Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

There is good reason to expect that in the United States today individuals who identify as multiracial experience negative treatment. Multiracial individuals report encountering discrimination and microaggressive behaviors such as racial exclusion and marginalization, exoticization, invalidation of their racial identities, and racial essentialization.² These behaviors are in part a result of the kinds of racism that all groups of color face, and in part products of monoracism, a system which privileges single-race categories over racial mixing.³ This system leads to the systematic exclusion and reduction of multiracial identities. For example, during much of the history of the United States, the “one-drop rule” (the idea that every person with any black ancestry was to be identified as only black) was both a social and a legal principle that was heavily enforced.”⁴

Monoracism and the discriminatory and microaggressive behavior it produces continue to affect multiracial individuals today. For example, there have been numerous cases of workplace racial discrimination presented to courts by multiracial plaintiffs alleging the violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁵ A common type of microaggressive behavior found in many of the court cases was racial essentialization; individuals were assigned to a single, monoracial group by others despite their multiracial background.⁶ For example, multiracial individuals with a black parent are typically described and treated as if they are solely African American.⁷ Even the courts themselves generally describe multiracial people with any black ancestry as simply black. Many scholars who are supporters of the “Personal Identity Equality” approach have critiqued this pattern, arguing that the “misrecognition of one’s identity” is a form of “social subordination,”⁸ although it is not against the law to refuse to acknowledge the racial identity that a person claims.

Mary E. Campbell and Sylvia M. Emmanuel, “On The Edge: Multiracial Groups and Public Policies,” in How Public Policy Impacts Racial Inequality, Josh Grimm and Jaime Loke eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 96.

Father Healy’s Imprint: Past, Present and Future

Posted in Articles, Biography, History, Media Archive, Passing, Religion, Slavery, United States on 2016-01-31 02:45Z by Steven

Father Healy’s Imprint: Past, Present and Future

The Hoya
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
2004-11-09

Moises Mendoza

Every day thousands of students pass by Healy Hall and marvel at its towering steeples and complex intricacies. Few of them realize that the man responsible for this Georgetown trademark was every bit as complex and dynamic as the building bearing his name today.

As the first black president of a predominantly white university, Fr. Patrick Healy, S.J., revolutionized Georgetown and helped build firm foundations for a young university.

Yet Healy’s trek to greatness began not in the hallowed halls of academia, but on the Georgia cotton plantation where he was born on Feb. 27, 1834. The son of an Irish Catholic and a biracial domestic slave, Healy had great obstacles to overcome. Healy’s father Michael immigrated to the United States from Ireland through Canada around 1815. Experiencing great success in a series of land lotteries, he moved to Macon, Ga., where he built his own cotton plantation with the help of 49 slaves. Michael Healy became relatively prosperous and became a prominent businessman in the Macon community…

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Tags: Georgetown University, Moises Mendoza, Patrick Francis Healy, Patrick Healy, The Hoya

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Mixed Race Studies

Father Healy’s Imprint: Past, Present and Future

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