In the past three decades, hip hop has undergone an evolution unequalled in any other genre of music, going from an underground music, dance, and art form to something regularly experienced in commercials, TV and movies. Although followed by fans and consumers of all races, it has not always been open to everyone. At first glance, you might think that the future looks bright for mixed Asians in hip hop. They have had a presence almost from the very beginning. Chris Won Wong, a.k.a. Fresh Kid Ice, a Trinidadian of Chinese descent, was and still is a member of 2 Live Crew, one of rap’s breakthrough groups. And just look at this lineup of current stars to see how strong the mixed Asian presence is in hip hop: Chilli of TLC is Arabic, East Indian and Black. Singer Kelis is Puerto Rican, Chinese and Black. Olivia is Jamaican, Indian and Dominican. Female MC Foxy Brown is Trinidadian and Asian. Black Eyed Peas member APL is Filipino and Black. R&B newcomer Amerie is Korean and Black. Singer Debelah Morgan is Indian and Black. Dena Cali, a female rapper who also starred in Master P’s comedy “Foolish,” is Black, Chinese and Swedish. Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park is Japanese and Caucasian. Female breakdancer Asia One, who is Chinese and Caucasian, is a former Rock Steady Crew member and organizes the annual B-boy Summit.
Mixed Asian non-musicians have indirectly contributed to hip hop culture as well. Actors like Russell Wong have appeared in films like “New Jack City” and “Romeo Must Die,” Rae Dawn Chong starred in “Beat Street,” and Sonja Sohn stole the spotlight in “Slam.” Naomi Campbell appeared in Michael Jackson’s “Keep It in the Closet” video and the TV show “NY Undercover.” Tyson Beckford appeared in Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” video while Jeni Fujita sang on Wyclef Jean’s “Guantanamera.” Bruce Lee, who is a quarter German, is referred to, quoted, or sampled in hundreds of songs. So the groundwork is all laid out. It should be a piece of cake from here on, shouldn’t it? Unfortunately, no. There is still a long ways to go.
While the many people involved in hip hop can refer to “shaolin” or “tiger style” or throw around words like “arigato” or “sensei,” few would even know if Bruce Lee was Japanese or Chinese. Only a handful of the stars listed above actually refer to their Asian background in any real sense. The mixed population is largely invisible to the public eye and that is because many of the stars choose to identify themselves with only one race. Japanese-Mexican Naomi Sugimoto, a writer at underground e-zine “Evil Monito,” doesn’t think the world of hip hop encourages the idea of a multiracial identity, particularly if the star is part African or African-American.
“I do not think that they understand, and I wonder if it is possible for them to ever understand. One of the Black students in my class demonstrated this to me by stating that Tiger Woods needed to make up his mind, and that he wasn’t really Black. I then asked him to tell me what I was: Asian or Latina. He realized (I think) that he was in no place to categorize me. This is something that I believe mixed people share with each other: the knowledge of their experiences, and it is a very special, unique thing.”
“I think mixed people are slowly gaining representation all over,” continued Sugimoto. “I see mixed people on the news, in music videos, in movies. I’m sure it will happen in hip hop inevitably. It’s all happening…just very slowly. Things are always slow to change in this country. I think people have a tendency to reach out because of the exotic mixes that attract them.”
Although the hip hop landscape has become increasingly diverse in recent years, Asian stereotypes still dominate. Many artists claim to be into Asian culture and philosophy, but the reality is that their understanding is superficial, limited to references to martial arts, Hong Kong movies, anime, geisha, dragon ladies, and kanji tattoos (try finding someone who can actually read what they say).
That said, there are signs of hope. Although still primarily an African-American and Hispanic cultural phenomenon, hip hop has undergone a racial evolution as well. With the continued dominance of Eminem, many, if not all, racial walls are tumbling down. The global popularity of hip hop culture will also promote continued diversity. Throughout Europe and Asia, citizens of all races and creeds have taken facets of hip hop eagerly and made it their own. In Japan, rarely a day goes by where I don’t see a group breakdancers in the train station, and DJs like Honda and Krush have achieved worldwide fame. Asian rap groups like Japan’s Kick the Can Crew and Dragon Ash, and Korea’s Jinusean and Drunken Tiger are proliferating.
A new generation of academics is pushing the boundaries of ethnic studies, compelling people to look beyond the traditional minority groups, to the experiences of mixed race individuals in America.By Erica Schlaikjer.
April 2003
Just five years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find a college course that addressed mixed race issues. But ever since 7 million people self-identified as multiracial in the 2000 census by choosing two or more races, the interest in mixed race studies has exploded. At least sixteen universities across the country—from New Haven, CT to Santa Barbara, CA—offer classes that explore the social implications of being mixed in America. A mixed race movement is clearly taking form: politically, socially, and now, educationally.
“We start at the personal level, and then move to the social and historical issues of race,” says Professor Robert Allen, who teaches a class called People of Mixed Racial Descent at the University of California, Berkeley. The students’ first assignment is to write a 2-3 page autobiographical essay describing how they became aware of their racial and ethnic identity, what they learned, and how it has defined them.
The class, one of the first of its kind, was established in 1981 by Native American professor Terry Wilson. It began as a response to the growth of the mixed race population, especially in California’s Bay Area, as well as student interest on campus. Historically, the West has always been very multiracial because of high immigration levels and an early end to laws against interracial marriage. Forty percent of the 6.8 million U.S. residents who checked off more than one box for race live in the West, so it’s no wonder many mixed race studies courses originate in states like California.
Allen’s class has over a hundred students. About half are multiracial (of “all imaginable, possible combinations,”) others are involved in interracial relationships, and some are neither.
Allen uses a variety of literature, texts, readings, films, and speakers to teach the subject matter. An anthology edited by Teresa Williams-Leon and Berkeley Graduate student Cynthia Nakashima “The Sum of Our Parts” and Dr. Maria Root’s “The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders As the New Frontier” serve almost as “textbooks” in the class, although, many fictitious novels telling stories of mixed people around the world are also included in the course’s critical analysis of race.
Another approach to mixed race studies is finding where one fits in the bigger picture. Prof. Steven Ropp teaches Biracial and Multiracial Identity in the U.S. at California State University, Northridge. He stresses the importance of “being a part of all the communities we belong to, by having a presence, communicating, staying active.”
The class he currently teaches began about six years ago under the tutelage of Teresa Williams-Leon, professor and co-editor of “The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans.” This year is the first year Ropp has taught the class. His vision is to create a general multiracial studies class, in hopes that it will draw more students than a class catered to a specific ethnic group.
‘I won’t victimise myself…it’s just part of growing up.’
US singer Amerie recently spoke to Sixshot.com about her mixed racial background. Amerie was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts to an African-American father and a Korean mother. Her father was in the United States military and this enabled Amerie to travel to and live in many different places, including Alaska, Texas, Germany, and South Korea. In fact Amerie’s first language is Korean, however, after the family left Korea, Amerie’s mother made a conscious effort to limit the use of Korean with her daughters out of fear that it would impede their development of English proficiency. Asked if her Korean background and the music of Korea like K-pop influenced her sound, Amerie said: ‘I think my Korean heritage shaped more of my personality and more of who I am growing up, which in turn affects my music. ‘I think it did shape it but I also grew up listening to classical music, soul music, pop music, and heavy metal.’
She described her liking for heavy metal music as a phase she went through in the fifth and sixth grade and went on to say: ‘I like to listen to a lot of things. What I can say about Korean music is that it is very rhythmic. It’s very drum heavy like African music—there are similarities.’
Britain has one of the fastest-growing mixed-race populations – but many people are still hostile towards interracial couples. We asked some of them how their lives have been affected. During the 1991 Gulf war, Richard Littlejohn wrote in the Sun that British women married to Iraqis ’should be left to rot in their adopted country, with their hideous husbands and their unattractive children’. Even making allowances for jingoism, this was vicious stuff – and typical of attitudes to interracial relationships for centuries. Today, the UK has one of the fastest-growing mixed-race populations in the world. According to a Policy Studies Institute report in 1997, half of all black men born here who are currently in a relationship have a white partner, and a third of black women (and one fifth of Asian men and 10 per cent of Asian women). One in 20 pre-school children in the country is thought to be mixed-race.
From Diana, Princess of Wales to Trevor McDonald, Michael Caine to Zeinab Badawi, countless celebrities have, or have had, lovers from different racial backgrounds. People of mixed race, from Zadie Smith to Halle Berry, Hanif Kureishi to Paul Boateng, are increasingly in the public eye; and in parts of our big cities, interracial relationships are so common that even to notice them is bad manners. When we set out to find couples for this article, some people thought that even taking an interest in the subject was racist.
Which it might be, if the relationships were untouched by other people’s assumptions. You don’t have to look far on the internet before you come across sites with quite vicious connotations: ‘A note to Asian (and white) men: who’s sleeping with your women?’ Then there are the offers of Thai brides and hot black chicks for people who like their flesh a particular, and preferably exotic, colour. (Since the eighteenth century, black people have been an icon for rampant, probably deviant sexuality).
Randall Kennedy, a professor of law at Yale University and author of a new book, Interracial Intimacies, (Pantheon) notes that African Americans take one of three views of such relationships: they see them as a positive good, decreasing segregation; they are agnostic, considering relationships a private matter – thus fending off the common assumption that successful black people want nothing more than a white partner; or they repudiate mixed relationships on politicised black-is-beautiful grounds.
The situation in Britain is less fervid than in the US, partly because of our different histories of slavery, partly because of the greater degree of residential integration here. Even so, the past couple of decades have seen a militant pro-black position that has led to mixed-race children being labelled black willy-nilly, especially for the purposes of adoption. Jill Olumide, interviewed below, has met white single mothers who have been told that they may not be suitable to raise their own children since they are unable to socialise them into ‘their’ ‘black culture’. As Paul Gilroy, the British-born Harvard academic has said, racism and this kind of anti-racism share precisely the same essentialist assumptions about totality, identity and exclusion.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown makes a powerful case in a recent book, Mixed Feelings, for awareness and acknowledgement of a new kind of Briton. People of mixed race are now 11 per cent of the ethnic-minority population, which implicates a lot of people if you include their parents and grandparents. Alibhai-Brown is wryly aware of the ‘unreal and unhelpful’ tendency of people like herself, in interracial marriages, to become ‘warriors for a cause’. It is possible, she reflects, that Britain is ‘good at’ certain types of diversity, such as food and sex; that doesn’t mean we’ve stamped out racism.
Even so, the final impression left by her analysis is pretty positive. Identity undoubtedly derives from being part of social groupings. But we also find and reinforce ourselves through our individual interactions. Interracial relationships have shown, time and time again, that no amount of social construct can kill human attractions.
I think mixed-race people should be much more visible: mixed-race children have an enormous amount to offer. I do feel like I have a cause about it: I’m a militant multiculty. Forward the mulatto millennium!
Where Harlesden had been black, Oxford was white. I went from being the only white kid on the team to the only black kid on the team.
Are you black, brother? Growing up, I just was. My mum was white and my dad was brown. My mum’s relatives lived here, and the old ones had German accents. My dad’s relatives lived in Israel and mostly couldn’t speak English. When we went there, they said things in a funny language and pinched our cheeks. They smelled of garlic. And they came, originally, from exotic-sounding places like Bukhara and Isfahan (in today’s Uzbekistan and Iran respectively).
This was no big deal. My friends’ families came from Jamaica and Guyana and India and Ireland and England and Wales and Spain and South Africa. I was vaguely aware that I was Jewish; but everyone was something. None of it seemed very serious. Things started to change when I went to secondary school. My state primary had been mixed, multicultural, and multi-ability. My new school was private, posh, and predominantly Jewish. But these Jews weren’t like my family. They were all white, and a lot of them were blond with blue eyes. Not only that, but they liked football, talked like cockneys, and lived in the suburbs. They went to synagogue – ’shul’ – and hung around only with other Jews. Some of them called black people ’schwarzes’ and brown people ‘pakis’ and they didn’t know what to make of me, this olive-skinned Jew who didn’t practise. One of them told me that because of my irreligiosity the Messiah would not be coming.
At about 14, I started playing basketball seriously. The Harlesden Cougars basketball club was 99% black. The other 1% was me. I wasn’t black, and couldn’t understand the patois into which the other guys sometimes lapsed. I was basically the white kid, or the whitest they had. And then came university. Where Harlesden had been black, Oxford was white. I went from being the only white kid on the team to the only black kid on the team. The blackest they had, anyway. They even told me that I had natural athleticism but lacked control and shouldn’t shoot the ball.
Away from the basketball court I had a few amusing incidents. One night, a very drunk, very blonde girl staggered into my room. ‘I’ve never really met a coloured person before,’ she confided in me. When I told her that we didn’t say coloured, we said black, and in any case I was not black but Jewish, her reply was: ‘I’ve never met one of those either’. All this time, I scrawled sarcastic comments across any ethnic monitoring forms that came my way. Well, it’s not nice when they don’t have a box for you.
That became considerably harder after university, when I got a job running diversity policy for a big company. I learned about institutional racism and about monitoring and about glass ceilings and about how, at every imaginable stage in recruitment, promotion and termination, across all employment sectors, people with darker skin get treated worse than people with lighter skin with the same aptitudes and qualifications. And I understood that without hard data, you couldn’t prove this was happening, and do anything about it. And that I ought to fill the form in. So I started to tick the box ‘mixed race’.
As part of the job, I started to try and get more people from different ethnic backgrounds to apply to the company. I went out and started talking to groups of black people or Muslims or whatever. And they all thought I was one of them. The black people thought I was black – light-skinned, certainly, but black. Muslims assumed I was Muslim. Indians had me down as an Indian. Arabs thought I was an Arab. Greeks – well, check the surname: Mokades.
The various Coloured communities in southern Africa developed out by events of the Dutch colonization of South Africa. In 1652 a small company of employees of the Dutch East India Company were settled on the southern tip of Africa in order to establish a refreshment station for the Company’s ships en route to the Far East. As groups of settlers moved away from the Cape settlement to develop farms, they needed workers. The Dutch government forbade enslaving indigenous people of southern Africa. They did allow the importation of slaves or indentured servants from the Malay peoples of Indonesia and Malaysia, in the Dutch East Indies. The first Malay slaves arrived in 1657, the first of what became the Cape Malay.
There were some mixed offspring of Malay and Dutch, who were called Coloured. The settlers or soldiers also had mixed offspring with the indigenous people, the Khoikhoi, the San and later the Xhosa. An additional contribution to the gene pool were the slaves imported from West Africa. The various other Coloured peoples also intermarried with the Khoikhoi, the indigenous people of the cape, until they have largely been absorbed into the Coloureds. The term Coloured came to be applied to all mixed people. One group of Coloureds escaped to the bush and lived as an African tribe, but became fearsome warriors on horses. These were the Griqua, who are still an Afrikaans-speaking tribe today. (One group of less than 200 Griqua also speak a Khoikhoi language called Xiri.) After the introduction of Indians into South Africa, they contributed to the mix of Coloureds.
The form of Dutch spoken in the Cape gradually changed significantly from that spoken in Holland. The Cape dialect came to be called Afrikaans (”the African language”). In the church, the law courts, educational institutions and official government circles, the official language was Dutch. But the common language of the people was increasingly Afrikaans. The Coloureds share the same language and religion as the “white” Afrikaners, although separated from them by strong social and class distinctions. Today over half of the 7 million Afrikaans-speaking people in South Africa are “Coloured” people.
Identity: The “Coloured” peoples represent a wide range of genetic backgrounds. They commonly have lighter brown or yellow skin with somewhat Negroid features. But skin color and features vary considerably, showing the broad gene pool re presented. The Coloureds are usually involved in business, some in farming, but commonly work in domestic jobs in homes or hotels. The tribal or racial identity of Coloureds has been basically imposed upon them by the social attitude of Europeans, both British and Afrikaner, who have considered them inferior. Their rights were legally limited under apartheid, 1948-1990. The Cape Malay group of Coloureds number only about 200,000. Coloureds as a whole make up 9% of the population of South Africa.
What a beautiful day it is, I am because of today. Today is the celebration of the birth of my mother, Roslyn Rayners. Old Lady you may not be here anymore, but not a day goes by that you are not remembered. You live through me, Sherwyn, Chene and your first grandchild Keziah. It feels like only yesterday when you finally embarked on the journey to go live with the Big Man (your Father) upstairs as we sang ‘It is well with my soul‘. Because of you, in celebration of your life. Happy Birthday, Old Lady.
C.R.R. LIV (holding tears)
In the beginning …
the universe hued,
everything in creation
rises within you -
as everything in you
rest in creation.
.
A cry, that was a dawn
upon a coming of age.
A plea of us, tears of us.
And that is how our time began.
.
From the very first moment
our tears and fingers met
with an intimate peck
you were always there
and upon that first smile
we shared… you held a tear.
.
And with that first gentle touch,
shared with smiling eyes
forging a forever
where even angel’s0
fear to tread.
.
Taking the first step together
holding my hand in yours
you held your breath in disbelief,
for since that day
you knew, I’ve grown,
holding a tear to your heart.
.
And as for the last smile,
holding your hand in mine.
Watching you smile away
I hold a tear to my heart
butterfly kisses dances, dances within,
whispering this moment away.
.
Looking deep into you,
lounging in your eternal sunrise
winnowing petals honoring eternity,
rememberances bearing your sigh
rests in my cries
and I know we’ll… I’ll be fine.
.
Till we meet again
holding tears in our heart.
With tears we’ll meet
in tears we’ll part
and that is how our hue
will forever… begin.
.
Another year has come and gone, yet we are no step closer to the ‘I have a dream’ reverence worded by Martin Luther King. It seems that our fears are holding us hostage to the beauty that ebbs and leaps inside and sadly the voices of our ancestors have been forgotten in the ebonics of victim and entitlement mentality. In the memory of our ancestors, I say unto thee, what we do today echo in eternity and if we do not learn from the wisdom and history of human suffering, peace and freedom will become a digital signpost lost in space. There are two kinds of learning, the one kind being the things we learned and know and the other being the training that thought us how to find out what we did not know. Inspired words by George S. Clason.
And my resolution for the day of tomorrow is that we realize that ‘We are the world’, today. All of a sudden the sweet words ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’ of an earthly guru, Ghandi, chimes through my being. And after the wind settles, Wayne Dyer resonates ‘Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change’. Still caught up in my day dream, Booker T Washington rise up from dead and leaves me with a morsel of thought ‘I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.’ And just like I am awoken by a silly little love song from the eighties ‘We are the world’
We are the world
There comes a time when we hear a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
and its time to lend a hand to life
There greatest gift of all
We cant go on pretending day by day
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change
We are all a part of Gods great big family
And the truth, you know,
Love is all we need
We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
Theres a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
Send them your heart so they’ll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stones to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand
We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
Theres a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
When you’re down and out, there seems no hope at all
But if you just believe theres no way we can fall
Let us realize that a change can only come
When we stand together as one
We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So lets start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
its true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me
US singer 