I would say I consider myself more black than white, but more biracial than anything else…Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2013-02-11 02:05Z by Steven |
Well, I would say I consider myself more black than white, but more biracial than anything else…
…My identity is biracial. But I say that I’m more black than white because for a lot of biracial people I think this sort of an attempt to balance both parts of their heritage with equal weight. In my life they’re not equal. The black side attempts to dominate. And I say that because for me, being a biracial person is to be a person of color in America. And so I tend to identify more with my non-white side than with my white side. But I say that I’m more biracial than anything else because my identity and my orientation as a biracial person seem to trump it all…
..I think it goes back to the point I was making earlier, about that for me, to be biracial is being a person of color, you know, in society. If you think about… going back to the days of segregation, there was no “biracial” water fountain in this country. You had “white” water fountains and you had “colored” water fountains and if you were biracial, you drank from the “colored” water fountain. You didn’t have the option of saying, “Oh, I’m half-and-half so I can drink from both.” That’s just not how it worked. So that for me, to be biracial is to be a person of color.
—Elliot Lewis, author of Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America
Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow, “Episode 62 – Mixed Chicks Chat with ‘Fade’ author Elliott Lewis”, Mixed Chicks Chat, (August 8, 2008). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-128390.mp3 or http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/audioPop.jsp?episodeId=128390&cmd=apop.