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.
about
Category: Passing
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Across the Border The Nation 2016-07-21 Michael A. Elliott, Professor of English Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia William Henry Ellis, (Photo courtesy of Fanny Johnson-Griffin) A new biography of William Henry Ellis reminds us how much we still don’t know about the elusive history of racial subterfuge in America. When, in 1912, James Weldon Johnson published…
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More than a coming of age story, Danzy Senna’s first novel, “Caucasia” (Riverhead Books, 1998) addresses themes of coming into consciousness within the U.S. ethnoracial landscape. Clearly in dialogue with Nella Larsen’s “Passing” as well as Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” “Caucasia” is a first person narrative where anything that happens to the protagonist, Birdie Lee,…
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A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border The New Yorker 2016-07-20 Jonathan Blitzer The African-American businessman William Ellis, pictured here around the year 1900, frequently passed as Mexican. COURTESY FANNY JOHNSON-GRIFFIN Some people knew him as William Ellis, and others as Guillermo Eliseo. He could be Mexican, Cuban, or even Hawaiian, depending on…
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Lost kin University of Chicago Magazine May/June 2015 Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Excerpt from A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2014 by Allyson Hobbs. Used by permission. All rights reserved. “Going as white” permanently created confusion…
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The Daughter of Union County Lake Union Publishing August 2016 432 pages 5.5 x 1 x 8.2 inches Paperback ISBN: 978-1503937321 Francine Thomas Howard Fourteen years after the end of slavery, Lord Henry Hardin and his wife, Lady Bertha, enjoy an entitled life in Union County, Arkansas. Until he faces a devastating reality: Bertha is…
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Making Jokes and History in An Octoroon African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) 2016-06-25 Christopher Bonner, Assistant Professor of History University of Maryland Last weekend I saw a performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ play An Octoroon, which is a reimagining of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a popular 1859 melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation. There is…
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My mixed-race sons look white, but that doesn’t mean racism stays away She Knows 2016-07-09 Fahmida Rashid My mixed-race sons can ‘pass’ for white, and that creates its own pile of issues The first time was when Jake was in kindergarten. He was showing off the drawing of our family: father, mother, baby brother and…
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The Pain of Passing Reviews in American History Volume 44, Number 2, June 2016 pages 264-269 DOI: 10.1353/rah.2016.0028 Renee Romano, Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Comparative American Studies Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp. Figures,…
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Oral history interview with Benny Andrews, 1968 June 30 Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Andrews, Benny, b. 1930 d. 2006 Painter Active in New York, N.Y. Size: Transcript: 29 pages Format: Originally recorded on 1 sound tape reel. Reformated in 2010 as 2 digital wav files. Duration is 2 hrs., 12 min. Collection Summary:…
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Theatre Review: ‘An Octoroon’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Maryland Theatre Guide 2016-06-05 Jennifer Minich We need to talk about An Octoroon: a razor-sharp, thought-provoking, radical, comical blast from the past. Playwright and DC native (bonus points) Branden Jacobs-Jenkins returns to Woolly Mammoth for the DC premiere of An Octoroon, an adaption of the 1859…