My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities.
It's important for me to think I'm mixed-race.
My mum is black, my dad is white, and when I was a teenager, people would say, 'So what are you? Are you black? Or white? What are you more of?'
Being biracial is so much a part of who I am that it's almost, 'Let it go already.' It's intrinsic to me. I think a lot of my fans relate to me because they felt different.
I'm black. I'm Latina. My mom is Cuban. Afro-Cuban. My dad is white and Australian.
To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half.
I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I'm mixed race. I've had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?
The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.
I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember - which, in mixed-people speak, means biracial.
I, in particular, am in a confusing spot because I am Indian, but I am white, which people don't get. So often I find myself struggling to explain my Indianness.
Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico's great federalist and apologist, has coined a wonderful term, la raza cósmica, "the cosmic race," a new people having not one race but many in their blood.
