Light-skinned-ed Girl

More on the Mocha Baby Nod

I spent the last few days in Las Vegas helping my friend launch her new bra-sized swimwear line.  (It looks fantastic --and it's perfect support for C/D and up sizes.)  -- We hired two models to show-off the swimwear.  It was only after three days of standing in a small booth for 8 hours a day that I learned that one of the models was half-black and half-white.  She had light-skin (like me), blue-green eyes (like me) -- but I just didn't see it.  Or maybe it was because she never chimed in when we talked about "black" woman things and she never gave me that all-important Mocha Baby Nod.  The young woman was very young--19-years-old.  So maybe it was a function of age, or maybe it is true that things are changing.  That she didn't feel like she had to bond with me because she knows lots of mixed people.  If that's true that's awesome.  But I still hope the Mocha Baby Nod carries on.

Mixed Race Mixed Media & the Saar Women

I had to see the incredible exhibit, Family Legacies, by the Saar women again before it closes on Sunday.  The first time I saw the exhibit with my mother.  It was incredibly moving to go through that space together, her, a white immigrant woman, and my tan me.  It opened up a place for us to talk about difference without it being --dangerous?  Today, I visited with my very good friend--another biracial (Jamaican and white American) woman with blue eyes.  She said it was a wonderful experience because she felt validated as a mixed race woman.  She said she felt like the exhibit gave her permission to tell her own complicated story without exception or apology.  Yes.  I felt that way too.

Survivor's $1M Game: Playing the Race Card

Survivor producer Mark Burnett is playing a really game.  Apparently, the producers have decided to divide the "tribes"--which are pitted against each other--by race.  Now, I am not a Survivor watcher, and this stunt won't turn me into one--but I think it's a shame that in 2006 it's okay to make a profit off of racial discord and the possibility that bigot in someone comes out.

More on Biracial Adoption/Transracial Adoption

If you haven’t heard of the Black People Nod, then you certainly haven’t heard of the Mocha Baby Nod.  But let me explain.  When black people see each other in public— particularly in a place mostly populated by white people—we nod to each other.  It’s a demonstration of recognition and solidarity.  It’s a simple gesture that says: I see you.  We belong to each other.

Being biracial (African-American and Danish), I also do a variation of the Nod that I call the Mocha Baby Nod.  If I see a white woman or a black man with a curly-headed light brown-skinned child in tow, I nod.  I’m trying to let them know: You are not alone.  I’m one of your daughter’s or son’s people—and guess what, we grow up and we’re pretty okay.  For me, it’s important to let interracial families know: I see you.  I see exactly how--despite your difference--you make a family.

Imposed invisibility is the primary difficulty of the mixed-race family.  I remember when I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for people to compliment my mother on the beautiful brown babies.  And then finish with: “whose are they?”  When we became a little older, there were the awkward silences when my mother would appear at school functions.  “Oh, this is your mother?” people would say in wide-eyed surprise when they looked at my blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother next to me.

My mother, a single white woman, who raised me and my two brothers, would take the questions and comments in stride.  And I think because it didn’t seem to bother her, it didn’t bother us as much.  We still knew what our family was.  We didn’t need anyone to approve of us.  As we grew older, there were fewer questions and comments.  And then there was Mariah Carey!, and Tiger Woods! and the other mainstream celebrities who brought attention to the mixed family.

In discussions about transracial adoptions like in the recent New York Times front-page article “Breaking Through Adoption’s Racial Barriers” August 17, 2006, I think it’s important to take into account the truth of the experience of interracial families.  The crux of the transracial adoption issue is whether through the American lens of race we can see mixed-race families as families.  The answer is: increasingly, we can. 

I applaud the growing number of transracial adoptions.  I am happy to know that more children are finding loving homes—regardless of the adopting parents’ race. 

More blended families means more visibility.  When “othermothering” and “otherfathering”—whether it be through interracial unions or transracial adoptions--becomes more commonplace, it only helps to change for the better stereotyped notions of interracial alliances.

A dominant objection to transracial adoptions is that white parents cannot adequately “teach” black children how to “navigate the country’s complicated racial landscape,” as an interviewee said.  But to accept that argument is to deny the reality of my experience and that of other biracial children raised by single white parents  (and there are many).  We didn’t have a black role model at home.  We learned to “navigate the country’s racial landscape” in a new way—in a way that I hope is redrawing the landscape’s map.

Writer Lisa Jones, daughter of Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, writes: “My mother, more than anyone I know, has taught me difference as pleasure.  Not as something feared or exotic, but difference as one of the rich facts of one’s life, a truism that gives you more data, more power, and more flavor.”  This is the best lesson that parents who adopt transracially can teach their children.

In a new biography, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, about Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, who was half-black and half-Danish, George Hutchinson writes that Larsen’s writing and biography have, thus far, been misconstrued because her interracial background was dismissed.  “Psychic health, as many would have it,” he writes, “requires the child to develop a normative black racial identity, assimilating ‘realistically’ to the law of the color line.”  Mixed families are changing that assumption and forcing society to deal “realistically” with the visibility of their family identity.

At the farmer’s market this week, I noticed a dark-skinned black man with dreds carrying a butterscotch-hued child in a knapsack on his chest.  The white woman next to him held the hand of a curly-haired little brown-skinned boy.  I gave them the Mocha Baby nod.  I smiled.  I nodded again.  They didn’t even notice me standing there—my wild, curly hair just like their son’s—my blue-green eyes as bright as the eyes of the baby they carried.  I didn’t take it personally.  I understood:  they didn’t notice the Mocha Baby Nod, because they were too busy being a family.

Reiki & Talking Back

Last night, I attended my friend's Reiki circle last night for the second time.  I am first to admit: though she explains it each time, the real deal behind Reiki.  But I can tell you that I felt profoundly relaxed after the guided meditation; I felt calmer when I left than I felt when I had arrived.  In her introduction to the evening she explained some of the good things that she has experienced since beginning Reiki practice and one of them she said was SELF-LOVE.  I cringed.  Self-love?  I like self-discipline, self-flagellation, self-defense, self-fortification!  The hard, gritty stuff.  But Self-love?  Well, what if that worked?  What if that is the way?  I'm thinking about it.

Writing Colonies as a Lifeline

Today's New York Times Book Review had a backpage essay about writers' colonies today.  It's a world that many emerging writers don't know about, but it could be their lifeline.  The Times article talked about Macdowell and Yaddo--the biggies--(I can't seem to get into Macdowell no matter what I write or who recommends me--aargh!).  But there are many others.  My first experience at a writers' colony was Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island in Washington state.  It is only for female writers and it was a haven.  I lived in my own cottage with a sleeping loft and kitchenette.  There was a shared shower/bath and laundry house not too many steps away.  My lunch was brought to the door in a lovely basket, and dinner was served in the main house with the other five residents.  It really changed my world--to have my own space, to have my writing (then 1997 and i hadn't written a publishable word) respected and recognized--it was amazing.  Since then I have become a colony junkie: Jentel Arts, Djerassi, New York Mills Cultural Center.  Each has had its own memorable features and each has been a place of profound creativity for me.

The Great Creole American Novel

this post can't do this subject justice, but let me start here.  several years ago, the excellent novelist Russell Banks wrote an article called "Who will tell the people?  on waiting still for the great american creole novel"for Harper's magazine.  he argues that our literature still hasn't told the story of america as one people -- all the different mixes as being from one great story and not disparate ones.  he writes: "our [america's] story does not commence, Chapter One does not open, until we begin to mix."  he wrote this in june 2000--i don't know that the Great one has been written yet.  but i know i've written one that is pretty darn good.  it is my great creole american novel.

Interracial Adoption

Today's New York Times front page led with a story "Breaking Through Adoption's Racial Barriers."  Apparently, in the last decade, the number of interracial adoptions has dramatically increased.  The NYT reports that 4200 black children were adopted transracially from foster care.  "That is up from roughly 14 percent, or 2,200, in 1998, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and from the Department of Health and Human Services."  Wow.  I think it's a great trend -- that children are getting homes without regard to their color.  I wrote about this in an article published a decade ago in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism: "Mothering Across the Color Lines: White Women, "Black" Babies."  I wrote about my personal experience as the biracial/black daughter of a white single mother.  The difficulties that people suggest are the difficulties of identification and assimilation and of keeping children connected to their "heritage" could also be the result of growing up in a household as I did.  And I would hope that we are not ready to (again) outlaw mixed marriages because of those difficulties.  I thought one woman--the white mother of two now-adult black adoptees--was the most important thing to remember for families blended in all different ways: "The way most white people use the term 'colorblind' is just silly.  We want to create color aware families, not colorblind families."  Agreed.  It's the solution to the problem that "Race trumps family" as George Hutchinson, author of In Search of Nella Larsen, so eloquently puts it. 

library card freak

that's me.  i can't help myself.  i love the library.  i love all libraries.  i visit libraries when i'm travelling even when i can't get library privileges. i just love the library.  today though i scored an all-time coup.  i got two library cards issued to me.  two--in one day.  one for columbia university libraries--and one for the research arm of the new york public library--it had been so long since i've done research there i didn't know a separate id was required.  but that wasn't the best part.  the best part is the access to the digital databases.  i can spend hours on-line at home printing to my heart's content articles from various scholarly journals and dissertations.  i know i'm a geek.  but look what i've found an article by thomas kennedy from The Literary Review called Living in Another Language!  and a piece by faith adiele in The Massachusetts Review called Gifts.  lucky me.  what a gift.  how will i ever stop searching these databases and printing and printing and printing!

Teaching the N-Word

is an incredibly wonderful article about an African-American woman, Emily Bernard, who teaches African-American studies at a mostly white university in Vermont.  Married to a white man, the professor's attempt to teach African-American studies as impersonally as possible -that is, academically, intellectually--breaks down when she confronts the truth of her Real feelings about the use of the N-word.  She writes about a conversation with her husband that unsettles her in ways she can't comprehend.  Her husband "confesses" that the only time he ever heard "the word" was from his fahter's cousin who said, referring to Jesse Jackson: "I'm going to vote for the nigger.  He's the only one who cares about the workingman." -- She relates the story to her class: "What I remember is that I tried to project for them a sense that I was untroubled by saying 'nigger,' by my husband's saying 'nigger,' by his father's cousin having 'nigger,' by his parents'--my in-laws--tolerance of 'nigger' in their home, years ago, long before I came along."  --It's a complicated business this word.  Because even writing this in this post makes me nervous --that somehow now my name and the n-word demand a result together in a google search.