Light-skinned-ed Girl

Thinking Bloggers

Thank you to Cloudscome for tagging me for the Thinking Blogger Award.  Now, I'm required to tag five bloggers who make me think.  This is only difficult in that I don't get to tag Cloudscome herself who writes wonderful posts about children's books and wonderful wonderful haikus.  Please make sure to read her Langston Hughes haiku.  Okay, here are my five (in no particular order):

1) Twisted Curlz: another mixed chick writer who writes about identity, race and her engagement with life.  She's in the thick of discovery and I'm always happy to read her blog.

2) A Birth Project: another mixed chick actress and student and deep thinker.  Read about her one-woman show about being a transracial adoptee.

3)That Black Girl: an African-American woman married to a white man who lives in my old neighborhood.  She's got a lot to say about race and identity (you can see a theme with the blogs I've picked) that other people won't say.

so enough about race, here are two other favorites that make me tune in in a different way:

4) Wish Jar Journal, a guerilla artist and woo-er of the muse.  She's a visual artist but her insights into the creative life worth living are wonderful.  Plus she encourages play!

5) Chapter XVII: an anonymous friend who has introduced me to some great blogs and books and other things.  You won't be able to guess the particulars of WHO this particular chick is.  She has multitudes and has wonderful insights into the everyday business of life.

According to the meme, all you guys who have been tagged must tag your own five.  Can't wait to see what you all have to say.

Seeds of Blackness II

I was interviewed for an article on Kiri Davis' short film, A Girl Like Me, which I blogged about some time ago.  I am cautious about talking to reporters because 1) I tend to say too much when I improvise; and 2) I have a fear of being misquoted.  I can't say that Burt Constable did in his Daily Herald article We’re ready for a black president; are we ready for black dolls?   But I am having some conflicting feelings about what I ended up sharing:

“I learned about the way I was supposed to think about black people from black people,” says Durrow, who has one white parent and one black. “A lot of times we didn’t have good opinions of ourselves.”

I feel certain that this is a bit of dirty laundry that I shouldn't have shared.  What do you guys think?

more sky

a writers' retreat: renewal under a big sky

this is my backyard for the next three weeks.  it's more beautiful than i can capture.  i have been excited and energized these past three days.  i hauled more stuff here than you can imagine: close to 100 books, two boxes of crayons, my cookie monster slippers and a month's supply of bendy straws and crates of papers and files.  i spent the weekend unpacking and setting up my studio in the most ideal way.  then this morning--completely ready to write in my perfect room of my own--i panicked.  with nothing stopping me, i stopped myself.  i couldn't get myself into the studio to work.  i took a nap.  why?  what i want most to do is write--every day, every where.  why wasn't i writing?  and then i thought maybe i need to turn the question around.  why do i write?

Persephone Speaks blogs about a recent women's writers' retreat she attended where she had to answer that question in a brand new way.  persephone writes:

"Why do I write?  That’s easy. It’s a question I’ve answered many times – or thought I had, anyway. I write because that’s how I process my experiences. I don’t necessarily write about my own experiences, but by writing, I come to understand the events of my life somewhat more clearly. I’ve said that countless times, and assumed I would rattle it off again when it was my turn.

But then something odd happened. I looked around the room, at these women, all close friends, all artists whom I respect and all people whom I trust – and I began to panic. I was to be the third to speak, and listening to the first two answers - sincere, generous - I started to tremble and then became very still. Because I knew that I would never, never be in a safer place than in that room, surrounded by those women; and I knew that I was either going to tell the truth, right then, or I was never going to tell the truth. When my turn rolled around, tears poured down my face as I said, haltingly, in a voice that sounded to me quite unlike my own: “I write . . . because . . .I write because. . . because I believe I have something to say that’s worth hearing.” And then I lay my head down on the table and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, while one of my friends said “I am so damned proud of you, Rob, for admitting that.” "

wow.  yes, i write because i have something to say.  and sometimes that something scares me.  that's what happened this morning.  but for now i'm just going to be scared.  i'm going to stare at that big sky and just keep on typing.

the road to wyoming

i have barely come off of the high excitement from the trip to asia and now am on the road again.  this time headed to wyoming for a month-long artists' retreat.  it's a three-day drive through a beautiful part of the country, but we have decided to make our nightly rest stops in the major cities along the way.  i'm a little disappointed by that.  i have romantic ideas about visiting old-time diners; walking along quaint main streets; or finding some sweet little b&b on the spur of the moment.  the truth is: i just don't feel safe making those decisions.  without overstating it: i am not certain that being a minority on a remote country road is necessarily safe.

call it paranoia, i call it playing it safe.  even during our asian travels, there were a couple of moments when our race-free trip (overseas our identity was AMERICAN) was not so race-free.  take for example these photos taken at a bangkok toy store. what are we to make of such moments?

passing for black or passing for white: biracial kids today

i think debra dickerson's got it wrong.  in a salon article "Don't be black on my account", dickerson (an african-american woman with two biracial --black/white--children) writes that she wants her children to be able to claim a biracial identity.  good enough-- but here is her stated reason: unlike her phenotypically white-looking children, dickerson says she "lived blackness.  All they can do is study and perform blackness."  (the emphasis is hers)  her list of lived blackness includes: learning about racism from Southern relatives, eating soul food, and attending a Southern Baptist church.  here we are again at a essentialist notions of blackness--the same ones that have fomented the discussion about barack obama's "black authenticity" since he is the son of an african and not the descendant of african-american slaves.

does dickerson think that she is no longer black because, as she confesses in the article, she doesn't even do those black things anymore?  in fact, she doesn't even study or perform her blackness in her upstate new york environs.  how is it she feels authentically black because her great-grandfather was born a slave, but her half-white children should not?  their great-great-grandfather was born a slave.  i don't get her logic.

dickerson writes: "I can't in good conscience as a human being tell them which category to pick, if any.  If that means they prefer sushi to fried catfish, so be it."  here i guess sushi is the substitute for whiteness and fried catfish is the substitute for blackness.  again, i don't get it.  what she seems to be talking about rather than choosing a race is choosing a class status.

i applaud her decision to engage this question about how to best help her children as they come-of-age and confront and discover issues of racial identity.  but i think she's got to rethink this thing of what makes her black, or more specifically what makes her think of herself as different from her children.  it's not her list of "lived blackness" but rather the fact that she is raising her children in a very different class situation than the one in which she grew up and LIVED.