The Mis-education of Mixed Race

Abstract

The national education industry has emerged as one of the most powerful vehicles through which mixed race is currently manufactured and marketed. Anthologies, collections, pedagogical manuals, and educational materials in print, media, and web form have popularized, propagandized, and institutionalized particular ideas and ideals of mixed race. The “Mis-education of Mixed Race” explores the ways in which K-12 through college curricula have begun canonizing the emergent field of “mixed race studies.” This canonization often occurs with the explicit rationale of inclusiveness and equity of representation, and sometimes lays claim to a revolution that shares much with radical challenges to education that the black and brown power movements initiated in 1960s and 1970s. These earlier reforms came with critiques of the way education normalized traditional racial and social hierarchies. Mixed race educational reforms often evoke this civil rights tradition, and sometimes the curricula do challenge certain social assumptions, particularly promoting the acceptability of interracial unions and transracial adoption.