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 best evidence suggests there has yet to be a sea change in the proportion of Americans selecting a multiracial identity. Furthermore, practices of racial self-classification are much less likely to have any significant implications for the direction of social policies than practices of social classification—how people are perceived and categorized racially and ethnically by…
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“I don’t believe in this miscegenation business. Though all human beings are really one, various social constructs were invented to perpetuate European supremacy.” —Marco Polo Hernández-Cuevas Lamont Lilly, “Afro-Latin And The Negro Common: An Interview With Dr. Marco Polo Hernández-Cuevas,” Racialicious, September 5, 2012. http://www.racialicious.com/2012/09/05/afro-latin-and-the-negro-common-an-interview-with-dr-marco-polo-hernandez-cuevas/.
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The use of defamation law to reinforce privately held class-based animus traces back at least to the eighteenth century. In 1791, South Carolina’s court of last resort held that falsely describing an individual as a mulatto was actionable “because, if true, the [plaintiff] would be deprived of all civil rights.” False imputations that white persons…
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“…It’s kind of like living in a shadow. It sounds funny, but that’s what it feels like. I want to be able to walk and say: ‘Hey, This is who I am. This is what I am. This ain’t what you want me to be. This ain’t what I’m thinking to be. This is me.’……
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One of the more tragic aspects of the racial worldview has been the seeming dilemma of people whose parents are identifiably of different “races.” Historically, “race” was grounded in the myth of biologically separate, exclusive, and distinct populations. No social ingredient in our race ideology allowed for an identity of “mixed-races.” Indeed over the past…
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For most of my life, I primarily identified as biracial, multiracial, or mixed, but over the last year, where I’ve encountered more racism and privilege than I have in the 40-something previous years—and that includes 18 years in Virginia—I notice that I’m more likely to identify as Black. This jives with my own dissertation findings…
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“I’m not black,” Joyce said. “I’m multiracial.” Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother who happened to be part African and part French and part Native American and part something else. “Why should I have to choose between…
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What is most disturbing about the paradoxical use of race is the effect it may have on the trajectory of ongoing human genetic variation research. By making the moral argument that race-based therapeutics address injustice in health care, and at the same time maintaining that genetics research will ultimately eliminate the need for racial categories,…
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The essence of this [racial democracy] myth is contained within an allegory common to school texts in Brazil addressing the origins of that nation’s population: the “fable of three races” (Da Matta 1997). This fable holds that the people of Brazil originated from three formerly discrete racial entities: Europeans, Africans, and Indians. These “races” subsequently…