Bianca Alexander: Global educator, principal. Creole colorism, classism.

Bianca talks about leading schools in the Middle East; and her Creole culture in which cousins intermarried to remain fair complexioned and preserve their culture, her grandmother deciding to passe blanc (pass for white), being adamant about not being African, and being shunned by her family because she had less European features than her siblings and associated with blacks; and her family's Creole social status and wealth attained in the Cane River, Louisiana community by former slave Marie Therese Coincoin who owned land and slaves resulting from a plaçage relationship with Frenchman Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer.  She shares stories about growing up in Bedford Heights and Cleveland, Ohio; not knowing that she was black; not being in the same social class as her peers due to parents’ divorce; earning a bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education/French and master’s in Instructional Technology from the University of Akron; her interest in developing the minds of students to explore other cultures; her independent study in France; earning a master’s in education law to protect rights of special needs students; working in Saudi Arabia as a resource teacher for students with special needs, relating to classism in their society, and not being seen as an American; working as a principal in Kuwait; frustration with U.S. schools not being equipped to address the social and emotional needs of disadvantaged students; serving as the principal of an Indian American school in New Mexico; her mother not identifying as black but instead American and her father's family preferring that he would have married a white woman; always knowing her grandmother, Lucy Couty, as white in contrast to her Negro certificate; family sending her grandmother to a Negro school apart from her siblings, who had European features, because of her more black features; family pressure on her grandmother to marry white but her instead having relationships with black men; defining Creole as the food, the Catholic church, and consanguinity; the Creole Native American, African, German, Spanish, French, and Jewish peoples creating a mixed-race group of people who lived peacefully within their isolated community while under French and Spanish rule; the Creole class hierarchy dictating that whites sit behind them in church; dating dark skinned black men in defiance of her family’s directive to not marry a black; Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer’s Revolutionary War service; her family's history not being the traditional negative narrative of slavery; joining the DAR to preserve her grandmother's legacy after she had been rejected by both blacks and whites; embracing her African, European and American Indian heritage;  "I am American before I am anything but even before I am American I am Christian"; feeling the DAR is a beautiful organization; “being American isn't about race but where you were born"; the necessity to identify with other black DAR members. Read Bianca’s biography at www.daughterdialogues.com/daughtersSubscribe to the newsletter at www.daughterdialogues.comFollow us @DaughterDialogs on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter