Taye Diggs Isn’t Wrong (Or Right) About His Son’s Biracial Identity |
Taye Diggs Isn’t Wrong (Or Right) About His Son’s Biracial Identity
The Establishment
2015-11-20
Jessica Sutherland, Marketing Director
In October, Taye Diggs released Mixed Me! as a followup to his first children’s book, 2011’s Chocolate Me! While Chocolate Me! was inspired by Diggs’ experiences as a black child in a predominantly white neighborhood, Mixed Me! focuses on the hope he has for his biracial son.
While doing press for the book this month, Diggs (aka my most famous Twitter follower, and probably yours too) enraged a lot of people by choosing to describe his 6-year-old son Walker as biracial, rather than black, in order to acknowledge both of his parents’ cultures (Walker’s mother is the actress/singer Idina Menzel, who is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent)…
…The controversy has stirred up fresh debate about the divisive issue of biracial self-identification—a divisiveness I, and many other mixed-race people, have experienced firsthand. Personally, as a biracial American, I prefer to be identified as such. But my Establishment colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, who is also biracial, prefers to identify as black.
Neither of us are wrong…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Ijeoma Oluo, Jessica Sutherland, Taye Diggs, The Establishment