Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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Tag: Pacific Standard

  • How Slavery Changed the DNA of African Americans

    Widespread sexual exploitation before the Civil War strongly influenced the genetic make-up of essentially all African Americans alive today.

  • The truth is that African Americans are essentially ALL mixed race.

    The truth is that African Americans are essentially all mixed race. From the beginning, enslaved and other Africans had close relationships with poor and indentured servant whites, that’s one reason why so many black people have Irish last names. During slavery, sexual relationships between enslavers and the enslaved, occurring on a range of coercive levels,…

  • Why It Was Easy for Rachel Dolezal to Pass as Black

    Why It Was Easy for Rachel Dolezal to Pass as Black Pacific Standard 2015-06-15 Lisa Wade, Associate Professor of Sociology Occidental College, Los Angeles, California Race is more social than biological. Source: (1)ne Drop Project Earlier this year a CBS commentator in a panel with Jay Smooth embarrassingly revealed that she thought he was white…

  • Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices.

    Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices. Those choices are not totally arbitrary, biologically meaningless, or without utility. But because they are choices, we have some leeway in how we define and apply racial categories. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves; how we define race does not just…

  • Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic

    Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic Pacific Standard 2014-05-30 Michael White, Assistant Professor of Genetics Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri DNA doesn’t determine race. Society does. If you glanced around the room at a conference of geneticists, it would be easy to guess where in the world all the attendees’ ancestors came from.…

  • White or Black? Conservatives, Liberals See Faces Differently

    White or Black? Conservatives, Liberals See Faces Differently Pacific Standard Santa Barbara, California 2013-06-05 Tom Jacobs, Staff Writer New research finds people on the political right are quicker to classify a racially ambiguous face as black. Did you notice that mixed-race gentleman who passed you on the sidewalk yesterday? During the split second as he…

  • Skeptic’s Café: Understanding Popular Uses of Percentages

    Consider this paragraph from a New York Times article about the increase in multiracial people in the latest 2010 U.S. Census: “In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population…

  • it’s one thing to claim that the multiracial population may increase 50 percent, but when the original figure is only 2.4 percent…

    Going back to the Census figures quoted in The New York Times, it’s one thing to claim that the multiracial population may increase 50 percent, but when the original figure is only 2.4 percent of Americans, a 50 percent increase simply means that the 2010 multiracial population could end up around 3.6 percent of the…