(gentle music) (calm piano music) - [Kylie] In a world that often seeks to categorize and label, mixed race identities can be seen as an anomaly.

But in reality, the number of multiracial Americans is growing at a pretty rapid rate, increasing from just 2.9% of the population in 2010 to more than 10% of the population in 2020, which would bring the total to around 33.8 million people and counting.

But despite this growing group, there's limited representation and information when it comes to multiracial identities.

- How difficult it is to find information like vetted, peer-reviewed information on these topics, and this is because there's no standardized language that describes people like us, you know, in one database, we're called interracial offspring, and another database, we're racially mixed people, and it's really hard to know what that language is to access the material.

- [Kylie] Karen Downing is an education liaison librarian at the University of Michigan.

Inside the Hatcher Graduate Library, she walks us through her latest exhibit.

- "Being Mixed Race in a Monoracially-Oriented world."

Goals for that exhibit are to raise the visibility of these issues on campus, we don't have a lot of curricular offerings that are explicitly about mixed race experiences the way we do about other groups of people, even though we know that the demographics have changed drastically.

In another five or 10 years, when the largest group of mixed race children come of age to be in college, I feel like we need to be ready in higher education, and we're not ready now.

- [Kylie] For Downing, the research is personal.

She identifies as multiracial being born to a Black dad, and Caucasian mom.

And much of her efforts are providing resources she didn't have growing up, and still isn't fully seeing today.

- So I was born in 1960, interracial marriages were still illegal in a number of states.

There wasn't a lot of conversation around mixed raced issues when I was growing up, and so when I got to the point where I understood how information is organized, and how you access information, that was really powerful.

That made me realize that there might be other people out there like me who needed access to this information, as well.

- [Kylie] As numbers of multiracial Americans continue to grow, Downing says stigma surrounding mixed race identities has lessened, and over the past few decades, it's ushered in a new chapter for people of diverse backgrounds to bring their whole selves to the table.

- The whole stigma piece is it's fading each successive generation that we get away from having interracial marriages being illegal and looked down upon, the kinds of violent past that have to do with slavery and colonization, and you know, all of the ugly parts of our history, and more and more people are coming together through love matches as opposed to violence.

People are just feeling more comfortable claiming their mixed race heritage.

There's so many different dimensions to that, there is your own personal way that you identify yourself within your family context, within your group of friends and so on, there is the way that other people read you, and therefore attach identity to you.

And all of those can be different.

(gentle music) - As someone who's mixed race, I understand it is impossible to capture every theme or feeling when talking about the complexity of multiracial identities.

We all have unique experiences.

- But as we've heard, there are not many avenues for those experiences to be shared.

So our team decided to get a snapshot of local populations.

So we put out a call to our community to elevate voices of a few whose experiences could resonate with many.

(ambient music) So your mother was Black, was African American, and so you have lineage and the story from that side, and then you have your dad was, you said Puerto Rican and Mexican.

- Yes.

- How do you identify?

- So I identify as an Afro-Latina.

I think it's been about 10 years now that I tell my family members I identify fully and wholly as a Black woman, and I identify fully and wholly as a Latina woman.

- [Kylie] While Samara Tobar sits confidently today, self-assured in her identity, and embracing every part of her culture and heritage, she, like many, took a winding road to get here.

- What did you think as you were growing up, who you were and what your background was, and what did you embrace?

- I did not know exactly where I belonged, to be honest.

If I had a friend group of Black people, I feel like I wasn't Black enough to be with them, and I would get teased like in a not so much harmful or hurtful way, but then, you know, behind closed doors, you think about those comments that have been made, and you ruminate over them, you know, being called things like mutt or half-breed.

It's like, "Wow, well what the heck am I?"

And you know, "Mutt, are they calling me a dog?"

You know, that can be offensive.

But I think that I just made the best of what I understood of myself at that time.

And ultimately, like in my story, there wasn't a time where I felt 100% apart, or that I fit in or meshed well with anyone.

But all in all, you know, I always say that I'm both, I'm both, like, you can't take one away from me, because I feel like my family did an amazing job at giving me my culture in the home, my grandfather and my grandmother raised me for the most part, and my first language literally was English and Spanish simultaneously, even though I understood everything that they were saying, I did not wanna speak Spanish until I was a young adult, and I got told, "Hey, we'll give you $1.50 more an hour if you speak Spanish."

I was like (speaking in foreign language) where do I sign?

(Samara laughing) So, and then on my mother's side, that is such a strong matriarchal family.

My mother's sisters taught us how to cook, how to make soul food, how to care for kids.

- [Kylie] Now a mother to two daughters herself who also hold multiracial backgrounds, she ensures identity and pride of it are always at the forefront.

- Knowing who you are, not so much aside from your culture, but like it's all-encompassing.

So you get to decide who you wanna be, who you present as, and then you get to educate people when they come to you incorrectly.

- [Kylie] But even though her own sense of identity has flourished with time and lived experience, outside factors, the way she's perceived and subsequently treated by others still weave a complicated web.

- Although we would like to think that we're so far advanced in this day and age, we're going into 2025, there are tons of biases that we walk around with.

I think being discriminated against by your own people hurts worse than being discriminated against by like, let's say a Caucasian random person on the street.

I expect that.

But being rejected or unaccepted by other Black women, because they don't know me, they don't know where I stand, they don't know who I am or what I am, and so they have a guard up against me, and I've been mean mugged, there's, you know, very many times, especially when I was younger and growing up, where there would be darker skinned young women that I found beautiful, but because I was lighter skinned, it was like, "No, I don't like her.

I don't wanna be friends with her."

My Hispanic side, I have been discriminated against.

Both of my children went through Spanish immersion school.

I was volunteering for Valentine's Day, and they don't expect me to know Spanish.

So there were a couple of mothers, and I was asking them in Spanish, "Would you like a scoop of ice cream?"

And I asked them three times.

At first I thought, they just didn't hear me, but they ignored me, and they turned their backs on me.

And I was 36 or 37-years-old, full-grown, a mother, and that hit me and it hurt me in a new place that I had never been, you know, dinged or injured before.

And I really, it took me a couple of days to process after that.

- [Kylie] While Samara's personal experiences are unique, feeling shut out is a barrier many multiracial people are familiar with, and one that can be felt through generations.

- I come from a mixed family.

My mother was Black, my father was white from Spanish descendant.

It was natural to be in a family with dark skin, light skin, but when I came here to United States, I didn't know the term minority.

I said, "What is that?"

"Oh, you are not white."

I said, "Okay."

(Lea laughing) You know, and it was like a wake up for me, but I, you know, I am who I am.

- [Kylie] And just as Samara's daughters have her to lean on and learn from, Samara has her grandmother.

- I was assistant principal at one of the schools, Harrison Park, and I suspended a Black kid, and the mother came and she said, "You are a racist, you are white racist."

I said, "No, I am not a racist, and I am not white."

"What do you mean?"

"My mother was Black."

"You are lying to me", blah, blah, blah.

So I had a picture of my mother in my office.

I said, 'This is my mother."

So, you know, I have to prove to people what I am all the time.

If I don't open my mouth, and they notice my accent, they think I'm, you know, just a white person.

But I know who I am, and that give me a place in this community.

- [Kylie] Together, the two offer words of encouragement towards the future.

- This is how I got to where I am right now.

It's through candid conversations, crucial conversations, like let's come to the table, these are the conversations that we need to be having.

- They don't have to prove anything to anyone.

Just keep walking with your heads up, and you know, the most important thing for a human being is to know who you are.

If you don't know who you are, then you are in trouble.

- [Kylie] And knowing who you are can often lie at the intersection of cultures.

- So we're gonna have a conversation today about the multiracial experience.

Now I have to be full disclosure here, it's not that you're a stranger, I know you, you are the husband of my lovely co-host, Kylie Ambu, but you do have a background that we wanna look at in this particular episode.

First, let's start with your racial makeup.

- Okay, yeah.

I am half Indian, Asian Indian, like from India, and half Black.

My dad's from Detroit, my mom is from India.

She came here when she was eight.

- Are you comfortable in both aspects of your culture?

- I'm definitely comfortable in the Black aspect of my culture, the Indian aspect of my culture is a little bit harder, 'cause again, I don't have as much of a lived experience with that growing up.

I think the other hard part too is like growing up, you know I was born in '94, so I was alive during 9-11, so a lot of times the Indian side of me got mixed in with some of the ignorant comments people would make about terrorism and terrorists, you know, I remember my brother being called a terrorist when he was in school once, and so it kind of was in such a negative light, and I mean at the time as a kid, right?

Like I'm like, well, you know, people treat me nicely when they recognize that I'm Black, and then when they hear anything about Indian, they start making like jokes about terrorism and bombs, so as I've gotten older, I've identified with it a lot more, and I've tried to, you know, be a little bit more intentional about that, but it's a little harder when I don't know it, I don't wanna feel like I'm forcing myself to now like something that I haven't known too much about.

- Did you ever get treated differently for either side of your culture or negatively?

- Yeah, definitely, on both sides, for sure.

On the Black side, I mean, again, when someone who, if you're not, if you're Black and you see me, and you can tell I'm just not fully Black.

And in the past especially, you know, in high school and stuff, people would just be like, you know, "Either you're not Black or what's your dad, because if your dad's Black then you're Black."

I'm like, I get called the N word either way, it don't matter what, you know what I mean?

So I don't know, I've gotten the negative on that side, I've gotten the negative on the Indian side, but again, I haven't had a ton ton of exposure with that side, but I've definitely had it, I mean with my dad being Black, part of the difficulty was him and my mom getting married, like her family didn't love that in the beginning, so sometimes when we would go to family get-togethers that were part of the extended family, sometimes I would see some of the different treatment, so it's hard to tell if it was specifically due to the race or not, but I've definitely, I've definitely seen a difference.

- So has anything changed?

What about today as a grown man, say, here in West Michigan?

- Oh, that's kind of a big question, especially in West Michigan, seeing that I'm originally from the east side of the state, 'cause there's a little bit of a different culture here.

But I think as I've become grown, you know, I'm 30 now, I think I've come to recognize that I am the sum of both parts, I am Indian and I am Black, and there are spaces where maybe I can identify more with being Black with some of my lived experiences, and there are spaces where I identify more with being Indian in my lived experiences, and I don't have to lean into one more than the other.

I'm just gonna have to unapologetically be myself.

I'm definitely very proud of it.

I mean especially on the Black side, there's a lot of pride, you know, with overcoming slavery, and just a lot of the negativity that my family's dealt with, you know?

And that even I deal with, you know, on the regular that if I could choose like, "Oh, would you rather have a life that is easier, or would you rather have a life that is what it is now knowing that, you know, people might call you all kinds of ignorant things?"

I would still pick where I'm at now.

I think that there's just a sense of pride with that.

There's a lot of lived experiences that come that are unique to mixed people that don't get talked about.

You know, being, dealing with ignorance on both sides, racism on both sides, I mean it sucks, because I feel like when it comes to mixed people, our voices aren't listened to nearly as loudly, and I can, you know, talk about the ignorance that I've dealt with on my Indian side, but I feel like I can, like no one really wants to hear that, if it's the thing that's louder is the ignorance that's happening to People of Color, like Black people specifically, right?

That's a side that's gonna get more attention.

And if I, being Black, am trying to have that conversation with even other Black people, it's not always that easy, because it's like you wanna create space for them to be heard, but at the same time, I don't wanna like during their hurt, criticize what they're doing.

- So do you plan on discussing your racial heritage, and makeup with your children?

- Absolutely.

I plan on discussing it.

I believe my wife does too.

We haven't talked a ton ton about it, but I know it's something that's important to both of us.

And the biggest reason why is because, I mean our kid is probably gonna be pretty racially ambiguous, seeing that my wife is also interracial, but they're likely not going to look white, so it's not like they can just pass and be fine on top of that, it's important that they know, because they need to know where they came from, they need to know how the world works.

They need to know what types of things they might face.

I think the biggest thing that I would say is be proud of who you are, I mean, race, it plays a huge part in how people treat you, which is unfortunate, but at the same time, like race doesn't specifically define you by putting you in a box and saying, "Oh, like statistically this many people are only allowed to do this."

Like, there are a lot of ways that like I plan to help my kid not be a statistic.

We're gonna find success, because we're gonna use all the resources and the role models that we have to make sure that happens, because no one's gonna define you, and say, "Because you're not, you know, this race, because you're mixed, that means that you can't do X, Y and Z", right?

There's not gonna be any exclusionary factor on my kid.

- Wee.

(carousel music playing) - [Kylie] While race doesn't define, its history and impacts can hold a sense of pride.

- You know, humbly I say this, we come from greatness on both sides.

You know, there's long legacies on both sides.

- [Kylie] Sisters Dorie Rios and Nickole Keith say they've always been proud of their unique and powerful heritage as Afro-Indigenous women.

Something instilled through their lineage.

- My father, Joseph Keith, he is from Vandalia, born and raised, which is about an hour away from where my mom grew up on a reservation, Pine Creek Reservation in Fulton, Michigan.

I don't know how they met, but like sitting here today is like, I don't know, it's just overwhelming.

- At that time in the 60s, that was forbidden, you know, my mother was born, she wasn't even a US citizen.

And for them to meet, and have that love, and to carry that on, and look beyond that color, that's something that still sticks with me today, because you know, it was forbidden, and they were breaking the law, but they still stayed together.

- [Kylie] Growing up, the two had strong ties to both sides of their cultures.

- We were in a predominantly Black neighborhood, we went to a predominantly Black elementary.

My mom, everywhere she moved, all of our aunts and cousins all lived within a radius of what?

Two blocks?

- Yeah.

- Every person in our neighborhood would say "That's where the Indians live."

- With our mother being a survivor of the boarding school era, a lot of our culture was suppressed, she still spoke some of the language, it was very little, but we still knew the language, the culture, the arts, we attended powwows, we frequented the reservation a lot, that's where our dad actually hunted, we fished, we foraged, even though we identify as Afro-Indigenous, and we always kept those together, 'cause we knew who we were to the outside world, not so much we could walk in a room that was maybe all Black and they knew we were mixed, and then same thing on the Native side, we walk in a room and they knew, you know, we weren't full-blooded Native American, so we probably always had that struggle, that identity struggle growing up, but as women, and women with children, we know who we are, (Dorie chuckles) and we recognize both sides.

I always knew who I was, and I loved it, because I was unique.

I love being unique.

- I don't think I actually like really valued it until 12th grade.

We had a special 12th grade newsletter, and I was kind of like the Head Editor, and I ended up, kind of had to do a self-discovery of myself.

And I wrote an article about being Black and Indian, and I said, "My mom is full-blooded Potawatomi Native.

She's like the soul food behind the scenes cook.

She can cook green, she can fry chicken."

I just felt a need to kind of reveal myself.

- [Kylie] Both women are active leaders in their community.

Nickole working as the Food Sovereignty Coordinator and Dorie, the Tribal Council Chairwoman for the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi.

They say even the roles today are a reflection of their heritage, and as close to their roots as they've remained, they're still a yearning to learn more.

- [Dorie] We are in Vandalia, Michigan at the historical Bonine House.

This is a part of our father's history.

- We came here, and visited as children, and then we have a sister, but we never knew the story.

- [Kylie] The James E. Bonine House, which sits in Cass County, has intimate connections to the underground railroad, freed people, and consequently Dorie and Nickole's paternal family.

- Learning like on our father's mother's side, you know, they were freed Black slaves, they were able to purchase over 200 acres in this area.

Our father's brother, Laurel Keith, he was a pediatrician, he graduated high school very early, because he was so intelligent, and he went to a historically Black college in the South.

We learned later, but he was a Tuskegee airman.

You know, that alone being part of the family's legacy.

We learned, our dad attended a one-room-schoolhouse that was the first integrated, one of the first integrated schools in Michigan, - [Nickole] Like we had no idea until after he passed, and then developing a close relationship with our half sister, Beverly Young, who was the mayor of Vandalia.

- Since our dad died, we've gotten very close.

You know, they're like my kids really.

We have a deep history here, and we're continuing to learn more.

- It just plays a huge role in, I think, our drive to make not only just our tribe, but just society in itself to be a better person.

On my mom's side, we have this concept of blood memory that is kind of like instilled in our blood.

And the things that I do at the farm, and do for my people on my mom's side is so intertwined with my dad's history.

It's like a blessing in disguise, the way that these two races come together.

- [Kylie] They say their past has a direct impact on their present and future, each step forward holding the footprint of those who walked before them.

Do you feel a sense of pride in just knowing the moves that your family was making?

- Not only pride, but it's a part of our legacy that we need to learn more about and continue to preserve.

I think that's a great deal of responsibility that we have on both sides of our families.

- Every day is a race to help our people, or help our community, help society.

And I owe that all to my upbringing.

I would never change it for anything in this world.

- To sit in this house, where we were once forbidden, on our father's side, to make those trips to DC, and to tell the story of our causes.

My grandparents didn't dream of things like that.

And here we are, living that for them, through them, through their vision, that makes me proud.

Being born to two races that were resilient.

Yes, they struggle.

Yes, the trauma was there.

Yes, ultimately, one race tried to eradicate them, and to hold the DNA from those two races and still be here in front of a camera, to hopefully broadcast on TV, that to me says it all.

(ambient piano music) - [Announcer] Thanks for watching.

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Thank you for helping us be mutually inclusive.

(ambient music)