Mixed Race Studies

My Music Is My Soul, My Language Is My Armor

Psychology Today
2014-12-02

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D.
Stanford University

Byron’s story of identity, healing, and empowerment

“One night at a pub I heard the sound of traditional Okinawan folk music, and it was like being hit in the head with a hammer. The impact was like a bolt of lightning! The song told the story of how in life there are things that each of us is born to do. I realized that I had been trying to erase the reality that I was born and raised here on this island. Suddenly listening to the music my hardened heart melted and I was freed.”

Byron has captivated me with his story since we first met in 1999, two mixed race guys, one an elder researcher, the other a young searcher in the throes of an identity quest. Born and raised in Okinawa by a native woman and her family, his face is marked by the genes of his father, an American whom he never met and whose name remains a mystery. With looks that branded him as an American, associating him with an occupying army and military bases and making him a scapegoat for hostility, Byron’s youthful life was full of strife and he had to fight to stay alive and maintain his dignity. He struggled to find himself, even venturing to Los Angeles to become an American rock star.

But when he had his great awakening he put away his electric guitar and devoted himself to the study of the sanshin, a 3-stringed snake skinned instrument. He set out on a road of discovery, immersing himself in the study of Okinawan traditional folk music of the islands. Music led him to language, as he wanted to understand the words of the songs he was singing. But years of neglect have taken their toll and it is a language no longer used in daily life, understood only by the middle aged, spoken only by the elderly. Byron felt anger at the society that did not value its own language, though he understood the history of incorporation into the Japanese nation, subsequent forced assimilation into Japanese language and culture, and self chosen accommodation, that had drastically reduced the use of the language. So he sought out elders and asked them to teach him…

Read the entire article here.

Girl in need of bone marrow highlights shortage of mixed-race donors

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-13

Vikki Ortiz Healy

When doctors told Michelle Trujillo in July that her 6-year-old daughter would need a bone marrow transplant to save her life, the Crystal Lake mother didn’t want to wait another minute before getting her only child back to health.

But months later, Sophia — who has aplastic anemia, a rare disorder that impairs her immunity — is still waiting for a donor match. Meanwhile, Trujillo says she lies in bed at night making mental lists of places to try to find a donor with similar multiracial heritage to her daughter’s — a group with a strikingly low match rate.

“I don’t sleep at night. I think of, ‘What can I do now? Who can I contact now?’ ” said Trujillo, whose daughter is half Filipino, as well as Irish, Spanish and Italian. “One match is all we need, but it’s like a needle in a haystack.”

The Trujillos’ predicament highlights a nationwide paradox that has troubled medical experts and families awaiting transplants for years: despite the ever-growing diversity in the United States, there are not enough minority and multiracial donors registered and available for patients in need…

Read the entire article here.

Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction Awarded to Louise Erdrich

News from the Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
2015-03-17

Winner to Participate in This Year’s National Book Festival

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has announced that Louise Erdrich, author of such critically acclaimed novels as “Love Medicine,” “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,” “The Plague of Doves” and her current novel, “The Round House,” will receive the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction during the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 5.

Billington said of Erdrich: “Throughout a remarkable string of virtuosic novels, Louise Erdrich has portrayed her fellow Native Americans as no contemporary American novelist ever has, exploring—in intimate and fearless ways—the myriad cultural challenges that indigenous and mixed-race Americans face. In this, her prose manages to be at once lyrical and gritty, magical yet unsentimental, connecting a dreamworld of Ojibwe legend to stark realities of the modern-day. And yet, for all the bracing originality of her work, her fiction is deeply rooted in the American literary tradition.”

The National Book Festival and the prize ceremony will take place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

“My grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was educated in an Indian boarding school, became chairman of his tribe and testified before Congress on behalf of the Turtle Mountain people,” said Erdrich. “My other grandfather, Ludwig Erdrich, came here penniless from Germany in 1920 and worked incessantly through many heartbreaks to raise his family, including my father. Of all their grandchildren, it would have surprised them most to think of me, skinny and tongue-tied, amounting to anything. But in addition to the Library of Congress, I have my parents Rita and Ralph, in whom my grandparents’ spirits are still vital, to thank for this recognition.”

Erdrich is the third winner of the award. Previous winners are E.L. Doctorow (2014) and Don DeLillo (2013)…

Read the entire press release here.

Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive

The Atlantic
2015-09-13

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Professor of Sociology
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Many sociologists argue that ideologies claiming not to see race risk ignoring discrimination.

How many times have you heard someone say that they “don’t see color,” “are colorblind,” or “don’t have a racist bone in their body?” Maybe you’ve even said this yourself. After all, the dominant language around racial issues today is typically one of colorblindness, as it’s often meant to convey distaste for racial practices and attitudes common in an earlier era.

Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of colorblindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.

For the first half of the 20th century, it was perfectly legal to deny blacks (and other racial minorities) access to housing, jobs, voting, and other rights based explicitly on race. Civil-rights reforms rendered these practices illegal. Laws now bar practices that previously maintained racial inequality, like redlining, segregation, or openly refusing to rent or sell real estate to black Americans. Yet discrimination still persists, operating through a combination of social, economic, and institutional practices…

Read the entire article here.

James Blake doesn’t want NYPD cop who tackled him to ‘ever have a badge and gun again’

The New York Daily News
2015-09-12

Wayne Coffey, Special Reporter

Rich Schapiro, Staff Writer

Retired tennis star James Blake said Saturday the NYPD cop who brutally wrestled him to the ground should be served his walking papers.

“I want him to know what he did was wrong, and that in my opinion he doesn’t deserve to ever have a badge and a gun again, because he doesn’t know how to handle that responsibility effectively,” Blake, 35, told the Daily News. “He doesn’t deserve to have the same title as officers who are doing good work and are really helping keep the rest of the city safe.”

Blake called on the NYPD to can Officer James Frascatore a day after the department released disturbing video showing the WWE-style takedown outside a Midtown hotel Wednesday…

…Blake initially said he believed race was a factor in the rough arrest. But asked Saturday whether he thought white tennis stars such as Andy Roddick or Mardy Fish would have been treated the same way, he demurred.

“I don’t want to say that at all because I think that muddies the issue at hand,” said Blake, who was born to a black father and a white mother. “In this incident it was the excessive force that’s really the issue, because it was a nonviolent crime.”…

Read the entire article here.

They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist

BuzzFeed
2015-09-11

Jenny Zhang, BuzzFeed Contributor

Will Varner / BuzzFeed

White poet Michael Derrick Hudson’s use of the Chinese pen name Yi-Fen Chou was an act of yellowface that is part of a long tradition of white voices drowning out those of color in the literary world.

To be Other in America is to be coveted and hated at the same time. It’s never been enough to know that I feel it, but I know I am often asked to prove it before I am allowed to speak on it. When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature. “No one is going to pay attention to a name like mine,” a white dude who exclusively wrote stories about white dudes said to me one time when I was feeling particularly low about my writing. I couldn’t enjoy a scrap of validation or wallow in a sliver of self-doubt without someone interjecting some version of “You’re so lucky. You’re going to have an easier time than any of us getting published.” They were shameless about their envy, not shy or coy at all about their certainty that my race and gender were an undeniable asset, which, in turn, implied that I could be as mediocre and shitty as I wanted and still succeed. This was how some of my white classmates imagined the wild spoils of my literary trajectory. This was how they managed to turn themselves into the victims.

…I won’t be scandalized because what Hudson is doing isn’t anything that white male writers haven’t already been doing since the first recorded instance of our culture embracing any kind of excellence that did not include them: scramble to come up with ways to keep the playing field uneven, to keep the odds stacked in their favor. The scandal of Hudson performing the laziest act of yellowface (co-opting a Chinese name) to get his poem published and accepted into the Best American Poetry anthology is lurid fodder for our cultural conversation because of its explicitness, but it should not be strange or unbelievable. White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it. After all, 50 years ago, when black voices were fighting to be heard, when their stories of trauma and abuse were struggling for legitimacy, it took John Howard Griffin, a white man who dyed his skin black and wrote about his experiences as a “black” man in his book, Black Like Me, for white Americans to believe that yes, black people were telling the truth about their lived experiences in the Jim Crow South. He was hailed a singular hero. Studs Terkel once said, “Griffin was one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered. He was just one of those guys that comes along once or twice in a century and lifts the hearts of the rest of us.” It may seem totally nuts now, but as far as who gets credit for simply being affected by black pain, it doesn’t seem very removed from our current world where we heap lavish praise on someone like Jon Stewart for announcing on the Daily Show that he was too heartbroken to make jokes after the Charleston church shooting, as if all throughout this country’s present and past, black people and people of color have not been so heartbroken and so violated that we were left humorless, or worse, dead. To praise Stewart as excessively as he was praised is to say to black people: Your pain is unexceptional and does not matter until a white man feels it too…

Read the entire article here.

James Blake and the Myth of an Unarrestable Black Man

The Daily Beast
2015-09-10

Tomás Ríos

Bill Bratton said race ‘had nothing at all to do’ with tennis star James Blake’s wrongful collaring and arrest. The numbers tell a different story.

What does a non-white person have to do for the police to leave them alone? The ready answer is that you have to be more famous than former tennis star James Blake.

Blake was leaving his Midtown Manhattan hotel to make corporate appearances at the U.S. Open when five white, plainclothes New York City police officers tackled and handcuffed him on Wednesday.

The real answer, of course, is that not being white means there is no escape from the consequences of not being white.

Among those who buy into the mythic moral righteousness of our police forces, there is a belief that people of color need only be perfect little humans to cancel out the realities of a racist society. Go to college, smile, pull up your pants, don’t smile at white women, and the prescription for transcending race goes on and on.

It seems not even James Blake—who attended Harvard, overcame scoliosis and a broken neck to become a world-class tennis player, and is now a cancer research philanthropist—can be that perfect. The numbers on incarceration make that much clear…

Read the entire article here.

In its focus on genetics and race, global newspaper coverage of athletics is far from “post-racial”

The LSE’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy
The London School of Economics and Political Science
London, United Kingdom
2015-09-10

Matthew W. Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Devon R. Goss, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
University of Connecticut

With the years of racially segregated sports now long behind us, many would consider that sports coverage is color-blind and post-racial. In new research which examines newspaper coverage of race, sport and genetics from 2003 to 2014, Matthew W. Hughey and Devon R. Goss find that this is not the case. They write that the media persistently reinforces the notions that African American’s athletic success is based on biology, while whites’ comes from hard work and intelligence. They also debunk the ideas often seen in the media that race has a biological reality which can be defined by genes, and that the historic process of slavery somehow eliminated ‘weaker genes’ from the African American population, making them a more athletic race.

For many, sport represents the ultimate color-blind space, affording a level playing field where only one’s training and skills are the hallmarks of competition. Hence, racist and prejudicial beliefs and phenomena are both literally and figuratively, out-of-bounds. Moreover, sport has been understood as an activity that promotes racial harmony amongst both participants and observers. But such a claim is a bit simplistic.

To make sense of the correlation between different racial groups’ success and failures amidst different athletic events, many draw from the deep well of scientific racism to quench their thirst for explanatory knowledge. For instance, some research has found that many athletes believe that white sporting success is attributable to intelligence, while nonwhite success is accredited to genetically predisposed bodies—a longstanding cultural trope known as “white brains versus black brawn”—that has been around for at least a century. After African American boxer Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of the world in 1908, he precipitated a slow reconsideration of the assumption of nonwhites’ physical inferiority—a central tenet of early 20th century racial science and eugenics. Fast forward to our contemporary moment and the banal ubiquity of this trope among sports commentators is well known, and was even recently panned by the comic duo Key & Peele…

Read the entire article here.

Vulnerability as Empowerment in the Classroom

Education Week
2015-09-09

Christina Torres, Middle and high school English and Drama Teacher
University Laboratory School, Honolulu, Hawaii

It’s back-to-school time for many students and teachers this week. For many, it means that 20 to 120 new faces enter our classrooms and our lives.

Jessica, a fifth-grade teacher in Chicago, wrote this beautiful piece on the vulnerability of her new students after asking them to share how they saw themselves reflected in literary characters:

I was in awe of the bravery of these kids. To speak this freely in front of their classmates. To tell these things to me, their teacher, who they barely even know at this point. That is bravery.

What they showed me is their capability to make themselves vulnerable. To be willing to share the deepest parts of themselves. To leave behind the worry of how others would react and share these moments and glimpses into their lives with us all.

The piece hits on an aspect of education that is often forgotten: students not only look to us for content, they also can experience either empowerment or oppression based on the culture of our classrooms…

We have to face this with our students head on. We must not only acknowledge this truth with students but also attempt to build trust in a space that has failed to validate their identities.

Here’s the thing: we have all been biased, and we have been hurt by biases. As Jay Smooth discusses in his seminal talk, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race,” “the race constructs that we live in in America were shaped … for centuries by a need to rationalize and justify indefensible acts.” Because of this, we “will never bat a thousand when it comes to dealing with race issues.” We’re going to mess up, which is difficult when the stakes feel so high…

Read the entire article here.

Serena Williams, Tiger Woods and racial identity in sports

ESPN
2015-09-05

Mike Wise, Senior Writer

Mike Wise writes that Serena Williams has embraced her blackness and found a spiritual home while Tiger Woods has been proudly biracial and found a perhaps unintended kind of isolation

You can’t miss the term “black excellence” pulsating through Claudia Rankine’s provocative story on Serena Williams in last week’s New York Times magazine. Though Serena never goes there herself, the acclaimed poet and professor takes the journey for her, living vicariously through Serena’s sass and brass. “Serena’s grace comes because she won’t be forced into stillness; she won’t accept those racist projections onto her body without speaking back.”

Rankine’s affection for Serena’s defiance is so deeply personal, she almost channels John Carlos and Tommie Smith, raising their black-gloved fists into a Mexico City summer night some five decades ago.

Step off, backward white folk.

Between black excellence and her picture next to the Twitter hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, Serena is clearly playing for more than herself and history at the US Open this week.

Meanwhile, a term not found with a Google search: “Cablanasian excellence.”

This is possibly because Tiger Woods has not won a major since the Bush administration, and he has been careful not to singularly co-opt any one part of his multiracial identity (African-American, Thai, Caucasian, American Indian, Chinese and beyond).

But now that we’re routinely taking stock of two seminal athletes of color, both of whom dominated their Downton Abbey-white sports at different times in their careers, it’s fair to delve into how they both handled race and ask a simple question:

Is the importance of a strong racial identity — especially being viewed as authentically black — something to fall back on during career and life struggles?…

Read the entire article here.