Mixed Race Studies

Escaping Blackness

New York Review of Books
2020-03-26

Darryl Pinckney

Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York City, 2019 Dominique Nabokov

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race
by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Norton, 174 pp., $25.95

The black individual passing for white in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction by white writers is usually a woman, and usually when the truth emerges, the purity of the white race is saved. However, in An Imperative Duty (1891) by William Dean Howells, a Boston girl is ashamed to find out that legally she is colored, but her white suitor marries her anyway and takes her off to a life in Italy. In the beginning of Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), a “high-bred” black man in North Carolina returns to his hometown to ask his sister to take his dead white wife’s place and bring up his son. A young aristocrat she meets in her new white life proposes marriage, but soon learns the truth of her origins. Literary convention, in the form of a fever, kills her. The white suitor realizes too late that love conquers all. He promises to keep the brother’s secret.

The secret was as radical as Chesnutt could get. From a North Carolina family of “free issue” blacks—meaning emancipated since colonial times—Chesnutt had blond hair and blue eyes. He wouldn’t pass for white, because if he became famous then he chanced someone appearing from his past. He preferred to pursue reputation as a black man. Chesnutt had cousins who crossed the color line and he never told on them, viewing passing as an act of “self-preservation,” a private solution to the race problem. The big escape from being black was an American tradition. Three of Sally Hemings’s six children ended up living as white people.

The nameless narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a widower and a father, says little about his life as a white man. He is interested instead in his past as a black person, his life with different classes of black people, his wanderings around Europe as a young musician. When he returned to the United States and went on a folk song–collecting tour of the South, he witnessed a lynching—a black man being burned alive. Terrified, he got himself across the color line. He didn’t want to belong to a racial group so utterly without power…

…Thomas Chatterton Williams, who belongs to the hip-hop generation of multiculturalism and diversity, is willing to risk being a throwback in his memoir/essay Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. To speculate on the racial future, he goes back to the days when the black individual who could do so took the side exit from segregated life to personal freedom. He deals with passing for white, class privilege, and his hopes for the possibilities of race transcendence, knowing perfectly well that because he is light-skinned he can contemplate racial identity as being provisional, voluntary, situational, and fluid…

Read the entire review here.

Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner’s Racial Imaginations

Harvard University
September 2013
177 pages

Linda Doris Mariah Chavers

A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies

Violent Disruptions contends that the works of Richard Wright and William Faulkner are mirror images of each other and that each illustrates American race relations in distinctly powerful and prescient ways. While Faulkner portrays race and American identity through sex and its relationship to the imagination, Wright reveals a violent undercurrent beneath interracial encounters that the shared imagination triggers. Violent Disruptions argues that the spectacle of the interracial body anchors the cultural imaginations of our collective society and, as it embodies and symbolizes American slavery, drives the violent acts of individuals. Interracial productions motivate the narratives of Richard Wright and William Faulkner through a system of displacement of signs. Though these tropes maintain their currency today, they are borne out of cultural imaginings over two hundred years old. Working within the framework of the imaginary, Violent Disruptions places these now historical texts into the twenty-first century’s discourse of race and American identity.

In the first part of the dissertation, I show in detail the various narratives at work in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in order to portray the imaginations shared by the white characters and disrupted by the interracial body as spectacle. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) depicts a similar racial imaginary but with more focus on its violent, corporeal effects. By contrast, in the second half of the dissertation, I demonstrate the writers’ central and racially charged characters from their earlier works, Light in August (1932) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin [Children] (1938; 1940) and look at how the figures of Joe Christmas and Big Boy, respectively, work as literary prototypes for their version in later works.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study

Macmillan
Ninth Edition
2014
732 pages
Paper Text ISBN-10: 1-4292-4217-5; ISBN-13: 978-1-4292-4217-2

Paula S. Rothenberg, Senior Fellow; The Murphy Institute, City University of New York
Professor Emerita; William Patterson University of New Jersey

Like no other text, this best-selling anthology effectively introduces students to the complexity of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States and illustrates how these categories operate and interact in society. The combination of thoughtfully selected readings, deftly written introductions, and careful organization make Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Ninth Edition, the most engaging and balanced presentation of these issues available today.

In addition to including scholarly selections from authors like Beverly Tatum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Annette Lareau, and Jonathan Kozol, Rothenberg includes historical documents like the Three-Fifths Compromise, firsthand narrative accounts of how these issues have affected the lives of individuals, and popular press pieces reporting on discrimination in everyday life.

This edition includes 28 new selections considering such relevant topics as the citizenship and immigration, transgender identity, the 2010 census, multiracial identity, the 99% and the occupy movement, the tragic story of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, South Asian Identity post 9/11, multiracial identity, disability, sexual harassment in the teenage years, and much more.

Table of Contents ^*Articles new or revised for this edition

• Part I THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DIFFERENCE: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY
  • 1 Racial Formations / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
  • 2 The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch / Richard Wright
  • 3 Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege / Pem Davidson Buck
  • 4 How Jews Became White Folks / Karen Brodkin
  • 5 “Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender / Judith Lorber
  • 6 The Social Construction of Sexuality / Ruth Hubbard
  • 7 The Invention of Heterosexuality / Jonathan Ned Katz
  • 8 Masculinity as Homophobia / Michael S. Kimmel
  • 9 Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History / Douglas C. Baynton
  • 10 Deconstructing the Underclass / Herbert Gans
  • 11 Domination and Subordination / Jean Baker Miller
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part II UNDERSTANDING RACISM, SEXISM, HETEROSEXISM, AND CLASS PRIVILEGE
  • 1 Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?” / Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • 2 Color-Blind Racism / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • 3 Smells Like Racism / Rita Chaudhry Sethi
  • 4 Oppression / Marilyn Frye
  • 5 Patriarchy / Allan G. Johnson
  • 6 Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism / Suzanne Pharr
  • ^*7 The 10 Percent Problem / Kate Clinton
  • 8 White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack / Peggy McIntosh
  • ^*9 Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life / Annette Lareau
  • ^*10 Class in America—2012 / Gregory Mantsios
• Part III Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration
  • 1 A Nation of None and All of the Above / Sam Roberts
  • 2 A New Century: Immigration and the US / MPI Staff, updated by Kevin Jernegan
  • ^*3 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of America / Mae Ngai
  • 4 Los Intersticios: Recasting Moving Selves / Evelyn Alsultany
  • ^*5 For many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color / Mireya Navarro
  • ^*6 Testimony / Sonny Singh
  • 7 Asian American? / Sonia Shah
  • 8 The Myth of the Model Minority / Noy Thrupkaew
  • 9 Personal Voices: Facing Up to Race / Carrie Ching
  • Suggestions for Further Readings
• Part IV DISCRIMINATION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
  • 1 The Problem: Discrimination / U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
  • 2 Abercrombie Settles Class-Action Suit
  • 3 Apparel Factory Workers Were Cheated, State Says / Steven Greenhouse
  • 4 Women in the State Police: Trouble in the Ranks / Jonathan Schuppe
  • ^*5 Why Transgender Identification Matters / Rebecca Juro
  • 6 Where “English Only” Falls Short / Stacy A. Teicher
  • 7 Blacks vs. Latinos at Work / Miriam Jordan
  • 8 Manhattan Store Owner Accused of Underpaying and Sexually Harassing Workers / Steven Greenhouse
  • 9 Muslim-American Running Back off the Team at New Mexico State / Matthew Rothschild
  • 10 Tennessee Judge Tells Immigrant Mothers: Learn English or Else / Ellen Barry
  • ^*11 Tucson’s Ousted Mexican-American Studies Director Speaks: The Fight’s Not Over / Julianne Hing
  • 12 My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish / Mana Lumumba-Kasongo
  • 13 The Segregated Classrooms of a Proudly Diverse School / Jeffrey Gettleman
  • 14 Race and Family Income of Students Influence Guidance Counselors’ Advice, Study Finds / Eric Hoover
  • 15 College Choices Are Limited for Students from Needy Families, Report Says / Stephen Burd
  • 16 Wealthy Often Win the Race for Merit-Based College Aid / Jay Mathews
  • 17 On L.I., Raid Stirs Dispute over Influx of Immigrants / Bruce Lambert
  • 18 More Blacks Live with Pollution / Associated Press
  • ^*19 National Study Finds Widespread Sexual Harassment of Students in Grades 7-12 / Jenny Anderson
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part V THE ECONOMICS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
  • ^*1 Imagine a Country—2012 / Holly Sklar
  • ^*2 Dr King Weeps from His Grave / Cornel West
  • ^*3 Rich People Create Jobs! And Five Other Myths That Must Die for our Economy to Live / Kevin Drum
  • ^*4 It’s Official: The Rich Got Richer: Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds / Robert Pear
  • ^*5 Study Finds Big Spike in the Poorest in the U.S. / Sabrina Tavernise
  • ^*6 The Making of the American 99% and the Collapse of the Middle Class / Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
  • ^*7 Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics Twenty-to-One: Executive Summary / Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor
  • 8 The Economic Reality of Being Asian American / Meizhu Lui and others
  • 9 The Economic Reality of Being Latino/a in the U.S. / Meizhu Lui and others
  • ^*10 Hispanic Children in Poverty Exceed Whites / Sabrina Tavernise
  • ^*11 Gender Gap on Wages is Slow to Close / Motoko Rich
  • 12 Women Losing Ground / Ruth Conniff
  • 13 Lilly’s Big Day / Gail Collins
  • 14 “Savage Inequalities” Revisited / Bob Feldman
  • 15 Cause of Death: Inequality / Alejandro Reuss
  • ^*16 Undocumented Immigrants Find Paths to College, Careers / Gosnia Wozniacka
  • 17 Immigration’s Aftermath / Alejandro Portes
  • ^*18 Inequality Undermines Democracy / Eduardo Porter
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VI MANY VOICES, MANY LIVES: SOME CONSEQUENCES OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER INEQUALITY
  • 1 Civilize Them with a Stick / Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes
  • 2 Then Came the War / Yuri Kochiyama
  • 3 Yellow / Frank Wu
  • 4 The Arab Woman and I / Mona Fayad
  • 5 Crossing the Border Without Losing Your Past / Oscar Casares
  • 6 The Event of Becoming / Jewelle L. Gomez
  • 7 This Person Doesn’t Sound White / Ziba Kashef
  • ^*8 In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger / Susan Saulny
  • 9 Family Ties and the Entanglements of Caste / Joseph Berger
  • 10 Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain / Don Sabo
  • 11 The Slave Side of Sunday / Dave Zirin
  • 12 He Defies You Still: The Memoirs of a Sissy / Tommi Avicolli
  • 13 Requiem for the Champ / June Jordan
  • ^*14 Against Bullying or On Loving Queer Kids / Richard Kim
  • 15 Before Spring Break, The Anorexic Challenge / Alex Williams
  • 16 The Case of Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson: Ableism, Heterosexism, and Sexism / Joan L. Griscom
  • ^*17 Misconceptions Regarding the Body / Jennifer Bartlett
  • 18 C. P. Ellis / Studs Terkel
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VII HOW IT HAPPENED: RACE AND GENDER ISSUES IN U.S. LAW
  • 1 Indian Tribes: A Continuing Quest for Survival /U.S. Commission on Human Rights
  • 2 An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves, South Carolina, 1712
  • 3 The “Three-Fifths Compromise”: The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2
  • 4 An Act Prohibiting the Teaching of Slaves to Read
  • 5 Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
  • 6 The Antisuffragists: Selected Papers, 1852–1887
  • 7 People v. Hall, 1854
  • 8 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857
  • 9 The Emancipation Proclamation / Abraham Lincoln
  • 10 United States Constitution: Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments
  • 11 The Black Codes / W. E. B. Du Bois
  • 12 Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873
  • 13 Minor v. Happersett, 1875
  • 14 California Constitution, 1876
  • 15 Elk v. Wilkins, November 3, 1884
  • 16 Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
  • 17 United States Constitution: Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
  • 18 Korematsu v. United States, 1944
  • 19 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
  • 20 Roe v. Wade, 1973
  • 21 The Equal Rights Amendment (Defeated)
  • 22 Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 2003
  • ^*23 Equal Protection Indeed / The Economist
  • ^*24 Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution / Linda Hirshman
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part VIII MAINTAINING RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER HIERARCHIES: REPRODUCING “REALITY”
  • 1 Self-Fulfilling Stereotypes / Mark Snyder
  • 2 Anti-Gay Stereotype / Richard D. Mohr
  • 3 White Lies / Maurice Berger
  • 4 Am I Thin Enough Yet? / Sharlene Hesse-Biber
  • 5 Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse / Sut Jhally
  • 6 The Plutocratic Culture: Institutions, Values, and Ideologies / Michael Parenti
  • 7 Media Magic: Making Class Invisible / Gregory Mantsios
  • 8 Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid / Jonathan Kozol
  • 9 Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex / Angela Davis
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Part IX SOCIAL CHANGE: REVISIONING THE FUTURE AND MAKING A DIFFERENCE
  • 1 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference / Audre Lorde
  • 2 Feminism: A Transformational Politic / bell hooks
  • 3 A New Vision of Masculinity / Cooper Thompson
  • 4 Interrupting the Cycle of Oppression: The Role of Allies as Agents of Change / Andrea Ayvazian
  • 5 Rethinking Volunteerism in America / Gavin Leonard
  • ^*6 The Most Important Thing in the World / Naomi Klein
  • ^*7 Beyond Elections: People Power / Mark Bittman
  • ^*8 Demand the Impossible / Matthew Rothschild
  • Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index

Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture

Peter Lang
2006
231 pages
0.340 kg, 0.750 lbs
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-8204-7931-6

Carlyle Van Thompson, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels—Richard Wright’s Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred—that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Consuming Hot Black Bodies: Miscegenation as Sexual Violence in African American Literature and Culture
• Chapter 2: Speaking Desire and Consumption of the Black Body in Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me”
• Chapter 3: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption: The Enduring Legacy of America’s White-Supremacist Culture of Violence in John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood
• Chapter 4: Miscegenation, Monstrous Memories, and Misogyny as Sexual Consumption in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora
• Chapter 5: Moving Past the Present: Racialized Sexual Violence and Miscegenous Consumption in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
• Chapter 6: White Police Penetrating. Probing, and Playing in the Black Man’s Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography

Gender and the Neighborhood Location of Mixed-Race Couples

Demography
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-012-0158-0
Published Online: 2012-10-17

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Gender asymmetry in mixed-race heterosexual partnerships and marriages is common. For instance, black men marry or partner with white women at a far higher rate than white men marry or partner with black women. This article asks if such gender asymmetries relate to the racial character of the neighborhoods in which households headed by mixed-race couples live. Gendered power imbalances within households generally play into decisions about where to live or where to move (i.e., men typically benefit more than women), and we find the same in mixed-race couple arrangements and residential attainment. Gender interacts with race to produce a measurable race-by-gender effect. Specifically, we report a positive relationship between the percentage white in a neighborhood and the presence of households headed by mixed-race couples with a white male partner. The opposite holds for households headed by white-blacks and white-Latinos if the female partner is white; they are drawn to predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. The results have implications for investigations of residential location attainment, neighborhood segregation analysis, and mixed-race studies.

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The Relationship Between Colour and Identity in the Literature of Nella Larsen and Richard Wright

Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal
Volume 3, Number 2 (June 2008)
ISSN 1718-8482

Elisabeth Hudson
King’s College London

The fiction of Nella Larsen and Richard Wright explores the struggle of African-American men and women to forge an identity for themselves that is free of the bonds placed on them by society. The protagonists of Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing and Wright’s Black Boy all have one thing in common: they do not wish for their identities to be defined by their race. Helga Crane, Irene Redfield, Clare Kendry, and the young Richard Wright all try to create identities for themselves that transcend racial boundaries. Because of this desire, they all have trouble relating completely to either white society or black society and, as a result, feel estranged from their communities.

In Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, the protagonist Helga Crane, who Hazel Carby called ‘the first truly sexual black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction,’ is trapped between two racial identities. The daughter of a white Danish woman and a black jazz musician she has never known, Helga has never had a black family member, and therefore struggles with the disconnect between her outward appearance and her external reality. Helga never truly feels at home in the company of either black people or white people and, as a result, is constantly fleeing from place to place in search of a society wherein she can ‘fit in.’ Wherever Helga finds herself, she is portrayed as the ‘other.’ In black society, she feels ostracised because of her colourful, flamboyant clothing, her distaste for ‘the race problem,’ and her ethnic identity as a mulatto. In white society, she is objectified as an exotic, primitive creature without agency. She is portrayed as a spectacle, almost never as spectator. Because she does not belong to one race completely, she never truly finds a place where she belongs. Helga’s sense of self is always censored by society’s restrictions and expectations. She never finds a version of reality that is not mediated by her surroundings…

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Agents of Change: Mixed-Race Households and the Dynamics of Neighborhood Segregation in the United States

Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Available online: 2011-12-08
DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2011.627057

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Christopher S. Fowler Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow in Applied Spatial Statistics
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington

This article explores the effects of mixed-race household formation on trends in neighborhood-scale racial segregation. Census data show that these effects are nontrivial in relation to the magnitude of decadal changes in residential segregation. An agent-based model illustrates the potential long-run impacts of rising numbers of mixed-race households on measures of neighborhood-scale segregation. It reveals that high rates of mixed-race household formation will reduce residential segregation considerably. This occurs even when preferences for own-group neighbors are high enough to maintain racial separation in residential space in a Schelling-type model. We uncover a disturbing trend, however; levels of neighborhood-scale segregation of single-race households can remain persistently high even while a growing number of mixed-race households drives down the overall rate of residential segregation. Thus, the article’s main conclusion is that parsing neighborhood segregation levels by household type—single versus mixed race—is essential to interpret correctly trends in the spatial separation of racial groups, especially when the fraction of households that are mixed race is dynamic. More broadly, the article illustrates the importance of household-scale processes for urban outcomes and joins debates in geography about interscalar relationships.

Read or purchase the article here.

Where Black-White Couples Live

Urban Geography
Volume 32, Number 1 (2011-01-01 through 2011-02-14)
pages 1-22
DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.1.1

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Steven Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

This study analyzes where households headed by Black-White, mixed-race couples live in cities. Using 2000 confidential U.S. Census data, we investigate whether Black-White households in 12 large U.S. metropolitan areas are more likely to be found in racially diverse neighborhoods than households headed by White or Black couples. Map analysis shows that concentrations of Black-White headed households are most often found in moderately diverse White neighborhoods. This relationship, however, varies by metropolitan context. Controlling for socioeconomic conditions reveals that Black-White couples are drawn to diversity no matter which racial group forms the neighborhood majority. In contrast, neighborhood racial diversity matters for households headed by Black couples only when they enter spaces containing many Whites or Asians; it matters for households headed by White couples only when they enter neighborhoods with a large number of Blacks or Latinos.

Read or purchase the article here.  Also, see Mixed Metro US.

Place, scale and the racial claims made for multiracial children in the 1990 US Census

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 32, Issue 3 (March 2009)
pages 522 – 547

Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

Richard Wright, Orvil E. Dryfoos Professor of Geography and Public Affairs and Geography Department Chair
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington, Seattle

Margaret East, PhD., Independent Scholar
Lexington, Virginia

Multiracial children embody ambiguities inherent in racial categorization and expose fictions of discrete races. Nevertheless, parents of multiracial children were asked for the 1990 US Census to report a single race for their offspring. Using confidential 1990 Census micro-data, we investigate the choices parents made for the three most common racially mixed household types (Asian-white, black-white and Latino-white) in twelve large metropolitan areas. We find that context affects the reporting of children’s racial identity. We examine these effects with models that incorporate three spatial scales: households, neighbourhoods and metropolitan areas. Model estimates reveal that racial claims made by parents of Latino- and Asian-white (but not black-white) children varied significantly across metropolitan area. A neighbourhood’s proportion white increased the probability that parents reported their children as white, while a neighbourhood’s racial diversity increased the probability that black-white parents claimed a non-white race (black or ‘other’) for their children.

Read or purchase the article here.

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.

Read the entire article here.