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: Definitions
-
Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (State legislature of Virginia) The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 of Virginia, United States, was a law that had required the racial makeup of persons to be recorded at birth, and prevented marriage between “white persons” and non-white persons. The law was the most famous ban on miscegenation in the…
-
Pigmentocracy Freedom’s Story: Teaching African American Literature and History National Humanities Center April 2010 Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English, Emerita University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Definition and Background In the past couple of decades, the word pigmentocracy has come into common usage to refer to the distinctions that people of African…
-
Mestizaje is an ideology which believes that the fusion of various cultural traditions (including language, religion, food, music, etc.) in the Americas created a new and better mestizo race. This idea gained strength after the Mexican Revolution, and José Vasconcelos popularized it in his 1925 essay La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race). Source: Marc’s House…
-
In the South African, Namibian, Zambian, Botswana and Zimbabwean context, the term Coloured (also known as Bruinmense, Kleurlinge or Bruin Afrikaners in Afrikaans) refers or referred to an ethnic group of mixed-race people who possess some sub-Saharan African ancestry, but not enough to be considered Black under the law of South Africa. They are mixed…
-
The Punjabi Mexican American community, the majority of which is localized to Yuba City, California is a distinctive cultural phenomenon holding its roots in a migration pattern that occurred almost a century prior. The first meeting of these cultures occurred in the Imperial Valley in 1907, near the largest irrigation system in the Western hemisphere……
-
The Code Noir (French language: The Black Code) was a decree passed by France’s King Louis XIV in 1685. The Code Noir defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire, restricted the activities of free Negroes, forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism, and ordered all Jews out of France’s…
-
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of “separate but equal”. Wikipedia Comments by Steven F. Riley: The Plessy decision is significant in…
-
Hyperdescent is the practice of classifying a child of mixed race ancestry in the more socially dominant of the parents’ races. Hyperdescent is the opposite of hypodescent (the practice of classifying a child of mixed race ancestry in the more socially subordinate parental race). Both hyperdescent and hypodescent vary from other methods of determining lineage,…
-
Triracial isolates represent some two hundred communities scattered throughout the eastern United States, particularly in the southeast, of varying combinations and degrees of European American, Native American, and African American descent. The triracial isolates are known by a wide variety of names. New York is the home of the Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecock,…
-
plaçage was a recognized extralegal system in which white French and Spanish and later Creole men entered into the equivalent of common-law marriages with women of African, Indian and white (European) Creole descent. The term comes from the French placer meaning “to place with”. The women were not legally recognized as wives, but were known…