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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And people bleach in Asia — lightening creams and lotions are as ubiquitous in drugstores in Seoul as eye shadow. They do it in Europe, despite the restrictions there on sales of hydroquinone. You can walk into any number of black beauty salons in London and find bleaching creams and lotions. But Africa? If you…
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Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is…
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Michael Tisserand: When I learned more about his family, I understood a bit more not just the pressures he [George Herriman] must have felt in passing for white, but also the strange, unsettling feeling it must have been to identify with a group of people historically known as Free People of Color, or Mulatto, or…
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[Tanya K.] Hernandez’s close examination of many multiracial discrimination legal cases in a variety of equality law contexts demonstrates the fallacy and danger of that presumption. The cases frequently describe acts of discrimination accompanied by pointed, derogatory comments about non-whiteness—and blackness in particular. The overarching commonality is the exceptionalism of blackness and non-whiteness, rather than…
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I feel what we’re what we’re experiencing with [Donald] Trump and his constituents is a lot of backlash anxiety about the loss of white supremacy, but this too is part of progress. Do you know the comedian Hari Kondabolu? I bet Z will like his stuff in a couple more years. Here he is on…
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[Emma] Dabiri’s own story serves as a typically atypical example. Her mother was born to white Irish parents in Trinidad, where Dabiri’s maternal grandfather worked as a civil engineer. Her father was born to black Nigerian parents in Ireland before moving back to Nigeria, and Dabiri herself was raised in her paternal grandparents’ house in…
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It is probably doing a disservice to ourselves as Americans to oversimplify issues that cannot, by their very nature, be simple. I have shared examples of passing in America that demonstrate that this behavior is neither new nor unusual. Yes, the image of Rachel Dolezal has meaning. She is consciously constructing blackness with, I believe,…
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In my family, racial passing and the deception it involved was the ultimate taboo and betrayal. It was what the writer Nella Larsen called a hazardous business, “this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.” The first…
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“As many of you know, I was adopted. As African-Americans in general, it’s often hard to know where our ancestry, where our roots are. As someone that was adopted, for me, it has been even harder. All I ever really knew was that I was from Milwaukee, but recently, I took an Ancestry DNA test…
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“What’s scary is how many people don’t realize that racism is written into your system in America. We had a very simple, blatant system. You could see where the tumor was, and you could cut it out. In America, the tumor masquerades as an organ, and you don’t know which parts to cut out because…