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: Passing
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Rachel Dolezal’s True Lies Vanity Fair 2015-07-19 Allison Samuels Justin Bishop, Photography Photograph by Justin Bishop. For a time this summer, it seemed all anyone could talk about was the N.A.A.C.P. chapter president whose parents had “outed” her as white. The tornado of public attention has since moved on, but Rachel Dolezal still has to…
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Faking Black identity: An American tradition The New Pittsburgh Courier Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2015-06-27 Robert Fikes Jr., Reference Librarian San Diego State University, San Diego, California The recent case of Rachel Dolezal, the White woman who reinvented herself as African American and headed the Spokane, Washington NAACP, is just the latest sensationalized instance of “passing.” Though…
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Dolezal and the Defense of the Community Public Seminar 2015-07-09 Richard Kaplan Reflections on the unique difficulties of passing from white to black in America It strikes me that an incredible amount of media attention and denunciation has focused on a poor, perhaps deluded woman in Spokane, Washington. Rachel Dolezal’s crime was to lie and…
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From ‘blood quantum’ to multiracial bill of rights, Dolezal saga ignites talk of identity The Seattle Times 2015-06-17 Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter The endless fascination with the Rachel Dolezal story reveals our hunger to talk about racial identity in all its complexity. When Amanda Erekson was in her early 20s, a friend introduced…
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The weird, strange narrative of Rachel Dolezal The Remix WHYY-FM Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2015-06-17 James Peterson, Host What determines your race? Is it about genetics or cultural identification? The curious case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who has been passing for black, has been met with surprise, outrage and confusion. Dolezal, former president of the Spokane…
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5 black Chicagoans who passed for white The Chicago Sun-Times 2015-06-16 Kim Janssen, Staff Reporter A baseball player who broke baseball’s color line decades before Jackie Robinson was born. A pioneering politician who has a West Side school named after him. An Emmy-winning “blonde bombshell.” A poet at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. And…
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Dolezal, Jenner raise fundamental questions about identity The Boston Globe 2015-06-16 Farrah Stockman, Globe Staff Finally, Rachel Dolezal — the self-identified black daughter of two Caucasian parents — has spoken. And finally, she was asked a question I’ve been wondering for days: When did it start? “At a very young age,” she replied. “About 5…
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Dolezal Controversy Sharpens Focus on Racial Identity University of Massachusetts Press 2015-06-26 The recent controversy concerning Rachel Dolezal’s racial identity steered many readers to a 2008 UMass Press book by Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture, which explores cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as…
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Driven by Love or Ambition, Slipping Across the Color Line Through the Ages The New York Times 2015-06-28 Rachel L. Swarns Clarence King, a Yale-educated white man who worked as a geologist in the 1800s and dined at the White House, lived a secret life as James Todd, a black train porter with a wife…
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Texas woman discovers she’s white after 70 years KHOU Houston, Texas 2015-06-22 Marvin Hurst, Reporter KENS 5 TV, San Antonio, Texas Byrd with her adoptive family. (Photo: (Photo: Family Photograph)) The mere mention of Rachel Dolezal’s name sets Verda Byrd off like a stick of dynamite. “She lied about her race,” Byrd said. “I didn’t…