Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Thinking ‘Post-Racial’ Ideology Transnationally: The Contemporary Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Americas

    Thinking ‘Post-Racial’ Ideology Transnationally: The Contemporary Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Americas

    Critical Sociology
    Published online before print 2015-07-03
    DOI: 10.1177/0896920515591175

    Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa, Assistant Professor, Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education
    University of Alberta, Canada

    This article introduces the special issue on post-racial ideologies and politics in the Americas. It argues for the necessity of a transnational frame when examining the related, yet historically variable expressions of post-racial ideology and politics across diverse moments and contexts in the Western Hemisphere. The article examines various modalities of ‘post-racial’ thinking and politics, including mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), colorblindness, and multiculturalism, elaborating their interrelated characteristics in relation to the silencing and minimization of racism and the elision of the role race plays in maintaining structural inequalities. The intersections between the post-racial and racial neoliberalism are highlighted as are the implications of post-racial ideologies for anti-racist and decolonial politics. Special issue article contributions are also described and situated.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Oreo: A Comeback Story

    Oreo: A Comeback Story

    On The Media
    WNYC FM
    New York, New York
    Friday, 2015-07-17

    Mythili Rao, Host and Producer

    Guests: Mat Johnson, Harryette Mullen, Mark Anthony Neal and Danzy Senna

    In 1974, Fran Ross published her first and only novel, “Oreo.” The satirical tale of a biracial teenager’s Theseus-style quest to find her father was almost completely overlooked in its era. Now, more than 4 decades later, its re-issue is being met with critical praise. Producer Mythili Rao explores why Ross’s take on racial identity was so ahead of its time.

    Listen to the interview (00:10:58) here.

  • Layers of Meaning in Mr. Obama’s Kenya Trip

    Layers of Meaning in Mr. Obama’s Kenya Trip

    The New York Times
    2015-07-23

    The Editorial Board


    Nairobi, Kenya (Credit: Ben Curtis/Associated Press)

    There often comes a time in the lives of Americans when they feel drawn to explore their roots, a quest that might take them on a pilgrimage to the “old country,” whether County Limerick, or Guangzhou, or a West African country from which their ancestors were abducted as slaves.

    Roots are an integral part of one’s identity, especially in a time of mass migrations. So it is no surprise that Barack Obama’s first visit to Kenya as president should be enormously poignant, complex and absorbing. This is no typical presidential visit — and this is no typical descendant of immigrants.

    The mix of narratives behind Mr. Obama’s trip is extraordinary. It is the ultimate American dream: the step-grandson of an illiterate African rising to the most powerful office on earth. There is Mr. Obama’s own story so movingly told in his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” about a youth raised by a white mother in Hawaii trying to build an identity out of his complex background, and the central role played in this search by the Kenyan father he meets only once…

    Read the entire article here.

  • On Being Biracial and Affirmative Action: Where Do I Fit in?

    On Being Biracial and Affirmative Action: Where Do I Fit in?

    Skirt Collective
    2015-07-23

    Shannon Luders-Manuel
    Los Angeles, California

    Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied entrance to the University of Austin, Texas [University of Texas, Austin], is taking her case to the Supreme Court, calling the decision a clear result of affirmative action. While I don’t know the figures (but this For Harriet writer does), I do have a personal investment in enlightening others on the role that affirmative action may play out for a real live, three-dimensional, skin and bones person. Perhaps learning someone’s story can help those who may be quick to judge the policy.

    The only instance in which I know for sure that I was a recipient of affirmative action was at the preschool in my town’s local community college. As a black biracial kid of a white single mother, I attended the preschool along with a few other minorities and many white children. Throughout the rest of my schooling, particularly in graduate school, I’ve wondered if affirmative action played a role in my education. While I believe affirmative action is important, and even crucial, knowing that it exists makes myself and other minorities wonder if we’re one of the few who’ve been “given a pass.” Despite my fear, I’ve faced my fair share of educational discrimination, which began in 5th grade…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Review: ‘Oreo,’ a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel

    Review: ‘Oreo,’ a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel

    The New York Times
    2015-07-14

    Dwight Garner

    Fran Ross’s first and only novel, “Oreo,” was published in 1974, four years after Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and two years before Alex Haley’s “Roots.” It wasn’t reviewed in The New York Times; it was hardly reviewed anywhere.

    It’s interesting to imagine an alternative history of African-American fiction in which this wild, satirical and pathbreaking feminist picaresque caught the ride it deserved in the culture. Today it would be where it belongs, up among the 20th century’s lemony comic classics, novels that range from “Lucky Jim” and “Cold Comfort Farm” to “Catch-22” and “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

    These sorts of lists have been for too long, to borrow a line from the TV show “black-ish,” whiter than the inside of Conan O’Brien’s thigh.

    “Oreo” might have changed how we thought about a central strand of our literature’s DNA. As the novelist Danzy Senna puts it in her introduction to this necessary reissue: “ ‘Oreo’ resists the unwritten conventions that still exist for novels written by black women today. There’s nothing redemptively uplifting about her work. The title doesn’t refer to the Bible or the blues. The work does not refer to slavery. The character is never violated, sexually or otherwise. The characters are not from the South.”

    Instead, in “Oreo” Ms. Ross is simply flat-out fearless and funny and sexy and sublime. It makes a kind of sense that, when this novel didn’t find an audience, its author moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s to write for Richard Pryor…

    Read the review here.

  • Preparing counselors for America’s multiracial population boom

    Preparing counselors for America’s multiracial population boom

    Counseling Today: A Publication of the American Counseling Association
    2015-07-15

    Bethany Bray, Staff Writer

    Preparing counselors for America’s multiracial population boom

    The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the nation’s multiracial population will triple by 2060.

    That prognostication only heightens the long-standing need for counselors to better understand this population, say Kelley and Mark Kenney. The husband-and-wife counselor educators spearheaded development of the Competencies for Counseling the Multiracial Population, which were endorsed by the American Counseling Association Governing Council this past spring.

    The new multiracial competencies, which offer guidance for working with individuals, couples and families who have backgrounds from more than one racial heritage, were developed by a task force made up of members of the ACA Multiracial/Multiethnic Counseling Concerns Interest Network, co-chaired by the Kenneys.

    Counselors are going to have multiracial clients walking through their doors more and more frequently, says Mark Kenney, a licensed professional counselor (LPC) who is a professor and coordinator of the master’s program in psychology at Chestnut Hill College at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. That client might be a multiracial teenager who is struggling in school, a same-sex couple that has adopted a child of a different heritage or many other scenarios.

    The ACA Code of Ethics’ call for counselors to be competent and ethical practitioners applies here, Mark says. Understanding and being sensitive to the multiracial experience “isn’t an option anymore,” he says. “This is an expectation with this population.”

    “Historically, there has not been a good relationship between this community and the helping professions,” he adds. “Only within the last 20 years has there been better research and understanding of this population.”

    Much of the talk leading up to the 2008 election of President Barack Obama – a man with a white mother and a black father – suggested that Americans still harbor significant misunderstandings about the biracial population, says Kelley Kenney, a full professor and program coordinator of student affairs in higher education at Kutztown University.

    “There was a lot of discussion about [multiracial] couples and families, brought on by the fact that we had a man who was running for president who, oh by the way, just happened to be of multiple heritages,” Kelley says. “As recent as 2008, there was still a lot of bias and stereotyping going on…

    Read the entire article here.

  • How to Unlearn History | Ella Achola | TEDxCoventGardenWomen

    How to Unlearn History | Ella Achola | TEDxCoventGardenWomen

    TEDx Talks
    2015-07-21

    Ella Achola, Founder
    Ain’t I A Woman Collective

    From awkward school encounters to groan-inducingly offensive questions, Ella finds herself at the intersections of identity, and shares her big idea for bringing ourselves into the stories we tell.

    Ella Achola is a writer and founder of the Ain’t I A Woman Collective. Born in Berlin, Ella founded the Collective as an opportunity to engage with her Afro-German heritage and extend the conversation about Europe’s black diaspora beyond the UK.

  • Newton Knight– abolitionist guerrilla leader in Mississippi

    Newton Knight– abolitionist guerrilla leader in Mississippi

    Workers World
    2015-07-22

    Paul Wilcox

    A hidden history of the Civil War

    Ever hear of the First Alabama Cavalry, or the name Newton Knight? Not likely. The capitalist media have always promoted stories of “former Confederate soldiers” who loyally served the Confederacy, loved Gen. Robert E. Lee, had no issue with slavery and so on. But there is another story, a hidden history, of poor white opposition to the Confederacy and to slavery…

    …The Scouts had strong allies in the Black population, giving them food, ammunition, information and other supplies. There is no hard information about the composition of the guerilla army, except that “every day more blacks liberated from plantations came into the swamps to join the struggle.”

    Many enslaved people risked life and limb to help, particularly Rachel, an enslaved person, who married Knight after the war. According to Jenkins and Stauffer, “They had an agreement, she would provide him with food and he would work to secure her freedom.” Knight was as good as his word. Eventually, he committed a “crime” in post-Reconstruction Mississippi by recognizing their own children and fighting for their right to attend school. Rachel and Newton were buried together outside a cemetery, because it was also “illegal” to have integrated cemeteries at the time…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Q&A “Blaxicans of L.A.”: capturing two cultures in one

    Q&A “Blaxicans of L.A.”: capturing two cultures in one

    The Los Angeles Times
    2015-07-21

    Ebony Bailey

    When race in this country is often discussed in black and white, where do those who don’t quite fit the dime fall?.

    Walter Thompson-Hernandez, a researcher with the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at USC, is attempting to answer that question with the help of his full-frame Nikon camera.

    Two years ago, he began a research project on “Blaxican” identity, interviewing individuals of African American and Mexican descent like himself. He thought it was important to share his research with audiences outside academia, so he started a project on Instagram called Blaxicans of L.A., capturing portraits of Blaxicans and their families…

    Read the entire article here.

  • First African-American woman novelist revisited

    First African-American woman novelist revisited

    Harvard University Gazette
    Cambridge, Massachusetts
    2005-03-24

    Ken Gewertz, Harvard News Office

    Harriet Wilson was a survivor. Now we have proof.

    Wilson wrote “Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of A Free Black,” the earliest known novel by an African-American woman. It tells the story of Frado, a young biracial girl born in freedom in New Hampshire who becomes an indentured servant to a tyrannical and abusive white woman. In 1859, when the book was published, the abolitionist movement had created a vogue among Northern readers for autobiographies of escaped slaves, but Wilson’s story of a free black abused by her Northern employer did not fit the established mold, and the novel soon fell into obscurity.

    Henry Louis Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, found a copy of the novel in a used bookstore in the early 1980s and was intrigued by it. Among those specialists who were aware of the book, many doubted whether it was really the work of a black writer, but Gates wondered why anyone in 1859 would identify herself as black unless she were.

    He started searching for evidence of Wilson’s existence and eventually succeeded in documenting her life up to 1863. The facts he uncovered closely resembled the events in the life of the novel’s protagonist. Gates, who published his findings in a 1983 edition of the novel, concluded that Wilson must have died around the time the historical trail went cold.

    Now evidence has surfaced showing that Wilson survived almost another 40 years, demonstrating in other areas of endeavor the resilience and creativity that allowed her to try her hand at writing.

    P. Gabrielle Foreman, associate professor of English and American Studies at Occidental College in California, and Reginald Pitts, a historical researcher and genealogical consultant, spoke Friday (March 18) about information they have uncovered about the latter half of Wilson’s life. The event was sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Department of African and African American Studies. Foreman and Pitts have incorporated their research into an introduction to a new edition of Wilson’s novel (Penguin Classics, 2005)…

    Read the entire article here.