Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial identities and resilience to racism: The role of families

Medical News Today
2021-09-14

Annabelle Atkin, Assistant Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

What challenges do Multiracial people face, and how do these challenges affect their well-being? Dr. Annabelle Atkin explains in this feature. Liliya Rodnikova/Stocksy

In this opinion feature, Dr. Annabelle Atkin — an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN — explores the unique challenges that Multiracial people face in attaining and maintaining well-being and offers suggestions on how to mitigate those challenges.

“I thought you were full Asian,” a professor of color once told me. “I didn’t know you were Asian!” a native Korean friend had told me a couple of years before.

Being Multiracial is often complicated for people to understand. This is especially the case in the context of the United States, where the dominant White group has fought to establish and maintain a clear color line throughout history to justify the oppression of People of Color.

The racial groups we know today are not biological. They were created, or socially constructed. And they are always changing. Just take a look at how the U.S. Census categories have shifted across the decades.

To protect the racial power structure in the U.S., Multiracial people have been erased throughout its history. One of the most well-known examples of this is the one-drop rule, which was created to ensure that anyone with a single drop of “Black blood” be considered Black to justify enslavement and, later, Jim Crow segregation.

As a result, our Multiraciality is often overlooked, and many people still struggle with accepting and acknowledging Multiracial individuals because to do so challenges their Monoracial understanding of the world…

Read the entire article here.

Plessy v. Ferguson: An Excerpt from Firsthand Louisiana

University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
2020-08-13

Devon Lord, Editor In Chief

Discover the history of the Pelican State through the eyes of the people who lived it and shaped its course. In Firsthand Louisiana: Primary Sources in the History of the State, historians Janet Allured, John Keeling, and Michael Martin have compiled dozens of important, interesting, devastating, and even entertaining firsthand accounts cover Louisiana’s history along with questions for further analysis and discussion. Below is an excerpt concerning the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision and its impact on Louisiana and the nation as a whole.

1896:PLESSY V. FERGUSON

The most important United States Supreme Court case to originate in Louisiana is Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 affirmed the constitutionality of southern segregation laws. In 1890 the Louisiana legislature passed the state’s first segregation bill, the Separate Car Act, which required that railroads provide separate cars for white and black passengers. As a state senator from St. John the Baptist Parish, Henry Demas was one of four remaining African American Republicans in that chamber. In response to the act, leading members of the Afro-Creole community in New Orleans formed the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens Committee) to challenge the legality of the act. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy bought a first-class train ticket from New Orleans to Covington and boarded the white passenger car. A private detective hired by the committee ensured that the conductor had him arrested for violating the Separate Car Act, and the test case began. After losing both in a local court and the Louisiana Supreme Court, the case was appealed to the US Supreme Court. In a 7–1 decision, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, asserting, among other points, that it was a reasonable exercise of the state’s police power to maintain the health, safety, and morals of its citizens. Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, however, saw through the reasoning behind the law and the majority opinion, and declared in the most famous dissenting opinion in the history of the Court that the decision established second-class citizenship for African Americans in the South. Through the “separate but equal” rule, that accommodations for each race had to be roughly the same in quality, Jim Crow laws came to dominate southern race relations until overturned fifty-eight years later by Brown v. Board of Education…

Read the entire article here.