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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The media’s metadiscussion explicitly endorsed a definition of Obama’s race that was essentially intersubjective, basing its racial descriptor on a combination of self-identification and ascription by others.
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“While it seems like blackness gets an unfair share of time, it’s what keeps this whole structure intact,” says [G. Reginald] Daniel. “Everything gets collapsed into the black/white paradigm, no matter what else is going on. Everybody that comes into this country from anywhere else inevitably has to deal with blackness to locate themselves in…
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The rise of a multiracial identity dovetails with an utopian ideal of a pan-ethnic, post-racial America—one where everyone is a little something. But that post-racial space doesn’t yet exist, with one of the effects being that multiracial people are often pulled between identities. Whether someone identifies more with one race or the other is strongly…
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White Latinos need to own up to their Whiteness because we just can’t continue to afford this to continue any further. We also need African-Americans to understand that Latin America has over 200 million Afro-descendants and that going to Africa also entails going to Colombia, Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico, among other countries. Blackness does not…
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Skin color is historically the locally adaptive trait most commonly considered by European cultures as a “racial trait” in humans. Skin color is an adaptation to the amount of ultraviolet (uv) radiation in the environment: dark skins are adaptive in high uv environments in order to protect from radiation damage that can kill and burn…
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Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices. Those choices are not totally arbitrary, biologically meaningless, or without utility. But because they are choices, we have some leeway in how we define and apply racial categories. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves; how we define race does not just…
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We evaluated two distinct but not mutually exclusive scenarios for the underlying mechanism that prompted reclassification of individuals as white in the 1920 Puerto Rican census: the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing) and the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting). The underlying boundary dynamics that drove racial reclassification in the…
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Broyard was, according to Henry Louis Gates’s 1996 New Yorker article “The Passing of Anatole Broyard,” some kind of a trickster. The word Creole requires rigorous semantic handling. Just as New Orleans became the home of French, Arcadian, and Haitian refugees, the very word Creole carries an underlying sense of evasion, a connotation of which Broyard clearly took advantage.…
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“Conventional wisdom tells us that a history of passing cannot be written: those who passed left no trace in the historical record, and only novelists, playwrights, and poets could write about this clandestine practice. But I believed that the sources were out there, just waiting to be discovered. So I went into the archives looking…