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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“I wasn’t white! It’s so hard to explain this to people: I don’t feel white.” —Rachel Dolezal Mitchell Sunderland, “In Rachel Dolezal’s Skin,” Broadly, December 7, 2015. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/rachel-dolezal-profile-interview.
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Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, than we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds…
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“Children of color in general either tend to get left out of school curriculum and societal teachings or hyper-visibilized in negative, harmful ways. Multiracial kids—since mixed race is still not often considered a “legitimate” group (by both whites and people of color alike)—often experience an added layer of invisibility that is so damaging for their…
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Race is deeply entrenched in our lives and communities. Whether we agree with it and accept its logic, or challenge its history, factual basis and presence in our realities, it is an organising principle of societies that determines much of our experiences of ourselves. Having mixed raced children will not end racism and result in…
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There are many layers to my life story. I straddle the boundary between majority and minority, sometimes enjoying the benefits of one while enduring the hardships of the other. Taiyo Scanlon-Kimura, “Identity Does Not Define Experiences,” The Oberlin Review, April 24, 2015. http://oberlinreview.org/8068/opinions/identity-does-not-define-experiences/.
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“I’ve got a piece coming out for Buzzfeed about the word mulatto. I think that’s a good word to start using more often. People don’t like the word, but they can’t point to why, or they think it’s a reference to a mule. But the word is actually an Arabic word referencing people of mixed…
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My white father and Black mother both encouraged me to be Black, to embrace Black, both as a label and as a way of being part of the world. To claim the Black community as my own. To them this was an act of resistance against a society that would devalue Black people and Blackness…
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“Many people portray the history of race in the United States as the rise of the “one drop of blood” rule. We have made too much of this. It was not the one-drop rule that kept the edifice of Jim Crow so strong. Racism could work through many different rules about ancestry, and it did.…
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The controversy has stirred up fresh debate about the divisive issue of biracial self-identification—a divisiveness I, and many other mixed-race people, have experienced firsthand. Personally, as a biracial American, I prefer to be identified as such. But my Establishment colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, who is also biracial, prefers to identify as black. Neither of us are…
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In the past, “white” was the only racial option available to Arab American respondents, a classification that didn’t truly reflect their social standing and hurt efforts for their political empowerment in post-Sept. 11 America, said Samer Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “If you are going to classify me as white, then treat [me]…