ABSTRACT
What Maria Root (1996) called “the multiracial experience” has rarely been studied from a comparative perspective. Although scholars of race and ethnicity have long recognized the importance of placing diverse national contexts side by side in order to glean insights about both their similarities and their particularities, mixed-race people have too often slipped through the cracks. To be sure, international comparison has often dwelled on the tendencies of some countries and not others to recognize racial mixture in their populations; notable examples include Nobles (2000) on Brazil and the United States, and Marx (1998) on the same nations as well as South Africa. But in these works, multiracial people are of interest as components of larger systems of racial structure and ideology; it is not their experience in particular that is at the heart of comparative inquiry.
