Tag: Leila McDowell

  • Exhibit A is President Barack Obama. He declined to check the box for “white” on his census form, despite his mother’s well-known whiteness. Obama offered no explanation, but Leila McDowell has an idea. “Put a hoodie on him and have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then,” said McDowell, vice…

  • There were 784,764 U.S. residents who described their race as white and black in the last census. But that number didn’t include Laura Martin, whose father is black and mother is white. “I’ve always just checked black on my form,” said Martin, a 29-year-old university employee in Las Vegas. She grew up surrounded by black…