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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…Onwurah’s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother’s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah’s comment on “a world that sees only in black and white” is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film…
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…This depiction of Alice [Jones Rhinelander] fell squarely into a white tradition of depicting mulatto women as sexually available, sexually victimized, and/or sexually predatory. By the 1920s many white Americans, particularly northern whites, joined African Americans in blaming southern white men for the existence of the substantial mulatto population that now (supposedly) threatened the racial…
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…Between 1913 and 1948–the latter date the abrogation of California’s law prohibiting racial intermarriage–80 percent of the Asian Indian men in California married Hispanic women. To this day, several thousand of the children and grandchildren of these Punjabi-Hispanic marriages, which involved vows between Muslims and Catholics or Hindus and Catholics, can be found in Imperial…
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“Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear — people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration. Nearly every one of the 14 million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is ‘passing’ — the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as…
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The mulatta emerged as a dominant fictional character and as a frequent subject for painters, photographers, and filmmakers not simply because she was as Hazel Carby deems her, “a narrative device of mediation”. Far from resolving issues of race, class, and gender, the ambivalence of the mulatta figure fascinated writers and readers, artists and audiences. The…
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…These emerging beliefs provided the legal community with a framework within which to justify increasingly rigid separation between blacks and whites and increasingly stringent definitions of blackness. One clear example may be found in Judge Thomas M. Norwood‘s remarks in 1907, entitled “Address on the Negro,” in which he reflected upon his experiences dealing with…
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The Loving opinion treated race as a monolithic and meaningful category, even though the realities of the case itself subverted this account. The litigation arose in Caroline County, Virginia, a place called the “passing capital of America” because so many light-skinned blacks were mistaken for whites. In addition, the Jeters made clear that “Richard [wasn’t]…
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…Finally, Rhinelander teaches us about the limited spaces that are available in society for recognizing families that are multiracial. Like many multiracial families, Alice’s family, the Joneses, existed within an American landscape that had no recognized place for them and their lives. Just like the one-drop rule was applied to individuals, it was applied to…