Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

There is good reason to expect that in the United States today individuals who identify as multiracial experience negative treatment. Multiracial individuals report encountering discrimination and microaggressive behaviors such as racial exclusion and marginalization, exoticization, invalidation of their racial identities, and racial essentialization.² These behaviors are in part a result of the kinds of racism that all groups of color face, and in part products of monoracism, a system which privileges single-race categories over racial mixing.³ This system leads to the systematic exclusion and reduction of multiracial identities. For example, during much of the history of the United States, the “one-drop rule” (the idea that every person with any black ancestry was to be identified as only black) was both a social and a legal principle that was heavily enforced.”⁴

Monoracism and the discriminatory and microaggressive behavior it produces continue to affect multiracial individuals today. For example, there have been numerous cases of workplace racial discrimination presented to courts by multiracial plaintiffs alleging the violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁵ A common type of microaggressive behavior found in many of the court cases was racial essentialization; individuals were assigned to a single, monoracial group by others despite their multiracial background.⁶ For example, multiracial individuals with a black parent are typically described and treated as if they are solely African American.⁷ Even the courts themselves generally describe multiracial people with any black ancestry as simply black. Many scholars who are supporters of the “Personal Identity Equality” approach have critiqued this pattern, arguing that the “misrecognition of one’s identity” is a form of “social subordination,”⁸ although it is not against the law to refuse to acknowledge the racial identity that a person claims.

Mary E. Campbell and Sylvia M. Emmanuel, “On The Edge: Multiracial Groups and Public Policies,” in How Public Policy Impacts Racial Inequality, Josh Grimm and Jaime Loke eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 96.

Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

Posted in Articles, Arts, Audio, Biography, New Media, United States on 2012-08-31 00:01Z by Steven

Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection
2012-08-30

NPR Staff

As summer winds down, All Things Considered is winding down its series “Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.”

For the past few months, the show has asked listeners to tell their stories about a particular piece of music they associate with their parents. Listener Melanie Cowart of San Antonio, Texas, wrote in to explain how Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” — a song that’s been interpreted by Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald and many others — became a running soundtrack for her parents’ relationship.

“My father was African-American; my mother was white,” Cowart tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “They met in 1929, at a time when that type of a relationship was not something that was acceptable in society. In fact, in many states, including in Missouri where they met, it was against the law. But they fell in love and formed a very strong bond.”…

Read the entire transcript here. Download the audio here (00:05:42).

Tags: All Things Considered, Cole Porter, Melanie Cowart, Melissa Block, Mom and Dad's Record Collection, music, National Public Radio

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Mixed Race Studies

Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

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