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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Half of the loonies in this country don’t think President Obama is American, the other half don’t think he’s Black. Steven F. Riley, e-mail message to professor, April 30, 2011.
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Perhaps the strongest reason to recognize multiethnicity is that self-definition ought to be encouraged. The individual and collective right of ethnic self-identification has been recognized and exercised by other racial and ethnic advocates as they redefined themselves with new terms like Chicano, Xicano, Latino, Asian American, Black, African American, or Native American. Multiethnic people are…
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Because of our nation’s history of slavery, segregation and interment, racism is conflated with physical racial separation. As a consequence racial progress is conflated with racial mixing. Multiracial individuals and interracial families are touted as icons of racial healing because they are thought to have special insights based on what they are—mixed. Marcia Alesan Dawkins,…
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My strongest conviction as to the future of the negro therefore is, that he will not be expatriated nor annihilated, nor will he forever remain a separate and distinct race from the people around him, but that he will be absorbed, assimilated, and will only appear finally, as the Phoenicians now appear on the shores…
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The dangers of insisting on black and white mixed-race political recognition in a system in which blacks are disadvantaged is that a mixed-race group could act as a buffer between blacks and whites and re-inscribe that disadvantage. It is interesting to note that under apartheid in South Africa, there was not only a robust mixed population known…
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“A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow,” explains Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Ethics Of Identity. “The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity is a good thing (if self-authorship is a good thing) but that the identity must make some kind of sense. And for…
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African Americans began to migrate from black to white as soon as slaves arrived on American shores. In seventeenth-century Virginia, social distinctions such as class and race were fluid, but the consequences of being black or white were enormous. It often meant the difference between slavery and freedom, poverty and prosperity, persecution and power. Even…
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I do not believe that any Mulatto race can be maintained beyond the third or fourth generation by Mulattos merely; they must intermarry with the pure races or perish. Robert Knox, The Races of Men, London, 1850.
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In general, the absence of options for multiethnic or multiracial individuals reveals part of the problem in using race as a risk assessment tool: it neglects to account for the extent of genetic variation that underlies the concept of race. Thus, not only does it disregard a number of people who do not fit neatly…
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An inhabitant of Africa remarked to Livingstone, that God made the white man, God made the black man, but the devil made the half-castes… Alfred P. Shultz. Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage…