As a bi-racial American, I have often felt out of place, excluded and alone in majority white spaces. In black spaces, I have also felt different. What I have experienced is that I do not neatly fit into white culture or black culture, but rather rest in the middle. I have conceptualized this unique in between space based on my experiences and the conversations I have had with other bi-racial people over the years. Exploring this in between space has been the major focus of my creative work. I am interested in the value of black bodies in contemporary America, which has a long history of violence against its black population through slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and brutal police killings of unarmed men, women and children.

My aim is to locate myself in this discussion as a bi-racial black man who has been both the victim of racism and passed for white, because of my light skin. In my paintings, I use self-portraiture and props to insert myself into a narrative structure. They create dual meanings – fluid metaphors in our current political climate of racial and cultural intolerance, and remind me of the work we have to do in this country (and beyond) to demand social justice, equal rights, and protection under the law.

In White Liberal, Too, I am thinking about the harmful residue of racism. Racism is a system of oppression based on race. It can be direct, indirect, conscious, unconscious, individual, institutional and systemic.

A Nation Within A Nation is the title of a book by Amiri Baraka. In this painting, I was thinking about living as a bi-racial black man in two worlds. I am thinking about fitting in and not fitting in and what that feels like and looks like.