Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities

    Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities

    Washington State University Press
    2019
    310 pages
    Illustrations / maps / notes / bibliography / index
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87422-364-4
    eBook ISBN: 978-0-87422-389-7

    Candace Wellman

    In this companion work to Peace Weavers, her previous book on Puget Sound’s cross-cultural marriages, award-winning author Candace Wellman depicts the lives of four additional intermarried indigenous women who influenced mid-1800s settlement in the Bellingham Bay area. She describes each wife’s native culture, details ancestral history and traits for both spouses, and traces descendants’ destinies, highlighting the families’ contributions to new communities.

    • Finalist, 2020 Willa Literary Award, scholarly nonfiction
    • 2020 Washington State Historical Society WOW selection

  • Being Mestiza

    Being Mestiza

    Enchantment Learning & Living Blog
    2020-09-22

    Dr. Maria DeBlassie, Professor, Writer, Bruja
    Albuquerque, New Mexico

    I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about what I mean when I say I’m mestiza. That fact is always one of the first pieces of information in all my author bio and that’s intentional. Although the term has been around for a long time, I specifically use the definition from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which focuses on developing a new mestiza consciousness. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, mestiza or mestizaje means a person of mix-raced decent.

    Being mestiza is different for everyone—everyone’s mix is a little different and, in many cases, few of us know everything about the mix that is our cultural background. This is because we are, in one way or another, products of colonization. And as a result of colonization, histories of the colonized sometimes get lost, erased, or suppressed. So it is important to remember that, like the wider Hispanic and Latinx communities, the mestizaje community is not a monolith. Our mixed heritage and our relationship to it are as complex and diverse as our backgrounds…

    Read the entire article here.

  • MIXED MESSAGES episode five – Steve

    MIXED MESSAGES episode five – Steve

    Mixed Messages
    2022-03-20

    Sarah Doneghy, Host

    Steve [Majors] discusses his book, “High Yella.” He tells what it was like growing up in a Black family and being told he was Black, to being white assumed as an adult while raising two Black daughters. In his search for identity, Steve discovers being Black is not only skin deep.

  • René Jones, one of 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, on his ‘secret’ for success: ‘You have to tell your story’

    René Jones, one of 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, on his ‘secret’ for success: ‘You have to tell your story’

    CNBC
    2022-02-27

    Jade Scipioni, Senior Reporter, Make It

    René Jones, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of M&T Bank Corp. Credit: Mark Dellas

    This story is part of the Behind the Desk series, where CNBC Make It gets personal with successful business executives to find out everything from how they got to where they are to what makes them get out of bed in the morning to their daily routines.

    René Jones says banking executives have a “bad rap.” His reason might surprise you.

    “I think it’s because we’re not really good storytellers,” Jones, 56, tells CNBC Make It.

    Jones, who has served as the chairman and CEO of Buffalo, New York-based regional bank M&T since 2017, is currently one of only four Black CEOs in the Fortune 500. He started there as an executive associate in 1992, and today oversees its 17,000-plus employees and market valuation of $23 billion.

    Over time, he says, he’s learned to lean into his own personal story as his “secret weapon” — sharing it with employees has helped him form deeper and more meaningful workplace relationships. Growing up with five siblings in a biracial family, for example — especially as the lightest-skinned of his siblings — taught him early on not to form stereotypes about people…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865

    Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865

    University of Georgia Press
    2021-03-31
    Illustrations: 13 b&w images
    Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
    Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6012-6

    Nik Ribianszky, Lecturer in History
    Queen’s University, Belfast, United Kingdom

    In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

    Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America’s system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one’s status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual’s continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

    Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together-by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies-these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property-including that most precious, themselves.

  • Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic

    Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic

    Social Sciences
    Volume 11, Issue 3 (Published 2022-03-14)
    14 pages
    DOI: 10.3390/socsci11030124

    Yasuko Takezawa, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
    Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, Kyoto

    Stephen Small, Professor
    Department of African Diaspora Studies
    University of California, Berkeley

    The most extensive theoretic and empirical studies of people of mixed racial descent extant today have addressed nations across the Atlantic. This article reveals how this literature on people of mixed racial descent is limited in its claims to represent a “global model”. In contrast, we argue that by juxtaposing institutional factors in the Atlantic region and Japan we can expand our understanding of people of mixed racial descent across a far wider range of social and political terrains. A consideration of Japan uncovers a fascinating combination of factors impactful in the emergence of populations of mixed origins in the Pacific region more generally. By identifying this range of variables, we believe this analysis can be instructive for scholars of race focusing on the Atlantic and can contribute to a more encompassing approach for theorizing people of mixed racial descent.

    Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

  • The dream of creating a mixed super-race

    The dream of creating a mixed super-race

    Spiritual Eugenics: Exploring the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality, from 1880 to the present day
    2022-03-19

    Jules Evans, Honorary Research Fellow
    Centre for the History of Emotions
    Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Eugenics often overlapped (and still overlaps) with scientific racism and white supremacy, leading many people to confuse the two. It’s true that in the United States and Germany, the two countries which most enthusiastically embraced eugenics in the 1920s-1940s, eugenics did very often overlap with an ideology of white supremacy and scientific racism. However, as I’ve explored throughout this project, there were several different varieties of eugenics, including versions which promoted using selective breeding to encourage inter-racial mingling, thereby creating a spiritual master-race.

    In this chapter, we’re going to examine four figures who promoted inter-racial forms of spiritual eugenics — ie they explored the idea that inter-racial breeding can help to create spiritually gifted individuals or even a new race of superbeings. They didn’t all necessarily believe in the state saying who can and can’t reproduce — but they did explore ideas of selective inter-racial breeding towards the goal of creating more spiritually advanced humans…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Who is Afro-Latin@? Examining the Social Construction of Race and Négritude in Latin America and the Caribbean

    Who is Afro-Latin@? Examining the Social Construction of Race and Négritude in Latin America and the Caribbean

    Social Education
    Volume 81, January/February (2017)
    pages 37-42

    Christopher L. Busey, Associate Professor
    School of Teaching and Learning
    University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

    Bárbara C. Cruz, Professor of Social Education
    University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida

    By the 1930s the négritude ideological movement, which fostered a pride and consciousness of African heritage, gained prominence and acceptance among black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. While embraced by many, some of African descent rejected the philosophy, despite evident historical and cultural markers. Such was the case of Rafael Trujillo, who had assumed power in the Dominican Republic in 1930. Trujillo, a dark-skinned Dominican whose grandmother was Haitian, used light-colored pancake make-up to appear whiter. He literally had his family history rewritten and “whitewashed,” once he took power of the island nation. Beyond efforts to alter his personal appearance and recast his own history, Trujillo also took extreme measures to erase blackness in Dominican society during his 31 years of dictatorial rule. On a national level, Trujillo promoted blanqueamiento (whitening), encouraging the immigration of single Europeans to the island and offering refuge to Jews during World War II because they were considered white—thus attempting to mejorar la raza or “improve [whiten] the race” of the Dominican Republic.

    Read the entire article here.

  • “Suspect-Proof”? Paranoia, Suspicious Reading, and the Racial Passing Narrative

    “Suspect-Proof”? Paranoia, Suspicious Reading, and the Racial Passing Narrative

    American Literary History
    Volume 34, Issue 1, Spring 2022
    pages 272–282
    DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajab089

    Sinéad Moynihan, Associate Professor of English
    University of Exeter

    This short essay considers racial passing narratives in relation to the “postcritical turn,” highlighting the proliferating reappraisals of the practices of “suspicious” or “symptomatic” reading in literary studies and the extent to which passing narratives offer an opportunity to test some of the claims of this body of scholarship. The utility of the passing narrative for this critical project lies in its persistent, self-conscious foregrounding of reading practices. Revisiting passing narratives in light of postcritique reveals that symptomatic reading is not a monolithic practice; rather, there are multiple ways of reading suspiciously. Moreover, and more importantly, passing narratives disclose that what has now become an orthodoxy in postcritique—that attitudes such as “paranoia,” “suspicion,” and “vigilance” profoundly limit “the thickness and richness of our aesthetic attachments”—ignores contexts, like that of a passer in a white supremacist society, in which such strategies are not a choice but are essential for survival (Felski 17). The key question posed herein is: What forms of privilege enable a reader to relinquish her attachment to paranoia, suspicion, and vigilance; to opt for openness rather than guardedness, submission rather than aggression (21)? Narratives of racial passing provide one answer to that question.

    Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

  • These experiences show that, while we as monoracial Black parents can socialize our mixed-race children to represent themselves to society as being part of the larger African American community, their individual traits, aptitudes, and personality differences as mixed-race children are also influential in the racial identity process.

    These experiences show that, while we as monoracial Black parents can socialize our mixed-race children to represent themselves to society as being part of the larger African American community, their individual traits, aptitudes, and personality differences as mixed-race children are also influential in the racial identity process. These personal factors may be strongly tied to a mixed-race child’s authentic view of themselves (their identity versus how they are identified by others), making parenting concerns such as understanding African American heritage more difficult. Unfortunately, in an effort to help our multiracial daughters understand their Black heritage, we as parents dismissed their experiences by noting that a “brown” identity is not satisfactory. I will also note here that this feeling towards a brown identity was most deeply expressed by fathers; each of us as stepmothers—without a direct biological tie to our daughters—were more open to the idea of our stepdaughters labeling and developing a self-defined identity. This could be influenced by our location as stepparents, as well as the fact that we all hold advanced degrees in social science fields. Critical race theory (CRT) challenges traditional claims that uphold the status quo (Ladson-Billings, 1998, Yosso et al., 2009). It is a form of oppositional scholarship, with a framework grounded in the experiences of Black Americans, meant to challenge the experiences of White people which are considered normative and standard in the U.S (Taylor, 1998). MultiCrit (Harris, 2016) is an offshoot of CRT that aims to challenge dominant monoracial ideologies by utilizing the experiences of multiracial individuals to deconstruct monoracial ideas about race. Based on the experiences of the case study families, I find that, essentially, during socialization, monoracial parents should be centering the experiences of their mixed-race child in an effort to not perpetuate monoracial ideas about race. Centering “communicates the lived experience of marginalized groups so that the understanding of the problem and its response is more likely to be impactful to the community in the ways the community itself would want” (Doucet, 2019, pg. 3).

    Yolanda T. Mitchell, “She’s Biracial, but She’s Still Black: Reflections from Monoracial African American Parents Raising Biracial Children,” Journal of Child and Family Studies, Volume 31, Issue 3 (March 2022) (Special Issue on Multiracial Families). https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10826-022-02263-8.