Multiracial Heritage Week is upon us! We hope you enjoy meeting some of leadership families. First up, the Baldwins!
It is sad to say that this Multiracial Heritage week comes in a time of greater racial unrest than any of the past six. Nonetheless, this week is one focused on celebrating our heritage and being proud of what makes us who we are. I’m the youngest of three children. My black father was born in Houston in 1960 and remembers, as a young boy, seeing the anguish in his family when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. He met my white mother here in Ohio while she was in college and he was playing for the Cleveland Browns. They celebrated my oldest sister’s birth in South Central Los Angeles in the middle of the Rodney King trial. We moved to Ohio just months after the senseless murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Racial unrest, injustice, and violence are not new to my family’s consciousness, and it is sad that today, most people of color can say the same. Despite these issues constantly being present in my world, I have typically felt at least a little disconnected from them, thanks to my privilege and my loving family. Today I feel a stronger connection to the injustice and see it more clearly than ever before. But it remains incomprehensible. No one in this world has shown me more love than my black father, my white mother, and my multiracial sisters, and there is no one I love more than those very people. Growing up in a household with people of three distinct racial makeups has made understanding tension, distrust, and hatred based solely on race difficult. I’ve received no greater sense of joy than that of time spent simply watching movies, playing games, and eating with my family. These are the people I love and the people who have helped make me who I am. While I sincerely want to do all I can to enact change in this world, nothing will ever change that.
Karson Baldwin, Project RACE Teens President