and his friends to football summer session. Every morning at 6am, I would get in the car with four or five smelly little boys. I am not sure at what point I realized that most of my son’s friends were mixed race children with intact mixed race families and households. So, in the back seat I had: Brian, mom was black Caribbean, dad was white, and stepmom was white; Michael, mom was white and dad and step dad were black African American; Terry mom was white, dad was black, orphaned Terrance now lived with his white aunt and uncle. Also along for the ride were my sons 15 and 13 at the time, and my daughter who was five. <br />
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The boys had what I would call a morning dialogue; it rarely varied. Once everyone was in the car, Brian would start counting. I am not sure he was counting people per se but he had a compulsive need to count races. I now believe it was a response to often, if not always, being the only person of color in almost any situation he was in. I see it in my lived experience more than that of my children as Brian and I were both the “first” mixed race person in our families. Anyway, the counting would go like this. “There are three black people, and three white people in the car. We are even.” “No man that is not right” someone would offer, usually my son. Then all hell would break loose as the boys tried to ferret out who was how much of what and how many “wholes” that made. They never got it right nor did they ever get the same answer day to day. The important point here is that they kept trying every day for four weeks. <br />
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I was more aware than usual of my children’s identity development around race as I was fully engaged in my critical race work at that time. The conversation that was taking place behind me was not only fascinating but really useful. Several things still stand out to me this many years later. First that the boys had a language and a contextual understanding of what race was what mixed race meant, and how to talk about it. For instance, bi-racial and mixed race were acceptable names for their socio-racial identities but mulatto wasn’t. The boys would talk about being part white and part black, but would never say they were white but would accept being called black. However, all of the boys were not comfortable with my daughter being called black as she, to them, was clearly white. What is exceptional here is the level of agreement on these things as they were never argued against. The race counting wouldn’t be the exact language, activity or framework I would chose as I don’t really like the baker’s method to race, but I don’t remember them deciding or having a conversation where they negotiated these terms either. I do remember the boys sharing stories about experiences they had in the community or at school where they agreed that these experiences were what made them mixed raced together. For instance around mulatto as a term, my younger son had a little friend named Jenna who called him mulatto at school and all the boys agreed that this was a racist behavior on this little girl’s part. “She should know better, we have all told her not to use that word a million times.” But when I asked them why this was a bad word they were not able to tell me except that my son said “it makes my stomach hurt when she says it. She means it mean.” and the older boys agreed.<br />
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Second, the boys agreed that race could be counted and that mixed race people could be counted in parts in such a way as to reinforce membership in both monoracial spaces. Each boy understood that they belonged to two or three different races and, for them; the “amount” of each race could be counted but did not restrict them from membership in one or another of those races. This particular attribute of these conversations stood out to me because it pushed against how race was being presented to me in the academy while it resonated with how I experienced my socio-racial location in my own intimate reality. One day Brian was talking about his step mother’s family and said “yeah they know I am black and they don’t like black people but my dad says I am his son and I belong with him in our [white] family.” All of the boys this sense that anyone could have multiple socio-racial memberships that the boys viewed the world and they were not to be swayed from that sense. One day my husband was in the car with us and Brian started counting. When he went to include my husband, who is Irish and English and whom my children suggest is the whitest man in the world, in the calculation Brian leaned his head up between the front seats and said “hey, Mr. P, what are you…half or a quarter black?” Despite the fact that all of the children in the car had a parent who was white, all of the boys wanted to know how much black my husband had in him including our own children. My husband remembers not wanting to break their hearts as they had these hopeful and excited expressions on their faces and because it was the first time the possibility of anything other than whiteness had been extended to him.<br />
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Finally, the boy’s assertion of their mixed race identities was strong. I believe that is because they had each other. With a community to think and process with, they boys were able to stand up to the pressure of identifying with a monoracial identity easier than mixed race people who are isolated from other mixed race identities. In high school I had two best friends one was Thai and United States white and the other was German and Greek. Our sense of having multiple racial and ethnic identities created the same space for our assertion of multiplicitous identities as the boys had with each other. <br />
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I also saw a reflection of what the boys did that summer in our community, especially at school. The students around them, through graduation, always spoke about race with context. The deeper learning here for me is that socio-racial identity and identity development is about context and that context is impacted by access to other people who share your identity experiences and intimate realities. I remember being none too pleased the first time I heard the phrase “black like [my son]” until my child explained to me that this was how other students differentiated between him and other students with various non-white identities. While there were deeper implications to the phrase that I won’t get into here, the innocence with which my son received this declaration was founded in being accepted as a mixed race person and not feeling like he was being forced into a box that didn’t fit.<br />
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When my husband and I realized we could not register our daughter as mixed race in school as the No Child Left Behind act had removed the possiblity of other or multiple boxes, we approached our sons who were registered as other about it. That is when they shared stories of having taken the standardized tests for years and being very aware that the teacher was marking the race box a) for them; and b) incorrectly. “But you don’t correct teachers” my eldest son said “and I knew you would freak out so I didn’t say anything”. My youngest son said, “I told them I was Italian and they believed me. I thought that was funny so I kept doing it.” I remember the shout of joy when my eldest son applied to college and there was a box for mixed race people. “Whew! Mom, I finally got a box!!!!” During the Obama election the boy’s taught their sister to chant with them “Obama is black like me”. <br />
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Most recently my daughter came home and told her brother, interestingly not me, that “there are no boxes on those dumb tests for me, its racist.” <br />
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I agree...<br />
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...more soonMixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-4141796692921545152011-12-29T18:34:00.000-05:002011-12-29T18:34:38.592-05:00It really is that simple...I wrote this over a year and a half ago:<br />
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<i>It would appear that the mixed race identity expresses itself in multiplicitous narratives that are articulated from the intersections of more recognizable narratives. That is to suggest that the reason mixed race identity is so easy to suppress, or worse dismiss, is because it is not locateable as a singular voice. Mixed Race does not speak as one identity, rather, mixed race is the voice of multiplicitous identities that are expressed all at once and are expressed in and as a "this and" experience.</i><br />
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I have been working on my dissertation this week. I aim to be done and turn in a final draft on the 18th of January. That said, I have been trying to articulate the characteristics of mixed race along with a frustration around the dislocation of mixed race people in socio-cultural histories. My assertion is that mixed race has, and must have, existed at the inception of race itself. If we understand race to have been a concept or construct that was placed on existing bodies rather than illicited from those bodies and lived experiences, then we must accept that even in the moment when africans were named less than human and raced as black there had to be bodies/people/lived realities that didn't fit within racial categories even then. They weren't supposed to. Race was meant to seperate and thus any socio-racial location that is not distinctly seperate from other socio-racial identities simply don't make sense. Worse, these identities serve to prove the social construct of race incorrect. And THAT is a problem.<br />
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Anthropologists have a lot to offer when they locate africans in the Americas and Native Americans in Africa long before the advant of african chattle slavery. Biologists offer us similar DNA in populations who seem to be completedly geographically inaccessible to each other... As populations migrated across the globe, and lived experiences culturally intersected through trade and war, there are children... I have spent six years talking to this century's version of those children and listening to the journey and development of their socio-racial identities. <br />
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It troubles me that it seems acceptable to be proud of ethnic mixing "I am italian and irish" and not race mixing. Why can't it be as wonderful to be "Chinese and Irish"? This is a very simple snapshot of what I have been doing for the last six years. But at times, for me, it is just that simple. I am certain I have said it many many times... When my children wake up they have a parent who is brown skinned and a parent who is white skinned. They understand that to be a black parent and a white parent. They also understand that mommy is mixed race because her parents are different colors. They also understand that daddy is irish, german, english, and welsh. Even more interesting is that this all makes perfect sense to children, yet academics call it research and scholarship.<br />
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So many times I have been reading history, sociology, anthropoloy articles and found strong articulations of mixed race individuals not just because I understand it as mixed race but because the individuals in their own narratives (pre-critical race theory's exploration of mixed race) understand themselves as mixed race. Also, almost always, they understand that they are not allowed to name themselves mixed race and must then find a way to articulate their socio-racial being. Yet every academic conversation about mixed race acts like it is a new conversation....<br />
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Mixed race is not new...really progeny of different people from different cultures is not new...I have really enjoyed exploring why allowing this reality to have a shape of its own is such a threat to who and how socio-racial identity is understood and allowed to be expressed.<br />
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More soon...Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-60946083668727902322011-08-17T13:59:00.002-04:002011-08-17T14:14:33.674-04:00The cup runith over...Again I assert that if identity, affinity, and racial memberships are constituted by the spaces you have access to and the spaces that you are restricted from, how can I, or anyone like me, be anything other than mixed race? I just finished a train the trainer diversity workshop with an international organization. The facilitators were a CEO of Jewish heritage and a woman who self-identified as being “of black African heritage. I am the descendent of kidnapped and enslaved people.” I immediately got a pit in the bottom of my stomach. I knew, three minutes in, that I was going to struggle. I knew I was not going to fit here. <br />
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We started an exercise where we were to stand up for the affinity groups we identified with. I stood for the “white race European heritage” and I stood for the “black African heritage” and then I demanded space for myself. I felt that in a place where we are talking about racism willingly, having paid for the privilege to do so, to not challenge this and many other systemically binary moments would have been a critical mistake. Joining my mixed race resistance group was another woman of English and Ghanaian decent from England. Another participant and I demanded the transracial black/white adoptee group. Grudgingly the facilitators put the two new groups on the board and “allowed” them to happen. Those caucuses were the best, most authentic conversations I had the whole conference. <br />
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I was very aware of how lucky I was in that moment, to have another person to fight the fight with. My colleague Lee was not so lucky. Lee self-identified as a transgender masculine queer dyke and there was no space allowed, created, or acknowledged around Lee’s non-binary identity. Non-binary, fluid identities that resist binary categorization are often if not always framed as resistant. In this training, resistant translated directly into antagonistic if not irritating and unnecessary. I also am more deeply aware than ever that non-binary identities are also disruptive. The amount of energy that the facilitators put into dismissing, ignoring, and disenfranchising those of us who were invoking non-binary identities was telling. <br />
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During the mixed race caucus we were invited to share a list of things we never wanted to hear again. The top two in that list were “Is that your mother/child/father, etc.” and “You just don’t want to be black”. After the first day, mixed race identity was never talked about again. Many of us took strong ally positions for Lee and non-binary identity, but I had run out of energy around fighting for the mixed race identity. I allowed myself, yet again, to be quietly folded back into the black identity – which I carry, but is only part of who I am – simply because it was easier. Simply because I wanted to belong and that was the only space I COULD belong to. From my outside observance Lee didn’t fare as well; although at one point I did see Lee move off to the LGBTQ caucus, but it was clear that it wasn’t enough. It made me wonder about what someone like my daughter – mixed race white affect - might do, as she cannot pass for black and it was clear that white people were not welcome in the black African heritage group. It was clear that I was not welcome.<br />
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For me, the beginning of a non-binary racial identity – that I am calling mixed race - is clearly defined and shaped in these moments when the intimate reality of mixed race and the systemic refusal to allow space for that intimate reality are pushing against each other. The other woman who claimed a mixed race identity said “I could have been raised by a white family if my Dad had died and a Ghanaian family if my Mum had died. I was lucky and I wasn’t, I was raised by both. Race in the United States is crazy.” I concur. <br />
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Finally, on the last day, I sat with the Black African Heritage caucus which meets annually. My mixed race colleague had left training the day before and never returned. I had sat at the “not identified” affinity table the day before during the gender caucuses – male and female – in support of Lee’s identity. I think people were upset not to see me there again the day of the Black, Latino, and Jewish Caucuses; which left all the white race heritage people sitting at the “not identified” table. I just remember the moment when I had to choose. I was acutely aware of the fact that I HAD to choose. I chose the Black African Heritage table because I WANTED a community that was identified. But I also wanted the black people around that table, especially the black women, to like me…to want me. It brought up a lot of stuff for me around the dissonance between my black birth mother who gave me away and my white mother who raised me to be this person…strong, proud, resistant, and sure of who I am. <br />
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At lunch, the leader of the black African heritage caucus would not look me in the eye; and I knew the invitations to community were truly not for me. I hung in there. It actually took a lot for me to not flee to the “not identified” table where I would have been more comfortable. Imagine, being more comfortable being “not identified”. Although, what are the other choices...misidentified? During that lunch a woman who framed mixed race as a self-identity; although she had not done so before this which was curious to me and made me feel more targeted, said “we with mixed race families will learn to see how we are confused in our relationships”. The leader then looked directly at me and said “we will learn to choose rather than to be chosen, we will learn to see what they have done to us”. And in that moment, the facilitator reached over to the door in between us, a door that was never really open, and turned the key. I am unwilling to have anyone deconstruct my intimate realities.<br />
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So I returned to my office... wrote about it in my disseration... cleansed myself of other people's "stuff" and am left with this... Cups are built to keep the fluid in... <br />
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More soon...Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3854745343801671446.post-53121784998892870422011-07-29T16:52:00.002-04:002011-07-29T16:52:40.572-04:00Responding to commentsMy apolgies, I am not smart enough to respond to comments apparently. I really appreciate those who are reading and commenting. I can publish your comments but have had no real success responding. So, if your comment is published, please know that I have read and appreciated what you had to say!!!! I will keep trying to figure out how to respond... grrr... <br />
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More soon.Mixed Race PhDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00836663094049028936noreply@blogger.com0