Printable Biography of Lisa Jones

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From the trenches of America's cultural landscape resounds the battlecry of Lisa Jones. Part soldier in and part satirist of the current wars on racism, sexism, and other insidious social conventions, she has tackled the politics of everything from hair products to Anita Hill in her award-winning "Skin Trade" column for The Village Voice. Co-author of three books with Spike Lee, Jones' best selling book, Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair, burst onto the scene to great critical acclaim. Now she brings her unique perspective and inimitable attitude to the campus stage for a rare look at the issues which tease, tempt, torture, and terrify black women in the '90s.

Born on New York's Lower East Side to a Black nationalist father and Jewish intellectual mother, Lisa Jones has never been one to accept the passive role of "tragic mulatto." Fierce, funny and "multiculti" to the core, she has chosen instead to wear her mixed heritage with bold and unabashed flair. The opening essay of Bulletproof Diva, for instance, is entitled: "How I Invented Multiculturalism" - an achievement Lisa considers her true claim to fame. In "Mama's White" she imagines a calling card for herself that would read something like this: "My mother is white. And I, as you may or may not have figured out, am black. This is how I choose to define myself and this is how America chooses to define me. I have no regrets about my racial classification other than to lament, off and on, that classifications exist period."

Racism, sexism, and classism Jones discusses with brilliance and razor-sharp wit, but style is her true passion and most profound obsession. Black Barbies and the marketing of such cultural mulattoes like George Michael, Michael Jackson, and Mariah Carey, she tells us, turn matters of style into larger questions about race, sex, and identity in American society. So do the rape case against Mike Tyson, the best-selling novel Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan, and black sitcoms like Martin and Moesha. "Style is political of course," notes Jones. "Its about danger and choices, who is made family and who is made slave...Style is where I want to be right now." Hip, fresh and uproarious, Jones offers audiences a raw, razor-sharp look at what it means to be black and female at the end of the twentieth century.