Light-skinned-ed Girl

Tyra's Painted Contestants Brown for "Hapa Honor"

Oh really?  Look, I don't watch reality TV--well, except that I do -- in fits and starts -- whenever I get control of the remote and find myself alone -- that is to say I have seen episodes of (but don't "follow" Project Runway, Survivor, and the Real Housewives of Atlanta on purpose.  My A.I. addiction is not included as reality TV.) 

Tonight it was America's Next Top Model.  Love it when I see it except today. In honor of being in Hawaii for the shoot and for the number one Hapa -- the President: she's got the contestants potraying "hapa" with different cultures.  She's painted some of the models brown and is playing "tribal" music in some of the sequences.  One contestant was told she was only portraying the "Russian" side of her "hapaness."  I mean really.

Would she do the same thing if they were in Kenya and said: now we will do a photo shoot of you as a black Kenyan?  No.  

Maybe I am making too big a deal of this --what do you think?

No Difference Between Them: Portraits of Interracial Couples

I was delighted to receive a copy of No Difference Between Them: The Black & White Portraits--a stunning photo book of interracial couples by Robert Kalman.  I was honored to write the book's introduction! 

Congratulations Robert!  And thank you for these beautiful photographs--an essential record of what human connection looks like.

Michelle Obama's Mixed Experience

I loved learning about the story of Michelle Obama's great-great grandfather, Dolphus Shields, a "mulatto" born two years before Emancipation.

Across the blogosphere, the story has met with a yawn, disdain at dredging up a painful history of black women being raped by slave masters, and irritation. Black in America has always meant mixed, folks say.  No argument from me.  

But let me just tell you what made it interesting to me: it was a Story!  Not just an abstract fact of life that most likely there were interracial relations in a family's past.  The New York Times and the genealogist who helped root out the details were able to tell us facts about this man and his life.  What we will never know are his thoughts about the circumstance of his birth, about his relation to living life as a black man when he knew that (if the law had recognized it) he was also half white.

Why is this blog called Light-skinned-ed Girl?

I was 11 the first time I heard the term "light-skinned-ed."  (And yes, the kids said it with the extra "ed.")

My family had just moved and we were living in a mostly black community for the first time. Someone had asked me the now-familiar question "What are you?"  I had learned pretty quickly that when people asked they wanted to know what race I was; why did I look the way I did?  "Black and white," I'd said.  "Oh," the girl said, "I thought you were just light-skinned-ed."

It baffled me at the time.

Now, I claim the term as my invitation or pass into black womanhood.  (I say black womanhood specifically because I felt most estranged from black women growing up--even though I wanted so much to belong.)

When I claim my light-skinned-ed-ness, it's not to valorize my skin color, but to accept the way that in some ways I belong to the world of black womanhood.  I can look like this and not have to Prove my allegiance.

Yes, well, then why claim it at all?  Why not be on firm ground and simply identify as a black woman?  Many women -- more light-skinned-ed than I -- have done that through the ages.  The answer is simply that it would negate my actual experience -- it doesn't tell the whole of the story I want to tell.

It's complicated this naming business.  I'm not sure that I've figured it out completely myself. 

Hello & Welcome to My Blog

Welcome to my blog, Light-Skinned-ed Girl, a mixed chick's mixed thoughts on a mixed-up world.

Since 2006, I've been writing about the vagaries of race, biracial identity, and the Mixed experience--essentially I write "On the Biracial Thing."

 Some of my favorite (and controversial) posts on those subjects appear here:

• The Family Album is Mixed
• 1st Mixed Race People History Month Kick-off
  
• 2nd Annual Mixed Experience History Month Kick-off
• 3rd Annual Mixed Experience History Month Kick-off
• Mixed Experience History Month Re-Cap & a Pledge to Soldier On
• Did you know that these people were mixed? playwright August Wilson, artist Isamu Noguchi, writer Nella Larsen (black and Danish like me), activist Mildred Loving
  
• Are Those Your Eyes Part 5
• Are Those Your Eyes Part 7

I'm a writer who often blogs about the creative life: moments of inspiration and disappointment.  In 2008, I won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change.  My debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books), will be published in February 2010!  (You can pre-order it now.)  The book, a coming-of-age story mixed with a mystery and a love story, was named one of the Top Ten Promising Debuts in Publishers Weekly in June.  Follow my journey from unpublished to published writer as I chronicle each little step along the way.

• My First Book Appearance
• The Advanced Reading Copy of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is Ready
• I Won the Bellwether Prize!

 Sometimes I write about my travels.  I am lucky to have experienced many adventures.

And sometimes I write about--well, anything that's on my mind.  That was especially true in 2008 when I blogged every single day of the year from wherever I was in the world.

I hope you enjoy the read!

:) heidi

P.S.  If you're looking for more cool stuff, check out my website where you can find more of my writing, or check out the weekly podcast I co-host called Mixed Chicks Chat and then read about the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, an annual free public event, I co-founded and co-produce!

Please Join Us at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival

Many of you know that I am the co-founder and co-producer along with my buddy, Fanshen Cox, of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival --www.mxroots.org--which takes place at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, CA (369 East First Street) on June 12 and 13.

This is the second year of the Festival and we are so excited about the line-up.  Mind you, as two women who didn't plan their own weddings because it was too daunting--it's a miracle that we're pulling this off, but we really are. 

Last year we had the help of some extraordinary folks: cousin Lesa, Meesh, and Amy!  They put in so many hours and hard work.  There really is no way to thank them.

This year the lovely Jennifer Frappier has whipped our vision into what looks to be an exciting and smoothly run event. 

I am so proud of this project.  I would really love for you to join us.  Please come.  And guess what?  It's all free!  This is what you get:

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• The Festival hosts the largest West Coast Loving Day party, a nationwide celebration of the Supreme Court decision which affirmed the right of people of different races to marry, on Friday, June 12, 2009 at 6:30pm. The free mixer features the Coca - Cola Lounge for drinks and cool fun while DJs Life and Vika spin decades of dance floor classics.

• Writer and producer Angela Nissel (Mixed, Scrubs) will receive the Festival's award for inspirational storytelling of the Mixed experience during the Saturday night Loving Prize Presentation, June 13, 2009 at 6pm, which features performances by musician Jason Luckett, actor Chris Williams, and comedian Maija DiGiorgio.

• The Melting Pot Moms, a multiracial family support group, will host a Family Event on Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 10:30am-12:30pm, for kids ages 3-11, featuring TV actress Kim Wayans and husband, Kevin Knotts, reading from their popular children's book series, Amy Hodgepodge.

• Hollywood actors, directors and writers discuss Mixed in Hollywood in a special panel on Saturday, June 13, 2009 12:50pm-1:50pm.  Karyn Parsons, Chris Williams, Joe Anaya, Jenny Rich and Angela Nissel.

• Among the dozen films that the Festival will screen is the award-winning In the Name of the Son (dir. Harun Mehmedinovic), which was an Official Selection of the Festival de Cannes and winner of the AFI Directing Award. Making her directing debut is the popular You Tube vlogger Tiffany Jones of the Mulatto Diaries.

• The Festival includes author readings by award-winning author Danzy Senna (Caucasia, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?), Bellwether Prize winner novelist Gayle Brandeis (The Book of Dead Birds, Self-Storage) and poet Neil Aitken (Winner of the Philip Levine Prize, The Lost Country of Sight), among others.

 

All events are free and open to the public. The complete schedule can be found on-line at www.mxroots.org. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged especially for the Loving Day Party. On-line registration is now open at www.mxroots.org.

Festival sponsors and donors include: Japanese American National Museum, Social Justice Works!: The Aaronson Fund, Zerflin.com, the Coca - Cola Company, Trader Joe's, Subway, Dolls Like Me, Devachan Salon & Spa, SAG Indie, Urth Caffé, L.T. Projects Plus Catering.

Mixed Experience History Month: A Recap & Pledge to Soldier On!

We've reached the end of the 3rd Annual Mixed Experience History Month!  Here are some of my favorite posts this year: Paula Gunn Allen, Charles Curtis, and William H. Johnson.

It has taken an extraordinary amount of research to find these forgotten, hidden or erased stories of the Mixed experience: many of the people I profiled this month were "new-to-me" biracial--maybe they were for you too.  In any event, I love mining the history books for these stories--more to come next year.  In the meantime, please send recommendations my way of people/events/ideas that you'd like to know more about.

I leave you with this wonderful email I received last week from the brilliant actor Stephen McKinley Henderson who recently directed the amazing show, Zooman and the Sign, at Signature Theatre in New York.  I am a huge fan of his work and was floored when I received this email from him in response to my August Wilson post.  I share it here with you with his permission:

Hello Heidi,

I was moved to write you because of the August Wilson entry that Google sent my way.  Your premise for the website is inspired.  The ancient literary staple of the tragic mulatto has long been eclipsed by the contributions and personal missions of mixed blood perspectives.  Every war that has been fought, perhaps even the war on terrorism soon, has produced children born across enemy lines.  Nothing human is foreign to us.

Thank you for your piece on August.  I traveled with him during the last ten years of his life as an actor in several of his plays here and abroad.  Freeing ones self and others from negative perceptions of the self and the world is a noble mission.  Soldier on, Sister.  Soldier on.


Stephen McKinley Henderson

I soldier on!  Thank you Stephen, and thanks to all of you who have followed Mixed Experience History Month this year.
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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Casta Paintings

Casta paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries featured mixed-race people in the post-Conquest period.

Done by many of Mexico's great artists including Miguel Cabrera, the paintings were often comprised of several family group scenes which showed the progressive dilution of 'pure' Spanish blood,
with Indian, and African blood.

In casta paintings, Spaniards have the highest social standing; in successive scenes, the families become darker and increasingly poor.  Beneath the paintings are inscriptions, such as "From Spaniard and Black, Mulatto," which essentially: "narrat[e] the process of miscegenation."

More information: Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Garcilaso de la Vega, historian & writer

The product of a mixed marriage between a Spaniard and a royal Incan princess, Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cusco, Peru.

Garcilaso spoke both Quechua and Spanish and traveled to Spain in 1560 with money inherited from his father.  There, he was educated but only after presenting his case to the Spanish courts to receive recognition for the rights of his father--mixed marriages were not recognized in Spain at the time.

Garcilaso took the name "El Inca," thereafter, as a proud statement of his heritage.

Garcilaso published Comentarios Reales de los Incas in 1609.  The book serves as the most detailed document of Incan history and early colonial rule of its time.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Nicolas Guillen, poet & activist

Nicolas Guillen, an Afro-Cuban born in 1902, became known as Cuba's national poet.

Of African and Spanish descent, Guillen studied law in Havana but abandoned a legal career to pursue journalism.

Guillen founded a literary magazine with his brother and wrote for several Cuban newspapers and magazines.  In 1930, he published his ground-breaking collection of poetry, Motivos de Son.  Guillen's poems were informed by his multicultural background.  In Songoro Cosongo, published in 1931, he emphasized the importance of mulatto culture in Cuban history.  Langston Hughes translated Guillen's poetry in a collection called Cuba Libre.  Guillen's writing became increasingly political; and in 1937, he joined the Communist party. 

Guillen spent much of the 1940s and 1950s in exile but was welcomed back to Cuba by Fidel Castro.  Guillen published more than a dozen books in his lifetime.  He died in 1989 after a long illness.