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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Biracial in ethnic derivation, nonbinary in gender identification, gay in sexual orientation, multi-hyphenate in creative aspiration, [Amandla] Stenberg embodies a similar blurring of boundaries. She grew up in Los Angeles with her African American mother and Danish father, commuting from their modest Leimert Park neighborhood to the far tonier Wildwood School. Her first movie role…
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“Very early on, I learned to, I‘d say, “Ruin the dinner party,” and that became something. I think of that as my origins as a writer, actually, was that I learned very early on that I was going to disrupt, and that I was going… My presence was not going to always be comfortable. And…
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“My inclusion in general POC spaces is a tricky one. While my ethnicity is very rarely discounted, the white privilege I’m afforded and responsible for owning quickly screws up the POC binary, too. Other people of color can respond with a hint of caution. Some openly recognize the complexity that I am holding and accept…
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The very first time I became aware of how my ethnicity affected me was when I was asked what my race was on a form when I was in elementary school. Ten to twenty years ago, official documents didn’t give you the option to say that you were multiracial or choose more than one race.…
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The [passing] genre overlooks questions of colourism, treats racial identity as rigid and fixed, and the complexities of the mixed-race experience are ignored. And then there is the issue of optics. It is tricky for the passing character to move from page to screen. [John M.] Stahl’s selection of [Fredi] Washington for the role of…
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Some Lumbees have red hair and freckles, others have tight blond curls, and others have sleek, dark hair and mocha skin. No one is kicked out of the tribe because of their skin tone — and that concept is hard for the BIA to accept, according to Mary Ann Jacobs, chair of the Department of…
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The express ornaments of black culture that appear in some of [Genevieve] Gaignard’s images—braids and Afros, head wraps and African prints—like all surfaces, can be borrowed. The photographs remind us, repeatedly, that the racial delineations imposed by society are often arbitrary and flimsy, always fraught. Katie Ryder, “An Artist’s Costumed Alter Egos Cross Racial Lines,”…
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“I’m trying to show that blackness comes in many different shades,” [Genevieve] Gaignard explained to artnet News during a tour of her current exhibition, “Genevieve Gaignard: Counterfeit Currency,” her first in New York, at the FLAG Art Foundation. Sarah Cascone, “‘There’s Enough Damsels in Distress’: Artist Genevieve Gaignard Wants to Undermine Your Assumptions About Beauty…
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My return to GW [George Washington University] helped me find myself ways I never thought possible. I’m on my way to forming a sense of self on my own terms and my life is fuller as a result. I think of myself as a traveler, a foodie, a passionate student, a news and media junkie,…
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[Paulo César] Lima’s words point to a painful and somewhat paradoxical consequence of Brazil’s racial fluidity. America’s politics of racial purity, which culminated in the notion that even one-drop of African blood made a person legally black, fostered solidarity among those targeted by discriminatory laws. In Brazil, however, the often admirable blurring of racial boundaries…