Race-ing Desire

by Rachel Ishikawa

Although my romantic entanglements to this day remain a short list, I cannot deny that race invariably becomes a factor in each relationship that I have. With my untraditional racial identity – part Jewish and Asian –  I find that I am always in an interracial relationship, no matter what race my partner is. From the start of college with my first prolonged fling, race has played the passenger, a sort of haunting that has followed all of my romantic decisions since. Shortly after declining my first fling’s request for a more serious and exclusive relationship, I noticed him jaunting with a young woman, who – like me – was petite, nose-ringed, and most perturbingly half-asian. Abjectly, my mind wandered to a question that I think many women of color face when involved interracial relationships: am I a desired “type?”

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#SwirlChat Transcript – Talking with Dr. Marcia Dawkins

Here is the transcript from our last TweetChat on Friday, February 24th, 2012, when we talked with Dr. Marcia Dawkins about the recent Pew Research Center study and interracial relationships. If you didn’t get to participate and want to weigh in on anything we discussed, please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

You can find the transcript here, in a pdf.

*Note that this chat was held on Friday, from 3pm-4pm EDT. The times you see in the transcript are indicative of the fact that the person who captured this transcript is located in Germany. Thanks Kim!

Please join our next live every-other-week TweetChat on Friday, March 9th at 3pm EDT!

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#SwirlChat Transcript – “Looks and the Mixed Race Community”

Here is the transcript from our first TweetChat of the new year, on Friday, January 13, 2012: Looks and the Mixed Race Community. If you didn’t get to participate and want to weigh in on this topic now, please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

You can find the transcript here, in a pdf. Sorry that the tweets read most recent to earliest. We are using a new transcript-pulling system and are still working out the kinks!

*Note that this chat was held on Friday, from 3pm-4pm EDT. The times you see in the transcript are indicative of the fact that the person who captured this transcript is located in Germany. Thanks Kim!

Please join our next live every-other-week TweetChat on Friday, January 27th at 3pm EDT. We will be talking with author Heidi Durrow about her book, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!

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#SwirlChat Transcript – “The Language of Race”

Here is the transcript from our TweetChat on Friday, December 2, 2011: The Language of Race. If you didn’t get to participate and want to weigh in on this topic now, please leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

You can find the transcript here, in a pdf.

*Note that this chat was held on Friday, from 3pm-4pm EDT. The times you see in the transcript are indicative of the fact that the person who captured this transcript is located in Germany. Thanks Kim!

Please join our next live every-other-week Tweet chat on Tuesday, December 13th at 8pm EDT. Stay tuned for more info on the topic!

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Book Review: Cry, the Beloved Country

by Rayuela

Cry, the Beloved Country was written by Alan Paton and was first published in Great Britain in 1948. It is set in the South Africa of the 1940s (1946 to be precise) – a country fraught with racial tensions and searching desperately for a solution to its problems. Apartheid was instituted only four months after book was published.

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Biracial vs. Racial

Originally published at Comp Lit and Mediaphilia

By Sarah Hannah Gómez

One of the reasons I hate the term “multicultural literature” (which generally means “children’s or YA lit with a protagonist of color, usually with a plot that deals centrally with issues of race or ethnicity) is because it leaves me without an appropriate label for a sub-genre (really a sub-sub-genre, because African American literature should be a sub-genre of fiction, not some other kind of lesser fiction) that I guess I’ll have to call biracial narrative literature. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of “African American literature,” especially books that deal more specifically with the biracial experience. That experience is utterly and totally different from the African American experience or the white experience, and it differs even more if you want to divide those narratives up by whether they deal with passing, with growing up in an African American community, or growing up in a white one. And that’s only three possibilities, just because I’m only talking about biracial people who are half black, half white.

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The False Positive

by Leotis Martin

Acquaintance: “So what are you doing in Florence?”

Me: “Spring vacation…I’m studying in Paris.”

A: “Oh, so where are you from in the States?”

Me: “Well, I’m originally from South America, but I grew up in the Bronx…”

A: “Oh, how is that?”

Me: “It’s the Bronx, so all the rumors you’ve heard are definitely true.”

A: “Hah. Well you made it to [insert private institution of higher learning here], right?  That means you had to be, like, extra super smart huh?”

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Separate and Unequal: A structural analysis of educational inequality in America

by Jeff Garrett

Fifty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that school segregation policies are unconstitutional.  Yet despite the moral victory of the Brown decision, in the decades since 1954 we have failed to create educational equality in America.  Despite countless initiatives, hundreds of billions of dollars invested in various school improvement efforts, and the passage of a federal law that mandates that no child be left behind, we continue to see gaps in educational opportunity that disproportionately impact the lives of low income communities and communities of color across the fifty states.  

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