Category: Articles

  • “It’s my black girl who looks like a white girl with a tan and a bad hair day.”

  • What is the Black Atlantic? My Comparative Perspective Afro-Europe International Blog 2011-01-09 Sibo Kano Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1994) is a difficult read but it’s a very influential book. An author who builds further on Gilroy’s work and who writes very accessible books about blackness is Livio Sansone (professor of anthropology at the University of…

  • Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is a dance to the rhythms of womanhood iNews 2016-11-02 Salena Godden Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016) Swing Time is a quiet and rhythmic book. Just as the title suggests, this book swings, oscillating from past to present, like the steady rhythm of a pendulum. This is…

  • When Looks Deceive: Being Biracial in Poland Wanderfull 2016-11-14 Julia Kitlinski-hong San Francisco, California It was a late December evening and my mom had just arrived in Krakow, where I had been studying for the past three months. We were making our way from my apartment to where she was staying in the nearby city…

  • What Being of Mixed Heritage Has Taught Me About Identity VICE 2016-12-10 Salma Haidrani This article originally appeared on VICE UK “What are you?” When you think about it, it’s a pretty stupid question to ask another person, especially when you already know the answer: a human, just like you mate. But that doesn’t stop…

  • From Her Dad To Her ‘Jamish’ Roots, A Poet Pieces Her Story Together All Things Considered National Public Radio 2014-12-28 Arun Rath, Host Growing up in 1970s England, Salena Godden stood out. Her mother was Jamaican and her father was an Irish jazz musician who mysteriously disappeared from her life when she was very young.…

  • Trevor Noah Still Doesn’t Get It BuzzFeed 2016-12-06 Tomi Obaro, BuzzFeed News Reporter Trevor Noah (Paul Zimmerman / Getty Images) The Daily Show host and biracial South African comic’s recent comments suggest a profound misunderstanding of the way racism works in America. “There’s many assumptions I’ve made about America that I’ve realized were wrong,” said Trevor…

  • Loving Star Ruth Negga on Biracial Politics: “I Get Very Territorial About My Identity” Vogue 2016-12-07 Gaby Wood With her mesmerizing performance in Jeff Nichols’s subtly groundbreaking film Loving, the Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga has become a star for our time. “I’m a rag of a woman today,” Ruth Negga says in her faint Irish…

  • Skin deep North By Northwestern Fall 2016 Mira Wang Photo by Alex Furuya / North by Northwestern Cracking the foundations of white beauty. When I was younger, my Asian American friends and I would play house. We’d be older, popular and wise to the world. We’d have cars and phones and play dates at the…

  • Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and instability in gender and race Maclean’s 2016-12-04 Sujaya Dhanvantari Sociologist Rogers Brubaker examines transgender and transracial differences TRANS By Rogers Brubaker In Western culture, gender and race were traditionally thought to be unchangeable and fixed for life. Black or white, male or female: These were forever separated by the binary…