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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. According to Pew Research between 2010 and 2020 the number of Americans who identify as more than one race nearly doubled to 13.5 million, but that's not really a surprise. If any of you frequent any city parks where kids of every hue, with every hair texture are playing and not really caring all that much about their race, but then outside forces enter their lives, and kids of more than one race often endure some pretty dumb questions from grownups, but what happens when someone asks them some smart questions about their race and asks them to share their thoughts about being part of families with different traditions and cultures?

You can watch it all unfold starting tonight in the new HBO documentary, 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed from Filmmaker W. Kamau Bell. Let's listen to about the first minute of the film.

Speaker 2: I would say I'm half Pakistani and I'm half African American.

Speaker 3: I would say I'm Asian and American, so I am mixed-race.

Miles: I am 100% Filipino, 100% African American, and 1,000% a person.

W. Kamau Bell: Then I talk to their families. I talked to some mixed-race adults who used to be mixed-race kids.

Speaker 6: I am mixed, but I'm not mixed up.

W. Kamau Bell: Some of the conversations went better than others-

Speaker 7: [unintelligible 00:01:27]

W. Kamau Bell: -and some of the conversations went surprising places.

Speaker 8: Just because we live in a diverse community does not mean that racism and all that doesn't happen.

Speaker 9: What is white culture besides racism and evangelical Christians?

W. Kamau Bell: I even got my mom and my mother-in-law to sit down and talk about their adorable mixed-race grandkids and racism. It actually went pretty well. I quickly found out that I'm not the only who thinks this is a good idea.

Miles: I think it's very fun for other people that are not mixed-race to learn and see what a mixed-race kid does, what he feels, and what he knows.

Alison Stewart: The film 1,000% Me: Growing Up Mixed drops tonight on HBO. W. Kamau Bell is the host and executive producer of the United Shades of America on CNN. The last time he was on the show he spoke about the series, We Need to Talk About Cosby which has since been nominated for a Peabody Award. Congratulations and welcome back.

W. Kamau Bell: Thanks for having me. It's good to talk to you again and I love talking to you. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Kids, adults out there, do you have mixed-race kids? How do you talk to your kids about race? What's something your kids have said to you that really blew your mind or moved you? What's been rough? A conversation in families that are mixed-race or maybe you want to share with us what you wish non mixed-race folks would understand. 2124-339- 692, 212-433-WNYC. You can reach out on our social media @AllofItWNYC, that's both Twitter and Instagram. We're looking for multiracial families to join this conversation.

Something that's really clear Kamau on this is that these kids referred themselves as mixed repeatedly. They do not bifurcate their identities, and I thought was really interesting. They're embracing it. What did you notice about the way kids talk about being multiracial?

W. Kamau Bell: Every generation, and this is true in this country no matter what race you are, figures out new ways to embrace their race. I think the terms that initially come to all of us are imposed on us, and then at some point, there's movements that reclaim and figure out the term that we feel is most accurate, and those terms evolve over time of course. I think with mixed-race folks or mixed folks it's no different obviously. I think the biggest thing I noticed was, when I was a kid we said biracial or you said half Black and half white, and these kids don't do it as fractions. There is that one kid, you hear Miles who basically gave us the title for the film, I'm 100% this, I'm 100% this, and 1,000% a person. They don't see it as being part of different races. They see it as addition. My dad is Black, so I'm Black. My mom is white, so I'm also white. They don't see it as being percentages.

Alison Stewart: The film is personal. Your kids are in it, your mom is in it, your mother-in-law is in it. When did you and your wife first start having those conversations about what it was going to be like to raise mixed-race kids?

W. Kamau Bell: Before our oldest daughter Sami was born, we started to talk about the fact that she was our daughter, but she was also going to have this identity as a mixed person that we wouldn't necessarily be able to understand what she was going through all the time. Now, we live in the Bay Area, so we luckily have a lot of mixed folks in our lives that we could send her off to. Talk to your Aunt Lisa, but we knew that her identity was going to be different, and so a part of that was being very proactive about how you talked to her or how we talked to her about her life and her family and history of this country so that she could understand that it was more complex than it might be for some people.

Alison Stewart: There are some things that seem pretty obvious to talk to mixed-race kids about. Like, you don't have to let people touch your hair.

W. Kamau Bell: Yes, we did that one.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Don't turn your back and run from police ever, but what was a surprising moment [crosstalk]

W. Kamau Bell: Oh this is a big one. If a Black woman smiles at you smile back. That's another lesson I taught my kids. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: A head nod.

W. Kamau Bell: Yes, a head nod.

Alison Stewart: What was a surprising moment being the dad of mixed-race girls, one you didn't see coming?

W. Kamau Bell: I think the DNA is an amazing thing and even if you have two Black parents kids can come out have different shades than their parents, so it's not that I was surprised about it, but I was prepared for it, but still dealing with it is different. Sami and Juno who are our two oldest daughters, Sami is what I would say is the classic mixed-race kid who looks like Cheerio mixed-race is what we call it. [laughs] Like the Cheerios commercial. She's got the brown big giant brown afro, she's got caramel-colored skin, but Juno even though she's half me and half her mom has wavy long hair and her complexion's more like her mom.

I was very clear that early on that Juno was going to find herself in positions where people thought she was white, and she actually talks about it in the film when she was seven how a kid basically accused her of being white, is the way Juno frames it. For me, it was like really preparing Juno for the fact that look, no matter what people think you are Black, so don't let other people put you into a category that you are not, and so when she came home and told me the story that she tells in the film about a kid calling her white, and not only was she upset, but she told a teacher I felt like, "Yay, I'm a good dad. Mission accomplished."

Alison Stewart: Yes. She not only said, "No I'm not white." She's like, "No."

W. Kamau Bell: Yes, no. She was very definitive about the fact that you can't take this identity from me whether you can see it on my skin or not.

Alison Stewart: I went digging down a YouTube rabbit hole and you used to talk about parenting mixed-race in your standup act before you got into your more journalistic work. This is a really good example of where this film could grow from. Let's take a listen.

W. Kamau Bell: The weird thing about having a mixed-race kid I don't know if people know this, people who have mixed-race kids know this, mixed-race kids never look like their parents, but they all kind of look like each other. I don't know if that's God's sense of humor or Darwin's last rule. I don't know what it is.

[laughter]

It just makes it weird. When I go to the playground with my daughter, because when we moved out here, we just moved to town me and my wife, my daughter, and we had a mixed-race kid. People are like, "You have a mixed-race kid, you got to go to Brooklyn. That's the home of mixed-race children."

[laughter]

Exactly. We go to the playground in Brooklyn and I let my daughter go play and I turn around and all mixed-race kids kind of look like each other. I look back and go, "Oh no. Oh man, which one is my daughter? All right, I'm going to just take this yellow afro home. Come on let's go." Change the diaper. "There's a penis here. Oh, come on." I need to trade this Lenny Kravitz Jnr for a Lisa Bonet.

Alison Stewart: We call it the floppy hair. It's all Brooklyn has floppy hair. [crosstalk]

W. Kamau Bell: That guy was trying hard.

Alison Stewart: Then you go on to say something poignant after that, that is that a mixed-race kid is a conversation starter whether you want it or not.

W. Kamau Bell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think people always want to talk about it or talk at mixed-race kids or want to get in on it?

W. Kamau Bell: It's weird to say this, but I think many of us have a very limited idea of what a family looks like, and I think there's a sense that a family is supposed to all look like a uniform. I mean, people say that as couples stay together longer than they start looking like each other, and I think that family members are all supposed to look like each other or be a clear mix of each other. When we talked to my goddaughter Carter who's adopted and how she gets interrupted or she gets put to the side, because she doesn't look like her white moms who adopted her, so I think there's just this real linear sense of what a family is supposed to be.

Then for some reason, if it doesn't look like what you think a family's supposed to look like, some people feel like, well it's my job to figure out what's going on here. As we say, I'm going to become a journalist now and ask this family what's going on here. I think we've certainly have had that happen or people assume things. I remember at the airport one time an older Japanese woman came up to all three of us and just looked us all in the face to figure out what was going on. I think one of the big things me and my wife tried to do was try to really limit that kind of interaction because we don't want our kids to feel like they're on display all the time.

We've taught our kids that they can turn their back on those situations. They don't have to engage with people like that, because it's really about knowing where your boundaries are and not letting the world push into you all the time.

Alison Stewart: 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed premieres on HBO today. My guest is W. Kamau Bell a filmmaker. We've got Paula calling in on line one. Hi Paula, thanks for calling All Of It.

Paula: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I'm a 78-year-old very fair skin African American woman. The mixing in my family took place in the 1800s. I'm sure that, although I think I'm 100% me too, that my feeling about what being a mixed-race person is quite different from the kids it sounds like you're talking about on your show about in the film where the one parent is white and identifies as white and everybody in their family identified as white and the other person is a person of color, be they African American or something else. Our points of view about what it means to be mixed. I know I'm mixed. I just need to look down at my hands.

Alison Stewart: Paula, thank you. I want to dive in because you know what? I'm going to dive in here for a second because that's something that's really fascinating in your film is you do go generationally. You go from kids now to people in their early thirties to your in-laws and your mom. How did you want to think about talking about history, especially because the tone of this is interesting because it's clearly meant so kids can watch it?

W. Kamau Bell: We always wanted it to be family-friendly. There's a couple of jokes. There's a joke about tequila that kids aren't going to get. We wanted it to be something that the family could sit down and watch together the way that I would sit down with my mom and watch Eyes on the Prize. I don't know if they meant for kids to watch that, but lots of Black kids grew up watching Eyes on the Prize. It was really important for me that it was family-friendly and putting the kids at the center of it. As a kid, you might zone out for some of the adults, but there's always going to be a kid coming that you can pay attention to.

At first, we thought it might just be kids, but the kids were so deep we wanted to then go, "What are their parents talking about?" Then it became clear that we don't want people to think that every mixed-race person is having the experience these kids are having, these kids in the Bay Area of like it's more and more and it's great. You find out the older you get, the more you can feel the trauma. When a kid gets to preteen or high school, and there's a couple of pre-teens and high schoolers in there, you can actually feel the fact that the outside world is now demanding they pick a side or telling them what side they're on, whether they want to be or not.

Then we have Roy Harrison, who's an 80-year-old man in the film who has since passed away. I'm really happy for his family that they have this legacy for him in the film. He talks about when he was growing up, there wasn't a term of mixed. He was just Negro, as he said because nobody was thinking about labeling these-- Again, the one-drop rule. If you are one drop of Black, then you're Black. Nobody's thinking about mixed.

Alison Stewart: Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC if you want to get in on this conversation. We're talking about the film 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed with filmmaker Kamau Bell. Do you have mixed-race kids? How do you and your family talk about it? We'd like to get you in on this conversation. Talking about adults, you have a woman named Erica in the film. How old is Erica?

W. Kamau Bell: She's post-college age but pre-IRA, pre-Roth retirement age. I don't actually know. I think she's in her late twenties or early thirties.

Alison Stewart: She gives a perspective on what it was like for her growing up. Let's take a listen.

Erica: My name is Erica. I identify as half Black and half Japanese. I was born in Oakland, California. Nobody gave me a rule book on what it meant to be half Black and half Japanese. When I had comments in high school, "Oh, you sound really white. Are you really white-washed?" I'm like, "Can you tell me then what is it supposed to be or how am I supposed to act as a half-Black and half-Japanese person? Where's the rule book for that?"

Not really having any representation around me, I was just like, "How can I fit in?" I found that route through being of service to others. Through that, I realized that I just loved listening to people's stories and really wanted to follow that career through therapy.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious what people in their late twenties and thirties told you about their experiences versus the youngins. You even have one family where there's a 20-year age gap between the--

W. Kamau Bell: Yes, we have Myles and his brother Georgio and they're 22 years apart in age. Georgio is very clear that when he sees Myles talk, he's like, "I'm happy that he has that space to talk about his mixedness" because it was not there for him." Georgio talks about how he grew up, basically in the Filipino community, going to a school with mostly Asian kids. He was one of the few Black kids, and so he felt very Filipino. Then he went to another school. It's what happens when you go to middle school and suddenly he's surrounded by more Black kids who look like him, which makes him feel good, but those kids don't consider him to be Black enough because he clearly does not come from their culture.

Again, you can see that this is a kid, a man now, who had to deal with some trauma in a way while Myles deals with the fact that some kids don't know that he's Filipino, it's not registering the same way. I think a lot of that's because Georgio's generation did a lot of work to back people off. I want to give Georgio and Erica and all these millennial mix folks credit for creating more space for these young kids.

Alison Stewart: Let's take Moira from Bloomfield, New Jersey. Hi, Moira. Thanks for calling. You're on the air.

Moira: Good afternoon. I listen to you all the time. First time calling. Yes, I'm from British Guyana. My father is Native American [unintelligible 00:15:42] and my mother is of African descent from Guyana. They have five children. I'm a twin and my sister looks East Indian. My twin sister looks East Indian. This is such a good program what you're doing today because you know where Bloomfield is. You're not far down the road from where I live. It's just why are you listening to Bruce Springsteen. Because I love music. Why do you listen to Marvin Gaye? Because I love music. I'm an artist. That's been very fru-- It's not frustrating. It's been sad. I shall say this much about my mother. I love my mother to pieces, but why is everything Black about you is what she says to me? I'm one of her lightest kids.

Alison Stewart: That's eerily interesting in the film, at least two people say, "Sorry, Mom."

W. Kamau Bell: Actually, they're related. Greg and Kaylin. In the middle of their talk, both want to give their moms some grace because they realize they're about to talk about their family in ways that their moms might not like. I've talked to both of those moms since the film came out. We did at a film festival.

Alison Stewart: I have to play Sumaya, who is maybe the heartbeat of the film for me.

W. Kamau Bell: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen. Oh my goodness, I hope we get the clip in time and we're going to go.

Sumaya: My name is Sumaya. I am 7 years old and I would think of myself a mix of basically all my favorite animals, a corgi, a spaniel, husky, Llama, and shiba inu.

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My mom is Asian and my dad is Black and my sister is just like me. She's a mix.

W. Kamau Bell: Do you like being mixed?

Sumaya: Yes.

W. Kamau Bell: What do you like about it?

Sumaya: I don't know. Maybe because I'm not one or the other or not one or the other or me and I like being me.

Alison Stewart: I love everything about her. Let's talk to Susanna from Erie, Colorado real quick. Hi Susanna. You got about a minute.

Sussana: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: Great.

Sussana: I just wanted to call and say I grew up in New York City and my mom is a Black Dominican. My dad's a white Puerto Rican. I'm mixed, I guess, but always called Latina, but then grew up in Harlem, where I was always called light skin. I had that whole [unintelligible 00:18:31] growing up. Now I have a 15-year-old daughter whose dad is white, and she's in school navigating that, but she's quick. She's white presenting, and she's quick to point out that she's not white and that she has some melanin and she stands up for being a person of mixed race or she considers herself in the minority group. I think it's a great thing that we're going to be watching this special tonight from W. Kamau Bell.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling in.

W. Kamau Bell: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Kamau, what is something not to say to a mixed-race kid?

W. Kamau Bell: Don't tell a mixed-race kid what they are. Let them tell you what they are. I think that's the number one thing. Also, if you're not in the middle of a conversation with them, don't walk up and ask out of the blue. That is none of your business.

Alison Stewart: The name of the program is 1000% Me: Growing up Mixed. It drops on HBO today. I think a lot of our listeners are going to be listening and watching. W. Kamau Bell, thank you so much for being with us, and thanks for making this film.

W. Kamau Bell: Thanks for having me as always.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

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