Mixed-race women’s experiences…

Mixed-race women’s experiences cannot be separated from the history of race and gender politics and contemporary racial debates. The history of hybridity is one in which bodies of mixed-race people have been observed, theorized about, and used as evidence in racial power debates, but their individual experiences are often disregarded. Women of mixed heritage, mixed white and “of color,” are caught in these politically charged, race-based controversies. Given general heteronormative assumptions, as women, and thus as people who can potentially bear offspring and who are expected to assume primary responsibility for raising children in a patriarchal culture, mixed-race women occupy a particularly charged social position. No matter what path a mixed-race woman chooses, she can be perceived as a traitor to both whites and people of color—a traitor to either side of her family, a traitor to equity, a traitor to cultural preservation, and a traitor to cultural purity.

Silvia Cristina Bettez. “Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 2010, Volume 31, Number 1, pages 142-165.

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