Mixed Race Studies
Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
recent posts
- The Routledge International Handbook of Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health
- Loving Across Racial and Cultural Boundaries: Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health Conference
- Call for Proposals: 2026 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at UCLA
- Participants Needed for a Paid Research Study: Up to $100
- You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness.
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Tag: Alisha Gaines
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The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise?
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Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy [Smith Review] The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research Volume 50, (Winter 2020) – Issue 4: Black Girlhood pages 86-88 DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2020.1811610 Justin Smith, Ph.D. candidate in English and African American Pennsylvania State University Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and…
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“Passing for white never left.”
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In “Black for a Day Alisha Gaines” shows the limitations of a specific kind of white liberal empathy. If liberalism requires that political space include others that are imagined as reasonable and therefore capable of persuasion, then empathy seems central to the project. How should people imagine these others?
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By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Alisha Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.
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I therefore turned with pleasure to Alisha Gaines’s thoughtful book, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy, which joins a slim list of studies of “‘passing, in reverse'”: the phenomenon of white people who pass for and sometimes claim to become black (p. 17).
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Crossing old boundaries to create new identities
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In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously “became” black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white…
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Whites pass for black to gain empathy, experts say in wake of Dolezal case USA Today 2015-06-13 Melanie Eversley, Breaking News Reporter In history and in many black American families, there’s talk of black people passing for white, especially during the days of Jim Crow laws or slavery when it benefited them or even saved…
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AAS 4570 – Passing in African-American Imagination University of Virginia The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American & African Studies Spring 2011 Alisha Gaines, Post-Doctoral Fellow (English) Duke University This course considers the canonical African American literary tradition and popular culture texts that think through the boundaries of blackness and identity through the organizing trope…