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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I now see fluid identity as a strength. I like being able to move in and out of different communities, being able to express the cultural characteristics of my surroundings without much thought. Perhaps the best example of this came a few years ago while I was in line at Disneyland with a few friends.…
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The dismissal of the “mulatto” through his emasculation is historically grounded: “so frequently did nineteenth century writers depict octoroons as delicate beauties that the word itself began to conjure up images of passive femininity. Although by definition an octoroon was either a male or a female with one-eighth Black blood, Black men in novels were…
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The slaves imported from Africa by no means represented “pure Negro races.” Of the original tribal stocks, many had admixture of Caucasoid genes from crosses with Mediterranean peoples. During the slave trade more white genes were added. The Portuguese who settled on the Guinea Coast had relations with the natives. The slave traders themselves were…
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…Marriage between blacks, whites and Indians was legal in Virginia for most of the 17th century. Genealogist Paul Heinegg found that 99% of all mixed children in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas before 1810 came from intermarriages of free blacks with whites. Cases of white masters having children by black slaves were virtually non-existence,…
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…From the 1620s, in southern British colonies like Virginia, white northern Europeans intermarried with Indians. They also intermarried with Africans who began entering the American colonies as early as 1619. Melungeons originate from these red, white and black peoples in this period of American history. They began forming identifiable separate mixed communities when the first…
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We are, in fact, at a crucial moment in research on multiraciality. The idea that race is socially, rather than biologically, constructed is well-accepted in academy and is gaining purchase in the larger society. Most recent research related to multiracial identity begins from the standpoint that racial categories are socially constructed and racial identity is…
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..It was always a longstanding, almost obsessive concern with me to attempt to build an existence outside of the world of racism, animosity, and rejection that I felt, separated from other Chinese people. I was told I was not Chinese by both relatives and unrelated people alike and believed that I wasn’t because of it. …
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Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil. Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out. But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time. I find…
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“If, however, one is critical of race, it then becomes apparent that there is an inherent contradiction in the idea of multiraciality; for if race is a myth, then multirace must of necessity be a myth as well. Yet how is one to self-identify, to assert an identity, when the only language seeming available is…
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…A major deficiency in multiracial scholarship has been the lack of historical context, together with the concomitant error of viewing mixed-race identity as an exclusively recent phenomenon… Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, 1999-08-12