Always under the skin of America. White guilt defines my life relentlessly. Never a Nazi, just a German. Marry white to dilute brown. Glad love doesn’t come in colors.

Six words to define how you feel about race may seem far too short for such a complex topic, but this is the philosophy behind the Race Card Project, an online forum meant to restart a conversation that some say has been left by the wayside in America. Project founder and longtime summer visitor Michele Norris said her six words change all the time.

Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. is passionate about roots. The Harvard professor, writer and genealogist first started on a family tree as a nine-year-old, after his grandfather’s burial, wanting to know about his connection to his father and grandfather. He’s followed his passion in his professional life, through scholarship and his popular television shows tracing people’s genealogy, and in the personal realm: still working on the family tree, he is trying to find the identity of his great-great-grandfather.

When most guests sit down to a dinner at Beetlebung Farm in Chilmark, they usually glance at the menu and then set it down again, absentmindedly imprinting it with grease and wine stains. But the more discerning will notice that the seemingly disposable item is actually a work of art — the design is innovative, the words have been selected for sound and form, and the ink has been elegantly fused with the paper.

Summer on the Vineyard conjures images of sand and surf, beaches and breaking waves, water and . . . wagging tails?

In addition to local meat and produce, last Saturday’s farmers’ market in West Tisbury featured some healthy local competition between two well-known Vineyard chefs. In the third annual Seafood Throwdown sponsored by the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance and the Dukes County Fishermen’s Association, chefs Jo Maxwell of Chesca’s in Edgartown and Teddy Diggs of Home Port in Menemsha met stove-to-stove in a stormy cook-off.