Mixed Race Studies

Student director tackles ‘mixed race’ issues

Daily Titan
California State University, Fullerton
2009-05-17

Sean Belk

From hapa to mestizo to mulatto, ‘Half ‘n’ Half’ acts out stories and history of miscegenation. Bright colorful faces peered through shadows of the low-lit set.

The multi-cultural group of student actors then formed a circle, surrounding an infant, and simultaneously shouted, “What would it be like to shake someone’s hand and not know what they are?”

Then, the set went dark.

It was a small 30-minute production, but the subject matter touched on a big topic that some feel has gone under-reported – the aspect of growing up as two races and the discrimination that can go along with it.

The short sketch was part of the Cal State Fullerton Theatre and Dance Department’s Spring 2009 One Act performances, May 8 and 15 in the Arena Theatre, where advanced directing students presented short plays they had been working on throughout the semester for an audience of friends, family and faculty.

“Half ‘n’ Half,” an adaptation from a 1998 compilation of essays written by 17 writers and edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, was the only play with an original script adapted from a book. The play was partly written and directed by Lissa Supler, a 25-year-old senior theatre directing major.

Half Filipino and half caucasian, Supler wanted to both share her experience on the subject of being a “mixed race” and also educate people about the history of miscegenation, a term once used to describe interracial marriages that were illegal in the United States until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race, mixed emotions

The Arizona Republic
2005-05-13

Janie Magruder

Multiracial children face challenges of identity, community

Aaron Foster was 3 years old the first time the question came.

“What are you?” asked the barber, out of earshot of his mother.

“I’m a boy,” Aaron replied, bewildered.

“No, what are you? Black? Chinese?”

“I do gymnastics.”

That exchange, in 1997, made Christina Cooper-Foster, the preschooler’s Taiwanian-born mom, realize that issues of race haven’t changed much. Cooper-Foster was raised by White adoptive parents in rural Florida in the 1970s, and the same hurtful queries and curious stares she got were now plaguing her son, who is mixed race…

…They also are more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, sleep problems and various illnesses, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Their 2003 study of 90,000 U.S. adolescents found students who called themselves biracial were more likely to have sex at younger ages, access to guns and poorer experiences at school.

“It did not matter what races the students identified with,” said J. Richard Udry, a professor of maternal and child health and lead researcher. “The risks were higher for all of them if they did not identify with a single race.”

Udry concluded that multiracial children live with stress that their single-race peers do not…

…Who are they?

They’re people like Nathalie Conte, a past president of SIMBA—Students Identifying Multiracial and Biracial at Arizona State University—who helped host a mixed-race event last month on campus. Tempe was among 15 cities on the Generation MIX tour, aimed at focusing attention on the challenges of multiracial people. It ended Tuesday in Seattle.

Conte, a 22-year-old ASU senior, has a Black mother and a Caucasian father.

“The biggest issue is we have to choose our race on application forms, and it’s kind of frustrating when you have to pick ‘other,’ because you don’t think of yourself as ‘other,’ ” she said…

Read the entire article here.

What Racial Hybridity? Sexual Politics of Mixed-Race Identities in the Caribbean and the Performance of Blackness

Lucayos
The School of English Studies of The College of The Bahamas’ Journal of Caribbean and Postcolonial Criticism and Creative Work
Volume 1 (2008)
pages 90-105

Papers from the 26th West Indian Literature Conference, March 8-10, 2007

Angelique V. Nixon, Assistant Professor in Residence of Woman’s Studies
University of Connecticut

for our blood, mixed
soon with their passion in sport,
in indifference, in anger,
will create new soils, new souls, new
ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed
to the star by which this ship floats
to new worlds, new waters, new
harbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed
with the wind and the water
the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed
fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.

~ Kamau Brathwaite “New World A-Comin’”

The authenticity of “Blackness” has continuously been challenged in the debates over identity politics, specifically within Black Cultural Studies, Black feminisms, African American Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. The meaning of the word “Black” often depends upon the social, historical, cultural, and geographical context, but it is almost invariably political. In the United States, Black refers to African Americans (including mixed people of African descent because of the “one drop” rule), while in Britain, the term Black politically generally categorizes all non-white people—Asians, Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans (Kanneh 86). In the Caribbean, the word “Black” is usually used to describe people of African descent, but its history remains complex given the array of reactions to racial mixing by different colonial powers (meaning the development of racial categories determined by blood and coded by law). Each European colony had legal codes and categories for mixed race identities, which created different “classes” of people determined by skin color. Today, the word “Black” has different political and social meanings, but at the same time, we cannot deny the realities of race and racism for Black people and other people of color around the world. Furthermore, mixed-race Black identities continue to have a major affect on how we think about race and identity. And considering the different political and social connotations of the word “Black” and the massive consumption of Black culture, “Blackness” as a signifier remains elusive and subject to appropriation and commodification; hence, Blackness has been and continues to be constructed and commodified by all kinds of people and places.

Therefore, any essential notion of ‘the Black subject or experience’ has been contested by a number of theorists; however, Stuart Hall argues for a “new politics of representation” that engages in difference and recognizes Black experience as Diaspora experience (170). In essence, he argues that we must remain committed to engaging in the politics of Black representation, while simultaneously recognizing the differences within our difference. The challenges to “identity politics, recent debates over ‘mixed race’ identities, forms of racism, and class complicate the broad terrain of ‘racial difference’ on which ‘Blackness’ is identified” (Kanneth 94). In these debates, postmodernism has been helpful to Black Cultural Studies insomuch as it allows for multiple Black identities, but as bell hooks recognizes in “Postmodern Blackness,” the postmodern critique of identity appears at first glance to threaten any opportunity for those who have suffered from oppression, domination, or colonization (hooks 23). But hooks argues that a postmodern critique of essentialism is useful in opening up constricting notions of Blackness, and this would be a radical and serious challenge to racist discourse that uses the notion of a Black authentic experience (28). She asserts that “such a critique allows us to affirm multiple Black identities, varied Black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of Black identity which represent Blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy” (28). While hooks does posit that we critique and abandon essentialist notions of Blackness, at the same time, she says that we must still “struggle for radical Black subjectivity”—where the lived and diverse experiences of Black people complicate our sense of identity (29). Although hooks does not specifically discuss mixed-race identities, I use her insights to discuss the possibilities around the signification of “Blackness.”

Given the recent media attention on mixed-race and bi-racial identities (including Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Kamora Lee [Kimora Lee Simons], Alicia Keys, and others) and the historical fetishization of “exotic” women of color, I am interested in how racial performance and performativity operates in a mixed-race body, and most specifically, how these complicate the signification of Blackness. Thus, how is the Blackness of a mixed-race person embodied? What does this embodiment of Blackness mean for a mixed-race person? Are mixed-race Black identities normalized through choosing a race, passing, or legal codes that regulate race? How is mixed race situated in the discourse of racism? When a racially mixed person claims or asserts Blackness through performance or a speech act utterance (I am Black, but I’m mixed, or I’m mixed and Black, or I identify as Black) does this destabilize racism or essentialist notions of race? In this project, I offer a theoretical framework about what I call the sexual politics of mixed-race identities and performance of Blackness in the Caribbean context, which I argue through using both personal narrative and literary representations….

Read the entire article here.

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published online: 2010-11-22
DOI: 10.1037/a0021562

Arnold K. Ho
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Daniel T. Levin, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies
Vanderbilt University

Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
Harvard University

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian–White and Black–White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian–White and Black–White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black–White social categorization. Experiments 2A and 2B used a speeded response task and again revealed evidence of hypodescent in both cases, as well as a stronger effect in the Black–White target condition. In Experiments 3A and 3B, social perception was studied with a face-morphing task. Participants required a face to be lower in proportion minority to be perceived as minority than in proportion White to be perceived as White. Again, the threshold for being perceived as White was higher for Black–White than for Asian–White targets. An independent categorization task in Experiment 3B further confirmed the rule of hypodescent and variation in it that reflected the current racial hierarchy in the United States. These results documenting biases in the social categorization and perception of biracials have implications for resistance to change in the American racial hierarchy.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Historical Treatment of Biracial Individuals
• Empirical Studies of Biracial Individuals: Identification, Categorization, and Perception
• Overview of the Experiments
• Experiment 1: A Blatant Test of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2A: A Test of the Automaticity of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2B: A Replication
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3A: Evidence of Hypodescent in Visual Face Perception
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3B: A Replication and Extension
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• General Discussion
• Conclusions
• References

The “mixing of races” in America provides a natural laboratory for measuring perceptions of new racial identities that diverge from older and simpler notions of race purity (Shih & Sanchez, 2009). Although social psychologists have studied how humans think about ingroups and outgroups for decades, relatively little is known about the perception of individuals who, by the fact that they embody mixtures of social identities within a single individual, blur traditional group boundaries. Such individuals provide intriguing test cases for social categorization and social perception. We focus on one aspect of such mixtures by studying how humans who meld two seemingly distinct racial groups are categorized and perceived, and thereby test how socially meaningful lines that determine inclusion into desired group memberships are drawn. Fundamentally, the categorization and perception of biracial and multiracial individuals more broadly can reveal how culturally entrenched social categories and norms guide, and even limit, social perception.

From a sociostructural perspective, miscegenation and biracial identity have profound implications for understanding the stability and permeability of extant racial group boundaries. In the United States, there is a clear and consensually agreed upon racial status hierarchy—members of dominant and subordinate groups alike agree that Whites have the highest social status, followed by Asians, Latinos, and Blacks (see Fang, Sidanius, & Pratto, 1998; Kahn, Ho, Sidanius, & Pratto, 2009; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, pp. 52–53). However, many have argued that the increasing rate of interracial dating and marriage between racial minorities and Whites, and resulting patterns of biracial identification of their offspring, will lead to a fundamental change in the American racial hierarchy (e.g., Alba & Nee, 2003; J. Lee & Bean, 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Sears & Savalei, 2006; Thornton, 2009). For example, J. Lee and Bean (2004) suggested that “based on patterns of immigration, intermarriage, and racial/multiracial identification…, Latinos and Asians may enjoy the option to view themselves as almost white or even white, and consequently, participate in a new color line that is still somewhat exclusionary of blacks” (p. 237). Others, like Thornton (2009), have documented how the mainstream media perceives the significance of multiracial identification: “For mainstream [news] papers, we are in a new era, sans racial determinants, and in this context multiracial people embody a color-blind America…” (p. 121). These sentiments assume that biracials will be accepted as part of their dominant parent group and not limited by their minority parent group status. However, are biracial targets perceived accurately as equal members of both parent groups or more in terms of their dominant or subordinate group lineage? The five experiments reported here are aimed at addressing this question…

Read or purchase the publication here.

Changing Family Structures in America [Project Description]

US 2010: Discover America in a New Century
2010

Zhenchao Qian, Professor of Sociology
Ohio State University

The US 2010 research project examines changes in American societ in the recent past.  Directed by sociologist John Logan, US 2010 is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Qian will create a descriptive portrait of changes in family structure, with a special emphasis on gender and racial/ethnic differences and geographic variations. Using the 2010 and earlier censuses and the 2005-2010 American Community Surveys (ACS), his research will highlight several trends.

Marriage rates have declined over the years. The weakened connection between marriage and childbearing, the growing popularity of nonmarital cohabitation, the stable high divorce rates, and the declining remarriage rates have all contributed to the decline in marriage rates…

Interracial marriage reflects racial and cultural diversity in American families. Recent increases in interracial marriage have narrowed the “social distance” between racial groups; Qian will demonstrate trends in intermarriage with whites for blacks, Asian Americans, American Indians and Hispanics. ..

“With increasing shares of minority populations, Americans can no longer be viewed in simple black and white or even single-race terms,” Qian said. “Intermarriage connects married couples, families, friends, and social networks of different racial/ethnic groups; the growing population of mixed-race individuals from intermarriage further blurs racial boundaries and adds another dimension of diversity in American families.”

Read the entire project description here.

Congenital dermoid cyst of the anterior fontanel in mestizo-mulatto children

Child’s Nervous System
Volume 17, Number 6 (2001)
pages 353-355
DOI: 10.1007/s003810000419

Sonia Fermín
Section of Neurosurgery
Hospital Infancy Dr. R. Reid C, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

R. Fernández-Guerra
Section of Neurosurgery
Hospital Infancy Dr. R. Reid C, Santo Domingo,  Dominican Republic

O. López-Camacho
Section of Neurosurgery.
Hospital Infantil Dr. Arturo Grullon, Santiago, Dominican Republic

R. Alvarez
Section of Neurosurgery.
Hospital Infantil Dr. Arturo Grullon, Santiago,  Dominican Republic

Objects: Twenty-seven cases of histologically confirmed congenital dermoid cysts of the anterior fontanel in children are reported. Methods: The age, sex and race of each patient was recorded. Conclusions: Ages ranged between 2 months and 6 years. There was a female predominance, and 77.7% of these patients were children of mixed race. Surgical excision resulted in complete cure without complications or recurrences.

Read the entire article here.

Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage in the United States [Interview with Daniel T. Lichter]

Population Reference Bureau
2010-05-20

Questions and Answers with:

Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology
Cornell University

Donghui Yu:
Could you please tell us some features of Asian American(partucularly Chinese American)’s intermarriage with other race? Thanks.

Daniel T. Lichter:
Asian women have among the highest rates of interracial marriage in the United States. My colleague, Yujun Wang, has shown with the 2007 American Coummunity Survey that roughly 55 percent of U.S. born Asian women (aged 18-34) married non-Asians, mostly white men. That’s a lot of out-marriage.

Compared with Asian women, Asian men have much lower rates of marriage to whites or other races. My Asian male students sometimes complain that white guys are dating Asian women, but that white women seem uninterested in them. There is lots of debate about why this is the case, and the empirical evidence is too weak to draw strong conclusions. Antecdotal explanations sometimes emphasize cultural definitions of masculinity (e.g., shorter height of Asian men) or gender roles (e.g., perceptions that Asian men may hold patriarchal gender role attitudes). We just don’t have enough hard data on these sorts of questions, which deal with highly sensitive issues that often strike a nerve.

To your last question, Chinese Americans overall have higher rates of outmarriage to whites than some other Asian groups (e.g., Asian Indians or Vietnamese). This probably reflects that fact that they have been in the U.S. for many generations (and a large percentage share common cultural traits of the majority white population, including language). But among recent Chinese immigrants—the first generation—rates of intermarriage are much lower and perhaps lower than in the past. Some of this seems to reflect the recent influx of Chinese with lower education levels from new sending areas(e.g., from Fujian province).

Chinyere Osuji:
Does interracial marriage really demonstrate a blurring of racial boundaries? If so, in what ways can we see this happening? Does this impact the lives of black-white couples? If so, in what ways?

Daniel T. Lichter:
From my perspective, the growth of interracial marriages has definitely blurred racial boundaries in the U.S. In fact, I often think of interracial marriage as the spoon that stirs the “melting pot.” For example, interracial couples bridge the family and social networks of each partner. They span racial boundaries by interacting on both sides of the racial divide and, more importantly, they bring other friends and family members with them. Of course, this assumes that both sides of the racial divide accept the interracial couple, which isn’t always the case.

Also, the mixed race children of interracial couples, by definition, blur the racial line. These children are more likely than single race children to have cross-racial friends and to marry interracially themselves. Most children of black-white couples, however, are still likely to identify themselves as black or African American rather than as mixed-race or some other racial label. President Obama identified himself as black on the 2010 decennial census, even though his mother was white and his father was black…

…Yang Jiang:
Dr Lichter,
How do you think the increase of biracial/multiracial population in the U.S affect the overall interracial marriage rates? Compared to single race counterparts, are they more likely to to inter marry or intra-marry? How should we distinguish inter- vs intra-marriages for biracial/multiracial individuals?

Daniel T. Lichter:
This is a more difficult question to answer than it appears at first blush. On the one hand, mixed-race individuals are more likely to than single-race persons to marry someone other than another mixed-race person. So if mixed-race people are treated as a separate racial category, then this would increase the overall share of interracial marriages in the United States. Zhenchao Qian and I have treated black-white mixed-race persons as black or white or mixed race in separate analyses. In the end, regardless of classification, it doesn’t have much effect on overall rates of racial intermarriage.

This is likely to change in the future. Only 2-3 percent of the population today self-identifies as having more than one race. Of course, many people who self-identify as having only one race (President Obama) may in fact be multi-racial. Is President Obama’s marriage to Michelle Obama interracial? This question makes clear the conceptual challenges of this sort of research and the subjective nature of racial self-identification…

Read the entire interview here….

Jen Chau Reflects on Her Work as a Change-Maker for Mixed-Race Communities

JVoices.com
2008-12-03

Cole Krawitz

Jen Chau, founder and director of SWIRL, (and an eagerly anticipated contributor to JVoices) will be presenting this Sunday at Inside the Activists’ Studio (which JVoices is a co-sponsor) on how activism needs a serious make-over, and tools for building a sustainable activist life. We caught up with her before the day’s event to ask her a few questions about her work, the celebration of SWIRL’s 8th Anniversary, and how the Obama campaign raised awareness of mixed-race experiences in the United States.

CK: Today you’re celebrating the 8th Anniversary of the organization you started, SWIRL, and it’s continual growth and success as a national multi-ethnic organization that challenges society’s notions of race. Tell us how this all got started, and what it’s like to watch your organization continue to grow.

JC: My work with Swirl primarily grew out of a real need for community. Since I had grown up very much between and outside of communities, I was determined to create something for those who had also experienced having “one foot in and one foot out” – mixed race individuals. Additionally, I decided at the start that Swirl would also serve interracial couples and mixed families. We have always been inclusive of anyone who feels that their experiences challenge this country’s traditional notions of “race,” culture, and identity.

Read the entire article here.

Racial Identity’s Gray Area

The Wall Street Journal
2008-06-12

June Kronholz

The Definition of Whiteness Continues to Shift

When Barack Obama, whose mother was white, identifies himself as black, and when Bill Richardson, whose father was white, identifies himself as Hispanic, who is white?

The U.S. Census Bureau says the country will be majority-minority in 2050—that is, the combined number of blacks, Asians, American Indians and Hispanics will put whites in the minority. Texas and California are already there.

But the definition of white keeps shifting. Groups have been welcomed in or booted out; people opt out, sue to get in or change their minds and jump back and forth.

The deepest racial divide, between blacks and nonblacks, endures. But there also are identity shifts among African-Americans, as Sen. Obama’s success suggests. Some make it into the middle class, where education and social mobility may help shape their identities as much as race does. Others are left behind in increasingly segregated schools and neighborhoods.

The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting—demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers—divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians.

Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in 1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian, says Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians, were asking the same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, he says. No one argued seriously that Jews and Greeks, or Irish and Poles—light-skinned but poor—weren’t white, but whether they were ethnically Caucasian was up for debate, he adds…

…”Who’s white [won’t] mean that much, but when someone is partly black, that will still be noticed by a large part of society,” says Bill Butz of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research group. He sees today’s black-white divide becoming a “black/nonblack” gulf…

…Opting Out of Whiteness

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was “some sentiment” among non-Arabs for counting Arab-Americans as nonwhite, says David Roediger, a University of Illinois race historian. Since then, the Arab-American Institute in Washington has unsuccessfully lobbied the government for a separate “Middle East and North African” category on the census. The institute puts the Arab-American population at three times larger than the Census estimates, which limits its political power and claims on government programs…

…The Melting-Pot Effect

That doesn’t mean race won’t matter, even as it becomes harder to define. Blacks still cannot jump back and forth across those shifting racial lines, which explains why Sen. Obama calls himself black even while he singled out his white grandmother in his speech claiming the Democratic nomination.

That’s not likely to change soon. Some demographers predict that within a century, there will be as many Americans who are mixed-race as there will be those whose parents are both of the same race, further blurring color lines. But that “hybridity,” as demographers call it, will be concentrated among Hispanics and Asians who marry whites and each other, not among blacks…

Read the entire article here.

Positioning American Japanese in the Context of Japanese and Okinawan Nationalism and Ethnicity

Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume II (October 2009)
18 pages

Stephanie Otani
Stanford University

have the right…
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy…
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify…
To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial…
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.

~from the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, by Maria P.P. Root

They wear war in their faces. They are the symbols of foreign domination. They embody the transgression of sacred boundaries. In Okinawa, people of Japanese and American descent (or Amerasians) are first and foremost foreigners, no matter how Japanese or Okinawan their language, customs, mannerisms, or worldviews may be. Before they even speak, their face and skin signal to people the circumstances of their births. The rights claimed by Root in the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” ultimately culminate in the right to first and foremost be understood as a human being as opposed to racial anomaly or mistake. As of now, these rights are insubstantial claims for those who carry signs of American parentage in their appearance throughout Okinawa and the rest of Japan. Instead, they continue to be externally categorized as gaijin or “foreigners” in their own homes.

Japan does not contain the linguistic nor legal infrastructure to accommodate them under the idea of Japaneseness. Within Japan, Okinawa is a particularly interesting and relevant site to explore issues of cultural and political legitimacy and conflicts between internal and external identity. The historical experience of Okinawa and its struggle for political sovereignty in international affairs mirrors the experience of American Japanese and their struggle to find a sense of national belonging. It is because of the contentious physical and political space Okinawa has historically inhabited that Amerasians struggle to fit into a larger Okinawan or Japanese identity.

Amerasians Within the Broader Context of Japan

In this section I will discuss the overall Japanese attitude toward multiracial people by examining the terms used to refer to multiracial people and the legal status of international couples. These two aspects of Japanese society reflect its reluctance to incorporate ethnic difference…

Read the entire article here.