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.

Revisiting the Marginal Man: Bridging Immigration Scholarship and Mixed-Race Studies

Immigrant and multiracial populations have both attracted attention for their significant impact on the demographic makeup of the United States. The anticipation of their continued growth raises important questions about how their increasing representation may alter the racial hierarchy. Although immigration scholarship frequently interprets intermarriage and multiracial identity as markers of assimilation, a large disconnect exists between the fields of immigration and mixed-race studies. This article bridges the gap between the two areas of scholarship by tracing their sociological origins to a shared theoretical progenitor: the marginal man. Through narrow interpretations of the resolution to experiences of marginality, the assimilation paradigm has largely failed to take into consideration the implications of multiracial identity, examining it only as transitive state assessed primarily through parental identification or within existing frameworks of immigrant identity. Based on interviews with 26 multiracial adults who have at least one immigrant parent, this study examines the meaning, content, and salience of multiracial identity for analyses of assimilation. Although much scholarship is concerned with the eroding and expanding boundaries of whiteness, this research analyzes how both part-white and nonwhite multiracial children of immigrant experiences contribute to understanding the role of multiraciality in blurring, crossing, or disrupting the boundaries that divide racial groups. The findings indicate that multiracial identity assertion was a mechanism for study participants to claim connection and belonging to multiple ethnoracial groups, rather than be rendered marginalized, distant, or partial with respect to their immigrant heritage(s).

“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.