“Now part of what”…“I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race— whether white or black” —Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Mark Dery, 1994
“For a white woman […] to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it’s the ultimate “you can be anything” success story of white America […] Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn’t get enough of the Dolezal story.”
— Ijeoma Oluo
Originally associated with cultural mixtures of African, European, and indigenous ancestry, today, creolization refers to this mixture of different people and different cultures that merge to become one.
“When it comes to defending Barack against the charge that he’s not Black enough, I tell folk, ‘Well, I’ve know him for over fifteen years, and what I’ve noticed is that he’s proud of his race, but that doesn’t capture the range of his identity. He’s rooted in, but not restricted by his Blackness'”
— Michael Eric Dyson in the forword of “Who’s afraid of Post-Blackness” by Touré.