Resources

  • Mostly White

    By Alison Hart

    A family saga: four generations of mixed–race African American, Native American, and Irish women experience intergenerational trauma as well as the healing brought by nature and music, leading to triumphant resilience. Mostly White begins in 1890 when Emma, a mixed–race Native American and African American girl, is beaten by nuns and confined in a closet for speaking her language at an Indian Residential school in Maine. From there, a tale that spans four generations of women unfolds. Emma's descendants suffer the effects of trauma, poverty, and abuse while fighting to form their own identities and honor the call of their ancestors.

    Listen to Militantly Mixed Ep 23 - Mostly White with Alison Hart

  • SWIRL GIRL: Coming of Race in the USA

    By TaRessa Stovall

    SWIRL GIRL: Coming of Race in the USA reveals how a hard-headed, Mixed-race, "Black Power Flower Child" battles society-and sometimes her closest loved ones-to forge her identity on her own terms. As the USA undergoes its own racial growing pains, from the 1968 riots to the historic 2008 election, TaRessa Stovall challenges popular stereotypes and fights nonstop pressures to contort, disguise, or deny her uncomfortable truths.

    Listen to Militantly Mixed Ep 102 - Swirl Girl Coming of Race in the USA

  • Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (New Critical Viewpoints on Society)

    By Sharon H. Chang

    Research continues to uncover early childhood as a crucial time when we set the stage for who we will become. In the last decade, we have also seen a sudden massive shift in America’s racial makeup with the majority of the current under-5 age population being children of color. Asian and multiracial are the fastest growing self-identified groups in the United States. More than 2 million people indicated being mixed race Asian on the 2010 Census. Yet, young multiracial Asian children are vastly underrepresented in the literature on racial identity. Why? And what are these children learning about themselves in an era that tries to be ahistorical, believes the race problem has been “solved,” and that mixed race people are proof of it? This book is drawn from extensive research and interviews with sixty-eight parents of multiracial children. It is the first to examine the complex task of supporting our youngest around being “two or more races” and Asian while living amongst “post-racial” ideologies.

    Listen to Militantly Mixed Ep 81 - My ancestors handed me the seed of resistance

  • Hapa Tales and Other Lies: A Mixed Race Memoir about the Hawai'i I Never Knew

    In her first work of literary nonfiction, Sharon H. Chang reflects critically on her Asian American, Mixed Race, and activist identity through the prism of returning to Hawai'i as a tourist. While visiting O'ahu and Kaua'i she considers childhood trips to Maua'i and the Big Island, pop culture and Hollywood movies of her youth that perpetuated Hawaiian stereotypes, and what it means that she has been stereotyped as a "Hawai'i Girl" her whole life though she has never lived on the islands. But what begins as a journey to unpack the ways she has been perceived and treated as a multiracial woman evolves into much more as Sharon learns the real impacts of colonization and corporate tourism on Hawai'i and uncovers what her Asian multiracial "mainland" identity actually looks like in relationship to the land, its Indigenous peoples, and the Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement.

    Listen to Militantly Mixed Ep 81 - My ancestors handed me the seed of resistance

  • Raising Multiracial Children: Tools for Nurturing Identity in a Racialized World

    The essential guide to parenting multiracial and multiethnic children of all ages and learning to support and celebrate their multiracial identities

    In a world where people are more likely to proclaim color-blindness than talk openly about race, how can we truly value, support, and celebrate our kids' identities? How can we assess our own sense of Racial Dialogue Readiness and develop a deeper understanding of the issues facing multiracial children today?

    Raising Multiracial Children gives caregivers the tools for exploring race with their children, offering practical guidance on how to initiate conversations; consciously foster racial identity development; discuss issues like microaggressions, intersectionality, and privilege; and intentionally cultivate a sense of belonging. It provides an overview of key issues and current topics relevant to raising multiracial children and offers strategies and developmentally appropriate milestones from infancy through adulthood. The book ends with resources and references for further learning and exploration.goes here

  • Black Berry, Sweet Juice by Lawrence Hill

    Lawrence Hill begins Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada with personal stories about how his parents met and married, what it was like growing up in an otherwise entirely white Toronto suburb, and how his own children are beginning to see themselves in a country where issues of racial identity are ignored. But Hill also looks beyond the personal, sharing his coast-to-coast interviews with Canadians of black and white parentage, and examines subjects such as romance between blacks and whites, racial terminology and Ku Klux Klan activity in Canada.

  • Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

    The history of race in North America is still often conceived of in black and white terms. In this book, A. B. Wilkinson complicates that history by investigating how people of mixed African, European, and Native American heritage--commonly referred to as "Mulattoes," "Mustees," and "mixed bloods"--were integral to the construction of colonial racial ideologies. Thousands of mixed-heritage people appear in the records of English colonies, largely in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean, and this book provides a clear and compelling picture of their lives before the advent of the so-called one-drop rule. Wilkinson explores the ways mixed-heritage people viewed themselves and explains how they--along with their African and Indigenous American forebears--resisted the formation of a rigid racial order and fought for freedom in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies shaped by colonial labor and legal systems.

    As contemporary U.S. society continues to grapple with institutional racism rooted in a settler colonial past, this book illuminates the earliest ideas of racial mixture in British America well before the founding of the United States.

  • Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education: Contesting Knowledge, Honoring Voice, and Innovating Practice

    This book invites Multiracial readers, their allies, and those people who interact with and influence the daily lives of Multiracial people to explore issues of identity and self-care, build coalitions on campus, and advocate for change. For administrators, student affairs personnel, and anyone concerned with diversity on campus, it opens a window on a growing population with whom they may be unfamiliar, mis-categorize, or overlook, and on the need to change systems and structures to address their full inclusion and unveil their full impact.

  • Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging

    Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey?

    Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.