CVK
This is not so much a Ward Watch item as an opinion piece about Ward. Alternet just ran a good column on how conservatives are increasingly tapping into young people, women, and people of color to get their messages across. Of course, Ward is the one they dote on the most:
…leveraging one’s demographic birthright to […]

CVK
Here’s my bitchy post of the day. Page Six reports that Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley has taken Mariah Carey under his ample wing. Uh… ALT has a LOT of work to do if he wants to transform Mariah into Vogue material (see pic at left for evidence of that).
MARIAH Carey, who is regularly mocked […]

CVK
This month’s issue of Elle magazine had a short blurb about the upcoming film “The Beautiful Country.” Sounds like a good movie. The only downside? The ubiquitous but insufferable Bai “Would-Attend-The-Opening-Of-An-Envelope” Ling is in it:
In this gripping drama by Hans Petter Moland (who made 2000’s terrific Aberdeen), Binh (Damien Nguyen), the biracal outcast of a […]

CVK
Okay, so this isn’t exactly mixed-related, but it was too funny not to post. From Angry Asian Man:
I watch a lot of TV shows, but I don’t really watch a lot of television. Does the make sense? Meaning, I don’t really watch a lot of commercials. So I’ve been hearing about some Starbucks commercial for […]

JC
Check out this radio program — Radio Hong Kong interviews white women and Asian men about their interracial relationships in a piece entitled “Mixed Blessings“. Thanks to Phil for the heads up on this one!
A few interesting things. I think it’s strange that many of the women are identified by two things: their country […]

CVK
Ugh. There’s an article in The Arizona Republic about the growing population of mixed youth. The second part of the article isn’t so bad, but the first part is absolutely awful. It cites that totally bogus UNC Chapel Hill study that made the news a couple years ago. Thankfully, Donna Jackson Nakazawa, author of “Does […]

CVK
This month’s issue of Maisonneuve has an opinion piece defending the 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?” (Maisonneuve describes itself, rather stomach-churningly, as “a New Yorker for a younger generation, or as Harper’s meets Vice, or as Vanity Fair without the vanity.”)
As Stanley Kramer’s film has aged, critics have piled on the epithets, from […]

KT (a new MMW contributor!)
Not sure if anyone watched ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy last night, but it included an Asian man/Caucasian woman couple. The woman was pregnant at a relatively old age (late 40’s I think), but also had cancer. She had to choose between saving herself but losing the child due to harsh medical treatments […]

CVK
More mixed-related summer reading for you all! The LA Times reviews Michael Connelly’s “The Closers,” a novel about the investigation of the murder of a young biracial girl:
In Los Angeles in 1988, a 16-year-old girl, Rebecca Verloren, disappears from her bedroom in her parents’ home, and her body is found on a nearby hillside two […]

CVK
The Associated Press interviews Amerie about her new album, Touch. The interview touches (haha) briefly on her mixed heritage:
AP: As a child did you feel that you weren’t accepted by some of your peers because of your mixed ethnicity?
Amerie: We grew up in a military environment and we were around black kids, white kids, […]

CVK & JC
If you haven’t already, please join our mailing list so that you can begin receiving our monthly email newsletter. Around the 15th of each month, Mixed Media Watch will fill you in on the previous month’s opinion pieces, action items, and top 10 news stories that made it onto our radar. This is […]

CVK
Um, I guess the purpose of this post is just to point out that there’s an interracial couple on the UPN show Veronica Mars. Okay, okay, this show is totally a guilty pleasure of mine, and the season finale was awesome!
Veronica’s dad (bottom right) has begun dating her best friend (bottom left) […]

CVK
I’ve been catching up with TV this weekend, and finally got around to watching Wednesday’s episode of America’s Next Top Model. It was sad to see that Naima was put in a situation so many of us mixed folks are familiar with–having one’s ethnic authenticity or legitimacy questioned and belittled.
For those of you who don’t […]

CVK
The May issue of Vogue has a long feature on Kara Walker, an artist both praised and reviled for her jarring images of silhouetted human figures, exploring the ongoing impact of slavery on representations of race, gender, identity. Here are some excerpts from the article:
Kara Walker’s art is a long way from safe. For the […]

CVK
James Spooner’s film Afropunk has won critical acclaim for its exploration of how race and identity impact black fans of punk rock:
More than your everyday, Behind the Music or typical black history month documentary this film tackles the hard questions, such as issues of loneliness, exile, inter-racial dating and black power. We follow the […]

CVK
SOHH.com interviews Kim Osorio, the former editor-in-chief of The Source who recently–along with Vice President of Marketing Michelle Joyce–filed a sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuit against the magazine. Osorio, who is of mixed heritage (Latino, African-American, Asian) and Joyce described…
The Source offices as every female employee’s worst nightmare. They allege that not only were […]

CVK
I haven’t seen “Crash” yet, but have heard good things about it. But blog Orient Extreme points out that while the film is great at skewering stereotypes of blacks, Latinos and whites, it is far less enlightened in its treatment of Asian-Americans:
The film “Crash” opened yesterday to raving reviews for its unflinching examination of racial […]

RN
Canadian director Dawn Wilkinson had a very reliable source for her first feature Devotion: herself. The film tells the story of 11-year old Alice, a bi-racial girl who loses her mother due to her dad’s drunk driving and has to struggle not just with the loss of a parent, but also her dad’s alcoholism, and […]

JC
The Los Angeles Times reviews “Tea“, the new production by Velina Hasu Houston about war brides and their lives and families. The show is currently running at the International City Theater in Long Beach, CA. This reviewer doesn’t have many nice things to say and seems to think that it is all done in a […]

CVK
The New York Daily News reports that Heidi Klum and Seal are tying the knot today:
Heidi Klum and Seal are due to wed today in Mexico, we hear.
Word is the five-months-pregnant supermodel, who’ll wear Vera Wang, will exchange vows with the R&B crooner in a beach ceremony witnessed by about 40 of their closest friends […]