By Arturo R. García

The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival contacted us with the heads-up: the submission period has opened for this year’s event, scheduled to run June 16-17 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

There is no submission fee for entries sent before Feb. 15, but entries submitted between Feb. 16 and March 15 must be accompanied by a $50 fee. We’ve got information on each category, and links to the required submissions forms, under the cut.

Film Submissions

• Subject matter may include but is not limited to: interracial/cultural relationships, transracial/cultural adoption and the exploration of multiracial/cultural identity.
• Please note that there may be a Q&A session at each screening of the Festival on June 16 or 17, though participation is not mandatory.
• Participants are responsible for their own transportation and lodging. The festival is unable to provide an honorarium. (This applies to all categories.)

Performance Submissions

• Open to comics, actors, musicians, and spoken word artists with self-contained, portable acts suitable to a black box theatre.
• Submissions must be complete and run under five minutes. (Performers must be off-book.)
• Performers must be available for both a mandatory rehearsal on June 15 and a performance during the festival.
• No props or furniture will be provided.

Literary Submissions

• Besides filling out the submissions form above, applicants must send a 10-15 page writing sample and a high res jpeg photo of themselves as attachments to mxrootsfest@gmail.com with “Literary” and the applicant’s name in the subject line.
• Participants must be available to read from their works during the festival.

Workshop Submissions

These submissions may address only one of the following:

1. Creation of literary content
2. Creation of film content
3. Providing a historical context for inclusion in film/literary content.

• All presenters’ attendance must be confirmed by applicants at the time of submission.
• Presenters are expected to arrive at the Festival site no later than 45 minutes prior to the scheduled workshop time.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

I’ve got Scandalous by Psycho Realm playing as I write.

It’s a Brown thing.

Brown Pride more like it.

That’s what this is about.  It’s also a fitting song since I’ve been referred to as scandalous, angry, mean, and I love this one — reverse racist.

Being Brown in a place that doesn’t have many Brown faces with colonial Spanish names in the media has you starving sometimes.  Similarly, I remember my Anishinaabe friend Deb Daynard saying she never saw a Brown face (Native American) on T.V while growing in Winnipeg, Canada.  For me it was never having a Brown writer with a name like mine to follow as a kid.

I grew up reading Gordon Korman and Judy Blume.  Both were funny and had me entertained for years but I couldn’t relate to their characters.

What the f-ck did I have in common with white boys attending private school?

My teen years saw me reading books on the Columbian cartel with dreams of being the next Pablo Escobar.  Maybe if I had some Brown writers to follow I wouldn’t have been looking up to a notoriously violent drug lord.

A few years ago I discovered writers like Jimmy Santiago Bacca, Ana Castillo, Luis J. Rodriguez, Gloria Anzaldua, Sherman Alexie.  I’ve also had the privilege and pleasure of studying with Indigenous greats such as Simon Ortiz, Marilyn Dumont, and Lee Maracle, and a soon to be great Daniel Heath Justice.

I remember jumping up a couple of years ago while reading Ernesto Quinonez’s Bodega Dreams.  There’s a scene where the main character goes to the fridge to grab a bottle of malt to accompany his rice and beans.

I saw myself.  I was at home in Quinonez’s novel.

Gracias Ernesto!

Still, I had no writer in my life who I could really relate to.

Before I go on you have to know my history and who I am, or what a white woman at a party last week asked, “What is your ethnicity?”

I’m mixed and proud.

My mom, born and raised in Peru, is Mestiza (Indigenous and Spanish), quarter Chinese, and has some Basque roots.  My biological sperm donor (I don’t say dad cause he’s didn’t raise me) is Arab.

“That’s some angry people!” said an acquaintance of colour when I told him my mix.

Anyway, last week I attended the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.  Really, it’s the festival of white authors with sprinkles of colour here and there.

I met someone important this week.  Important to me, not the higher ups.

One of my main goals for the week was to meet Ojibwa/French poet David A. Groulx.  I saw his face, a Brown face, in the festival guide and read that he was a poet.

“Perfect,” I thought.  “Someone I can meet and tape for blackcoffeepoet.com.”

It turned out to be way more than that.

I saw David across the room at a party.  It’s hard to miss a six-foot-something, 225 lb. Brown guy in a sea of white people.

“David Groulx,” I said with my hand out to shake his.  “I’m Jorge Antonio Vallejos. I run blackcoffeepoet.com.”

“Oh, you’re Black Coffee Poet!  I watch your site!” said David.

Music to my ears!

We chatted, laughed, met a couple of other rejects in the room (Brown South Asian poet Sheniz Janmohamed and her friend K Rock who the rest of the room would probably label as white trash), and parted ways.

The next day saw us talk on the phone and we made plans for the following night.

I attended his reading which also featured my writing mom Lee Maracle.

David’s poems told stories of uranium mines destroying Indigenous land, racism, cops killing Native men and getting away with it, appropriation of culture, and warnings to white folk.

I was home again.

It was again my Indigenous side, the Mestizo in me, jumping up.  You could argue it was my Basque roots too since they are Indigenous to the lands now called Spain and France.

There were no rice and beans and malt, nor a colonial Spanish name, but there was a mixed race Brown face reading good writing, challenging colonialism, and showing pride in who he was and where he came from.

Another party followed the reading that saw David, Lee, and I chilling in a corner as the white literati sipped wine and made connections.  A Brown guy from Trinidad walked up to us and said, “I thought I’d join the Brown corner.”  We welcomed him with open arms.

One more party happened, as did a dinner, but more importantly I got alone time with David.  We talked Fanon, Alexie, colonialism, peoples with white privilege who don’t come from white backgrounds, being Brown with long hair in a society that sees that as a threat, and our love—poetry.

I felt like I found an older brother.  Someone a little older, who I look like, and who not only has similar history but who has similar day to day experiences when walking the rough terrain that is this white run society.

People of the dominant class don’t understand that.

I was telling a white writer on the weekend how I was so happy to have met David.  I mentioned all the reasons listed above.  He looked at me like I was nuts.

On our last day together David gave me a copy of his first book, The Long Dance, and a three page bio.  I noticed that he was published in 191 different places!  I thought I was doing good.

This year alone David has had 3 collections of poems published.  He showed me his latest, hot off the press, at our last dinner together.  His big smile gobbled shrimp as he had his new book on the table.

While in bed that night I thought of David and how happy I was to meet him.  A Brown guy who was humble, kind, funny, had bang on politics, and who was published in almost 200 places, and who published three books in one year.  If he could do that so could I.

David signed his book for me:

To Jorge,

I’m really glad we met.

Your friend,

David A. Groulx 

Kind words to match a kind Brown face who some label scandalous.

David, I feel the same!

By Guest Contributor Jen Chau, cross-posted from The Time Is Always Right …

In the past couple of years, I have noticed a certain complacency that I never noticed before, in my eleven years of leading Swirl. The same passion and the same excitement around building multiracial communities had faded a bit. In the one year leading up to the Presidential election, we launched five new chapters (the norm had been a chapter every year or every other year). People were excited by the energy created by Obama’s campaign, and they were motivated and eager to be a part of creating supportive and inclusive multiracial communities.

And then once Obama was firmly placed in the White House, something happened. It got quiet.

My theory was that it was all related to the claims that we were now in some sort of post-racial wonderland. I think it very much had to do with the fact that Obama is of multiracial heritage. This fact resulted in a sort of sitting back. A sentiment that sounded like, “we’re good now.” The idea that Obama understood so many of us, and that he cared about diversity was something that gave people a reason to relax. Take a breath. Stop pushing so hard. I understood this and even felt a bit of it myself. The other reality is that in an individual’s development, one may feel a strong desire to connect to community at one point and not at another. Swirl has always understood and been supportive of this.

Organizations, academics, student leaders still continued their work, but it was clear that a lot of people – our members, our “audience” – were….gone. I heard the same from other groups – that membership started to lull. Student campus groups folded. It seemed that people didn’t need our mixed groups in the same way they had, previously. Before Obama. Before “check all that apply” on the U.S. Census.

But had things changed all that much? Yes, we are counted now. We know the numbers of multiracial people and interracial couples in this country. But do people start understanding one another and become supportive overnight just because we have a tally? Do things feel different for a multiracial person or a mixed family on a day to day basis?

Yes and no. I have heard from many people that things are better. That they are not questioned nearly as much. That people no longer stare in awe as they talk about the fact that their mom is black and dad is white. That they feel comfortable being all of who they are, at all times. It always makes me happy to hear that this is what people are experiencing. It means that progress is being made.

But others still experience the awkward questions. The demand by strangers to “prove” they are one thing or the other. Moms being asked how long they’ve been babysitting their own children. Stares, rude comments, family tensions and sometimes divisions. This is all still real and still happening.

And your experience, in part, is impacted by your context. Your circle, your larger environment. Where you live. In pockets, multiracial people and families are supported, recognized, understood. In others, far from it.

There are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance. It’s absolutely critical that things happen on the institutional level, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the corresponding changes automatically happen at the cultural or individual level. And vice versa. Just because a change occurs on one level doesn’t mean that the others follow neatly in line. We have the ability to “check all that apply” on the Census (which is huge), but that doesn’t mean that individuals immediately understand the complexity of multirace. Things don’t change overnight. We know this logically, but it seems that we sometimes want to pretend it isn’t the case (see “post-race”). I want to live in bliss too, believe me. But a real one, that we work hard to create for ourselves…not a superficial one that we wish into being.

This piece was prompted by a New York Times article on a mixed family. I hope that their story (and others) help to illustrate all that still needs to be understood.

Welcome to the Mixed Race panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

Phil Djwa, technologist; Jozen Cummings, creator of the Until I Get Married blog; LM, long time commenter and friend of the blog; LB, friend of the blog; Jen Chau, Founder and Executive Director of Swirl and co-founder of Mixed Media Watch and Racialicious; N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Holly, contributor at Feministe; Ken, friend of the blog; and A.C., friend of the blog.

Phil: My mother was white from Canada and my father Chinese-Indonesian. It was a funny combination of totally being normalized and also sticking out. My family was interracial, but no one else was. It seemed totally normal inside the family, but I couldn’t see any other examples of it locally. I remember meeting the only other Chinese family in the neighbourhood and realizing they were “like me”. I learned later from my parents that they had quite a bit of turmoil in finding a home to rent at first and had received funny looks etc. My mom, who is white, would go to meet the realtor and my dad would only come later after they had agreed to rent it. For myself, dating white women as opposed to Chinese was pretty natural as there were not a lot of Chinese people at my school at the time. There was a lot of casual racism, “Hey Chink” and that kind of stuff, but my extended family was supportive of my mother’s choice, so it didn’t seem to matter.

Jozen: It felt normal in my family. My mom and my uncles who raised me grew up with a Puerto Rican father and a Japanese grandmother. So my family was in on this whole interracial relationship thing early, like dating back to the 1940s. My father who was never around was Puerto Rican and Black, but soon after I was born, my mom married the man who would adopt me as his son and he was white and they had my sister, so she’s mixed. All my uncles married and had children with women from other races, so if there was any type of message about interracial relationships it was that it was not only okay, but kind of normal. There was no beating of the chest about the diversity within the family, it’s just how we live our lives. More than interracial relationships, we all were different people, different values, and I think culturally there was some disconnect within the families, but that’s more of a generational thing than it was a race thing. My Korean cousins were never called out for acting Korean, Filipino cousins weren’t treated differently than our black cousins. It was all mixed up but the conflicts resided in other things outside of race, like most families.

LM: I didn’t, at least not out loud. I came from a white father and Puerto Rican mother, and that background was viewed as “mixed” by anyone who asked about it. But my mother, though she identified strongly with Puerto Rican heritage, looked “white.” So did I. Furthermore, her last name came from her straight-off-the-boat Irish father and she was fluent in both English and Spanish. (To speak English fluently and look white with freckles, as she did, was to have her Puerto Rican-ness doubted — by white people.)

There was enough of a stigma tied to being Puerto Rican — not in our house but what I picked up from muttering cabdrivers and pop culture — that I suspected a) if my mom and I didn’t look white, we might have been treated differently, and b) within my family at least, the concept of inter-group relationships was OK. On this second point, I understood that in reality, there might be opposition to such relationships based on more obvious surface differences. But even as a pre-teen, I figured no one but the two people in a relationship ought to have a say in the matter.

LB: I’m half Black, half-Navajo, however I was raised culturally in a Black home, as my Navajo mother was adopted by a Black family and removed from the reservation. That being said, I definitely received some mixed messages regarding interracial relationships. My mother is a an evangelical Christian, and so I was taught to love everyone equally, that there were no races and we were all God’s children. However, there were messages communicated to me that anyone dating white people thought they were better than other minorities. There would be discriminatory comments made in my family about other races. So, it was a bit confusing at times to reconcile these mixed messages.

Jen: I didn’t receive the most positive messages about interracial dating growing up, which was a shame given that I am the product of one. I received messages from peers, messages from my parents and family, and messages from the communities to which I was attempting to belong. Peers asked questions all the time. They didn’t quite understand how I could be both Chinese and Jewish at the same time. They asked a lot about my parents and how they met. I got the feeling that my parents coming together was a strange thing. An abnormal thing. If it was normal, then there wouldn’t be so much interest and intrigue, right?

My family – my Jewish grandparents in particular – used to tell me that I would marry a “nice, Jewish boy.” Funny – the first boy I really liked was black and Jewish, but somehow they didn’t quite mean that brand of Jewish. It was clear that white was right when it came to whom I should be dating. This felt invalidating and made me wonder if anyone in my family truly understood my experience – both as a mixed women and a woman of color. I kept wondering and stayed single right through college. I knew that the boys to whom I was attracted, would not do. In hindsight, I don’t think that I was ready to fight that fight with them.

And then, the Jewish community – while there were many diverse and accepting synagogues out there, mine was not. Even though we rehearsed for my Bat Mitzvah with my father up on the bima (the altar), the night before my big day left my mother in tears. She got a call from the Rabbi. He told her that the Ritual Committee had had a special meeting and decided that the three of us – me, my mom, my dad – could not be on the bima together. They did not want to promote intermarriage.

I grew up knowing in my heart that there was nothing wrong with interracial relationships (again, I came from one)…but got message after message that they were not approved of, and probably more trouble than they were worth.

N’jaila: I’m a Caribbean American Blasian mutt. My parents made more of a issue of them being from different islands than them being different races. My mom was brown, my father was lighter, but still brown so I never felt “mixed”. Mixed was for people that were part white in my head growing up. I really did think that it interracial was code for “White”. There’s so little discussion of Black and non white/non blacks marrying and dating. Even less about intercultural relationships within races.

When I got older there was a feeling like both my parents did this whole mixing thing wrong. One of them was supposed to be white. I remember when my first serious relationship abruptly fell apart he solemnly said “if god wanted us to be together your mother would have been white.” So a lot of times I felt like I was a double cast out. Black people were only allowed to be Black and nothing else.

Holly: I grew up in a proudly multi-racial household, although when my sister and I got older it became clear that there would still be problems if either of us wanted to date “beneath us” in terms of class, and of course overlapping that in all sorts of ways, race too. My mother, who’s Japanese, always had much more mixed feelings about being in a multi-racial relationship than my father did. For my mother, it represented giving up her heritage in a lot of ways, and having kids who were “Americans” at heart, instead of “actually Japanese” like she would have had if she had stayed in Japan, or maybe if she had married another Japanese immigrant. I don’t know if she actually would have followed that path, though, despite her misgivings! I’ve always had a feeling that my father thought that being in a multi-racial family made him cooler and more politically with it than other typical white guys, which became a thorn in my side as a teenager, naturally. He eventually characterized one of the most enduring problems of his relationship with my mother as being about cultural differences and lack of acceptance — from his family, and from the two of them trying to adjust to each other. So in the end… I got a lot of overt messages when I was younger about how multi-racial families and kids are great, but a lot of more subtle messages about how it didn’t work.

Ken: As my parents are Southern and things of their generation were very black-white, no acknowledgement of mixed-race ancestry ever took place until I started researching genealogy. I do remember my mother saying when I was a pre-teen, however, that she would prefer I not bring a white girl home. (Since I’m a gay-but-open-minded male, really no worries there!) She did acknowledge a few years later that I would likely bring home ‘a foreigner,’ and she seemed to be alright with that. So now I’m a good-ol’ American mutt (black/white/native) in a relationship with a dark Spaniard.

A.C.: I never spoke explicitly with my parents about interracial dating. As a mixed-race kid, though, my parents never really just talked with me about how I felt about being Latino, Irish and German. I was raised partly, though, by my father’s aunt, who came to live with my family and help with me and my sisters while my parents worked. She had a real problem with black folks and it scared me off from ever asking out nonwhite or non-Latino girls, since I knew I’d have to bring them by eventually. It was only years later, when she finally moved back to San Antonio, that I brought home an African-American girlfriend to watch a movie. My dad came down to say goodnight-and I hadn’t told him I had been bringing anyone over, which was pretty ordinary, really. But I do remember a look of surprise on his face. I can’t rule anything out but maybe it was because I was in the basement watching a movie with a girl. Maybe not.

Phil: I think the white side was the strongest as we were living in a white community. A lot of the Chinese Indonesian side was a little forced, with sometimes going to the Lions club (Chinese) or my mom making Chinese Indonesian food. It seemed a little like play-acting. Still, my mom was concerned that I have some exposure. My parents never made any comments that I could remember about dating. I do remember not being able to go on a high school trip to South Africa with my girlfriend at the time because of my skin.

Jozen: When my dad and mom divorced, my mom met the man I would call “Pop” for 11 years.. Essentially he raised my sister and I and he was black and Filipino, but culturally, he was like a lot of brothers who lived in our small town of Seaside, California. He raised my sister and I to be conscious of being a person of color, but it was never something was pushed us. I wasn’t raised to embrace being black, but I don’t speak Spanish and I don’t speak Japanese. One of the benchmarks of any culture is it’s language, so not speaking either of those tongues made it appear as though I was not trying to identify them. But the fact is, my mom’s parents never taught her and my uncles their languages, largely because my grandfather was a Puerto Rican in the U.S. Army and they were all raised on military bases in the 50’s and 60’s. There was none of this holding onto language and such going on, so my mom and uncles don’t speak Spanish or Japanese either. I think, culturally my family identified as people of color and Seaside is a black city, and we were just looked at as part of that mix. It never impacted messages I received about dating. I was bringing home black girls who I liked to meet my mom when I was way too young to be bringing any girls home (a point my Mom made clear). We could date whoever we wanted, but I do think it would shock anyone in my family if I brought home a woman who wasn’t black. I went to an HBCU, Howard University, and as one classmate of mine jokingly told me, “You didn’t come here to not date black girls.” I laugh at it, but it’s kind of true because like most men, one of the factors I considered in choosing a college was the girls, and well, you can only guess Howard was my idea of heaven on earth from a social standpoint.

LM: While there were no overt messages, my mother’s celebration of her Puerto Rican heritage, plus practically annual visits to my grandparents on the island and a three-year stint there due to my father’s military assignment, led me to identify significantly with that “side” of me. I thought of myself as white because that’s what I looked like but saw no conflict between that and being Puerto Rican. Meanwhile the Irish “side” — though it came from both parents and my mother’s stepfather — came across to me as lip service. From Ireland I got pale skin, freckles and soda bread. Guess which two I didn’t much appreciate.

After several moves due to my father’s military service, I eventually came of age in New York City, where from eighth grade on I felt an immediate connection to many Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean islanders — and by the time my consciousness was raised in college, people in other communities of color.

LB: Culturally I was raised Black with very little connection to my Navajo heritage. My mother lives her life as if she is a Black woman, with a footnote that she’s Navajo whenever questioned about her ethnicity. I often have conversations with her reminding her that she can’t really speak about the “struggle” to others when she looks like a Native American woman. I think I was raised to ignore the Navajo side of my culture if only because it reminded everyone that my mother was not the birth children of my grandparents. Nobody discussed the adoption, ever. It wasn’t until I was 8 years old did I realize my mother was adopted, as pointed out by my cousins who taunted me for not being our grandfather’s “real” granddaughter.

Jen: For all intents and purposes, I was raised as a white, Jewish girl with little to no Chinese cultural influence. However, my Chinese father was probably the more vocal parent when it came to communicating expectations around whom I should be dating. He came to this country in order to receive better opportunities and always stressed the importance of success to me and my brothers. He always talked about choice of partner influencing this success. Partnering with people who “didn’t struggle” in this country was ideal. Partnering with others would only put us in danger, bring us down, hold us back. Of course, this was very hard to hear, as I knew he was applying practicality to a matter that didn’t always feel that cut and dry. He made relationships sound like business propositions. I remember nodding at the dining room table as he lectured on, knowing that I would do what I wanted to do in the end.

N’jaila: I used to be a firm believer in the one drop rule racially, but I identify strongly as West Indian. No matter what race a person is if you are Jamaican or Trini no matter what race, where you move or who you marry you’re still West Indian and your kids are West Indian. I came from a more inclusive culture.

My parents have their prejudices , ironically I think my father would be much happier if I did not marry or date Asian, my mother is a lot more fluid, for her education is more important. She doesn’t care what color the man is so much as he pedigree.

My parents were very passive with race, this might have to do a lot with my father’s own issues with his race, they always made the conversation about culture.

It is a little odd for a mixed race person that looks Black. I think many people expect us to only think , act and identify as Black and the assumption is that we will greatly favor Black or White partners. When I started seriously dating I found myself looking for the men that I “should” want to be with and not the men I wanted to be with regardless of who had anything to say about it.

Holly: I was raised to believe that I was both “Japanese” and “Welsh/English/Irish/Scotch,” which looking back I can see as an attempt on the part of my dad’s liberal, middle-class family to be more specific about “their half” of our identity than just homogenous whiteness. But that half of my family is… well, really white. And the very fact that I was raised on the west coast of the US meant that my sister and I were raised in their cultural context, not my mother’s. My mother felt alienated and we were perpetually aware that “her side” was very far away, especially because she didn’t have strong ties in any local Japanese community. She made us go to Japanese language school during our junior-high years, and we went to the Japanese grocery store, took aikido and kendo lessons at times, but we barely knew any of the other kids and families. So I was always aware that I was mixed and was “half-Japanese” — it was the most significant and visible marker of difference, otherness, outsiderness in my childhood — but we also felt extremely far away and cut off from the source of that. Thinking back, I feel really lucky that I did get to visit Japan and my relatives there a few times growing up — if I hadn’t, I would have felt even more like a solitary alien from a long-lost planet.

Ken: Definitely raised to identify more with the black aspect of my heritage as both of my parents grew up in the Civil Rights Era south. And as N’jaila said, if you outwardly appear as black to most folk, that’s all you are or have a chance to be until you assert yourself as other.

I didn’t know any mixed couples growing up, so my messages were from pop culture. Essentially that interracial dating might make for a nice Hallmark moment, but otherwise it’s likely too difficult of an option to entertain.

A.C.: Culture factors in big. My dad’s pretty explicitly encouraged me to date Latinas in the past, and though I have, it’s simply never worked out to be a lasting relationship. In spite of the fact that I’ve been exposed to a lot of Irish, German, and South Texas culture about equally, I identify a bit more as Latino for several reasons. I’m much more attached to that side of my family, and was raised on southwestern food. I’ve always enjoyed visiting Texas more than rural Illinois, where my mother’s from. There are two things important to me in a potential partner that have filtered down: speaking Spanish and cooking food I enjoy. But those can be learned.

By Arturo R. García

Nope, that’s not Peter Parker in the picture above. Which makes this Vote With Your Wallet time again for Marvel Comics fans. The appearance of this new web-slinger isn’t just a potential turning point for the comics business, but it’s the biggest in a series of moves over the years by Marvel to build more diversity into its’ highly-lucrative Spider-brand. Spoilers under the cut.

As you might expect, there’s a caveat to throw out there right off the bat: this Spider-Man is not part of “regular” Marvel continuity; he’s part of the more “contemporary,” more diverse Ultimate Marvel Universe. This is where the bulk of the characterizations for Marvel’s film canon have come from – most notably, Nick Fury being played by Samuel L. Jackson.

As USA Today reported on Tuesday, today’s issue of Ultimate Fallout will feature Miles Morales, a half-black, half-Latino teenager out to fill Peter Parker’s shoes. Parker died after fending off several of his enemies in Ultimate Spider-Man #160 two months ago.

Brian Michael Bendis, who wrote both Peter’s death and Mile’s debut, told the paper Morales’ “casting” was inspired by actor Donald Glover’s social-media campaign to play Spider-Man in the upcoming film series reboot, a role that ultimately went to Andrew Garfield, a white Englishman.

“It’s certainly long overdue,” said Bendis, who also orchestrated Luke Cage’s rise to prominence and co-wrote Takio, which centered around a multi-racial adoptive family. “Even though there’s some amazing African-American and risnority characters bouncing around in all the superhero universes, it’s still crazy lopsided.”

On a slightly more disconcerting note, Ultimate artist Sara Pichelli was also quoted as saying, “Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal,” which, as David Brothers points out, doesn’t do Marvel any favors:

What she says works directly against Marvel’s marketing. (Spider-Man is black now!) She’s saying that this sort of thing should be par for the course, rather than an aberration. I like that she slipped that in there, whether my understanding of her statement is what she intended or not. The big deal about Nightrunner, the new Aqualad, and… who am I forgetting? Batwing? Blue Beetle? The big deal about all those guys should’ve been no big deal to us. I don’t get hype when an ill new black character shows up in One Piece (word to sleepy old Admiral Kuzan) or in a new movie. Why should I when it happens in the comics I’ve been reading since I was a child? If anything, these books should be the ones blazing trails like they used to do.

Brothers is right when he notes that overall, Marvel’s efforts to be more diverse have reached a bit farther than those of its’ competitor, DC Comics. In fact, Morales is the third Latino to adopt the mantle of the Spider.

In 1992, Marvel attempted a sort-of Beta version of the Ultimate line, with the Marvel 2099 comics, originally set in the far-flung future of “present-day” continuity. The first book in the line was, of course, Spider-Man 2099, which featured a light-skinned biracial hero, Miguel O’Hara. Like the original Peter Parker, Miguel’s scientific prowess was remarkable, but Miguel had a cynical streak that initially underscored his black costuming.

More recently, the company introduced Anya Corazon in 2005, first under the name Arana, later graduating her into the role of Spider-Girl, with her own series. And, while O’Hara had his own crossover with the first Spider-Man, Anya not only interacted with Spidey, she also got his endorsement to continue on as Spider-Girl, and was even name-checked by him in his own title.

Unfortunately, both Anya and Miguel’s series would end up cancelled. And that spectre is already hanging over the gamble to introduce a POC in one of Marvel’s most marketable characters, even if it is an alt-universe variant. Hopefully, the same-day digital release for Miles’ adventures in Ultimate Spider-Man will attract readers and retailers who won’t either live up to the most vile stereotypes of comic-book fans, or just won’t follow a hero of color because they don’t find him or her “relatable.” But, what kind of sales numbers – digital and hard-copy – will it take for Morales’ book to continue its’ run? And if it does end up cancelled, will Marvel keep Miles in the mask, or hot-shot a resurrection of Ultimate Pete for the sake of “tradition”?

On Thursday, June 9, I attended a Gen-Art sponsored screening of Victoria Mahoney’s independent feature Yelling to the Sky in Manhattan. Starring Zöe Kravitz and co-starring Gabourey Sidibe, this film has had significant buzz. It made its debut at the Berlin Film Festival and was workshopped via Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters and Directors Lab. Based on synopses I read prior to the screening, I was curious to see if the portrayal of black women(hood) would be complex and fresh (as it was in Ava Duvernay’s wonderful I Will Follow) or if it would stick to the usual, shopworn portrayals that sometimes plague even independent feature films. I was especially interested to see whether Sidibe’s character would be similar to the one she played in Precious or if that image would be turned inside out (Sidibe was actually cast as Latonya Williams in Yelling before being slated to play Precious Jones).

In Yelling, Kravitz plays Sweetness O’Hara, a biracial high school student coming of age in New York City while managing a difficult home life. Quiet (at least for the first part of the film), sensitive, introspective, and intelligent, Sweetness has to contend with an alcoholic father, a mother with emotional (and possibly mental) issues, an older sister coping with young motherhood, bullies at school, and urban poverty. Zöe Kravitz did a great job with the script she was given; her performance was nuanced and quite believable. Actually, most of the actors in the movie were strong (including Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of The Roots). However, despite the actors’ efforts, they could not overcome the disjointed storytelling nor the director’s inability to avoid well-worn tropes of the “coming of age in the ‘hood” drama. And whether intentionally or not, the director played into common cinematic (and real-life) racial memes. There were four that stood out.

Dark(er)-skinned black people are mean and like to victimize light(er)-skinned black people. The opening scene of Yelling involves Sweetness, accompanied by a friend of similar complexion, riding her bicycle right into a group of kids from her high school who in short order take her bike and beat her down in the street. Gabourey Sidibe’s character Latonya is the ringleader of this group, initiating the bullying and fighting, and ultimately ordering her boyfriend to viciously finish the job. The assault only stops when Sweetness’ sister Ola, who like Sweetness is very fair, brutally assaults her sister’s male attacker. While the director may not have intended for this scene to evoke intraracial stereotypes and conflict about skin color, it certainly looked that way on screen. Also, while Sidibe’s character was well put together (her hair was laid and her makeup was popping), she was still an (physically) intimidating bully.

Girls/teenagers/women who are “authentically” black are bad. They fight, party, don’t care about achieving anything in life, and use illicit substances. After yet another incidence of family trauma, Sweetness reinvents herself. She starts selling drugs, begins cutting class, seemingly abandons her aspiration to attend college, and gets a makeover courtesy of two of the (darker-skinned) girls who were involved in her initial beat down. Her new look involves rocking doorknocker earrings, sashaying down neighborhood streets and school hallways in tight jeans, putting on lots of eye shadow and lip gloss, and a wearing a cornrow on the right side of her hair. She also enacts revenge upon Latonya, again with assistance from her two new friends, beating her bloody between classes. Near the end of the movie when it seems that Sweetness in trying to return to her old ways of being, she distances herself from her friends, apologizes to Latonya for beating her up, and pleads with her school’s guidance counselor to get her into any college that will accept her. Sweetness’ trajectory is not uncommon to young people of all races and ethnicities, especially when dealing with challenging life circumstances. But in this particular film, her journey to and return from darkness are literally marked by her association with and ultimate dissociation from those who are dark (of skin).

Dark(er)-skinned black male patriarchs mean well even when they’re doing bad, and they always abandon their kids in the end. When Sweetness wants to get into the drug game to supplement her family’s meager (non-existent?) income, she seeks out Roland (Black Thought’s character). He’s an educated hoodlum…you know, the black man that would be a CEO, were it not for America’s racist brand of capitalism. Roland resists Sweetness’ initial requests for him to put her on. But after being worn down by her relentless requests, he acquiesces and becomes her mentor and supplier. His daddy-figure drug dealer status is cemented when he also rejects Kravitz’s character’s romantic advances after a night of partying. Contrasted with the stoner sellers that Sweetness sometimes works alongside in her school’s stairwells, Roland’s selling of illicit substances seems almost righteous. In that way, he’s not dissimilar from other sympathetic drug slingers like Ice Cube’s Doughboy (Boyz ‘N The Hood) and Chris Tucker’s affable Smokey of Friday fame. But in the end, Roland puts Sweetness in harms way when he brings her to a drug pick-up that goes wrong. He ultimately ends up bleeding on a neighborhood basketball court after getting shot in retribution for the deal gone bad. Sweetness witnesses his murder after playing ball with him minutes earlier. But it’s not surprising. Black men always end up leaving their children to fend for themselves.

Interracial relationships are dysfunctional and make everyone involved unhappy. Sweetness and Ola have a white, alcoholic father and a black, emotionally impaired mother. Their mother seems shell-shocked and is actually missing-with little explanation-throughout most of the movie. Earlier in the film, it seems that she literally abandons her children, but later it’s hinted that she was in a mental institution. The father physically assaults everyone in the house at least once during the film and regularly metes out verbal punishment. Near the end of the film, again with little in the way of explanation, Sweetness’ father decides to actually attempt to parent her. He tries to keep her off the streets and pull her off the dark path she’s started to follow, becoming her savior. The O’Hara’s family dynamic embodies three classic celluloid tropes: black mothers are bad and/or incompetent, white people/men are the ones who save the day, and (female) children who are the products of interracial relationships have tragic lives.

Zöe Kravitz as Sweetness, good girl gone bad.

Though I enjoyed the visual quality of this film and at times, the lyrical storytelling, I felt that Victoria Mahoney tread well-traveled ground. Yelling to the Sky seemed to me a mash-up of Kids, Larry Clark’s tale of urban teenage nihilism, and Proenza-Schouler’s controversial Act Da Fool; visually captivating, emotionally brutal, and unstereotypical in its presentation of stereotypes of black/biracial women and urban blackness.

While Mahoney is black and/or a woman of color (she was profiled in the April 2011 issue of Essence in an article about black independent filmmakers, “Independent Women”), that does not mean that she is incapable of promoting prosaic images of black women and people. I was unable to unearth much about Mahoney’s background, except that she worked as an actress, then moved into directing/writing/producing. I have no idea what her experience as a non-white woman has been. However, whether or not she meant to make statements about race, the images she has put forth still speak to some “truths” held by her and/or a society steeped in white supremacy. As bell hooks said in Outlaw Culture, “Whether we like it or not, cinema assumes a pedagogical role in the lives of many people. It may not be the intent of the filmmaker to teach audiences anything, but that does not mean that lessons are not learned.”

A friend recently asked me about the beginning of Swirl.

I told her how I started it. And why. She interrupted to clarify – she wanted to know how I felt. What specifically I was experiencing when I came up with the idea, when I took the first steps to incorporate, when it all came to fruition. I had to think about this – after all, it was nearly eleven years ago.
And there wasn’t one feeling, but a pretty good mix of many emotions from the time the idea started to form in my mind, through the very first year of Swirl’s existence.

Hopeful – as I sat down at one of the big wooden tables in the Center for Work and Service on Wellesley College’s campus in April of 1999. The whole world ahead of me as I looked for my first job after college. I knew I wanted to work at an organization that served multiracial people and families.

Confused and disheartened – about ten minutes into my research at the Center for Work and Service as I realized there were no mixed race organizations in New York City to which I could apply and beg for a job.

Curious – as I told one of my closest friends, Nadiyah, that there weren’t any mixed orgs for me to work at, and mulling over her nonchalant, perfect response: “Just start one yourself.”

Scared but determined – when I started to take little step by little step to research and then set up Swirl as an official organization. I was nervous. I knew how to set up organizations at Wellesley, but here in the real world? It felt big and foreign. But I knew that what I was doing was needed. And wanted. I also knew that I couldn’t use the same tactics I used at Wellesley (wink, for those who know what I’m talkin’ about!), so I was determined to figure out this new terrain.

Energized – looking around the table at the first Swirl meeting and seeing a few people grow to about twenty by the time we were ready to begin that afternoon. Twenty people agreeing to be a part of helping to start up New York City’s only multiracial organization in support of mixed individuals, interracial couples, and mixed families. I was so energized that I started to work on Swirl during the evenings and weekends when I wasn’t at my full-time job, helping to prepare homeless men and women for full-time jobs at a welfare-to-work program.

Validated and seen – Admittedly, Swirl also helped me to feel seen in a way that I never had, growing up multiracial myself. For once, I had a community to which I could turn. People who understood me. Others to whom I could relate and with whom I would feel safe. Wrapped up in my hope to build community for others, was my own need to feel a sense of belonging. I knew first-hand how important this was, and what it meant not to have this kind of connection. Community seemed to be something others sometimes took for granted if they had one in which they were fully accepted. Maybe even two. Growing up in the generation in which I grew up, it was common to “have the best of both worlds” (as others called it) yet not feel a part of either. Swirl was for just these people – those who were not fully accepted because they were not enough of any, and too much for the simple check boxes we came to depend upon as a society.

That tingly feeling you get when you are really happy and filled with hope/excitement – You know what I mean? I would get this feeling a lot over the first year and years to come. It’s a feeling that I would get when I saw strangers really connecting before my eyes; when I would get feedback that Swirl mattered; when people thanked me for creating a community for which they searched for the greater part of their lives. The tingliest thing that happened to me was during the holiday party that first year of Swirl. An older multiracial male – in his 50s at the time – came up to me and said, “I feel like I’m finally home.” Tears welled in his eyes as I smiled back at him.

I still get this tingly feeling, especially now, as I return (more fully) to my work with Swirl. The feeling comes on when I imagine a better way of living together – all of us – not in harmony for the sake of harmony, but a harmony that we really understand because we have actually built it and worked very hard for it. Over time, and through authentic relationships. Knowing that it is far away from where we are now, but seeing sparks all the time. On the subway. In classrooms. In the cafe where I am writing this. The possibility that people can come together (across cultures and socially-constructed races) and see one another for who they truly are, rather than what merely appears on the outside. Sometimes I get so excited about what is possible that I can’t sleep. Ideas run through my head and keep me up until I finally give in and let the thoughts flow down my arm, through my pen, and onto paper. Excitement that with effort and energy, we can make positive change and create a new culture of addressing difference in this country.

I appreciate my friend having encouraged me to think about how I felt in the beginning. It’s good to remember why I started doing this work in the first place.

So today, I connect back to the beginning. The same feelings as I had back in 1999 (now accompanied by a bit more maturity and know-how, I’d like to think!). I am hopeful. Determined. Energized. More excited than ever. Eager to move forward with what I envision, which is probably similar to what many of us envision and hope for. Connected, healthy, and strong communities adept at dealing with conflict and difference. Together.

(picture was taken at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory in 2006 at a SwirlNYC event)

It began when Activist X posted a link to this article about the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival and noted with some irritation that despite the festival’s claims to inclusivity, there were no Latin@s mentioned in the article. X asked: if Latin@ people are the largest group of multiracial people in the Americas and the festival is supposed to be open to everybody, why weren’t Latin@ people included? A few people agreed with X, and some people who had been at the festival said that they thought Heidi Durrow and the festival were great, but that they could see X’s point.

Enter Activist Y: after expressing some trepidation, Y said that the festival was using the term “mixed race” or “multiracial” to refer to people who had parents of two or more different racial categorisations. Activist Y said that if your whole family shared the same ethnic identity, then you were not mixed in the way the festival intended.

Dear Racializens, I am sure you can imagine what happened next: a veritable Facebook wall brawl — albeit one that was highly intellectual and restrained. Most people sided with X (it was X’s wall to begin with) and Y, after making several long attempts to explain themselves, eventually left in a digital huff.

This exchange brought back some of the most difficult writing that I have ever done on Racialicious: where readers challenged my right to call myself, as a mixed race person with parents of two different races, mixed in a separate way from those who are mixed race but share the same identity as their whole family, for e.g. folks who are mestizo, Creole, African American, Metis, Peranakan…

(From here on in I will refer to people who come from mixed lineage as MRs, and people who have parents of two different and separate racial categorisations as MR2s.)

So here is one of the most important things I have learned from all my years of toiling in the anti-racist trenches here at Racialicious: when you are talking about race with anti-racist people of colour, you are speaking from a place of pain, to a place of pain. (Ok obviously we are about more than pain, but pain is always on the table.) Many of us come to anti-racism through struggle. We are used to having things taken away from us, and we turn to anti-racism to try and arm ourselves against the corrosion of racism. We are sensitive, and we come by it honestly.

Both of my parents are – to the best of my knowledge – the first members of generations and generations of their families to marry outside of the race. When I first started writing about mixedness on Racialicious, I had never heard of mixed race being used in any way other than to refer to people who had parents of two different races. I grew up in Canada and Singapore, and while, as a postcolonial nation, there are many MR communities in Singapore, they refer to themselves as Eurasian, Peranakan or Straits-born Chinese, not mixed race. It was never suggested to me that I might have a similar experience to these folks, and neither did the Eurasian friends I had seem interested in me as an identity buddy. More than this, in Singapore the term “mixed race” was restricted not simply to “a person with parents of two different and separate races”: it was used to specifically refer to people who had one white parent, and one parent of colour. (Obviously, this happens not just in Singapore.)

Through some big f-ups (which you may read here and here and here, though I am sorry to say the comments might be missing on some of those), I learned that many Americans of colour — often African Americans and Latin@s — have a problem with “mixed race” being used solely to refer to MR2s.

Using the term “mixed race” in this narrow way is to systematically erase ethnic histories that bear witness to slavery and colonization; or simply, to erase ethnic histories, period. To do so can be read as an act of white supremacy: it covers up the fact that many Americans, regardless of skin colour or the stories elders are willing to tell, have mixed lineages. To do this silences a whole community’s right to express their experience.

And another thing: it is grating to hear the term “mixed race” applied solely to MR2s, as if we invented mixedness. Cultural forces (usually — though not always — powered by white folks) that select MR2s as somehow unique, or the antidote to racism, or hybridly vigorous, or exquisitely beautiful, are just pouring salt in the wound. After generations of MR folks being ostracised or having to commit violent contortions to have a peaceful life, being mixed is all of a sudden hot – and this is the very moment that the label is being rescinded from MRs. You don’t even get invited to speak at the damn mixed race festival.

And let us note that a lot of this friction gets even hotter when we are talking about MR2s who have a white parent and a parent of colour, because we are talking about people of colour who also have white privilege and/or light-skin privilege.

There are other reasons why MRs get angry when MR2s say that being MR2 mixed is different from being MR mixed – and you are welcome to chime in in the comments, if you are so inclined – but these are the ones I have come across, time and again.

After my Racialicious education, I tried to be sensitive to the fact that “mixed race” can mean MRs or MR2s. To acknowledge this widening of the category, in a post I was writing about Alicia Keys and her warped presentation of historic racial relations, I referred to Alicia Keys as a first generation mixed race person. To my dismay, this language was deemed just as offensive as my original ignorance. Because, a commenter said, the language of generations is offensive and recalls such awful categories as quadroon and octoroon, and because, why, after everything, did I have to keep on insisting that there was a difference between mixed race people from long lines of mixedness, and mixed race people who were racial anomalies in their families?

It wasn’t, I started to realize, that MRs were solely mad that MR2s and the dominant culture didn’t recognize them as mixed. They were mad that a distinction was even being made between themselves, and MR2s. (Perhaps my very decision to say “MRs” and “MR2s” is aggravating this tension right now.)

When you are dealing with sensitive people who are reeling from cultural rejection, distinctions feel like rejections. Why do MR2s think they are so special that they can’t possibly be in the same club with MRs?

So I will dig deep into my horrible well of childhood pain to explain what this distinction business is about.

I come from a nation of two. There’s me, and there is my sibling. When I was growing up, I had no language to explain my experience. I did not know people who were mixed. And these problems were exacerbated by the fact that I was a TCK in a postcolonial nation that was still dealing with a lot of (justifiable) anger towards Westerners, and I was read as white, and I was given a hard time because of that. This was all without a real knowledge of race or racism, but simply a sinking feeling that I was hopelessly and sometimes offensively different from everyone around me, and that those gaps could never be bridged. Until I was in my mid-20s, this was what being mixed was for me. In my family of origin I  did not know a single person — not my grandparents, cousins, my mother and father, or even my sibling (who, thanks to the genetic lottery, came out looking a different race from me and so had their own experience altogether) — who could understand my ethnocultural identity.

Note: I am not saying that only MR2s understand true isolation. Pulllease. I am just saying that this was my experience, and I am sure, sadly enough, that there are many other roads to that kind of loneliness.

So when I meet MRs who come from long and often proud lines of family members who share the same ethnocultural experience as them, I can’t imagine that they could have shared my particular brand of racial isolation. It is not about thinking myself better or even, as some people have alleged, more authentically and mixedly mixed than folks who share a more complete heritage with their family. It is simply that I can’t imagine they could have had the same experience.

Part of this has to be the emo-as-heck tragic mixie inside of me who is too terrified to hope that, after all this time, my nation of two is a nation of millions. I swear, that stupid Blind Melon video where the weird little bee finally finds all the other little bees gets me every time.

I know I could be wrong that there is a yawning distance between MRs and MR2s; but we can never get past the front door of fighting over what I should call myself and what I should call them, to find out. Like I said at the beginning, I’m a sensitive brotherpucker.

Like so many other things, some of this is about the amount of space the dominant culture is willing to allot the people it has marginalized: we are fighting for table scraps because we know the right to tell our own stories is in slight supply. It both frustrates and saddens me that my attempt to assert my identity causes pain to other people who are just trying to do the same thing.

We become possessive over our suffering. There is something that MRs and MR2s definitely have in common: we are fighting over the right to this label and the right to make distinctions, because any concession feels like giving up the history that we fought so hard to survive. I can only wonder at the experience of mixed race people who are both MRs and MR2s. Again, chime in from the comments if you’d like to weigh in.

I guess what I am giving you here is my thought process so far. I have no conclusions when it comes to this fight. Do I think that folks who come from a mixed lineage are mixed? Of course I do. Do I think that they should have the right to call themselves mixed, without qualification? Definitely. Do I believe that we are mixed in the same way? This is something I still struggle with. Do I want to be allies? Do I want to search for kinship where I never thought to look before? Do I want to have a mixed race festival and invite everyone?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

“Two things are important to me,” she says over a sushi supper in downtown Corvallis. “Justice and love, and both of them clicked for me in Islam.”

Fakhraie grew up in a family where religion was respected but not forced on her or her younger brother, Anayat, 24. Her father, born in Iran, did not practice his faith. Her mother, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, studied religion with another woman but didn’t attend services.

“I was raised as a white girl with a funny last name and a foreign dad,” she says. As an adolescent, she was “the black cloud” over her parents’ house. “I was sullen. I hated everything.” Today she says she and her family are close, but her brother, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, remembers her black cloud days.

“At Christmas, we’d be opening presents and she’d be sulking in the corner,” he says. “She didn’t want anyone to take pictures. ‘Do we have to do this?’ she’d complain. She embodied the quintessential teenager angst.”

“I was a ‘why’ person,” she says. “I always wanted to know why.” Why, for example, was her father so strict with her when it came to boys? An avid reader, she began reading about Persian culture, which led her to the subject of Islam. She kept on reading. When she got to college, she read Fatima Mernissi’s “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam.”

It was a breakthrough moment for her.

“I could be a feminist and a Muslim,” she says. “I was a feminist before I knew what a feminist was.” Fakhraie’s mother was the family breadwinner and her dad was “Mr. Mom.” She remembers being upset that her mom came home from work and picked up household chores.

“It was like a double shift,” Fakhraie says. “Fairness has always been an integral issue with me.”

–Excerpted from Fatemeh Fakhraie: A Feminist Muslim Breaks Stereotypes

Photo Credit: Utne

By Guest Contributor Monique Jones, cross-posted from moniqueblog

If you’ve been following the news surrounding Akira, you might have heard that Keanu Reeves was circling the film and probably would have been cast in the role of Kaneda. But Reeves has dropped out of the film. Also, according to CinemaBlend, a big chunk of the staff on the movie have been let go and the previsualization department has been shut down. However, WB says the movie is still in development in the following statement:

Production on Akira has not halted or been shut down, as the film has not yet been greenlit and is still very much in the development stage. The exploratory process is crucial to a project of this magnitude, and we will continue to sculpt our approach to making the best possible film.

Reeves, whose background includes Hawaiian and Chinese heritages, may have been considered by the studio execs and/or the casting agent over “Akira” to be a good pick for the film because of this. Racebending.com seems to think so. However, Racebending explains their hesitance to see Reeves cast as Kaneda:

We can sort of see why Warner Bros. would want to go with one of their previously established stars–Reeves is arguably Warner Bros. biggest actor of Asian descent (granted, only 2% of WB films from 2000 to 2009 had an Asian lead, and they were mostly Asian nationals like Jet Li and Rain.)

At the same time, it’s unsatisfactory to see Reeves (who has played white characters, multiethnic characters, and even Siddhartha) default to Hollywood’s only go-to actor when they need to find someone to portray an Asian lead character. Hollywood isn’t exactly hard at work to discover this generation’s next hot “Keanu.”

For Asian American actors who aren’t Keanu Reeves, opportunities to play lead characters continue to be few and far between. Will Warner Bros. exceed expectations and cast an Asian American actor alongside Reeves to play Tetsuo? Can a $230 million Akira project that barely resembles the source material make enough to make a profit?

Now, I understand what Racebending is saying here. They would like to see Asian/Asian-American actors who aren’t the typical Hollywood type cast in the film adaptation of one of the biggest Asian art exports ever. They are also slightly annoyed at Reeves being constantly picked for these types of roles instead of Hollywood execs trying to find someone new. To be clear, I’m not knocking what Racebending’s opinion on the matter is; they are, after all, an Asian-American group and I’m African-American, a person on the fringes. And their opinion is partly the impetus behind my epic Akira Asian shortlist posts, because it does get tiring to see the same people get cast over and over again. But something that I noticed in the comments section of various movie websites paints a different picture about Keanu-gate. Yes, the commenters are just as annoyed as Racebending, but there’s a large number of people who think Reeves is white and white only, thereby not suitable for the role.

This wave of dissention from commenters raises the issue about the murky state of biracial or multi-racial actors and actresses in Hollywood. Some are thought of as a representation of one race while others are viewed almost like an “all-purpose” type person; both ideologies have a bit of error in them. The statement also raises an even bigger question–what is Hollywood’s role in our race perceptions?

There are some actors like Reeves, who are able to play characters from many different backgrounds because of their many different ethnicities. Lou Diamond Phillips–who is Scots-Irish, 1/4 Cherokee, Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Hawaiian–is one such actor, having played Native American/Mexican outlaw “Jose” Chavez y Chavez in Young Guns and Young Guns 2, The King in the Broadway revival of The King and I, Ritchie Valens in La Bamba, and Latino student Angel Guzman in Stand and Deliver.

Johnny Depp is also a multi-ethnic actor. You might recall the recent mulling over Johnny Depp has been doing over revising the role of Tonto in the upcoming reboot of The Lone Ranger. Depp, who is part Cherokee or Creek Native-American through his great-grandmother, said to Entertainment Weekly that he is making sure Tonto is not the sidekick he was in the show; Depp’s Tonto aims to be what he felt Tonto should’ve been in the show, which is being a more proactive character instead of a slap-in-the-face to Native American viewers.  Depp’s family history also has ties to French Hugenots.

Another example is Taylor Lautner, who has been featured in Moniqueblog’s “Native American Pride” section. He is Dutch, French, German, and has distant relations on his mother’s side to the Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes. Because of this, he has been able to portray Native American Jacob Black in the Twilight series.

With all of this said, however,  it would appear Reeves’ multi-ethnicity hasn’t cut the mustard with a big number of commenters on the aforementioned movie sites; they think Reeves is only white, therefore, they are glad he’s not in the movie.

This type of assumption and backlash is some of what actors and actresses who are part African-American have to deal with. They know of their white heritage, but in quite a few circumstances, they are only accepted by the public as black. Halle Berry is half Caucasian and half black, but is only labelled by Hollywood as “African-American” . In fact, Berry has stated many times that she identifies as “African-American”. (In a similar vein, Mohawk actress Kaniehtiio Horn, who is half Caucasian, has said “I am a Mohawk, a Mohawk woman, even if I don’t look like one.”) Other thespians such as Shemar Moore, Lisa Bonet, Thandie Newton, and Karyn Parsons are biracial but are generally thought of by the public (and possibly by Hollywood) as simply “black” because they “look” black and/or because they’ve played black characters, when in fact, many biracial actors have played biracial characters; for example, Parsons played a biracial woman in Mixing Nia.

But, there are other biracial actors and actresses like Jennifer Beals and Rashida Jones who, while not shunning their African-American heritage, do have the ability to be cast as other ethnicities in film and television because of their light skin tone. However, both Beals and Jones have stated their opinions on this: Beals has a history of asking for her characters to be biracial and has played a biracial woman passing for white in the film Devil in a Blue Dress, and in an interview with Women’s Health Magazine, Jones speaks openly about being thought of as “not black enough”:

RJ: My parents were crazy cool and I was a straight up geek. I wanted to be a lawyer, a judge, president…

WH: And instead, you became…an actress!

RJ: That was never the plan! But I always wanted to pursue theater and my black cultural identity. In my second year at college, I did the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, and it was so healing. It was an incredible experience.

WH: Healing because the African-American crowd shunned you for “not being black enough,” right?

RJ: Yeah. I’m lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want. The thing is, I do identify with being black, and if people don’t identify me that way that’s their issue. I’m happy to challenge people’s understanding of what it looks like to be biracial, because guess what? In the next 50 years, people will start looking more and more like me.

It would seem that a lot of people are giving Reeves the same “you’re in or you’re out” treatment a lot of biracial or multi-racial actors and actresses get; because Reeves looks white, this is causing a few problems for the commenters, and probably, a lot of Akira fans.

As to Hollywood’s role, I will say that it’s pretty much a fact that the bigwigs in Hollywood generally cast people by looks alone; they aren’t always so sensitive as to figure out what your actual ethnicity(ies) is/are (they should be, however). My dream-come-true interview with Michael Benyaer, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest Season One voice of Hadji and voice of Reboot’s Bob, proved that fact:

“Hollywood is … Hollywood is very specific,” he [Benyaer] said. “Hollywood casts roles based on what you look like.”

Also, said Benyaer, many people in Hollywood do not differentiate between accents that originate from India and the Middle East. “To them it’s all the same,” he said, “and I’m like, ‘No, that’s a Pakistani accent,’ [or] ‘No, that’s an Israeli accent.’”

However, I’ve only touched on the tip of the problem when it comes to deciphering where Hollywood’s role ends and our role as everyday people begins in how we view race. I guess one step in ending the merry-go-round of confusion about ethnicity would be to realize that probably about 50%-80% of us in America have different ethnicities somewhere in our gene pool; I personally know that I make up part of that percentage. I put it to you, though–what do you think about this topic? Has Hollywood and our pop-culture failed us in some way? Or is all of the blame to be put on us “regular people”?

By Arturo R. García

Yesterday, Moviefone’s Gabrielle Dunn wrote that this image of Jennifer Lawrence in character as Katniss Everdeen from the planned Hunger Games movie adaptation “calmed” any concerns about her casting. We beg to differ.

To be fair, Ms. Dunn was referring more to questions about the 20-year-old Lawrence playing a 16-year-old character. But the concerns regarding a white, blonde actress being hired to play a character many fans considered to be multi-racial won’t go away soon, as Racebending’s Michael Le illustrated on Twitter:

Meanwhile, movie blogger Ms. Go identified Lawrence’s unspoken “co-star”:

This isn’t to diminish Lawrence’s talents, but it’s not hard to figure that she required some cosmetic help to play Katniss, because even accounting for camera discrepancies, her skin tone on that Entertainment Weekly cover does not match the one seen in this picture she took for Elle:

Both the film’s director, Gary Ross, and Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins have gone out of their way to assure both fans of the book series and potential audiences that Lawrence is the only person who could play Katniss. But the truth is, while Katniss’ ethnicity was undefined in the books, the casting call for the movie called for Caucasian actresses from the get-go. That would seem to contradict Ross’ statement to EW that there was no “doctrine” regarding the character’s race.

The truth is, the doctrine has always been there in Hollywood, and – again, through no fault of Lawrence’s – it’s designed to give people like her a pass. And those concerns should not be ignored by anyone anymore.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

Being mixed race always has its challenges: isolation, language barriers, not fitting in, not being ‘enough’, and the many forms of racism that come with all that.

Every time I tell people that my mom is Peruvian and my dad is Lebanese I get:

1. Exotic!
2. Interesting.
3. How did that happen?
4. You look more…

One time a famous playwright of colour stroked my cheek and whispered “exotic” in my ear after I identified myself to him.

When I break it down even more (Mom: Indigenous/Spanish/Chinese + dad: Arab, moved to South America in his teens) I get the insult that people think is funny and acceptable: “you’re a mutt.”  It gets worse when I say my dad isn’t in my life, but I really don’t want to go there right now.

Reading Fireweed #75: “The Mixed Race Issue” was not only fun it was refreshing.  Its contributors wrote about a lot of what I have experienced over the years; and they wrote from the heart, holding nothing back, and well.

Published in 2002 and guest edited by Lisa Amin, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and May Lui, all mixed race women, Fireweed # 75 was a follow up to a similar anthology, Miscegenation Blues, published in 1994.  Amin writes in the intro, “This one is for the beige babies.”  It’s that and more.

“Heinz 57,” by Anne-Marie Estrada, is my life story.  Except, I’m not Anne-Marie and she isn’t writing about me, she’s writing about herself.  A very short piece, “Heinz 57″ speaks to many of us mixies. Broken down into two sections, “HERE.” and “THERE.”, twelve questions Anne-Marie constantly gets are displayed throughout, many of which a lot of mixed race people get:

1. Where’s your accent from?
2. Are you…?
3. Did you go to school in…?
4. What do you speak at home?
5. What do you eat at home?
6. What do you know about your family?
7. How did she come to marry a man from…?

Marie writes:

When someone sees my name they think one thing.

When they hear my voice they think another.

Then they see my face and are mildly confused.

Marie ends her short, fast paced, punchy piece with: “Because you just can’t tell by looking.”  True!

Jesse Heart has two pieces in Fireweed #75: “Pinky Rant” and “Really/Not Really.”  “Pinky Rant,” a non-fiction piece – short essay really, possibly an Op-Ed, goes deep in a small space.  Heart explores race and gender and colonialism better than most academics in a concise, cutting manner.  Heart starts off with a solid slap to the ear:

I think I am reaching a point of exhaustion.  I am tired of explaining…explaining my orientation…my identity as trans, as butch, as boi, as dyke.  Explaining my “origin”…?

The explaining is tiring but not as bad as what Heart so beautifully calls “Colour f-cking adjectives.”  Heart is referring to comments like “drunken native” when people find out about their Indigenous ancestry.  And then there’s the ogling on public transit:

And if it’s not my “origin”, it’s the public debate I must witness, like on a fucking subway, “is that a man/dude/guy…or woman?…**giggle, giggle**.

Heart shines again in their simple yet poignant statements in “Really/not really:”

In her untitled essay, Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz (a half Arab and half Jewish woman) explores hypogamy, racism, the intersection of Zionism and racism, and the ever present racism in feminist/activist circles.  It’s deep, hard, honest, and sad.

As a half Arab who doesn’t fit in with the Arab community I love Weiner-Mahfuz’s essay.  And I can see why it’s untitled; some things can’t be named or labeled such as many experiences in mixed race life.

Being a different shade of brown, speaking Castellano (the Spanish dialect) and not Arabic, raised by a single mom, eating South American food my entire life, and using my mothers Spanish-colonial surname has left me outside of the Arab box.  Trying to explore my Arabness in university I joined the Arab Student Club (really a Palestinian solidarity movement that has gone through many names and is now Toronto’s biggest Palestinian activist group).  Although I met some good people, every problem written in Fireweed #75 surfaced: questions and explanations, lateral racism, misogyny toward female members, colour f-cking adjectives, tokenism etc.  Weiner-Mahfouz had similar experiences in feminist activism and at a race conference.

While recently talking with another mixed race friend (Native American and Black) about not fitting in with the Toronto Arab activist scene she said, “You’re too Indian for them.”  I prefer the word Indigenous, and I identify my indigeneity as Mestizo (Indigenous and Spanish; read Gloria Anzaldua for a much more detailed explanation).  But I got what she meant.  How can I relate to middle to upper class Arabs, who speak francais and Arabic, and hang mainly with other academics involved in activism, many of whom are white skinned and pass in the white world?  I grew up with Blacks and Latinos and Persians, all of colour, who’s parents, like my mom, worked in factories, restaurants, hotels, and as delivery people and taxi drivers and janitors.  I’m one of two in my crew who have gone to university; more of us have been incarcerated!  I don’t think that’s a coincidence.  And most of the friends I have, old and new, mainly of colour, have never heard of Edward Said, Ward Churchill, bell hooks etc.  And they don’t care too.

Weiner-Mahfouz writes of the exclusion she experienced in family circles for being both Arab and Jewish.  And she painfully writes of literally having a door slammed in her face at a race conference in Boston titled “Race and Racism in the 90s:”

I raised my hand and asked where mixed race people were to go…The white women in the room, including the white facilitator, said they felt I should caucus with them because  I could pass for white.  Most of the women of colour concurred with this…

The discussion proceeded with the facilitators spending ten minutes talking to the group about the privileges of being able to choose—as if I were not in the room…Finally, the group resolved that I could choose where to go…

It was not resolved for me.  I felt alone.  I felt that regardless of where I chose to go it would be the wrong choice.  I felt like the illegitimate bastard child that no one wanted and/or knew what to do with.  Many of the women of colour were angry with me.  Many of the white women felt as if they had made an anit-racist intervention by challenging me on my racism.  Still as the group broke up, I made a choice and walked towards the room that the women of colour were to meet in.  As I approached the door it quickly slammed in my face.

Not only do I believe that most of the contributors to Fireweed #75, and most mixed race people, have felt like Weiner-Mahfouz, but they’ve probably had real doors slammed in their faces like her.  I understand where the women of colour were coming from but that was cold.  Weiner-Mahfouz’s experience at the conference was horrible and one that continues today.  And so do all the problems laid out in the journal.  How far have we come along?

Weiner-Mahfouz poetically states that as mixed race peoples we are feared:

“We are feared because interracial relationships are still taboo in our culture.  We are feared because our mere existence often calls into question the status quo and the way that race is constructed in our society.  We are feared even by people on the Left who propose to be working to challenge these deeply rooted beliefs and constructs…We are not considered whole just as we are.”

The Mixed Race Issue has many brave, honest, entertaining and emotional pieces.  Karleen Pendleton Jimenez writes an erotic piece exploring her life as a white skinned Chicana and the complexities of skin politics in her dating life; Billie Rain’s essay title explains her piece: “The Myth of the White Jewish Race;” Lisa Amin writes about passing and failing as a mixed race person; Kim Trusty writes about her white mom; and there is so much more in this extraordinary and important collection.

Although we mixed race people are not considered whole, we are.  And this issue of Firewood shows that.

By Guest Contributor Diana Lin

Prime-time television shows may be a lot more diverse than we give them credit for. And before you jump down my throat, think about it: Darren Criss from Glee? Part Filipino. Morena Baccarin on V is of Latin American origins. And Jesse Williams of Grey’s Anatomy—part black, part Scandinavian. See? That’s three more actors you didn’t think of as POC.

People of color have long struggled with representation on network television. We are obviated on sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother, where there’s never a single minority to be seen, much less in a positive light; we’re tokenized on shows like Justified where Erica Tazel’s Rachel Brooks exists simply to fulfill a racial quota in an otherwise all-white cast; or else we’re trigger-happy stereotypes in material like The Chin-Chens, which premiered a trailer so problematic it was subsequently removed. And the flip side of all this is yet another issue: color coding.

Coding occurs when the projection of identity upon a person (of any color) eclipses his or her actual ethnic identity. It is a widespread phenomenon in all media, with the oft-cited examples of Cameron Diaz and Jessica Alba as actors usually coded as white. Diaz has made no bones about her lack of identification with her Cuban background, while Alba, after facing criticism, has attempted to negotiate her identity by choosing some loaded roles.

So does this mean we’re approaching a post-racial media era? Not a chance. The pervasiveness of white as default in media leads causes casts to appear monolithic, even if actors of color are embedded within. The result isn’t diversity, because the audience views the cast demographic exactly as though the characters are white. It is unfortunate because race-neutral roles are often main characters with better developed storylines and conflicts, opportunities for minority actors to bust out their acting chops.

Cases in point:

Blaine from Glee: As one of the lead Warblers at Dalton Academy, Criss’s character Blaine is cool, confident, and dashing. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember the last time I witnessed a gay male lead that embodied all these qualities. But the fact that Criss’s biracial background goes unnoticed, primetime television has missed yet another opportunity to subvert old tropes: yes, a gaysian man can have pan-sexual appeal, yes, he does have cis-hetero characteristics.

Anna from V: Morena Baccarin’s coding was spelled out to viewers from the get-go. When the alien visitors arrive on Earth, the reporter played by Scott Wolf remarks, “You all seem to be what we consider attractive.” The observation resonates, because with the sole exception of Morris Chestnut, all other visible aliens are white. I don’t know if the subtext could be any clearer: if aliens wanted to ingratiate themselves with the inhabitants of Earth, they would not elect to blend in with the most populous ethnicity in the world (the Han Chinese), but instead they would dress themselves up in really good looking white people. Of course, this plays neatly into the narrative of white as default and as the dominant standard of beauty. Baccarin fits neatly into this narrative, her own background obscured by the whiteness of the cast.

Jackson Avery from Grey’s Anatomy: William’s case is also interesting. The show’s producer Shonda Rhimes, one of the few African Americans helming a primetime show, has done an admirable job providing audiences with a diverse cast in Grey’s Anatomy. The characters of Bailey, the Chief, Yang, and Torres are clearly developed as African American, Korean American or Latin@ characters. Avery, Williams’ character, is much more ambiguous, as showcased when Avery’s grandfather, a legendary surgeon, appears in all his white prestige without the show so much as a touching upon a multiracial family discourse. This is juxtaposed against the development of Cristina Yang’s character, where the running joke of her “Jewish faith” colors her reactions to social situations. Whether this was because producers felt that minority representation was at saturation point in the show or not remains to be seen, but Grey’s certain missed a chance to engage in some riskier family dynamics.

All this said, we shouldn’t forget that we, as viewers, have some agency in this respect, that coding is in a way our projections of what color a character should be. But ultimately, within the media industry, it’s the POC viewers who lose when characters are coded as white: we are invisible even to ourselves, no nuances or complexities are brought to the same tired roles, and valuable opportunities for dialogue or positive representation are lost again and again.

By Guest Contributor Shannon Riffe, cross-posted from The Interrobangs

My corner of the blogosphere erupted last week with the announcement that Jennifer Lawrence will play Katniss in the upcoming film versions of The Hunger Games trilogy.  I agree with a lot of the outrage, and found editorials like this one, obviously written by someone who has never read the book, infuriating. So let’s lay it all out on the table.

Why are so many people so upset about this announcement? It’s just a movie, right?

It is just a movie. And that’s exactly the point. It is a frivolous, entertaining, blockbuster of an action franchise that will be sure to draw big publicity and big crowds and probably major box office bucks. And that’s why this would have been an amazing chance to take a “gamble” on someone who didn’t look like the stereotypical Hollywood starlet. Can you think of the last time that a person of color fronted a big budget action movie? How about a woman of color?

One only need look at the endless parade of remakes and sequels to know that Hollywood doesn’t like to take risks. But a huge, devoted fan base has fallen in love with these books and with Katniss, described as olive-skinned and dark haired. Yet the director still couldn’t extend the casting call to include anyone other than Caucasian? Before the Harry Potter movies, no one knew who Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, or Emma Watson were. Why wasn’t an unknown actress of biracial, Latina or Mediterranean heritage given a shot? They could cast Tyler Perry in drag (*shudder*) in this role and it would still make buckets of money.

Katniss’ racial identity is left somewhat vague, we don’t know what she is, but we know what she’s not. She’s not blonde haired and blue eyed like her mother and sister and Peeta. She’s dark, like Gale (can’t wait to see who gets that part). And even though we know that the cinema magic that can turn handsome 40-ish Brad Pitt into 80-year old Benjamin Button can surely turn J.Law into the grey-eyed, black haired Katniss, that’s not good enough.

Because in a world where the majority of readers seem to not even understand that Rue is black (example A, example, B, example C – just read the comments on this one), a wig and a spray tan falls far short. Luckily the director has stated unequivocally that Rue and Thresh are black. So I guess we’ve got that to celebrate, even though it should have never been up for debate in the first place.

As a woman of color who reads and writes YA, I’m committed to seeing more characters of color in stories where their race isn’t the issue. I found a lot to admire in the Hunger Games and its subtle, smart treatment of race and class. And that’s why I am so disappointed with this casting choice, even though it’s just a movie. Ultimately, maybe the answer to this issue is that all of us who enjoy writing and reading YA fiction continue to work on our stories, continue to question and critique the who, what, and why of our characters’ identities. And maybe one day a bestselling YA book and its film remake will both feature girls of color in the lead role.

Image courtesy of NYMag

Jen Chau – Oh No, Hybrid Vigor on the Big Screen?!

By the way, for those of you who are not famliar with the term “hybrid vigor,” the definition is:

the marked vigor or capacity for growth often exhibited by crossbred animals or plants

However this is not based in reality…it’s bull…and we at MMW do not like hybrid vigor theorists who go around spouting this nonsense. I’m sure you’ve all heard it (sometimes from mixed people themselves!): “Mixed people are the most beautiful and the healthiest and the smartest and the……..” JUST STOP.

Carmen (Van Kerckhove) Sognovi – Half Asian is the New White?

The Jan/Feb issue of Psychology Today magazine included an article titled Mixed Race, Pretty Face? It was all about–you guessed it–hybrid vigor. But specifically, it was about the fact that Asian/white mixed people are supposedly the most beautiful of all. Oh and look, who’s the first person they mention in the article? Nice! this gives me an excuse to post another pic of Keanu Reeves on MMW! Point Break-era Keanu, nonetheless.

Actor Keanu Reeves and supermodel Devon Aoki have more in common than fame, fortune and good looks—both are also part Asian. Known in popular culture by the Hawaiian term hapa (meaning “half”), people with mixed Asian and European origins have become synonymous with exotic glamour. In Hong Kong and Singapore, half-Asian models now crowd runways once dominated by leggy blondes. In the elite world of Asian fashion, half-Asian is the new white.

So the article goes on to quote several scientists who talk about how genetic diversity supposedly equates to beauty. And they also base a lot of the story on this really bogus-sounding study from Australia (we told you about it back in October) that claimed “Caucasians and Asians rated average Eurasian faces as more attractive than average faces of either race.”

Jen Chau – Do Our Faces Really Need to Be Examined More?

I was actually asked to participate [in The Hapa Project] at a mixed student conference a handful of years ago. When I respectfully declined (because it already seemed questionable to me), the student who was helping Kip looked at me like I was crazy. He might as well have said: “What?! You’re passing up the opportunity to be in a book, pictured in all of your naked-collarbone glory with other hapas? HAPAHAPAHAPAHAPAS forever!!!”

At the time, the project came off as slightly self-fetishizing to me. I know there is a thin line between that and pride. And it seems that Kip’s intention is to lean more towards pride, but I don’t know whether that will be accomplished — The Hapa Project’s mission statement:

The Hapa Project seeks to promote awareness and recognition of the millions of multiracials of Asian/Pacific Islander descent in the U.S; to give voice to multiracial people and previously ignored ethnic groups; to dispel myths of exoticism, hybrid vigor and racial homogeneity; to foster positive identity formation and self-image in multiracial children; and to encourage solidarity and empowerment within the multiracial/Hapa community.

I am just not convinced that we need a book like *this* in order to increase visibility and give voice. It just seems like another chance for people to obsess and pore over the ambiguous looks of hapas. I can see people using the book like a game — covering over each person’s identifying ethnicities and trying to guess. Perhaps I am cynical, but I doubt that many will come away with a deeper understanding of what it means to be hapa. It bothers me that the visual aspect is the focus. And I don’t think it will be challenging ideas of hybrid vigor — from what I have seen, it looks like there are nothing but attractive people in the book.

Jen Chau - Scientifcally Beautiful!?

OH no! A study to show that there is a “scientific” basis for why people think Eurasians are more beautiful? Just what we need. And what does this prove? Not that these people really ARE more beautiful — just that so many people have been socialized to think they are more beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…. And please, what scientific basis is there really? I see no proof in this article. Mainly by saying that a mixed person “looks healthier?” That somehow becomes a statement with biological implications?!

Carmen (Van Kerkhove) Sognovi – Hyphen takes a look at “the Multiracial Dream”

This post talks about Ward Hines, the recent Miss Georgia (I can’t believe we didn’t post about her! ), and an article that appeared in Hyphen, by Claire Light, Multi-Racial Dream. She takes a stab at all of the ridiculousness surrounding our fascination with mixed race people and how they are going to “change the world and lead us into colorblindedness!”. Here’s a part of her rant:

See, this is why I’m glad to be biracial. All of you monoracials out there are just people, but me? I’m a magic pill on legs. Doesn’t matter if I never lift a finger in my life, even to pick my nose. Like Haile Selassie or Frodo Baggins, I was born to a higher purpose: to end the racial problem by erasing it. 

This is just the pseudo-scientific leading edge of an idea that’s been around for decades, an idea that wets the panties of every American who’s ever felt helpless about being privileged. It’s the dream of future racelessness. If we all shut up and stopped “Balkanizing” into our little identity groups, we could start fucking our way into a dark beige future. My parents got a head start, and once I marry a black/latino/arab, my kid will be a united nations of one. Won’t you join us? Dreaming of a raceless future is much, much easier than getting a handle on racial issues now. In fact, if you contribute to multiraciality (or even just wish along with us) you don’t ever have to wonder if you might be racist, too, or change your lifestyle, ideas, attitudes and behaviors. In fact, if your kid is half black/asian/indian/latino/arab/brownish-something, you’re officially not white anymore.

Say it, sister!

Bonus: Addicted to Race 13

INTERVIEW WITH DR. JOSEPH L. GRAVES, JR.
Carmen and Jen interview Dr. Joseph L. Graves, pre-eminent evolutionary biologist and author of The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. He’ll answer everything you always wanted to know about race and biology. What exactly does it mean when we say that race is a social construct? Why can racial DNA tests be misleading? Is it true that if you need a bone marrow donor, you can only find a match with someone of your own race? Are African-Americans really better at basketball than any other people? Are mixed people really more healthy/beautiful/intelligent/strong than non-mixed people?

By Arturo R. García

The main character and narrator of the story. Katniss is slender with black hair, grey eyes and olive skin. She is sixteen years old and attends a secondary school somewhere in Appalachia, known in the book as District 12, the coal mining sector. She is often quiet and is generally liked by District 12′s residents, mostly because of her ability to provide highly-prized game for a community in which starvation is a constant threat. Katniss is an excellent hunter, archer, gatherer, and trapper, skilled just like her deceased father. She and her father shared singing ability, too. Since his death in a mine explosion, which killed Gale’s father too, Katniss has been the sole provider for her family, a role she was reluctantly forced to assume at the age of eleven when her mother’s grief overcame her ability to function. Katniss is surprised when her sister is chosen to compete in the Hunger Games, and willingly steps forward to take her place out of love.

- Character profile for Katniss Everdeen, via Goodreads

Does that description – more specifically, that physical description – sound like it matches Jennifer Lawrence, pictured above?

Only in Hollywood.

It was announced yesterday that Lawrence, coming off an Academy Awards nomination for Winter’s bone, had been chosen to play Katniss in a film adaptation of The Hunger Games, the first story in a three-book series that sees the character become a folk heroine, then a revolutionary leader, in a post-apocalyptic North America.

According to Racebending.com, Katniss’ skin tone is of specific interest to her character’s backstory: she shares that description with other residents of The Seam, an impoverished area in the Appalachian district where she lives. Among them is her father, a mixed-race miner. By comparison, her mother and sister stand out in the community of the Seam precisely because they are blonde and white-skinned. Which makes Racebending’s conclusion nothing short of accurate:

Given this story takes place hundreds of years into the future, Katniss is almost definitely of mixed ethnicity–making her one of very few protagonists in young adult fiction who would be considered biracial or multi-ethnic by “real world” standards.

Of course, as Marissa Lee notes, Paramount Pictures, which is financing the film, stacked the casting deck right off the bat, saying candidates for the role, “‘should be Caucasian, between ages 15 and 20, who could portray someone ‘underfed but strong,’ and ‘naturally pretty underneath her tomboyishness.’”

Director Gary Ross justified the choice to Entertainment Weekly by saying the series’ author, Suzanne Collins, gave him her blessing:

Suzanne had no issues with Jen playing the role. And she thought there was a tremendous amount of flexibility. It wasn’t doctrine to her. Jen will have dark hair in the role, but that’s something movies can easily achieve. [Laughs] I promise all the avid fans of The Hunger Games that we can easily deal with Jennifer’s hair color.

Whether the series’ fans respond as positively has yet to be seen. If Paramount and Ross aren’t careful, they might have another Airbender mess on their hands.

Meanwhile, the updated version of Red Dawn, the 1984 action-cult “classic” is getting another update, this time behind the scenes: The Los Angeles Times reported that the remake, which was to feature China as the invading force in place of the original Soviet Union, will now cast China as a smaller player in a coalition led by North Korea, with digital trickery being used to minimize the Chinese threat.

But don’t go thinking this decision is based on an outpouring of sympathy toward the Chinese people by MGM. The studio, which has had the film on the shelf while sorting its’ financial affairs, is hoping the switch will make the new Dawn easier to sell in the increasingly-important Chinese film market:

A number of Hollywood studios are deepening their business ties to the world’s most populous nation. Disney is building a theme park outside Shanghai, Sony Pictures co-produced the recent “Karate Kid” remake with the government-affiliated China Film Group, and News Corp.‘s Fox International Productions recently made the Chinese-language hit “Hot Summer Days” there. Even independent studios like Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment will release their films “Killers” and “Red” in China in coming months.

Dan Mintz, whose DMG Entertainment is a leading producer and distributor of movies in China, said the “Red Dawn” story dramatizes how Western companies can fundamentally misunderstand how the nation works. If the picture had gone out without redacting the Chinese invaders, he said, “there would have been a real backlash. It’s like being invited to a dinner party and insulting the host all night long. There’s no way to look good…. The film itself was not a smart move.”

Mintz, who met with the producers of “Red Dawn” to offer some suggestions on how they could proceed, said that doing business in China requires a partnership approach. “The more you reach out, the better your relationships will be,” Mintz said. “This is bigger than a single film.”

So, a movie about Communist invaders is being edited so as to not offend a Communist nation. Instead of WOLVERIIINES, maybe the battle cry in the remake should be IRONYYYYYYYY!

Top image courtesy of Celebrity Pictures

By Guest Contributor The CVT, cross-posted from CHOP-TENSILS

With the lead-up to Obama’s inauguration, there was a ton of chatter about multi-racial people and what that meant for the future of the U.S., in regards to racial relations and understanding.  (*1)  Some years passed, the 2010 census went down, and now the conversation seems to have reappeared in the public arena.  (*2)

The ideas are nothing new, of course: there are drastically more people claiming a mixed-race identity than ever before, with the numbers expected to continue trending upwards; and somewhere around 2060, the U.S. is expected to be less than 50% white.  The resulting question is deceptively simple – does this mean that we are getting closer to a “post-racial” world, and that, subsequently, racial conflict and inequality is on the downslope?

My simple answer?  Um . . .

Hell no.  And that’s it.

But for those of you who would like a bit more complicated answer, I’ll see what I can do here.

Check the “Multiracial” Box

I’m going to start this all off with a quick tear through some points I’ve mentioned in the past that touch on why current statistics on “mixed-race” folks doesn’t necessarily mean anything in regards to racial understanding or equality.  For those looking for a quicker-read, y’all can just stick to that.

For those looking for a little bit deeper analysis (and why I referenced Facebook in this post), that will come in the last section.  Cool?

Alright, here we go . . .

Statistics.

First off, I know statistics and how people use (or mis-use) them to come to questionable conclusions, and let’s just say that the statistics we’re looking at here are questionable, at best.  (*3)

It’s basically just a matter of sampling – nobody’s going to deny that “multiracial” wasn’t an official option until the last decade or so in  any official data collection attempts.  So the question is – how can we compare current numbers of “multiracial” folks to past numbers, if there are no past numbers?

We can’t.  At least not accurately.  Instead, folks employ all sorts of other statistical methods (all with their own flaws) to extrapolate that data from what they can find from past records.

But past records didn’t allow for “multiracial” individuals.  For all practical purposes, we’ve been talking “one-drop” up until now, so any “mixed” people were “monoracial” back in the day.  Hell – even Obama isn’t acceptably “multiracial” in a lot of folks’ eyes today.  So any guess – no matter how “statistically rigorous” – on how many “multiracial” folks there used to be is just that: a guess.

So yeah – anecdotally-speaking, it seems like there are a lot more mixed folks, but we can’t really prove that.  It’s probably true, but I bet it’s a much smaller increase than everybody’s claiming.

“Mixed kids are a step towards greater overall racial diversity.”

So let’s say there really is a huge increase in mixed folks in the U.S.  Then what?

The bolded statement above?  A huge assumption that’s not necessarily true, either.

Let me give you an example: take a bi-racial (white/Asian) gal.  Say she marries a “mono-racial” white guy and has kids.  In all likelihood, what are those kids going to look like, and how are they going to identify themselves, racially (and be identified)?  Yeah – probably as “white.”

So, in that case, the mixed girl was actually an interim step towards less blood of color in her family’s genepool.  Add to this example the fact that most white-and-”other” mixed folks tend to marry and have kids with other “monoracial” white folks (especially in Asian communities), and it just stretches out the case that mixed kids often lead to less racial diversity on an overall level.

Is this the majority of the cases?  (*4) Maybe, maybe not.  But it’s certainly common enough to dispense with that particular myth, and call into question the drastic increases expected based on current numbers.

“Brazil.”

Brazil is ridiculously mixed (between 40 and 50% of the population).  There are specific names for many of the different racial combinations possible, because it’s so common.

So Brazil must be “post-racial,” right?  Um.  Not so much.  The racial hierarchy remains the same, color-wise (lightest skin at the top, darkest at the bottom). They just have more names for the “in-between” folks.  Subsequently, there is just as much (or more) racism and conflict, but with more epithets to throw around.

Great.

In the States, Hawaii is the most-mixed State by far, and the extent of racial conflict (kids throwing stones at white people in the street, for instance) and tension definitely competes for the highest in the U.S.

In real life, greater levels of true diversity (ie. not just a couple “token” folks, but more evenly-represented groups) tend to bring on greater levels of conflict.  Because, in those situations, when there is cultural misunderstanding and/or negative interactions, the “majority” doesn’t have the overwhelming numbers to make the “other” folks just “shut up and take it.”  Suddenly, “those minorities” are actually speaking their minds and standing up for themselves on a regular basis – and this shakes things up, obviously.

“We’re all human beings.”

We are.  It’s true.

However, that doesn’t make race “not matter.”

It does mean that some mixed folks have better racial understanding and ability to “see it from both sides.”  It also means that plenty of mixed folks have no f-ing clue, or don’t care, or “don’t want to get involved” just like all the rest of humanity.  Meaning a whole lot more ethnically-ambiguous folks like me doesn’t necessarily suggest that “understanding” is going to increase at all. 

And finally . . . “The Social Network”

So I don’t agree with the pundits.  I don’t think the numbers mean what other folks want them to mean.  Great.

That said, it’s more than that.  Because I worry about how people are using these numbers.  How people are talking about the “inevitability” of a more-diverse nation, and the subsequent “inevitability” of greater racial understanding as a result.

My problem with that is that it’s so passive, and it completely ignores how social/political change actually happens in the world.

To better understand what I’m getting at, let’s check out Facebook, the newest world superpower:

The most current statistics I can find seem to have Facebook carrying about 250 million users, with the numbers continuing to increase.  (*5)  The site is pretty much omnipresent, as far as modern media goes,  they made a dramatic movie about it that got all sorts of Oscars love, and now folks are claiming Facebook’s responsibility (along with Twitter, of course) in fomenting revolution across the Middle East . . .

Now how the Hell did that all happen?

To state the obvious – they created a social movement, which worked like any other social movement:  First, some guy (or multiple guys – I’m not trying to judge) got an idea and got a bunch of hard-working folks together.  Then, these folks took all sorts of risks and developed a product.  Next, they convinced other folks higher up to take their own risks to fund it and push it out into the world, “early-adopters” took some social risks to get on board, then more folks, bla, bla, bla . . . and then Facebook took over the world.

But was any of it “inevitable”?

Well, let’s look at Facebook about five years ago:  Lots of folks were using their product, they were in the public eye, they were getting a decent chunk of MySpace’s market share.  Other up-and-coming social networks were out there, too, but Facebook was near the top.

So what if the Facebook folks had seen all that and said, “We’ve arrived. We’ve been increasing in size steadily, and if we continue to grow like that, we’re going to be huge in five years.  So let’s just chill on it, leave our product as-is, and wait for the world domination to begin . . .”?

Um.  Right.  That seems patently ridiculous, and it’s obviously not what they did to become the power that they are today.

And yet, with another social trend – that of “increased multi-racial individuals in the States” – we all want to read the statistics and pretend that it’s all going to continue and keep getting better without any extra effort on our part.  Folks want the comfort of thinking, “I don’t have to actively do anything at all, and racial conflict will handle itself – see the numbers?”

As if thousands of individuals (maybe millions) haven’t sacrificed and risked and fought for the last many generations to get to this point.  As if thousands (and millions) more won’t have to fight to keep up the momentum and get beyond this current, still-unequal, state.  As if Facebook could have gotten so huge without “normal” people signing on as active users.

The same applies to the U.S. today.  Everybody got all “rah-rah” and excited about voting for Obama, patted themselves on the back and hit the streets for his victory, and then said, “we arrived.”  And now?  Our lawmakers are more racist (Arizona), classist (Wisconsin), and nationalist (“outsourcing” debates), than any other period in my generation’s lifetimes.

Because Facebook has active users, and Obama got the equivalent of millions signing up for an account (a vote) without ever checking or updating it.  And then everybody gets disappointed with the results?  Please.  The U.S. president only has the power to do what is “safe” or generally acceptable enough to get away with.  And if the general public isn’t doing the work to make “equality” safe or acceptable for the lawmakers to act on . . ?

So.  There are probably more mixed folks in the States.  Meaning more interracial relationships.  Possibly meaning a little bit more racial understanding in the world.  Right now.

But where is it all heading?  That, we can’t know.  No passive numbers or statistics can tell us that.  Only the actions of large numbers of individuals.  Only risk and hard work.

And right now?  While a bunch of us are passively looking at these statistics or patting ourselves on the back for a freaking vote, the Tea Party and Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers are getting active users ala Facebook.

So great – you signed up for an account.  But now what are you going to do to make your “social network” mean something?

(this article was written by the CVT, who has no affiliation, public or private, with Facebook or any of their people . . .  really)

(*1) I wrote on it back then.  However the writing was, in my opinion, pretty bad, which is why I’m “re-visiting” in this fashion, but if you want to check it out for a laugh, it’s here.

(*2) With articles such as this one from the New York Times.

(*3) I’ve seen some pretty shady “data massaging” in my past work in the field of Psych research.  Sadly, I’ve since learned that that’s pretty standard practice, which is why I’m certain that the majority of scientific “findings” out in the world are complete fabrications.  When results are the only way to get more funding (via grants, etc.), people do what they have to do to get “results.”

(*4) I’m kicking myself here, because I read a great article that had all the numbers on this many years ago, and I haven’t been able to track it back down.

(*5) Unfortunately, I’m not one of those 250 million, cuz I live in China.

The Root: The experience of having your Miss Navajo Nation reign challenged calls to mind the debate over the Cherokee Freedmen. Is this a common issue across the Native community, of African-Native Americans having trouble finding acceptance?

Radmilla Cody: I grew up having to deal with racism and prejudices on both the Navajo and the black sides, and when I ran for Miss Navajo Nation, that especially brought out a lot of curiosity in people. It’s something that we’re still having to address as black Natives, still having to prove ourselves in some way or another, because at the end of the day, it all falls back to what people think a Native American should look like.

But there’s been many times when people have said to me, “Oh, my great-great-grandmother was an Indian.” I’ll ask them if they know what tribe, and they don’t. It’s very important because in order to be acknowledged as a tribal member, you have to be enrolled. So I can see where Native people are protective about defining who’s a tribal member, and are questioning of people claiming Native ancestry.

…

TR: Were you surprised by the backlash that you received?

RC: I wasn’t surprised. I knew it was going to happen. Right before I left to go to compete in the pageant, my grandmother sat down with me. She said to me, “My child, I just want you to know that there are going to be some people who are not going to be accepting of this.”

Growing up, I was taunted at school with racial slurs and would come home in tears. My grandmother would be there, waiting to console me. She always said, “Let ‘em talk. You are a Navajo woman. This is your land. This is how I raised you. You be proud of who you are.” Every time, that’s what she would say.

So this day before the pageant, when she cautioned me about people who wouldn’t be accepting of me participating, I turned around and told her, “Let ‘em talk, Grandma. I’m a proud Navajo woman, remember?” She had a big smile on her face. I think she felt content that I was ready for what I was going to be challenged with.

TR: Do you have any connection to African-American culture and community?

RC: I spent more time in the Navajo community growing up because my grandmother raised me. When I would come into town in Flagstaff, Ariz., to see my mom, who had black friends, and my dad’s relatives, I was in the black community more. I went to high school in Flagstaff, and one day a friend was wearing a T-shirt with a big “X” on it. I said, “That’s cool! I should get one that says ‘R’ for Radmilla!” I didn’t know anything about Malcolm X. He told me to join the black student organization. I had a lot to educate myself about and embrace, because I come from two beautiful cultures.

In the black community I also had my challenges. I was always told, “You think you’re cute because you got that long, fine hair,” and I would have to stand up for my Navajo side because of stereotypes placed upon the Navajo. When I’d go back to the Navajo community, I would have to stand up for my black side because of stereotypes.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Image credit: unieketrouwringen.nl