
Blurring the Color Line | Mixed Race: Being Black & Chinese
Clip: Season 11 Episode 4 | 2m 56sVideo has Closed Captions
A mother and daughter share memories of growing up mixed race within their Chinese family.
LeAnna Saucier and her daughter Asia open up about being mixed race - both Black and Chinese - and the indelible experiences they had growing up surrounded by their extended Chinese family. Though they have many warm memories, LeAnna and Asia also share the times each felt unaccepted by their own family and others.
Major funding for America ReFramed provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by Open Society Foundations,...

Blurring the Color Line | Mixed Race: Being Black & Chinese
Clip: Season 11 Episode 4 | 2m 56sVideo has Closed Captions
LeAnna Saucier and her daughter Asia open up about being mixed race - both Black and Chinese - and the indelible experiences they had growing up surrounded by their extended Chinese family. Though they have many warm memories, LeAnna and Asia also share the times each felt unaccepted by their own family and others.
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Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- I drove from Augusta, Georgia, to Gulfport, Mississippi, to meet these relatives I never even knew existed.
Aunt Barbara's daughter, LeAnna, she shared some troubling memories of the way she was treated for just being half Black.
- I do know that when I would go back and visit my grandmother... you know what?
There were times when I would- my feelings would get hurt, because I realized, I can't even say right now that she was prejudiced or she was racist, because she was very loving and she was very caring to us.
I remember going to California to visit her, and me and my brother couldn't play in the front yard.
And I think I talked to my mom about it, and my mom said, "She doesn't want the neighbors to see y'all in her front yard, because she lived in a white neighborhood."
So, my grandmother, I feel like she never really fully accepted us and fully accepted the fact that my mom married a Black man.
However, she didn't treat us any different.
And I do know that my grandfather did not accept us at all.
And my parents did have some difficult times in their marriage.
And my mom wanted to leave my father, and her father said, "No, if you come home, you know you can't come with those kids.
You have to give them up for adoption."
I really, really had to keep telling myself, "Okay, she's from a different time."
- Yeah.
- A different generation.
And because she had us in her life and she spent time with us and we hung out and went shopping and did different things together and went on vacations together, maybe she wasn't as bad as what she could have been.
Without my grandmother having these Brown children in her life, she could have been worse.
- Like when we're all walking together in stores, like, we don't think, you know, "Well, we're walking with our Chinese grandma," you know?
So, like, when we're out in public, some people, they do stare a little.
- Yeah.
- Or, like, when we go to Six Flags and stuff all the time, it'd be our time to get on the ride, they'd be like, "Okay, how many people?"
We're like, "Four."
It was me, my brother, my sister and my grandma.
And they'd get me and my brothers and then they'd stop her.
"How many for you?"
I'm like, "We just said four.
She's with us."
They're like, "Oh, sorry.
Okay, okay."
- Yeah.
- Because I've had a few Asian friends growing up.
I don't, I don't think that Asians really...
I just don't see a lot of Asians hanging out with Black people.
- Yeah.
- I don't.
I feel like they fall more in line with white people because they're not...
I know Asians can get dark like Filipino- I've seen a lot of darker Filipinos and stuff like that.
But they're not Black.
And I feel like, I feel like also they feel like they don't fit in with Black people.
- Why are some Chinese so uncomfortable in Black space?
Or any space outside our own, for that matter?
Blurring the Color Line | A Black and Chinese Neighborhood
Video has Closed Captions
In Augusta, Georgia's Black neighborhood, Chinese grocery stores once lined the streets. (1m)
Blurring the Color Line | Acceptance?
Video has Closed Captions
Members of the First Baptist Church of Augusta talk about shared but separate histories. (1m 14s)
Blurring the Color Line | A Community Together
Video has Closed Captions
Residents relive the aftermath of the three days of the 1970 Augusta Riot. (1m 7s)
Blurring the Color Line | James Brown
Video has Closed Captions
Deanna Brown talks with filmmaker Crystal Kwok about her father, James Brown. (53s)
Blurring the Color Line | Jim Crow Laws
Video has Closed Captions
Why were Augusta's Chinese afforded certain privileges that Black residents did not have? (16s)
Blurring the Color Line | Preview
Video has Closed Captions
How do Chinese grocers in the Jim Crow South complicate America’s binary paradigm of race? (30s)
Blurring the Color Line | The 1970 Augusta Riot
Video has Closed Captions
The death of a Black teenager led to the largest uprising of Black Americans in the South. (1m)
Blurring the Color Line | Trailer
Video has Closed Captions
How do Chinese grocers in the Jim Crow South complicate America’s binary paradigm of race? (1m 12s)
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipMajor funding for America ReFramed provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by Open Society Foundations,...