Ambi

MONTHLY MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2016

AMBI WON’T BE BOXED IN

EXPLORING IDENTITY WITHIN TODAY’S MULTIRACIAL ADOLESCENTS

L E TT E R F ROM T H E EDI TOR I AM no stranger to hardship. I was born in the back of a taxi cab in Brooklyn in 1953; at age 3 she lost her mother to breast cancer; she barely knew her father; and she was molested by an uncle at age 9. She had three children by the time she was 21. After fleeing an abusive husband, she gathered her kids and set out on her own. She enrolled in

New York Law School at Queens College where her oratory skills won her a job with the Philadelphia Public Defender’s office – not one interview required.

After leaving the law, Iyanla found her true calling, teaching women who were moving from welfare to the workforce. She knew she had a gift for deeply connecting with women in

,”I’ve always believed that my job was to facilitate the evolution of human consciousness.” "“I’ve always wanted people to know who they are from the inside,",”Iyanla said., "Then they can create the life they desire and deserve."

Her ability to know people from the inside catapulted Iyanla to fame and

You have a nurturing heart that is second to none. Your strength of spirit, your resilience, and your compassion amaze and inspire me.

Just as the phoenix rises from fiery ashes, you can rise again as an even stronger embodiment of fierce grace, authenticity, and love.

- Iyanla Vanzant

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BOXED IN: THE MIXED RACE LIFESTYLE Feeling a bit left out is common, but how do you handle it when others try to define you?

TOC AUGUST 2016

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YESTERDAY + TODAY A look into the term mulatto and why it’s now considered an offensive term.

SOOOO EXOTIC Tired of the same old slang gone wrong? We take a look into the origin and how others feel about the term.

16 DENYING ROOTS What is racial passing and would you do it if you could?

28 NAME GAME Can your name effect your future? There’s a history in naming that you may not know!

e l k c e fr ac e “ “ f THEY CA

HOW would you describe a typical redhead? Do you think of Julianne Moore: light skinned and beautiful, with rust-coloured hair and a flush of crimson through her porcelain cheeks?

Or do you think of Ed Sheeran?

Either way, it’s likely the redhead in your mind is white. Red hair is mainly considered the preserve of

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northern Europe, a Celtic-Germanic trait.

This is what resulted in London-based photographer Michelle Marshall’s quest to capture as many Afro Caribbean redheads as possible as part of her project, MC1R. MC1R , or Melanocortin 1 receptor if you’re feeling fancy, is the gene responsible for red hair. Mutations in it can cause various degrees of pigmen-

It’ll either work “properly”, causing your hair to get darker, or it will become dysfunctional, not activate and then fail to turn red pigment to brown, causing a build up of red pigment and thus, red hair.

“To make sense of what's around us we put people in boxes, It’s a natural reflex and is not intended in a malicious way,“,”

says Lyon-born Michelle, who finds her participants on social media, through recommendations or in passing in a packed shopping centre. “I’m hoping that with these pictures that reflex changes a bit.”

However, there’s no concrete data and a distinct lack of research on the ethnicity behind those with red hair. A quirk of nature it might seem.

And she’s right. For me, growing up tall, mixed-raced, with thick, frizzy ginger hair, in a predominantly white, working-class seaside town was not the ticket. At 13 years old I was buying skin whitening cream from Boots to pulverise the freckles and at 14, during my Slipknot phase at the turn of the millennium, was violently straightening my newly-dyed black hair. Now, though, I couldn’t care less and relish being unique.

and that she’s trying to persuade the youngster to take part in the project to boost her confidence.

One woman who has been in touch with

Francis Johnson, a 24-year-old born and

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“On my father’s side, my grandfather was also pale-skinned and referred to as a ‘white Jamaican’ with green eyes, but prominent black features.”

Coral Kwayie, a 23-year-old creative and stylist, explained that “growing up in Tunbridge Wells was good, it’s a nice area... very white.

““A lot of people have been feeling quite isolated,",” Michelle says,. “"I got a message from one boy who said, ‘I didn’t realise there were so many of us.’ I’ve not even shot 50 people.

But the fact that he was able to see a cluster of people that matched his identify and could relate to that is quite positive.“

of myself as different to other kids but... I was chronically made aware of it at times through bullying, unfortunately, as some people just didn’t understand my afro hair, my freckles and birthmarks. It also made me question a lot of times what I was ‘about’ and the true meaning behind my make-up.”

“My mother and her mother are both redheads with family deriving from Scotland, through the Celtic bloodline you could say, but looking back deep enough to the ancestry of Celtic people

Kwayie, a 23-yearold creative and stylist, explained that “growing up in Tunbridge Wells was good, it’s a nice area... very white.

“I went to school with the same people from nursery through to primary and secondary school so I didn’t realise I was different in that sense.” Coral’s sister and half-brother are also ginger, so the gene definitely runs down her Ghanaian father’s side at least.

“I never hated being ginger, to be honest,” she adds. “I have never been bullied or made

from this guy once at secondary school who shouted ‘ginger’ at me on the bus and my friend hit him with a tennis racket and that was that. I have never and would never dye it.

I like my hair colour.”

As for the photographic project, Michelle hopes to garner the interest of geneticists because she wants the “science side” to run alongside it: “I want some facts so I can make a final statement,” she said.

She hopes to have an exhibition some time in the near future,

“I want to stir the perception that most of us have of a redhead as a white Caucasian individual potentially of Celtic descent,” She told VSCO earlier this year. “While there seems to be an underlying Irish/ Scottish connection to the MCR1 gene in the occurrence of red hair, I am not sure that being ‘ginger’ still only means being Scottish, Irish, Welsh or even being white.”

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YESTERDAY TO TODAY

“Many people are taught that because blacks were enslaved, this motivated the abolitionist and other Northern whites to put an end to slavery.“.

White Slaves: “The Mulattoes�

During the time period of slavery in America the white slave owners would have sex with their black female slaves, and the result often was children being born. Many slave owners did not help their mixed blooded mulatto children; they labeled these children black and let their black mothers raise them. These white looking children were considered slaves just like their mothers.

The one drop blood rule that Southern whites followed said, that if you have one drop of black blood in you then you are black, no matter how much white blood and genetics you have in you. This is only partially true, some Northern whites and abolitionists wanted to

help free blacks from slavery, but the major reason that motivated the Northern States to end slavery was because they saw mulatto Quadroons and Octoroons in slavery. Now the abolitionists were armed with evidence that white looking people were in slavery, they used this as a motivator to help inspire many Northern whites to go to civil war against the South.

Many whites who were journalists, religious ministers, travelers, business owners, etc went to the South and, they were horrified when they saw mulatto Octoroons and Quadroons who looked white and not fully black locked in slavery right along with blacks. Journalists, writers, travelers, and business owners started reporting what they saw, and when the Northern whites heard and read about mulattoes who looked

South in general. The fear that people who could pass for white were held in slavery motivated the North to go to war with the South.

The North believe that if

person was accused of being a run away slave who escaped from the South, and went North, that white person could be taken into slavery.

“Many people are A mixed-child born to a white woman was often abandoned or sold secretly. The children would often be singled out for all sorts of abuse from forcing them to wait on their white halfsiblings to enduring physical mistreatment.�

MULATTO: mu·lat·to Now considered to be an offensive term, the word Mulatto was originally used to refer to a person who was born from one white parent and one black parent, or someone who was born from two “mulatto” parents.

It is easy to think of mixed children during #slavery as the product of white slave owners, white overseers, and African slave women.

The truth is not all mixed-raced children were the result of the African women being raped. A free woman of color could have had a child or children fathered by a white man. The biracial children in this case were considered free; it was the mother’s status that determined whether a child was free or not.

“The child’s status determination was due to the 1662 law “in the case of a child one of whose parents was free and one slave, the status of the offspring followed that of the mother,” (Foner 52), these children would often then become their father’s property.

White women did not just have a new found revelation and start loving the arms of a #black man. Many white women and black men also had affairs, more often

of slavery or freedom was the determining factor. No, mix-raced children did not have it easy, just because the color of the skin.

In actuality, these children had a difficult life, very rarely were

communities or the black communities.

Most white fathers usually denied that a slave’s light-skinned offspring was his.

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I AM ___________ ______________ I _______ I SEE _ WANT ________ TEND __________ ______________ I _______ I UNDER

____ I WONDER HEAR _______ ______________ I ________ I PRE_____ I BELIEVE I FEAR _______ RSTAND _______

I WON'T DENY MY

ROOTS

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PASSING is shorthand for racial passing which means people of one race. Anybody who’s surprised that there’s a shorthand terminology for what might seem a pretty unlikely scenario will be more surprised that the phenomenon, with its lengthy history in American culture, isn’t all that unusual.

Some of the earliest stories about passing reach back to the 19th century, when slaves like Ellen Craft, who penned a mesmerizing slave narrative used their light skin to escape, and novelists from Mark Twain to Charles Chesnutt mined the subject for their oeuvre.

But along came the ’60s. And with it,

Black Power and other ideologies that made the saga of passing — and the act of passing itself — soppy, weakkneed and thus unhip.

“As long as there’s white privilege,, as long as there’’s racism of the ““‘but would you let your daughter marry one“‘?”variety,,,passing will exist and ““so what?”” won’t be the most frequent reaction to it.“ Passing for white offered the opportunities white people received.

During slavery, it could mean freedom.

There are many documented instances of fair-skinned slaves who posed as white in order to escape.

In modern times, it meant being able to

vote in the South. It meant a job in the office rather than a job cleaning the office.

It meant schools with the latest equipment and books, instead of dilapidated buildings and out-of-date texts.

It often meant better housing. It meant being treated with respect, not disdain.

In one sense, it’s not surprising. Stories of white Americans “passing” as members of other racial and ethnic groups have often captivated the American public — though the cases that have most fascinated us have usually turned on the hypocrisy of the protagonists.

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BLOOD L Many years and an entire civil rights movement later, passing still carries a largely racially charged definition – especially for me. As an American biracial woman who passes as white, I live daily with a pronounced array of privileges that are coupled with the assumption that I am white. But my passing isn’t just limited to my racial identity. I’ve also spent several chapters

unwillingly passing as something else: straight.

A fairly conventional femininity has imbued me – at least at first glance – with heterosexual privilege, even though I’m partnered to a woman.

And I’m not alone. As LGBTQ rights continue to become more visible, complications within identity continue to overlap with the collective and individual

experience of passing.

The result is that passing has greatly expanded over the last century from its original racial roots to include many marginalised identities, underscoring intersectionality within American identity.

Take Jeremy Allen, 25, of New York City. He has been out as gay since adolescence and says that he comes across as gay.

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EXPLAIN SLANG

“It’s not OK to call someone exotic just because you can’t figure out what their ethnicity is. It’s not OK to assume that someone isn’t from the U.S. just because they aren’t white.”

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Calling All Outsiders!

Before you call anyone exotic, mentally replace the word “exotic” with “very different, strange, or unusual.”

Does whatever you were about to say sound insanely rude now? It probably does. When applied to people, exotic can be

microaggression.

These are brief and commonplace statements or actions that can be intentional or unintentional.

They communicate slights and insults, and can have a harmful or unpleasant impact on the person experiencing them.

The most important point here is that microaggressions don’t have to be intentional.

“The message that it communicates to the recipient is, ’Hey, I think you’re super hot and desirable because you don’t look like your ethnicity.’”

EXOTIC: ex·ot·ic

The term “exotic” originated when referring to plants, animals, or food being of foreign origin or character. The definietion of strickingly unsual and strange, describing physicalities, then followed.

I AM __________ ____________________ _______ I FEEL I WAS ________ ___________________ ________________ I QUESTION _

______ I THINK __ I TRY _______ L ______________ ________ I LIKE _________ I STOP I ASK _________ __________________

IDENTIT Y SPOTLIGHT

“African-American names became symbols of resistance. They resist uniformity and West European influence, and therefore the limiting cultural framework of how one should present his or herself.�

That’s Not My Name Raven- Symonés comments on “The View” did not surprise me in the least African Americans with uniquely “blacksounding” names have an added stigma to overcome.

before they hit the job market. And usually, the more unusual the name, the more susceptible to bias. A study published in 2005 found that teachers had lower

expectations for children with unusually spelled names even when compared to siblings with “less black sounding” names.

Besides the barrier to entry to employment that comes with a “black name,” employers also tend to hire “racially palatable” blacks or other minority individuals. If a person is unstereotypically nonwhite — which is to say, for example, that he or she acts white that person is more likely to be considered.

“Nontraditional names are testaments to nonconformity,, but they do not signal combativeness or

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That’s because preconceived notions about black-sounding names are not only racist but an indication of class bias. Unusually spelled names that have punctuation are associated with low socio-economic status — a factor that consciously or unconsciously biases teachers, employers and everyone in between. The assumption of low socio-economic status is specific to AfricanAmerican names (or so-called ghetto black names), as opposed to names of African origin like Nia or Jelani.

The diversification of baby names in America started in the late 1960s during a larger sociocultural shift that emphasized individuality, and that’s where names for black and white Americans began to diverge. As black Americans began to give unique names to their children (much more so than white Americans),

there was a sharp rise in the prevalence of distinctively blacksounding names — influenced at least in part by the championing of black culture by the Black

Power movement.

We must appreciate the ideology behind unique names and root out the stigmas about them.

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GHETTO: ghet·to

The term “ghetto” originated to describe a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure. The term specifically described the part of the city to which Jews were restricted.