Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but&#8230;

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

As the director of African-American Studies at the University of Montana for the last seven years, I tell my students each semester, “I want you to know that I know I’m white.” I make clear that being passionate about racial justice does not require white people to become black.

It requires those of us who are white to become more, not less, aware of our racial identity and all the power, privilege, and access it affords. Masking that identity, as [Rachel] Dolezal tried to do, changes nothing.

Only changing the institutional practices that give the benefit of the doubt to white people will create a world where racial passing no longer captures our attention.”

Tobin Shearer, “Reflections On Rachel Dolezal, White Privilege, And “America’s Headlong Progress”,” Reflections West, Montana Public Radio, March 9, 2016. http://mtpr.org/post/reflections-rachel-dolezal-white-privilege-and-americas-headlong-progress. http://cpa.ds.npr.org/kufm/audio/2016/03/RW-Shearer-Dubois-03-09-16_0.mp3 (00:01:54-00:02:44).

Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but…

Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but we need to be thinking a lot harder about how we communicate these issues and how they should be attentive to intersectional specificities as well entangled proximities to whiteness.

Chantelle Lewis, “Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?” Discover Society, August 23, 2019. https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/23/please-can-we-stop-talking-about-mixed-race-identity-on-its-own/.

Tags: Chantelle Lewis, Discover Society

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 27th, 2019 at 00:34Z and is filed under Excerpts/Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but…

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