Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

Category: Excerpts/Quotes

  • Multiracialism and Anti-Blackness

    Even if multiracialism shifts us from the “one-drop rule” to a more graduated mestizaje model of racialization, this changes nothing for black people because blackness is still located at the “undesirable” end of the continuum—or, more accurately, hierarchy. In my view, it is necessary that we first understand the stability of that unethical structural relation…

  • The Octoroon Melting Pot

    If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro (sic) blood makes the…

  • Multiracial Identity and White Supremacy

    Nonetheless, correctly and jointly, these articles recognize that we live in a society dominated and dictated by white supremacy. To understand multiracial Americans, we must place individuals with this identity within this context. Additionally, this collection does what no other has: It includes in this recognition the role that class can and does play when…

  • Race Remixed… Reconsidered

    This lame and utterly boring series has yet to even reach the already low, low bar set in the mid-1990s regarding this topic by Time and Newsweek. Beyond the drippingly bathetic nature of the reporting throughout the series, there is never more than a sentence or two given over to the fact that there is…

  • Closing the Circle

    As [Matt] Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.” The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many…

  • (Re)Claiming Rights?

    …Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after…

  • The harm done by racial mixtures I believe is much wider than the scope of this paper.

    The harm done by racial mixtures I believe is much wider than the scope of this paper. Its importance as a factor in asthma, eczema and spasmophilia are beyond question to me. So wrapped up it seems are racial mixtures with the ailments of mankind, that I have almost reached the stage that I would…

  • The history of racial passing…

    Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive…

  • When examining the issue of multiracial identity, it is important to understand the legacy of white supremacy.

    When examining the issue of multiracial identity, it is important to understand the legacy of white supremacy.  It is a theory and practice based on the irrational opinion that white Europeans (mainly Anglo-Saxon and Northern European origin) are inherently superior to non-Anglo-Saxon origin peoples—particularly those of African and Asian ancestry.  Moreover, it is also a theory…

  • Intermarriage versus Miscegenation

    We have noted important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related but separate social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. Whereas all these topics deal, on some level, with racial-boundary crossing, the implications for the boundaries themselves and the racialized social structure are…