Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being BiracialPosted in Articles, Audio, Autobiography, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2015-05-27 01:25Z by Steven |
Novelist Mat Johnson Explores The ‘Optical Illusion’ Of Being Biracial
Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2015-05-24
Growing up in Philadelphia, Mat Johnson lived mostly with his mother in a black neighborhood. The son of an African-American mother and an Irish-American father, his skin was so light that he might have passed for white. But being biracial meant only one thing back in the ’70s: “Um, it meant: black,” Johnson says with a laugh. “There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity there. I didn’t hear the world biracial or didn’t think of myself as biracial. And when I did hear that, I reacted to it defensively. I thought it was just black people of mixed heritage who were just trying to run away from blackness.”
Johnson was born three years after Loving Day — the historic 1967 Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal. His new novel, Loving Day, is a funny, sometimes absurd look at what it means to be mixed race in this country.
These days, Johnson has a more nuanced way to describe his racial identity. He says he is a mixed person of African-American descent. But he also uses another, more loaded word, to describe himself: mulatto…
Read the entire article here. Download the interview here. Read the transcript here.
