Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial ideology, like the monoracial ideology it depends on, is a false consciousness. The frustration its adherents feel would be better directed at criticizing the American racial paradigm itself rather than at attempting to modify the paradigm’s configuration.  A modified paradigm, one containing a multi-racial category, would be a fallacious as one without a multiracial category.  As long as the idea of race has legitimacy, and as long as the racial hierarchy remains undisturbed, nothing will really change.

Rainier Spencer, Mixed Race Studies: A Reader, Chapter 29.

Within the United States, ‘mixed race’ has gained currency as a loaded but culturally comprehensible term referencing individuals where one parent is white and the other is of color. Some […] challenge this approach and claim recognition for ‘mixed-race’ identities that were never legally proscribed. It is a strategic but frivolous petition as the explicit legacy of Anglo-European slavery and colonialism, which gave birth to the ominous idea of race in the first place, facilitated the abhorrent notions of miscegenation, hybridity, and mixed race. Efforts to expand the discourse of ‘mixed race’ to include any combination that abridges diverse ethnic/ national origin – e.g., Chinese-Chicano, Southeast Indian and Iranian – seem rather disingenuous given the mating history of humankind. Scholarship on the impact of contemporary demographic changes and their impact on mixed identities per se must not confuse the historical particularity of mixed race. Again – more, not less, clarity and precision is needed and the appealing notion of third-ness, a separate space defined for mixedness, still confuses the challenges of racial ambiguity with panethnic mixing between minority communities.

Azoulay, K.G. 2003. “Rethinking ‘mixed race’ (review),” Research in African Literatures. 34(2):233-235

“…’race’  as it is understood … was a social mechanism invented in the eighteenth century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: … European settlers, conquered Indians, and Africans brought in to supply slave labor… [Race] … subsumed a growing ideology of inequity devised to rationalize European attitudes and the treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples…”

American Anthropological Association 1998 Statement on Race

The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival 2009 (2009-06-12 to 2009-06-13)

The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival is an annual free public event celebrating stories of the Mixed [race] experience through films, readings, workshops and live performance.  The Festival is an inclusive event which brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial/multicultural individuals, families and friends.