Associate Professor Ralina Joseph’s new book, “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” is now available from Duke University Press.

Representations of multiracial Americans, especially those with one black and one white parent, appear everywhere in contemporary culture, from reality shows to presidential politics. Some depict multiracial individuals as mired in painful confusion; others equate them with progress, as the embodiment of a postracial utopia. In Transcending Blackness, Ralina L. Joseph critiques both depictions as being rooted in—and still defined by—the racist notion that blackness is a deficit that must be overcome.