Tiffany Jones and The Mulatto Diaries

Discussions About Race In America

Being the intellectual voyeur that I am, I recently stumbled across the video Diaries of Tiffany Jones, a biracial actress/performer who lives in New York City. In her vlogs or Diaries, she tackles the issue of race in America from the mixed/biracial perspective.

The internal struggle with racial identity that she talks about reminds me of my own. I've always had to deal with the identity problem. Dubois was a genius...way ahead of his time. Jones is the perfect example of the "two-ness" that Dubois wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk (two Souls, etc)...although in the case of mixed raced people...the issue of Black and White or whatever the mixture happens to be has to be thrown in there as well. But the concept is similar.

Jones takes it to a different place by arguing that there shouldn't be two Souls, two worlds, code switching, etc.... there should just be one Soul, one world, that encompasses a variety of cultural/ethnic differences, and they should co-exist harmoniously. People shouldn't have to choose.... they should simply be who they are...whomever they want to be. People's race/cultural identity shouldn't be defined by others....or at least people shouldn't allow others to define them. But I still believe that Dubois was on the mark almost a Century ago...because the "two-ness" and two Souls struggles keeps coming up.

Will we really ever reach a point where people won't be defined by race? Will there ever come a time when multi-racial people won't have to choose?

Mulatto Diaries #60 - Who Is Black?


MD#40 - The Reasons for Starting the Mulatto Diaries

MD#32... MD#11, ....MD#25, ...MD#26, ...MD#28

Find the Full List of Diaries here.

Obama and Race: Echoes of W.E.B. Dubois

One of the things that struck me about Obama's speech last week was how much it echoed or reflected the struggle that W.E.B. Dubois described more than a Century ago. Obama provided a modern touch to an age old discussion. Dubois offers a prophetic view of the enduring issue of race in America.


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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.


--W.E.B. Dubois from "The Souls of Black Folk"