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It's important for me to think I'm mixed-race.

People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

I come from a mixed background - my mom's black, my dad's white - and I traveled around the world.

I grew up in an area of Ireland where there weren't many black or mixed-race children. But I never had any hassle; maybe I've blocked it out, but I don't think so.

Keep in mind that diversity does not just mean black. It means all of it - age, weight, gender.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, 'We're black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we're all brought up differently.'

Often, when you go to the movies or the theatre, you think, Jesus Christ, everybody is white. But my daughter goes to an amazing dance school called Ballet Black, and they have every colour: dark, white, mixed. It looks like the future to me.