“How are multiracial people identifying and how does that impact their romantic relationship choices and their experiences within those relationships?” That’s the question that Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Dr. Melinda Mills’ recent book “The Colors of Love: Multiracial People in Interracial Relationships” aims to address.
“The Colors of Love” was published in December of 2021 and builds off of the foundation laid by Mills’ previous book “The Borders of Race: Patrolling Multiracial’ Identities” as well as her graduate school dissertation.
Mills grew up in an interracial family in the Caribbean and was attending graduate school at Columbia University when the U.S. Census Bureau began to allow multiracial people to claim two or more races on the Census, which inspired her formal research. This work has been expanded on through her published books, addressing different aspects of multiracial identity.
“I was really trying to make space in this book to talk about and try to capture some of the fluidity. What does it mean to be multiracial and to identify as just one race throughout one’s life, but also maybe one race at one particular moment, or in one particular place? And then to have that change over time and space? Or to keep changing, right? How do you grapple with that fluidity and put it on paper?” Mills said.
The fluidity Mills references has a direct impact on how multiracial people engage in romantic relationships. When the cultural expectation is for people to “stick with their own kind or partner with someone who is similar,” as Mills frames it; what does similarity look like for someone who is multiracial?
“We have the previous generation of parents who are married or partnered interracially and, depending on how they experienced that they’re saying, “please don’t do that again” and discouraging their children who are mixed race from making a similar choice. So they’re saying, ‘pick this group’… I was finding that pattern emerging over and over again, and that was interesting and surprising to me,” she said.
She also uses the book to bring attention to the evidence of persistent anti-black racism and the ways that it plays out in romantic relationships. She argues the importance of acknowledging that romantic relationships are a social space where broader racial dynamics are still at play.
Mills hopes that readers are able to use her book as a tool for connection, understanding, and appreciation of other people’s experiences. She also hopes that it creates new ways for people to communicate how they identify themselves racially.
“There’s a lot there to celebrate, right? There’s a lot to appreciate. There’s a lot for multiracial people to learn about themselves and their own sort of internalized racism, where it exists. And there’s a lot from their experience that I think other folks can connect to and learn from as well,” she said