That Mixed Race Membership Moment

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

Mixed Race Asian

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

Marriage Equaltiy is about all of us

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

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.