Identity

Black Couple Adopts a White Daughter When Mark and Terri Riding take their three children to the park where they live in Baltimore, they’re usually met by lagging stares, obvious whispering and even people bold enough to come up and question them as parents. Their children are all healthy, normal-looking individuals, but it’s their 9-year-old...
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Steven Renderos posted an opinion piece in the Twin Cities Daily Planet on behalf of the Organizing Apprenticeship Project. The message of the piece is all fine and good and whatever. What really caught my eye was this particular statement: As a state, the face of Minnesota is changing. By the year 2035 one in four...
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“Wanda Sykes says she’s ‘proud to be gay’” “You know, I don’t really talk about my sexual orientation. I didn’t feel like I had to. I was just living my life, not necessarily in the closet, but I was living my life,” Sykes told a crowd at a gay rights rally in Las Vegas on...
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WCCO is asking and I answered. Read the story or watch the video. My thanks to Jason for asking for my input. We had an abbreviated conversation on the topic a few weeks ago. I’m glad to see he followed through with the story. I was also happy to see that some points I thought...
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Yet another film festival that I just missed. This one is the Twin Cities’ 5th Annual Arab Film Festival, presented by Mizna. The Arab-Muslim world is the most embattled region in the world and its peoples are the most scrutinized – even vilified – people on the planet. How do Arab films reflect this situation?...
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MinnPost has a story on author David Mura. He talks about being Asian in the Twin Cities and his conversations with African-American author Alexs Pate about being (writers) of color in Minneapolis. “Alexs and I have talked about what it means to be writers of colors in Minneapolis as opposed to New York or Los...
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We are respectable negroes (“3 happy, non-threatening, colored folk”) has a list of 68 terms people use to refer to white people without saying the word “white.” Stuff like “mainstream voter” and “hockey mom” and “Average American Voter” and “Middle America.” You’ve heard them all before. I came to this via stuff white people do, via...
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A four-part training and discussion series addressing issues of racism and white privilege in our community, and in our organization. Each session builds on the other so you must be able to attend all four sessions to participate. Part One – Monday, September 15, 2008, 6:00 – 8:00 pm View Jamie Washington’s keynote address from...
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Via Liz Burr, I see the NY Times Freakonomics blog has posted on some research that blog and book author Steven Levitt has done on “the plight of mixed-race children.” *sigh* I can’t say it any better than Twanna Hines, who read the whole damn study and explains at the Huffington Post what a bunch of...
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