Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
To consider the life of Korla Pandit—and that’s what I will call him because that is who he became—is to consider the weight of wearing a mask for 50 years. It is to grasp the fear of exposure, of a revelation that would have killed his career. One slip and he would have gone from being a mirror of white America’s mania for things “exotic” to somebody white America didn’t want to face. He would have been revealed as a fraud, and his fans would have never forgiven him. It is to recognize how he had to cut himself off from a black community that he’d grown up in, from a culture that had shaped the musical skills, and the survival skills, that he drew on for the rest of his life.
The history of Afro Latinos is not taught in American schools, and the idea that someone can be Black and Latino still feels novel to some people, according to Tanya K. Hernández, a professor at Fordham University School of Law.
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Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.
“This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”
Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.
“We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there’s a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”
Mystic surprised the world by walking away from a record deal after her successful debut album. But for her, it was all part of the plan to create and be of service, completely on her own terms. (Nastia Voynovskaya/KQED)
Mystic sits in her backyard on the kind of warm, autumn afternoon that makes people remark at how good it is to live in Oakland, California. Dappled light shines through a lush canopy of persimmon, fig and guava trees. Her pet lovebird chirps in the distance, and she’s snacking on almonds between Zoom calls with young musicians she mentors.
This is the veteran hip-hop artist’s little oasis, away from the unruliness of the city, where she ponders the changing seasons of life, love and art.
It’s a good time for reflection. The recent loss of her longtime close friend and Digital Underground collaborator, Shock G, shook her deeply. That, and the grief of living during a global pandemic, prompted her to listen inward and ask herself what would fulfill her soul right now.
“I mean, shouldn’t we be doing what we love? Isn’t it the time now?” she asks in her naturally poetic cadence, lowering her voice into a near-whisper. Then, she starts to get louder and more passionate, as if proclaiming a manifesto: “If we’re artists, and art is part of our healing journey, then we should all be making art right now, right? There should be art flooding our speakers and our museums and our buildings, right? Public art.”
And for Mystic, one of the roles of hip-hop as a public art form is to bring traumas out of darkness and into the light, where they can be examined and processed—maybe even let go—in communion with others. That’s the power of her classic album Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom, whose 20th anniversary Mystic is celebrating this year. She recently took ownership of the master recordings and put out a podcast series looking back at its creation. Now, she’s gearing up for a vinyl rerelease in December.
From the outside, it might look like Mystic is recommitting to her art after years of focusing on her other loves: academia and teaching. After Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom was released to great acclaim, she walked away from a record deal and took a different path that brought her to UC Berkeley and, eventually, the University of Oxford for her master’s degree in education. For years, she spent more time in kindergarten classrooms than on stage in front of fans. But to Mystic, these multiple pursuits are all part of one continuous quest to create, express and be of service.
“It takes life to make art,” she texts me after one of our conversations. “There are times of input and times of output. I take my time for input, and that includes healing, living, loving, working with children, school and community. When my art is ready to be born, that is output. That is all 😉.”…
Eva Lourdes, 7 Stella Marèsol, 3, at a table in their garage filled with art and books on June 11, 2020. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
June 12 is celebrated as “Loving Day,” a day commemorating Loving v. Virginia — the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional in the United States. With this in mind, we spoke with a few Bay Area families and experts on the importance of talking about race in multiracial families.
Sarah Baltazar-Pinheiro identifies as Filipino American and works in the education field. She lives in Walnut Creek with her husband, who is Afro-Brazilian, and their two daughters, ages 7 and 3-years-old.
“What is the right way to educate a 7-year-old who’s, like, half farts, half losing her teeth? And also 10% attention span?” she said.
At home, they are doing history lessons she calls “American heroes are Black women.” Baltazar-Pinheiro calls to her daughter to see if she remembers who they talked about the last few days — Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells and Shirley Chisholm. Her daughter recounts the names, with a few small hints…
…“If you think your whiteness will protect your mixed kids from this country as it currently stands, you’re misguided,” she said. “We have words and we have language to talk about … race and class and gender — and gender fluidity and how we all want to live in this world. I just want to teach her the words that she needs so that she can always express herself.”…
“It’s kind of interesting to me that, on some level, things have shifted,” Kelley Kenney said, when thinking back on their years of studying the topic. “But, you know, we’re still dealing with the same inherent issue of racism and bias and lack of understanding. … I’m hoping that we’re moving forward in at least starting to dialogue more about it.”
Kelley Kenney said talking about race within family is not just a singular event. “It’s not just a one time conversation, but it’s very, very, very much a part of the whole family dynamic.”…
…“In cases where the relationship involves a white partner for whom this is perhaps their first interactions … dealing with issues of slavery, it is important to spend some time being honest with folks and really talking about what that all means in terms of how they want to proceed in a relationship and a family and all of those things.” — Mark Kenney, counselor…
Picking a college isn’t easy. For teens weighing their options there are a lot of factors to consider. YR Media’s Valencia White says her racial identity played a big role.
As a senior, the question I get asked the most is: Where do you want to go to college? My answer is always the same. I want to go to Howard University or Spelman College, both of which are historically Black colleges. But sometimes I ask myself, “Am I Black enough to go to an HBCU?”
I’m biracial — my mom is mixed with Black and Filipino and my dad is white. In seventh grade, my parents switched me from a majority-white Catholic school to a more diverse school. I quickly realized how little diversity I had been exposed to at my old school. I was happy for once not to be the only Black kid in the class.
But adjusting to a new school didn’t come easily.
Kids would ask me, “Why do you act so white?” I felt like I had to change my personality just to be accepted. I know I’m Black and that’s something I’ve never doubted. But when my peers constantly doubted my blackness, I started to question my identity…
Read the entire story here. Listen to the story (00:02:08) here.
Betty Reid Soskin’s lectures at Richmond’sRosie the Riveter Museum have garnered her national attention, including a visit with President Obama in 2015. Soskin’s talks reflect on the oft-overlooked African-American wartime experience and how opportunities for black women have changed throughout her lifetime. Now the 96-year-old has written a memoir, “Sign My Name to Freedom,” documenting her history as a political activist, musician and entrepreneur. A longtime resident of the East Bay, Soskin illustrates how the Bay Area laid the groundwork for the national civil rights movement.
Listen to the interview (00:34:56) here. Download the interview here.
I enjoy a lot of privileges. I’m middle class and I go to a good school. On top of that Asian Americans just seem to fare better in terms of bias and racism — at least these days.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that privilege exists. We don’t have to become defensive, and we don’t have to feel guilty for it, but we do have to know when it’s there.
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My mom is Chinese, with black hair and tan skin. My dad is white, with light eyes and skin the color of office paper. I, on the other hand, am an awkward midway point: dark skin, but not super dark; black hair, but not super black.
It used to be that I never thought about my mixed race. But as I’ve gotten older, and now that I attend a predominantly white suburban school, race is constantly on my mind.
Recently, my classmates and I participated in a survey calculating our privilege…
Read the story here. Listen to the story (00:02:20) here.
In his 1964 Nobel Prize lecture, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described humanity as a “world house,” filled with family of all backgrounds who must somehow learn to live with each other.
Within the borders of our countries, cities and states, our own homes are increasingly becoming multi-ethnic, multiracial microcosms of the greater world house to which King refers.
On the most recent episode of So Well Spoken, we dove into the complex world of multiethnic families, interracial marriages and cross-cultural adoptions. How do families handle racial issues and celebrate who they are?
Read the entire article here. Listen to the episode (00:51:26) here.
Using a common DNA ancestry test, President Obama would be 100% Caucasian.
Sometimes genetic tests aren’t as useful as you think they will be. For example, if President Obama were to take a common ancestry DNA test, it would almost certainly come back as 100% Caucasian. Useful, huh?
This sort of test, a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) test, can look into the deep past but it can only see mom’s side of the family. And it isn’t even really that powerful. It not only ignores dad’s side of the family, but in reality it can only see a sliver of mom’s as well…
…The other kind of test, the Y chromosome test, can go as far back along the paternal line as the mtDNA test can along the maternal line but it suffers from the same problems. In fact, a surprising number (35%?) of African-American men actually have Caucasian Y chromosomes (well, given plantation life, maybe not so surprising). None of these men will learn anything about their African heritage with this test.
So the bottom line is don’t put too much faith into DNA testing alone. It is kind of fun to trace back your history this way but you are really only following one strand of your ancestral web back in time. The rest of the web is invisible to DNA testing…
