Mixed Race Studies
Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
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- 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: Anita Florence Hemmings
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When Anita Florence Hemmings applied to attend Vassar College in upstate New York in 1893, she did not disclose her racial identity to the school. She passed as a white student for years before eventually being outed as a black woman shortly before graduation, after her white roommate’s family hired a private detective to investigate…
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Anita Florence Hemmings graduated from Vassar in 1897. But though she was an excellent student, she came very close to not getting her degree at all. That was because just days before graduation, Anita’s roommate uncovered her deepest secret.
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Anita Hemmings was Vassar College’s first African American graduate. But no one was supposed to know that she was black.
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In the many conversations with her since her story has been made public Miss Hemming[s] has attempted no defense of her position other than to say no one asked her while she was in college if she were white or colored. She takes the ground that she was not under moral obligations to announce her…
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COLORED VASSAR GIRL. The Saint Paul Globe Sunday, 1897-09-05 page 21, column 7 People at Poughkeepsie Thought Miss Hemmings Was a Spaniard. Anita Florence Hemmings, the Boston girl who has stirred up such a sensation by daring to complete a course at exclusive Vassar when she new that there was negro blood in her veins,…
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“Passing” meets “The House of Mirth: in this “utterly captivating” (Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of “The Kitchen House”) historical novel based on the true story of Anita Hemmings, the first black student to attend Vassar, who successfully passed as white—until she let herself grow too attached to the wrong person.
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When Anita Florence Hemmings applied to Vassar in 1893, there was nothing in her records to indicate that she would be any different from the 103 other girls who were entering the class of 1897. But by August 1897, the world as well as the college had discovered her secret: Anita Hemmings was Vassar’s first…