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 suggestion of a fruitless future for the black American is reinforced in the faces of the two young figures. Homer endows the women with traditional Caucasian features by painting them with light skin and slender facial bone structure. By representing the figures with a combination of both prototypical black and white physical characteristics, Homer…
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People of mixed racial heritage, or “mulattoes,” symbolized the dependence of white men on black labor, both in the field and in the bed. Marked by their very skin color and other features as products of the white-black encounter in the South, mulatto women were obviously white and not-white, like “our white Caroline.” They were…
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Regardless of the criticism directed toward fair-complexioned Negroes who allegedly withdrew into color conscious “blue vein societies,” most black Americans fully understood why some chose to “pass,” namely to reap the benefit of first-class citizenship. Although blacks were careful to guard the secret of those who did “pass”and tended to treat such people as dead, there…
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Instead of advocating for an endless slide of identities, Cablinasian works effectively as a marker of a racialized identity if its users momentarily stop its movement and claim identities, while retaining their original reflexivity. In two parallel arguments, cultural critics Stuart Hall (1996) and Candice Chuh (2003) advocate for an understanding of race as fiction,…
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I find it quite ironic—and perhaps a bit amusing—that after all of the debate surrounding multiracial identity and the United States Census, the most famous son of an interracial couple and the daughter of the most famous interracial couple, checked only one racial identity on their census form. It would appear that the heralding of an era…
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It is impossible to do more by way of an introduction to a study of race mixture, but it is clear from the foregoing generalizations that concepts of racial purity are largely invalid and that the psychic homogeneity of the human species is much greater than is commonly supposed. It is also evident that differences…
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At the very time that some in the United States have timidly embraced multiracialism as a fitting ideal for North Americans, Latin American critics have begun to argue that multiracialism, like racial democracy, functions as an ideology that masks enduring racial injustice and thus blocks substantial political, social, and economic reform. Melissa Nobles, “The Myth…
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The mulatto is the chief factor in the negro problem; the problem is bound to increase, then, in geographic area, in number of discontented negroes, and in its intensity, hand in hand with the increased flow of Anglo-Saxon blood into the veins of this new American man. All forms of miscegenation between the two races…
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When we see a black body [President Barack Obama] embodying the American state, and particularly a black body that didn’t have to be black—that could have chose some other kind of intersectional identity. And was no, “I’m black.” On his census form, “I’m black.” And then married Michelle who looked black from way over there and…
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While many commentators who supported the approval of BiDil for black patients state that “race” is not a scientifically precise term for identifying relevant genomic or physiological characteristics that differentiate population groups, nevertheless, they argue that “self-identified race” is a useful proxy for those characteristics. However, what is the evidence that the proxy “self-identified race”…