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this is my first posting. hello! my name is sarah, and i'm half black half jewish. my mother is jewish.
A friend of mine recommended a book called 'Ace of Spades' by David Matthews (you can find it here: http://tr.im/iGsu), and I love it so much. I'm half way through it and I can't believe how great this book is. It's so funny and personable. There are moments where I have to put the book down and just burst out laughing. But wow, is it well written! David Matthews is poetic with his words. Truly astounding.
Here's a brief description from The New Yorker:The son of a Zionist white mother and a Malcolm X-admiring black father, Matthews, in this memoir, is a boy without a race in a city, Baltimore, that requires him to choose one. The story of racial pinball is not entirely unfamiliar: the black kids reject him as too light-skinned, the whites as too broad-nosed. But Matthews displays improvisational verve—blacks are "burnished" and "browned butter," and whites are anything from "alabaster" to "a puffy marshmallow in Baltimore’s steaming cup of cocoa"—and narrates with the vigor of a movie script. Indeed, it is on television that, as a child, he finds the clarity he yearns for. "I was a living contradiction of elements that shouldn’t have been," he writes at one point, whereas on TV "everything was black, or white, and a lot like life."
Really, i can't recommend this book more! I love it! Have you read it?
here's the author, david matthews:
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Mar. 29th, 2009 @ 01:54 pm
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I'm a biracial girl with no biracial friends. I created a journal specifically to meet other biracials so we can all discuss our experiences, opinions etc. It'll cover a lot of topics that most biracials have to deal with at one time or another. Please add me and let's talk! :) |
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 Asians are considered racial minorities, but there is very little effort to include their people, customs, and or specific issues within the context of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Community. They are overshadowed by other races and rarely taken into account.
Learn more and share your experience, by checking out:
Diversity Lesson 101: LGBTQ Asians |
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 Now that Obama El Dali Lama has won, I find myself in a position I never wanted to be in, don't like, and am very resentful that I have to defend from not only the black community but now the white community.
Let me set every single one of you straight before I type another thing.
I am MULTIracial. My father is WHITE. My mother is BLACK. They are MARRIED. I wasn't made OUT OF WEDLOCK (not that should matter anyway). My parents were married in the sixties, a time when interracial relationships were not common and still looked down upon (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner). I grew up at a time when little mixed kids weren't the poster children for Gap ads. My family on my mother's side didn't like me much. Same could be said on my father's side. School wasn't much easier either. I attended both all white and all black schools. I was called a nigger in one, a honky in the other. At summer camp, councellors when filling out paperwork would always try to classify me. It seemed that everyone had a problem with my dual background.
Everyone but myself.
Let me go into a little more detail here if you will so indulge. On my mother's side its black (from slave days- make no doubt about it, my family on that side have been here a long time) as well as American Indian, Lakota Sioux to to be precise. On my father's side, English and Scottish however after doing some recent research that I have found out I am more French (my great, great, great grandfather came over from France in the late 1800's) than Scottish, and more Scottish than English.
If you look at me, you have a hard time placing me. A lot of people seem to mistake me for Latino.
But once again, make no mistake-
I AM MULTIRACIAL AND VERY PROUD OF THIS FACT.
And no man who was confused about his "identity" is going to define me.
Which is the very first moment, several years ago when I was on Obama's website when he was running for his SENATE seat (so kiss my ass people who think I dislike him just because Hillary lost- you are stupid. You probably didn't know his name or who he was four years ago.) and participating on his forums that I started to see what he was about and started to formulate my strong dislike of the man. I saw trouble a long time ago for people like me, who fight to not be defined or to be accepted as being of more than one race as opposed to the old time slave attitudes that has been accepted by most Americans, both white and black. Only in the last 15 years (15!!) have Americans been allowed to pick more than one race on most government forms as opposed to choosing or denying the genetic contribution of the other parent.
Let me explain to you where that "one drop" rule came from- it was a form of control so that slave owners when they slept with their slaves could still put the child of the union in the field and deny them a right to inheritance.
If that isn't a backwards view, I don't know what is. Yet it persists in 2008- gap baby ads and all!
So it's taken all this time to finally get the United States to allow a person like me to represent myself exactly as I am and now I am having to fight fights I used to have to only occasionally fight. It seems that the "white" people are now emboldened to say things that perhaps they only thought (and I mean those so-called "liberated" ones) where as I usually have only have had to have this discussion on a regular basis with black people who think that I am trying to "pass" or be a "traitor to my kind".
I hate this shit. I hate it. I hate it. And I thought it was getting better until the moment Obama stepped on the scene and pulled the political stunt when it came to race that would bring the house down.
So I am glad if you feel that the US has turned a corner when it comes to race relations but you would be sadly mistaken. We've only proven "separate, but equal". It proves only that no matter what, you can only be one or the other because the world would end if we acknowledged that maybe a black person and a white person produced another PERSON who is the sum of it's parts and not one or the other but BOTH. It's only in humans that we do this shit (and it seems even more an American Affliction, which probably explains why I want to move to the UK so badly) where people are classified by "drops". It makes me sick and anyone who buys into it, I hate with an unbridled passion because it only proves to me that for all the love of equality and people are the same, deep down they are full of shit and one is still the "other" because if you didn't deep down think people are different, then there could be a "both".
So spare me why I don't like Obama (or Hallie Berry for that matter). To me, yes it IS personal. For anyone to question who they are based on what color their parents are instead of just accept that they are alive and a product of both disturbs me immensely. What disturbs me even more is that now we have a president who is buying into this crap and Americans are notoriously swayed by flashing lights on tv and what is thrown at them and adopt a group-think mentality instead of really questioning things to the deepest level.
My life is already hard as a woman. It just got harder as a PROUDLY MULTIRACIAL woman.
I can't fight MTV, YouTube, or the Media. Once spoken, things spread like wildfire.
Again, I saw this long before anyone knew who Obama was outside of Illinois.
If you're white, you won't get what I am saying. If you are black, you won't get what I am saying. I suspect only mixed race people will get where I am coming from by having shared experiences but I don't even expect them to agree with me- at least not if they are American.
I started to write this last night because I knew he was going to win. This morning, I have such a deep sadness in my soul it's going to be very hard to get through the day.
Make no mistake- I hate with a passion discussing issues with race, however I feel forced to do so now and I will be forever resentful of this. |
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Aug. 26th, 2007 @ 01:08 am
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ok so first things first
brianne
16
black/irish
this might sound weird maybe it's because of where i grow up? i don't think i get treated much differently for being mixed i mean i know i do because people are always careful to try not to offend me. but i guess i know a good number of mixed people. but it's obvious that im mixed i dont look black and i dont look white ( sorry if those terms offend anyone) but i looked completely mixed till in 5th grade where i almost broke my nose so now i have a wide-ish nose but i look like the classical mixed person or what people think of-yellow tinted skin, hazel/light brown eyes, good hair, hair that lightens in the summer, and features of both races. every once in a while i get some grief about it that i dont fit in here or here. i remember one time some guy said he would never date a "white" girl because he doesn't believe in intreracial relationships and doesn't think they work out and almost everyone turned to me and i was just like "so..you KNOW im mixed right? and you know about 4 other people in this room are RIGHT?" and it just seemed like he didnt care which makes me wonder if im going to run into trouble later. but maybe it's growing up near military bases but i never even knew there was a movement for biracial people =\ everyone around here is every color of the rainbow lol you walk through the mall and see mixed people, asians, caucasians,african-americans, arabs,hispanics it's just a mix of people and for the most part people are accepting. but if there IS a movement then i'd like to get more info on it if anyone has some =]]Current Mood:  thoughtful |
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Hi everyone!
I'm thinking about starting a blog...
I've been a little bit burnt out in terms of my mixed race activism this summer, and I'm trying to figure out what I can do to..rejuvenate my energy and excitement. As some of you might know, I've been all over the country this past year meeting people and going to conferences and what not, meeting all the right people, doing all the right things, but in doing so I've become very disenchanted with the face of mixed-race activism, in that I feel it isn't aligning itself with the anti-racist movement as effectively as it could. I'm kind of in love with the blogosphere, and I thought that this might be a good medium for the work-- what ever it becomes-- that I could pursue.
So I'm thinking about starting a blog to more tangibly fuse the two movements. Ideally, the blog would be comprised of three to six regular contributors who write articles that pertain to mixed-race (including transracial adoptee) identity that present a critical analysis of the relationship of mixed-race identity to the anti-racist movement. People could focus on movies, tv, music, academia, fashion, literature, their day to day experiences, make up, marketing, classism, privilege... whatever they like, really.. as long as it's about mixed identity and furthers an anti-racist agenda.
I would love it if the people involved in this project came from a wide variety of experiences in terms of class and educational backgrounds, ages, gender identities, sexual orientations, geographic locations, etc.
If any of you are interested in being a writer, or have experience with the blogosphere, please contact me with any thoughts you might have about this project.
Also, if you know anyone who might be interested in this project, please please please forward this email to them.
Yours,
Danni Sigwalt
aim: dsigwalt
yahoo: dannigrl212
gtalk/email: danielle.sigwalt at gmail dot com
Aug. 19th, 2007 @ 12:10 pm
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