Racial discrimination explains a large proportion of the racial differences in wages and employment. Native-born Non-Latinx African American men have a 20 percent weekly wage penalty and 9 percentage point employment penalty relative to native-born Non-Latinx White men; other groups of Black men have similar outcomes. Non-Latinx African American women have a 2 percent weekly wage penalty and 2 percentage point employment penalty relative to native-born Non-Latinx White women; other groups of Black women have similar outcomes.

Chapter 6 examines the attitudes toward the offspring of interracial unions that characterized some influential members of the Italian scientific community in the postwar years. After reviewing scientific and pseudoscientific opinions about racial mixing from the beginning of the century to the postwar period, I focus on the making of a ponderous anthropometric study on the war children of color published in 1960. Its author was Luigi Gedda, a doctor-geneticist and former president of Catholic Action, who advised Pius XII on matters of reproduction. The chapter contrasts the attitudes of Gedda and other doctors and geneticists to those of psychologists.

Drawing on institutional records and oral testimonies, Chapter 4 shows that racial beliefs and prejudices did not just exist among the educated classes, but were present also among ordinary Italians. It reconstructs the difficulties that the children had to face as they entered adolescence in the late 1950s in a society that was not particularly kind to people who looked “different” or did not profess the dominant religion. This chapter describes the attempts on the part of some social workers to shelter these children from social hostility and marginalization in the communities in which they lived, and the rather mixed results of these attempts. The difficulties of adoption are also examined, along with stories of mothers who kept the children, and who were stigmatized along with them.

This interlude briefly recounts the story of other “brown babies” who were born from the encounter between Italian women and colonial subjects considered "dangerous" and sent by Mussolini to confino (internment) in an isolated village in Calabria at the end of the 1930s. One of them left the village for Ethiopia in 1961 to access the inheritance left to him by his wealthy father and became the protagonist of a sensational story reported on both sides of the Atlantic.

Asian American literature at the turn of the twentieth century begins with multiracial, transnational, autobiographical Asian American writing by two Eurasian sisters, Edith Maude Eaton and Winifred Eaton, or as they are known through their pen names, Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watana. Yet the flourishing of mixed-race Asian American literature written by multiracial Asian Americans about Asian American experiences has mainly occurred at the turn into the twenty-first century. Like their non-mixed-race writing peers, multiracial Asian American writers are confronted by questions of how much of their art is autobiographical and how much is fiction. This chapter examines the porousness of autobiography and fiction in May-lee Chai’s Hapa Girl (2008), Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian 100% Hapa (2006), Paisley Rekdal’s The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000), and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats. These four texts represent four distinct genres: memoir, travel writing, art book, and novel. Whether fiction or non-fiction, all chart the personal experiences of their mixed-ace authors as multiracial subjects while crafting aesthetic works that contribute to our understanding of multiracial Asian American literature at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the publication of “Theresa” in Freedom’s Journal, a short story about women’s wartime heroism into the broader history of the Haitian Revolution. “Theresa” paints an image of mixed-race womanhood that was not insignificant for both this American venue and for a larger transatlantic context. Like the anonymously written British epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), “Theresa” shows mixed-race women who are aligned with Black racial uplift rather than white assimilation. Moreover, both of these texts present images of mixed-race heroines who differ significantly from those of the “tragic mulatta” genre that would gain popularity during the antebellum period. Instead, “Theresa” frames its mixed-race heroines as models not only of racial solidarity but also of radical abolitionist action. In this, “Theresa” anticipates postbellum mixed-race heroines, through foregoing mixed-race women’s heterosexual union with Black men with their political action alongside them. The chapter offers an analysis of early nineteenth-century texts such as Laura Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and Zelica the Creole (1820), which make the safety of white women the priority of their mixed-race characters.