Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Black–White Biracial Students in American Schools: A Review of the Literature

    Black–White Biracial Students in American Schools: A Review of the Literature

    Review of Educational Research
    Volume 79, Number 2 (June 2009)
    pages 776-804
    DOI: 10.3102/0034654309331561

    Rhina Fernandes Williams, Assistant Professor of Education
    Georgia State University

    With increasing numbers of students who identify as Black and White multi-racial and with the persistence of the Black–White test score gap, the necessity for research regarding these students’ educational experiences cannot be understated.  To date, research in this area has been scarce.  The purpose of this review is to synthesize the available literature related to the experiences of multiracial—Black–White biracial in particular—students in American schools and to identify areas in need of further research. This review offers a synthesis of the historical, social, and political context of biracial people, as well as a synthesis of issues relevant to biracial students, namely, psychological adjustment, home and parental influence, and school factors.  Recommendations and implications for further research related to multiracial students and their schooling are offered.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil

    White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil

    Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
    Volume 13, Number 2 (July 2009)
    pages 39-56
    DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2009-005

    Patricia de Santana Pinho
    State Univiersity of New York, Albany

    This article analyzes anecdotes, jokes, standards of beauty, color categories, and media representations of “mixed-race” individuals to assess the junctions and disjunctions of whiteness and blackness in Brazil.  While the multiple and contradictory meanings of “racial” mixture stimulates a preference for whiteness, thus reducing the access to power by those deemed black, it simultaneously fuels a rejection for “pure” forms of whiteness as witnessed in the country’s celebration of morenidade (brownness).  Not all forms of miscegenation are valued in Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, and some “types of mixture” are clearly preferred in detriment of others. I argue that anti-black racism in Brazil is expressed not only against dark-skinned individuals, but it also operates in the devaluing of physical traits “deemed black” even in those who have lighter skin complexion, thus creating “degrees of whiteness.”  One’s “measure of whiteness,” therefore, is not defined only by skin color, but requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the definition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class affiliation.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Melungeon

    Melungeon (pronounced /məˈlʌndʒən/) is a term traditionally applied to one of a number of “tri-racial isolate” groups of the Southeastern United States, mainly in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia: east Tennessee, southwest Virginia, and east Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations thought to be of mixed (1) European, (2) sub-Saharan African, and (3) Native American ancestry.  Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200.  Some self-identifying Melungeons dislike the term tri-racial isolate, believing that it has pejorative connotations. Until the late 20th century, some considered the term Melungeon to be pejorative…

    Wikipedia

  • Speaking Up: Mixed Race Identity in Black Communities

    Speaking Up: Mixed Race Identity in Black Communities

    Journal of Black Studies
    Volume 39, Number 3 (January 2009)
    pages 434-445
    DOI: 10.1177/0021934706297875

    Tru Leverette
    University of North Florida, Jacksonville

    Within Black communities, individuals of mixed Black/White parentage have faced diverse reactions, ranging from elevation to scorn. These reactions have often been based on the oppressions of history, the injustices of the present, and the hopes for a radically different future. This article traces the common historical responses, both positive and negative, within Black communities to mixed race identities, thereby elucidating contemporary reactions to race mixture within Black communities. In so doing, it argues that an historical understanding of these reactions as well as a recognition of the positions mixed race individuals occupy can challenge assumptions about race, difference, identity, and community—fostering new ground on which individuals can stand for common causes within heterogeneous communities.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mixing It Up: Early African American Settlements in Northwestern Ohio

    Mixing It Up: Early African American Settlements in Northwestern Ohio

    Journal of Black Studies
    Volume 39, Number 6 (July 2009)
    pages 924-936
    DOI: 10.1177/0021934707305432

    Jill E. Rowe, Assistant professor, African American studies
    Virginia Commonwealth University

    Prior to the 19th century, African American settlers founded a number of productive communities in northwestern Ohio.  During this time period, there were a number of intermarriages and couplings between indigenous people, European explorers, ethnically diverse shipmates, and free and enslaved Africans in this section of the country.  Descendants of these unions were dubbed Melungeon, mulatto, or colored, depending on the discretion of oft-illiterate census takers. Though much is written about the hostilities free people of color faced in the South, descriptive documentation of their experiences in northwestern Ohio is scarce.  An examination of primary and secondary sources offers evidence of their agency as they struggled with structural barriers that led to disenfranchisement and descent into the racially identifiable category of African American.  White resistance to these diverse settlements and settlers challenges America’s collective memory of a racially tolerant North.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • hypodescent

    Hypodescent is the practice of determining the classification of a child of mixed-race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent.  Because Caucasians were historically socially dominant in the Western world, mixed-race children in slave societies were most frequently assigned the status of their non-Caucasian parent.  This was also to keep them classified as property, which slaves were.  In some colonial societies, however, especially the Catholic Portuguese, Spanish and French, a third class of “people of color” developed.

    Wikipedia

  • Mix-d:

    mix-d: (pronounced “mixed”) Describes a position of pride and place where one can bring all sides of their cultural identity together and express an identity which is similar to but not specifically like either. By dropping the term race we make a step forward and begin to talk about a fully lived experience rather than constantly referring to an outdated social construct which keeps us trapped in the past.

    Bradley Lincoln, The Multiple Heritage Project

  • Psuedoscience

    …professors and medical doctors offered scientific evidence that ‘race mixture’ contaminated Europeans, biologically and culturally, and gave rise to a population of mixed origins that was physically inferior and psychologically unstable. …At the same time, the vigour with which White men opposed ‘race mixture’ officially, especially for men of colour, was exceeded only by the fervour with which they practiced it privately…

    Stephen Small’s (2001) ‘Colour, Culture and Class: Interrogating Interrracial Marriage and People of Mixed  Racial Descent in the USA’…

  • Multiracialism

    What this current discourse is about is lifting the lid of racial oppression in our institutions and letting people identify with the totality of their heritage. We have created a nightmare for human dignity. Multiracialism has the potential for undermining the very basis of racism, which is its categories.

    (G. Reginald Daniel, The New Yorker, 1994-07-25)

  • The Era of Moral Condemnation: mixed race people in Britain 1920 – 1950

    From the University of Kent: ‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study

    A major new study, jointly undertaken by Peter Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Kent, and Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow at London South Bank University, will investigate who was considered to be mixed race in Britain between 1920 and 1950, and how this population was perceived and treated by officialdom, the media and wider society.

    British Pathe/ITN Source

    Titled The Era of Moral Condemnation: mixed race people in Britain 1920 – 1950, the study will use first-hand accounts, autobiographical recordings and a range of archival material to understand how these perceptions emerged and the impact they may have had on the conceptualisation of mixed race people in Britain today….