Mixed Race Studies

Revealed: How Britons welcomed black soldiers during WWII, and fought alongside them against racist GIs

The Telegraph
2015-12-06

Patrick Sawer, Senior Reporter

This was no ordinary Saturday night punch-up outside a pub.

At the height of World War Two, with the country gripped in a life or death fight for freedom against fascism and dictatorship, dozens of local drinkers fought alongside black soldiers against white Military Police officers harassing them outside a Lancashire pub.

It was just one extraordinary example of the active support shown by ordinary Britons for the thousands of black American troops stationed amongst them during the war – in stark contrast to the vicious racist abuse they received from their fellow countrymen.

The Lancashire riot was just one of hundreds of cases of simple humanity displayed by ordinary Britons towards black soldiers.

Details of the riot are revealed in a new book exploring the experience of black GIs stationed in Britain during the war.

While white GIs sought to have them banned from pubs, clubs and cinemas and frequently subjected them to physical and verbal assault, many ordinary Britons welcomed the black troops into their homes – and on several occasions physically stood up to their tormentors.

The book, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War, also reveals how in June 1943 there was a public outcry when four black servicemen were refused service in a bar in Bath, for no reason other than the colour of their skin…

…While most people have heard of the GI babies the US troops left behind, few have considered that many of these children were of mixed-race, the offspring of affairs between local white women and the black soldiers they encountered.

Many of those “brown babies” only came to know their fathers in later years, with some of their descendants now embarking on a search for their American grandfathers.

Miss Hervieux said: “Given the racial tensions that exist in Britain today, as in other countries, it is hard to believe that the UK was once a relative racial paradise for African Americans. Britons were willing to open their hearts and minds to fellow human beings who were there to help them…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Like Us: How to Support Biracial Children and Their Shifting Identities

Literatigurl
2015-12-01

Kimberly Cooper

The year was 2002. I’d just landed in Tucson, AZ to present my graduate school research on the “Social Perceptions of Multiracial Children” at the first-ever National Conference on the Multiracial Child in the United States. Hundreds of teachers, mental health professionals, social workers, student organizations, academics, authors and families from all over the U.S. and abroad met for two days of workshops specifically celebrating multiracial children and their histories. Organized by the two largest multiracial advocacy organizations in the U.S. – AMEA (The Association of MultiEthnic Americans) and The Mavin Foundation, we convened to share resources, strengthen collaboratives and then return to our respective fields to expand discussions on diversity and multiculturalism to include those of us strongly identifying with two or more distinct racial backgrounds.

Growing up biracial, I’d learned that negative social perceptions of biracial, multiracial and transracially adopted children were largely impacting the growth, well-being, and resources available to members of our own community at home and in schools. Asserting that biracial children were more “mixed-up” than mixed-race only served to further perpetuate negative stereotypes about us.

But what if mixed-race and biracial children were supported for an identity which embraced both parents?…

Read the entire article here.

White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed — and what can never be repaid — for racial privilege.

The New York Times
2015-12-02

Eula Biss. Professor of Instruction
Department of English
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one quality of debt that I’ve been pondering lately — how easy it can be.

I had very little furniture for the first few months in my new house and no money left to buy any. But then I took out a loan against my down payment, and now I have a dining-room table, six chairs and a piano. While I was in the bank signing the paperwork that would allow me to spend money I hadn’t yet earned, I thought of Eddie Murphy’s skit in which he goes undercover as a white person and discovers that white people at banks give away money to other white people free. It’s true, I thought to myself in awe when I saw the ease with which I was granted another loan, though I understood — and, when my mortgage was sold to another lender, was further reminded — that the money was not being given to me free. I was, and am, paying for it. But that detail, like my debt, is easily forgotten.

“Only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory,” Nietzsche observes in “On the Genealogy of Morality.” My student-loan debt doesn’t hurt, though it hasn’t seemed to have gotten any smaller over the past decade, and I’ve managed to forget it so thoroughly that I recently told someone that I’d never been in debt until I bought a house. Creditors of antiquity, Nietzsche writes, tried to encourage a debtor’s memory by taking as collateral his freedom, wife, life or even, as in Egypt, his afterlife. Legal documents outlined exactly how much of the body of the debtor that the creditor could cut off for unpaid debts. Consider the odd logic, Nietzsche suggests, of a system in which a creditor is repaid not with money or goods but with the pleasure of seeing the debtor’s body punished. “The pleasure,” he writes, “of having the right to exercise power over the powerless.”…

…Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. “There is, in fact, no white community,” as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself…

Read the entire article here.

Kansas City Artist Shane Evans, Co-Author Taye Diggs Demystify Mixed-Race Families In New Book

KCUR 89.3
Kansas City, Missouri
2015-12-04

Laura Ziegler, Special Correspondent

Shane Evans at KCUR studios to talk about illustrating new children’s book (Laura Ziegler KCUR)

Kansas City artist Shane Evans was raised by a mother and father whose racial and cultural backgrounds were different from one another. But to Evans they were just mom and dad. He’s also raising a mixed-race daughter.

That’s why Evans was eager to collaborate with his friend, actor Taye Diggs, on a children’s book that takes on the complex issues of growing up in a mixed-race household. Diggs has a six-year-old son with actress and singer Idina Menzel, who is white.

The book, Mixed Me, came out in October. Evans is the illustrator…

Listen to the interview (00:30:46) here.

Parents (of multiracial kids) Just Don’t Understand

AsAmNews
2015-12-03

Alice Wong

Talking about race is complicated enough but how do parents of multiracial Asian American children talk to their kids about race and racial identity? What are the experiences of multiracial Asian American children? What’s missing in the media representations of multiracial kids?

Writer, scholar and activist Sharon H. Chang talked with AsAmNews about her multiracial family and the findings from her research on multiracial Asian American children from her new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World. Below are some edited excerpts from their conversation.

You and your husband are both multiracial Asian Americans—describe your family’s cultural mash-up.

Our collective family ancestry is Japanese, Taiwanese/Chinese, Slovakian, German, French Canadian, British, Welsh – American. But culturally we feel multiethnic, mixed, 2nd gen Asian American.

How do you and your husband talk about your child about being multiracial in America?

We talk pretty openly about systemic racial inequities in front of him. We don’t hide those struggles and even encourage him to participate in the conversations when he’s interested. Then regarding his own identity (i.e. relationship to those racial struggles) we don’t tell him he’s white. Because he’s not. He’s certainly asked, “Am I white?” And we’re very clear, “No.” Instead we offer Asian, Asian American, and mixed…

Read the entire interview here.

OPINION: Mixed raced children will not fix racism

Eyewitness News
Johannesburg/Cape Town, South Africa
2015-12-02

Danielle Bowler

Images courtesy of Tarryn Hatchett.

Danielle Bowler says being a visibly mixed-raced person is often to encounter yourself as a perpetual question.

Logging onto social media last week, I came across a meme that is frequently posted without interrogation of what it means or implies. ‘End Racism. Have mixed babies’. The images that appeared alongside these words are of light-skinned children, with blue eyes or masses of curls. A popular idea of what mixed raced children look like. A popular ‘type’ that is favoured, because of an appearance that is close to white, yet simultaneously ‘exotic’ and ‘other’.

The problematic idea that we can fix racism through outbreeding it, shares a similar logic with the notion that mixed babies are cuter, and the assumption that if we date, marry or befriend people across racial lines we cannot still be racist. It ignores how we can and often do make exceptions out of people who we are in intimate relationships or friendships with.

As Ella Sackville Adjei points out in her story about her ‘racist one night stand’, ‘racists don’t wear badges’ and not being racist is not as simple as being intimate with someone of another race to you. But it also ignores the fact that those mixed raced children are born into a world structured by race.

But the idea that we can fix racism through making everyone visibly mixed still has currency. Despite the existence of mixed raced people and race-homogenous societies in the world, where race still matters. Despite evidence that race’s logic runs deep. Despite reality…

Read the entire article here.

The Terrible Tale Of My Racist One-Night Stand

BuzzFeed
2015-10-24

Ella Sackville Adjei, BuzzFeed Contributor

Tom Humberstone for BuzzFeed

This is the tale of how I accidentally slept with a racist, and the laughably horrible things he said to me while I lay in his bed.

In July I travelled around the Cyclades with two friends, reunited after spending a year apart at different universities, and re-learning who we might have become in the time away. We’d met Australian Sam and his friend in Athens and, excited at seeing a familiar face in a Mykonos club, dragged them across the dance floor. What we took for enthusiasm at mutual recognition turned out to be more prosaic; Australian Sam and co had no memory at all of our previous meeting and clearly thought their irresistible physical magnetism was what made us pluck them out of the crowd. When you’re determined to get over an ex – even if it has been the best part of a year since the breakup – and let’s be real, prove that “still got it!” attractiveness to yourself, bad things can happen…

…A classmate I spoke to, who is of mixed black and white Southeast African origin, had slept with a white South African who insisted on discussing apartheid, her “tribe”, and his exhilaration at “breaking the rules”. The rhetoric and mentality of colonialism is so often still painfully present for so many of us – and not just in our institutions and systems. And unfortunately, racists don’t tend to wear badges to identify them: It would be a lot easier to work out who to avoid on a sweaty dance floor if they did, and whose bright blue eyes to ignore…

Read the entire article here.

Leaving to learn

Columbia Daily Spectator
2015-12-02

Claire Liebmann

Courtesy of Karl Jacoby

Several years ago while browsing newspaper clippings online, Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Columbia, came across the story of William Ellis—a Texan slave who built a million dollar fortune while posing as a Mexican millionaire in New York, essentially hacking the system of American expansionism and oppression.

Tracking Ellis as he took on different names and personas was difficult: Ellis deliberately introduced falsehoods into the historical record to ensure that his racial passing was accepted by the broader society, but Jacoby stuck with it. Years later, this chance encounter with Ellis’ story would come to drive his personal historical research. Undertaking a yearlong leave of absence, he pursued his interest in reclaiming untold narratives, working on his book The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.

Jacoby’s academic career is driven by his interest in complicating comfortable historical narratives. This process of reinvention and rediscovery depends on another kind of separation from the establishment: Jacoby’s reliance on his leave of absence as a means of promoting academic innovation…

Read the entire article here.

Love in the face of racism: Being an interracial family

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-11-25

Jareen Imam, Social Discovery Producer

CNN)—When Karen Garsee picked her 5-year-old daughter up from kindergarten in September, she wasn’t prepared for what Kaylee had to say.

The kids at school wouldn’t play with me today.

Why?

Because I’m brown.

Those words struck Garsee right in the heart. Being white, she didn’t know what she could say to make her daughter feel better. At that moment, they simply embraced.

“I didn’t think kids at that age really thought about other kids being different,” Garsee says.

That wouldn’t be the last time the schoolchildren didn’t want to play with Kaylee.

“We live in the South and racism is loud and it’s still out there,” Garsee says.

A CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll on race found that about half (49%) of Americans say racism is a big problem in our society. Compare that to 2011 when 28% said racism was a big problem. And in 1995, shortly after the O.J. Simpson trial and a couple of years after the race riots in Los Angeles, 41% of people said racism was a big societal problem…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race marriages a reflection of multicultural Blacktown

The Daily Telegraph
Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
2015-12-01

Nick Houghton

Joanne Vella, Editor
Blacktown Advocate

• Quakers Hill one of Blacktown’s most livable suburbs
• Iranian migrant calls ‘multicultural tolerant’ Australia home

WHEN Stephen Zahra went on a four-week holiday to Vietnam in 2006, little did he know how life changing the trip would be.

His love for Vietnam inspired him to quit his job and move permanently to the southeast east Asian nation.

It was a decision which would lead him to the love of his life, his wife Dao Nguyen, and the start of his present day life back in Australia as a happily married father of daughter Hayley.

Stephen, a second generation Maltese, and Vietnamese Dao are the changing face of Australian families and the multicultural melting pot which is Blacktown.

“Our wedding day in Ho Chi Minh City was probably the biggest reminder how big the mix of cultures is between Dao and myself,” Stephen said.

“My family flew over for the wedding and despite having no ability to speak Vietnamese with Dao’s family found a way to communicate and make the day truly memorable…

Read the entire article here.