My Blog

Moving to Open.Salon.com

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:21:57 -0500

This blog is on the move! I’m relocating these random thoughts of mine from this site (www.lewisfreelance.com) to Open Salon, where you will find me under the pen name “NewUrbanBlend.”
For those who are not familiar with it, www.open.salon.com is a spinoff of the online publication, www.salon.com. Open Salon is basically a hangout where thousands of member-bloggers post their ramblings. The site generates an astounding number of visitors, most of the liberal-progressive variety. Since I’m generally blogging about issues related to multiculturalism and such, it’s not a bad place to be. But now you’ll also find posts on other other random topics from time to time: essays on living single, Macs vs. PCs, my Top Ten List of Law Student Pick-up Lines.
In fact, my association with Open Salon started after I had written an essay on the ups and downs of dating that I was looking to publish. It didn’t seem to “fit” on this site, so I posted it on Open Salon and within minutes, it generated dozens of hits. So it just makes sense to do all my blogging there from now on. You will still be able to find older posts through this site. For newer material, you’ll want to look in my new space:
http://open.salon.com/blog/newurbanblend

More Multiracial, Multicultural Books

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:18:43 -0500

One of the cool things about becoming an author is that you end up meeting other authors who’ve written similarly themed books. You cross paths at book festivals, academic conferences and other events, and you find yourself becoming a member of a literary community that you never knew existed.
That’s what happened to me after the publication of Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America in 2006. At the time, a limited number of books dealing with multiracial identity issues had been published, and Fade listed a number of them in the appendix for readers wishing to explore the topic further. Since then, the list of multiracial titles has expanded, so it seems that an update is in order.
So let’s assume that you’ve already purchased a copy of Fade (I know, I know, that's being awfully vane on my part) and you’re looking for additional books that also deal with multiracial, multicultural issues this holiday shopping season. Here are some recommendations – some fiction, some nonfiction – with particular emphasis on those written by my multi-culti peeps:
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
by Heidi Durrow
Heidi is co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival held annually in Los Angeles. Heidi and I first met in Portland, Oregon, back in the early 1990s and reconnected at a multiracial conference in Chicago in 2007. This is her debut novel. It’s the story of a biracial girl who survives a family tragedy and the identity issues she faces. The book has generated quite a bit of buzz.
Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything In It
by Sundee Tucker Frazier
Sundee and I go way back. I mean, way, way back. We went to high school together in a small, rural college town in eastern Washington state, where our parents worked for the university. It still amazes me to think that two writers on the biracial experience both came out of Pullman, Washington. Anyway, this book landed Sundee on NBC’s Today Show when it was chosen for Al Roker’s Book Club for Kids. The book is aimed at middle school-aged readers, but older folks will enjoy this tale as well. The story is about a 10-year-old biracial boy who does all the things 10-year-old boys do. But things take a turn when Brendan winds up bumping into the white grandfather he has never known.
The Other Half of My Heart
by Sundee Tucker Frazier
This is Sundee’s second novel for young readers which I’ve only started to read myself. But already I’m hooked! It’s about two biracial twins. One is light skinned; the other is darker skinned. They both enter a beauty pageant, and things unfold from there.
Kinky Gazpacho
by Lori Tharps
Lori’s memoir of self-discovery takes the reader from Milwaukee to Spain and back again, exploring issues of race, romance, culture and identity all along the way. Lori and I met at the Mixed Roots Festival and have since discovered we have a lot in common: we’re both journalists, we were both AFS foreign exchange students as teenagers, we both speak Spanish, we both fell in love in Spain. While Lori ended up marrying the person she met there, I wasn’t that lucky!
Substitute Me
by Lori Tharps
This is Lori’s just-released novel, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet. It’s a story about the relationship between a white woman and the black woman she hires to be her child’s nanny.
Mixed
by Angela Nissel
This book came out at about the same time as Fade, and for awhile, the two books were partnered together on Amazon. Angela is perhaps best known professionally as a writer and producer for the sitcom, “Scrubs.” We met for the first time at the Mixed Roots Festival in L.A. and hit it off immediately, cracking each other up trading one-liners like we’d known each other for years. Angela’s sense of humor is on display in this memoir as she hilariously recounts the plusses and minuses of growing up biracial.
Love in Black and White
by William S. Cohen with Janet Langhart Cohen
William Cohen is a former U.S. senator from Maine who served as secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. He has also authored several novels. We met when we were both hawking our books at the National Press Club’s book fair in Washington, DC in 2006, and our tables were right across from one another. Cohen is white; his wife, Janet Langhart Cohen, is black. This is the story of their lives together.
Spork
by Kyo Maclear
This one comes recommended by Lori Tharps. Haven’t read it, and I don’t know the author, but it sounds cool. It’s a children’s book whose central character is a kitchen utensil. His mom’s a spoon, and his dad’s a fork, making him “Spork.” The author is biracial, but it seems the book has broader lessons about just fitting in.
What Blood Won’t Tell
by Ariela Gross
This is probably the most “serious” book on the list. A work of non-fiction, the book examines the history of racial classification in America, particularly “racial identity trials” in which legal issues involving property, freedom, and individual rights turned on questions of racial identity. I don’t know Ariela, but the book appealed to the law student in me.

What I’ve Learned in the Last Year

Mon, 6 Sep 2010 10:35:56 -0400

It’s been a full 12 months since I loaded up the U-Haul and moved from suburban Washington, DC to Akron, Ohio. The first year of law school is now behind me, and fall classes are once again in full swing. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m not just talking about the res gestae limitation on the felony murder rule or how to justify a risk utility analysis in a products liability claim. I’ve been growing in other ways, too. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

From Essence.com

Sun, 1 Nov 2009 20:21:19 -0500

Originally published October 21, 2009 at Essence.com
http://www1.essence.com/news_entertainment/news/articles/new_commentary_growing_up_black_and_white

By now you've heard the story: Beth Humphrey, who is White, and Terence McKay, who is Black, were denied a marriage license earlier this month by a white justice of the peace in Louisiana.  "There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Keith Bardwell told the Associated Press. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

Maybe now people will stop referring to 2009 as the dawn of the "post-racial era." Even the election of a biracial President couldn't completely sweep away long-standing prejudices against interracial couples and their offspring.

For years, biracial children were seen as tragic outcasts doomed to a life of racial confusion—a view Bardwell apparently still holds. Others, perhaps caught up in Obama-mania, now see biracial children as the wave of the future and view being multiracial as hip, in vogue, and exotic.

Neither view captures my reality.

Race mixing has been going on in my family for generations. My father's birth certificate actually listed his race as "mulatto," an archaic and somewhat offensive term referring to someone who is half-Black and half-White. My mother, who is also of Black and White ancestry, is so racially ambiguous in her appearance that she is often mistaken for Filipino. I guess you could say we were biracial before biracial was cool.

Growing up in the 1970's and 80's, I had my share of run-ins with race. The conventional wisdom back then encouraged Black-White biracial children to adopt a Black identity starting at an early age. It was supposed to forge a sense of community and, oddly enough, mitigate the sort of alienation that Bardwell was talking about.

But that "Black-only" approach to racial identity never quite worked for me. In the fourth grade, Black classmates described me as a "half-breed." At a family get-together, a dark-skinned uncle once referred to me as "White boy." In middle school, a White kid called me a "White n----r." In other words, I was either Black-with-an-asterisk, or not Black enough at all.   But none of these encounters was fatal. I survived them and I turned out just fine. The journey became easier when I began to meet other mixed-race people who shared similar stories. In the end, many of us came to embrace a multiracial identity because that's the only label that truly fit us, both in terms of ancestry and personal life experience. Finally that label is growing in acceptance along with public support for interracial couples and their children.

We may not have arrived at the post-racial era yet. But I've always believed race relations in America behaves sort of like the stock market. There are ups and downs over the short-term, even an occasional crash. But the long-term trend is positive.

Just look at the swift reaction to the situation in Louisiana. A growing chorus of public officials is calling for Keith Bardwell to resign, or face removal from office.

Now that would be change we could believe in.
UPDATE: Keith Bardwell has resigned as justice of the peace.

Census 2010: New Twist on Race Question

Sun, 4 Oct 2009 22:02:31 -0400

The 2010 U.S. Census is just around the corner, and the government’s made some changes to the census form in how it’s asking about race. I stumbled upon a sample 2010 questionnaire on the Census Bureau’s website. The differences between this form and the one used in 2000 are subtle and would probably have gone unnoticed had I not lived and breathed this issue in the course of writing Fade. (Scroll down to compare the two.)
In Fade, I make a big deal of the 2000 census for good reason. It was the first time in American history that multiracial people could check multiple racial categories on the census form and have our answers tabulated that way. Prior to 2000, when multiracial people attempted to mark more than one box, say “black” and “white,” or “white” and “Asian,” the Census Bureau would ignore the multiple check-offs and arbitrarily assign those individuals to a single racial group. That all changed in 2000 when the Census Bureau actually began recording the numbers of people who checked more than one category and the various racial combinations that they marked. (See my previous post if you want a further explanation of the numbers.)
Contrary to popular belief, the census form did NOT ask respondents to “check all that apply.” It drives me nuts when people refer to it that way, because in fact, there was no such language on the questionnaire. Instead, the form asked people to “mark one or more” based on what you “consider” yourself to be.
As I point out in Fade, that language was chosen specifically because the statisticians did NOT want people to check all that apply. The question was worded so that people would answer based on the racial group or groups that they “consider” themselves to be, recognizing that in many cases, that’s not the same thing as “all” of the racial groups present in someone’s family lineage. The question is about racial identity, not racial ancestry.
Here’s why that matters: Historians tell us that the vast majority of “black” people in the United States are racially mixed. Go back far enough and you’re likely to find either a white person or a Native American hiding out somewhere in the family tree. But certain social realities lead mixed race people to think of themselves in certain ways, even when our genealogy suggests something more complex. Some of us embrace a multiracial identity. Others, not so much.
Even when the racial mixture is evident only one or two generations ago, many black-white biracials still identify as black, and black alone, as is their choice. They acknowledge their white ancestry when talking about their heritage, but their bottom-line identity is black. Black is what they “consider” themselves to be, in contrast to those of us who think of ourselves as multiracial.
But based on my 2010 sample questionnaire, the new form removes the word “consider” from the race question altogether. Instead, it simply asks people to “Mark one or more boxes.” Period. All of the subsequent language which directed respondents to check one or more, “based on what this person considers himself/herself to be,” is gone.
Like I said, it’s a subtle thing, and I don’t know how much of a difference it will make in terms of how people will interpret the question. We probably won’t know the answer until 2011, when the Census Bureau is expected to release such data. As changes go, it’s a small one to be sure. But it’s a little change worth noting.