Our goal in this research project to learn how mixed-race, school-age children form racialized identities through their school environments. The project has four parts:
- Recording 15-20 conversational dialogues between mixed-race children and important members of their school environments (a parent, siblings, mentors, etc.);
- Three “radical listening” sessions for the greater Seattle public to hear excerpts of the conversations and engage in intergenerational dialoguing on mixed-race;
- A book project Generation Mixed Goes to School (currently under contract with Teachers College Press) that draws upon the stories as the connective tissue in this monograph on how to create “mixed-race conscious spaces” in school communities;
- A website that hosts the recorded stories and acts as a companion piece to the “radical listening” sessions and the book.
This work is necessary because mixed-race children are largely absent from critical education literature despite their demographic surge. In 1970, a handful of years after interracial marriage became legal in the United States, the U.S. Census reported that only 1% of babies living with two parents had parents from different races. As of 2013, 10% of babies living with two parents had parents from different races (Pew 2015). With the 1967 legalization of interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia and the de-stigmatization that followed, the population of mixed-race children has grown astronomically in the past fifty years. And yet, despite this demographic growth many school communities remain ignorant about how to best serve this growing demographic population. What does it mean for teachers, students, and families to truly see mixed-race children in all aspects of their educational experience, and to foster mixed-race conscious spaces, as “generation mixed” goes to school?
