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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Achin surveyed hundreds of biracial adolescents through MySpace and Facebook, personal connections, and random interviews, asking probing personal questions of how they viewed themselves. She found that their responses clustered into five categories of identity: “Monoracials,” who defined themselves predominantly by a primary peer group; “Bidentifiers,” who identify confidently with more than one racial identity;…
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Finally, while his name does not appear in the text or bibliography, I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe to Steven Riley, who maintains the mixed-race scholarly website, “Mixed Race Studies: Scholarly Perspectives on the Mixed Race Experience” (http://www.MixedRaceStudies.org), which is the most comprehensive and objective clearinghouse for scholarly publications related to critical…
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The offspring of interracial unions were threatening to whites primarily because they blurred the lines between what many of them understood to be a naturally superior white race and a naturally inferior black race. As long as there was a clear distinction between the two racial categories—in other words, as long as the two categories…
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Black and white sexual pairings, therefore, became a widespread phenomenon that originated from a demographic imbalance, but expanded and developed through a cultural fetishization of women of color. The islands, built upon complex systems of violence and sexual control, promoted and legitimated interracial relationships. Caribbean visitors certainly held this impression. Pierre McCallum emphasized the importance…
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It is impossible to evaluate the impact of multiracial politics without attention to historical and social contexts. Without such contexts, it is tempting to conclude, as many have, that the collective efforts of multiracials are inherently progressive, inherently regressive, or even irrelevant. Appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show, for example, a black/white woman explains to…
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“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say,…
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…There is a lot to unpack and a lot of mistruths around this historical concept of mixed race. I’m 40 years of age and some young people ask me if there are any people that are older than me who are mixed race. Because in their minds people who are mixed race are usually, you…
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Quadroon Balls functioned as a form of entertainment but also served a meeting space for its participants to enter into plaçage/sexual relationships. It was at these dances that free young women of color, guided by their mothers, charmed their way into the hearts and pockets of Louisiana’s white males. At the balls, quadroon women “show…
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The use of the term “colored” was coined by mixed-race people (Ottley 1968:95). In the eighteenth century this population and their descendants created their own caste system, which was marked by color and class. In one case in South Carolina, mixed-race people formed the Brown Fellowship Society, an exclusive mulatto organization that I will discuss…