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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Nationality demands solidarity. And you can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you can not build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races, and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto.…
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In my first marriage I paid my compliments to my mother’s race; in my second marriage I paid my compliments to the race of my father. Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
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…being mulatto is longing for oneself [o mulato é saudade de si mesmo] just like the despised hermaphrodite outcries the conflict between the sexes… the mestiço is thus an unexpected being in the plan of the world, an unfortunate experiment of the Portuguese. Mendes Correia, 1940: 122
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No stigma was associated [in the early 1600s] with what we today call intermarriages. Black men servants often married white women servants. Records from one county reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls were mulatto (Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003) notes that five out of ten black…
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The Civil War afforded the community of free Negroes an opportunity to show their solidarity with their enslaved brothers in the South. Anti-Confederate feeling was so strong in Gouldtown [in New Jersey] that all the men offered to fight. The community officially informed President Lincoln that it could raise a regiment of colored men burning…
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Subverting racial labels is not the same as subverting racism. Eric Liu, “Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation,” Slate Magazine, August 22, 1996. http://www.slate.com/id/2398/.
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In conclusion, then, mulattoes may be viewed as the apotheosis, or as the nadir, of Afro-American strength—as the hope or despair of the future. In this regard, these recent studies often differ profoundly. However, they do demonstrate significant points of agreement regarding the historical roots and role of Americans of mixed black-white ancestry—regarding their growing…
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“One of the things that interested me in the last campaign, was the byplay having to do with Obama’s racial origins. It struck me that the press and the public generally reserve the ‘mixed race’ label for the offspring of racially mixed marriages. But there is a paradox here. Obama, half black and half white,…