[VIDEO] Raising Mixed Race @ Kinokuniya Seattle

[Me and Angel "Moonyeka" Langley / Photo by Bo Kim]

by Sharon H. Chang

On Saturday afternoon, March 5, 2016 we held the first unbelievable Raising Mixed Race book signing at Kinokuniya Bookstore in Seattle's International District. I say "we" because I was very intentional in organizing the event. I wanted it to be not just about me - but about community and centering, uplifting all mixed race, people and women of color voices; a transformative goal that actually lies at the center of Raising Mixed Race itself. And I'm pretty sure we accomplished that goal. Which is why I say "unbelievable" because for me and I think for many there - at the risk of sounding cheesy (but who cares?) - this was nothing short of a transcendent experience. It was a special moment, a rare moment, that very few of us mixed identifying people get to have. A moment where our voices could be not only heard, but fly free and liberated. I'll never forget it.

So pleased to be able to share an incredibly well done video of the event by Angela Flores-Marcus below. Take a look. View time is over an hour and I know it's hard to find an hour to do anything these days. So. I've included a view menu. Definitely jump around or watch it in bits and pieces if you need to. But please do watch it. Promise you won't be sorry...

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VIEW MENU

     0:18  Ahren Scholtz
     8:10  Cody Choi
   12:42  Angel "Moonyeka" Langley dancing to "Exodus" by M.I.A. & The Weeknd
   15:48  Luzviminda "Uzuri" Carpenter performing her poem "To Pass Or Not to Pass"
   19:31  Kalayaan Domingo
   32:00  Me! (trailer for Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides at 45:19)
1:01:37  Q&A

(for full bios of speakers and performers please go here)

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GALLERY

[Ahren Scholtz / Photo by Bo Kim]

Singer songwriter Ahren Scholtz (Indonesian/Dutch/Caucasian) opened with a stellar short acoustic set on guitar. He played us two songs - with his wife proudly recording front row - including the title track off his album Suckerfish.  

[Angel "Moonyeka" Langley / Photo by Bo Kim]

Angel "Moonyeka" Langley (mixed Filipina) followed with a crowd-draw dance performance to "Exodus" by M.I.A. & the Weeknd. Folks walking by couldn't help but stop to watch. Moonyeka is one of the only female poppers in Seattle; a subject she's also conducting an ethnographic study upon as a dance major at the University of Washington.

[Cody Choi / Photo by Bo Kim]

Brilliant youth voice Cody Choi (Korean/white) gave testimonial next with a sharp essay about her experiences growing up and navigating the complex waters of being mixed. Cody is a writer and activist, and senior at the Ida B. Wells School for Social Justice.

[Luzviminda "Lulu" Uzuri Carpenter / Photo by Bo Kim]

Luzviminda "Lulu" Uzuri Carpenter (Queer, Black/Filipina) read her powerful poem "To Pass Or Not to Pass." Lulu does more things than I could count on a million hands. She is widely known and respected; a force in the Seattle justice community. You need to know her, her incredibly important work, and her multi-multi-multi-faceted activism.

[Kalayaan Domingo / Photo by Bo Kim]

Mother and activist Kalayaan Domingo spoke deep from her heart about her experiences as a multiracial woman and now as parent to two multiracial boys. She talked about intersections; mixed race as resistant, political, historical; and the vital necessity of expanding mixed conversations beyond biracial-mixed-with-white.

[My turn / Photo by Bo Kim]

[Photo by Bo Kim]

[Standing room only / Photo by Bo Kim]

[Signing / Photo by Bo Kim]

[Photo by Bo Kim]

[Me and Lulu / Photo by Bo Kim]

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Hope to see you at the next signing

Kinokuniya Portland, Oregon, Saturday April 16th!

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YOU'RE INVITED! Raising Mixed Race Signing 1, Seattle WA

Also go to the --> Facebook Event Page: Raising Mixed Race 1st Book Signing!

Music / AHREN SCHOLTZ ~ Ahren is a Dutch/Indonesian/Caucasian singer/songwriter from the Seattle to Everett corridor of the Pacific Northwest. He was raised with an awareness of diversity and it shows, mostly in his love of food. Writing songs has always been a passion for him but even more than that, it has been a way of expressing his inner most emotions and thoughts: www.scholtz.bandcamp.com



Youth Voice / CODY CHOI ~ Cody Choi is a soon to be 18 year old senior from one of the Middle College High Schools sites, the Ida B. Wells School for Social Justice. Empowered by the transformative nature of an engaged pedagogy, Cody utilizes her voice to expand important discussions around critical real world issues. Through her transcendence as a student and a woman of color, Cody uses her writing to reach out to others and with determined activism to help reconnect the global community.



Dance / ANGEL "MOONYEKA" LANGLEY ~ Moonyeka is a young Filipina-American street dancer and choreographer pursuing her dance degree at the University of Washington. Current projects include “WHAT’S POPPIN’ LADIEZ?!” , an ethnographic research project and community event series focused on the female popping experience. Moonyeka has collaborated and organized with Youth Speaks Seattle, Moksha, Arts Corps, Anak Bayan, and the Seattle dance scene. She has been a teaching artist teaching ballet/modern/hip hop at Rainier Dance Center, Remix Dance Team at My World Dance and Fitness Studio, Arts Corps as a resident artist, at Mt. View Elementary and other Seattle elementary schools, D&G Dance Studios, Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, Massive Monkees Studio: The Beacon, and local community centers. 

[PHOTO CREDIT: Mario D Lemafa]

Afrofuturism: Amalgamation / LUZVIMINDA "LULU" UZURI CARPENTER ~ Lulu is an artist, educator, consultant, cultural and youth worker, producer, community organizer and strategist. She is the Seattle Girls School Performance Studies Teacher & Resident Artist; Roots Young Adult Shelter Anti-Oppression Change Team Consultant; Hollow Earth Radio Youth & Young Adult Program Coordinator & Anti-Oppression Consultant; Radio Host of #LuluNation + Crew; Co-Chair of the City of Seattle LGBT Commission; and an Ambassador for On the Boards (OtB). She shows her commitment and love towards Duwamish territory through projects with Uzuri* Consulting & Productions, and weaves intersections of community, nonprofits, business, and organizing through Green Bodies & WonderLab.


[PHOTO CREDIT: Tien Vo Tse]

Intro / KALAYAAN DOMINGO ~ Kalayaan is a multiracial woman of Filipina and mixed European descent, and is the mother of two multiracial boys, Réne and Raúl, who are proudly Filipino, Mixed European and Salvadoran. Raised in a multiethnic community in South Seattle Kalayaan is proud of her multiracial roots and strives to instill the same foundation in her sons. Kalayaan spends her time surrounded by a large extended family, supporting bi-lingual/bi-cultural Amistad School, building and participating with Families of Color Seattle, and working on health equity issues within King County to ensure our larger community is a safe and just place for all residents.

 

Photography / BO KIM ~ Bo is a Seattle-based freelance photographer who moved to the area from Maui, Hawaii a little over 6 years ago. She graduated from UW Seattle with a Film Studies Degree and worked in multiple different fields starting in Fashion photography and Experimental Digital Video later moving into Public Relations with GKPR (Seattle-based PR Company). Bo continues to do all different kinds of photography from blogging to restaurants/businesses to product photography and editorial work. See more at her website: www.bokimphoto.squarespace.com

 

Video / ANGELA FLORES-MARCUS ~ Angela is an audio engineer and in-house videographer at Earwig Studio. She is currently in school for electrical engineering and hopes to pursue a career in audio hardware design. Angela is actively engaged with her community, and is working with other young women who are pursuing careers in science and engineering through the Women in STEM club at South Seattle College. Angela has loved playing music since she was a kid. While she especially enjoys producing R&B and hip hop music, she loves working with artists of all genres.
 

REVIEW: Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World

by Hugo Wong 
[ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN PRINT ONLY. REPRINTED HERE WITH PERMISSION FROM RICE PAPER MAGAZINE]

In the United States, the fastest-growing census demographic is "multiracial" - those who check more than one box to answer the "race question. For some, this growth can't come soon enough. Many believe that more multiracial people will eventually make physical differences irrelevant and usher in a new era of racial harmony. Other well-meaning people try to be colour blind, unaware that they might be overlooking real problems that non-white people face each day. In her book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Children In a Post-Racial World, author Sharon Chang looks at these issues as well as many others - and adds an extra complication: whether subtle racism and racist social structures can affect toddlers and young children.

" . . . the new vocabulary in the book has helped me talk about thoughts and feelings I didn't have words for."

Raising Mixed Race is an ambitious book, diving into issues like poverty, education, and media representation: challenges that are often linked to race. In a particularly revealing section, the parents Chang interviewed were almost all hesitant to talk about race with their kids. Most wanted to keep their children innocent, and felt that they didn't understand race anyway - but Chang says that are not blissfully unaware. She cites a study that revealed that three-year-olds preferred same-race playmates and that white children increasingly wanted white playmates as they got older. Preschoolers can treat people differently based on skin colour, with one Chinese-American mother telling Chang that their four-year-old "would not accept whites speaking to him in Mandarin, saying, 'No. You don't speak Chinese.'" From birth to adulthood, Chang writes that peers and adults keep trying to fit multiracial children into a dated five-race construct (black, brown, yellow, red, and white) to determine if they're closer to one particular race, denying them the right to identify with every part of their own heritage.

Chang's conclusions are, for the most part, hard to argue with. Parents should give their children more credit and talk about race so they can better resist the forces of institutionalized racism. However, the book's prose and organization might be hard to follow for anyone expecting another feel-good parenting book; Raising Mixed Race is denser than your average magazine article.

"I hope this discussion moves to mainstream . . . so that more people can gain the same knowledge and tools that Chang has given me."

Though it is not light reading, Raising Mixed Race is in many ways empowering: the new vocabulary in the book has helped me talk about thoughts and feelings I didn't have the words for. I hope this discussion moves to mainstream arenas like talk shows and checkstand magazines, so that more people can gain the same knowledge and tools that Chang has given me. 

My 2015 Year In Review

by Sharon H. Chang

I recently saw a fellow blogger pull together a year-in-review roundup and thought, "Why haven't I been doing that? I'm gonna try that!" So I sat down one morning and started rifling through 2015's posts and events and you know it was actually pretty fascinating. Fascinating how much can happen in a year; how momentum just moves you in certain directions when you don't even know what those directions are; how you start wondering where the journey will take you next. Okay, stopping. Won't get too heady. Needless to say I'm happy to share now, without further ado, my 2015 Year In Review . . .

New York Times Just Boarded the Post-Racial Express: A critical response to "Choose Your Own Identity"

[screen shot from NY Times Magazine]

by Sharon H Chang

This Monday, The New York Times Magazine published a very unfortunate essay about multiracial Asian children: Choose Your Own Identity, by author and mother Bonnie Tsui. In it, Tsui (who is not multiracial herself) puzzles over her children's mixed-race identities, what they may or may not choose to be one day, while taking a brief foray back/forward in time to consider the sociohistorical context of mixed-race and America's impending multiracial future. After mulling on the subject for about ten paragraphs, she concludes with a seeming liberatory message on behalf of her children: "...the truth is, I can't tell my sons what to feel...I can only tell them what I think about my own identity and listen hard to what they have to tell me in turn."

Sounds innocent enough, yes?

No.

"I'm so tired of mothers of bi and multiracial children speaking on behalf of their children." ~ TS

All about my NEW book - Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World

When Raising Mixed Race came last week (after I screamed & did a dance first)

by Sharon H Chang

I am so thrilled to announce that, at long last, MY BOOK Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World has been released on Routledge!!! This moment is so deeply meaningful to me beyond anything words can express. Raising Mixed Race represents not only years of work on my end but a multitude of others' lived racial realities; stories about and involving mixedness that are poignant, sharp, relevant and vital, and yet - remain mostly untold in America and around the world. To my immense and humble gratitude, advance reviewers have embraced this book with tremendous love; reviewed it glowingly in and out of the US. The Facebook Release Party for the book was incredibly well-attended on Friday, Dec 11, and pre-orders SOLD OUT on Amazon over the weekend! It is my sincere belief if we engage with Raising Mixed Race it can (will) challenge our thinking on mixedness to go deeper and contribute to moving society as a whole towards justice, healing and true transformation. I hope you too will read Raising Mixed Race, and join our journey.

In the mean time, you can of course find a brief Raising Mixed Race book description at any online retailer. But I know that doesn't tell much. So. I put together a little extra something to give you a closer peak. Following are summaries for the book's chapters plus short videos of ME telling you all about them (from the Facebook Release Party)! Take a look, and Happy Reading...

'Raising Mixed Race' Virtual Release Party!!

YOU'RE INVITED

I'm having a party for my new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World on Friday December 11 and I want you to come! And guess what? If you use the Internet and Facebook - you CAN. What's a Facebook party you ask? It's easy. That's what it is. Facebookers (and newbies) just do what you always do. Log on to Facebook, go to the Raising Mixed Race Facebook page any time between 9:30am-1:30pm PST on Dec 11, read, like, comment, share and voila! We have a party. But suuuch a cool party. Really. I'm super excited. Here's some things you can expect:

• Posts every few minutes - for four hours - so yeah, LOTS going on
• Video "sneak peeks" of Raising Mixed Race chapters (2 mins or less promise!) 
• Thread discussions (though this isn't a rant party, so light thread discussions)
• Humor - as in memes and word games like "caption this" or "react to this"

But possibly the best part of the party? THE GIVEAWAYS. THE GIVEAWAYS. THE GIVEAWAYS. I'll be giving away 4 signed copies of Raising Mixed Race plus over 20 stellar donations by other authors, artists and filmmakers - all by/about mixed race Asians.