So now on to thoughts.

I just noticed that people are actually looking at this blog. I don't think about it too often, but now that I might be able to get a real audience. I spend so much time thinking about mixed race issues, even though I myself am not mixed race, just bicultural. I am starting to understand this experience as a bicultural one. Students who are mixed often fit in, don't have a hard time finding a social group. Just like their family it is some place where they feel welcome, where they don't stand out. They live in homes that experience the same joys and sorrows that other families do. I am not sure if black and white mixed race people grow up in disproportionately single family homes, with white mothers. My experience many of these children do live in single parent homes. But then statistics show that more and more children overall grow up in single family homes. As a society this is still seen as a bad thing. Instead of finding ways to support women and men who find themselves alone with children, society vilifies people for being that way. We make it hard to live on a single income, hard to maintain health insurance, hard to find safe and stable place to live. You have to work hard to find a good school for your students, and then when you are working to make ends meet you struggle to find time to make it to school functions for fear of loosing your job. Then we knowingly bring children in to a highly racialize culture where people don't treat brown people fairly. so what happens when they are labelled in this world by the color of their skin. This color makes them stand out since brown comes in many shades, but they all get the same label. We have labelled everyone of African American origin black. But this belies the cultural differences that exist between communities. Instead we have a notion that there is one monolithic way to be black or white. Yet, as many researchers in race studies note, whites have the ability to pick an ethnicity. You can be Irish, French, Danish, because you can trace your ancestry. You weren't ripped from the soils of your land and enslaved, if you survived the horrific voyage across the ocean. Once you reached the "New world" your family, language, culture was sublimated and ripped away, so that everyone became one "morass" of blackness (I use this term deliberately, as white slave holders didn't think of their African slaves as people but as chattel, but this is far from how I think of people in this culturally diverse nation). Yet historians have found and witten about various cultures that have developed around African American groups, people who have held on to various traditions, like for instance the Gullah or the various metis and creole cultures across the southern parts of the US. Furthermore, this blanket grouping implies that new cultural norms and expectations are not formed in communities. Yet we use terms like Minnesota nice to describe the polite but distant way that people living in Minnesota interact. Or that New Yorkers are brusk and direct. Historically Africans created communities for themselves that have withstood the test of time. Some of their cultural developments gone mainstream, for example hiphop music has changed music as we know it. Whites have adopted high fives, using the word man just to name a few examples. So how does this connect to the mixed race students and individuals. Well, one of the problems faced by researchers of this topic, is that mixed race individuals do not form one cohesive group, but then again neither do blacks or whites as per the arguments above. Mixed race people are as diverse as any other group in the US.