I had been told this moment would come, but I didn’t believe it. Until today. My days as “mad old bald zombie” and “the non-binary deity of spring” appear to be over. Barely an hour ago, as I stood halfway between the berries and the bell peppers in the produce section of my local grocery […]
Unfixing the race
Twenty years or so ago, I tried to write a book about multiracial identity and media called Mixed Messages. For a variety of reasons, the book never happened. But one piece of the project did wind up in print as a journal article on Eminem . . . and there was a lecture that went […]
Asking better questions
Recently, I found myself responding to one of those semi-regular “campus climate” surveys that universities (sometimes) like to do in order to take the proverbial temperature of the community with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s a task that I routinely approach with a jumbled sense of necessity and cynicism. The necessity, of course, […]
Fifty Shades of Black (conference version)
Continuing the slow march through the archives that I promised/threatened to engage in a few weeks ago, here’s a conference paper that I wrote, but never delivered. This was supposed to be part of a panel at the 2018 “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference in Shanghai . . . but Air Canada decided (wrongly!) that […]
Fifty shades of red
The more I read about the Rachel Dolezal story, the angrier I get. But not at her. Because, as I mentioned before, none of us know enough to say with any certainty who or what she “really” is. Race isn’t that simple. Identity isn’t that simple. Yet all sorts of people — too many to […]
Fifty shades of black
I don’t know the truth about Rachel Dolezal or her heritage. And neither do you. Yet an awful lot of people seem quite confident — even as they acknowledge the slipperiness of racial identity and/or the artificiality of race itself — that they know she’s really white. Maybe they’re right. Maybe. But the swiftness with […]