As long as mixed race bodies and identities exist under a system of white supremacy, there will always be an implicit racial hierarchy among mixed race people, which celebrates lightness and whiteness and denigrates darkness and blackness.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2018-02-27 01:35Z by Steven

As long as mixed race bodies and identities exist under a system of white supremacy, there will always be an implicit racial hierarchy among mixed race people, which celebrates lightness and whiteness and denigrates darkness and blackness.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, “DeCentering Whiteness: On Facing the Class Privilege that Exists in Mixed Race Asian Communities & Beyond,” The Body Is Not An Apology, February 15, 2018. https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/decentering-whiteness-on-facing-the-class-privilege-that-exists-in-mixed-race-asian-communities-beyond/.

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For Multiracial Women, Hair Is a Political Statement

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Canada, Media Archive, Women on 2018-02-27 01:27Z by Steven

For Multiracial Women, Hair Is a Political Statement

The Link
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Volume 38, Issue 5 (2018-02-06)

Aysha White & Marissa Ramnanan

Two Women of Colour Talk About the Racialization of Their Hair

I have a weird ethnic first name (Aysha) and she has a weird ethnic last one (Ramnanan).

We are both mixed race, meaning we won’t find ourselves represented in mainstream media. In mostly white environments, such as universities, we become uncomfortably aware of how different we look from people belonging to a single race.

I gravitated towards Marissa, guessing she was also mixed because of her very curly hair…

Read the entire article here.

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DeCentering Whiteness: On Facing the Class Privilege that Exists in Mixed Race Asian Communities & Beyond

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2018-02-27 01:10Z by Steven

DeCentering Whiteness: On Facing the Class Privilege that Exists in Mixed Race Asian Communities & Beyond

The Body Is Not An Apology
2018-02-15

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
University of California, Berkeley


[Featured Image: A person with shoulder length black hair wearing a black t-shirt and denim stands indoors staring solemnly out of a window. Pexels.com]

Growing up queer, mixed race, and Asian in the American south, my identity often felt like an absence of any identity at all. For a long time, I existed in a kind of limbo state, not having a language to describe myself. Until my early twenties, I was unaware that the word “mixed race” existed, much less as a term that I had the option to identify with.

Because I neither knew nor saw any other mixed race children or people around me, for a long time my sense of self was only defined as a negation: I was certainly not white, and certainly not Japanese (at least by the standards of ethnic purity that were operative within my Japanese family and community), but as to what I was, actually, no one could really say.

So it was more than a breath of fresh air—more like a sense of psychic and spiritual relief—when I learned that such a thing as a mixed race identity existed, and that it was something I could identify as, with no other qualifications or explanations. When I finally encountered a community of other mixed race people during my twenties, I felt I was able to inhabit my body and experiences more fully and comfortably…

Read the entire article here.

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