This conversation occurs in Chapter 16. Scout asks Jem what a mixed child is, and when he explains and notes that they're sad, Scout asks why. Here's Jem's reply:
"They don’t belong anywhere. Colored folks won’t have ‘em because they’re half white; white folks won’t have ’em cause they’re colored, so they’re just in-betweens, don’t belong anywhere..."
So, according to Jem, a mixed child doesn't belong anywhere because each race sees in the child the portion of the opposite race and rejects that aspect of the child. To paraphrase what Jem said exactly, black people reject a mixed child because she's got whiteness in her, and white people reject a mixed child because she's got blackness in her. It's a very sad situation for any mixed child, therefore, at least in the time period in which this book takes place.
Their conversation becomes more important in Chapter 19, when Scout recalls Jem's comments and thinks about Mayella:
"...it came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years. When Atticus asked had she any friends, she seemed not to know what he meant, then she thought he was making fun of her. She was as sad, I thought, as what Jem called a mixed child: white people wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs; Negroes wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she was white."
Even though Scout is a little kid, she's showing some serious insight here. She sees the similarity between between being a mixed child (caught in between the black and white worlds with no place to belong) and being a poor white person (caught in between the two worlds of black people and richer white folks). Either way, whether you're of mixed races or whether you belong to the very poor class in Maycomb, you're stuck between two worlds, neither of which accepts you for who you are.
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