I am black, cocoa-colored like my grandmothers from Arkansas and Mississippi.
#Black and white 1 lan play skin#
"Her father is white, with his Irish grandmother's freckled skin and red hair and his Finnish grandfather's long limbs and blue eyes. "With her butterscotch skin and thick copper-colored curls, it's easy to see that white is only half the story," wrote Ford. "I wanted her to identify with me, but I still had to respect her." She described how she felt about her daughter's ambivalence in an essay, "Black on the Inside," that was published in Brain Child magazine. "She decided she was white, but black in the inside," said Ford. One of her daughters struggled with her racial identity when she was younger. "To some degree, we are shaped by society but ultimately how we see our identity ourselves is deeply personal to us," she said. Their two daughters, 11 and 9, consider themselves biracial. The United States is having a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage, one that is expected to accelerate, according to a report in The New York Times.ĭionne Ford, a writer from Montclair, N.J., is black and her husband is white.
One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 20 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Berry's remarks underscore an ongoing debate about racial identity in a country that is becoming much more multi-ethnic.