Mixed-Race Arts and Letters

An Interview with Heidi Durrow

As we continue exporting and rendering and prepping past MBreauxsia films for your Vimeo-viewing pleasure, we took a moment to check in with author Heidi W. Durrow.

Heidi is the New York Times best-selling author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books), which received writer Barbara Kingsolver’s PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was hailed as one of the Best Novels of 2010 by the Washington Post, a Top 10 Book of 2010 by The Oregonian, and a Top 10 Debut of 2010 by Booklist. Ebony Magazine named Heidi as one of its Power 100 Leaders of 2010 along with writers Edwidge Danticat and Malcolm Gladwell. She was nominated for a 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Debut.

Heidi is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Heidi has worked as a corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and as a Life Skills Trainer to professional athletes of the National Football League and National Basketball Association.

We asked Heidi a few questions….

What are you working on these days?

I’m working on my second novel and hoping that it starts to look like a novel soon. I thought I had learned how to write a novel after finishing The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, but I realize each book will have to teach me how it needs to be written.

What does your daily process look like (i.e., what’s a day in the life of Heidi Durrow)?

I don’t have a steady routine because I travel so much. The one thing that I do, though, wherever I am, is to write three pages long-hand first thing in the morning while drinking coffee. Sometimes it’s just journal writing but sometimes I find myself writing stuff that will end up in the book or become part of an essay or blog post. I try to read every day. It’s so important to have the well filled that way for me — and really for my writing.

How has the way you identify played into your writing, and how has this changed over time?

The fact that I finally, in my 30s, decided I could identify myself as I wished, and not as people saw me or expected me to, changed everything for my writing. I had an incredible freedom in my imagination that I hadn’t felt in the many years I struggled with being acceptable or understandable to others.

What keeps you up at night?

My never-ending list of things to do. And fear that the muse won’t come back again.

What are you totally over (i.e., what makes you sleep soundly at night)?

I’m going to answer the second question: good wine!

What advice would you give someone trying to self-publish a book? How would you suggest they handle marketing and publicity?

I have no clue about self-publishing. I looked into it many years ago, but the business is changing rapidly and I haven’t kept up. I did a lot of promotion on my own for my book but again I think it’s different if it’s a self-published book. I had a publishing house behind me and what I did in terms of promotion was to supplement the work that they did.

Heidi will be teaching a week-long writing workshop, “Writing the Debut Novel: Developing Your Manuscript and Your Career,” in January 2016 as part of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. To keep up with her other goings-on, visit her website at http://heidiwdurrow.com/.

An Interview with Canaan Kennedy

During the 1989-1990 school year at Stanford University, I took Adrienne Kennedy’s playwriting class. We’ve been in touch ever since. Now, her grandson Canaan has written a book on his family, and I’m not only helping with the Kickstarter campaign, but I asked him a few questions about the project.

What’s the name of your book, and what is it about?

The title of my book is Struggles to Victory – Over Racism in America. This book is about my family’s experiences with being black in America and dealing with the racism that came with it. Ever since I was little, my family would tell me stories of the difficulties they faced in life because of the color of their skin. This book contains interviews from my father, my grandmother, and my grandfather. My father’s story explains his incident with the Arlington Police Department, when he was unlawfully beaten outside of his home in Arlington, Virginia. The interview explains this traumatic event and how he overcame this to write the play Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which went on to win the 1996 Obie Award for Best New American Play.

My grandmother’s interview tells her stories of attending Ohio State and traveling the world as she began her journey of becoming a playwright.

My grandfather’s interview explains his life and his co-founding of Africare, a non-profit organization committed to aiding people of Africa.

At 17 years old I wanted to record their lives into the form of a book so that people could gain insight into being black in America. What makes these stories so great is the fact that they were able to overcome racism and achieve their dreams. I’ve always been interested in how people overcome difficult obstacles and situations in life because ultimately overcoming obstacles, turning struggles into victories is what life is about. Understanding how people overcome adversity to achieve greatness is what I want to be able to mimic.

What was your process for creating it?

Well, I had this epiphany one day that made me want to sit down and write a book about my family. It was during the summer, it was a hot day, and this idea to write a book just came to me. I can remember writing about the process actually and on one occasion I wrote, “Well I’m writing a book and I have about seven pages.” It was a long process. I spent hours reading, researching, and conducting interviews and then transcribing them. Many hours were spent editing the transcriptions because they didn’t come out that well. I really immersed myself in the book because I really enjoyed doing it, and creating something of my own about something I care about was really wonderful. I can’t wait until it’s finished because then I can start to work on my next project.

Who’s the audience?

The audience is young adults who are trying to navigate life. The stories can teach me lessons about how to overcome difficult times.

What do you hope people take away from it?

With everything going on from Michael Brown to Eric Garner, I hope that people can get a better understanding of being black in America. I just want people to know about my family and what they had to go through. I was always proud of my family stories and found them very interesting, and I hope that people will be intrigued and fascinated too.

Who are some of your influences?

In my room I have posters of Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, Julius Caesar, Ramses, and Alexander the Great. My father taught me about these people who strived for greatness, who wanted to change the world. These are my icons because I too want to be great. These were all great men and their ability to command and lead people is why I respect them. All of these people understood that greatness is not built in a day, it is about the amount of everlasting effort you put into it.

Check out the Kickstarter project at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbreauxsia/struggles-to-victory-a-book-by-canaan-kennedy, and share your own stories of victory on social media using the hashtag #StrugglesToVictory.

I’m Black, I’m White, I’m Neither

“I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.”–James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

It’s been over a century since the publication of James Weldon Johnson’s novel in which a bi-racial man passes for white in post-Reconstruction America. He shares first his experience of living as a black youth, then as a young man who passes for white in order to become successful and avoid persecution. He goes from a continual sense of doom and danger to a life of safety and security.

James Weldon Johnson lived during a time when it was perhaps understandable why someone would want to shed one’s skin, so to speak, and be done with social ostracism or culturally sanctioned murder.

Just when it seems as though things and times have changed—along comes Trayvon Martin. And Michael Brown. And John Crawford. And a list way too long, with statistics way too skewed against black males in America’s prison industrial complex.

The novel’s lead character, Ex-Colored Man, passes as white. One wonders why anyone wouldn’t still want to do the same thing, if possible, to secure a fat slice of the American, upper-crust pie. Well, no self-respecting bi-racial person, or at least not a socially conscious one, would do that today. (Right?) Still, perhaps she’s found herself in situations where she’s assumed to be a certain race and has to act accordingly.

What has this looked like for me? What does it mean for a mixed-race black and white person to experience blackness, whiteness, and something outside of either?

My father was told not to marry my mother because she was Jamaican. (We know how that turned out.) Once he went ahead with it, he was told to not have kids. (Ditto.) As a young girl, I experienced racism within my own extended family. I was never expected to do well, never encouraged to even speak at social gatherings, and always assumed to be, in the words of one of my aunts, “dumb.” As I got older, I learned what it’s like to be invisible in groups of mostly white people (especially in upstate New York). I’ve gotten side eye, up and down eye, glare eye, and annoyed face. In college, I started understanding and returning “the nod” when walking by a black person, as if I was part of a secret club.

I was also the first in my family (and I believe hometown) to go to a prestigious college. I’ve always—knock on wood—had good job karma, usually landing positions after one or two interviews, if I’ve even had to interview. I grew up being ridiculed for loving The Beatles. I’ve been told, “Oh, I thought you were white.” I’ve heard the N-word uttered, with no black people in sight, when no one thought I would care. I was often told as a child that I had “good hair.” I’ve gone to clubs with black friends who were turned away at the door after I was told I could go in (followed by me yelling at door guy, my own “annoyed face”, and leaving in a huff).

I’ve experienced both racism and privilege. Is this what it feels to be black and/or white? Is this the mixed-race experience?

Mixed-race, as it turns out, is a whole different beast, an alternate reality that takes elements of both white and black, and everything between, outside, and around. The puzzled looks of people trying to figure out what I am. The conversations with other mixed-race people that can only happen after such incidents as a recent trip to the grocery store. An older white man came very close to my mixed-race toddler, exclaimed, “The hair!”, and tried to give her a high five. She cowered and I interrupted with, “Hello, strange man, I don’t think she likes that.”

The mixed-race woman in the next aisle saw the whole thing. Thus came the post-game commentary: eye rolling accompanied by a discussion of how annoying it is when that happens. She told me that it wasn’t until she was 25 until she realized she had “good hair.” On the one hand I thought, great, maybe all the comments my daughter gets about her hair or indeterminate race won’t affect her all that much and she won’t even think about them until she’s older. On the other hand, I thought, wait, this woman spent two decades of her life thinking she had awful hair? Is this what it means to be mixed race—existing in a no man’s land created by society’s need to peg someone definitively as something, until such time that the someone finds her own sense of pride, identity, and self-respect? And what forms of suffering happen until then?

Ours is not a tragic mulatto!

Like any identity, mixed-race is a culmination of life experience, some good, some bad, and some uncertain. It’s refusing James Weldon Johnson’s “mess of pottage.” It’s taking the best of two worlds, processing the rest, and offering a unique perspective that can only come from seeing the larger world in different ways.

On a train in Italy back in the late 1980s, three Canadian guys mistook me for German, talking about me openly behind my back and not realizing we spoke the same language. My Italian friend said something to me and blew my cover. Being racially ambiguous has its more entertaining moments.

A Mulatto Playlist

Cinemulatto is all about laying down truth, whether it’s how to raise a mixed-race child, defining the New Tragic Mulatto, or simply locating oneself in an oft-baffling existence.

To that end, we’re here to act on the age-old trope that says music defines and shapes identity. We present to you the Mulatto Playlist, bringing together the very best of “black” and “white” music. Now you can be a mulatto, too, or just sound like one.

Here’s the perfect mixture of culturally appropriate songs for any occasion. Sit back, relax, and be a Mulatto.

Puff the Magic Dragon – Peter, Paul, and Mary

Night and Day – Al B. Sure!

I Honestly Love You – Olivia Newton-John

Don’t Call Me No Mo – Project Pat feat. Three 6 Mafia

Take Me Home, Country Roads – John Denver

Cat Daddy – Rej3ctz feat. Chris Brown

Surfin’ USA – Beach Boys

Gucci Mane – 911 Emergency

Dueling Banjos – Arthur Smith

Don’t Drop that Thun Thun – Finatticz

Don’t Cry Out Loud – Melissa Manchester feat. clowns

Wiggle – Jason DeRulo

Muskrat Love – The Captain and Tennille

‪T-Pain feat. B.o.B – Up Down (Do This All Day)‬

(You’re) Having My Baby – Paul Anka and Odia Coates – interracial parenting!

Buju Banton – Good Looking Girl

Because the internet has over 4 billion sites and we can find things like this, have a bonus track:

Mulatto Problems – Alejandro Mulatto

Feel free to suggest additions to the list!

The New Tragic Mulatto —
on Social Media?

I took a very informal poll (of like, two people) to find out if most friends on social media are like-minded and homogeneous.

Question: Do you have a very diverse mix of friends on social media or do they tend to be the same? Like, filmmakers, artists, queers, white people, people of color, mods, activists, Republicans, or what?

Answer 1: I have a mix. No religious freaks that I know of, or any hard Republicans. At least as far as Twitter goes. My Facebook is way more diverse. I have a lot of musician friends on Facebook, more than Twitter.

Answer 2: Hmm. Mostly similar, i.e., progressive, artists, queer or queer-supportive, mix of POC/white. Small number are old high school friends or relatives who are more conservative that I don’t interact with really. Should probably unfriend those people!

I asked because I realized recently: I have a very diverse mix of friends on social media. They come from all walks of life, and yes, they include filmmakers, artists, queers, white people, people of color, 60s music aficionados, left-wing activists, Republicans, and “or what”. I have rich friends. I have poor friends. CEOs. VPs. The unemployed. Hustlers. Thieves. Authors. Atheists. Christians. Actors. Poets. Politicians. Comedians. Kids. Just about every race, creed, ethnicity, and religious belief is represented.

Some of my Facebook “friends” I don’t know all that well, but I respect them. Even so, more often than not, I feel as though I don’t quite fit in anywhere.

Outside of social media, I have very few close friends, or rather, confidantes. This could be part pride, part laziness, part same feeling of not always fitting in. Feelings of not quite being part of the pack, I know, are common. If they weren’t, there’d be no such thing as teen angst.

But I’m not a teen. And I consider myself a pretty confident person. So what’s up with this “not fitting in”, which seems to be thrown into greater relief on social media?

Could this be the New Tragic Mulatto?

Granted, the fictional stereotype involved nasty things like self-loathing, depression, and sometimes suicide. So extreme! The New Tragic Mulatto isn’t so much tragic as kinda-sorta listless sometimes. How would I define this archetype?

The New Tragic Mulatto is an entity on social media who, despite having a diverse social network, feels “not quite [x] enough” in many virtual communities, such as not quite queer enough, or not quite POC enough, or not quite 60s enough. Speaking in situational terms: she’s on the periphery of the periphery. The New Tragic Mulatto often can’t quite keep up with the rules of any given social group, always seeking to do and be something different from what the group dictates. As a result, she ends up bringing this dynamic to the non-virtual world, meaning she mostly avoids social events and goes to sleep early.

Well, I don’t *entirely* avoid social events, but if one is feeling like an outsider is she really present at the event?

Whether this phenomena is truly tragic or a run of the mill midlife crisis is anyone’s guess. Or maybe Mulattos are onto something that transcends any of the dynamics created by their social groups, online or otherwise. Social ties, after all, are ultimately a good thing, outsider status notwithstanding.

I’ll think about all this again in the morning, after a good night’s early sleep.

Am I Raising a Mixed-Race Child?

CleoBubbles — Forced photo credit: Dakota Billops-Breaux

“Are you raising me white?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you’re raising me mixed?”

I have two mixed-race daughters. My teen daughter and I had the above exchange as we drove to her SAT. It came right after my sage advice to use either ‘bruh’ or ‘blood’, depending on who she was talking to, in the event of a race war. (Always know who you’re dealing with.)

This wasn’t a situation where someone was asking me or my wife if either of us is the birth parent of our toddler. It had nothing to do with someone trying to figure out our daughters’ racial heritage. There were no skin tone comparisons, or earnest inquiries, or attempts to touch hair.

What does it mean to raise a child to be mixed-race? Is there a mixed-race culture?

The teen daughter in question is fond of music. Her favorite genre is pop-punk, whose musicians are predominantly white. Although she’s familiar with contemporary hip hop and can quote lyrics like nobody’s business (or is it bidness?), there are no black hip hop artists on her smartphone. Does this make her mixed-race? Would having music by black artists allow her to play a race card?

Her meals run the gamut from organic and vegan to cheap and processed. Does this make her mixed-race?

She can dance. Does this make her mixed-race?

She has self-proclaimed “hair issues”. But doesn’t that cross racial lines? (Doesn’t it?)

She can switch from a “white” accent to a “black” one. Is this the defining factor?

Most importantly, how has parenting contributed to any and all of the above? Was it early exposure to The Beatles? Did slipping in The Roots shake things up? Was it the hip hop dance classes?

I have no idea. I know she’s aware of the predominance of white women and girls in books and media. Her friends are diverse. The first report she ever wrote for school was on Ruby Bridges. She doesn’t currently identify so much with her Asian heritage, although she wants to someday visit Japan. (She’s not part-Japanese.) We have a blended family that includes black, white, Native American, and Filipino.

Perhaps I have indeed raised a mixed-race child. How has this manifested? My daughter is smart, sensitive, hilarious, and culturally attuned. She can interact with people of all races, ethnicities, creeds, and backgrounds. She even knows how to combat hair issues.

We haven’t laminated the race card, but we’re working on it.

Guest blogger:
Dakota Billops-Breaux

To honor Millennials, mixed chicks, and digital natives, Cinemulatto presents our first guest blogger: my daughter. May this serve as a time capsule and provide insight on what the “young people” are thinking.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are now experiencing an EXTREME. BLOG. TAKEOVER!
(Cue intense classic rock music and fire shooting up from unexpected places.)

My name is Dakota Billops-Breaux and I am honored to be Cinemulatto’s first guest blogger. Because I’m not a blogger, nor do I know the first thing about being a blogger, this should be an interesting experience. I do know, however, that this particular blog is about film. And race. And stuff. It says so in the header. So, readers, for the next three to five (or maybe six) hundred words, I’ll do my best to enlighten you on all of my knowledge of those three subjects.

Film.
Unlike my mother, I’m not one to pay close attention to the films I watch. How they were made, what shots were used, and various trivial facts about the films aren’t really in my best interest. (I mean, really, the only reason I’m even calling them “films” instead of “movies” is because I know that’s the Cinemulatto way!) However, I do know a lot about my mom’s films, and I’ve been on the set or a part of the cast or crew for basically my entire life. Being behind the scenes of several movies has really taught me a lot about film. For instance, when you’re four and wearing plastic purple heels and your assignment is to walk towards three drag queens, sometimes you just have to stop crying and suck it up for the camera, no matter how scary their false eyelashes and tall stature may be.

Race.
I am extremely mixed race. I’m about as mixed as a person can get; the only race missing is Latina. In addition to being mixed race, I come from a very mixed family, thus having relatives in a bunch of different parts of the world including Jamaica, England, New Mexico, Texas, and Minnesota. I visited my Minnesota relatives this past winter break for the celebration of my great grandmother’s 100^th birthday. (She lives in North Dakota. She’s adorable.) The reason I’m telling you about my trip to Minnesota is relevant, promise. I was staying in a hotel there (The Hilton. Very fancy. We used a Groupon.) and I took my sister, Precious, downstairs to see what was going on in the lobby, as bored 16-year-olds do. In the elevator a girl with straightened hair and a black headband turned to me and, with a fascinated look on her face, asked, “Are you Blasian?”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“Blasian,” she repeated, “You know, like, Black and Asian?”
“Ah. That would make sense. I mean, I guess I am, yeah.” I obviously was not aware that “Blasian” was a thing. Turns out the 14-year-old Minnesotan was also “Blasian”, being a mix of African-American and Cambodian. It’s interesting that she chose to define herself as specifically as “Blasian” (in addition to choosing to create her Internet friend group out of almost entirely “Blasians”) when she could easily define herself as mixed, like I do. Granted, I am more than two races. What would my term be? Whi-a-bl-native-sian?

Stuff.

Dakota Fanning’s real name is Hannah.
In the music video for “What’s My Age Again?” by Blink 182, the band was naked about 40% of the time.
License plates in the Canadian Northwest territories are shaped like polar bears.

Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed being Cinemulatto’s first guest blogger. Because I don’t have a relevant thought to end on and keep you thinking about for the rest of the week, remember to eat your vegetables!

You Know You’re a Tragic Mulatto When….

Does the tragic mulatto still exist in literature and film? We’re not quite sure. Imitation of Life has been old news since the advent of Jennifer Beals, Halle Berry, and Maya Rudolph. Even The Human Stain is verging on outdated. It seems transgender is the new black, or the next frontier of mainstream media figuring out there’s more to entertainment than stereotyping.

Tragic mulattoes are still out there, however. Here’s how you can tell if you’re one of them.

You know you’re a tragic mulatto when:

You identify with Tyler Perry movies.
You think half-breed is the name of a cocktail.
You think mixed race is another term for Bay to Breakers.
You think biracial is a skin whitener pronounced bee-RAH-cee-all.
You have no black friends.
You have no white friends.
Your idea of racial pride is watching The View.
You often can’t decide between a polite handshake and a fist-bump, slap-on-the-back, “wassup dawg” combo.
People who don’t speak Spanish address you in Spanish.
You search Urban Dictionary on a weekly basis for new terms.
You have a news alert set up for Tiger Woods.
You’re a mulatto who’s never heard of the tragic mulatto.

There’s hope for you yet. Stay strong, do some reading, and get out more.

Category: Mixed-Race Arts and Letters