Another video!

Its amazing what "related videos" can bring up, there is a lot of trash (what is this "Tribute to black and brown honeyz"?? please, let me go gag now.) but there can also be a lot of great stuff and I can spend hours just click, click, clicking away!

So this workshop seems to be really good, though, and I hope there are things like this in the conference this Saturday. She seems to know a lot and what she brings up seems to be major issues and some great answers in a clear and organized format. I want to see if I can set something like this up in my school, that would be too cool.

UPDATE: This is so cool! I just found out who the speaker is (I was thinking, she is really good, I want to bring her to my school or at least go to a lecture/workshop with her and - boom!) Checked out New Demographic which is the place that put on the workshop, and turns out she is the creator, Carmen Van Kerckhove, who I have heard so much about and I think is even going to be at the SWAYA Multiracialism Conference this weekend! I am sooo excited, and she is also the creator of Racialicious (which I mentioned before), too! This hapa knows her stuff (I think she is hapa... van kerchove... but she looks more asian, so more like hapa-haole) and it would be HUGE if I could meet her (I want to so bad!).

A Little Detour

So this has to do with my journey to re-discovering any Asian-ness I might have (which is still in question) but more its just wicked exciting!

Our awesome AAC or Asian American Coalition at my school was in the paper this week! It is not for any particular reason, its just a club spotlight, and I wasn't totally happy with the article, but it was still really cool to open the Wire and see us all in there. This was taken last week:

I know, we are all wicked cool, aren't we? But anyway, the article itself is here, although, like I said, it wasn't a spectacular one but a decent one.

Awesome new vid I found...

So I just found this awesome video that came up on "related links" when looking at kip's interview (which I have seen before, but this one is new). I definitely agree with what they are all saying, although I have never been approached and asked "what are you", cause usually people assume I am white or at least that is what I figure because they don't say anything, and usually if I looked a different race, they would point it out. Its all because of the 'white is 'nothing'', and how its only when you are another race someone wants to point it out.

But I got to say that I really agree with the kid from Western Mass, its basically the same thing. He never felt like he had much link to his Chinese culture because his Dad wasn't really into it, and I think thats a thing I have, too. Also, the girl who talked about feeling special because she was half - that was the whole jump-off point for me. The issue was this since I was born: I feel really special and proud to be Chinese, but when the pride is continually thwarted by this silence I get from other people about me being Chinese, it hurts. It makes me want to throw away my white part (for her it was the Chinese part). Not that I want to look full Chinese, but I want people to think about it twice before they categorize me as white.

Kip Interview

So here is Kip talking about hapa-ness with Betty Nguyen, who, go figure, happens to be hapa, too. I think that is interesting and I wonder did she chose to do this interview? Or was she put on it because she was hapa? I think it would be interesting to figure that one out.

Hyphen and Fulbeck

All hapas who are one iota interested in their hapa-ness know about (or should know!) Kip Fulbeck. He is like the God to the active hapa community (ok, not really, but he is the one who reclaimed the term "hapa" - it was a derogatory term previously, and he brought an immense amount of awareness to the issue.).

The above pic happens to be from a HYBRID ISSUE (no joke, how amazing is that?!?!) of Hyphen, a wicked cool magazine that I have always found (since I started following it) to be really hapa-friendly. It is an Asian-American magazine, but it isn't dry and frustrating like The Multiracial Activist which is supposed to be about multiracial issues but it has lots of random other stuff too and it really wasn't that interested when I read it. Now, to be fair I didn't spend that much time exploring it (I wonder why...).

The magazine has an interview with Kip, and you can read part of it here. You know that I will be going straight to the magazines in the Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning (ha! I don't need to pay for it) next time I can get there to get the issue, I hope we have it! I think its the newer edition. 

No way! Fellow bloggers talking about race!

No way! So I just found, just now, another blog at Blogger that is all about race and is written by an Asian woman, a professor, actually. It makes me think, how many others are writing a blog just like mine? Well anyway, here is her blog, though it is not about multiracial issues in particular.

Other Spoken Word Poem

So here is the other poem I was talking about, I decided it was pretty easy to put it up and I wanted to get more stuff up. Man do I have a backlog of all the info I have found online from searching "multiracial" this, "biracial" that on google and youtube and yahoo and everywhere! Unfortunately the embedding was disabled, but here is a link. I LOVE the part about oreo cookies! It made me think of the terms "twinkie" or "banana" (white on inside, yellow on outside) and I actually wrote a poem about it, I can put that up later, too. But what is this and mixed race and food? What is that saying about how people view mixed race? I actually will write a blog post on that later.

Why I no longer like Freakonomics author

This article made me so pissed. Apparently us mixed kids are the worst and most delinquent type of kids there are, we get the good looks from the parents, and the bad behaviors. What one commentator said was so right, how can he even judge what attractiveness is?

So basically this article was how the Freakonomics author wanted to figure us biracial kids out (exclusively black and white mix) and so did a study that found that, and I quote:

Mixed race kids do have one advantage over white and black kids: mixed race kids are much more attractive on average

There are some bad adolescent behaviors that whites do more than blacks (like drinking and smoking), and there are other bad adolescent behaviors that blacks do more than whites (watching TV, fighting, getting sexually transmitted diseases). Mixed-race kids manage to be as bad as whites on the white behaviors and as bad as blacks on the black behaviors. Mixed-race kids act out in almost every way measured in the data set.

What are they talking about?! and I guess the rest of the study was pretty biased. Now, at first I was like, why am I angry, they said that they kids are more beautiful? But honestly:

1. Attractiveness is in the eyes of the beholder, and if they say that mixed kids are prettier, they are claiming they have a right over distinguishing the beauty of the child and can speak for everyone

2. In conjunction with the rest of the "facts" they came up with, this is not a compliment, it is a cold-hearted judgement, looking at us mixed kids as exotic animals that should be studied.

I am so upset, too, because I actually like Freakonomics and always recommended it and claimed how good a book it was whenever it came up. I really respected the author. And then he judges mixed race like THIS? It made me upset!

Side note - not only that but what is that about the "typical" delinquent behaviors of blacks and whites? Way to enforce stereotypes.

Video

So I am just learning how to do this blog, and its pretty simple in general. But I couldn't figure out how to comment under my video. So I just made another post.

So I found this video the other day, cause I was searching for biracial spoken word artists (having dabbled in spoken word myself) and she was really good! There is this other spoken word poem, too that I really like, though not as much. Though neither of them are hapa :( but I figure we all go through the same issues (us biracial kids) and a lot of what they said resounded in me. I have a couple poems about being hapa, maybe I will post them someday.

Conference

So I found this conference about Multiracialism hosted by Harvard HAPA and SwirlBoston this weekend. I am SOOO EXCITED I will actually get to meet other mixed up kids like me who actually are passionate about their mixed-up-ness, if you will. There will be great convos it looks like, too. I am trying to get our AAC at Wheaton (Asian American Coalition) to go, but understandably, they are not quite certain about it, as its not specifically Asian. This is the link for the event. I hope it will live up to my expectations!

First one I got

Multiracial kids are caught between not existing at all -- with outdated forms that require them to check only one box for their identity -- and existing so far outside the percieved norm that people can't pass them by without commenting on their appearance

This was by Donna Jackson Nakazawa and I think it is really true, from what I found multiracial kids will tend to be asked "So... What are you?" all the time, or they, like me, looking one race or another (I tend to look white on most days) so people won't even ask before checking off "caucasian" on the form they are filling out for you (Stupid blood donation nurse woman! A story for another day). This comes from a larger article I found that was really good: Black/White/Other: "Helping Multiracial Kids Find Their Way" from Edutopia.org

So this is the first one...

Hey!

I know that no one is probably going to read this, but I felt like publishing random articles and videos and so forth that I find on the web all in one place because it helps me have a place I can, through random meandering, figure my way into my multiracial heritage (I am half Chinese, my father is ethnically and culturally Chinese though he grew up in Thailand until he went to college, and my mother is from a proud Bostonian-Irish family). So bear with me through my wandering!