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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What is it about black girls that you find so attractive? We come in all different shades and sizes. Amongst all of the women who could be identified as black, there exists such a huge diversity of features and appearances that it is hard to talk about what a “black woman” looks like in any…
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While advocates in the multiracial movement never explicitly indicate distaste for the minority that constitutes part of a mixed race individual, the insistence on the development of a new racial designation inadvertently associates this minority with inferiority. African-American studies professor Jared Sexton argues that the implicit rejection of the black race in multiracial discourse is…
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As scientists have repeatedly pointed out, the concept of race is fundamentally cultural, not biological. Nevertheless, because some realities of population genetics are unfortunately caught up in the false rhetoric of race, we might have to rely on the construct and acknowledge the biological differences in HLAs in order to save lives. Black people already…
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When interviewer-based surveys try to gather data on ethnicity their questions may not always capture what they are aiming for; rather, it is the interviewees’ opinion on what ethnic group (or groups) they think they belong to. Partly in response to this sort of experience, the idea of ethnicity has now been replaced by today’s…
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“Gender is one of the most important predictors of racial identity, with women more likely than men to incorporate multiple races into their self-identification, all else being equal. This finding emerges across black-white, Asian-white, and Latino-white biracials, though the effect is most pronounced among black-white biracials. Biracial men are relatively more inclined to identify with…
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To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting…
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The idea of widespread interracial sex was central to the construction of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy. Sex and its traditional connection to intimacy and interracial reproduction were used to create a racially complex society and as an effective weapon of subjugation for the enslaved. Sex was attributed a transcendental meaning…
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“My identity was questioned a lot when I was growing up. I never really felt like I fit in anywhere. My mom’s boyfriend, who’s basically my stepdad, is Black. My white friends’ parents wouldn’t have a problem with me, but when they saw my stepdad, they wouldn’t let their kids come over anymore. And in…
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In 2004, my mother and I were having an argument and she called me a “Black bastard.” And I’m like, even if you want to hurt my feelings, who says that? Call me stupid. call me whatever, but “Black bastard?” Where did that come from? So after a pregnant silence, she told me the story…
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Research shows that white parents of multiracial children are often, for the first time, thrust into the realities of racism, are subject to an experience from which they had previously been immune. Where they had once had the privilege of invisibility, white mothers who were raised in homogeneously white families may now face racism from…