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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Miscegenation and passing provide the primal scenes of American racial anxiety. In Boy, Snow, Bird they become more than themes: miscegenation and passing also drive the novel’s fundamental imagination and its modes of narration. The novel is replete with sly passing metaphors. One character describes another as “seventy percent all right and thirty percent pain…
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Within the context of the panel, the paradox refers to the “in-between” space in which mixed-race people find themselves, neither here nor there. Our faces occupy visual markers in society. On-lookers file faces into categories in unconscious, routine assessment. In that instant they assign identities to people that can usher in a whole set of…
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But contrary to popular narratives, interracial heterosexual relationships and their result, multiracial children, are not the antithesis of white supremacy, but can be easily co-opted as the glittery mask behind which racism and antiblackness continue to thrive. To be clear, though, interracial relationships themselves are not under critique here. The danger, rather, is in how…
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William kneels between Sarah’s thighs. He uses a condom. He doesn’t know where the stripper has been. He practices some of the lingo he has learned from years of listening to rap music. “I’ve wanted to get all up in that since the day I first saw you, Sierra. I love your phat ass.” Sarah…
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For African Americans, Obama’s presidency had been largely defined by his reluctance to engage with the ways that racial discrimination was blunting the impact of his administration’s recovery efforts. Obama has not shown nearly the same reticence when publicly chastising African Americans for a range of behaviors that read like a handbook on anti-black stereotypes,…
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President Obama’s historic tenure ends as the nation celebrates what would have been Martin Luther King’s 88th birthday. As I see it, Mr. Obama is the only figure to ever give Dr. King a run for his money as Greatest Black Man in American history. More than a gentle rivalry for supremacy in the history…
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Writing the biography of a black person who passed for white in 20th-century America adds an extra layer of difficulty to the detective work any biographer must undertake. This is especially true since [George] Herriman seems never to have addressed his deception in his personal writings or confided his feelings about racial identity to family…
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The definition of race has come under scrutiny by a number of researchers (Case, 2012; Soudien, 2010; Rose & Paisley, 2012). This can include the arguments surrounding the ‘one drop rule.’ This has its origin in the racial segregation laws in the USA that defines the extent to which any person can be considered African-American…
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“I think it’s important to recognize that to be Latinx is to be hybrid. There is no such thing as purity in Latinidad, if you even buy into this very American idea of Latinidad.” —Natalie Scenters-Zapico Sebastian Hasani Paramo, “A Conversation With Natalie Scenters-Zapico,” The American Literary Review, March 27, 2016. http://www.americanliteraryreview.com/reviews–interviews/a-conversation-with-natalie-scenters-zapico.
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Yet there are many Brazilians – including other black activists – who think that the tribunals are a terrible idea. Petronio Domingues, a historian with the Federal University of Sergipe who studies the fight for racial equality in Brazil, said it’s absurd to think that there are characteristics that can be evaluated objectively to determine…