Saturday, June 18, 2011

Know Our Culture: Our Popularity and Our Dilemmas

Over the past few weeks, I've come across a few websites and articles for the Mixed-Race population, and those wanting to learn about us. As a population and a culture, we're expanding. Not just in numbers, but in the media, in popularity.

Exploring the Popularization of Mixed Race America - An article by the Human Experience that speaks on this giant explosion of mixed race pride and popularity. With the new media, there has been positives and negatives. The article discusses all of these things and popular artists and writers that feature mixed kids.

Mixed and Happy - To get away from the "tragic mulatto" image, there is this website that lets mixed race people and interracial couples to post their love, celebrations, and positive news. My fiance and I posted our engagement there.

Mixed-Race Students Wonder How Many Boxes to Check - NY Times article. Something as simple as deciding which races to identify as may not be a big deal to other people, but to mixed-race college students it is a real moral issue. Though we can identify as more than one race now, it's still a problem of choice. Will choosing white and black or asian and black exclude us from getting the benefits of just a black student?

From personal experience, I can say yes. Because I identified as mixed: white and black, I did not get a minority scholarship, even if I grew up in a primarily black neighborhood or low-income household. But if I had only put black, I wouldn't have been true to myself. I would have felt like I was selling out.

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