Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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Month: April 2013

  • In fact, of course, we’re all mutts…

    In fact, of course, we’re all mutts—and as Americans, we’ve been mixing it up faster and more thoroughly than anyplace on earth. At the same time, we live in a state of tremendous denial about the rambunctiousness of our recent lineage. The language by which we assign racial category narrows or expands our perception of…

  • Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany

    “Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany,” republished in a new annotated edition, recounts Ika Hügel-Marshall’s experiences growing up as the daughter of a white German woman and an African-American man after World War II.

  • I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,”…

    I won’t get into how I learned how not to identify as “mixed,” how I began to understand that “mixed-race” in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only Black. Soon, I understood “mixed” as an intermediary…

  • The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism

    The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism Indiana University Press 2007-05-22 320 pages 22 b&w photos 6.125 x 9.25 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-21927-5; Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-34902-6 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz exposes and challenges the common assumptions about whom and what Jews are, by presenting in their own voices, Jews of color from the Iberian…

  • In Living Colors

    In Living Colors B.L.A.C. Detroit: Black Life, Arts and Culture Magazine February 2011 Jared A. Ball, Associate Professor of Communication Studies Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland [Listen to the interview with Jared Ball and Lori Robinson on WDET in Detroit on 2011-02-01 here.] A Black man with a White mother examines the concept of multiracial identity—past,…

  • Biracial cohabitation in Miss. is old news

    Biracial cohabitation in Miss. is old news Desoto Times Tribune 2011-04-27 Bill Minor, Syndicated Columnist (Covering Mississippi politics for more than 50 years.) Mississippi Republicans dismissed as Democratic hogwash a recent report of a poll showing that nearly half of the state’s GOPers believed interracial marriages should be illegal. The poll—showing that 46 percent of…

  • Skin Bleach And Civilization: The Racial Formation of Blackness in 1920s Harlem

    Skin Bleach And Civilization: The Racial Formation of Blackness in 1920s Harlem The Journal of Pan African Studies Voume 4, Number 4 (June 2011) pages 47-80 Jacob S. Dorman, Assistant Professor of African American History and American Studies University of Kansas Unlike previous scholarship on skin-bleaching advertisements conducted by scholars such as Lawrence Levine and…

  • Playing Games with Race

    NOTE: This article expands on a comment on Prof. Hortense Spillers’ article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s, Too” published on The Feminist Wire on February 25, 2011. Omar Ricks would like to thank Prof. Spillers for inviting his contribution to The Feminist Wire.

  • Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination

    This Article aims to expose the shortcomings of the prevailing crude racial categories as a means to implement the core provisions of antidiscrimination law—constitutional and statutory provisions such as the Equal Protection Clause and Title VII, and the jurisprudence that has developed around these provisions.

  • Passing for White, Passing for Black

    It was the New Graduate Student Reception for my class, the first social event of my first semester in the best graduate department in my field in the country. I was full of myself, as we all were, full of pride at having made the final cut, full of arrogance at our newly recorded membership…