#3: Home Mixed Home November selection

📷 portraits of mixedness + 📚learning our ancestors' language + 🌍psychologically safe families

Hola, multiculti pals!

Here is the first edition of the monthly Home Mixed Home selection. This is where I share handpicked articles, books, podcasts, movies, series, anecdotes, etc. that got me thinking about the joyous mess of multicultural family living.

This month, I’ve picked:

1. Artist Kip Fulbeck’s photo books celebrating mixedness

2. Writer Michelle Cyca on connecting with her grandmother’s language through her daughter’s books

3. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson on creating psychological safety across cultures

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1. “pick Mom or Dad”

I stumbled upon part Asian · 100% Hapa in a Brussels bookshop some 15 years ago. It’s a book of portraits and hand-written self-descriptions of mixed people, which has since followed me around in all my house moves. I still like to leaf through its pages for a moment of joy, reflection and recognition.

Then (left) and now (right). Portraits by Kip Fulbeck in hapa·me: 15 years of the hapa project

I’ve just discovered (better late than never!) that artist Kip Fulbeck has since published two more books: Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids (2010) and hapa·me: 15 years of the hapa project, a follow-up book with new participants plus updated portraits and statements. (You can view some of these on this cute website. Import fees from the US will make it steep for me to get my hands on the books, but maybe some of you will find them at their local library!)

The video below is a short making-off of Mixed that includes still-shocking facts about how the US long forbade mixed-race marriages. Did you know that the year 2000 is when US census forms first allowed respondents to tick more than one box¹ to define their race? Fulbeck recalls:

As a kid whenever I got that “check one box”, what that box really said to me was: “pick mom or dad.”

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2. “through you we are born again”

In this touching, hopeful Romper article, Michelle Cyca explains how she connected with her grandmother’s first language and culture through her daughter’s books. (The piece also links to a lovely selection of picture books.)

My grandmother’s first language was nêhiyawêwin, but I never heard her speak it. Like most Indigenous people of her generation, she attended a residential school, where she was forbidden to speak anything but English. And like many people of my generation, I grew up in an urban area, far from my nation. I didn’t know any nehiyaw people besides my own family, and I often felt vaguely fraudulent: How could I be Indigenous when I didn’t look or act like any of the Indigenous people I found in books and movies?

I don’t speak Malagasy, one of the languages my forebears spoke, oceans away from Cyca’s grandma. I recognised parts of my experience (and shame) in the paragraph below:

Reading with my daughter helped me unlearn the shame of not knowing the language. For most of my life, I was embarrassed about this, as if it were my personal failing and the inevitable result of generations of forced assimilation efforts by the government. Now I’m gentler with myself. I practice the words I know; I look them up when I forget. I take notes from my daughter, who is curious and open, who knows she has her whole life to learn what she doesn’t know yet. It makes me think of a line from one of our favorite books, We Sang You Home (Ka Kîweh Nikamôstamâtinân) by Dene author Richard Van Camp and Cree-Métis illustrator Julie Flett: “Through you we are born again.” mwecih âsa mîna kâwih nihtâwikîyan.

Screenshot: Romper.com

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3. “where, for better or for worse, you are yourself”

Last month, I published a podcast interview in my other newsletter, exploring the importance of psychological safety in teams with its foremost expert: Amy Edmondson, leadership and management professor at the Harvard Business School. (She is as kind and insightful in person as you'd expect from her work!)

#101: How to create safe teams

Amy told me that the concept of psychological safety applies beyond the workplace, including to families:

… that sense that one can be oneself, that I can speak up, that I can ask for help, that I can disagree with my dad… Most families—not all, but most families—have a reasonable degree of psychological safety. That's the place where, for better or for worse, you are yourself. 

Some cultures will have a harder time than others creating or maintaining psychological safety, she told me:

[T]here is no question that cultures with a lower power distance have a kind of a leg up because they fundamentally believe in candour. Like in the United States or in the Netherlands, there's a shared value that yes, of course, you would share your view, you should speak up, right? […] But in other cultures, there is a value on: Oh, you're not supposed to speak up, you're supposed to wait for the boss. So it's harder, no question about it, but it's no less necessary and it can be done.

The “power distance” that she mentions is one of several cultural dimensions defined by the late Geert Hofstede, a Dutch social psychologist who developed tools to quantify cultural differences. Hofstede’s Power Distance Index (PDI) measures how willing people are to accept or challenge authority and hierarchy.

You can play with the source data on the Hofstede Insights website.

This doesn’t mean that any two parents from say, Russia and New Zealand, will necessarily have opposite and irreconcilable parenting styles, but they will certainly have been surrounded by distinct “patterns of thinking.” (My beloved and I come from places with similar, middling PDIs; if you have bigger PDI gaps, I’m curious to know how this plays out in your relationships! You can always leave a comment or reply privately to any of my email newsletters.)

Coming up on Home Mixed Home: A post about intercultural baby naming (name nerds, you’re in for a treat!), and an interview with a Czech-Franco-German family that brought tears to my eyes. If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up to receive them in your inbox:

1. In many places, including France where I grew up, these boxes don’t exist at all—I’m making a note to open that can of worms some other day.