Waegner discusses how polycultural performances have become a contemporary art form enabling marginalized populations to construct hybrid identities free from the fixed cultural scripts that are commonly placed on them.

Pinder examines the onus we place on our contemporary and historical, multi-racial icons (like Tiger Woods or Sally Hemmings) to redeem our nation from its legacy of privileging white purity and superiority.

Readings like these inspire a question of how we might identify ourselves in a future world where everyone is multi-ethnic. Considering our tendency to use minority, non-white populations as the referent standard by which we give value and identity to ourselves, I can imagine how much a challenge a bi- or multi-racial individual poses to the world order.

Without fail, just about every topic we have covered has been laden with binaries; white/black, male/female, right/wrong, good/bad: these are the terms by which we make sense of the world. Binaries are put in place to maintain organizational clarity and to reject any opportunities for confusion. However with regards to the body, the living social and political being within which we all live our lives, the limitations of this structural framework becomes immediately apparent. It’s not simply a matter of embracing one’s multiple identities outside of the binary structure, seeing as each (racial) label is accompanied with a corresponding value within our societal hierarchy.  As Lorraine O’Grady alludes to in Pinder’s article these oppositions are “hierarchical, superior/inferior oppositions, so that male/female, black/white, good/evil, body/mind, nature/culture are not just different, one is always better than…”

All at once, the importance of having a visibly non-white population or an “underdeveloped”  “dark continent” like Africa becomes paramount in the establishment of a pure and superior race. Which brings us back to the question of how one goes about affirming one’s identity not at the expense of degrading another’s.