For Mike Duncan in Maryland, it was a sign that Americans were moving beyond rigid thinking about race.
Both have also based their humor on seemingly rigid categories, including race and gender; yet they play with boundaries, exhilaratingly breaking them down while exploring ambiguities.
But in this post-racial era where the rigid reigns of race are supposed to be loosening up, should there be outrage in the selection of Ellana Placas as the magazine's new fashion director?
Kang Youwei, one of China's leading philosophers, described a rigid hierarchy of races, with "white" and "yellow" at the top, and suggested that the "monstrously ugly black" be whitened by changes in diet, intermarriage, and sterilization.
Add to that the infamous one-drop rule that claims anybody with non-white ancestry is no longer considered white, and you get a very rigid classification of races that overlooks those who don't fit into the extremes of the black-and-white binary.
They are a "secret army", a "state nobility", a "race apart", a "rigid and arrogant cast".
Having fought against a rigid Mennonite upbringing merely to race his bike, he was also fighting the pain from an injured hip.
They emphasize the failure of science to establish exclusive boundaries around populations or lines of rigid distinctions that the term race conveys.
Life experience and personal attributes come into question only when they challenge rigid assumptions about gender -- and race, or class, or ethnicity.
Among the most immovable legacies of apartheid are the rigid geographic boundaries that separate the races.
