Aiko’s sister, Mila J, is a singer, songwriter, and dancer herself…
Aiko is one of five siblings who grew up in a multiracial and tight-knit family from Ladera Heights, a Black middle-class enclave in south Los Angeles. Jhené Aiko Chilombo was born in 1988 in Los Angeles to Christina Yamamoto, a woman who is African American and Japanese, and Karamo Chilombo, a man of mixed-Black and Native American ancestry. The performance was a touching display of affection between three generations of women, and as such, offers an opportunity to reflect on the role Aiko’s mother’s racial heritage has played in Aiko’s musical career. I’m becoming my mother, my beautiful mother, she is love in the flesh, what a sight.”Īfterwards, Aiko and her young daughter, Namiko Love, serenaded the audience with an original song Aiko wrote titled, Sing to Me. I am becoming my mother, my beautiful mother, who taught me with age, comes might. I’m better, I’m wiser, I’m leveling up overall. “I found another grey hair today but I was not bothered at all. Photo courtesy of The come Up Show.Īt the 2018 VH1 Mother’s Day music tribute concert titled, Dear Mama: A Love Letter to Moms, Grammy nominated singer and songwriter Jhené Aiko recited this poem she wrote for her mother, Christina Yamamoto, a woman of African American and Japanese ancestry: Jhené Aiko and the Problem of Multiracial Self-Representation Finally, in attempting to construct a new lexicon, I am perpetuating a fictional history which ignores the ways in which the social processes of ‘racial’ mixing are themselves old.” “…Furthermore, one could argue that partially deflecting the attention away from what I call the popular folk concept of ‘race’ to other forms of identification and stratification diminishes the significant and potent function institutionalized racism plays in the maintenance of privilege and power for some and disadvantage and discrimination for others. “…Using a French-African term in an English context, even if simply for discursive analyses, could be percieved as potentially exoticizing and further marginalizing ‘mixed-race’ subjectivities…” But later she states in Mixed Race Studes: A Reader… Her desire was to create a common non-racist, non-sexist term that ‘mixed-race’ individuals could claim as one of their own. Ifekwunigwe, had used the term métis and/or métisse instead of ‘mixed-race’ in her early works as a way of focusing away from ‘race’ as a form of identity. It is still commonly used by Francophones today for any multiracial person… However, the term was used by other groups around the world, mostly in countries which were under French influence, such as Vietnam. In the Western Hemisphere, this term usually is used to describe someone born or descended from the union of a European and an Amerindian. The term is of French origin, and also is a cognate of mestizo in Spanish, mestiço in Portuguese, and mestee in English. From Wikipedia: A métis is a person born to parents who belong to different groups defined by visible physical differences, regarded as racial, or the descendant of such persons.