Several years ago, I had the opportunity to catch a few episodes of a rather peculiar tv show called "Dead Like Me." I'd forgotten about it, until recently seeing it referenced on some website. So I torrented a copy of the pilot episode and watched it this evening. The dead girl is played by Ellen Muth, a very understated actress.
Eerie. Funny. Strange.
In a recent article that appeared in The Atlantic magazine (January 2009) by Hua Hsu, "The End of White America?" the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson asks "Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?" This has always bothered me. And it makes glaringly obvious the arbitrary nature of "race."
True post-racialism necessarily must lead to the elimination of such facile and artificial categories as black and white. Ethnic difference will, of course, persist. But that's not the same thing at all.
