Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
“I always identified as black. That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn’t psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn’t have that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way. I think of myself as mixed, and I think of myself as part of a long history of African-American writers, so I don’t see them as so distinct as people do these days.”
“…The black community was where I placed myself, and I felt actually sort of disparaging of people who identified as mixed; that seemed kind of tragic to me, because it seemed like they were avoiding the politics and the power relations that were really at the heart of race, to me. So a lot of my politics grew around this identity growing up, of identifying myself as black and seeing race as much more than a biological category. I think now I don’t worry so much about what I identify as; that just seems sort of simplistic, to suggest that there’s one answer to that. But I don’t feel badly that I didn’t.” —Danzy Senna
The story of this brilliant, sometime forgotten, underrated composer can date back to the ugly history of racial discrimination in the United States. His family’s sojourner led this brilliant man to work and strive in his chosen profession. It was that sacrifice of his father that made that opportunity possible…
Fernandez is one of countless examples of Black locals who have contributed to Hawaiian culture and life for over 200 years, yet whose stories have largely gone unrecognized.
“Black people have been evacuated out of the narrative of who is in Hawaii,” Sharma says. “Historically we don’t think Black people were in Hawaii when they actually were.”…
Sharon Ho Chang knows her way around community journalism. She is the managing editor at the South Seattle Emerald, a digital news and culture publication run by and centering the BIPOC people and communities who live, work, create, and are experiencing displacement due to gentrification in the city’s Central District and South End. The Emerald is a beacon of thorough, complex, and vital reporting for the immediate area, as well as an example of how journalism can embrace multifaceted local stories that have regional, national, and even global importance. In addition to editing the Emerald, Chang is also a writer, artist, and documentarian with a lot of storytelling under her belt, including the publication of two nonfiction books — Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (Routledge, 2015) and the memoir Hapa Tales And Other Lies: A Mixed Race Memoir About the Hawai’i I Never Knew (self published in 2018) — both of which explore in academic and personal ways the experience of being mixed race. She is also a photographer and videographer, and is dedicated to documenting underrepresented and underreported stories of the people and places in her community in Seattle, her family and elders in Taiwan, and her own multiracial transnational experience.
Chang spoke with Interviews Editor Sarah Neilson over Zoom about her many, many journalism projects past and present; her experiences with feedback and creative inspiration over time; voting in her first Taiwan presidential election; and what Economies of Harm means to her…
The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.
It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”
He was referring, of course, to the Jews.
In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.
Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.
Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks…
