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 […]

JC
Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News ponders the rising rates of black female-white male relationships. He attributes the growth of these couples to the vast shortage of black men available to black women. He blames high rates of incarceration and fear of medical care. Thanks to Kim D. for the heads up on […]

JC
Newswise reports on a study to come out of the University of Maryland about marriages where one partner is black and one partner is white. While many of the interviewees mention that race is not central to the issues they face as a couple, the study shows that it remains an important dimension of the […]

CVK
Personally I’m sick to death of the whole Strom Thurmond / Essie Mae Washington-Williams thing, but it is my duty to report that yet another book is coming out soon on the topic later this month. Dateline Alabama reviews Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond by Jack Bass and Marilyn W. […]

CVK
Sex, Murder And A Double Latte sounds like it would be a fun summer read. The protagonist, like the author herself, is black and Jewish. Here’s the book description:
When a mystery writer cries bloody murder, everyone blames her overactive imagination . . .
Thriller scribe Sophie Katz is as hard-boiled as a woman who drinks […]

JC
On the 50th Anniversary of the death of Emmett Till, federal authorities have taken interest in further exploring the case and plan to exhume Till’s body. In 1955, this black youth who was visiting relatives was dragged from his bed and brutally murdered after he was witnessed whistling at a white woman earlier in […]

CVK
NPR’s All Things Considered did a story on Mavin’s Generation Mix tour. You can listen to the feed online here: A Generation of Mixed Race Youth Speaks Out. The story is pretty basic, but at least it doesn’t further reinforce any of the awful stereotypes out there about mixed folks. Sometimes, that alone is […]

CVK
The San Fransisco Chronicle covers a study of Asian Americans in primetime TV that demonstrates (surprise, surprise) that they’re way under-represented:
Asians, who make up 5 percent of the U.S. population, play 2.7 percent of regular characters. It also shows virtually no Asian actors are on situation comedies, and the characters they play in dramas tend […]

CVK
California paper Red Bluff Daily News covers Ward “Moneybags” Connerly’s recent speech at a Republican fundraiser. Interesting that the paper refers to affirmative action as “racial preferencing.” Anyway, here’s Ward’s usual load of bull:
“It shouldn’t be controversial for me to say that giving a person 250 bonus points simply because of his or her race […]

CVK
Paris Hilton’s character in the recent film “House of Wax” dates a black man and believes she is pregnant by him. When reporters asked her what she thought of the fact that the black man/white girl pairing would have been controversial just 20 years ago, this is what she had to say:
“I never would look […]

CVK
Sad that this kind of thing is still so commonplace. An interracial couple in Charlotte, NC found a cross burning in their backyard recently. Police are trying to determine if it’s a hate crime. By the sounds of it, this isn’t the first act of intimidation the couple has faced:
Kim and Robert Mackey say […]

CVK

Last week’s New York magazine had an interesting article about how gentrification is affecting one single block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood long known as one of the most dangerous slums in Brooklyn, but now being prized for its supply of well-maintained brownstones and proximity to Manhattan.
The article points out that many of the neighborhood’s new […]

JC

The NY Times featured an article in their Sunday Styles section about Mavin’s Generation Mix tour and some of the other activism that is coming out of the mixed community. We were especially excited to have Mixed Media Watch mentioned! This is definitely one of the better articles we have seen written about the mixed […]

JC
Nicholas Jones of the US Census Bureau has just released a report on the multiracial respondents of the 2000 Census, We the People of More Than One Race in the United States.
This report provides a portrait of the Two or More Races population in the United States and discusses the twelve largest race combinations within […]

CVK
The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews former NBA star Charles Barkley, who is promoting his new book, Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man? in which he interviews 13 influential Americans - from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to Tiger Woods and George Lopez - who speak frankly about race and racism:
Barkley’s complexity enhances his controversial nature. […]

JC
The Tennessean talks to Nate Creekmore, a senior at Lipscomb University. Creekmore has won several awards for Maintaining, the comic strip he writes for the campus paper. His own experiences being mixed have definitely fueled the comic, which features a biracial character named Marcus. It’s possible that when he graduates, Maintaining will make it into […]

CVK

Woah. Last night’s episode of America’s Next Top Model was… interesting. They did a photo shoot where each model was transformed into an ethnicity different from their own, and were supposed to emote that ethnicity from within, or something. In one priceless moment, Tyra berated a model for not emoting “Eskimo” enough, saying: “Think about […]

JC
Now…I’m not one to gossip ;), but…looks like Life & Style is getting canned and people are pointing the finger at Kimora. Her diva ways seem to have turned off more than a couple of people. The assumption about why she has failed to bring in the “urban” watchers is interesting. Perhaps the statement is […]