Other: The New Yorker & TIME articles

UPDATE: Thanks to Karen for this link to a TIME article featuring Rashida :)

Occupation: Actor
Ancestry: Black, Russian Jewish, Irish, Portuguese and Cherokee

Quote: "I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want. The thing is, I do identify with being black, and if people don't identify me that way that's their issue. I'm happy to challenge people's understanding of what it looks like to be biracial, because guess what? In the next 50 years, people will start looking more and more like me."
—to Women's Health magazine in 2008

-- Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words, TIME

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An interesting article about race and progress in Hollywood from The New Yorker's Richard Brody

The Front Row: In Black and White

[excerpt] That’s one reason why yesterday’s lament by Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, in the Times, about the dearth of leading black actors in Hollywood is, though clearly well-intentioned, a little beside the point. Things take a while to get through the pipeline of production, and what looks like a trend turns out to be a coincidence. The longue durée encouraged by the historian Fernand Braudel is especially useful when dealing with the modern Hollywood machine.

But look at “The Social Network,” and, in particular, at Rashida Jones. She plays a supporting role as a lawyer—she gives the movie its memorable envoi—and the fact that she is a mixed-race woman is of no significance to the story, which is itself significant. The senior lawyers representing Mark Zuckerberg and his antagonists are white, only one is a woman, and none is young. But David Fincher seems to suggest that this will change in a few years. Only a few years ago, Hollywood wouldn’t have known what to do with Rashida Jones; now she played (and quite well) Paul Rudd’s love interest in “I Love You, Man,” and she’s got more on the way.

It’s a small but significant sign. [/]

-- The Front Row, The New Yorker