Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being Biracial

Posted in Articles, Audio, Autobiography, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2015-05-27 01:25Z by Steven

Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being Biracial

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2015-05-24

Growing up in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson lived mostly with his mother in a black neighborhood. The son of an African-American mother and an Irish-American father, his skin was so light that he might have passed for white. But being biracial meant only one thing back in the ’70s: “Um, it meant: black,” Johnson says with a laugh. “There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity there. I didn’t hear the world biracial or didn’t think of myself as biracial. And when I did hear that, I reacted to it defensively. I thought it was just black people of mixed heritage who were just trying to run away from blackness.”

Johnson was born three years after Loving Day — the historic 1967 Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal. His new novel, Loving Day, is a funny, sometimes absurd look at what it means to be mixed race in this country.

These days, Johnson has a more nuanced way to describe his racial identity. He says he is a mixed person of African-American descent. But he also uses another, more loaded word, to describe himself: mulatto

Read the entire article here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.

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Mixed Race Americans Picture A ‘Blended Nation’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Audio, Book/Video Reviews, Census/Demographics, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-03-05 23:02Z by Steven

Mixed Race Americans Picture A ‘Blended Nation’

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2009-11-08

Liane Hansen, Host

The 2000 U.S. census was the first to give Americans the option to check more than one box for race. Nearly 7 million people declared themselves to be multiracial that year, a number that’s expected to shoot up in the 2010 count. As more of the nation’s population identifies itself as being of mixed race, the authors of a new book say Americans’ traditional ideas of racial identity are in for a challenge.

In the book Blended Nation, photographer Mike Tauber and producer Pamela Singh combine portraits of mixed-race Americans with stories of living beyond the sometimes rigid notions of race. The husband-and-wife team tell host Liane Hansen they wanted to highlight the personal experiences of life between categories.

“We really wanted to know what it was like for somebody who checks more than one box to exist in that realm,” Tauber says…

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Listen to the story here.

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