Light-skinned-ed Girl

Black History and Biracial Youth

Was it ever Black History week?  I seem to remember it that way as a kid.  That question came to mind when I read this newspaper article: Biracial Youths Carve Out Their Own Identities.

How was the week or month celebrated when I was a young kid?  I haven't the foggiest.  It's not like the memories of classroom Thanksgiving festivities: tracing my hand with crayon on construction paper and cutting it out and then coloring it in as a turkey; or Valetine's Day: counting out the number of valentines on my desk and hoping that Joe Cutest Boy had possibly written something special to me. 

Nope, the only black history week or month celebration I remember happened when I was probably seven or eight-years-old.  My brother and I were playing in front of the television while the Today show played.  My mom came back into the room and shushed us and said something like: "This is very important.  He was a great man."  The gravity of her voice and message stunned us both into silence, and then we sat and watched a portion of Dr. King's speech, "I Have a Dream."  We didn't know it had anything to do with us.

A Poem for You By Audre Lorde

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn

On Michelle Obama

What do you think of this Newsweek essay?  She makes him "blacker"?  I think maybe I agree.

Multiracial Privilege in a Cafe au Lait World

I hope you'll take the time to read this sweet essay published in today's New York Times written by the white mother a biracial child.

Aliyah Baruchin writes: "What I didn’t know . . . was that our family’s story would unfold not as a parable of racism, but as its opposite. I never anticipated how interesting, how funny and how instructive having a multiracial family would be, and how much it would teach me about my place in the world."

Baruchin has been lucky to raise her daughter in a diverse New Jersey community.  So diverse is their life that when Baruchin was reading to her daughter, Hannah, and she turned to "an illustration in her book that showed two parents, both white, hugging each other. Hannah pointed to their entwined arms, genuinely shocked, and asked, 'Why is their skin the same color?'"

Baruchin calls this "multiracial privilege"--the ability to create "a tiny bubble" of a place that nurtures her multiracial family and her daughter's mixed heritage.  I hope that bubble will continue to expand.

Photo by Alex Nabaum 

Carly Simon is kind of black?

I subscribe to a couple of yahoo groups focused on the multiracial/multicultural experience.  Every once in a while, there is a post that captures my imagination.  Today, it was a headline that singer Carly Simon is the daughter of the Simon & Schuster founder Richard Simon and a black-Jewish biracial woman, Andrea Simon.  Who knew?  The post provides a wikipedia link with not more information than that.  I did my own limited digging this morning for more details.  According to the New York Times headline, on August 4, 1934, "Andrea Heinemann Bride: New York Girl [was] to Wed Richard L. Simon, Publisher."  The link, for the story, on the New York Times website however, was dead.  In July 1934, Time magazine reported the couple's engagement noting that the publisher was to wed "his office telephone operator."  Nothing else.  The story interests me because 1) who knew Carly Simon was black?; and 2) the marriage between the telephone operator and the publisher doesn't seem to have set off the same kind of scandal as the Rhinelander case, another interracial marriage only ten years prior.  The Rhinelander case rocked New York's high society when the wealthy Kip Rhinelander married a black woman from Pelham, NY.  When the marriage was announced, the groom's family forced him to sue for an annulment and claim that his bride had fooled him into believing that she was actually white.

I am always excited to bring people into the multiracial/muticultural fold.  I am quick (probably annoyingly so) to say "biracial" when some mixed celebrity or public figure is mentioned in conversation.  Welcome, Carly--if you'd like to be welcomed.

Also, I am intrigued by how easily and quickly (not even a generation later) the multiracial experience is erased.  How is it that it becomes irrelevant to future generations of family?  How is it that the ancestral connectedness stops (or is stopped from) being meaningful?  This is in part the reason for the project, May is Mixed-Race People History Month, which I started last year.  Look for it again in a couple of months with many more posts and insights into our shared multicultural and multiracial history.

Anyway, I plan to do a little more research on Carly Simon's story, but if anyone else has more information, please let me know. 

Come Together: Healing Tensions Among Women Working for Equality

Women's Space and What Tami Said are sponsoring a women's history month blog carnival: Come Together: Healing Tensions Among Women Working for Equality. 

The bloggers write: "All women are invited to participate, including women who have tangled with one another in the past, women who have fought with each other or attacked each other online or in real life, women who have offended other women or been offended by other women, online or in real life. This includes all of us!  The hope is that by our honesty and truth-telling we can move in the direction of healing and building bridges, no matter what has happened between us in the past."

I am particularly interested in submissions made in the vein of Post Secrets --They are seeking anonymous secrets about your feelings about/relationships with women.  How many of us have felt like the writer of this post card?

Here's the submission information:

"We are accepting essays, poetry, photographic essays, art, You Tube presentations, short fiction and other creative expressions designed to strengthen the bonds among women and heal rifts caused by historic and current conflicts, as well as by differences in race, age and sexual orientation.  Submit work no later than Feb. 28 to Tami at What Tami Said or Heart at Women's Space. We cannot guarantee on which blog your work will be posted.  Along with your submission, please include a short bio (2-3 sentences) and a link to your blog if you have one."

Stolen Generation: Mixed Australians Receive an Apology

Today the Australian parliament extended an apology to the country's indigenous people, in particular to those who were part of the "Stolen Generation."  "The Stolen Generations (or Stolen Generation) is a term used to describe the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, usually of mixed descent, who were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions, under various state acts of parliament, denying the rights of parents and making all Aboriginal children wards of the state, between approximately 1869 and (officially) 1969," according to Wikipedia.  The government's brutal policy was to acculturate the mixed children to white society which could only be done in white homes.  The result was to tear apart families as the mixed child was often removed forcibly.

Here is an account of what is being called the Day of Apology from the Daily Telegraph:

In the Great Hall, and in the chamber itself, where members of the Stolen Generation sat in the Distinguished Visitors Gallery, the tears flowed freely.

Why would they not? For Mr Rudd was delivering what indigenous Australians had been begging for: an acknowledgment that "the laws and policies of successive Parliaments have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss" on generations of Aborigines.

Developing his theme, the Prime Minister spoke of "the mothers and fathers, the brothers and the sisters" who had endured the anguish of the loss of their families, the breakup of their lives.

It was delivered with plain sincerity; in tone and content, precisely the sort of thing the audience had been expecting.

But the tears threatened to flow in torrents as Mr Rudd recounted the story of Nanna Nungalla Fejo, snatched from her family at Tennant Creek with her brothers and cousins when she was "about four".

Shunted from mission to mission at the theological whim of successive orphanage overseers, Nanna Fejo was sent finally to prearranged domestic employment in Darwin when she about 16. She was never to see her mother again.

"She said, what I should say today is that all mothers are important," Mr Rudd reported.

"Families - keeping them together is very important."

I applaud the government's decision to apologize.  The symbol of the apology is important.  But now, I hope that there will be real policy change to increase opportunity for those who have suffered.

The Black-Brown Racial Divide?

Am I the only one confused by the consistent reports that there is a long-standing racial divide between African-Americans and Latinos?

The New York Times reports today: "While Mr. Obama has made great strides in appealing to white and black voters, his campaign has proved less effective in drawing Latino support.  While a few experts point to longstanding rivalries between blacks and Hispanics over jobs and other opportunities, most faulted him as doing too little, too late." 

Really?  Long-standing rivalries?  Maybe someone could enlighten me about these long-standing rivalries because I am unaware of them.  Perhaps my ignorance is a function of growing up first overseas and then in the mostly white city of Portland in the 1980s.  Portland's minority population was mostly black, and there was a small Asian immigrant population of people from Vietnam and Cambodia.  I studied Spanish in high school "knowing"that it was going to be an important language to learn, but I only knew two people who spoke Spanish, my teacher (who had learned it in school) and a guy named Jorge whose family had immigrated from Mexico--but he was the only guy!

My first real experience with the Latino community and with Latinos personally came when I went to Stanford.  I was assigned to Casa Zapata, the Hispanic theme house.  I thought I had been racially profiled when I first learned of the assignment.  I hadn't.  The notion was to create a dorm-style community that was 50 percent Latino and 50 percent something else to allow for cross-cultural communication and friendships to develop.

I found a home in that community right away, in a way, that I hadn't in the black community growing up.  I was elected the second-vice-chair of the Histpanic Engineering Society, and my closest friends, and connections were in the Latino community.

So tell me, where are the rivalries?  And how did they come about?  Yes, I have heard of gang rivalries and also prison gang rivalries, but I dare to assume that those folks are not voters anyone is out courting anyway.  Reading about the racial divide between black and brown feels much like reading about the ethnic rivalries between Kenyans that has sparked so much violence since the recent contested election; or like the rivalries between Muslims in Iraq.  I didn't know of those things.  But this I question: who are these experts?  And why bring up the issue of old rivalries now when to me it seems like something of a past generation or imagined?

Danish Aphorism

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher

That Unfamiliar Voice is Your Own: A Poem for You by William Stafford

When I Met My Muse

by William Stafford

I glanced at her and took my glasses off—they were still singing. They buzzed like a locust on the coffee table and then ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and knew that nails up there took a new grip on whatever they touched. "I am your own way of looking at things," she said. "When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

—William Stafford