Mixed Dreams

Waking from Mixed Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:38:00 +0000

Let me begin, if I may, by introducing this rather belated post with the powerful words of some scholars, poets, writers, and activists to set our scene:

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it--and that it belongs to him [the black child]. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything." (James Baldwin)

"It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this 'Third Space', we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves." (Homi Bhabha)

" The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being... people
who have been obliged to define themselves--because they are so defined by others-- by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves... To see things plainly you have to cross a frontier." (Salman Rushdie "Imaginary Homelands")

To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads. (Gloria Anzaldua- full poem at the end of the post)

I've been feeling a lot like an oyster these past couple of years, working out, mulling over, rubbing painfully up against a little grain-- an irritant-- that made its way suddenly into my pristine little shell (although, perhaps, it had always been there). Now bear with me, I promise this image will (hopefully) make sense by the end of this.

I began this blog back in 2009 as a response to a very particular moment in our ever-shifting, ever-challenging social terrain in the U.S. That moment was what I liked to call the time "We-Drank-That-Postracial-KoolAid-And-Almost-Died". It was a time of short-lived, but heady hope for a new America in the wake of President Obama's historic 2008 win. To that point, there are actually some really interesting reflections out there on how the visceral reaction against the post-racial moment (of which I was very much a part) in its fervor actually obscured the possibility that a particularly important and valid desire was being articulated. A desire, that perhaps, prematurely and albeit naively, declared itself into a celebratory daze despite all obvious evidence to the contrary.

Yet, arguably, the desire itself was not bad, wrong, destructive, oppressive, or misguided at all. Beneath all the la-dee-dah-ing, the desire was simple and not altogether new: a society in which race was not a thing that divided, was not a thing that subsumed everything else you were, where processes of racialization were obsolete because that power that fed on it with such insatiable voracity was at long last toppled. In this light, was it not an articulation of a desire for a "postracial" future when MLK in his now iconic (albeit much-coopted) speech said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."? We hardened social justice critics, often eschew the I Have A Dream speech of MLK's for his more radical and his more incisive ones in warranted resistance to the normalization
and domestication of MLK and the 1960s civil rights struggle more generally. But that dream he spoke of remains, as ever, a passionate one, a live one, an aspirational one, a good and valid one. Of course, the getting there is what thwarts us every time. We look for the messianic leaders, or the catch-all social-political dictums and prescriptions of colorblindness or multiculturalism, or the recognition and celebration of certain bodies or identities (like the multi-babies of the world) as panacea to fix things or just erase them from memory altogether. Meanwhile, a tormented America cries out silently at every turn beneath the cracked and rotted veneer of unity and diversity for racial redemption, a deliverance from the racial sins upon which it was built. But the American power recalcitrant, refuses to do the work and to understand deeply and profoundly that that road to redemption is long, arduous, and very possibly, never-ending. And that that road cannot and will not be crossed on the already broken backs of people of color. But the desire for "deliverance" in the post- civil rights era, as was so crudely and cursorily expressed through postracial rhetoric as was colorblindness before it, is in itself something that we should continue to grapple with and continue to hold our society and ourselves accountable for.

In the often defensive and critical stance taken to make sure we STAY WOKE, perhaps, we're forgetting to give dreams a chance, and most importantly, to remain creative and imaginative. I've been starting to think that our spit-fire social media world has made our thoughts and our politics more reactive than anything else and for that reason, I retreated into my shell for well over a year to continue reflecting and thinking without necessarily feeling the need to send those half-baked strands and threads into the cyber ether. This post is more a reflection on a picture (or to follow my oyster metaphor, a pearl-- an ugly lumpy one at that) that is slowly beginning to emerge from some of my thinking on multiracial issues over the past year. Still half-baked, but ready for some preliminary putting out there.

The model upon which I developed much of the early blog content and the course I taught in Oberlin on multiracial identities relied heavily on the social justice frameworks which have been my bread and butter for over a decade now. Frameworks, which were based on the kind of powerful identity politics that shaped the social justice movements of people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community. My project, at its tender beating heart, was and continues to be a political one. Identity politics was the tool I had at hand-- one which I felt had been useful in bringing together, developing critical consciousness, and mobilizing communities. Yet, in my passion for developing a kind of radical or "critical" mixed-race understanding, I failed to ask, what for? Of course, I knew what for-- multi people needed to come together, needed to know "'bout themselves" and how we fit into the very salient racial histories and realities in America. But in declaring this, I inadvertently toed a very tenuous line that left me at risk of reducing and essentializing multi identities and experiences. My project was at once personal but also political. The personal project needed to be about fluidity and empowering self-identification, and a recognition of those third and fourth and fifth spaces we occupy as mixed folk. But the political one needed to be about critical consciousness building and understanding structures of power and oppression and inequality and how we were implicated in those systems. Reconciling those two is not an entirely easy task when multiracial people are so diverse and when the world is calling upon some yet nascent multiracial self-hood to represent itself in all its pretty glossy glory on the one hand, yet on another, being told in not so many words that it needs to take several seats 'cause folk is still out here struggling.

Which brings me to the second reason I began this blog: to address what I saw as the increasing cooptation of multiracial people and identities to usher in the aforementioned post-racial era. I wanted to figure out how to temper that proclivity to make multiracial people the poster children for some brave new world. I felt that the multiracial students I was working with were hungering for a history, a name, tools to express who they were. Similarly, I was beginning to feel that the multicultural politics that became standardized and institutionalized in schools, college campus', workplaces, and even (disturbingly) in corporate America were creating a kind of diversity complex that was wholly reductive, essentializing, and even in more radical or resistant iterations of it, still grappling with how to account for the multitudes, the axes of difference, the intersections, and asymmetrical privileges and inequalities that all make up our social realities and identities. Why were all these categories or racial and ethnic differences so monolithic when the reality has always been far from that? These concerns prompted me to imagine that perhaps alongside the conversation of multiracial identities and experiences, we also needed to complicate and disrupt all these other categories that hem us in and make us recognizable or unrecognizable to ourselves, others, and the "state" writ large (and I evoke the state here, because identity politics as mobilized by social justice movements were every much about representation and the politics of recognition vis-a-vis state power as much as they were about creating community and building consciousness). And this worked in the context of higher education I was in. The course I taught and the work that emerged from it was really amazing. But, I soon left the hallowed halls of higher learning and perhaps it was then that I began to take note, however vaguely, of the little grain inside my shell.

The third reason I began this blog and the general project of writing and thinking about multiracial issues was one that was deeply personal and perhaps, not very obvious at the start. To the extent that I can (for my "story" is also shared by others whom I can't speak for), I've written here and there about my multi identity and what that's meant for me alongside my identities as a black woman. Being the nerd I am, I felt developing some educational material and critical thought for myself and others might help me make sense of who I am and again, the political implications of multi-ness.

I travelled to India for a year upon finding out about my birth story in my early twenties. That year was a trippy one for me and really complicated my thinking on race in ways that even years later I am still working out. Passing as I did for Indian and also realizing that my birth mother had actually never grown up in India, and instead identified much more with the southern African country in which she was raised, threw open so many issues about identity and origins, heritage, race, nation, and the complexities of migration that my personal history came to embody. People with whom I share my "whole" story are often amazed and encourage me to write a book or make a movie. Which is flattering, of course, but what I'm more invested in is demonstrating how unexceptional my story is. While the small details of it may be unique, the bigger themes are no different than so many other stories. And I think there is something important at stake in making stories like mine the norm instead of the exceptional, the Other, the spectacular. If our future is poised to recognize these "new" realities, perhaps, something important will be gained. I'm married to someone who identifies as multiracial and is Japanese and white-American. So while, that "multiracial" so called "new face" of America is being called into existence, he and I may inevitably be part of literally reproducing that future (as will the thousands of "new" families that are not only multiracial, but make up queer families, multi-religious and transnational families, etc. Indeed, the normative bounds of "family" are due to be disrupted and transformed). To be sure, imma need lots of reflection on raising African-Latino-Indian-Japanese-White-American children in a world and a society that's slow to catch up on changing realities in ways that are critical, meaningful, and committed to breaking down barriers instead of building them up sky-high. So, I take up these issues for myself but also for the family I might have and the world they might inherit.

I've been studying Migration Studies at the University of Oxford since October and living in the UK has been a strange and enlivening experience. I also left the States, in the wake of the killing of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, the latter who hailed from my hometown of Staten Island, NY. It's been strange being outside of the U.S. and coming to a place like Oxford, in particular, at a time in which communities back home have been taking to the streets and we just may be witnessing one of the biggest social movements in my short life-time. During this time, I've wondered what place my previous work and thinking on multiracial identities have when people of color are being killed in cold blood? That multi stuff, I keep thinking was for those other days, not these days when the sky seems to be falling and America is waking up with a massive lurching hangover from its postracial sleep. I feel like I need to put away my multiracial hat and throw myself full on into the "struggle" lest my loyalties be questioned-- but then I realize no one is questioning those so-called loyalties but me. I realize, that while I'm good at talking that big talk, I didn't escape entirely unharmed from all the pressures of thinking of black as a monolith-- a conception that with a new generation is steadily being challenged. So on good days, I consider that it still is a really important and worthy project and not just some pet project. That my approach to multiracial issues actually has some interesting co-valences with "queer" critique, insomuch as I'm calling for a disruption of the normative and raising political concerns and questions about how power and structures are implicated.

In many ways, I've felt like those black artists and intellectuals who had come to Europe at some pivotal point in their lives-- and how that distance from the racial saga of the U.S. meant that they could for the first time think, reflect, and confront that beast in distinct ways. At Oxford I've had to rethink identity politics and multiculturalism in an academic and socio-political context that has critiqued it and declared them "failed," and "dangerous groupism." With multiculturalism, that backlash has been the particular pet project of a growing conservative and extreme right governments against the social policies which many European nations happily adopted and institutionalized in the 80s and 90s. But the backlash, warranted or not, has been picked up and academics have offered new terms like "superdiversity" (Vervotec) which aim to get at what multiculturalism seemed to have missed-- the layers, the growing number of axes of difference people occupy and identify with. It's also been used as multicultural was, to describe new spatial realities, material practices, and zones of contact in global cities and elsewhere. Of course, the term superdiversity is not without its strong critiques. Chief among them, is how new is this really and what are the political implications-- will we start speaking of a superdiversity politics and to what extent can it resist cooptation (much like the multiracial movement in the U.S. to get more Census categories)? The mostly UK-based and academic-driven conversation on superdiversity is an interesting one and one that I think could have interesting reverberations if it does not fall prey to the same malaise of multiculturalism.

Frankly, far from enlightening, my thinking during my time in the UK has been (until recently) rather

muddled. While I organized a solidarity march for Ferguson and other activities to open up dialogue on race here at Oxford, it's also been a really trying time for me to see if my tools work-- if they are at all translatable and intelligible in a context like the UK (which may have more in common with the U.S. than it'll ever own up to). I've had to bring race into the space in ways I never had to before, in ways that have angered me, opened up old wounds, and left me feeling exposed, tired, and confused. I've had to talk about race to peers who, understandably, can't quite grasp its meaning from their diverse national backgrounds. Why would black lives matter here? I struggle with not wanting to practice American "cultural imperialism" and bring in these U.S. social justice frameworks that really actually don't fit. While still grappling with my belief that racism is globalized and that is a reality we need to acknowledge from outside our national bubbles. So I've started working with others on really important, albeit exhausting, process of making connections, provoking expansive analyses about the systemic and root causes of issues that may have different area codes and time zones, but actually beneath the surface really are very similar. The black lives matter message can be imagined internationally as a powerful call for us to reflect on who "matters" in the different places we call home.

I already see how the "Black Lives Matter" movement back home is perhaps marking a new and inspiring activism and politics of identity and social justice that is responsive to a complex, diverse, and multiply-situated reality. Started by a Nigerian woman and two queer black women, the organization Black Lives Matter and the mobilization of orgs like the Dream Defenders have fostered a desperately needed expansive analysis and understanding of the structures of state- sanctioned violence and racism in the U.S. and globally. It's reviving the kind of international black politics of Angela Davis, Malcolm X and others. They've also spoken about black struggles right along with women of color, queer and trans struggles, and class struggles. In the UK there was a critical time when "Black" was an identity taken up by South Asians and other racial and ethnic groups in a kind of collective politics. Further back in the day, during the time of the Haitian revolution and its foundation as the first black republic, all of those first citizens of Haiti (including white people, for indeed there were white people who took up the cause alongside the black revolutionaries) all claimed the identity "Black." This shows us that our activism and our politics can be "hybrid" and multiracial (and in fact most of the poc movements have been) and that we must always call upon ourselves to reimagine our politics of identity in creative and transgressive ways.

I've often felt like Ralph Ellison who wrote " I was taken very early

with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond." I've struggled over the years to figure out where to hang my political hat, where to draw those lines of my being in all those different spaces when I was being called upon to be just black, or just Latina, or just multi, or... just me. For the political is not the only thing that constitutes identity and belonging and I have sometimes lost sight of that.

I titled the blog and subsequent work, including the course at Oberlin "Mixed Dreams" and I seem to be waking up from that dream committed to seeing how some of those dreams can constitute a reality. There is really amazing work that's come out over the years in the "critical mixed-race studies" world, including DePaul's conference of the same name and the site Mixed Race Studies is always updated with compelling and important material. To the extent that wider society will pick things up and stop reproducing the same tired message about our multiracial future is yet to be seen. But these are indeed difficult, but exciting times to be doing a little dreaming.

So I'll keep working on that grain in my shell to see what dreams may yet come and what brave new futures we can create.

****

To Live in the Borderlands

Gloria Anzaldua

To live in the Borderlands means you
are neither hispana india negra espanola
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from;

To live in the Borderlands means knowing
that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,
is no longer speaking to you,
that mexicanas call you rajetas,
that denying the Anglo inside you
is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black;

Cuando vives en la frontera
people walk through you, the wind steals your voice,
you're a burra, buey, scapegoat,
forerunner of a new race,
half and half - both woman and man, neither -
a new gender;

To live in the Borderlands means to
put chile in the borscht,
eat whole wheat tortillas,
speak tex-mex with a brooklyn accent;
be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints;

Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to
resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle,
the pull of the gun barrel,
the rope crushing the hollow of your throat;

In the Borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have shattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back;

To live in the Borderlands means
the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off
your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart
pound you pinch you roll you out
smelling like white bread but dead;

To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:46:00 +0000

Just as supplemental reading to go along with my previous post Who Gets to be POC?, this article entitled "Coming Out As Biracial" by Stephanie Georgopulos is pretty awesome and spot on.

"And it’s coming out. It’s coming out to strangers, and friends, and lovers on the off chance that you might convince them that race isn’t one size fits all. It’s coming out to see the look on some bigot’s face when he realizes his idea of white is wrong. It’s coming out so that interracial couples don’t have to fear the America their future children will grow up in. Looking like a white woman comes with white privilege, but it also comes with the responsibility of making myself known, of changing minds. I’m treated the way all black Americans deserve to be treated, and it’s only because my dad’s genes won a round of tug-of-war with my mom’s. My skin color is just a small joke that racists—career or casual—aren’t in on.

So I come out. Again and again and again. My appearance can’t do the talking, but I sure as hell can."

Who Gets to Be A POC?: Self-Identifying & Privilege

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:51:00 +0000

This post is in response to a great question a friend asked about how the wonderful new book

(1)ne Drop:Shifting the Lens on Race by Dr. Yaba Blay and Noelle Theard, featuring portraits of individuals who identify as "Black" speaks to an article entitled "4 Ways to Push Back on Your Privilege" by one of my favorite bloggers, Mia McKenzie (aka Black Girl Dangerous). Many portraits in (1)ne Drop may raise a few eyebrows. Take the portrait of 'Zun Lee' on the right. He says:

"When I applied to grad school or for jobs, all of a sudden the boxes come up. I had to make a choice, so for the first time, I checked 'Black.' And I didn't think long about it because for me, it was based on personal circumstance. I just chose the box that I felt most at home with because I didn't relate to any of the other options. From then on, if I were asked, I would answer, 'I'm Black.' Of course, people told me I couldn't do that — that I couldn't choose that box. But I had spent all of my life being pushed away by people. In Germany, I wasn't even given the option to check anything because I wasn't welcomed there. I had no box. For the first time, I was being given the option to identify myself. Now I had a box, and I was happy in that little box."

Is it okay for Zun Lee to identify as black? He doesn't self-identify in his quote as "Asian." Should we, the viewers and readers see him and insist that he must be "Asian" or at the very least "not black?"

The Black Girl Dangerous article says:

"4. Be careful what identities you claim
If you’re a cis dude who is only into women but you call yourself ‘queer’ because all your friends are queer and plus you kissed a guy once and also you feel more politically aligned with queer folks…rethink that. Consider how your privilege (and sense of entitlement) gives you access to claim identities even when your lived experience doesn’t support it. The same goes for white-presenting people who claim POC (Person of Color) but by their own admission don’t experience oppression based on race. Just consider what it means to claim that and to then argue about its validity with people who do experience racism in their daily lives, and who don’t have access to the kind of choices around it that you have. (I’m not saying you’re white or that you should call yourself that. I’m only questioning use of the term POC.) Think about what it means to claim a marginalized identity when you don’t have a marginalized experience. Really. Think about it. Don’t just get offended and start crying about identity-policing. Really consider what that means."

So here's my take on all this…

I agree with Black Girl Dangerous. But I also agree wholeheartedly with the project of (1)ne Drop. Both perspectives are actually in very compelling dialogue with each other. One asks, what is “black identity”? The other asks “what does it mean for you to claim a "marginalized" identity when you haven’t ‘lived it’?” I think it's critical to interrogate the boundaries and contours of identity. I think it's really important for identities that have so often been spoken for and about, to be able to take a self-reflexive moment and ask, who are we really? Is racial identity merely skin color? Is it politics? Is it a shared experience of privilege or lack there of? Is it geographic--bound by national or transnational ties? Is it about family, community, about who takes you in and makes you feel grounded and home? Is it about the way you're treated by others and viewed by the systems at large?

I would argue that it's about all of these things and that everyone should feel empowered to name themselves. At the same time, identities come from somewhere and have histories. And that is something very crucial to understand, especially when it comes to the ways in which racial identities become marginalized and oppressed. McKenzie is definitely speaking to this point. But I would like to push back a little on the Black Girl Dangerous article and how this point can be very limiting for multiracial people who may have white/light-skinned privilege and yet identify themselves as a person of color (POC).

As you all know by now, I'm often harping on this idea that identities are political. They are political

because they function in a system of power and privilege, of exclusion and inclusion yada, yada, yada... you get the point. The “Man” made the system, the system’s broken and destructive, and we’re all inextricably tied to the system no matter how white, how mixed or how black, we may be. Politicizing identities was also a very strategic posturing that many social movements like the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the LGBTQ rights movements all used to stake claim to space and recognition and advocate for rights and equality. That is not to say, however, that identities are only political.

I think that the really powerful anti-racist, social justice school of thought and action that I and others like me are steeped in can sometimes be very limited in its understanding of this. We focus a great deal on marginalization, and identities of "oppression”—of being defined by what privileges you don't have, what you weren't given, what is not recognized. It is a very powerful way to develop identity and a critical understanding of systems of oppression and how to dismantle them. But it also runs the risk of essentializing and reducing identities. So, while blackness is most definitely about the painful history of Africana people being dehumanized and enslaved, of being conquered and colonized, of being marginalized and discriminated against, it is also about the beautiful history before colonization and enslavement, and of resistance and struggle, of survival, of community, of building new homes, cultures, families--of starting new races and peoples and nations and imagining more just and vibrant futures.

Throughout U.S. history, blackness has encompassed all manner of individuals and communities that "white" society deemed “less-than,” illegitimate, pariahs, unassimilable. The one-drop rule was a construction of a white supremacist colonial system that depended on classifying race in order to protect its grip on power. Actually, the individuals photographed for the (1)ne Drop book that may look "white" or "not black" would have very likely been classified as "black" at so many points in our history. Fun fact, Irish immigrants were once considered "black", as were early East Asian immigrants. The white poor in the U.S. were often called names typically used to degrade black folk. The labels “black” and “white” were never only just about "skin color." That was the front. That was the lazy, surface qualification that propped up the whole system that was always deeply aware of its own frailty, fearful of its own demise, constantly thinking of more insidious ways to maintain its power.

Things became inextricably attached to skin color—the system gave it deeply inscribed meanings. Skin color then came to dictate whether you were someone’s property or someone’s master, if you were the conquered or the conqueror, if you were closest to evil or closest to godliness, if you were an animal or a human, if you were stricken by poverty or capable of amassing wealth, if you were illiterate and uneducated or if you were literate and educated, if you had no history worth a damn or if your history was the glory of human civilization….. and on and on and on. And so skin color came to matter. It came to mean a lot of different things. And still, the labels were shifted here and there, lines were bent or erased entirely. White people today were not necessarily considered white people a century ago. And while we allow whiteness that freedom, that strange anonymity and inconsistency, we continue to essentialize blackness. Blackness, which is so complex, and so incredibly diverse gets reduced and policed day in and day out all over the color line.

I hear what McKenzie is saying, loud and clear and 99.9% of the time I’m saying the same thing. Yea, I bristle at the idea of a blonde haired, blue-eyed "white" person coming up to me and saying they identify as "black". But I also understand that identity is so deeply experiential and subjective. I also feel like McKenzie’s article lumps together privileges a little too freely. I definitely don’t experience all my privileges in the same way and they are also in dialogue or conflict with each other and other parts of my identity at any given moment. They are all accessed, played out and read externally in very distinct ways.

I don't actually know any "white" person who goes around saying they're black. But I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that's not a conversation I necessarily think we should shut down every single time. While they may not carry a “political” experience of blackness, there may be cultural, geographic even gendered, classed or religious reasons why a white person may say “hey, I’m black”. And there may be that one white person in ten thousand billion where we can hear them out and say, “yeah, actually I get that.” I think sometimes we’re too quick to say “nuh-uh, you can’t just come over here and say that. Stay in your box. You can’t understand this pain, you can’t get this identity.” And we play misery poker and shut folks down. And yet, there are times folks accuse light/white-presenting folk who have African ancestry (ex: Mariah Carey) but who claim other parts of their identity or say they actually identify more closely with their “non-black” identities of being self-hating, or confused or “you know, you’re just a black person like the rest of us.” That reaction comes from a very protective and defensive place and it, too, has a history. And so the great complexity of it all is something we all navigate and grapple with.

Look, don't get me wrong, I'm not invested in opening up spaces for "white" people to start claiming all kinds of POC identities. But I do think that its important for us to take whiteness and POC-ness to task and push against those boundaries. The theoretical side of me wants us to burst open these labels and understand the fullness of what all these identities really are. It makes me sympathetic to the hypothetical "white/ white-presenting" person calling themselves a POC. I know several multiracial people who may "pass" as "white" to the masses, but they self-identify proudly as POC and I would be loath to question that. I know plenty of Latin@s who are definitely “white-presenting”, but who consider themselves POCs because of language, culture, national ties etc. I also know some folks from South Asia and the Middle East (ex: Persians) who are officially considered to be “white/Caucasian” but who consider themselves POCs as a result of their identities as immigrants, as post-colonial subjects or even because of the dramatic shift in how the U.S. viewed people from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa after 9/11. Marginalization and oppression don't draw neat little lines and racism is often tied up with classism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia etc. etc.

I am deeply committed to fostering dialogue that allows multiracial people to be able to name themselves. For me, part of empowering multiracial identities is allowing multi people that freedom of naming themselves and their space in various communities. I think Black Girl Dangerous' point does not really allow for that. I also don't think it's something multiracial people have historically felt "entitled" to do, nor is it a freedom we always have, to claim our identities. It's not an easy formula based simply on the way we look.

So let's go back to Zun Lee's statement. Zun Lee clearly isn't going to mistaken for a black person any time soon. But his statement speaks to a kind of experience of alienation and marginalization that is familiar to many people of color in the U.S. But what I really love about his statement was that he chose the box he felt most at "home" with. I don't know what his circumstances were. He doesn't really elaborate. But perhaps that was the community that took him in, that let him feel like he belonged. His statement really challenges us to think about what identity means to us and why we claim the identities we do. Privilege is a very important piece of the identity puzzle. And I think that allowing for more fluid, more transgressive understandings of identity will allow us to engage in deeper dialogue and work to dismantling oppression.

La Negra Tiene Tumbao: The "Afro" in "Latina"

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 07:44:00 +0000

The Dominican population "has tried to disconnect itself from its African roots to the point where they've constituted a community that's mostly mixed" but calls itself "indios," wrote historian Frank Moya Ponsin in the prologue of the book "Good Hair, Bad Hair."- Huffington Post "Artist & Educators Aim to Tranform Thinking, Laud Black Heritage in Color-Obsessed Dominican Republic"

America parade in Madrid, Spain; Dominican immigrant youth. circa 2008

I was born in beautiful Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic. And while neither of my parents were
Dominican, I still hold on to the island as a part of my identity. My first passport was a Dominican one. In it, my "raza" or "race" is described as being "trigueña." According to urban dictionary the term means:

triguena

In the Caribbean (specifically, Dominican Republic) trigueña or trigueño depending on whether the person is male or female, is someone identified of three (tri)cultures. Namely, someone of indigenous (carib, quisqueyano or taino indians) african (from the slaves brought over by ships) and Spanish (Spain)heritage. It has been used in the Latino/Caribbean culture as a term of endearment, a compliment but also at times as a descriptive word when neither 'morena' or 'blanca' seem to completely describe the subject.

I often wonder what the officials filling out my information saw when they saw 8-month old me. Did they see my brown skin and deem it not too light, not too dark? Somewhere in between, just 'right'? Did they look at the shiny black curls and deem them potentially "pelo bueño" (good hair)? The reality was that I was neither indigenous nor Spanish and my West African father arrived in the DR not on a slave ship, but on a plane to attend medical school only a few years before I was born.

Growing up in the United States, very much aware that I was always being seen as black first and foremost, it intrigues me to think that at some point in my early life, in another country, in another racial order I was seen as something else entirely. And as intrigued as I am, I am also deeply disturbed, knowing the lengths to which the DR has gone to shed its ties to blackness and the African diaspora throughout its history. Being called triguena and morena as a "compliment" basically means you're, thankfully, not a "negra (dark-skinned, black)." It's downright disturbing to me, to be praised for my "canela (cinnamon)" complexion and supposed pelo bueno. I am invariably complimented on how "nice" my hair is at Dominican salons. But as an adult I still pay an occasional visit to the Dominican hair salons. I go mostly out of nostalgia for getting my hair done with my mom growing up and because my mixed hair means neither the white salons nor the black salons really know what to do. I also feel very at home in those spaces because whether they would identify themselves as such, I see them as Afro-Latinas, like me.

What Dominican salons have perfected is the art of taking the "African" out of a curly girl's head. And the fact they are so freakin' good at it and will talk about you and how your hair is too thick, or too nappy (ie: pelo malo, said behind your back, assuming you're a black American and can't speak Spanish) means the whole establishment is steeped deeply in race and some intense colorism. One could write volumes on race and colorism in Dominican salons. So if that's so incredibly palpable in a space like a salon (and I've been to ones in Europe and on both coasts of the U.S. and it's the same story) can you imagine what it's like in the motherland?*

Both in the U.S. and in Latin America we have some serious problems with denying the "Afro" in "Latino". Haiti is a devastating example of how maligned African ancestry in the make up and formation of Latin American peoples is. People: Haiti, was the FIRST BLACK REPUBLIC. It was a symbol of freedom, struggle, revolution and triumph. Today Haiti is among the poorest countries in the world. Scores of Haitians risk their lives every year on the treacherous waters between the DR/Haiti and Florida. The DR has had a pathological anti-Haitian mentality that at it's most perverse resulted in the "Parsley Massacre" or El Corte by dictator Trujillo in 1937. More recently, the DR has passed stringent and blatantly racists anti-immigration policies against Haitians. What message is the DR sending? The outright denial and explicit self-loathing of anything to do with it's African ancestry is maddening and so inextricably linked to the colonial project in the DR and the rest of Latin America. In Costa Rica, where my mother is from, the story is a little different since the black presence in the country came in the form of Jamaican migrants (who were British subjects the time) in the late 1800s. Blacks in Costa Rica were segregated until 1948 despite there being several generations of Caribbean migrants that called the country home. If Latin American societies historically and presently, can't seem to shake their racism and colorism, then how much more complicated does that get when migrants from those countries are confronted with the U.S.'s unique brand of racialization, colorism and racism?

My mother is Afro-Costa Rican and if we want to talk about color, she's a shade or two darker than I am. Ok, so she isn't my biological mother, we know that now. But my rootedness in my Latina identity has everything to do with seeing her navigate her own identity as an Afro-Latina in the United States. Neither of us are ever read as Latina at first look and that was cause for a lot of frustration for me, and still is. I was always proud to be both Cameroonian and Costa Rican. I was proud Spanish was my first language. I was proud my favorite foods were mangu, queso frito and flan. I was proud of the black cake my mother made for Christmas every year and the jamaica/sorrel we drank. I was proud of the mixedness of the Caribbean identity of my Costa Rican family. For me being Latina inherently encompasses being of African descent. Those two were always seamless in my family. Being black to me inherently encompasses being Latina. So, I get rabid every time I see a form where I'm asked to check the "Hispanic/Latino" box if I'm Hispanic but not black, and asked to check the "Black/African-American" box if I'm black, but not Hispanic. So ummm... what exactly am I supposed to check?

The external reading of my latinidad is usually regional-- in New York, I'm sometimes asked if I'm Dominican. I've also been asked if I'm Trinidadian, Guyanese or if I have some "Indian" in me. Which now knowing that my birth mother was (East) Indian seems ironic. Living in Los Angeles, I got to be the invisible Latina. I got to give servers in taco trucks heart attacks with my perfect, rapid-fire Spanish. On the whole, though, most Americans think Latinas look like JLo not Zoe Saldana. And we can laud JLo's African ancestry insofar as it gave her a donk, and lambast Zoe Saldana for not being "black enough" to play a certain role.

Our language is also limited in how much it can capture. The terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" privilege Spanish-speaking, former colonies of Spain. Yet, Latin America includes former French, Portuguese, British, and Dutch colonies. In addition, a distinction is often made between the "Caribbean" and "Latin America," when in fact they are all part of the same continent and geographic zone. It's incredibly hard to contain all those multitudes and create an umbrella term for all of them. As with most other identities, we crave new names to better reflect our distinct histories, cultures and realities. But the U.S. racial order thrives on oversimplification and reductionism. So everyone gets lumped together despite having very different identities and subjectivities. Not only do Latinos get lumped together, but depending on your perceived "color" and socioeconomic class you are commanded to step into the black-white colorline accordingly. There's all this talk about how "mixed" Latino identities are and the Latino community is very vocal about celebrating mestizaje, but I think a huge part of the strategy of becoming a recognized political identity in the U.S. system has been to reduce the definition of Latinidad to an limited understanding of mestizo, to simply mean the mixing of indigenous and European ancestry. And while, that might be more true of some countries (like Mexico, Chile, or Argentina to name a few), African ancestry is a huge part of the racial makeup of a number of Latin American countries.

In the U.S., Afro-Latinos get subsumed into the "Black/African-American" box, which is cool and all. That box is used to making room for all kinds of folk depending on what time in history we're looking at. But in that camp, we face similar problems in encompassing the multitudes. Caribbean immigrants and African immigrants are seldom visible members of the "community". Africa is ancestral, not a modern, post-colonial continent. The Caribbean is a tourist destination-- not the historical site of black radicalism, black revolution and the first independent

black nations in the New World. Afro-Latinos are cool until they start speaking too much Spanish or blaring their salsa and merengue down the street. Immigrants are cool until they start "taking jobs". Lines are drawn, borders are demarcated between Black and Latino and to me it makes no sense.

The issue of immigration has become synonymous with Latino political identity. There are thousands of undocumented black immigrants that are working and being exploited all over the country and even if there weren't, immigration is not just a Latino issue. But according to the media, immigration is apparently ONLY a Latino issue. Few are taking a step back and smelling the rat. Smelling the fact that the arbitrary divisions are made to pit communities against each other and against themselves. How quickly we forget that in cities like New York and Los Angeles, blacks and Latinos have lived and worked side by side for decades. Back in the 60s and 70s the Young Lords modeled themselves after the Black nationalist movement and saw themselves as part of the same struggle of black resistance. Cultural productions like salsa and more recently, reggaeton are unmistakeably Afro-Latino..... look, I could go on this rant for pretty much ever.

I say all this to say, I am incredibly proud of my latinidad and my blackness. I love to think of my mixed identity as part of the complicated and rich histories of people of color in the Americas. I gain a lot being able to think about my mixededness in the context of the hybridity and creolization of Latin America. I navigate being all I am as an American because of my understanding of the cultural and political histories I am a part of. I struggle against the racial order of our country that makes multitudes invisible and reduces complex identities. I really believe talking about race within the Latino experience is a conversation we can all benefit from having. I think it also opens a lot of doors for building political coalitions and fostering solidarity. In my ideal world, this dialogue can also pick up the very crucial conversations about U.S. imperialism, neoliberal policies, exploitation and labor in Latin America and elsewhere that many African-Americans, Chicanos, Nuyoricans and others were very vocal about during the 70s and 80s. These conversations can be cultural, political, global and so incredibly relevant in their scope. Instead, we build walls, we stake claim to certain identities and struggles and not others. We don't see how the struggles and experiences of one group are a window into our own struggles and experiences. And we let a racial system built on oppression, marginalization and white supremacy dictate who we are and who we aren't, instead of standing tall and proud in our collective struggles and histories of resistance to build better, more just and democratic societies.

Note: There has been a growing movement and coalition between Dominicans and Haitians in the diaspora to confront the anti-hatianismo and racism in the DR.

What My Mother Gave Me

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:28:00 +0000

[Blogger's Note: While mixed identity is a very personal and political issue for me, I don't usually use this space to write exclusively about my own life. Though my work and writing make it clear I identify as black, African, Latina, mixed, multi etc, on both the Mixed Dreams twitter and Tumblr sites I've still been asked "what are you?" Since what really spurred me to begin this crusade was so deeply personal and so inscribed in that very question and the realities of my life, I thought we'd take a break from our "usual programming" to reflect on the evolution of my own mixed story. This post is dedicated to my parents.]

"To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past."

-Dr. Saidiya Hartman

I am the spitting image of my mother.

Three years ago I learned the 'truth' about my origin story. The 'truth', however, didn't make the myth of my early life any less real--any less a rooted marker of who I was and who I am or will become. And that, I owe to my mother.

Mom and I in 2009

You see, three years ago I was told that I was kinda, sorta adopted-- not legally with paperwork and red tape, not brought from some far off place to an entirely different family, but taken in quietly, seamlessly, secretly by the love and determination of a woman who loved my father very much. That woman became the only mother I have ever known.

My father, who I write about in "Native Speaker," has always been a very strong and visible part of my identity. The Cameroonian name I inherited from him, make my African identity proud and visible against a face that is sometimes hard to place. My Cameroonian family is large and spread all over the world and the blackness I share with them is rooted in a vibrant ancestral past and a contemporary post-colonial African present.

And yet, in key ways it was my mother who gave me kin, country and identity.

I did not have the luxury of forgetting. For in order to forget, one must first remember. Instead my early past was simply erased from my young memory by those who rewrote my history to protect, to move on, to survive. In that way my story is no different than the countless mythologies created as people leave homes and re-fashion new identities --always moving, surviving, leaving behind imprints and shadows of their private truths and hazy fictions as they go.

I am the spitting image of my mother. And yet, she was not the woman who gave birth to me.

My mother is Afro-Costa Rican. We're both "mutts", as she likes to say. Her skin looks just like mine, her first language is my first language, we were both born in Latin America. And, she too, did not grow up with her biological mother. The similarities are striking. Three years ago when I found out she wasn't my 'birth' mother, that my 'birth' mother was Indian, that after all that, I was a classic taboo--a "forbidden love child"-- it was my mother's Afro-Latina/Caribbean identity that anchored me in the face of a simple truth that threatened to uproot and displace me and all I was.

I dedicated my undergraduate life to developing my black consciousness and in particular, my Afro-Latina consciousness. I even spent a summer with my maternal grandmother in Costa Rica unearthing the lost histories of blacks in Limon, Costa Rica-- empowered by their rich transnational narratives, their liminality and their resistance as Africana people. Fluent, familiar Spanish danced effortlessly on my tongue. Rice and peas, escovitch fish and platano tasted like home. I saw my mother's face-- my face-- in everyone I saw and I felt keenly a part of a history, a people, a legacy. It was then that I realized that it was my Afro-Latina identity moreso than my Cameroonian identity that connected me to a living history of blacks in the Americas. It was my Afro-Latina identity that carved out a space for me to understand the breadth of mixedness-- of blackness, its contours, it's depth, it's beautiful distress. It rooted me to a sense of place and home that weaved me seamlessly into a diverse black Atlantic legacy charting it's way from west African shores to Jamaica to Costa Rica to my birthplace in Santo Domingo to Jamaica, Queens where I spent my early years and even Staten Island where I grew up black and middle class in an overwhelmingly white wealthy suburb-- a proud part of the multitude that contained multitudes.

Don't get me wrong, while grounding, my parent's identities did not spare me my black girl/mixed girl woes. Sure, having two black parents should have been easy enough. But from an early age I could sense that our family identity wasn't quite the 'norm.' The "mixed-up" anxiety I had and the struggles with identity I faced growing up and into my college years were a product of an alienation born from being a "hyphen"-- an "and" in a system where that hyphen is still rendered illegitimate, where multitudes are bound and limited to sound-bite definitions and caging boxes. I was a black girl in a white world. An immigrant daughter in American society. A first-generation African girl in an African-American culture. An Afro-Latina/Caribbean girl in a mestizo Latino world.

Dr. Saidiya Hartman writes "To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past." I lost my birth mother-- Not to death, but to the past, to culture, to tradition, to destiny.... who knows? I was denied entry to an identity, to kin and to a country that should have been my birth right.

Last year, I traveled to India for nine months to find out more about this identity, this country, this kin that was erased from my history. And as I wrote in my post "And I'm Either No One, Or I'm A Nation" India, too, felt vaguely familiar. For the first time in my life I was not automatically read as "black" and to my incredible surprise I found myself passing. That "passage" felt like an act of trespass and yet it was deeply validating. But as in most spaces, that validation gave way to the more familiar sensation that I am perpetually a stranger in a strange land. And well, that's okay. It's who I am.

Since my time in India and over the last three years I've reflected a great deal on how transgressive my racial history has been-- how constructed and (re)constructed. My experiences have shaken my previous conceptions of what race is, what family is and what identity is. They have profoundly underscored cultural critic Stuart Hall's mantra that "Identity is always in the process of being and becoming." That goes for someone with as complex a history as mine as for a whitebread kid in Ohio. The paradox of identity is that it is meant to ground and define and yet by its very nature it is always in flux. So, what do we hold on to?

For now, I hold on to my mother. The woman who gave me everything. I hold on with the understanding that this is not who I will always be, but that at the core of my mixed journey is knowing that while we may not always be writers of our past, we are creators of our future. That identities come from somewhere and have histories, but they also have transgressive and yet unwritten futures. I stand proudly in all my truths and contradictions.

Shades of Black (The Flip Side of the 'Zoe-Nina' Debate)

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 05:46:00 +0000

In 1966, the woman born Eunice Kathleen Waymon penned 'The Four Women', which begins, "My skin is Black/ My arms are long/ My hair is wooly/ My back is strong/ Strong enough to take the pain/ Inflicted again and again." Nina had the posture, past and physicality to make this song not only brazen, but also believable and therefore revolutionary in it's telling. How can Saldana possibly bring the pain in an afro-wig and, God-forbid, dark makeup? - Nicole Moore "Disappearing Acts: Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone & The Erasure of Black Women in Film"

Zoe Saldana Nina Simone

The blogosphere floodgates flew open two weeks ago as news broke that actress Zoe Saldana would be playing the role of the iconic Nina Simone in an (allegedly "unauthorized") indie biopic of the late singer and civil rights activist. The film is said to be less of a portrait of the legend and will focus on a speculative love affair between Simone and her assistant/manager Clifton Henderson (to be played by British actor David Oyelowo)

News of Saldana's role unearthed difficult questions about blackness, race and issues of authenticity. While critiques ranged from the legitimacy of the story itself to the need for more black directors, screenwriters and producers to tell our stories in a more sensitive and critical way than the usual Hollywood "whitewashed" versions, the overwhelming number of critiques focused on the casting of Zoe Saldana in the title role (as an undeniable product of Hollywood "whitewashing".)

And, don't get it twisted, I'm right there questioning whether a story not even authorized by Nina Simone's daughter or her estate should really be going around masquerading as a 'biopic' and helllllll yes we need to take control of our own narratives and representations in the media. But reading the following statements and countless statements like these that made up the hailstorm as the public sounded off on Zoe's casting was troubling to say the least:

"She's (Saldana) too light-skinned to be taken seriously as Nina Simone."

"And besides--she's a Latina. She's stealing jobs from real black actresses."

Whether you're a Saldana fan or think she has the acting skills of a pineapple is one thing. But a disturbingly large number of responses to the news said things like "Saldana is too pretty to play Nina Simone" (ummm, and by "prettier" you mean what exactly?? confront your own skewed colorism and then maybe we can have an intelligent conversation.) "Zoe Saldana isn't even black, she's Dominican (responding to that would take a separate post entirely--but let's just say we all came on the same ships, they just stopped in different area codes.)

I was torn. On one hand, I believe Nina Simone is an iconic figure whose story in film should match her revolutionary spirit which was a profound reflection of her experiences as a black woman. And yet, the discussions surrounding the issue were making me uncomfortable. Was it merely just my light-skinned guilt smarting-- a little light-skinned privilege with no place to go?

I felt like I wanted to come to Saldana's defense, a fellow Afro-Latina who has invariably been cast in roles that don't recognize her latinidad and yet have established her as a black actress from playing Judith Scott and Bernie Mac's daughter in Guess Who and Nick Cannon's love interest in Drumline (you all know that was a black movie) to the barrier-breaking Uhura in the J.J. Abrams film remake of Star Trek. Then all of a sudden, Saldana is being accused of capitalizing on blackness for "monetary value" or "taking jobs from "REAL BLACK actresses" when she's only ever been seen or identified herself as black (the operative word in AFRO-Latina; and, since when has being black ever added any 'monetary value?' People, pleeassee.)

Many comments have also failed to recognize the fact that Saldana has been just as much a product of racialization and an industry that has made it a habit of rendering black bodies (and other bodies of color) invisible. Is Saldana's own racial and ethnic erasure in film illegitimate? Why is her body seen as the vehicle of black erasure? Does her skin color or her Latina heritage make her own struggle as an actress of color navigating one of the most racist industries any less difficult-- any less real? Are we just talking about skin color or something else altogether?

How would we have felt if actress Kerry Washington had been cast as Nina Simone? Or if Saldana was cast to play black (and since all we can seem to talk about is skin tone--very light-skinned) revolutionary Angela Davis? Is REAL BLACKNESS less about which side of the paper-bag test you fall on and more about an assumed identity politics that go along with it?

Nicole Moore's article "Disappearing Acts: Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone and the Erasure of Black Women in Film" states: "Because Simone's blackness extended as much to her musical prowess as to her physicality and image, it's perplexing that the film's production team, led by Jimmy Iovine, expects anyone, particularly in the black community, to (re)imagine Nina Simone as fair-skinned, thin-lipped and narrow-nosed?"

This statement makes me wonder what we're really seeing when we look at Zoe Saldana. Are we measuring her nose and lips (which are really not that much thinner/ "finer" than Nina Simone's)? Or are we looking at her skin tone, her straightened hair, her thin frame, her mainstream fame and summing up the extent of her "pain" and "struggle" accordingly? Additionally Moore's article likened Saldana's performance to a type of racial "drag" comparing Tyler Perry as Madea to Saldana as Simone even going as far as to suggest Saldana in "black face" asking How can Saldana possibly bring the pain in an afro-wig and, God-forbid, dark makeup? What makes this actress' racial identity so illegitimate, so inauthentic and so far from blackness that she would need to don an 'afro-wig' and 'dark makeup'? Why can't a 'cafe au lait' complected, 'Afro-Latina' Zoe 'bring the pain'??

So, as you can see, I've been all kinds of mixed up. And it's taken me a few weeks to write this.

I've poured over countless drafts and have had one too many late night conversations with any dear friend that will listen about why the "Zoe-Nina" debate has got me sick and damn tired. I've read countless articles and opinion posts (the most critical and well-executed being Nicole Moore's article quote above and this article by Emmanual Akitobi.) And while I agreed with much of what was being said, I felt like not enough was being said about some of the vitriol being spewed in the other direction against a largely anonymous, generalized mass of "light-skinned women" and "multiracial women" that were being accused of erasing blackness. I also felt that while the blogosphere lent itself to making sure many voices were heard and people could address the controversy head-on, it was also creating a space where no further meaningful discussion could be had because the reaction especially from black women was, understandably, visceral and swift.

I've swung back and forth between saying what's on my mind or holding (read: policing) my tongue because I understand profoundly that colorism is real-- that light-skinned privilege is real--that talking about colorism as a black woman hurts and that talking about light-skinned privilege as a mixed woman is treading dangerously through a painful minefield.

While I love me some Zoe Saldana, I'd be the first to say I'm very doubtful she would live up to the role. I do believe that Hollywood has a serious and disturbing color problem. And I do believe that lighter black actresses, are more palatable to a gaze that has yet to confront its own oppressive and marginalizing tendencies (read: its white supremacist nature)-- and no where is that more keenly felt than on the body of dark-skinned black women.

Adepero Oduye

Paula Patton

Viola Davis

But let's not bash the actresses. In discussions about the debate, along with Saldana, actresses Jacqueline Flemming, Paula Patton, Thandie Newton and Halle Berry have been grouped as the ostensive "Wannabes" against actresses like Adepero Oduye, Viola Davis, Anika Noni Rose, and singers India Arie and Lauryn Hill who have all been suggested as recasting alternatives for the Simone film.

What I find interesting is that all of the actresses in the first group would have been called black just a a few short years ago and now they are being called "bi-racial" and "light-skinned" to differentiate them for "real black" women. All of these women at one point or another have identified themselves as black, some even clearly stating they are NOT MULTIRACIAL.

Ultimately, no matter what shade we are, we're still pawns in a system that doesn't value or respect blackness-- its beauty, its history or its incredible diversity. And, the very fact we're having this conversation is because black women (whether we're dark or we're fair) are still scrambling for scraps and an equal place at the table.

And light skin does not have to be inherently anti-black. In the United States, it is a reality and a reminder that white blood and mixed blood have been an inextricable part of black history. Let's not forget that the one-drop rule was made to confront multiraciality and to police light skin. And today the value on lighter and bright is no less an instrument of the same system-- just a different manifestation. It has been used as a tool to divide and marginalize black folk. And that's where my heart kinda breaks a little. Let's dismantle the system, not each other.**

** There is a strong petition in Change.org calling on Jimmy Iovine and Cynthia Mort to recast Saldana and what I really appreciate is that it explicitly makes it about the system and not Saldana.

In 1966, the woman born Eunice Kathleen Waymon did indeed write 'The Four Women'. It was a song about the realities and pain of black womanhood. Each of the four women was a different shade-- black, yellow, tan and brown. Their collective and individual pain was just as real... And each was just as black as the next.

My skin is black My arms are longMy hair is woolly My back is strong Strong enough to take the pain Inflicted again and again What do they call me My name is Aunt Sarah My name is Aunt Sarah Aunt Sarah

My skin is yellow My hair is long Between two worlds I do belong My father was rich and white He forced my mother late one night What do they call me My name is Saffronia My name is Saffronia

My skin is tan My hair is fine My hips invite you My mouth like wine Whose little girl am I? Anyone who has money to buy What do they call me My name is Sweet Thing My name is Sweet Thing

My skin is brown And my manner is tough I'll kill the first mother I see My life has to been rough I'm awfully bitter these days Because my parents were slaves What do they call me My name is PEACHES

The Hypervisible Man: Obama as the First Black, Mixed-Race, Asian American and now Gay President

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:42:00 +0000

“I have always sensed that he [Obama] intuitively understands gays and our predicament—because it so mirrors his own. And he knows how the love and sacrifice of marriage can heal, integrate, and rebuild a soul. The point of the gay-rights movement, after all, is not about helping people be gay. It is about creating the space for people to be themselves. This has been Obama’s life’s work. And he just enlarged the space in this world for so many others, trapped in different cages of identity, yearning to be released and returned to the families they love and the dignity they deserve.” -Andrew Sullivan, "The First Gay President" Newsweek

I admit, I've missed quite a bit being oceans and continents away from the US of A. But one watershed moment managed to reach my little apartment in Udaipur last week as I was sipping my morning chai. Front page of the Times of India was Obama's declaration of support for marriage equality. Between you and I, I was always of the camp that believed Obama's previous stance was no more than a mere (albeit calculated and predictable) front to protect his political hide as the over-hyped newbie presidential candidate. Seems my sentiments were shared by Andrew Sullivan in his cover article in this week's edition of Newsweek, which featured the above image and the headline "The First Gay President."

Reading Sullivan's article, I remembered a talk I attended at Oberlin College for Asian Pacific American Month in 2010 where the speaker's last slide was entitled "The First Asian-American President" beneath two photographs of Obama, one as a child in Indonesia and one hugging his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng at his high school graduation in Hawaii. The speaker insisted that Obama's early childhood spent in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, his youth spent in Hawaii, his identity as a hyphen American, and immigrant son made his experience akin to that of many Asian-Americans and thus earned him the title "First Asian-American President." And in those terms it totally made sense. Obama could be Asian-American. Obama's identity lends itself quite easily to repeated acts of reading and (re)interpretation. Though he's self-identified as African-American, many still call him "The First Multiracial President." Because it matters much less what Obama thinks of himself than what we the people think of him--what images we project onto his being.

In my course, I used Obama's story, his identity as a tool to understand how multiraciality contains multitudes and how a multiracial critique could be instrumental in breaking down monolithic notions of identity. So I encouraged students to talk about multiraciality as part of black identities, as part of Asian-American identities, Latin@, Native, White, adoptee and queer identities. If anything multiraciality benefits a great deal from a queer critique-- queering race. And there's increasingly more out there in Academe that works at the rich intersection. That being said, I still found myself a bit surprised to see such a bold act of race queering on the cover of a mainstream American publication such as Newsweek.

I don't know if Sullivan was quite sure that he was actively queering race as he compared Obama's racial exodus to the experiences of queer folk. And while I think using a queer critique as a tool is vital to destabilizing notions of identity, it's also crucial to understand that "gay" and "queer" are highly political and politicized words and not colorful labels you tag willy-nilly. So just as it was kinda cute to say Clinton was the "First Black President," (no one, least of all black folk, really believed that), so to, does Obama's new title only serve its true function as symbolism if not just mere sentiment.

The article linking Obama's racial identity to queer experiences does give me hope for a shift in the conversation not just regarding marriage equality but to that notion I'm often going on about: our identities are fluid, y'all. Full stop.

Whether Obama is reelected for a second term, whether he goes down in history as a saint or a villain, a triumph or a failure, one thing is for certain: Obama's legacy will be marked by his symbolic currency. It is a Obama's ability to quite literally absorb our nation's imaginings, our own distinct senses of belonging/and yet not belonging, into his words and onto his "mixed/queer" body and weave it back into his life story and identity that makes him most powerful. I'd like to see you try to do that, Mitt Romney.

The Newsweek cover image itself warrants a little playful analysis: our still disarmingly debonair, now-seasoned President, appearing a little grayer, brow now gently (though, I fear permanently) furrowed, gazing stoically off into some unknown distance. What I find most intriguing is that rainbow halo floating proudly in a glow above his head. Obama as saint, Obama as martyr-icon, potentially committing a yet to be determined act of political suicide/sacrifice? The halo- perhaps a crown marking his coronation by the queer community?....

Frankly, I think Obama's not in any real danger at this point. A little recklessness would do him a world of good. If anything, that glowing halo will serve the newly sainted/crowned Obama well in the upcoming election, helping him cement the support of the increasingly apathetic millenials who are credited for his sweeping 2008 win, and of course the mainstream gay community whose monetary backing is crucial. But let's not talk politics. For perhaps most significantly, once again, his words, his actions, his body, have changed the national conversation. Obama as symbol, Obama as icon, Obama as chameleon, Obama as both perpetual canvas and national mirror will long outlive Obama as politician...Obama as mere president.

From Newsweek, "The First Gay President" May 21, 2012

"[T]here is something on this subject [marriage equality] with Obama that goes deeper in my view than cold, calculating politics and a commitment to civil rights. The core gay experience throughout history has been displacement, a sense of belonging and yet not belonging. Gays are born mostly into heterosexual families and discover as they grow up that, for some reason, they will never be able to have a marriage like their parents’ or their siblings’. They know this before they can tell anyone else, even their parents. This sense of subtle alienation—of loving your own family while feeling excluded from it—is something all gay children learn. They sense something inchoate, a separateness from their peers, a subtle estrangement from their families, the first sharp pangs of shame. And then, at some point, they find out what it all means. In the past, they often would retreat and withdraw, holding a secret they couldn’t even share with their parents—living as an insider outsider.

“And this, in a different way, is Obama’s life story as well. He was a black kid brought up by white grandparents and a white single mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, where his color really made no difference. He discovered his otherness when reading an old issue of Life magazine, which had a feature on African-Americans who had undergone an irreversible bleaching treatment to make them look white—because they believed being white was the only way to be happy. . . .

“Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. . . .

“This is the gay experience: the discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation. It is easier today than ever. But it is never truly without emotional scar tissue. Obama learned to be black the way gays learn to be gay. . . ."

And Either I’m Nobody, Or I’m A Nation

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Climbing into a rickshaw or walking through the busy streets of Udaipur, Rajasthan, I see an expression I never knew I longed for.

My poor Hindi, my all too eager smile, and my unsure footsteps in this unknown city belie my foreignness. But, perhaps, in all other ways my face, my color can easily be lost in the interminable swirl of browns and thick blur of vivid all around me.

I arrived in India two weeks ago, the end (or perhaps just the beginning) of a deeply personal journey I began over three years ago to figure out what it meant (if anything) for me to be Indian. What does it mean, when I had been raised African and Afro-Costa Rican; when my memories are wrapped up in the black and brown faces of my family and their stories of “back home”; when even my very politics are steeped in blackness and latindad and when language and culture anchor and bind me to proud histories that trace the routes of slavery and migration from Africa, to the Caribbean, Central and North America?

It seems fitting then, that the Universe took her poetic license and fashioned the Dominican Republic--really the Caribbean--as the cuna, the cradle of my multitudes. My creation story, my own brief and wondrous life began in the “Ground Zero of the New World.” There begins my myth threaded into the countless other magic fictions born there everyday.

India too, like Africa, feels like an ancestral place to my very being. Something about its haze, its smell, its taste, its movement is reminiscent of the other "back homes" etched in my rememory. In Hindi, 'to remember' and 'to miss' (as in I miss you), are the same word... And I miss what I cannot remember.

Some days India feels like a coming home, a place of rest. Maybe it’s all the Octavia Butler sci-fi I’ve been reading, but thousands of feet in the air, tossing in my seat on my Air India flight, listening to "Shiva Mantra" and "Aisa Des Hai Mera" on repeat, I had a fever dream, a dozy hallucination that had me wondering if land, earth, tierra... had flesh memories. If the minute I stepped on Indian soil, she would know me. Understand me, if only in theory, as one of her own. Perhaps it's the same way we Africans in the diaspora long for the continent, long for recognition, familiarity. I wanted it to be a fiercely intimate pact between us that, “You are a part of me, and yes, I am a part of you.”-- A mutual agreement, a validation. Something I have no need to defend to anyone, Indian, African, Latin@ or otherwise.

Home and nation, culture and race, history and destiny, truth and myth.... questions yet unformed, answers still hidden and scattered across the world.

My story Osiris. And I, I could be Isis.

* Inspired by Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Derek Walcott's poem at the beginning of the novel

Oberlin College's Multiracial Student Resource Pamphlet

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 06:22:00 +0000

Here's the Oberlin Multiracial Student Resources pamphlet I put together this past summer.

A few things didn't make it into the final version. This section came out of a discussion with the students from the ExCo. I've included them below:

A Mixed Toolbox

 MIXED ME: Empowering Multiracial Identities 

“To thine own self...”: Self-identifying: Develop confidence in identifying yourself and demand that others respect your identity.

“The more you knowwww”- Education: Explore your own background as well as resources, writing, scholarship dealing with multiracial experiences, histories of people of color and issues of social, economic and racial justice.

Power To the People: Developing Critical Consciousness: Understand the role of power & privilege and systemic structures on your identity and how it relates to that of other historically marginalized or underrepresented groups.

In Solidarity: Be An Ally: Support other multiracial people, but also other historically underrepresented and marginalized groups.

BEING A MIXED ALLY 

Understand that the question “What are you?” can be a very sensitive one for multiracial people.

Be conscious of how simple remarks or even compliments can “other” or “exotify” multiracial people.

Be mindful not to homogenize mixed experiences and identities. Multiracial identities are diverse and complex. They may be distinct from other identities and experiences, but there are also many commonalities and shared histories.

Recognize that multiracial people indeed exist and include multiraciality in discussions on race and multicultural activities and events.

Respect everyone’s process. Respect that individuals have the right to self-identify and that policing mixed identities or ignoring them altogether can be alienating to multiracial people.

Take time to explore and read up on multiracial issues. Yet perhaps most importantly, take time to explore your own identities and the spaces you occupy in the social system as it relates to power and privilege.

* Please see the MRC’s Privilege, Allyship & Safe Space Resource pamphlet for more information and definitions.

Mixed Dreams Guest: Rita Kamani-Renedo

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:41:00 +0000

On a New York-based, historically situated Multi Narrative

by Rita Kamani-Renedo

On Monday, September 26th, I traveled to Brooklyn after work to attend an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society called “Who Are You? A discussion about mixed heritage.” I didn’t know what to expect but I was ecstatic (well, as ecstatic as one can be on a Monday after a full day of work). My “multi” friends and I had long contemplated the need for a conversation about multiraciality and mixed-heritage that is situated within New York’s unique historical context—a fabric that is woven from narratives of immigration, urban decay and plight, gentrification, racial altercations, ethnic enclaves, and post-9/11 politics. Many conversations that I have been a part of have assumed that multiracial means “White and something else.” Those of us who are the products of two people of color or two (or more) distinct immigrant identities have sometimes felt that conversations around racial mixing have excluded our experiences, and there was always something about a New York-focused discourse that seemed would embrace our experiences much more. We “East Coasters” have often lamented the lack of public dialogues, artistic projects or action campaigns around mixed issues in places like New York or Washington when we look west towards California and the Pacific Northwest, where organizations like the Mavin Foundation, the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival and the Association of MultiEthnic Americans seem be constantly reshaping public dialogue on issues of multiraciality. But the West Coast’s history of racial mixing is uniquely shaped by its histories of expansionist policies, the encounters/destruction of the region’s Native American, Spanish, French and Anglo inhabitants, immigration through Angel Island, the Gold Rush and the construction of railroads that brought thousands of Chinese workers to the region, and of course, the region’s geographic proximity to Asia, Mexico and Central America. The demographic, racial, and cultural landscapes of the region’s urban centers have also transformed racial and ethnic identities in ways that are vastly different from the ways that identities and histories have crossed borders in New York. Thus, a conversation that considers New York’s distinct historical, economic, ethnic, racial and cultural terrain is necessary, now more than ever.

This is precisely the vision of the folks at the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) who have initiated the Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) public programming and oral history project. This initiative seeks to provide a forum for dialogue around “mixed-heritage families, race, ethnicity, cultural and identity, infused with historical perspective.” Such an historical perspective will allow the project’s participants to explore the stories of mixed-heritage individuals and communities who have been shaped and who have shaped Brooklyn’s own racial history. Upcoming events will examine the 1991 Crown Heights Riots, Spike Lee’s iconic Jungle Fever, and Kip Fulbeck’s The Hapa Project. This conversation is bound to draw upon Brooklyn’s rich cultural mélange—Jews, Poles, Haitians, Russians, Dominicans, Italians, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, West Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, not to mention the hipsters, the hip-hop-ers, the musicians, writers, artists and activists who call Brooklyn home. I am gradually learning more about the CBBG, and last night’s event helped me to understand more about the vision and scope of this exciting project.

The evening began with an introduction by Jen Chau, the Founder and Executive Director of Swirl. Jen’s comments (which started with a personal anecdote about the time a 2000 Census workers curiously asked Jen what country “Biracial” is) were followed by brief presentations by Judith Sloan, co-author and co-creator of Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification, Race and the Search for Authenticity in Post-War New York, and Katrina Grigg-Saito, creator of the documentary and installation, FishBird. All three of the panelists focused on the historical context and the geographic complexities of multiraciality. Katrina Grigg-Saito’s project actually emerged when she heard a woman in the UK say, in reference to mixed-race people, “a fish can love a bird but where would they live?” This question really touches upon one of the central questions explored at Monday’s event and one that I have long pondered – what does location have to do with one’s experience as a person of mixed-heritage? This really begs two more sub questions that I am exploring in this post and will continue to throughout this project. First, if there is a need for conversation around mixed-heritage that is situated within a particular geographic and historical context—Brooklyn, to be exact—what will that conversation look like? Second, for those of us who identify as mixed-heritage, how does our geographic location—and all the cultural, racial, economic, political and social implications it bears—impact or shape our experiences? Are there certain places—cities or countries, perhaps—that can feel more like “home” to mixed-heritage folks?

This last question takes me back to one mixed dreamer’s recent post about the concrete jungle itself. As Nicole so eloquently said, “In New York, my identity and all that I am seems to make sense. The ‘uniqueness’ of my own life is but a thread in the fabric, part of the millions of interwoven identities and narratives of migration, change, process and formation that make the city a home for the transient, a place for the liminal, those existing here and there and yet all the while staking claim and setting roots deep in the here.” If you haven’t yet, check out Nicole’s reflections on space, place, race and how “region and geography play such a critical role in identity formation”. She refers to how the city’s histories of migration, movement, and conflict have brought together Blackness and Latinidad in ways that have not been possible in other parts of the United States. The city’s Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Guyanese, Haitians, and so many more embody Afro-latinidad and reaffirm the multi identities that emerged from the mixing of people across continents, cultures, and colors.

This makes me think about my own unique history. When I tell people I was born in Queens, we often make jokes – “Where else would an Indian man from Ethiopia and a Chilean woman meet and make a baby?” Queens—the most diverse county in the United States of America. Ride the 7 train and in addition to passing the historic and extraordinary tattooed walls of 5Pointz, you’ll pass through Pakistan, Ecuador, Colombia, Russia, China, India, Turkey, Bangladesh…all without a passport! Now, I’m the last person to feed you the “melting pot” story that so many New York-lovers sing and dance. There are lines, borders, walls, boundaries, all throughout New York. I live on a block that is primarily Dominican. You cross the street and move away from Broadway towards Amsterdam, and you’re on a block that is almost exclusively African American or African. One block in Jackson Heights will have you speaking Spanish and eating arepas, while on the next one smells of curry and sounds of Amitabh Bachchan overwhelm your senses. And while gentrification might be pushing these lines in one direction or another, the stark differences and inequalities can still be found. My love of Queens does not equate to any kind of claim that all the Colombians and Russians and Chinese and Pakistanis are getting together and making Col-Rus-Chin-stanis (I tried). It’s not that simple, and that’s not what “multi” is about. But, there’s GOTTA be something about the geographic intimacy of so many different nationalities that allows for the unique coming together of histories and identities that otherwise may never interact.

Perhaps this hunch is what always drew me to New York growing up. I was born here but sadly, not raised. It wasn’t until my late teens and early twenties that I started spending time here and eventually moved back to the city of my birth. It was then that I realized there was something that felt like home about this fast-paced, walk-fast, look-straight-ahead, hustle-and-bustle, belly-of-the-beast world. Despite the city’s vastness and the fact that to visit a friend I sometimes have to travel 1.5 hours on a train, I have gained a sense of community here that I could never create in any other cosmopolitan center. Perhaps it’s because, as Staceyann Chin so beautifully explains, “I fit in because there was no criterion for belonging.” I believe that in New York City, you can be many things at once. Perhaps the boxes are not as rigid or people don’t expect you to fit into them so much. Or maybe, you just get to pick many and move throughout them as you please. As Staceyann Chin, a Black, Chinese, queer feminist from Jamaica, said about her beloved Brooklyn, “These noisy streets offer ample room, and by extension time, to hate Jamaica, to fall in love with Jamaica, and finally, to find the medium through which I can separate the impossible from the possible and become my most comfortable self.” I believe that in being in New York, you can still continue to be in other places, other countries, other worlds. Perhaps I am my most comfortable self when I can carry my histories within me and know that around me, identities that are as disparate as my own are colliding and changing every day around me.

Notes on A Work in Progress

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:09:00 +0000

This past summer I've been in hibernation--hard at work on what I've dubbed a "multifesto." My hope is to finish it up by October and publish the full text electronically on issuu.com for your downloading pleasure. The "multifesto" is constructed as my blog meets topics from the Oberlin ExCo course meets my inner thoughts on multiraciality in the U.S. Since I'll be on hiatus for a number of months working in India beginning this fall, I wanted to leave something substantial behind while I'm gone.

Below is a sneak peek of the work in progress with just a few of of the more or less finished pages. The multifesto is a combination of short essays and resources. So far, the publication is over sixty pages of what I'm hoping is some pretty good stuff. So feel free to take a look!

Made in New York

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 18:48:00 +0000

It's been stick to the pavement, fry an egg on your dashboard, Afreeecahh hot in New York City for the past week. Last night I ventured out of my self-imposed hibernation in the air conditioned indoors to visit a close friend and fellow mixed dreamer, educator and activist, Rita. Walking down Amsterdam Ave toward Broadway last night, merengue blasting from open parked cars, folks perched on their respective stoops and street corners, humid air smelling vaguely of something rank, fried and sweet all at the same time, fire hydrants raining down the streets and kids, men, women--young and old jumping into the spray, I got that feeling I always get when I'm back home, feet slapping quickly against the pavement, moving, always moving... That feeling that I am part of the mass of bodies in movement, the steaming concrete (which itself seems to breathe), the hard lines and rough edges above and below me, the gritty air and the unrelenting syncopated rhythm of the city. Among the many things Rita and I talked about during my visit was exactly why New York made us feel this way. Why NY feels more like "home" than any other place?

If there were a map of NYC and we were all dots on it, all the dots would be moving and buzzing around. We're a city of transience. I just don't think that happens everywhere else. -Rita Kaman

For the mixed and multicultural, finding place and belonging can be a struggle- no big there. Though I mostly grew up in the suburbs of Staten Island (the forgotten borough of NYC), I remember being surrounded by Latino, African, South Asian and Caribbean folk in Jamaica, Queens and even later in Staten Island growing up in predominantly white spaces, but where white identity was tied to great pride in being Italian, Irish, Russian, Armenian etc. I went away to college, have traveled extensively both at home and abroad and it's more than just the fact that I grew up here. In New York, my identity and all that I am seems to make sense. The "uniqueness" of my own life but a thread in the fabric, part of the millions of interwoven identities and narratives of migration, change, process and formation that make the city a home for the transient, a place for the liminal, those existing here and there and yet all the while staking claim and setting roots deep in the here.

In diverse places like SoCal, I often feel uneasy with just how vast and yet disconnected all the parts of the city are (I call the NYC subway the Great Equalizer). I guess on a more personal note I'm uneasy with how Caribbean identities, black identities don't often fit into conceptions of latinidad, or how latinidad doesn't quite fit into understandings of blackness out west. And it makes sense Cali, has had a different history. That simple understanding of the mixed nature of latinidad and blackness is something that I see reflected in my own family, but also all around me in NY with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Bajans, Guyanese etc. Even within the African American history of New York you see that intersection in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem and Washington Heights, decades of living, loving, struggling and yes even conflict between African American, Caribbean and Latino folk have left a distinct mark on race relations in the city. The city is segregated and divided along racial and class lines like all cities and the gentrification of historically black neighborhoods has already changed the face of communities across the city.
So let's not get it twisted. This is not just an I Love NY and there's no place on earth like it ramble. The specters of violence, racism, post 9-11 trauma, Islamophobia, xenophobia, police brutality, racialized and sexualized violence, gentrification, poverty, hunger, homelessness and straight-up down and dirty NY crime as old as the city itself continue to loom large. And no, this is no multicultural utopia or mixed-race mecca. But it is my home.

My love of NY and reflecting on how my life here has provided challenges but also valuable opportunities to navigate and understand my own identity and that of those around me, I got to thinking about how region and geography play such a critical role in identity formation. A great deal of scholarship and discussions around mixed issues has historically had a West Coast leaning. And indeed, the multiracial movement and much of the major organizations, events, scholars and activists are based in California. This leaning can tend to privilege a specific set of experiences, identities and even socioeconomic issues. But my time working at Oberlin-- OHIO, of all places, where I saw more mixed people, couples and families in two years than I had in 22 years of living in New York or living in Europe (a veritable Petri dish of multiculturalism and immigration in the 21st century) challenged me to think about the different forms mixed identity and multiculturalism writ large take on nationally and transnationally. In addition, being a part of the Other Tongues Anthology and reading the experiences of women from both Canada and the U.S. also prompted me to ask how does the conversation around these issues change? What do things look like from the distinct places in which we stand? What makes home? What creates a sense of place and belonging?

It still amazes me that when I am away from New York, the angles of me cry out for the subways, the impolite service industry and the streets teeming with cultural insanities.-Staceyann Chin from "No One Cared If I Kissed Girls" in Other Side of Paradise

Generation Mix? A Statement of Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:52:00 +0000

Call it a quarter-life crisis. A change in the winds, perhaps. Maybe it's my sad stack of rejection letters from graduate schools. Whatever the case may be, of late, I've been having a bit of an intellectual, (even vaguely political) existential crisis when it comes to "mixed-race" issues. So, almost two years since I embarked on my self-proclaimed crusade toward a radical engagement with mixed issues, it's about that time to remind myself of the basics that started it all.

First off let me state: I'm a product of my times. I'm a millenial. We try hard to hang on to those foggy late 80s early 90s memories, pretending we weren't drooling Gerber mush over our bibs the night the Berlin Wall came down-- all in vain attempts to separate ourselves from our younger text-happy, equally tech-junky, mass media dependent, Disney Channel-fed, over-stimulated siblings born after 1990. We're all the same. Part of the newly christened "Boomerang Generation" of wandering twentysomethings who were raised partly, in the boomtown years of Clinton, but who really came of age under the dumbing apathy and silencing control of Bush Jr. We've gotten a pretty bad rep for being coddled, apolitical, just a touch nihilistic and downright lazy (Look! in our defense, try graduating from college right at the start of one of the greatest recessions in our country's history!)

And yet, we were the generation credited as most responsible for getting the first black president in the White House. We're the generation with the largest number of college graduates in the nation's history-- though we're now making history as much for being degreed as we are for being indebted and jobless. We're among the first children of the Internet age, though we vaguely remember early life without it. We're the "Ism" kids-- growing up amidst more (inter)national and societal ideological shifts and trends than we could imagine.

I myself was spoon-fed a good amount of liberalism... I blame that mostly on my New York roots and liberal arts education. The most activist and progressive among us have a nostalgic leaning towards revolutionary iconography of the 60s and 70s-- because if truth be told, we have few contemporary heroes... We were born at the height of multicultural politics only to currently find ourselves right on the cusp of colorblindness and post-raciality. We've been called Generation Mix- with a growing number of us choosing to claim multiple racial and ethnic identities. All of these things among many others have informed the type of young adult I've become and (most relevant to this conversation) how I see myself as a woman of color, as a mixed person in the U.S.....It's to my generation and those that follow that I often find myself speaking.

Mixed-Consciouness: In Search of a Political Education

Political education is crucial and yet, many of us are painfully deficient. For me political education is about developing a critical consciousness- a fancy word for a way of thinking and being and perhaps, most importantly understanding who we are and how we fit (and don't fit) into wider systems and structures of power, privelege and opression we are all a part of. Since mixed folk have historically never been recognized as legitimate social or political subjects in this country, figuring out who we are let alone how we fit into these systems can be a struggle to say the least.

So how do we politically educate and raise consciousness-- individually and collectively? Well, for me it starts with taking a look back into our pasts. Now, the type of reading and understanding of history I'm taking about it not this often random, ahistorical revisionist type that attempts to reclaim "mixed-race" people of the past and present: DuBois was mixed and so is Slash!!!Wooot!!!(though very cool, nonetheless). Our history is there, between the lines of Indigenous histories, Black histories, colonial history,U.S. expansion, immigration, Asian-American history, Latina/o & Chicana/o histories, U.S. military imperialism etc etc.-- we’re all there, we are and our ancestors are all part of these histories. Even me, with parents who didn’t come to this country until the early 70s. My history is nevertheless tied to immigrant histories and policies that made it possible for my parents to come here, my connection to Black, Latina/o and East Indian histories are rooted in my parent’s identities as part of the wider African and Indian diasporas and systems of global colonialism and imperialism that spread millions around the world over centuries and subjected them to the phenomenon of racialization.

I developed the "Mixed Dreams" Experimental College course at Oberlin in a humble attempt to patch together a Mixed History 101 and to start to provide a “political education”--tools with which young mixed folk and transracial adoptees could explore who we are, where we’re coming from and how to feel empowered enough to locate ourselves in those histories and identities. I’ve also had students who identify as monoracial and my greatest hope is that we can use discussions on mixed identities, to also break open myths of monolithic identities, cultural & racial authenticity and purity. Isn’t being a 'hyphen American' in key ways also a “mixed” experience? Can we also discuss queer identities as parallel to if not linked to “mixed” experiences as well? What about issues of socioeconomic class and access. In the course, we speak very specifically about mostly “first generation mixed-race experiences post 1967 (acknowledging all the while the limitations of that)-- but we also use multiraciality as a lens through which we can engage with a wider range of issues concerning identity, belonging and perhaps most significantly social justice. In doing so, the discussion changes from some unique, community-specific discussion on our experiences that happens behind closed doors, into a wider, more powerful dialogue we can all deeply benefit from having.

Living on the Color Line: Fighting for Social Justice

Mixed folk's racial loyalties and politics are often under attack. There are quite a number of haters out there who for good reason, are wary of the multiracial wave and its implications on racial justice. The need to be recognized as multiracial on forms and in the general schema of American racial politics has been seen as an empty, individualistic desire that is not only pointless, but feared as destructive to the advancement of other "monoracial" communities of color. Those fears are not without some basis. But I am starting to get a tad defensive about people questioning just how “down” mixed people can be. It’s getting old. It’s true, as mixed people we live on the colorline, but just living there isn’t going to provide any buffer or change much if any of the tensions and violence that still continue to erupt on that line. I believe the only way we can truly start to be a part of changing the racial landscape and speaking some truth to power is by tapping into what Prof. G. Reginal Daniel (Sociology, UC Santa Barbara) called the ‘greatest tool in our arsenal-- our anti-racist possibilities.’ For me that requires us to tell our stories (the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival is truly committed to that), critically and with sensitivity while educating ourselves and building that consciousness so that we can find the voice to say,

I’m mixed and proud, my mixed identity is rooted in the legacies and struggles of people of color in this country and transnationally and I recognize the privileges that can effect the ways I move through this world in relation to white supremacy and power. I won’t collude or be coopted by disguised white supremacy and its insidious henchmen Multiculturalism, Colorblindness and Post-racialism. I’m no mixed-up, confused, tragic anything, nor am I some hybrid, superhuman. I’m family, a legitimate member of various communities--I’m a partner, an ally, and I stand and act in solidarity.

4th Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival!

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:19:00 +0000

Happy Mixed Heritage Month!!! This weekend June 11th- 12th is the 4th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles. Check out the schedule of events here!

The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for
the Arts, a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt

organization. Contributions on behalf of the Mixed Roots Film &
Literary Festival must be made payable to the New York Foundation for
the Arts, and are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Please support this project with your tax-deductible
donations. Donate on-line at www.mxroots.org donation link. Or send checks payable
to New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Dusky Sally Productions PO
Box 291775, Los Angeles, CA 90029. Please specify “Mixed
Roots Film & Literary Festival” in the memo.

Obama Releases "Official Birth Video"

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Sun, 01 May 2011 18:26:00 +0000

President Obama's got jokes! At the Annual White House Correspondents Dinner this past Saturday, Obama takes a moment to respond gracefully and humorously to the birth certificate spectacle and The Donald (who was in attendance). I love my president.

Outsiders Within

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 06:07:00 +0000

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

-President Obama, Election Day Speech November 2008

"A natural born citizen is a person born with unalienable and undivided allegiance to the United States of America. And this is something the current occupant of the Oval Office never had. "-From The Birthers website

Call me unpatriotic. Call me unAmerican.

But I have to admit, I've had all too many days in my short life when I've been ashamed to be an American. Today was such a day-- as I read the news articles and watched the television coverage announcing that 44th President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama was indeed born on U.S. soil (I didn't realize so many people were doubtful) as proven by his birth certificate. I felt sick watching Donald Trump's statement posted above. Sick thinking that people felt they should be demanding proof from Obama of his U.S. birth to begin with. Sick that it has been framed as something "witheld" and "concealed" from the American public whose right it is to know without a shadow of a doubt that Obama was born in the U.S. It makes me sick that no one is publicly asking why there is even a doubt in people's minds about Obama's birth and citizenship status in the first place...

Before today, I was one of those people that snickered at the foolishness of the "birthers"--so dedicated to getting their hands on Obama's birth certififcate, questioning the legitimacy of his presidency on the grounds that he was not a natural born citizen. I believed that efforts of the birthers and their supporters were ultimately ineffectual-- stupid and racist, but really just a blip. But apparently, (and sadly) they held enough sway to finally obtain Obama's birth certificate and make it public. And we're supposed to be "post-racial?" Can you imagine just how much power this small group of "birthers" and supportive voters in states like Iowa have, to be able to sit there and have their petulant, ludicrous demand met? The thought itself makes me shudder.

Today we saw a shining example of the twisted paradox that is the United States of America. In one moment we uplift our "multicultural" history as a part of the Great American Melting Pot (and parade it around the world and actually have the audamndacity to judge other people on how badly they're doing on civil rights and justice) and in another moment we scrutinize the leader of our country-- the praised "American son," the oft-celebrated "embodiment of the melting pot" and demand that he produce cold hard proof that he is indeed a natural born citizen of the United States of America. Obama produced his birth certificate in an attempt to finally shut down the birther's once and for all, and to perhaps reveal their foolishness and demonstrate that amidst the countless more significant issues facing our world and country today, the matter of a simple piece of paper has consumed so much time and effort. Incredulously, even after the document was released, there are still those that believe the certificate was forged.

Today, was proof (not that we needed it) to many of us-- people of color, immigrant mothers and fathers, immigrant daughters and sons that our claim to citizenship and belonging is not stable... it is contested and delegitimized at every turn from the seemingly benign inquiries about where we're really from from? to the same insidious hand of white nationalist supremacy that publicly questions the legitimacy of President Obama's black body--his mixed body and it's belonging in this nation.

You don't have to be an avid Obama supporter to recognize the blatant racism that underlies the "birth" issues ( Funny how no one is asking Senator John McCain for his birth certificate. He was born in Panama). This preoccupation with Obama's birth is in no way an isolated issue,-- a hiccup in our post-racial paradise-- but rather, a reminder that rhetoric such as this has been inscribed in the very nation-building history of our country. In my course today we covered mixed Asian-America and discussed the "mixed" experience of simply living on the hyphen, always having to validate the "American" part of your identity with other qualifiers like Native American (this is the one that gets me the most), African American, Japanese American, Mexican American. "American", apparently cannot stand on it's own and histories of exclusion and violence against communities of color as well as outright denial of citizenship time and time again have buttressed this need for constant acts of identification.

Later for the genocide and colonization of indigenous peoples who have long lost any "legitimate" claims to the land we now call the "United States" save for the reservations on which they were (dis)placed. Later for the millions of Africans who were brought forcibly to the Americas and on whose backs and labor we built a powerful empire. Later for the millions of immigrants who have claimed America as home and have labored for this country over generations. Later for all those who checked their heritage, histories and languages at the borders in order to access the elusive American dream/myth. Are these people and their descendants not part of the nation? Have they not proven their worth? Apparently not....

Must we be perpetual foreigners? Must our bodies always be markers of our difference? Will we forever be outsiders within?

I guess today, I'm angry and defeated. Tomorrow, I'll pick up the pieces and remember Obama's words--(however, cheesy and full of fuzzy feel good liberal multi-culti rhetoric) back in early 2008 and remember that the struggle continues and that I stand on the shoulders of those before me. Those who painstakingly carved a space for me to exist as a young woman of color in the 21st century. That space was not freely granted or written into the founding laws of this country, but it was fought for and will continue to be fought for as long as racism and injustice are the order of the day. Tomorrow, I'll pick my torch back up, move forward and resist.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners — an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome and Other Mixed Symptoms

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 06:04:00 +0000

Am I to be cursed forever with becoming
somebody else on the way to myself?
~ Audre Lorde

Despite the twisted logic and lies of eugenics, scientific racism and old school anthropological research, none of us wear the completeness of who we are on our skin, in our eyes, the thickness of our lips, the squareness of our jaw or the texture of our hair. So why does our cultural, racial or ethnic legitimacy and authenticity have to come from how we look? How do we resist the colonizing gaze and decolonize our conceptions of beauty and aesthetics? How can we find strength and empowerment and how can we break static definitions and categories of who we are if we insist on reading our bodies as if they should be a clear and discreet sum of our parts?
We are all marked. And we all take part in marking ourselves and others. Our skin carrying it with it visible and invisible stories of who we are (and aren't). How much control or power do we have over what others "see" and who we feel we are? Are we arbiters of our own appearance and how we choose to express it? Do collective politics trump our individual agency? Oh, the questions.....
Last week in my Mixed Dreams class we discussed the complexities of "keeping up appearances" as multiracial individuals (though, as always, I would argue the same goes for 'monoracial' people). Appearance plays a key role in conceptualizing "mixed" experiences because it is often what marks our "difference." The privileging of the visual is something we can't quite escape and it holds a powerful currency all its own. And indeed, if we were all blind, would race exist at all? The visual is an inextricable part or the world we live in. Yet, while empowering aesthetics of people of color is a critical part of decolonizing our bodies- mixed aesthetics--mixed looks-- are often contested. And in this wonky racist world we live in, some would say rightly so. I'd like to take up two points-- paradoxes--of the "mixed experience"(forgive the generalization): on the one hand how do we critically discuss our racial appearance without always centering it and privileging "passing" and "ambiguity" as the text book markers of multiraciality and second, how do we as mixed people understand who we are and how we choose to present our racial selves as at once a personal choice, but one that is, ultimately, often externally ascribed and politically implicated as well.

Mixed Drag?: Performing Race
Marking our identities is something we all do -- sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Throughout my life and at different points in my personal growth I've marked my gender, my races and cultures-- often through clothing and hair. Froing my hair out to the best of my ability one day, wearing big earrings and blasting reggaeton the next, pressing my hair out or piercing my nose another day.... Some decisions were motivated by trying to fit into the communities that make up who I am, others were experimentations with my mixed looks and how far I could stretch them to encompass all that I am-- what would it take to look "blank enough"? But is "looking something" the same as "being something?" Is there something problematic and appropriative in the process of marking?
Some of my acts of marking and racial performing were attempts to hide what I felt were inadequacies--those gaps in authenticity. Looking back and even now as I continue to grow in my self-identification, I'm embarrassed at the ways in which I inevitably succumbed to essentializing myself and others on the road to de/reconstructing myself. Yet you use the tools you are given... inadequate as they are.... and ultimately, I turned my racial marking into an exercise of empowerment and a grounding source developing my own style and embracing the fact that I can be all those different women. At the same time, I have butressed those empowered identities with the development of a critical consciousness. I would argue that, especially as a mixed-race black women I cannot express my racial identities without a deep understanding of my positionality in the systems and structures that unfortunately still control our lives. But with that understanding in mind, I'd like to think that I can inhabit both the personal and political spaces of my identities....

Oberlin College just finished hosting it's annual Drag Ball-- a celebration and homage to queer identities and performance. Despite the continuing violence inflicted on queer communities, the basic idea that gender is something that is performed and not biological is a commonly accepted one in the world of progressive liberal bubbles.
And while I am often wary of using "queer" as a catch all phrase or a blanket theoretical lens because of its political significance, discussing multiracial identities and queer identities-- particularly when thinking about trans and gender non-conforming folk provides some really provocative insights into racial identities and appearance as well. Ultimately, we all perform our gender, but also our race. But are there different implications for performing our gender and our race? Is the relationship to power different when moving between genders as opposed to moving between racial identities? In class, there was a unanimous discomfort with the idea that race can basically be a choice. While empowering for many, if anyone can be whatever race they feel like, how do you respond to a person of color saying they are white or a white person saying they are a person of color? There were some interesting ethical concerns I couldn't quite put my finger on underlying this discomfort that weren't present in discussions of gender that suggest some distinct considerations when it comes to thinking about race and gender.

Racial Spies & Imposters: On Passing & Authenticity
There's an overwhelming amount of scholarship on multiraciality and racial ambiguity. There's also a weird pathology that accompanies these discussions- remnants of hybrid degeneracy and marginal man stereotypes of multiracial people in U.S. history. While these are important issues, I often wonder how much we limit ourselves by constantly reducing mixed identities to preoccupations with passing and ambiguity. I don't want to downplay the fact that for many of us this is cause for a great deal of anxiety about place and belonging. Feelings of inadequacy or feeling like a racial spy or even an imposter aren't healthy for anyone's identity formation. There are also so many external factors that police those lines. The gatekeepers are often times, members of our own communities. Yet instead of thinking about multiracial identity as the identity for the racially ambiguous how can we redirect the lens and challenge ourselves and others to look at the diversity of appearances and yes, ambiguity that exist in all races. That redirection would perhaps also lend itself to creating safer more comfortable spaces for mixed folk because it would destabilize the farce of authenticity. I don't know how many mixed people feel this way, but I know that I was often consumed with the search for authenticity. And it wasn't until I understood that authenticity did not truly exist, that I was able to create and find spaces for myself and my identity. I also accessed my other identities through coming to a profound understanding of the mixedness of my blackness- my most visible and political racial identity. We all have a different process, but multiracial identification often comes under attack because it is conceptualized as simply the opposite of "monoracial"-- specifically monoracial communities of color-- and in doing so it falls into the same trap of essentialism and from the outside looks suspiciously separatist. That dichotomy "multiracial"/"monoracial" is itself a farce and one that we need to critically debunk. The debunking, however, does not have to come at the expense of silencing mixed identities. Instead, I'd like to think that it would strengthen and ground mixed identification.

Decolonizing Mixed Looks: The Politics of Mixed Aesthetics

One of the dangers of blindly kumbayahing ourselves into a multiracial/post-racial paradise is that we will fail to adequately heal the scars of internalized racism. Contrary to popular belief, mixed folk have not escaped unscathed by any stretch of the imagination. As a mixed black woman, I have inherited just as many complexes about my blackness and my mixedness. Our bodies and minds need to go through that important process of decolonizing. I use "decolonizing" before "empowerment" or "pride" because while other marginalized racial identities are deemed inferior in the US's color schema, multiracal identities (I would argue some more so than others-- crazy to think about a heirarchy or pigmentocracy within multiraciality) are increasingly praised. And look, that can and does mess with your head a little. But as I find myself saying all too often: whatever you do, don't drink the Kool-Aid! Because anyone can assert racial pride-- case in point our resident white supremacists. Acts of decolonizing are related to power and privilege and require a conscious politics of resistance and empowerment.

This is where knowledge of history and a political education becomes incredibly important on our road to a radical mixedhood. And I'm starting to get a tad defensive. But I can't fight alone. The multiracial collective is accused of being individualistic and even ahistorical. It is seen as having no concern for the needs of other communities or standing in solidarity with other communities of color. It's all about our personal right to choose and to hell with everyone else (that sentiment came up a lot during the fight for multiracial identification on the 2000 Census.) But we must remember, the minute multiracial people and families decided to mobilize for state recognition was the moment that mixed-race became a political identity. As such, that comes with a different set of implications that demand we go further than the personal. What we all could do well remembering is that before we could choose multiple boxes, we were all and still are part of the other "boxes." We can't blame civil rights organizations and advocates for getting a little territorial. While we're over here celebrating our "right to choose" we've got things like racial profiling and the prison industrial complex destroying communities. We can't put the cart before the horse. I want to obliterate all these racial boundaries just as much as the next one, but we're still living in a world where these racialized identities matter and hold political significance.

Will we ever wake up from the sleep we've lulled ourselves into over the years? I refuse to collude with oppressive systems and structures. But will we ever be able to collectively create proud, politicized, anti-racist, anti-oppressive multiracial identities?
And even as I continue to use "we," I sometimes find myself questioning whether there is a "we" to speak of at all.

Mixed Dreams ExCo Syllabus 2011

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Check out the syllabus for my course!

Mixed Dreams ExCo Syllabus 2011
Oberlin College

Also take a look at this list of courses compiled by Steve Riley of Mixed Race Studies.org.

Mixed Dreams on Tumblr!!

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:26:00 +0000

Want your daily dose of radical mixed-ness? Follow me on Tumblr!

Yelling to the Sky (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:13:00 +0000

Containing Multitudes

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:14:00 +0000

"Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men-- and in the civil rights movement those dreams had seemed large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you'd been born or the house where you'd been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned--because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself-- I believed that it might over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life." - Barack Obama from Dreams From My Father

Alright, I know, I know, talking about Obama and multiraciality is like beating a dead horse. But, I swear, I have a really good point (or two) to make!

Point 1: NO IDENTITY IS MONOLITHIC

It sounds simple enough: Race is not biological, it's a social construct. Identities are fluid, they change and even expand over time. But most of U.S. society hasn't caught on yet. And ultimately we need to ask, who gains from keeping these strict boundaries around identities?

In the U.S. we've gotten pretty good at essentializing identities into strictly defined, carefully bound, digestible boxes. The black American community, in particular, has long been seen as a monolith-- a static and unassimilable one at that-- and yet nothing could be further from the truth. I recently watched the Kobina Aidoo documentary film The Neo African-Americans. The film aims to explore issues facing Caribbean and continental African immigrant communities and their descendants in the U.S. Though, it was at best an introduction to some very deeply rooted issues concerning black people in the Diaspora, the film definitely brings up some provocative points around identity, authenticity and community. The film got me thinking about the (often invisible) multitudes racial and ethnic identities contain and how crucial and yet limiting the process of "self-naming" can be for historically marginalized groups. As people of color, many of us live on the "hyphen"-- as hyphen "Americans" in a way that members of white ethnic groups do not.

Indeed, many of the issues faced by mixed people, mirror those faced by many "monoracial" people of color, especially as our society becomes increasingly defined by it's heterogeneity while migration, gender, socioeconomic class and sexuality further shape and shift our identities over time. We're all struggling to define and (re)define who we are as individuals and as collectives. Thus, crises of authenticity, legitimacy, community, progress and belonging are not the sole domain of one particular ethnic or racial group. In significant ways, we can say that they have become woven into the very fabric of our racial inheritance in this country and as such we are ALL implicated: black, brown and (perhaps especially) white in tackling these issues head on.

POINT 2: WHITENESS AS FREEDOM?

Today, I attended a discussion on Nell Irvin Painter's polemic 2010 book, audaciously entitled A History of White People. In it she breaks down how whiteness has been constructed historically and has come to function in U.S. society as the marker of all that is "free", "unbound", "privileged", "powerful", and "sovereign". Painter's book ends with a compelling conclusion which suggests that since whiteness has, over time, shifted and changed (through simultaneous acts of inclusion/exclusion) to encompass certain groups (ie: the Irish, Italians, European Jews)--in the 21st century, the new beneficiaries of whiteness may actually be educated, wealthy black Americans. She cites Oprah as an example of such a black individual being included in the whiteness "club."And in a way it makes sense. Oprah, through her socioeconomic class, has ascended into the realm of of the "free", "unbounded" "privileged" "powerful" and "sovereign" which defines the essence of whiteness according to Painter. But does Oprah, really count? Individuals may be "let in," but the whole collective is ages away from gaining admittance. Is this, then, really "whiteness" or something else entirely? Should we conflate socioeconomic class mobility with equally mobile racial identities in U.S. society? Poverty, state violence and the prison industrial complex continue to cripple communities.

Painter offers Obama as another example of an individual of color who is for all intents and purposes "white", not because he has a white mother-- but because of his status. He is, after all, a Harvard educated lawyer and the head of one of the most powerful empires (yes, I said empire) in modern history. True, Obama came at the right time in U.S. history. His multiracial body (however presumptuously) coming to represent race reconciliation and racial redemption. He is America. But while he may be the mirror, he also becomes the canvas upon which many liberals have haphazardly and yet desperately cast every dream of social change and justice in a country whose racial inheritance is dark and burdensome to say the least. In addition, despite his white ancestry, the political right challenges Obama's legitimacy at every turn-- his very claim to citizenship, nationality and belonging are contested. In significant ways, the tea party, birthers and even the less obvious, but no less insidious anti-Obama rumblings can also be seen as symptomatic of a crisis of whiteness, the upheaval of seeing a "black" man in the White House. Whiteness doe not suffer that same objectification, the same scrutiny, instability, contestation or (as I would argue is the case with Obama) the voracious consumption. It is wholly free of it and protected from it, on both the individual and collective levels. So is Obama really white even according to Painter's criteria?

I consider the quote above, from President Obama's first book Dreams From My Father (which I half-jokingly call the story of how Obama became an African-American) to be one of the most profound statements about what it means to be black in America, but also what it means to be mixed in America. One need only go as far as this book, written years before Obama became president to understand (in his own words) his often contested racial identities

I'd also like to rethink the idea that whiteness has dibs on freedom and sovereignty. The fighter in me wants to believe, there is a way that we can think of blackness, or browness as "free" and "unbound" as well. Perhaps, not in a huge macro, super-structure way that magically dismantles centuries old inequalities in one fell swoop, but in a gradual manner that acknowledges the power of not just the individual, but also the marginalized masses to be agents and arbiters of their own destinies.

With that understanding, we can also (re)imagine Obama's choice on the 2010 census to only check "Black" as staking claim to an identity he came to understand as just as much his own as his white identity and to claim as a form of political resistance--as a means to bring about change-- personally and collectively. It's just a hunch- maybe a crazy one. But no harm in considering it. Perhaps he's not limiting or making invisible all he is at all-- instead he is exercising his right to choose, name and define himself-- a right that was bitterly fought for by black people in the U.S years ago. And which is reflected in his words "Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned--because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself-- I believed that it might over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life."

Ultimately, America contains multitudes. Black contains multitudes just as white and Latin@, Asian mixed etc. When will we accept the "uniqueness" of Obama's life--really, the uniqueness of our own lives--and let that wield a transformative power all its own?

Back to The Future: A Response to 'Young & Mixed in America'

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:35:00 +0000

"One in 19 people are born mixed race and if you keep mixing there's going to be an average color that pops out...probably not in the next decade, but probably in the next century or so things will have changed a lot because things are changing exponentially and because of that race will no longer be the big hot topic...at least not the way it is now. Most people will be in some way mixed" NYT 1.20.11 "Young & Mixed in America"

Since the late 90s, every few years an article or segment appears in our mainstream media about mixed-race people in the U.S. The New York Times, in particular, has often kept its fingers on the multiracial pulse.

In 2001, it was a NYT article declaring that now, given the choice, 6.8 million Americans checked more than one box in the decennial census. This was followed by another article that same year: "Multiracial Identification May Affect Programs" which expressed concerns about what increased multiracial identification could do to state/federal programs and policies based on enforcing long fought for civil rights. In 2003, the NYT article "Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous," focused on media and advertising. In 2005 "When You Contain Multitudes,"(oddly enough published like a new trend under "Fashion & Style") covered MAVIN Foundation's highly anticipated "Generation Mix Tour." The video "Being Mixed in America" and an article "Who Are We Now: New Dialogue on Mixed Race were featured in 2008. Throughout 2007 and 2008, a few other articles appeared discussing what President Obama's mixed heritage could mean about the future of race in the U.S. Most recently, this past Saturday, January 29th, 2011 the NYT featured a video and an article entitled "Young and Mixed in America" which cover the rise of multiracial-identified students and organizing on college campuses.
...Now, I've only been alive for twenty four years and I vaguely remember anything before the late 90s. But I've been getting this weird sensation lately, that when it comes to discussing mixed issues in this country we're like a broken record-- repeating the same basic information for the past 10 years-- Surprise! There's mixed people in the U.S. They are visible and starting to be more vocal about their identity. Soon we'll all be mixed. Yay! Full stop.
But when do we move past that? When does the cover story move further and more profoundly into the issue? Mixed people seem to be always in a process of "becoming", on the brink of fully "being" and reinventing the wheel every few years-- particularly younger generations.

I remember being a "multi baby" once in college, navigating my multiple identities and my spaces and finding and defining community for myself. The MAVIN Foundation was alive and well then, and I remember watching the film Chasing Daybreak about the Generation Mix Tour in a room full of other mixed students. Some students were mobilizing to specifically register other mixed people to be bone marrow donors. Others attended conferences solely dedicated to mixed students at other colleges. I remember when the first Kip Fulbeck book Part Asian, 100% Hapa came out and everyone wanted Kip to grace their campus. I also attended a small liberal arts college and was privileged to have a space where I could figure out what being mixed meant to me. Granted, it was always an uphill battle to figure out the needs of the mixed student community and there were always issues with support vs. activism, leadership, membership and organizing as with any student org. But, it was a start and one that many college students (let alone K-12 students) don't ever get to experience.

I work in higher education now and have found myself advocating for multiracial college students in a big way because it's true... the numbers don't lie and students are being even more vocal about the ways in which they choose to identify--mixed race or otherwise. But still, there are an overwhelming number of mixed students who come in feeling like they've been the "only ones" in their high schools and hometowns; mixed students struggling to navigate their spaces, not getting validation for their experiences and not hearing from either their peers or their professors about their history (yes, we have one-- several actually).

So, on the one hand it's amazing to know that there's visibility and recognition of the mixed community. Yet on the other, many of the articles I listed above speculate in some way, shape or form, what a mixed identity-- really, what a mixed body could mean for the "future" of race in America. I'm done with it. I kinda want to say... it's not about you right now, America. It's not about what "average color" is going to eventually "pop out"-- the browning vs. the whitening of America. My body will not be used as a launchpad toward some raceless, colorblind national myth or even as a resting place for dreams of race reconciliation. Not right now. Centuries of history has shown that mixing doesn't make race irrelevant. In key ways, race in the U.S. was constructed to confront the already existing reality of race mixing. So that can't possibly be the answer to our racial dilemmas. Since "multiracial" wasn't (and still isn't) a federally accepted racial categrory, no real comprehensive data exists before 2000 about how many people actually were of mixed race. But I'm sure that at the height of slavery, there was no doubt a sizeable amount of mixed people in the United States. They just weren't being counted, that's all.

What has changed drastically is the fact that "multiracial" is becoming more visible as a legitimate identity on its own. So, what I am more concerned with, is less about what this means for the racial redemption of America, but rather about how we empower and support that identity development-- critically and sustainably as parents and family, as educators, as peers, as policy makers and as a society. How can we educate, build community and reveal our histories-- those that already exist between the lines of various intersecting national and global histories? How can we contain all our multiple identities in a still rigid racial classification system and understand what it means to be mixed and black, mixed and Asian, mixed and white, transracially/transnationally adopted etc?

There's a spotty institutional memory that hasn't been passed down as fully as it could be and organizations who were at the forefront of advocacy work like MAVIN/The Mixed Heritage Center, MASC, iPride, AMEA are active (some less so than others) and media like the weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat among many others are still out there doing their thing. But few that aren't out on the west coast or weren't in some way connected to the early movement know anything about their existence. So we're left wandering around in the dark, trying to reinvent the wheel and making the same news over and over.

I want this generation and the next generation of mixed kids and adults to know that there was a movement, however flawed, however much a blip compared to things like the civil rights movement, but a movement nonetheless of activists and advocates, families and young multiracial people that fought for recognition in the face of controversy and a centuries old system of power that served to either deny or grant people humanity based solely on the color of their skin.

Being mixed isn't some developmental phase you deal with in college and move past by your mid 20s. Nor is it a passing demographic or social trend. It's an identity and a lived experience.
It's ten years later, mixed folk. How far have we really gone? And how conscious are we of where we're headed?

4th Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival Coming this JUNE!!

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:30:00 +0000

The fabulous duo of Mixed Chicks Chat and their team of amazing organizers will be hosting the 4th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles, California this June 11th- 12th at the Japanese American National Museum. The festival is currently seeking nominations for their event line-up! See their call for nominations below and if you have any great nominees fill out the survey by February 14th.

Seeking YOUR nominations!

What's the proudest Mixed moment of 2010?

What film or book best depicts the Mixed experience?*

We're gearing up for the:

4th Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival:

June 11-12, 2011

to be held at the

Japanese American National Museum

Los Angeles, CA!

And we need your help! We are creating the Festival line-up and we'd like for you to be a big part of the process.

This year we are going to have an Awards Presentation based on your nominations! So we are asking you to nominate films, media, and literature in the following categories. And please feel free to make suggestions for more categories!

...drum roll, please...

The 4th Annual Mixed Roots Festival Nomination Categories are:

Best film or book depicting an interracial/intercultural relationship
Best film or book starring a person with a Mixed background
Best reveal of a person who is "passing"
Most historically accurate representation of the Mixed experience
Best commercial representing the Mixed experience
Best film or book representing the Mixed experience
Proudest Mixed moment of 2010
Your suggestions

We are accepting nominations until February 14,2011. Voting will then take place from February 21,2011 - March 7, 2011. The winners will be announced at the Festival in June!

Click

HERE

to take the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival Nominations Survey!

*Remember, when you make your nominations, to consider that the "Mixed experience" refers to interracial/intercultural relationships, transracial/transcultural adoptions, and anyone who identifies as having biracial, multiracial, Hapa or Mixed identity.

Thank you for being a dedicated supporter of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival and for being a critical part in the planning this year.

Colorism Wars

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:34:00 +0000

Here we go again....
Cherished readers, I closed the year 2010 with a pre-holiday hiatus blog post entitled For Mixed Girls, For Black Girls. I wrote it as a call to "lighted skinned" and "dark skinned" women in the black and mixed-black community to confront our pain and our struggles and ultimately come to a place of healing, love and understanding. No sooner do we hit the new year, however, does a club in Columbus, Ohio start planning a "Dark Skinned vs. Light Skinned Party" (Exhibit A to our right). Club promoters apparently thought it would be cute to use the Twitter hashtags #teamlightskin and #teamdarkskin as inspiration for their party, which has subsequently caused a Twitter frenzy and blogosphere sound-off (see Clutch Magazine's article on the party) over the past few weeks...

To add fuel to the already volatile colorism battle that ensued in cyperspace, our very own mixed race entrepreneurs of Mixed Chicks hair products-- a brand that makes products for naturally curly/kinky hair (and which I've been using religiously until well, now) allegedly tweeted
"#teamlightskin sure hope all will try @Mixedchicks to care 4 those curls.” The company has stated that it sent messages to all teams, not just #teamlightskin. (check out Black Girl With Long Hair's article on this subject. In addition, Sakita Holley's blog discusses the brand's PR epic fail that caused huge fallout in this article ).

But I guess for me that's neither here nor there. The damage, despite whatever good, clean intentions has been done. The Mixedchicks tweeter was a bit unsympathetic if not wholly ahistorical in their follow-up responses to the Twitter debate. The Mixedchicks tweeter seemed to think that we've moved beyond our issues with colorism stating "we didn't realize there was "a war" still. thought everyone celebrated difference like that. again, we apologize." Look, I as much as the next one would like to fantasize about how we can fix the world's ills one natural curly/kinky head and magic hair potion at a time. Yet for some communities, particularly those with people of African descent, hair is political and skin color is political. It's kind of a fact of life at this point. Things have been deeply internalized through systems and institutions of power and oppression that predate you and I, but somehow still effect our day to day. Yeah, it sounds all doom and gloom. And in these our postracial climes, it's not sexy and cute to talk about it. "Let's Confront Colorism" doesn't make quite as hot a party flier. That, however, doesn't make it a non-issue. In many ways colorism and its tons of baggage is a very intra-community issue affecting Latin@, Asian, indigenous and mixed communities alike both here at home and abroad.

There's nothing that gets to me more than colorism within communities of color and the minute I feel like we're taking one step forward, we take a hundred steps back.

Yet, what does it mean for us to move forward? Thoughts?

(Check out BGLH guest blogger "Makiya's" article " A bi-racial woman’s response to the Mixed Chicks Twitter debate

For Mixed Girls, For Black Girls...

noreply@blogger.com (mixed dreamer) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:09:00 +0000

Fiona, Jo Burg, complex of mixed girls/
For surviving through every lie they put into us now/The world is yours and I swear I will stand focused/Black girls, raise up your hands; the world should clap for us... Jean Grae from Talib Kweli's Black Girl Pain

I recently googled "mixed-race women." Among the first things that pop-up after the photos of Halle Berry, Thandie Newton and Alicia Keys were the following results: 1) Dating mixed race women Free Dating, Singles and Personals 2) Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out: Amazon.ca (a recent addition!) 3)Mixed race women are put in place of black beauty and 4)Why are mixed race women usually associated with beauty and black women are not? followed by a few other pages full of dating and personal ads as well as forum threads about "beautiful" or "hot" mixed-race women and models.

To the arguable extent that Google can be a viable indicator of any popular thought, it does show that at least in cyber-space most of what's out there about mixed-race women fixates on our physique and our bodies particularly in relation to "monoracial" black women. As a mixed-race, black woman myself, I've struggled to break down the stereotypes in my own communities that often favor "light-skinned,"red-boned" women with pelo bueno (good hair) while painfully pitting mixed beauty against black beauty. These conceptions beg the question:
Is mixed beauty inevitably 'anti-black' beauty?

Growing up, the contested terrain of mixed/black beauty was played out most profoundly in the politics of hair. My hair was often the only thing that belied any mixed heritage and at different points in my life I felt like Zora Howard in her Biracial Hair poem: Some days, I'd stare in the mirror convinced I looked just like Alicia Keys or I'd frantically tease it out in repeatedly failed attempts to rock the perfectly epic Angela Davis 'fro trying desperately to fit into iconic neo-soul black beauty, only to be left looking like a vague, frizzy-haired, busted teen version of Diana Ross.

There's a common misconception that mixed black women have it all. After all, the media seems to favor us or at least light-skinned women that look like us, from Hollywood to our very own black entertainment industry (if it indeed, is "ours"). Colorism is nothing new. It's a painful and persistent inheritance of internalized racism and self-hatred-- the eternal struggle between the "Wanabees" and the "Jigaboos" comically immortalized in Spike Lee's acclaimed satirical film School Daze. Are we either "high yella heifas" or "tar-babies"?... Wanabees, or Jigaboos...

But sisters, whether you're 'dark or you're fair' we've all been damaged. We've all been used and exploited. Our bodies, the violent battleground of inequality--and to add insult to injury we just keep driving that imagined chasm between us deeper and deeper. Light-skinned privilege is real. More "European" features are generally favored--true story. But black folk come in different shades, sizes and hair textures that make visible just how mixed our history as a people has been. Yet our beauty is irrevocably constructed in relation to whiteness and widespread healing from the collective trauma of oppression inflicted and then self-inflicted (most notably, through damaging products like lye-relaxer and bleaching cream) has only just begun. And mixed girls have not been immune. For first generation mixed women of African descent learning to love our blackness and our mixedness is a long process if we ever even get there. And I am, ultimately, left with too many hard questions...

Mixed-black sisters out there: how many times have we considered the privilege we embody? How do we resist the use of our bodies by media, or even by our own families to further marginalize black beauty and objectify ourselves? Will we always be seen as "Wannabees?" Must our bodies always be seen as somehow "anti-black"? Can we love the kinks, the curls, the dark, the light and everything in between? Is mixed pride inherently anti-black pride?

Mixed girls, black girls and mixed-black girls, can we (re)imagine a beauty where we can all be celebrated as the queens we are or will we continue to play into the hands of exclusive standards of beauty? In the words of Ntozake Shange, will we ever find ourselves at the end of our rainbows and will we learn to love each other fiercely?

I desperately hope so.