Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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Category: History

  • How the Africans Became Black

    How the Africans Became Black The Atlantic 2012-12-13 Wayétu Moore A Liberian-American reflects on the experiences of Africans who have moved to the United States, a growing community that accounts for 3 percent of the U.S.’s foreign-born population. After leaving my nine-to-five job, I was led to a New York Immigration Coalition job posting. While…

  • Let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people…

    In the third year of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson pleaded “to let our settlements and theirs [Indians] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” Six years later, just before returning to Monticello, Jefferson promised a group of western Indian chiefs, “you will unite yourselves with us,… and we shall all be Americans;…

  • The loving bride drank the blood, made the necessary oath, and his honour joined their hands, to the great satisfaction of all parties.

    In 1819 a Scotsman named James Flint crossed the Atlantic Ocean, made his way from New York to Pittsburgh, sailed down the Ohio, and settled for eighteen months in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just opposite Louisville, Kentucky. His letters home described everything from native trees and shrubs to the “taciturnity” of American speech, “adapted to business more…

  • Statehood Issue Stirs Passions About Puerto Rican Identity

    Statehood Issue Stirs Passions About Puerto Rican Identity Puerto Rico: Unsettled Territory Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication Arizona State University 2012-10-29 Kailey Latham Cronkite Borderlands Initiative SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — What does it mean to be Puerto Rican? For over 500 years, the people of this island have struggled with the…

  • The portrait of a nation: Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s study on the Brazilian ‘anthropological types’, 1910-1920

    The portrait of a nation: Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s study on the Brazilian ‘anthropological types’, 1910-1920 (Retratos da nação: os ‘tipos antropológicos’ do Brasil nos estudos de Edgard Roquette-Pinto, 1910-1920) Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas Volume 7, Number 3 (September/December 2012) pages 645-670 ISSN 1981-8122 DOI: 10.1590/S1981-81222012000300003 Vanderlei Sebastião de Souza Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio…

  • Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture

    There is no teasing apart what interracial couples think of themselves from what society shows them about themselves. Following on her earlier ground-breaking study of the social worlds of interracial couples, Erica Chito Childs considers the larger context of social messages, conveyed by the media, that inform how we think about love across the color…

  • Jean Toomer and the History of Passing

    Jean Toomer and the History of Passing Reviews in American History Volume 41, Number 1, March 2013 pages 113-121 DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0016 Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies Brown University Jean Toomer. Cane. With a new afterword by Rudolph B. Byrd, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.…

  • Kiss Me, I’m 1/16 Irish: African-, Irish-, and the Hyphenated-Americans

    Kiss Me, I’m 1/16 Irish: African-, Irish-, and the Hyphenated-Americans The Huffington Post 2013-03-15 Theodore Johnson, Op-Ed Columnist, 2012 White House Fellow Years ago, I spent Saint Patrick’s Day in an Irish pub singing ditties with a restaurant full of my newest friends—and left feeling a little green with envy. The Irish-American traditions and fare…

  • Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars

    In “Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses,” Betsy Erkkilä argues that it is through the historical and psychological dramas of blood as a marker of violence, or race, or sex, or kinship that Americans have struggled over the meanings of democracy, citizenship, culture, national belonging, and the idea of America itself as it was constituted and…

  • Mixed Race Across the Pacific

    Mixed Race Across the Pacific University of Southern California Freshman Seminars Spring 2013 Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion In an era when a mixed-race President of the United States proudly proclaims himself as the first Pacific President of America, how might we rethink the study of race in a global, rather than merely a…