Mixed: Four young alums open up about their multiracial heritage and how it shapes them

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, United States on 2014-05-26 07:15Z by Steven

Mixed:  Four young alums open up about their multiracial heritage and how it shapes them

Dartmouth Alumni Magzine
May/June 2014
pages 42-47

Book Excerpt from: Garrod, Andrew, Christina Gómez, Robert Kilkenny, Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

Seeking to be Whole
By Shannon Joyce Prince ’09

Whenever I’ve been called on to define my heritage, I smile and say, “I am African-American, Cherokee (Aniyunwiya) Native American, Chinese (Cantonese) American and English American.” I excise nothing of myself. I claim the slave who was a mathematical genius; the storyteller, the quilt maker and the wise healer; the bilingual railroad laborer; and the farmer—regardless of the amount of melanin in any of their skins. I pay no attention to the pseudoscientific idea of blood quantum (the idea that race is a biological, measurable reality) and am uninterested in dividing myself into fractions, I am completely, concurrently and proudly all of my heritages.

From the time I was able to think about such things, I have considered myself both quadricultural and ana-racial (my personal neologism for “without race”). I am zero (raceless) and hoop (part of the peoples from all over the world). I think my parents might have been a little less comfortable in it, but I felt that four peoples had found space in my blood; thus, people of all bloods belonged in every space in general. I was comfortable at school not because I didn’t know who I was but because I did. And I knew who I was because I came from a strong family.

At my secondary school, melanin in an adult person’s skin most likely meant he or she was a menial laborer. In Hanover, melanin was a status symbol: It automatically meant you were an Ivy League student or a professor. Many nonwhite students felt uncomfortable in such a white space, even to the point of leaving the College. I was stunned by their reaction…

Read entire excerpt here.

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Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Posted in Anthologies, Autobiography, Books, Campus Life, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-02-06 13:51Z by Steven

Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Cornell University Press
2013-12-17
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8014-5251-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8014-7914-4

Edited by:

Andrew Garrod, Professor Emeritus of Education
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Christina Gómez, Professor of Sociology and Latino & Latin American Studies
Northeastern Illinois University

Robert Kilkenny, Executive Director; Clinical Associate
Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention
School of Social Work
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Mixed presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other times recalls a familiar world of racial and ethnic prejudice.

Exploring a wide range of concerns and anxieties, aspirations and ambitions, these young writers, who all attended Dartmouth College, come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike individuals who define themselves as having one racial identity, these students have lived the complexity of their identity from a very young age. In Mixed, a book that will benefit educators, students, and their families, they eloquently and often passionately reveal how they experience their multiracial identity, how their parents’ race or ethnicity shaped their childhoods, and how perceptions of their race have affected their relationships.

Contents

  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • Part I. Who Am I?
    • 1. Good Hair / Ana Sofia De Brito
    • 2. So, What Are You? / Chris Collado
    • 3. In My World 1+1 = 3 / Yuki Kondo-Shah
    • 4. A Sort of Hybrid / Allison Bates
  • Part II. In-Betweenness
    • 5. Seeking to Be Whole / Shannon Joyce Prince
    • 6. The Development of a Happa / Thomas Lane
    • 7. A Little Plot of No-Man’s-Land / Ki Mae Ponniah Heussner
    • 8. Finding Blackness / Samiir Bolsten
  • Part III. A Different Perspective
    • 9. Chow Mein Kampf / Taica Hsu
    • 10. A Work in Progress / Anise Vance
    • 11. We Aren’t That Different / Dean O’Brien
    • 12. Finding Zion / Lola Shannon
  • About the Editors
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Dartmouth Junior wins Beinecke Scholarship

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, United States on 2010-05-19 20:23Z by Steven

Dartmouth Junior wins Beinecke Scholarship

Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs
Press Release
Media Contact: Kelly Sundberg Seaman
2010-05-18

Anise Vance, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2011, has been named a Beinecke Scholar, one of 20 college juniors nationally. The award, which supports the “graduate education of young men and women of exceptional promise,” provides $4,000 prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school. He joins Gabrielle Ramaiah ’10 and Jodi Guinn ’09 as the third Dartmouth student tapped for the scholarship in the past three years.

Vance, of Weston, Mass., is majoring in geography. “This is a huge honor,” he says, “both for the validation of my aspirations, and the financial support.” On the other hand, he notes, “it raises expectations. The call from the award committee came while I was working in the library; I phoned my parents, and then went right back to work.”

Issues of social justice, in the United States and globally, engage Vance. He traces his drive to ask questions about who lives where — and what results from that mix of space and identity — to his childhood “growing up all over the place”: Vance attended school in Kenya, Botswana, and Egypt. Growing up, as he calls himself, “a mixed race child of an Iranian mother and an African American father,” he was aware that the perceptions of others were often linked to one’s environment. This understanding has formed the basis of his research thus far…

…My current research for my senior thesis as a Mellon Mays Fellow investigates the causes of and mechanisms by which residential segregation continues to plague urban centers and their populations,” he reports. “Using a variety of methods, including ethnographic research, census-data analysis and structural examination of lending and real estate practices, I hope to provide a comprehensive investigation of African American segregation in my father’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut.”…

Read the entire press release here.

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