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.