All Mixed up: Multi/Racial Liberation and Compassion-Based Activism

This paper seeks to identify pathways of liberation amidst contemporary challenges faced by those who identify as multiracial by re-imagining various approaches to confronting racial oppression through compassion-based activism. The primary question of this study focuses on how compassion (as broadly understood by and across the world’s spiritual traditions) might sustain, invigorate, or be adapted to aid the struggle for racial justice in the United States. This paper begins with reviewing theories from critical mixed race studies and brings them into dialogue with the eight themes of compassion-based activism. The results of this interdisciplinary study provide both the promises and challenges to a compassion-based approach when it comes to multi/racial liberation and proposes a reinterpretation that centers multi/racial experiences.

“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s, Too” – Toward Critical Mixed Race Studies

This article examines the development of ‘Critical Mixed Race Studies’ (CMRS) as a crucial framework to critically engage with the shift in US racial discourse from long-standing politics of the one-drop rule to a pervasive celebratory multiracialism and its support in the early formation of ‘Mixed Race Studies.’ With a focus on the black-white paradigm, this contribution sketches the preconditions of this academic discourse, discusses a number of its foundational scholarly texts and contrasts them with prominent black critiques. Finally, a call for CMRS as a part of the Black Studies project will be formulated via trend-setting examples.