You don't look mixed race

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

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

The 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...

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.

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...

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?

Blank stare....which always elicits further explanation and no self-reflection....

"You know African Americans speak (air quotes) black English (end air quotes) and not (more fricking air quotes) so called white English..."

Blank stare... (seriously???)

awkward silence...

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.

Blank stare...

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".

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.


...more soon...

Burnt Orange Giraffes

Every 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.
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.
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.
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.

Dumb things people say day...rant...no educational value at all... :)

Hey! It is dumb things people say day!!!! Yay!

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...

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.

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...

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.

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....

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.

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.

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!!!!

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.

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?

more soon...

Black 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.”

I agree...

...more soon

It really is that simple...

I wrote this over a year and a half ago:

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 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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

More soon...