mixed race heritage

The Latte Rebellion

brittany — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Asha Jamison’s classmates are quick to categorize her. She is called both a “towelhead” and “barely Asian.” Asha and her best friend Carey have a harder time describing their own ethnicities. Asha is part Indian, part Mexican, and part Irish, while Carey is half Chinese and half Caucasian. When they begin describing themselves as lattes—a mix of coffee and milk—they start brainstorming ways to distribute their idea to other multiethnic teens and coffee lovers. The Latte Rebellion is born, first only through t-shirt sales that Asha and Carey hope to use for a post-graduation trip but spiraling quickly into a viral social movement.

Things get out of hand, though, when other chapters of the movement take the message too far. Asha promotes peaceful rallies, but others resort to hate speech and violence. The Latte Rebellion becomes targeted as a terrorist group, and Asha is forced to go before the school board for a disciplinary hearing as a result of her involvement. Now more than ever, Asha must find her voice and speak out for what The Latte Rebellion is truly about: empowerment, belonging, and identity.

Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s The Latte Rebellion sports a gorgeously textured cover, and it was the side-by-side glossy and matte finishes that lured me into the book initially. I can’t help but be tempted by a delicious-looking cup of coffee. While I couldn’t always identify with Asha’s struggle, I admired the book’s promotion of mixed-ethnicity understanding and acceptance. I was rooting for Asha, though after reading a book about advocacy—albeit a fictional one—I would have liked to have gotten more riled up. Throughout much of the novel, it was hard to accept that these teens cared about much more than their t-shirt sales, vacation plans, and cute guys. They are teenagers, after all.

The Latte Rebellion is founded on a solid premise, but its message is one that can be grasped quickly from the first few chapters. Much of the remainder dragged on and on. Unfortunately, I found this book to be short on substance, too much milk and not enough coffee. (If you are not a fan of the latte metaphor, this book is most certainly not for you, as they are used in abundance.) Perhaps teens who can relate better to Asha’s quest will find more meaning behind The Latte Rebellion’s manifesto and pursue their own journey toward social change. As for me, I’ll stick with the coffee and the cool t-shirt.

Written by: Melanie Goodman, April 9th 2011

Violet

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Tania Duprey Stehlik, Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic

Second Story Press

A first day in a new school. Stomach butterflies, lunchroom trades, art projects. Kids asking why you’re not the same color as your dad. This is the story of Violet, a children’s picture book by Tania Duprey Stehlik with edgy illustrations by Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic.

Violet’s mom is red, her dad is blue, and Violet is, well, violet. Back home at the kitchen table after school, Violet asks her mother to explain. She brings out the paints: “If you take red and mix in a little blue, you get a lovely purply-violet.” When Violet asks whether there are others like her, her mother responds by assuring Violet that “...many children are mixed, just like you.”

Ouch. The word “mixed” as a description of a person’s ethnicity is jarring, especially in this storybook context. Doesn’t a “mix” refer to a dog or Betty Crocker? Connotations aside, the word is more problematic than meaningful. A heck of a lot of people, especially in North America, have some element of mixed ethnicity. Another approach to Violet’s story would be to emphasize this fact and dispel the myth that skin tone can be classified into a set few colors. Surely of the red, yellow, and blue kids at Violet’s school, some had lighter skin and some had darker skin, each with a distinct shade and tone. But in an illustration depicting the schoolyard, the matching skin colors of the children are starkly in contrast with the careful individuality Jovanovic gives the rest of the children’s features, clothing, and expressions.

Nevertheless, Violet seems to find her mother’s explanation sensible and confidence-building enough to proudly use it herself. Perhaps the matter-of-fact explanation of color-blending is just the ammo Violet needed to quickly mollify her bewildered classmates and get back to art projects and making new friends. However, one hopes the teachers at her school will look into some activities with multicultural play dough.

Written by: Jonelle Seitz, December 8th 2009

Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Edited by Sherene Razack

Between The Lines

Institutional racism: we all know it exists, yet many deny it does. In this book, Sherene Razack, author of Looking White People in the Eye, edits a set of deeply disturbing accounts of racially-motivated public policies and resultant public consciousness in North America. Beginning with the premise “Race is Space,” _Race, Space, and the Law_ unearths half-forgotten history of racial injustice and challenges the romanticisation of European settlement which is so deeply embedded in Canadian and American folklore. In other words, it seeks to unpack and debunk the notion of the peaceful collaboration between settlers and the aboriginal community, and the idea that the Native peoples have “always accepted, and to some degree, were willing to agree that being the possessors of a land need not necessarily be the only source of legitimacy of its use.”

Razack's book brings together disparate laws and fragments of history—laws on drinking establishments, the ban on "unparliamentarian" language, midwifery, mosque-building, a murder of a sex worker, and inner city slum dwellings—to subvert the "universal" values of justice upheld by the law. There are far too many examples in Race, Space, and the Law that illustrate these modes of subversion and resistance in brilliant, infuriating colour to fit into this review, so I will only be able to share a few.

In "Keeping the Ivory Tower White," Carol Schick sets the predominantly White University of Saskatchewan as a stage for the maintenance of White privilege by exploring the responses of White students to multicultural education. The course, which focused heavily on Aboriginal culture and history, brought out feelings of discomfort. As members of a respectable and intellectual domain of the university, students founded their discomfort and racial insecurity on rationality to side step racist or non-PC misgivings about the content of the course. Schick argues that by making disclaimers and claiming credentials as a feminist sympathizer, students can project themselves as utterly reasonable people—especially as ones who understand the necessity of civility and self-control as they secure White privilege and entitlement.

Renisa Mawani's "In Between and Out of Place" describes the situation of biracial individuals who symbolised the destabilisation of colonial power through the blurring the racial boundaries in mid nineteenth-century British Columbia. Racial categories, often a product of British colonialism, were crucial to maintaining the “racial order of things,” that determined who had certain rights to land and citizenship. Biracial men and women were perceived to be troublemakers and untrustworthy, and hence there were strict laws on alcohol purchase and distribution for this group. The logic behind this was motivated by the fear of interracial mixing because it might result in, quite simplistically, more biracial people.

Perhaps the most recent challenge to Whiteness is the growing presence of Islam in the West, particularly after the September 11 attacks. In Engin Isin and Myer Siemiatycki's essay "Making Space for Mosques," xenophobia and Islamophobia emerged from behind the cloak of neighbourly respectability when the building of new mosques in Toronto was met with resistance. The level of restrictions placed on the Muslim places of worship, particularly on those built on sites of formerly Christian worship, was unprecedented. Suddenly, the “change” a mosque would bring to the look of the neighbourhood became a prime concern for the surrounding residents that resulted in the physical curtailment of the mosque's development, including the reduction of the minaret's height and in some ways, its potent symbolism.

These essays reiterate the fundamental premise that space, particularly a public one, produces identities of privilege and degeneracy. I highly recommend this book to people interested in marginalised history and its place in institutionalised racism today. Perhaps a dose of history will give naysayers of institutional racism some food for thought, too.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, July 29th 2009

2666

admin — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:16:00 +0000

By Roberto Bolaño

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Epic in its proportions, 2666 is a modern day mystery novel more akin to James Joyce than anything on the shelves by John Grisham. The five sections that comprise the book are set around the world, yet the heart of the narratives remains bound to the fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa. An industrialized hub, Santa Teresa is home to a multitude of maquiladoras whose workers are paid paltry sums compared to their American sisters directly across the border. An obvious portrait of Ciudad Juarez, Bolaño does not fail to leave out one vital detail. Throughout the book we are confronted with a string murders that exclusively target the women of Santa Teresa. It is clear that Bolaño is not only describing Ciudad Juarez, but he is boldly describing the femicide that has plagued the city for over a decade.

The novel opens with a group of European academics in search of their muse, Benno von Archimboldi. An elusive German writer, he is known only to his publisher. The scholars spend their days teaching his writing and attending conferences devoted to his work. Driven to find Archimboldi, their search brings them to Santa Teresa. It is here that they lose the trail, but they do not give up hope. “Archimboldi is here, and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him,” explains Pelletier, a French scholar who has devoted his life to Archimboldi. It is here that Bolaño reveals the nature of his beast. This town teetering on the brink of fiction and reality is the closest the reader will get to understanding the mystery that unfolds throughout the book. No matter how far Bolaño takes us away, it is to this town that we will eventually return.

Unique to other fictional tales that grapple with femicide, Bolaño does not mythologize the killings. Artfully, he creates a surreal world in which giants exist and wars rage on in castle-filled lands. But he handles the killings with a realistic integrity that enriches the text. The longest and most painfully poignant section titled “The Part about the Crimes” describes the killings and sexual abuses in detail, employing a style that stands apart. We learn the names of the women killed, and of the many more that remain unidentified, with family too far away or too scared to claim their lost daughters and sisters. Just as he does when the trail runs dry on Archimboldi, Bolaño leaves the reader with little closure. Some of the killers are found but most cases remain unsolved.

Written at the end of Bolaño’s life and published posthumously, 2666 is an expansive novel whose stories wildly unfurl leaving the reader with more questions than answers. At the close of the book the truth behind the mysteries remains elusive, however one thing is clear: the murders are not a fantastical portrait of society; rather they are an mercilessly truthful reflection of a world wrought with problems. In this respect the line between fiction and reality is appropriately steadfast in Bolaño’s profoundly affecting new novel.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, May 4th 2009

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:34:00 +0000

By Suzanne Kamata

Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering is a collection of essays by twenty different women who are all raising children in a multicultural environment. The children in this book mainly fall into three categories: they are of mixed racial heritage, they are being raised in a country to which their parents have immigrated, or they have been adopted by parents from another culture. Being multiracial myself and having been raised in an army town where interracial relationships, foreign mothers, and multiracial children are fairly common, I was interested to see what Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering had to say.

Overall, I found the stories in the book to be very hit or miss. Some were moving and touched on issues that multicultural families sometimes face. One stand out is “Fade to Brown,” the story of a woman of mixed race who worries how her daughters’ differing skin colors (one is light, the other dark) will affect their relationship with each other and their cultural identity. It’s an insightful story, dealing with real concerns and specific problems that many people of mixed race can relate to.

Other stories in the collection are less on target. For instance, “Dr. Bucket in Bishkek” has nothing to do with raising children in a foreign country or culture. Instead, it is an amusing tale about an English woman’s experiences while being pregnant in Kyrgyzstan. While it makes for a good fish-out-of-water story, the essay has little to do with the central theme of the collection. Many of the stories were also centered more on how the mother was reacting to the family’s environment or circumstance instead of focusing on the children. These stories were more about bad marriages and personal prejudices than about mothers coping with unusual situations.

My main problem with many of these stories is that due to the way they were written, they just did not feel real. Don’t get me wrong—the writing is good, but it’s all very fanciful and poetic, making the work seem more like fiction than a relating of real life events. Instead of flowery prose, I would have preferred straightforward accounts of the obstacles and triumphs these mothers have encountered. In the end, Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering is worth a look for the better stories, but be prepared to have to wade through the bad ones as well.

Written by: Victoria Kroeger, April 28th 2009