I know I've been silent --but I can't be silent when it's time to celebrate my peeps!
Mixed Experience History Month, established in 2007, celebrates stories of the Mixed experience. I'll bring you a new story each weekday of May starting on Monday, May 4: a new profile of some person, story or experience that highlights the Mixed experience.
I will say it again: the Mixed experience and Mixed identity didn't begin in the 1960s because of Free Love--we have a long history of Mixed experience that's been erased and/or forgotten. It's time to tell the complicated Truth.
I am more excited to share these stories with you this year than ever before--mostly because I have felt that silence was safer than talking about these issues. And that's not what I want to believe.
Here's why:
I attended a reception for NAACP President Ben Jealous -- lovely man. Lovely reception. I was glad to be invited.
Ben Jealous, by the way, is biracial. His white father was in attendance --and I know it's not something that Mr. Jealous hides, but it's also not something that he has allowed to complicate the story he's telling about "Colored People."
At dinner after the reception, I managed to get into one of those crazy conflicts when you think that you're in agreement but you see the other person is infuriated (not a good thing at a nice dinner party). I was talking about the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival and biracial identity and I was getting all excited. But the woman who was a Mexican mother of a black-Mexican child objected to the word Mixed. I couldn't recover. Or maybe she couldn't. I wanted to talk about her aversion to the word. And really, I thought, her aversion to the idea of talking about being Mixed. But I failed. The conversation ended on a bitter note in one of those dinner party ways. I know she was probably still talking bad about me when she left. And really, I was just wondering what had I said to inflame her?
How do I talk about this stuff without getting people all riled up in a way that turns them off? Especially someone who should be in my ideal audience. (Do you think she will buy the book? :) )
My default is to not make it personal--and maybe that's what went wrong--I didn't stick to the default. If Ben Jealous or Barack Obama or this young woman who is the mother of a biracial kid don't want to be biracial: cool. Self-identification is the key.
And it doesn't behoove the story I'm trying to tell to make the biracial thing a "trend." I love the magazine cover with Heidi Klum and Seal and the photos of their family--but I'm not talking about celebrities or a moment--I'm talking about history --
So .... welcome to Mixed Experience History Month. Tune in every weekday of May to read about something or someone that has to do with this loooooong history of Mixed folks and Mixed experience. And now I'm just talking facts! Go on and disagree or not. Here we go . . .
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