Mixed Race Studies

Firsthand multlicultural experience

The Daily Independent (Ashland, Kentucky)
2009-10-22

Mike James

Ashland — When he brings up the fact that he is biracial, Elliott Lewis most often hears platitudes.

Some of them are flattering, others not so much. The one that drives him nuts is the question, “What are you?”

It’s one of the things he has to cope with in a generation that is redefining what it is to be biracial.

Lewis, a former television reporter now in law school at the University of Akron, spoke Thursday at Ashland Community and Technical College during the annual Teaching-Learning Conference.

Diversity is the focus of the conference, and Lewis embodies the theme. As a young biracial American, Lewis sees a divide between two generations that have two ways of viewing racial identity.

Had he been of his parents’ generation, grown to maturity before and during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, he would have been biracial by birth and black by experience. “There were no biracial water fountains in the south,” he said….

…Multiracial Americans are a growing segment of the population and thus a group educators need to be informed about, said conference chairman Dan Mahan. “He (Lewis) is on the cutting edge of the subject.”

Even in northeast Kentucky, student populations at the community college level are diverse and becoming more so, he said…

Read the entire article here.

Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America

Basic Books an imprint of The Perseus Books Group
2006-12-28
302 pages
ISBN: 9780786718825
ISBN-10: 078671882X

Elliott Lewis

Television journalist Elliott Lewis weaves his memoirs as a black-and-white biracial American with the voices of dozens of multiracial people who are challenging how we think and speak about race today. “What are you?” This seemingly ordinary but politically charged question has become a touchstone for debate around race and ethnicity. Now, more than ever, mixed race Americans are calling themselves biracial and multiracial rather than feeling forced to choose only one race. Nearly seven million people checked more than one racial category in the 2000 US census, the first time in history Americans had the option to mark more than one box. With Fade, Lewis offers a comprehensive look at the multiracial state of the union. Here he speaks with dozens of individuals, tackling hot button issues such as the often complicated lives of multiracial people in communities of color, interracial dating, transracial adoption, and the birth of the multiracial movement. The author also shares his own moving — and often humorous — firsthand experiences with race, along with intimate stories from those at the forefront of nationwide efforts to formally recognize the multiracial population.

Part Asian, 100% Hapa: Portraits by Kip Fulbeck

Chronicle Books
February, 2006
264 pages
7 x 7 in; 125 color photographs
ISBN 0811849597
ISBN13 9780811849593

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Foreword by Sean Lennon

Afterword by Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Part Asian, 100% Hapa — Originally a derogatory label derived from the Hawaiian word for half, Hapa is now being embraced as a term of pride by many people of Asian or Pacific Rim mixed-race heritage. Award-winning film producer and artist Kip Fulbeck has created a forum in word and image for Hapas to answer the question they’re nearly always asked: “What are you?” Fulbeck’s frank, head-on portraits are paired with the sitters’ own statements of identity. A work of intimacy, beauty, and powerful self-expression, Part Asian, 100% Hapa is the book Fulbeck says he wishes he had growing up. An introduction to the rest of the world and an affirmation for Hapas themselves—who now number in the millions—it offers a new perspective on a rapidly growing population.