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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So here I am. I’m still black and I’m proud, but I will acknowledge the white blood that is running through my veins if pressed more about my heritage. I also love to see the shock on peoples’ faces when I tell them that my ancestors were raped by slave masters and my “mulatto” and…
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“For me growing up as a mixed-race person, you’re forced to see both sides,” he explains. “I grew up in a house where my mother was Xhosa, my dad was Swiss, my stepdad was Shangaan, my friends were Zulu. I lived in such a melting pot that I never grew up with a preconceived notion…
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I told my reflection, with the impossible hubris of a child, That white boy will never be me. I wasn’t, I decided in the basement of our rented duplex on Dwight Drive in Madison, going to be made to live that lie. I would decide what and who was important to me and become who…
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However, though my mum’s Irish, my father is Nigerian. I am not white! This fact, one that I had never even considered before I returned to the land of a thousand welcomes, now became the defining feature of my existence. I remember that first week or so back in Dublin, when I was sent out…
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“But I am saying, in this novel, as in other works, the lessons I have learned from my life as a mother, now a grandmother, as a teacher of African American literature and a writer about race: that so-called mixedness means little in American history. As I said above, many enslaved Americans, including the great…
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As the director of African-American Studies at the University of Montana for the last seven years, I tell my students each semester, “I want you to know that I know I’m white.” I make clear that being passionate about racial justice does not require white people to become black. It requires those of us who…
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“I’m a Dominiyorkian of mixed decent. If you read my book [Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina] you will find that I’m mixed and that I am just one example of the many of how the new world came to be. I’m the genetic evidence that the new world happened. So can’t just turn my…
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Obama co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with substitute blackness; picked and chose among instances of surplus blackness; and, toward the end of his presidency, after being forced into it by blood and renewed protests in the streets, came to a truce with subversive blackness. But for much of his presidency he preferred, and personified, symbolic blackness: His…
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As Dear White People receives much deserved praise for its “diverse” representations of Black characters, the conversation on mixed race identity fails to be fully engaged with and must continue. The hypervisibility of mixed race women as video vixens, eroticized Others, or Tragic Mulattas flattens the complexities of negotiating a mixed-race identity within a Black-White…
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For Artur Santoro, 21, identifying as black is about being honest with himself—a process similar to coming out as gay. “I had to come out of the closet twice—once as gay, and once as black,” Artur tells me. He says growing up with a white dad and a “light-skinned black” mom made it difficult to…