Renowned Diversity Expert Brings Newest Novel to Book Passage

Joan Steinau Lester has worked on the cutting edge of defining and understanding diversity in our culture for decades.

Her brand new book, Mama's Child, deals with the intricacies of a relationship between a white mother and her biracial daughter against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement.

Joan will be doing a reading from Mama's Child at the Book Passage in Corte Madera on June 15th at 7:00 p.m. 

Get a sneak peak of this wonderful author with a pre-event interview! 

What is the situation for children from mixed families as they grow up and constantly get the “What are you?” question? What are some possible responses and interventions?

It’s both complicated and wonderful to grow up with the several perspectives that being biracial or multiracial offer. The complicated part is the bewildered looks you encounter, as people try to figure out your ethnicity—as if that will show them how to peg you.

If someone asks, "What are you?" some teens (including my own) have answered, "I'm human. What are you?" If people persist—they often do—following up with "Where are you from?" as if they expect an exotic locale, you have the right to throw a frosty stare, answer "San Francisco" if that's your home, or answer with a query of your own: "Why do you ask?" Or, you may decide that simple curiosity is not a crime and you respond, gently, "Why do you ask?" That could lead to an interesting conversational engagement.

Every member in a mixed family gets this kind of intrusive question, from "Where did you get this child?" ("From my body," you could answer, if the child is biologically yours) to "How did your child get so...fill in the blank: tan/light/dark?" The main issue is to how you maintain your sense of integrity and self-worth under the barrage of questions. That is really "an inside job." Once we are cool with ourselves, creative answers will flow.

As parents, the most significant support we can provide is to show our kids how much we love them. Our families are as normal as anybody else's, and the more relaxed we can be under the questioning, the more we will transmit that easy comfort to our children.

There are huge advantages to being biracial. You're not "half this, half that." Instead you're double or triple, with the potential to merge multiple backgrounds into one integrated you. You are Mexican enough, or Native American enough, and you don't have to prove it. Relish in your ability to cross boundaries where most people halt. One of the hallmarks of multiracial people is how fluidly they move in different environments. President Obama is a shining example.

On top of your personal experiences in a biracial family, you have a doctoral degree in multicultural education and lecture across the country about racial equality. How do you see “race”? What is it, where did this concept come from, and how has it been used over the past 300 years? Why is it still so charged?

“Race” originated as a conceptual means of keeping people separate and therefore more easily exploitable. During the 17th and 18th centuries when Europeans were colonizing much of the world, while simultaneously classifying plant life and animals, they began to "scientifically" classify people based on superficial aspects like skin color or hair texture. The classification was useful as a justification for slavery, or later, Jim Crow, since some people could be considered "less human" than, conveniently, others—i.e. those who were white Europeans.

One of the most fascinating aspects of "race" history is seeing how often definitions shift, according to the political context of the moment. In Boston in the 1970s, Asian Americans were first classified as white, then as "other," then back to white, in the span of ten years—all because school districts needed the numbers to add up differently in different years for purposes of "racial balance" and busing.

Bliss Broyard's book One Drop recounts an astonishing history of Louisiana, where mixed race people have been classified in numerous ways over the last hundred years. Even Langston Hughes's family, over one ten-year period, was variously counted as "White," "Colored," and "Negro," in different Kansas counties during the 19th century.

The emotional charge remains because of the extraordinary history of violence, with the concomitant legacy of the racial ideology, purporting that "races" really are objectively different. And the discrimination which has flowed from that ideology persists to this day, with darker skinned people often having lower status (e.g. in jobs, education, or marriage prospects) than lighter skinned folks.

Your biography of civil rights icon Eleanor Holmes Norton – Fire in My Soul – helped shape certain scenes in Mama’s Child?

The research I did for Fire In My Soul was fresh in my mind as I began this project immediately after finishing her biography. My characters Lizzie and Solomon’s time in the Mississippi Delta in 1963, for instance, drew heavily on Norton’s volunteer work there that summer. She really did arrive in Greenwood, Mississippi the day after Medgar Evers was shot—as happened to Lizzie O'Leary in Mama's Child.

What’s the book you most want to read again for the first time?

James McBride's The Color of Water, because it is suffused with love, as well as the fascinating story of an unusual family. The book has two voices—white mother, biracial son—which inspired Mama's Child, also written in two voices: white mother and biracial daughter.

Why are you so riveted to race?

Because it is such a freighted topic in the United States, much like class in England. It's very hard for any of us to drop the racial lens when we interact with each other—yet the characters in my novels keep on trying. And so, in real life, do I.