Category: Excerpts/Quotes

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.

2024-08-06

Though I am younger than Ms. Harris by six years, in her Blackness, I recognize my own. It is a Blackness born not in slavery but much later, in a whole other context, in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements, when there was no mixed-race category. You were either Black or…
What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that we are wrong for ballet.

2023-01-23

“What’s interesting is when I started ballet at 13 years old, I was told I had everything that it took to be a ballet dancer, physically, artistically. So that’s why there’s kind of this interesting dichotomy when I think about Black women specifically in ballet and the language that’s being used in telling us that…
“I am a White woman who married a Black man and had a Black baby,” said Amanda Lewis, a sociologist who runs the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

2022-05-20

For some people, identifying themselves as more than one race matters little if Americans tend to put people in either the “Black” or “White” categories. Former President Barack Obama, who has a White mother though he identifies as Black, has described being mistaken for a waiter or parking valet before he was famous. “I am…
Black success—in the skillful work of passing itself as well as in endeavors passers pursue once they access opportunities they had been denied—disrupts the ideological backbone of racial injustice, enacting a reductio of white superiority and revealing whites to be easily fooled. Successful acts of fugitivity achieved by passing also serve to undermine the hegemony of oppression, disrupting its ideological functioning as a natural or inescapable condition.

2022-05-17

Conversely, it is essential to recognize that [racial] passing can take on an ethical and political significance by exposing the internal contradictions and contingency of seemingly totalizing systems of oppression, revealing gaps and openings for liberation and working to create and exploit them. Black success—in the skillful work of passing itself as well as in…
Markle’s frankness should be applauded as brave in a nation that still fails to fully acknowledge the roughly 7% of us who claim multiple races.

2022-05-16

[Meghan] Markle’s frankness should be applauded as brave in a nation that still fails to fully acknowledge the roughly 7% of us who claim multiple races. Indeed, either through erasure or denial, American media—both social and traditional—seem to insist that biracial folks like myself simply do not exist. David Kaufman, “Meghan Markle is the biracial…
Continental ancestry categories fail to adequately capture human diversity. Newly assembled datasets, such as those referenced in Science, highlight that there are no distinct categories of genetic variability, only blurred continuities.

2022-05-13

Continental ancestry categories fail to adequately capture human diversity. Newly assembled datasets, such as those referenced in Science, highlight that there are no distinct categories of genetic variability, only blurred continuities. Recent high-profile studies in statistical genetics have shown that, in many cases where the use of population categories was previously considered necessary, categories can…
Three years after the release of “Lost Boundaries,” Dr. [Albert] Johnston was fired from his job as a radiologist at Keene Community Hospital. The president of the hospital board told reporters “racial prejudice was not the reason for the dismissal,” but the doctor believed otherwise.

2022-05-09

Three years after the release of “Lost Boundaries,” Dr. [Albert] Johnston was fired from his job as a radiologist at Keene Community Hospital. The president of the hospital board told reporters “racial prejudice was not the reason for the dismissal,” but the doctor believed otherwise. “They have been picking on me ever since my story…
This is the problem with using biracial identity as an excuse to be racially neutral. Doing so often results in ignoring both black suffering and the racist political, economic, and social structures which produce black suffering.

2022-04-21

This is the problem with using biracial identity as an excuse to be racially neutral. Doing so often results in ignoring both black suffering and the racist political, economic, and social structures which produce black suffering. Dak Prescott claimed that being biracial helped him in being a leader for the Dallas Cowboys because he can…
“I see the ways in which the media has sold me, and other light-skinned actors in general, as monolithic representations of a Blackness. It is so damaging and gross – honestly, it’s nasty.”

2022-04-20

“I see the ways in which the media has sold me, and other light-skinned actors in general, as monolithic representations of a Blackness. It is so damaging and gross – honestly, it’s nasty.” The anger in her voice is palpable. “It’s just like sneaky racism.” She says that she is now very wary when people…
We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation.

2022-03-30

We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation. That means assessing the patterns of diversity that reflect the distribution of human genetic variation across the globe. To this end, genetic ancestry should be understood as a continuum that it is not categorized in such a way that serves as a surrogate for…

Mixed Race Studies

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Category: Excerpts/Quotes

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.

“I am a White woman who married a Black man and had a Black baby,” said Amanda Lewis, a sociologist who runs the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Markle’s frankness should be applauded as brave in a nation that still fails to fully acknowledge the roughly 7% of us who claim multiple races.

Continental ancestry categories fail to adequately capture human diversity. Newly assembled datasets, such as those referenced in Science, highlight that there are no distinct categories of genetic variability, only blurred continuities.

Three years after the release of “Lost Boundaries,” Dr. [Albert] Johnston was fired from his job as a radiologist at Keene Community Hospital. The president of the hospital board told reporters “racial prejudice was not the reason for the dismissal,” but the doctor believed otherwise.

This is the problem with using biracial identity as an excuse to be racially neutral. Doing so often results in ignoring both black suffering and the racist political, economic, and social structures which produce black suffering.

“I see the ways in which the media has sold me, and other light-skinned actors in general, as monolithic representations of a Blackness. It is so damaging and gross – honestly, it’s nasty.”

We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation.