ABSTRACT
Mixed race can be described as people whose parentage is of two or more "races", although race itself is a social construction, a category not based on fact or biology, but based on the need for society to find a way of categorizing people. Social constructionism posits that we move away from taken for granted realities and consider the ways in which identities are socially produced. Current research on preferences for terminology and classification of mixed heritage among mixed heritage peoples inform us of the extent to which descriptions are multiple and complex. Scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggested that mixed unions would create "hybrid degeneration", that is mental, physical, and emotional deformities, a sense of whiteness being contaminated with black blood. Although there has been a fair amount of research and thinking about mixed race heritage populations, there has not been a corresponding amount of training in this area.
