Category Archives: biracial

kimora on growing up mixed

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Kimora Lee Simmons: "My Kids Make My World Go 'Round"

New mom to 2 1/2-month-old baby boy Kenzo Lee Hounsou, Kimora Lee Simmons found the time to write an article for Working Mother. The 34-year-old Baby Phat CEO and Style Network star addresses the racism she faced as a young girl, how her mom always encouraged her to believe in herself and work hard, and how she plans to instill these same values in her three children.

“My friends are surprised to learn that, outgoing as I am today, I was a loner growing up. I was a mixed-race girl with a Korean-Japanese mother and an African-American father, and none of the other kids at my school were like me. I was nearly six feet tall by the time I was 11 years old. And I was an only child being raised by a single mother.

At school in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, MO, everything about me seemed to be a source of ridicule to other kids: my face, my height, the texture of my hair, my body shape. I was a real fish out of water. And because I had so many growth spurts, it took time for me to grow into my body. The popular kids were into sports, but I was awkward and gawky. I was super clumsy—I still am. Kids can be cruel. They called me “chinky giraffe.” I cried all the time. But my mother wanted me to turn my tears into something else, something positive.

…As my mom did for me, I’m helping my own girls, Ming Lee, 9, and Aoki Lee, 7, learn about tolerance—to respect differences in culture, religion and even the way we look. I also try to set boundaries, let them know what’s expected and give them room to develop and grow. I will do the same with my infant son, Kenzo Lee Hounsou. I recently married his father, Djimon Hounsou. He’s an actor and a model, and he speaks five languages. We learn a lot from him.

Read the rest of the article here

biracial wedding

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I thought this was a sweet story for Sunday blogging.  Yay, biracial couple!

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

New York Times

By KATIE ZEZIMA

Vows

SOMETIMES the one for whom you’ve been searching your entire life turns out to have been beside you all along or, in the case of Leah Elizabeth Squires and Eric Raymond Traub, in the next crib.

“The memories of her go as far back as I can remember,” Mr. Traub, now 32, said.

In the 1970s, their parents, Helen Gagel and Bob Squires and Linda and Ray Traub, were neighbors in Evanston, Ill., and became close friends, sharing a bond that ran deeper than their camaraderie and commitment to social justice. Ms. Squires’s parents are an interracial couple, while Mr. Traub, of mixed race himself, is an adopted son of white parents. Back then, Linda Traub said, “It wasn’t as accepted.”

Leah Squires and Eric Traub, the most bookish of the children, could always be found, said Catherine Squires, an older sister, “with their heads together” reading mystery and fantasy books. So independent and feisty was Ms. Squires that she even got Mr. Traub to play with her Barbies, her mother said.

After leaving for college they stayed in touch, if only sporadically, leading lives that were quite different yet oddly in sync.

In the winter of 2002, when the Varoom Group, a collective of dancers and choreographers of which Ms. Squires was a member, gave a performance, Mr. Traub and his girlfriend at the time came to New York to see it.

Their next reunion — the funeral of Ms. Squires’s father in October 2004 — was sad, but far more telling about their relationship. Mr. Traub was a pallbearer, which served to remind Ms. Squires of just how deep the bond between the two families remained.

“My dad was one of his first role models of being an African-American man,” she said.

re:mixed race in the uk

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This is a sad story.  I’m not up on the politics of the United Kingdom, so I had to look up the BNP or British National Party.  Here’s what I found on Wikipedia:

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The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right and whites-only political party in the United Kingdom.

The BNP is not represented in Parliament.

According to its constitution, the BNP is “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948”. The BNP proposes “firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home”. The party also advocates the repeal of all anti-discrimination legislation, and restricts party membership to “indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of ‘IndigenousCaucasian’”. The BNP also accepts white immigrants that are assimilated into one of those ethnicities. The BNP asserts that there are biological racial differences that determine the behaviour and character of individuals of different races, although it claims that it does not regard whites as superior to other ethnic groups, and that preference for one’s own ethnicity is a part of human nature.

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Schoolgirl victim of racist bullying says tormentor’s sentence is ‘pants’

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By Nick Allen

The victim, a 14-year-old mixed race girl, was repeatedly insulted with racist terms for six months by a 15-year-old, BNP supporting fellow pupil.

Last month the boy became the first school child to be convicted of racially aggravated harassment of a fellow pupil following a trial at Lincoln Youth Court.

The conviction prompted questions over whether such racist bullying should be dealt with through criminal law or by schools themselves.

The boy could have been detained for up to two years in a young offenders’ institution but he was instead sentenced to a six month supervision order and made to pay £500 compensation to the girl, which will be paid by his father.

The victim, who tried to kill herself with an overdose of stress pills and painkillers, said she was “disappointed” with the sentence.

She said: “When my mum told me the sentence I just thought ‘Is that it? That’s pants.’

“He has got a slap on the wrists and been told he was a naughty boy – that’s all. He has not paid the price for what he has put me through and he will never have to suffer like I have.

“I want him to be out into a multi-cultural school where he is one of the only white pupils to see what it feels like to be in the minority. I want him to be in my shoes and see how he copes with that.”

The girl, who is of mixed white English and black African heritage, was called “wog”, “coon”, “nigger”, “gorilla” and “golliwog” by the boy. She also suffered abusive chants of “white, white, white is right, kick them out, fight, fight, fight” and was repeatedly told: “Go back to your own country, you don’t belong here.”

She wrote a suicide note and took an overdose on Jan 25 this year. She was then sectioned for six weeks in a psychiatric hospital before the family moved to a different part of the country.

After the sentencing her mother said: “…He bullied her to the extent she actually wanted to die but he had no remorse. When he was found guilty we were on a high and thought we would finally get justice. But now we feel we have put ourselves out there and not got anything back.

During the case it emerged the boy was a known BNP supporter who actively tried to enlist other youths.

The victim’s mother said: “It’s very sad and comes from ignorance more than anything. My daughter is British, she was born in this country and has a British passport. But they just think everyone living in the UK should be white and English.”

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yay, gossip girl

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jessica_szohr1Ever since I learned that Jessica Szohr is biracial like me, I’ve been very curious as to the race of her character on Gossip Girl.  I watched a few episodes and my guess was that she was playing white.  Guess again, me!!  I think this is exciting! More biracial visibility!!

Exclusive: Gina Torres Joins Gossip Girl

Gina Torres will appear on Gossip Girl this fall as Vanessa’s mom, TVGuide.com has learned exclusively.

Gabriela Abrams, mother to home-schooled vid-kid Vanessa, is described as being warm and outgoing, which will certainly be a change of pace for this show, not exactly known as the paragon of parental virtue. She is a free spirit, a former Brooklynite who lives “off the grid” in Vermont and has definite opinions about things, especially concerning her daughter. Ah, that’s more like it.

Torres is best known for her roles on Alias and Firefly, though she also had a recent blink-and-you-miss-it cameo on Pushing Daisies as the wayward mom of Emerson’s daughter. The actress is married to CSI‘s Laurence Fishburne.

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GossipGirlJS

mixed race in the uk

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I guess we’re the fastest growing group in the world, muah-ha-ha-ha! Just kidding. But I’m with you, Dani. We need to educate everyone about this group with rapidly increasing numbers.  I wonder if mixed race people are more likely to be victims of crime in the U.S.

Mixed race ‘fastest growing minority’

Karlene Pinnock BBC NewsBeat

“Best of both”, “pick and mix”, “Asian”, “half-breed” and “coloured” – they are just some of the names mixed race people say they’ve been called.

The mixed race group is the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the UK and is expected to become the largest by 2020.

Britain has one of the highest rates of interracial relationships in the western world.

If government watchdog figures are right, mixed race Britons will overtake Indian people to become the UK’s largest ethnic minority group within 25 years, reaching 1.24 million.

Seventeen-year-old Seeder is from Manchester. She said: “I actually expected mixed raced people to be the biggest ethnicity.

Listen to 1Xtra’s Mixed Race documentary

“Mixed raced isn’t just one race like me, English and Jamaican, there’s so many different mixes of so many different races.”

The latest official statistics available show mixed race people are more likely to be victims of crime than any other ethnic minority.

The risk of being the victim of a racially-motivated crime is also higher.

Dani thinks more needs to be done to educate everyone about the UK’s fastest growing ethnic minority group.

“I remember my teacher describing me as coloured and I was like actually not really fond of that one,” she said.

“We need to start looking at how we can make things more multicultural and I think the education system’s going to be a biggie.”

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thank you, gladys

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Gladys Hernblad, 79; advocate for racial understanding

By Sally A. Downey

INQUIRER

Gladys Kinard Hernblad, 79, of Northern Liberties, an educator, author, and advocate for interracial understanding, died of heart failure July 27 at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse.

Mrs. Hernblad grew up in Saluda, S.C. Encouraged by her mother, Sadie, she walked six miles each way to high school, and after graduation moved to Philadelphia in search of better educational and employment opportunities.

She met Robert Hernblad at a gathering for young adults at a fellowship house in North Philadelphia. He was white, of Swedish and Irish descent. She was African American. They married in 1966, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage in all states.

In 1992, Mrs. Hernblad established the Interracial Families United Network. She told a reporter at the time that she and her husband had experienced discrimination in the early years of their marriage. “We had no support for our situation,” she said. The new network, she said, would support, “all interracial marriages – Asian, Hispanic, and African American.”

Mrs. Hernblad was a major supporter of President Obama, not only for his political views, but because his biracial background mirrored her family’s, which she considered a symbol of improving race relations in America.

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slanderous

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A couple of days ago I came across this crazy comment on an article about health care and the uninsured.  I wasn’t going to post it, but I keep thinking about it so here it is.

via

Responses to “Uninsurance in the 300-400 Percent of Federal Poverty Line Bracket”

Davis Says:

—-

T.S. Eliot: “white trash” is a white person who fornicates with a non-white.

—-

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST EUROPEAN AMERICANS.

Obongo has supported:

(A) Reparations. Redistributing money from European Americans (whites) to blacks, mestizos, and Asians.

(B) Criminalizing white parents who refuse to let their children practice miscegenation.

(C) Using “hate crime” laws to silence any criticism from European Americans.

(D) Using Third World immigration to overwhelm European American majorities.

(E) Maintaining anti-white affirmative action programs

(F) Creating a mandatory “America Serves” community-service program to indoctrinate and deracinate young European Americans
—-

Here comes my favorite part…..

From sociobiology email list: “Children of mixed, white-black, marriages identify 99% of the time as black and detest European Americans (whites). Why? Whites have recessive traits, so mixed-race children almost always look black (eye color, hair texture, nose shape, lips, skin color, etc.). Obama wrote: “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s white race.'”

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Davis, Davis, Davis.  Come on!

On another note, I’m eagerly awaiting the report on the President’s beer date with Gates and Crowley.  I find it so fitting that this black and white man is getting together with this black man and that white man to bring us all to some common ground on this issue.  This is a perfect example of how Obama’s “unique experience” is helping him (and us) address the larger struggle.  I’m just sayin’.

“holler”

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This is exciting! Especially on the heels of Prom Night in Mississippi.  As I was watching the documentary, I wondered if there were any biracial students in Charleston, MS.  Actually if there were any biracial people there at all.  It seems as though it would be a miracle.  Anyway, this movie will show us what it might be like if there were a biracial student in that very segregated setting…

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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Screen Gems and Jennifer Aniston are teaming up to tell a tale of lingering racial tensions in the Deep South.

The company has acquired “Holler” (aka “Mutt”), written by Dana Adam Shapiro, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Murderball.”

Inspired by true events, the script centers on a biracial high school student who returns with his white mother to her hometown in Mississippi, where he falls for a white girl. When prom season arrives at the high school, he is shocked to discover that she cannot be his date at the segregated prom. He soon finds himself a catalyst for change, not only for the prom but for the school and entire town.

HBO on Monday aired a documentary on the same subject, “Prom Night in Mississippi.”

The film will be produced by Aniston’s partner at Echo Films, Kristin Hahn, along with Tracey Durning. Aniston will executive produce with Jeff Mandel.

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)

prom night in mississippi

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ONE TOWN. TWO PROMS.
UNTIL NOW.

1954
The U.S. Supreme Court orders the integration of all segregated schools in America, including all their events.

1970
The town of Charleston, Mississippi, finally allows black students into their one high school. White parents refuse to integrate the school Graduation Dance, starting a tradition of separate, parent-organized White Proms and Black Proms.

2008
Change happens.

Oh. My. Goodness. Guys did you see this!?  Last night was the premiere of the HBO documentary Prom Night in Mississippi.  It was just so darn good.  One of my favorite documentaries ever!  In case you haven’t heard, the town of Charleston, MS had been holding two separate, segregated proms since the schools integrated in 1970.  Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the prom in 2007 if  they would just hold one for all of the students.  His offer was declined.  He tried again in 2008 and his offer was accepted.  The film exposes the climate of race relations in Mississippi and makes clear that this up and coming generation must make a conscious choice to break the cycle of division.

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I have long been a fan of Morgan Freeman.  Probably since the first time I saw the movie Glory. Then he sealed the deal with Robin Hood and Shawshank.  Anyway, I was inspired by the way he spoke to the students and handled the adults on the school board, but the most poignant Morgan moment for me was when he said “If I go around hating you because you have blond hair and blue eyes, I’m doomed. You’re fine, but I’m doomed.”  I believe that with all my heart.  I’m always saying that this racism thing is a double edged sword.  On the surface it may seem like it’s just those being discriminated against who are being hurt by it, but I’ve always felt that most of the damage is done to the discriminator.  I just loved hearing him say that.

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There is a section of the film where the students are so openly talking about the ways they’ve been taught to be racist and pondering why this could be.  Some of the white kids come to the conclusion that it must be that their people don’t want mixed kids in their family.  That’s why the adults are so afraid of an integrated prom.  We’re told that one parent said, “I don’t want no n****r grinding up on my daughter.  I won’t have no mixed kids in this family.”  The fact that people think this way is certainly not news to me.  It’s my history.  I know it well.  And yet, I was so uncomfortable hearing it spoken aloud.  Like kinda squirmy.

There is one interracial couple in the film.  Heck, there is probably one interracial couple in the whole town, and they happen to be students at the school.  They do not hold hands in public.  They have never been on a date because her father, who insists that he is not racist, will not allow it.  He hasn’t “whooped her or nothin”, but he grounded her and took her phone away.  To his dismay she overcame it all and is still dating Jeremy.  They got the most applause during the senior walk at the prom.

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There are so many things I want to relay, but really I think you should just see the film.  Please.

more obama love

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As someone who is consistently accused of either holding negative ideas about what being black is and/or trying to be white, I cannot tell you just how much gratification I got out of reading President Obama’s response to the reactions to his recent NAACP 100th Anniversary speech.  In this Washington Post interview with Eugene Robinson he explains that though he was speaking directly to a group of affluent, successful, educated African Americans who are dedicated to raising their children to be the same that one should not

“underestimate the degree to which a speech like the one I gave yesterday gets magnified throughout the African American community,” Obama told me in the Oval Office, where a bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. surveys the room in silent admonition. “Folks on Friday go in and get their hair cut, they’re getting ready for the weekend, they’re sitting in the barber’s chair, and somebody said, ‘Did you see what Obama said yesterday?’ It sparks a conversation. . . . And part of what my goal is here is to make sure that I’m giving a lot of folks permission to talk about things that maybe they’ve talked about around the kitchen table but don’t get fully aired in public.”

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I am no Obama, but I must admit that I feel like this is exactly what I’m trying to do.  Get everyone talking about this uncomfortable stuff in ways that almost seem too honest because we’re just not used to having the conversation.  I have been accused of airing “our” dirty laundry.  This always leaves me thinking, “Why not?  Dirty laundry just creates stagnant funk.  Let’s air it out and move on.”

This next bit really spoke to me as well.  Whenever I highlight the widely accepted generalizations of blackness that tend to be negative and also tend to inform the definitions of blackness held by both whites and blacks, I am hoping that by looking back and seeing where these ideas came from and how they seeped into our consciousness that they will be exposed for the ridiculous, limiting notions they are and then will be dispelled.  I’m never saying “that is what blackness is and we ‘mulattoes’ are not like that.”  I just mean that there are many ways to be black.  Mainly just being born black and then living your life as you.  Whoever that turns out to be.  Whoever you turn out to emulate, hang out with, enjoy the music, company, writings of.  I think we’re American first.  And yes being black in America is still not the same as being white in America.  We are still on the outside.  But, in my opinion, the tragedy lies in thinking that’s where one belongs and making a conscious choice to stay on the outside.  Perhaps in order to reject the mainstream as they have rejected us. But with all of it’s faults, this country has a lot to offer a life.  Sometimes I think people are so busy being “black” (or whatever one has been taught to believe should infom their identity) that they miss out on some of the riches of simply being American.

“One of the ways that I think that the civil rights movement . . . weakened itself was by enforcing a single way of being black — being authentically black. And, as a consequence, there were a whole bunch of young black people — and I fell prey to this for a time when I was a teenager — who thought that if you were really ‘down’ you had to be a certain way. And oftentimes that was anti-something. You defined yourself by being against things as opposed to what you were for. And I think now young people realize, you know what, being African American can mean a whole range of things. There’s a whole bunch of possibilities out there for how you want to live your life, what values you want to express, who you choose to interact with.”

…Said Obama: “I do think it is important for the African American community, in its diversity, to stay true to one core aspect of the African American experience, which is we know what it’s like to be on the outside.

President Obama, I just love you and I promise that by focusing on my “unique experience” I am not detaching from the larger struggle. K?