Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery’s worst legacies—the Southern “one-drop” rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke—was also slavery’s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It’s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a ” black community” as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.’s South Central (a liberty that’s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole—even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral—the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists—has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can’t imagine growing up any other way.

Erin Aubry Kaplan, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 16.

My Favorite Articles and Papers

For a quick treat, I’m providing a list of my favorite and most interesting articles. No subscription or payment is required, so dig in!

Title	Author
Extended Families: Mixed-Race Children and Scottish Experience, 1770-1820	Daniel Livesay
The Multiracial Epiphany of Loving	Kevin Noble Maillard
“If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black”: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule	Nikki Khanna
“Racially-Tailored” Medicine Unraveled	Sharona Hoffman
The History of the Idea of Race… And Why it Matters	Audrey Smedley

More coming soon!

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Mixed Race Studies

My Favorite Articles and Papers

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