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.
about
Category: Excerpts/Quotes
-
Race is an absurdity, having long ago been discredited as a valid biological category and, in the Brown decision, a defensible legal one. Yet as a means of defining and separating people, it retains its power. That power can’t be undone simply by pretending it doesn’t exist, or even by telling African Americans that they…
-
It doesn’t matter how dark or fair someone’s skin is or if they grew up in a family that struggled or one of privilege. There is no such thing as being Indigenous enough. Charla Huber, “Charla Huber: Every Indigenous person is Indigenous enough,” The Times Colonist, December 30, 2018. https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/columnists/charla-huber-every-indigenous-person-is-indigenous-enough-1.23566435.
-
“Historically, in the United States, if you had one drop of black blood, you were defined as black. You had various names for people who looked as white as their master, but they were defined as black. I didn’t grow up identifying as black because of that — for me it was more about pride,…
-
The value of black pride cannot be overstated in its role of providing hope, dignity, and political strength to a population that has long existed within a racist white supremacist nation.1 After centuries of American history that have consistently made it difficult to be anything but black (via hypodescent) and made black pride the most…
-
“I want to move people away from thinking of racism as a feeling of hatred, because it’s rare to find someone who blatantly hates people of color. But the impact of racial bias isn’t lessened because it’s not blatant. If someone denies me a job because I’m “not the right fit,” without realizing that their…
-
By the 20th century these stories had morphed into stereotypes about “mixed-race” black women, which migrated into popular culture, where we now had the privilege of being represented as “tragic mulattos”; according to white supremacist discourse, the mulatto did not have the “right to live” the US senator Charles Carroll said in 1900. We were…
-
As a half-white, half-Asian woman I find myself viewed by my white surroundings as a safe and relatable personification of their orientalist fascinations. I theorize that this intercalary role is a convenient tool for white people to mask racial tensions and guilt. By exhibiting acceptance to people of color who embody whiteness, such as in…
-
According to Alaina Roberts of the University of Pittsburgh, Native American nations “have always had this fear, and a valid fear, that when they accept black people as part of their tribe they are seen as not ‘Indian first’.” Caleb Gayle, “The black Americans suing to reclaim their Native American identity,” The Guardian, November 2,…
-
As a mixed child of a Latin American couple, I could be seen as socially undetermined — part of a mestizo/mulato muddle, yet embraced as part of a Puerto Rican national identity. But in the United States, my fate has been to be inexorably drawn to the identity of my darker parent. Like Pedro Pietri…
-
I’d thought I was alone, or just unlucky, but as I spoke to other women — 13 for this piece — I realized it wasn’t just me. Targeted harassment from Asian-American men toward Asian-American women over choosing a non-Asian partner or having multiracial children, I discovered, is widespread, vicious, and devastating. We tell kids, “Ignore…