Mixed Race Studies

Scales of Whiteness and Racial Mixing: Challenging and Confirming Racial Categories

The Geographical Bulletin
Gamma Theta Upsilon – The International Geographic Honor Socieety
Volume 50-2, November 2009
pages 93-110

Serin D. Houston
Department of Geography
Syracuse University

This paper examines personal and public portrayals of the self and family articulated by heterosexual mixed-race households living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It argues that an attention to scale sheds light on how mixed-race partnerships and households both reproduce a racial hierarchy and express shifting racial identities. A focus on the work of whiteness—defined here as an evaluative set of practices and processes that implicitly or explicitly legitimate a static racial hierarchy—in the confirmation of and challenges to racial categories further specifies my claims. I explore seemingly contradictory expressions of race in an effort to 1) point to the resilience of racism and to 2) indicate moments and spaces wherein racial identities change. Through qualitative interviews and a scalar lens, I aim to contribute to conversations on where and how stalwart assumptions about race emerge and add to considerations of where and how interpretations of race adopt a more contextual and dynamic form. Recognizing both the instances when different racialized landscapes come to the fore and the times when ardent stereotypes surface can help pave the way for re-imagining racial futures.

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Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States

Progress in Human Geography
Vol. 27, No. 4
pp. 457-474
(2003)
DOI: 10.1191/0309132503ph444oa

Richard Wright
Department of Geography
Dartmouth College

Serin Houston
Department of Geography
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis
Department of Geography and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington

Steven Holloway
Department of Geography
University of Georgia

Margaret Hudson
Department of Geography
University of Georgia

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature.

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