“Are you–like– Rashida Jones Black?”

This sub-series of Self-Portrait entitled Girl Like Me, is a deeply personal and reflective journey into my own American black and white mixed identity.

Welcome, again, to Art on My Mind. This sub-series of Self-Portrait entitled Girl Like Me, is a deeply personal and reflective journey into my own American black and white mixed identity. Through painted portraits of mixed-race women, I will begin to explore my story as a young person by exploring our stories as people who have always existed and will continue to exist. It is my hope this work is representative of the nuance and intersection in me, in this nation, and in this world.

Girl Like Me is more than just a collection of art; it’s a dialogue—a visual art journalism project seeking to uncover the layers of complexity within people of culture, mixedness, heritage, identity, and belonging, honoring the nonlinear, nonpolar, and often invisible narratives that shape who we are.

I recognize that the themes explored here—race, identity, and intersectionality—can be deeply emotional and sometimes uncomfortable, particularly for those outside these experiences. My hope is not to alienate but to invite: invite understanding, reflection, and a willingness to see the world through a lens that might differ from your own.

If at any moment you feel challenged, I encourage you to pause, breathe, and consider the courage it takes to share stories like these. I wasn’t ready to, but the collection is done. If I cannot have an opinion even on being a mixed Black person, then my identity is then being erased in the process. By engaging with this project, you are opening yourself to a world that you may feel unfamiliar with. Embrace it.

Thank you for stepping into this space with me and allowing me to define myself for myself with a little help from my friends.

“Are you–like– Rashida Jones Black?”

by Maya James

Rashida Jones is a Pisces ©Maya James 2024

It’s 2015. I’m a young, very awkward, very naive, very misguided seventeen-year-old sitting on the couch at home, eating potato chips with my mother–who would later sell this house– watching the red carpet on E! before the very well-marketed Screen Actor’s Guild Awards. I am about to witness an overlooked and definitive moment that would massively shape the trajectory of culture for mixed women in our nation forever. Television host Danielle Demski along with her awkward co-host JD Heyman are floating around doing the bizarre job of interviewing all of our selected celebrities to explain what, or rather, “who”, they are wearing, how life has been, any projects that are coming up, and if there are any other products they would like to place before the ceremony.

Rashida Jones is iconically beautiful this evening. Our generation’s hilarious and beautiful actress is wearing a drop-dead gorgeous gown by Frech fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro with an abstract black and white print, trimmed in blue on the bodice–to create a frame for a deep-v neckline. It's the kind of beautiful that a person of intersectional backgrounds can be that might completely baffle someone like Danielle Demski. It’s not on me whether or not Demski was reacting out of the confusion that a woman of color could, in fact, be more aesthetically beautiful than her, but a similar-seeming discomfort is omnipresent when Demski begins to open her mouth:

“You look like you’ve just come off an island or something. You’re very tan, very tropical,” she says.

Rashida Jones holds back the face all us mixed girls want to make when we are mis-raced. Similar to being misgendered, it’s a type of ignorance that, while microaggressive, sparks reminders of every time someone told us that, in their eyes–even though we are the ones who know who our Mama and Daddy are–we were somehow not the true authority on our race or ethnicity.

Exhausted, Jones replies:

“I mean, you know? I’m ethnic.”

I feel for her in that moment, even at seventeen. Every single time a white person misconstrues who you are only to become confused at your intersections and write you off as “exotic”, “of color” or “ethnic”. We are now categorized into an obscure “trash” folder in their brains called “racially ambiguous”, and unfortunately, we can even get confused and start to put ourselves there first. This tends to be followed by social punitiveness after our presence and differences make others uncomfortable, usually in the form of the non-mixed person making things weird or awkward, like when the cis, white, co-anchor says “Me too”, which, according to Lauren Le Vine on Refinery 29, “...made no sense.”

It’s so hard to come up with a word to describe yourself when people of all backgrounds want to tell you that you’re not what you know you are. Jones, like me, is Black and Jewish, and there is no way to be the Black Jewish daughter of a Blonde Jewish mother without members of your own community telling you that you are not Jewish enough, not Black enough, and are now construed into some equally weird and incorrect category elsewhere. I have been told by a white person that I am not black, I am Mexican, even though I am related to no Mexican people. I have been told by a Black person that I am not Black, I am Asian, even though I have done a genetics test, and I am certain I have no Asian DNA. Our communities would rather have us claim half or none of our identity than have us correctly claim both or a multitude of our identities as a full person. Other mixed people are not exempt from this polarizing attitude either. Many of us feel like we need to check one or the other box on our government, health, school, and employment paperwork instead of selecting all that apply.

We need to give Rashida Jones a break. She does not exist to live in the footsteps of her father, Quincy Jones, or her white Jewish mother, actress Peggy Lipton, who says when Jones was growing up she would always say that she wanted to be the “...first female, black, Jewish president of the U.S!” As she came to grow into the mixed, Black, Jewish woman she is, she found out the truth of it all.

The dilemma of mixedness is that, as Lauren Le Vine points out in her article “That She’s Not Tan, She’s “Ethnic”’, “...other people had–and continue to have–trouble with the different adjectives Rashida would use to describe herself.” Jones’s sister, Kidada, has historically identified more with her Blackness from a young age than her sister–according to Jones and her mother–but being from the same blood and background, Kidada points out that there is not one set way of being a mixed black woman and that disidentifying with yourself to make it in an industry that continuously changes your identity to shape a product or a storyline in a work of media can be extremely challenging: “Rashida has it harder than I do” says Kidada, “she can feel rejection from both parties.”

In non-white communities, Black mixed people are often accused of being light-skinned, saditty, arrogant, and undeserving of any positive experiences they may receive in life. This makes sense for some light-skinned or mixed people, as people from many different backgrounds can be these things. However, it is harmful when we take out the rage we feel towards the nature of privilege, white supremacy, and capitalism onto other marginalized communities. Mixed Black people are still Black people, can have Black features and dark skin (or not), get killed by the police, and still get discriminated against in white spaces. Our ability to codeswitch is both a point of privilege and a survival mechanism deeply engrained into our psyche. The only thing that is accomplished by socially punishing light-skinned or mixed people for being mixed is making their lives unbearable in each community they belong to, with no safe space in sight. This might be why people of all communities assume mixed people are standoffish or arrogant. Frankly, to speak for myself, it could be because we are afraid you hate us before you know we love you.

In Jones’s words: “When I audition for white roles, I’m told I’m ‘too exotic’. When I go up for Black roles, I’m told I’m ‘too light’. I’ve lost a lot of jobs, looking the way I do.”

Think about this. No one can control how they look when they are born. Mixed women, while having the privilege of being historically considered more institutionally aesthetically appealing to the white gaze and how it perceives and perpetuates the images of Black people, are still assaulted, exploited, and exposed to gender-based violence at alarming rates. We tend to get rejected from things because, in a world that is polarized racially, we end up in a box of ethnic ambiguity that has been disguised as a way to discredit and erase people of color who contain many identities. Mixed people do not do well in apartheid states or racial caste hierarchies, which should be a red flag waving in everyone’s face about the state of humanity.

I am confused why a mixed black woman still feels confined to the role of a white person, or that very obviously fully black, LatinX, Asian, or white children are playing mixed people in movies and on television as if we have no real-life examples of the variety of ways mixed people look, or if there is some imaginary shortage of mixed actors. As displayed in Yaba Blay’s One Drop, we are dark-skinned, light-skinned, multilingual, diasporic, talented, African, Asian, transnational, transcontinental, transgender, Latina, Palestinean, Jewish, LGBTQIAP+, have straight hair, have curly hair, are white, and are Black. In this nation, when you are born mixed, the narrative perpetuated by media that we will somehow bring people together is not only a myth, counter to the reality of things, but in fact, social settings constantly reinforce that mixed people are deserving of no heritage, no lineage, no ethnicity, no self-identification, no community, no safe space, no culture for you, you non-existent mixed person. Pick, damn it, says the world, you’re either Black or white or half-something, never a whole person, and we will fight you the entire time, so you better choose correctly.

“I want to say, ‘Do you know how hurtful that is to somebody who identifies so strongly with (...) who she is?’” says Rashida Jones to Refinery29.

So, inevitably, mixed people like Rashida, Kadida, and me, choose their own path. We proclaim who we are in our entirety as we know to be true, and that is what makes us authentic. Mixed people are as dislocated as the entire United States occupation itself, and we have shown time and time again that when there is no culture to begin with, the people will make one. Mixed people are the epitome of that culture.

So, the next time you talk to a person who you consider “biracial”, if you feel inclined to judge where they come from, ask them what they identify as. It may surprise you. Or just read One Drop by Yaba Blay. I chose Rashida Jones to start this conversation/series because we have this ugly concept in black culture of “Rashida Jones Black”, which is, to paraphrase, to assimilate quietly out of your blackness via your mixedness into a point of “passing”, but when Jones herself was asked if she “passed”, she replied:

“Passed?! I had no control over how I looked. This is my natural hair, these are my natural eyes! I’ve never tried to be anything I’m not.”

Even more disappointing, from my perspective, is that this is a stereotype that we have imposed on Rashida. Entire communities love watching her light up the room and make us laugh, but the focus, like for many women artists of color, has geared often to her social location and not the merit of the work she creates. This is robbing her of the celebration she deserves as an artist. Jones even expresses the all-too-familiar feeling of guilt based on one’s social location that comes with a mixed identity. “I feel guilty,” says Jones, “knowing that because of the way our genes tumbled out, Kidada has to go through pain I didn’t have to endure. Loving her so much, I’m sad that I’ll never share that experience with her.”

Quantifying and authenticating the Blackness of people who are already struggling with their identities should not be our prerogative, making the world a safer place for all Black people, should be. We are getting distracted from the mission, veering off course and blaming it on Rashida Jones Black when Black is Black is Black.