The Mourning the Creation of Racial Categories (MCRC) Project engages the visual and performing arts —dance, music, theater, poetry, visualization — to tell the stories of how people in the United States were divided into a handful of unequally valued racial categories, such as Asian, Black, and White. This was not an easy process. It involved breaking ties with people who did not look like them including ties with ancestors, family members and friends. That categorical system required those in the White category to distance themselves from people in nonwhite categories.

The MCRC Project offers a language for talking about how our country, communities, and relationships have not yet recovered from a categorical system made in this way.