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.
about
Tag: Sarah Valentine
-
Literature has given us light-skinned blacks who “passed” as white, from famed critic Anatole Broyard to figures in the poetry of Pittsburgh-based poet Toi Derricotte. Ms. Valentine’s story is something else again.
-
“For a long time,” Sarah Valentine writes, “I felt like a bundle of fragments, and I wanted to be whole. I wanted to be able to write a family history that answered all my questions and filled in all the blanks, but all I got were different versions of the past and an incomplete, unfulfilling…
-
As Valentine endeavors to explore what her new identity means to her, she searches for ways to connect to her blackness. For Valentine, learning that she is black is to reject whiteness; she cannot comprehend how the privileges of whiteness can be held hand in hand with the racism the black body is subject to.
-
A black woman who lived her formative years identifying as white, Sarah’s story is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her “passing” was less intentional than conspiracy. This memoir is an examination of the cost of being black in America, and how one woman threw off the racial identity she’d grown up with,…
-
The Divine Auditor Prarie Schooner: Stories, Poems, Essays, and Reviews since 1926 Volume 87, Issue 2 (2013 Summer) Sarah Valentine, Visiting Assistant Professor of English Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois It is still dark when my cell phone begins to buzz. When I flip it open, my mother’s voice comes through a connection often interrupted by…
-
When I Was White The Chronicle Review The Chronicle of Higher Education 2015-07-06 Sarah Valentine, Visiting Assistant Professor of English Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Sarah Valentine as a girl, with her two brothers (Source: Family photo) Rachel Dolezal’s recent unmasking as a white woman living as black sparked a debate about the legitimacy of “transracial”…