Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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Month: March 2013

  • Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism

    “Troubling the Family” argues that the emergence of multiracialism during the 1990s was determined by underlying and unacknowledged gender norms. Opening with a germinal moment for multiracialism—the seemingly massive and instantaneous popular appearance of Tiger Woods in 1997—Habiba Ibrahim examines how the shifting status of racial hero for both black and multiracial communities makes sense…

  • Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial

    Representations of multiracial Americans, especially those with one black and one white parent, appear everywhere in contemporary culture, from reality shows to presidential politics. Some depict multiracial individuals as being mired in painful confusion; others equate them with progress, as the embodiment of a postracial utopia. In “Transcending Blackness,” Ralina L. Joseph critiques both depictions…

  • The Chowan Discovery Group: Documenting the Mixed-Race History of North Carolina’s “Winton Triangle”

    The Chowan Discovery Group: Documenting the Mixed-Race History of North Carolina’s “Winton Triangle” Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners 2013-03-20 Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History Texas State University, San Marcos Here’s another region of the South with a fascinating history of mixed-race ancestry. I discovered the Chowan Discovery Group after Steven Riley, creator…

  • BlackAtlas and Laura Izibor in Dublin, Ireland

    Singer/Songwriter Laura Izibor explores multicultural Dublin, Ireland through her eyes. Featured are Temple Bar area, the pubs, the Guinness factory, the Grand Canal, the Royal Canal and a statue of Phil Lynott (the only African-Irish statue in Ireland).

  • Danzy Senna

    Danzy Senna The Southeast Review 2010-05-01 The Southeast Review is published by Florida State University’s Creative Writing Program. Interviewed by Janeen Price Danzy Senna is the author of two novels, a memoir, numerous essays and works of short fiction. Her debut novel, Caucasia, a coming-of-age story, was named the Los Angeles Times Best Book of…

  • 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…

  • Creating a “Latino” Race

    Creating a “Latino” Race The Society Pages: Social Science That Matters 2013-03-13 Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology University of British Columbia (Author of Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race) Editors’ Note: The author prefers to capitalize Black and White along with other socially constructed racial categories. For much of American…

  • Stated more bluntly, the true motive behind the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was the maintenance of white supremacy and black economic and social inferiority…

    An investigation of the people who laid the groundwork for Virginia‘s miscegenation law reveals that the pseudo-science of eugenics was a convenient facade used by men whose personal prejudices on social issues preceded any “scientific theory.”  Stated more bluntly, the true motive behind the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was the maintenance of white supremacy…

  • The most perfect expression of the white ideal…

    Virginia has made the first serious attempt to stay or postpone the evil day when this is no longer a white man’s country. Her recently enacted law “for the preservation of racial integrity” is, in the words of Major E. S. [Earnest Sevier] Cox, “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important…

  • 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;…