Mixed race people

No industrialized nation has so large a percentage of its population in prison as does the United States. And no such nation is producing so many mixed race people. These two facts about the United States are not directly related. Yet they bear mention together because of the antithetical implications these two realities have for... 

The most virulent opposition to the notion that people of mixed race can carve out an identity that is neither black nor white is now coming from Afro-Americans. Mixed-ethnicity children who do not have a black parent are not subject to the same One Drop rule, but for those with a black parent, there is often intense pressure to cleave to the black, and accusations of racial betrayal if the individual chooses not to choose to be only black. Surely it is a significant irony that, one century after Euro-Americans were trying to write mulattos out of existence, the repression is now coming from Afro-essentialists. It seems we are witnessing another instance of the construction of the racial out of the denial of the interracial. (33)... 

Monoracial is a term used widely in the essays collected by Root (1992a, 1996b). Like Spencer (1999), I take it as a terminological indicator of the disavowed reassertion of racial purity that characterizes the academic literature on people of mixed race to date. 

Gaskins, Pearl Fuyo, ed. 1999. What Are You Voices of Mixed-Race Young People. New York Henry Holt. 

Spencer, Jon Michael. 1997. The New Colored People The Mixed-Race Movement in America. New York New York University Press. 

The emergence of a racially mixed population is transforming the face of the United States. The increasing presence of multiracial people necessitates that we as a nation ask ourselves questions about our identity Who are we How do we see ourselves Who are we in relation to one another . . . Resolving the [national] identity crisis may force us to reexamine our construction of race and the hierarchical social order it supports. (3)... 

United States—Race relations. 2. Racially mixed people—United States. 3. Interracial marriage— United States. 4. Race discrimination—United States. I. Title. 

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