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: Elsie Roxborough
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Roxborough represents one of the few documented historical instances from Michigan of a Black person choosing to live nearly full-time as a member of white society. This phenomenon, known as racial passing, has received renewed popular attention through recent artistic works like Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel “Passing” and Britt Bennett’s…
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Writer and reporter Ken Coleman tells the story of Detroiter Elsie Roxborough, who was born into a wealthy, Black family in Detroit. But when she died in 1939, her death certificate listed her as white.
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On the surface, race appears as a simple category to quantify—the color of one’s skin, the box one circles on the census, even the percentage that appears on an at-home DNA testing kit. But the reality of one’s racial identity is hardly objective.
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‘A Chosen Exile:’ Examining African Americans Passing As White In America [VIDEO] NewsOne Now NewsOne 2015-02-27 Author Allyson Hobbs joined Roland Martin on “NewsOne Now” to discuss her new book, “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.” Hobbs an assistant professor of American History at Stanford University told Martin that when…
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‘A Chosen Exile,’ by Allyson Hobbs [Senna Review] The New York Times Sunday Book Review 2014-11-21 Danzy Senna A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life By Allyson Hobbs; Illustrated. 382 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95. One of the best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a “calling card” by the…
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‘A Chosen Exile’: Black People Passing In White America Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity All Things Considered National Public Radio 2014-10-07 Karen Grigsby Bates, Correspondent Culver City, California Dr. Albert Johnston passed in order to practice medicine. After living as leading citizens in Keene, N.H., the Johnstons revealed their true racial identity,…
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“Elsie Roxborough started out to shake the stigma of color; when that proved impossible, she joined step with the oppressor. Her life as a disguised alien in the middle reaches of the white social register did not satisfy her ambition or her pride. Perhaps no happy ending awaited her. The welcome thawings of racial prejudice…
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The Chosen Exile of Racial “Passing:” Allyson Hobbs at TEDxStanford TEDx Talks 2014-05-30 Allyson Hobbs, PhD 2009, speaks about the history of racial passing for TEDx Talks. Using the Emersonian idea of “coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience,” Hobbs tells the story of a cousin who passed for white,…
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Driving her fashionable Ford roadster from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Elsie Roxborough arrived at the University of Michigan as a freshman fifty years ago last fall. She was the first Negro student to live in a University dormitory. Her classmate Arthur Miller, an aspiring playwright and fellow reporter on the campus newspaper, called her “a…