“Performing Postmodernist Passing”, Cathy Covell Waegner: Artists’ exploitation of black face and yellow face create discourse on the connection between the African and Asian American culture.

“Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art”, Kymberly N. Pinder: A multiracial individual is often used as a currency for moral redemption for white oppression over people of color.

Tiger Woods is more complex than you may think. No, I am not talking about his sex scandal or golf. I am referring to his multiracial identity in relation to his sports career. His ethnicity includes Caucasian, African American, and Asian American origins. This may not affect his golf performance. However, it affects how the global society sees the sports player. Because of his complex mix of racial identities, African Americans and Asian Americans can claim him as making progress in the sports world for their ethnicity. The celebrated athletic symbol can also serve to remedy racial issues and tensions from the past of America. The thought that parents of distinct and mixed races came together to produce such a magnificent golf player is thought to represent a truce between racial groups in a country that has struggled with its racist past. Such an exclusive thought of Woods and other prominent mixed raced individuals asserts multiracial individuals as “socio-political currency,” as Kymberly Pinder states in Race-ing Art History. They exist as symbols of redemption for past implications and consequences of colonialism and white supremacy. If the parents of Tiger Woods put aside past racial differences to produce him, can’t we all? But this view commercializes the identity as a form of currency and commodity to claim or cash in and ignores layers of socially constructed racial identities that they struggle with. It exploits their complex social reality as an item to claim for various ethnic groups and the system white supremacy, asserting that this system can do no wrong. But it has in the form of colonialism and still stalks the “other” identities of the present, such as multi-racial individuals.