Mixed Race Studies

Often Misidentified, Multiracial People Value Accurate Perceptions

American Psychological Association
Press Releases
2013-08-02

Average American has trouble identifying multiracial people, research finds

HONOLULU — Multiracial people may be misidentified more often as being white than black and may value being accurately identified more so than single-race individuals, according to research presented at APA’s 121st Annual Convention.

“Today, the distinctions among white, black, Latino and Asian people are becoming blurred by the increasing frequency and prominence of multiracial people,” said Jacqueline M. Chen, PhD, of the University of California, Davis. “Still, average Americans have difficulty identifying multiracial people who don’t conform to the traditional single-race categories that society has used all their lives.”

Chen discussed six experiments in which participants were consistently less likely to identify people as multiracial than single-race and took longer to identify someone as multiracial compared to how easily they identified black, white and Asian people. When they made incorrect identifications, they were consistently more likely to categorize a multiracial person as white than black, the study found. Time pressure, distractions and thinking of race in either-or terms made observers significantly less likely to identify someone as multiracial. The study was conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara and involved 435 ethnically diverse undergraduate students.

Participants identified the race of black, white, Asian or multiracial individuals in photos and researchers recorded each participant’s accuracy and time to respond. Researchers used a memorization task and a time limit in two experiments to determine if either would affect a participant’s accuracy. In another experiment, participants were told the study was about reading comprehension and attention. They then read news articles about scientists claiming to find a genetic basis for race and were asked to view several photographs of faces and identify them by race.

Scientists agree that the racial categories we use today are not based on biological differences but are social constructions that can change over time, Chen said, noting that until the mid-20th century, the Anglo-Saxon majority in the United States viewed Irish and Italian immigrants as different races. Previous research has found that people who identify as multiracial have as many as or more positive experiences than those who identify with a single race, regardless of that group’s status in society, she said…

…In another presentation during the same convention session, Jessica D. Remedios, PhD, of Tufts University, looked at how multiracial people value the accuracy of another person’s perception of their race. “Our research found that multiracial people expect positive interactions with people who accurately perceive their racial backgrounds because that affirms their self-perceptions,” Remedios said. ..

Read the entire press release here.

Breeding Unity: Battlestar Galactica’s Biracial Reproductive Futurity

Camera Obscura
Volume 27, Number 3 81 (2012)
pages 1-37
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-1727446

Anne Kustritz, Assistant Professor in Television Studies
University of Amsterdam

While Battlestar Galactica reinvigorated the science fiction genre by representing contemporary political problems in a complex, often radical fashion, the series also makes visible a new articulation of eugenic thinking. Postmodern eugenics repurposes turn-of-the-twentieth-century ideas of racial progress and recombines them with different narratives and ideologies so that audiences may receive them as new and cut off from history. By centering its finale on the survival of one genetically idealized child, Battlestar constructs a new narrative context for an old story that rationalizes the sacrifice of the nonheterosexual, nonreproductive, and nonconformist to build a “better” race. The idealization of biraciality in Battlestar puts eugenic means to modern ends: the biological construction of a future wherein difference can be dealt with in reproductive rather than political terms. Two pieces of fan video art, “Unnatural Selection” and “Battlestar Redactica,” clarify Battlestar‘s complicity in eugenic violence and history, while offering alternative solutions to the moral and narrative impasses of the series. By refusing the genetic stasis Battlestar proposes, these fan video projects invite audiences to continue exploring multiple definitions of survival, hybridity, and cultural transformation, reanimating characters sacrificed in the series on its way to genetic utopia (or dystopia) and thereby resuscitating the multiple, queer, contradictory futures they embodied.

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Is George Zimmerman white, Latino or mixed race? Depends on who you ask.

The Seattle Globalist: Where Seattle Meets the World
2013-08-01

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington, Seattle

It’s been nearly two weeks since the George Zimmerman verdict was handed down, and the conversations in my Facebook feed have shifted from outrage and sorrow to more nuanced discussions of the state of race in the U.S.

Many of these conversations have focused on Zimmerman’s racial identity and, more recently, the identity of the lone “non-black” juror.

Zimmerman’s mixed ethnicity has stirred up conversation about how much his race “counts”: To what extent does he identify as Latino, and does it make a difference in how he saw himself and how he saw Trayvon Martin?…

Read the entire article here.

Langston Hughes showed me what it meant to be a black writer

The Guardian
2013-07-31

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

His 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain made clear that a black writer must write the best work they can, while refusing to be defined by other people’s racial agendas

One of my first columns on these pages didn’t make it into the paper. I’d written about the NATO bombing of Bosnia and the comment editor at the time thought I should stick to subjects closer to home. “We have people who can write about Bosnia,” he said. “Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this.”

The whole point of having a black columnist, he thought, was to write about black issues. I had other ideas. I had no problem writing about race. It’s an important subject that deserves scrutiny to which I’ve given considerable thought and about which I’ve done a considerable amount of research. I have no problem being regarded as a black writer. It’s an adjective not an epithet. In the words of Toni Morrison, when asked if she found it limiting to be described as a black woman writer: “I’m already discredited. I’m already politicised, before I get out of the gate. I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination, it expands it.”…

Read the entire article here.

Status and Stress

The New York Times
2013-07-27

Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.

What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.

Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age…

…“Early-life stress and the scar tissue that it leaves, with every passing bit of aging, gets harder and harder to reverse,” says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. “You’re never out of luck in terms of interventions, but the longer you wait, the more work you’ve got on your hands.”

This research has cast new light on racial differences in longevity. In the United States, whites live longer on average by about five years than African-Americans. But a 2012 study by a Princeton researcher calculated that socioeconomic and demographic factors, not genetics, accounted for 70 to 80 percent of that difference. The single greatest contributor was income, which explained more than half the disparity. Other studies, meanwhile, suggest that the subjective experience of racism by African-Americans — a major stressor — appears to have effects on health. Reports of discrimination correlate with visceral fat accumulation in women, which increases the risk of metabolic syndrome (and thus the risk of heart disease and diabetes). In men, they correlate with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

Race aside, Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York, describes these relationships as one way that “poverty gets under the skin.” He and others talk about the “biological embedding” of social status. Your parents’ social standing and your stress level during early life change how your brain and body work, affecting your vulnerability to degenerative disease decades later. They may even alter your vulnerability to infection. In one study, scientists at Carnegie Mellon exposed volunteers to a common cold virus. Those who’d grown up poorer (measured by parental homeownership) not only resisted the virus less effectively, but also suffered more severe cold symptoms…

Read the entire article here.

What Interracial and Gay Couples Know About ‘Passing’

The Atlantic
2013-07-31

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

As I awaited news of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in the same-sex marriage cases last month, I began to reflect on all of the daily privileges that I receive as a result of being heterosexual—freedoms and privileges that my husband and I might not have enjoyed even fifty years ago. For our marriage is interracial.

Given my own relationship, I often contest anti-gay marriage arguments by noting the striking similarities between arguments that were once also widely made against interracial marriage. “They’re unnatural.” “It’s about tradition.” And my personal favorite, “what about the children?” In response, opponents of same-sex marriage, particularly other blacks, have often told me that the struggles of gays and lesbians are nothing at all like those African Americans (and other minorities) have faced, specifically because gays and lesbians can “pass” as straight and blacks cannot “pass” as white—as if that somehow renders the denial of marital rights in one case excusable and another inexcusable. In both cases, denying the right to marriage still works to mark those precluded from the institution as “other,” as the supposed inferior.

But what does it mean to “pass”? And what effect does passing have, in the longer term, on a relationship and on a person’s psyche?

Until a recent trip with my husband to South Africa, my understanding of the harms caused by passing came primarily through my research on interracial family law, and in particular through the tragic love story of Alice Beatrice Rhinelander and Leonard Kip Rhinelander, to which I devoted the first half of my recent book…

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Study explores race differences of lung cancer risk

Vanderbilt University Medical Center Reporter
2013-08-01

Mimi Eckhard

Vanderbilt research scientist Melinda Aldrich, Ph.D., MPH, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Academic Career Award to investigate some of the genetic secrets behind a greater risk of lung cancer among African-Americans compared with other racial and ethnic groups.

Aldrich, assistant professor of Thoracic Surgery and Epidemiology, will study the genetic ancestry of African-Americans to identify the genetic and environmental risk factors associated with a higher incidence of lung cancer in this population.

To date, this represents the largest study of African-Americans with lung cancer.

Though smoking is certainly a well-documented risk factor for lung cancer, it does not explain the racial disparity in lung cancer risk. Therefore, Aldrich believes a genetic difference may lie at the root of the problem…

…This five-year research study will be the largest to examine the genetics of lung cancer in a population whose ancestry is mixed and separated by thousands of years. African-Americans have ancestry in both Africa and Europe, and genetic mapping could identify common key regions that contribute to racial differences in lung cancer incidence…

Read the entire article here.

Prove you’re Japanese: when being bicultural can be a burden

The Japan Times
2013-07-29

Louise George Kittaka

Parents’ decision to add a katakana name can create issues when kids enter the big wide world

Japanese are Japanese and foreigners are foreigners, and never the twain shall meet? In many aspects of daily life in this country, there is one way for the Japanese and another for the rest of us. Like it or not, that’s just how it is. At least foreigners know where we stand.

However, bicultural individuals — the children of one Japanese and one foreign parent — may find that life isn’t quite that simple.

Although they were born, raised and educated in Japan, and as Japanese citizens are entitled to all the legal privileges that entails, society sometimes marginalizes them in ways that their foreign parents may not have anticipated. Japanese television shows and commercials might be full of cute “half” young adults, but back in the real world, being a bit “different” isn’t always such a good thing when you are trying to make your way in this country…

Read the entire article here.

‘Doing the right thing’: transracial adoption in the USA

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 8 (August 2013)
Special Issue: Mothering Across Racialised Boundaries
pages 1273-1291
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Ravinder Barn, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

Racial/cultural identity and parental cultural competence in transracial adoption (TRA) are subjects of fierce debate and discussion in contemporary western societies. The ongoing practice of TRA has led to a polarization that either supports or berates the suitability of the environment provided in such homes. The external scrutiny invariably creates doubt among white adoptive parents as to whether they are ‘doing the right thing’. By drawing upon extant literature and original qualitative research carried out in New York, this paper explores adoptive mothers’ conceptualization and understanding of racial/ethnic socialisation (RES). The paper puts forward three discursive approaches. It is argued that the ways in which white adoptive mothers understand and experience diversity influences their approach to RES, which in turn is mediated through family and community networks and societal discourses on race, power and hierarchy.

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Narratives from a Nottingham council estate: a story of white working-class mothers with mixed-race children

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 8 (August 2013)
Special Issue: Mothering Across Racialised Boundaries
pages 1342-1358
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.776698

Lisa McKenzie, Research Fellow, Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Nottingham

This paper introduces a group of white working-class women living on a council estate in the UK drawing on an ethnographic study conducted between 2005 and 2009, examining the impact of class inequality and a stigmatized living space in an ethnically diverse urban neighbourhood. All of the women are mothers and have mixed-race children; they reside on the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham, an inner-city neighbourhood that has been subject to poor housing, poverty and unemployment for many generations. The women who live on this estate say that they suffer from negative stereotypes and stigmatization because of the notoriety of the estate, because they are working class and because they have had sexual relationships with black men. However, there is a sense of connectedness to the estate and there are strong cultural meanings that are heavily influenced by the West Indian community. This paper then highlights the importance of place when focusing upon families, class inequality and intercultural relationships.

Read or purchase the article here.