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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Even though my skin is fair, not once have I considered what it would be like to somehow transform myself into “being white.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I exclusively sat at the “black lunch table,” not as a guest, but as a resident.…
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“Today,” [Larry] Sabato said, “a mixed-race family is a political plus. Without saying a word, you project an image of progress and modernity.” Michael Paul Williams, “Williams: A positive among the attack ads in the Gecker-Sturtevant race,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 2, 2015. http://www.richmond.com/news/local/michael-paul-williams/article_6b52ef50-c465-5bc0-a03f-fa1789661a0c.html.
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In contrast to the courts that openly struggle with fluid racial identities, others deal with the problem by merely assigning a category to a fluid identity individual in order to make the prima facie case analysis a simpler proposition. In cases out of Virginia, Texas, and Minnesota, courts were presented with claims brought by a…
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The varied tragedy of human life furnishes few more pathetic spectacles than that of the educated mulatto who is honestly seeking the welfare of a race with which a baleful commingling of blood has inexorably identified him, — who is striving to uplift to his own level a people between whose ideals and ambitions and…
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But the most wrenching reactions to Obama centered on how he did or did not respond to the numerous highly visible acts of violence and injustice against African-Americans during his tenure. Charles Coleman Jr., a civil-rights attorney in New York, talked about two critical moments in Obama’s presidency. “So, George Zimmerman is acquitted,” he says…
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To be white is not about your skin color but about your ready socialization into a privileged group membership that defines itself against blackness, a legacy emerging from an understanding of black bodies as fuel, the needed refuse by which a capitalist, slave labor economy can sustain itself. As long as blackness is its opposite…
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“I consider myself black. I consider myself biracial too. But for me—I’m not trying to define it for other people—because as you just said, other people feel differently. But, I look at being biracial as a category of being black.” —Lacey Schwartz Ebro in the Morning, “Movie “Little White Lie” Creator Lacey Schwartz Talks Not…
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It was against this backdrop that the three races met and mingled along the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Long before the end of the eighteenth century, miscegenation had become a problem for New England settlers, who, if they had no clear idea of the nature of Africans, had even less understanding of the nature…
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Mulattoes like Sally Hemings have been both weaponized and victimized in a complicated racial structure designed to protect white supremacy while satisfying the sexual fetishes of white, slave-owning rapists. Light skinned slaves were often given better positions on plantations, treated better. Sometimes they became enforcers over other, darker people. Sometimes they were freed upon the…
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The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you…