We’re doing it again! This year we’re excited to offer a special goodie bag for the first 100 attendees! Want one of these awesome Mixed Remixed Festival water bottles? Then get there when the doors open at 9:30am and be one of the first 100 people at Mixed Remixed this year! You’ll also have a chance to receive Festival stickers and special discounts from our sponsors! Be there and claim your goodie bag first thing on June 10! See you soon!
Are you coming to the largest nationwide gathering of mixed-race and multiracial families and people?
Registration is now open for the Mixed Remixed Festival 2017 and we want to make sure you don’t miss out. Here are some of the many folks who have already registered! It’s time for you to register too! Spaces are limited in many sessions! Did we mention it’s FREE!
Mixed Remixed Festival 2017 Presenter Highlight: Tehran Von Ghasri
“The mixed experience is a unique, bold, and new experience that gives ‘mixed’ people an extraordinary ability to understand and see the world from many angles . . . “
We are extremely pleased that Tehran Von Ghasri will be part of the 2017 Mixed Remixed Festival. Tehran will participate as part of a special roundtable discussion The Mixed-Race Conversation: Is It a Wrap? and also host the Storyteller’s Prize Presentation and Live Event. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged.
What are you?
LOS ANGELES or did you mean where am I in life cause in that case…NOWHERE
What is your mixed experience?
I’m half Persian, half Black, and all AMAZING.
What is the most important thing you want people to know about the mixed experience?
The mixed experience is a unique, bold, and new experience that gives ‘mixed’ people an extraordinary ability to understand and see the world from many angles from the eyes of different races, cultures, and heritages at the same time.
Do you remember when you first started thinking about the mixed experience? Was it because of a certain moment or event? Please tell us about that.
Growing up being ‘mixed’ was very new, and to this day being Black and Persian is very rare. I remember as a young child people not being able to comprehend that I was a product of both my father and my mother, because I did not ‘look’ like either one. Teachers would often ask my father if I was adopted or if he was my step-father. They couldn’t fathom mixed race children. Its nice to have a place in the world where that doesn’t happen.
What was your experience when you attended the Mixed Remixed Festival? Why did you want to come back?
The Mixed Remixed Festival is a place of liberation, freedom, and understanding. Its a place to share common bonds and common experiences.
What are you looking forward to most at the Festival this year?
I’m looking forward to Tehran hosting. He is great!!!
Mixed Remixed Festival 2017 Presenter Highlight: Writer Maria Olsen
We are lucky to have writer Maria Olsen join us again this year for the Mixed Remixed Festival. In 2016, Maria participated as a children’s book author. This year she will speak on a special parenting panel on how to deal with bullying of your multiracial child and having the Race talk. The panel is scheduled for 3:00pm on June 10, 2017 at the Mixed Remixed Festival, the largest nationwide gathering of mixed-race and multiracial families and people. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged.
What are you?
Half Filipina and half Caucasian (English, Irish, Slavic, French)
What is your mixed experience?
Biracial
What is the most important thing you want people to know about the mixed experience?
For someone like me, who has hovered in the space between cultures, Mixed Remixed is a place where I feel understood and that I belong. No explanation needed. So grateful to have found Mixed Remixed!
Do you remember when you first started thinking about the mixed experience? Was it because of a certain moment or event? Please tell us about that.
As a young child who grew up brown in a sea of white, I always felt other. Kids can be cruel, and I endured the jokes because of my appearance and mother’s ethnicity.
What was your experience when you attended the Mixed Remixed Festival last year? Why did you want to come back?
My experience was fabulous. Met amazing people and made friends there that continue to help me both professionally and personally. I recommend it to every mixed person I know.
What are you looking forward to most at the Festival this year?
The workshops. Such deep thinkers. The festival means so much to me. I fly across the country to be here. It’s so important and I hope it will continue every year. I hope to bring my grandchildren some day!
Mixed Remixed Festival 2017 Presenter Highlight: Writer May-lee Chai
We are extremely pleased to have writer May-lee Chai as part of our Featured Writers Reading. You can hear her read on June 10, 2017 at 1:00pm at the Mixed Remixed Festival. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged.
What are you?
Mixed-race Asian-American, specifically Chinese-Anglo/Irish/German.
What is your mixed experience?
I am biracial, daughter of a Chinese father and White Irish-Anglo-German American mother.
What is the most important thing you want people to know about the mixed experience?
We are not half anything, we are wholly ourselves. Our families have a right to exist and we have a right to celebrate our existence and to see our families represented in American culture in a positive way through a non-racist lens.
Do you remember when you first started thinking about the mixed experience? Was it because of a certain moment or event? Please tell us about that.
I had to think about the mixed experience for survival’s sake when I was 12 and we moved from the NYC-area to rural South Dakota and people started driving by our house to stare at us, shout racial slurs, and eventually to shoot and kill our dogs. I had to assert my right to exist when monoracial adults and their children told me God didn’t want the races to mix and that I by my existence was a sign of the “End Times” and Satan’s reign on earth. I learned to insist upon my family’s right to exist and our right to be represented in American culture in a positive light rather than through the lens of racism.
Is this your first time attending the Mixed Remixed Festival?
Yes
Why did you want to be a part of the Mixed Remixed Festival? What do you hope to gain?
I want to represent my family, I want to tell my story, I want to meet other mixed-race writers and artists and families.
What are you looking forward to most at the Festival this year?
Meeting everyone and hearing all the stories!
Mixed Remixed Festival 2017 Presenter Highlight: Poet Julian Randall
“I think like a lot of Biracial people I’m defined by droughts and mirrors.”
We are extremely pleased to have poet Julian Randall as part of our Featured Writers Reading. You can hear him read on June 10, 2017 at 1:00pm at the Mixed Remixed Festival. Pre-registration is strongly encouraged.
What are you?
I am a Biracial Black Queer man
I am half Afro-Dominican and half of what you could call Afro-American Black, though America has rarely if ever wanted anything to do with me and I allow it proximity to my name only for the sake of clarity.
What is your mixed experience?
I think like a lot of Biracial people I’m defined by droughts and mirrors. In essence I am what it is to come from two impossible bloodlines and still find your face nowhere. As such I had to piece together my identity in bits and pieces, different hour blocks on the tv, different books, eternally just in heated pursuit of some proof I was possible beyond my own body. I’m a writer because of the skills that I learned in my hunger, I’m in many ways in the business of mosaics (of building a face from the shrapnel of other times) I come from so much that American culture throws away off screen, but I’m here, I’m back, and in so many ways, I never left.
What is the most important thing you want people to know about the mixed experience?
I want folks to know I do not exist by accident. When I say, “I come from the impossible” I mean that one half of my family was chained and placed on a boat, then eventually landed in Mississippi, then eventually I had a great grandfather who was born light skinned and with no record of his real birthday. He owned part of a hardware store and sold insurance. One day the white folk of Greenville, MS came to his business after discovering that he was not white; they gave him 24 hours or he would be tarred and feathered to death. He carried my grandmother and fled to East St. Louis. She grew up to meet my grandfather, they had my father. This was not an accident, it was violence.
Similarly my abuelo, my mother’s father, was a loudmouth opponent of the US supported Trujillo Regime. Trujillo’s thugs started asking around about my Abuelo. And so one half of my blood mounted a plane and landed in New York to save the women who would become my Tias, become my mother. This was not an accident, it was violence.
Make no mistake, without violence I do not exist. My parents could not have existed anywhere but at the edge of a blade and so I am from “the impossible” a descendant of what Ariana Brown so aptly calls “The Unsurvivable”
Do you remember when you first started thinking about the mixed experience? Was it because of a certain moment or event? Please tell us about that.
Well, I guess I want to say here that in my memory it is twofold, there’s the moment where you see what you are and the moment that other people confirm they see it too. So it’s about gaze in that respect. Mine actually centers around the year 2001 when both Taina and That’s So Raven were on TV around the same time. It might seem silly to some but at age 7 I was so grateful to know I wasn’t alone, they may have been on separate channels but here was the time I most easily was able to see families that looked like mine though they could never touch. It was really nice, and they were images I had found on my own.
It was strange though too. I went to a predominantly white school where I was not reflected in a lot of ways. People didn’t really know often, what to do with me, what to call me and it led to a lot of microaggressive events from the jaws of the well-intentioned. A lot of folks would substitute/code the “Which side do you feel closer to?” question as “Well which show do you like more; Raven or Taina?” and so I knew that they saw this supposed line down the middle of me too. This line that none of them had to bear, this other way that it was a burden to remember me, to hold me all in one place.
When Taina got cancelled I was devastated, at the surface level because it was a great show but really I think I knew then what I would be told again and again, there could only be one. I was already two, so it seemed there could be no me.
Is this your first time attending the Mixed Remixed Festival?
Yes
Why did you want to be a part of the Mixed Remixed Festival? What do you hope to gain?
I’m not sure how many more times I can say mirrors before it seems like I only know 6 words. But it is important, to know oneself within the company of people who bear some version of our own particular histories, the spaces that can feel barren for want of a friend, a contact, somebody who is built of similar improbabilities
What are you looking forward to most at the Festival this year?
I couldn’t have imagined I would ever get a chance to do a reading with Tara Betts who was one of my teachers at The Watering Hole and a hero, friend and advocate I hold in highest esteem and love. So I am excited to be in LA for the first time to do such holy work as reading with my fellow featured writers!
23andMe Joins as Benefactor Sponsor of Festival Celebrating Mixed-Race Families
23andMe Joins as Benefactor Sponsor of Festival Celebrating Mixed-Race Families
LOS ANGELES, CA, April 28, 2017 — 23andMe, the leading personal genetics company, has signed on as a Benefactor Sponsor of the Mixed Remixed Festival, the nation’s largest gathering of mixed-race and multiracial families and artists. The Festival will take place at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown Los Angeles (514 S. Spring Street), June 10, 2017.
Now in its fourth year, the Festival celebrates stories of multiracial Americans and families, the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. A free public event, the Festival brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial and multicultural families and individuals for workshops, readings, performances, and film screenings. Families can enjoy interactive craft activities, free face painting, and interactive storytelling time.
“We are extremely pleased to have 23andMe as a sponsor,” says Festival Founder Heidi Durrow who calls herself an Afro-Viking because she is African-American and Danish. “The company provides a valuable service that helps people discover the complexity of their backgrounds. The DNA stories 23andMe reveal highlight how the Mixed experience is one that we all share.”
“We are excited to support such a wonderful event,” said Joanna Mountain, PhD, population geneticist and Senior Director of Research at 23andMe. “Our country’s rich and diverse history is reflected in our DNA. Exploring your family’s genetics is just one way to connect with and discover more about your family’s unique story.”
The Festival, a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization, is produced by Durrow a New York Times best-selling writer, and a talented team of entertainment professionals and artists.
Registration opens May 1 for the fourth annual Mixed Remixed Festival, a free event that is open to the public. The complete Festival schedule will be available when registration opens at www.mixedremixed.org.
Festival sponsors and funders include: 23andMe, Mixed Chicks, the Leo Buscaglia Foundation, and the Puffin West Foundation.
The Mixed Remixed Festival, a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization, celebrates stories about mixed-race and multiracial experience and identity with an annual film, book and performance festival.
Cultural Competency should include more on interracial and transracial families
I am in my senior year of college, and I am double majoring in social work and English. Now, originally, I was double majoring in sociology and English. However, because I wanted to work with people face-to-face, and not study people from a distance, I switched to social work. Because that department focuses so much on empathizing with a variety of people of hyphenated identities, as a mixed race person, I grew to love my department right away!
In my major, I have done research on policy that has affected mixed race populations, and I am doing research with other awesome social work students in transracial adoption. Having the freedom to do research and interventions on our passions and passions we never knew could develop is a delightful freedom to have.
The most important thing for me, personally, that the social work department emphasizes, as any serving department emphasizes, is cultural competency. Cultural competency is being able to work cross culturally with other individuals and groups. Being able to acknowledge the culture you come from, while also knowing the best tools and the best way to be intentional for people of a culture, or cultures, you are outside of.
In the majority of my textbooks on social work, there are chapters that emphasize how to work best with certain racial populations, and what you need to know about them. However, I’ve noticed that as each of the authors go through each group, interracial families are either barely touched on or not touched on at all.
There isn’t enough research done, or interracial families are touched on in one example case study out of the many case studies the authors present to the reader.
Moreover, when discussing transracial families, the Indian Child Welfare Act is briefly touched on, or the process for kids transitioning from being a foster child to an adopted child. However, there still isn’t enough research done on what transracial families are like, or, how to best work with transracial families. Especially when there has been debate on whether or not parents should adopt children of a race(s) that isn’t their own (Smith, Jacobson, Juárez 2011).
A problem I have with this lack of attention and lack of research is that it perpetuates the idea that interracial and transracial families are exotic rarities when they are anything but.
Another problem I have with this is that it perpetuates a particular binary when it comes to doing research in diverse populations.
Social workers have to compare monoracial white people and monoracial people of color (yes, the phrase “people of color” to group so many people in one category marks my last statement as a binary). Social workers have to compare straight people and the LGBTQIA community (again, grouping various people together into one still perpetuates a binary). This list can go on and on into class, religion, etc.
There’s not enough middle ground. There’s not enough of a spectrum present. And more and more people ought to know by know how wide the spectrum is when it comes to interracial families having mixed race children, transracial families in regards to the background(s) of the children that are a part of their unit.
When I presented my policy research last year, people were shocked to find that there are no policies that are enacted to protect and provide benefits to various mixed race communities in the same way that there are for various monoracial communities (Campbell & Herman 2010). And even in that, it can be difficult to present, because if I want to be a social worker, how helpful am I going to be by using a monoracial verses multiracial binary? Whether it’s individuals or families?
One positive that can come out of this process of figuring this out, for me, personally, is to advocate for more of that research to be done, if not do it myself, as a mixed race person.
There needs to be more of us in the social work field.
There needs to be more of us researching policy to see how mixed race populations are affected by certain policies.
There needs to be more of us making sure the cultural competency in our backgrounds and other people’s backgrounds is done much better than it has been.
Top Ten Children’s Books with Mixed Race Families
As a mom in a mixed race family, I am always looking for children’s books that feature interracial families. Back when I was a kid, I do not recall hunting through the books shelves in search for books with white families (I feel like they were pretty common…please note my sarcasm). I do remember waking up each morning and sitting in a chair by my mirror (kind of like Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live). Then I would say to myself, “I am white. My mom is white. My dad is white. And dog gone it, people like me.”
Wait. What? Does that sound creepy and weird and not at all true? Ummm, yeah. That’s because this kind of morning ritual would be freaking ridiculous.
Nevertheless, time and time again I find children’s books geared toward kids of mixed race, which sound exactly this cheesy and contrived. “You are Black and White, and you are just right.” “You are Asian and Black, and you are on track.” “You are White and Hispanic, and you don’t need to panic.” Come on, writers. Can’t we offer the multiracial children of the world something a little more substantial?
Please understand that I know that there is a place in children’s literature for these types of books. When people are in a minority group whether through race, religion, disability, family style, or whatever, it makes sense that it would be nice to read an affirming and empowering book which proclaims the message that it is okay to be different and you are wonderful just the way you are.
On the other hand, if children’s literature truly represented ALL types of children from ALL kinds of families in a natural and organic way, kids would not need to be told that their family situations are okay. They would just know that they are okay because they would see reflections of themselves on TV, in movies, and in the books that they read.
So I would like to give a shout out to all of you authors, illustrators, and publishers out there who boldly created a book where a child of mixed race attends a birthday party, builds a tree house, ponders his or her future career, or plays the piano. You are showing the world that biracial children in mixed race families do normal things (rather than sit around and talk about how cool and multiracial they are.)
In honor of this topic, I would like to highlight my family’s top ten favorite children’s books that organically feature a biracial child or interracial family:
The Hello, Goodbye Window features mixed race parents (black mom/white dad) and mixed race grandparents (black grandma/white grandpa). In this book, the little girl tells a wonderful tale about visiting her grandparents via her experiences surrounding a special kitchen window. I love this book because the racial makeup of the family has zero impact on the storyline. The illustrator could have drawn a white family, an Asian family, or a Latino family; however, the illustrator just happened to draw an interracial family. Fabulous.
15 Things Not to do with a Baby has a self-explanatory title. For example, don’t give your new baby to an octopus for a cuddle, plant him in a garden, or send him up in a hot air balloon. This storyline again could be illustrated with any type of family, but it’s fantastic to see that the father is black and the mother is white with a biracial big sis and a new baby brother.
In Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match, Marisol is a bilingual Scottish-Peruvian American girl that doesn’t match, nor does she want to. She has brown skin and fire-red hair, wears plaid and polka dots, eats peanut butter and jelly burritos, and plays princess and pirates. She begins to feel defeated after a bit of teasing for her mismatched ways. However, an empowering note from her teacher reaffirms her unconventional identity, and the story ends with her finding a new and equally mismatched friend.
Marisol is back in Marisol McDonald and the Clash Bash, and she is planning a mismatched birthday party to celebrate her eighth birthday. But it is not unicorns and soccer balls that she desires. More than anything, Marisol wants her Abuelita from Peru to be able to visit. She has been sending her allowance to Abuelita to help pay for the plane ticket, but visas and paperwork also stand in the way. Nevertheless, Marisol’s parents devise a creative solution, which makes her birthday the greatest Clash Bash in history.
***By the way, a new Marisol book entitled Marisol McDonald and the Monster was just released on May 15th. My family can’t wait to check it out! Another important note about the Marisol books: they are written in English and Spanish!***
A Wild Cowboy features an Asian-American mom and an African-American dad with two young sons. The family packs up for a journey to grandma’s house, all while pretending to be cowboys. Like other interracial books that I love, the family’s ethnic make-up is irrelevant to the storyline. It’s just a great story for a western-loving boy or girl.
In The Favorite Daughter, a young girl who is Japanese and white, struggles to embrace her heritage. Her father lovingly guides her through her brief identity crisis and rekindles a spark of appreciation for her Japanese roots. This book touches on sensitive topics such as divorce and teasing by peers (people frequently mispronounce her name Yuriko, and she is teased for having “Japanese eyes” but blonde hair). This book is a beloved (and long) story, which my children love to select at bedtime just so that they can significantly delay the inevitable.
In My Two Grannies a young girl stays with her two grandmothers (one black from Trinidad and one white from Great Britain) while her parents (black mom/white dad) go away on holiday. Although at the beginning of their stay the two grannies disagree on how to care for their beloved granddaughter, the book demonstrates how to celebrate two different cultures coming together.
Dumpling Soup is set in Hawaii, where an Asian-American girl recounts her efforts to help make dumplings for her family’s New Year’s Eve celebration. The young girl describes her family as chop suey, which means “all mixed up” because her extended family is comprised of people of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Native Hawaiian, and haole (Hawaiian for white people) descent. Her grandma claims that their special mixture gives “more spice” to the family.
In The Very Inappropriate Word, young Michael adores vocabulary words and even “collects” them like special treasures. This story portrays the funny events that unravel as Michael overhears his first “inappropriate” word on the school bus. I was thoroughly amused with this book and loved the fact that the illustrator just happened to make Michael a mixed kid with a white mom and black dad.
My final selection is All the Colors We Are. In a very understandable and child-friendly manner, this book explains what makes up skin color and how people obtain their skin color (e.g. parents, ancestry, the sun, one race, two races, multiple races). This book features photographs of children in every shade and hue, as well as a great variety of families. Furthermore, the text specifically states that families with parents of two different skin colors will have children whose skin is light, dark, or anywhere in-between. This book is a recent find of mine, and I can’t wait to share it with my children’s schools!
Well, I hope that you have the opportunity to enjoy some of these fantastic stories. Whether you are part of an interracial family or you simply desire to diversify your at-home reading library, any one of these titles would be an excellent choice. For more diverse titles that my family adores click HERE.
by Amy Hayibor, Festival Blogger, Mother in the Mix
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