Category: Autobiography

  • Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being Biracial Weekend Edition Sunday National Public Radio 2015-05-24 Growing up in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson lived mostly with his mother in a black neighborhood. The son of an African-American mother and an Irish-American father, his skin was so light that he might have passed for white. But…

  • Learning to live with complexity and ambiguity

  • I’m Black. I’m White. I’m Both. I’m Neither. GPB Blogs: On Second Thought Georgia Public Broadcasting Atlanta, Georgia 2015-05-20 Celeste Headlee I’m black. My grandfather is William Grant Still, the “Dean of African-American composers.” His skin was the color of maple syrup. Mine is the color of café au lait. My grandfather suffered countless indignities…

  • Proving My Blackness The New York Times Magazine 2015-05-24 Mat Johnson I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement. I put my dashiki on…

  • Having come through some difficult times as a teenager Kira now happily identifies with both of her cultural backgrounds. Annina says that when you are ‘mixed-race’ people make assumptions about your identity and consider it to be “up for debate”, but she is clear that “whiteness is not something I’m a part of.”

  • When I was four years old, I came home from preschool and said to my mother, “they think I’m one of the white kids.” To their credit, I have always looked like one of the white kids. Unfortunately for those not interested in giving evidence to the proverb about books and their covers, my appearance…

  • Lopsided Afro Mixed Humans ~ Reflections on occupying a space of inbetweenness. Persistently grappling with identity. 2015-05-04 Brian Kamanzi Cape Town, South Africa Self Determination. I never realised how practical those words would become for my life until I started to explore the world beyond the safety of my University. Work spaces where the politics…

  • TCK TALENT: Neil Aitken, Computer Gaming Whiz Kid Turned Award-Winning Poet The Displaced Nation 2015-04-29 Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang Neil Aitken (photo supplied) Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang is back with her column featuring interviews with Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) who work in creative fields. Lisa herself is a prime example. A Guatemalan-American of Chinese-Spanish-Irish-French-German-English descent, she…

  • One-Dropping and Multi-Dropping: Embracing Contradictions of the Racialized Self (A Personal Journey) Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar. Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies California State University, Fullerton My exploration of my mixed race identity began in my early 20’s after an incident I…

  • Embracing otherness, embracing myself TedGlobal July 2011 00:13:55 Thandie Newton Actor Thandie Newton tells the story of finding her “otherness” — first, as a child growing up in two distinct cultures, and then as an actor playing with many different selves. A warm, wise talk, fresh from stage at TEDGlobal 2011.