Race matters

Race matters. It matters in ways that transcend traditional theorizations of identity, 'color', 'race' and cultural difference around them/us, center/periphery or inside/outside categories. This paper draws on interviews with 50 interracial families and argues that the micro-localized site of the family reveals the complex ways in which race discourses and racializing practices are re-articulated within and across diasporic cultural groups and cross-generationally. The data suggest that the formation and 'lived experience' of interracial relationships draws individuals through a number of critical change events and into complex and unpredictable sites and moments of 'third space' otherness.