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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If interracial relationships were widespread prior to the abolition of slavery in 1888, they became a matter of national duty afterward. That didn’t happen “just because we all happened to get along,” said Mirtes Santos, a law student and Coletivo Negrada member. “It was a way to erase black identity.”
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“I have some Chinese roots, I’m mestizaje [mixed].”
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“If my parents had instilled any Italian culture in me, I might want to share that with my son. But if you’re talking about general whiteness, there’s nothing there to pass down.”
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People with mixed backgrounds can disrupt notions of purity that undergird race and synthesize vast cultural traditions. People with mixed backgrounds can also internalize and carry out racism.
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Just as [Donald] Trump cannot seem to utter “the African Americans” sans “inner city,” [Rachel] Dolezal’s conception of blackness is steeped in a fetishizing of struggle, pain and oppression. Opting into the struggle is yet another place where her whiteness acutely rears its head.
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“I eventually realized I could never make everyone happy with how I saw myself and my own relation to race, “Johnson continued. “I focused on making myself happy with how I identified. Ultimately, race is a strategy. Race doesn’t exist. It’s something we use to deal with ethnicity and class. We use it to keep…
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America’s “one-drop rule” historically identified any individual with a single black ancestor as black, and therefore inferior. And while most of us these days know that “racial purity” is as grounded in reality as mermaids and unicorns, the “one-drop” idea continues. Harvard University psychologists found that mixed-race individuals are still perceived as belonging to the…
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Race takes on a particular relevance in the United States, given our history and also the political climate now. In science, we see the way race has become this enduring variable that explains things like oppression. It’s very powerful and it resonates, so there’s even more responsibility to use it carefully and to really uncouple…
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Being biracial or multiracial doesn’t stop white parents from teaching their kids internalized racism and colorism. Not all interracial relationships begin with a white partner who has a deep understanding of systemic racism, white privilege and colorism. Undoing privilege and anti-blackness is a lifelong endeavor.
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The idea that white identity is under attack assumes that whiteness is something fixed, something immutable. But whiteness has always been a fluid category. Whiteness isn’t a biological fact, rather it is a sort of members-only club that has rewritten its entry requirements over the years.