Mixed Race Studies
Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
recent posts
- The Routledge International Handbook of Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health
- Loving Across Racial and Cultural Boundaries: Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health Conference
- Call for Proposals: 2026 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at UCLA
- Participants Needed for a Paid Research Study: Up to $100
- You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness.
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Category: Excerpts/Quotes
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After my school experiences, any demands to explain where I came from disconcerted me. My parents taught me to hold my head erect, to look directly at adults who addressed me, to smile with my eyes not just my teeth, to speak clearly, and to be conspicuously open, transparent and honest. My dad said that…
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Today, this hyper-sexualization and fetishization of mixed race people has unfortunately become the norm. A disproportionate amount of mixed women experience sexual violence compared to other minority women. The 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence study found that mixed race women experienced rape, physical abuse, and stalking by an intimate partner at a rate…
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Nor is he [Thomas Chatterton Williams] the first thinker to ponder how multiracial people navigate a world so obsessed with the minutiae of race. Self-Portrait in Black and White doesn’t meaningfully engage with centuries of work from black-identifying scholars who wrote accessibly about their backgrounds, especially those with mixed-race ancestry. Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing, was…
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Identity angst is a luxury of the privileged. And I was privileged. And I was/am angst. The fact that I have time space and a vocabulary to tease out my own relationship to race and represent Asian, and to lobby for more gender equity or fight for diversity in Western media and culture, means that…
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Instead, [James] Young Deer began to create a new identity and in his own way “discovered” his Indian roots. After all, “going Indian” might open the door to other opportunities, especially in an era of dime novels and Wild West Shows. With dark skin, a braided wig, a feathered war bonnet, and a name like…
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“That fascinates me that there was a black person [Samuel Codes Watson] who had white privilege and was cognizant of his ethnicity,” he said. “When you really think about it, he kinda wasn’t a black person when he was there. That’s such a juxtaposition for me.” —Tylonn J. Sawyer Micah Walker, “He passed as a…
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“It’s really hard for administrations to catch up,” says G. Reginald Daniel, PhD, professor and vice chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One of the key areas lagging behind in universities is student counseling. “There are special kinds of microaggressions that come with multiracial identity,” says Daniel. “Our…
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Her [Brittany Howard’s] most striking lyrics come on Goat Head [in her album Jaime], as she discusses growing up as the child of a poor, interracial couple in rural Alabama. “When I was born – or rather when my sister was born in 1984 – that was like the first wave of mixed babies, little…
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In the United States, racial segregation enforced strict political and social barriers between Blacks and whites long after slavery. (“One drop” of African blood designated you as “Black,” no matter what your complexion or ethnicity.) But in Puerto Rico and other parts of Latin America where racial mixing was common, there are numerous ways to…
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Hair is Africa’s most enduring marker in America, the phenotype most likely to persist through generations of interracial children. Hair is what black folks look at when trying to determine who is one of us. Many mixed-race people are not permitted to fully determine their own identity because of how the world insists on defining…