Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • ‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study

    …The ‘mixed’ population is now the fastest growing ethnic group in Britain. While the substantial increase in the size of this group is a recent phenomenon, population mixing has happened throughout the 20th century and earlier. By the 1920s there were settled mixed race populations in a number of British seaports, including Liverpool and Cardiff, brought about in part by visiting African and Asian seamen, and significant communities in other cities including London and Manchester.

    University of Kent, “‘Invisible’ history of mixed race Britain becomes the subject of a major study”, News Release, (May 15, 2008).

  • Records of the Eugenics Society, 1934

    ‘In certain circumstances, race mixing is known to be bad. Further knowledge of its biological effects is needed in order to make it possible to frame a practical eugenic policy.  Meanwhile, since the process of race mixture cannot be reversed, great caution is advocated.’

    Records of the Eugenics Society, 1934

  • Multiracial ideology, like the monoracial ideology it depends on, is a false consciousness.

    Multiracial ideology, like the monoracial ideology it depends on, is a false consciousness. The frustration its adherents feel would be better directed at criticizing the American racial paradigm itself rather than at attempting to modify the paradigm’s configuration.  A modified paradigm, one containing a multi-racial category, would be a fallacious as one without a multiracial category.  As long as the idea of race has legitimacy, and as long as the racial hierarchy remains undisturbed, nothing will really change.

    Rainier Spencer, Mixed Race Studies: A Reader, Chapter 29.

  • Mixed Race Terminology

    Within the United States, ‘mixed race’ has gained currency as a loaded but culturally comprehensible term referencing individuals where one parent is white and the other is of color. Some […] challenge this approach and claim recognition for ‘mixed-race’ identities that were never legally proscribed. It is a strategic but frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race. Efforts to expand the discourse of ‘mixed race’ to include any combination that abridges diverse ethnic/ national origin – e.g., Chinese-Chicano, Southeast Indian and Iranian – seem rather disingenuous given the mating history of humankind. Scholarship on the impact of contemporary demographic changes and their impact on mixed identities per se must not confuse the historical particularity of mixed race. Again – more, not less, clarity and precision is needed and the appealing notion of third-ness, a separate space defined for mixedness, still confuses the challenges of racial ambiguity with panethnic mixing between minority communities.

    Azoulay, K.G. 2003. “Rethinking ‘mixed race’ (review),” Research in African Literatures. 34(2):233-235

  • race

    “…’race’  as it is understood … was a social mechanism invented in the eighteenth century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: … European settlers, conquered Indians, and Africans brought in to supply slave labor… [Race] … subsumed a growing ideology of inequity devised to rationalize European attitudes and the treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples…”

    American Anthropological Association 1998 Statement on Race

  • 2009 Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival

    The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival 2009 (2009-06-12 to 2009-06-13)

    The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival is an annual free public event celebrating stories of the Mixed [race] experience through films, readings, workshops and live performance.  The Festival is an inclusive event which brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial/multicultural individuals, families and friends.

  • Harvard Professor Kimberly McClain DaCosta Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Harvard Professor Kimberly McClain DaCosta Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.)
    Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
    Episode: #101 – Dr. Kimberly McClain DaCosta
    When: 2009-05-08, 21:00Z 

    Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
    Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

    Kimberly McClain DaCosta is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Social Studies at Harvard. Professor DaCosta received her doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program at Yale, is a recipient of a fellowship from the Advertiser’s Educational Foundation, and was a 2004-2005 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Professor DaCosta is interested in the intersections of cultural ideas of race and family and their practical effects. Her book Making Multiracials: State, Family and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford University Press) examines how multiracialism emerged as a topic of public discussion in the last quarter century, and how “multiracial” became a recognizable social category and mode of identification.

    Click here to listen to the episode.

  • It matters how and when you ask: self-reported race/ethnicity of incoming law students

    It matters how and when you ask: self-reported race/ethnicity of incoming law students

    Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
    Volume 15, Number 1 (January 2009)
    pages 51-66

    A. T. Panter
    Department of Psychology
    University of North Carolina

    Charles E. Dayle
    Department of Psychology
    University of North Carolina

    Walter R. Allen
    Department of Psychology
    University of North Carolina

    Linda F. Wightman
    Department of Psychology
    University of North Carolina

    Meera E. Deo
    Department of Psychology
    University of North Carolina

    The high-stakes nature of law school testing and admissions puts a premium on the student data presented to admissions committees, such as essays, academic and work history, and student background characteristics including race/ethnicity. 4,472 law school-bound students self-identified their race/ethnicity using (a) a mutually exclusive “choose one” format during registration for the law school admissions test, and (b) an elaborated “check-all-that-apply” format as part of a national survey administered during the first weeks at their chosen law school. Student multiraciality that was masked by the first assessment was associated with self-reported ethnic identity, discrimination experience, intergroup contact, race-related attitudes, academic performance, and trait ratings, as compared to monoracial majority students. A different profile of findings was observed across these constructs when multiracial students were compared to monoracial majority students, to monoracial minority students, and within group. These correlates also predicted the likelihood of changing identification across the two assessment contexts. These findings support the continued study of specific combinations of multiracial groups, fluidity of multiracial identities, and context effects that influence race/ethnicity self-categorizations.