ABSTRACT
Blending books span a range of universal topics such as family relationships, school, friendships, and genre. Some Blending books include multiraciality as little more than a library keyword tag. Some authors of multiracial fictional characters go to considerable length to include descriptions that not only provide the reader with a visual, but also establish the protagonists as different from other people—first phenotypically, then in other ways. Research in sociology has established that context plays a key role in how multiracial identity is formed. Within the long-standing paradigm of racial hierarchies, the laws of hypodescent have determined that multiracial people be assigned the racial category of their nonwhite heritage. The insight that Blending books offer is that sometimes context shapes mixed race experiences so they are no different than mono-racial ones. The danger is that they will be received as evidence of our having become a post-racial society in which race does not exist or matter.
