Mixed Race Studies

Some Observations on Identity Problems in Children of Negro-White Marriages

Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease
Volume 146, Issue 3 (March 1968)
pages 249-256

Joseph D. Teicher (1912-2000)
University of Southern California School of Medicine

The Los Angeles County General Hospital population includes every case, and, inevitably, many Negro-white families present themselves for service at the hospital’s Child Psychiatry Unit. The problems of the children in these families are directly related to the fact that one parent is Negro and the other Caucasian. Such comments as “Any white woman who marries a Negro man is sick!” and “The children are always a mess!” are common, and yet no systematic research has been done in this area. As some of the unit’s staff began to explore the special problems of the children of Negro-white marriages, they became interested in refining the methods of studying these interracial families. The report that follows presents, in brief, a statement of the problem, a review of the literature, three case histories and a description of the study now in progress.

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History and Current Status of the Houma Indians

Midcontinent American Studies Journal
Volume 6, Number 2 (Fall 1965)
pages 149-163

Ann Fischer
Tulane University

Brewton Berry, in Almost White, reports that there are some 200 groups of “racial orphans” in the United States. Among these, those who have some claim to Indian ancestry are known as “so-called Indians.” This term is apt, for these peoples have a tenuous racial status. Although so called Indians are of mixed ancestry, they emphasize their Indian identity. Mulatto groups, on the other hand, consider their own status to be midway between white and Negro. Both Mulatto and so-called Indian groups may be found today in Louisiana, living in separate, isolated social units. In these Indian groups in Louisiana, there has been consistent strong resistance to identification with Negroes. Whites, Indians and Negroes agree that as a result of this resistance the Indian groups are more deprived than Negroes who live in the same areas. The racial status of these people varies from parish to parish, and migration can often overcome the problems of racial identity.

The so-called Indians of Louisiana live in settlements which are isolated from the Negro settlements of the same area. Negroes work in the cane fields and usually live in identical unpainted houses in rows perpendicular to the road, surrounded by sugar cane fields. Indians live in houses, often run-down, along the levees in the typical line villages of the bayou country. In many parts of this region white and Indian houses maybe mixed in the line villages, due to the movement of the whites down the line. Negro and Indian housing, on the other hand, is never mixed in the situations which I have observed. Many Indians know no Negroes, and when they compare themselves to any other group it is usually to the white French. They reject the white judgment that they are sexually immoral, pointing out, probably accurately, that the same sexual patterns are common to both groups. It is in sexual behavior and the differences in the standard of living that Indians compare themselves to others. When Indians improve their economic circumstances and these improvements become visible, they feel that the whites resent their successes and think they are not entitled to them…

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Are Mixed-Race Children Better Adjusted?

Time Magazine
2009-02-21

John Cloud

Americans like answers in black and white, a cultural trait we confirmed last year when the biracial man running for President was routinely called “black”.

The flattening of Barack Obama’s complex racial background shouldn’t have been surprising. Many multiracial historical figures in the U.S. have been reduced (or have reduced themselves) to a single aspect of their racial identities: Booker T. Washington, Tina Turner, and Greg Louganis are three examples. This phenomenon isn’t entirely pernicious; it is at least partly rooted in our concern that growing up with a fractured identity is hard on kids. The psychologist J. D. Teicher summarized this view in a 1968 paper: “Although the burden of the Negro child is recognized as a heavy one, that of the Negro-White child is seen to be even heavier.”

But new research says this old, problematized view of multiracial identity is outdated. In fact, a new paper in the Journal of Social Issues shows that multiracial adolescents who identify proudly as multiracial fare as well as—and, in many cases, better than—kids who identify with a single group, even if that group is considered high-status (like, say, Asians or whites). This finding was surprising because psychologists have argued for years that mixed-race kids will be better adjusted if they pick a single race as their own…

…In short, multiracial kids seem to create their own definitions for fitting in, and they show more psychological flexibility than those mixed-race kids who feel bound to one choice or another…

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The “Multiracial” Option: Social Group Identity and Changing Patterns of Racial Categorization

American Politics Research
Volume 39, Number 1 (January 2011)
pages 176-204
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X10378845

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

This article focuses on a new and growing trend in the United States: multiracial (or mixed race) identification. Multiracial self-identification forces us to consider that the norms of racial identification are shifting in which Americans perceive greater individual agency in how they choose to racially identify compared to the choices offered in the past. Given this, is the willingness to identify as multiracial a proxy for changing political attitudes about American race relation? Using a unique data set that includes multiple measures of racial identification, this article examines the individual-level determinants that predict who is willing to self-identify as multiracial and the political consequences of this identity. This research demonstrates the complexity of racial identification today as well as the need to reconsider how race is measured in public opinion surveys. Most importantly, the data demonstrate that those who self-identify as multiracial hold different racial attitudes than those who do not.

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Double-barrelled race system to start on Saturday

Today Online
2010-12-31

Zul Othman

SINGAPORE – From Saturday, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) will implement the registration of dual heritage options for children with parents of different races. This means these children will be able to share dual heritages on their identity cards (ICs), by way of “double-barrelled” races.

This change was first announced in Parliament in January; giving mixed marriage couples—a Caucasian-Chinese, for example—the flexibility to decide how their children’s race should be recorded instead of categorising them as Chinese, Caucasian, or Eurasian.

The ICA says that there will not be any advantages in terms of policy considerations for those who register either a double-barrelled or singular race…

…As for the HDB’s [Housing and Development Board’s] Ethnic Integration Policy—which puts a cap on the number of families of each race in a HDB block to ensure a balanced mix of races—it has previously said that it may be more flexible towards mixed-race couples…

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Rhetoric and Silence in Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father”

Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice
2009
46 pages
ISSN: 1097-3087

Barbara Clare Foley, Professor of English
Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey

When Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance first appeared in 1995, it was greeted with relatively modest sales but favorable reviews: critics welcomed a politician who actually possessed writerly skills. In the wake of Obama’s celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and successful bid for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate, sales mounted, and a second edition appeared, this one containing the convention speech. In 2006, the audio book version, featuring the author as reader, won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. In 2007, a third edition was published, this time accompanied by an excerpt from Obama’s 2006 policy book, The Audacity of Hope. By July 2008, as the election neared, Obama’s autobiography had been on the best-seller list for 104 weeks. As of this writing in the summer of 2009, the book has sold millions of copies and been translated into eight different languages.

While Dreams from My Father has supplied some fodder for attacks by conservative pundits, it has for the most part inspired positive reviews, many of them bordering on hagiography. Toni Morrison praised Obama’s novelistic skill in “reflect[ing] on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had.” Joe Klein, in Time, proclaimed that the book “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times critic, described Dreams from My Father as “the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography [ever] written by a future president.” Indicating the book’s popular appeal, the hundreds of reviews recorded on Amazon.com give the now-President’s autobiography an overall rating of 4½ stars. An informal web-based survey of college course syllabi suggests that, either excerpted or in its totality, Obama’s autobiography is being frequently assigned to college students. Dreams from My Father has proven to be an outstanding success in commercial, critical, and popular terms.

Arguably, however, it is precisely because the President’s literary star has ascended to such heights that his text warrants critical scrutiny. For success in the U.S. book market is in large part a measure not just of literary excellence or authorial prominence but also of a text’s embodiment of normative assumptions about society and self. In particular, a narrative of ascent—of which Dreams from My Father is a prime example—characteristically invokes dearly held myths about bootstraps individualism and social mobility, however poorly such notions may mesh with the realities of life in modern capitalist society. In this post-millennial moment, rife with anxieties domestic and international, economic and political, there is a particular yearning for tales about individuals who have passed over barriers and triumphed over hardships, thereby affirming the nation’s transcendence of its ugly racial past and entry into a present that is, if not “post-racial”—the current popular buzz-word—at least qualitatively more benign. To the extent that the identity quest embarked upon and achieved in Dreams from My Father can be taken to illustrate the integrity of not just its central actor, but the nation that has chosen him to be its leader, the text functions as Exhibit A in the case for American progress.

My principal goal in this essay—which is directed primarily to teachers of Obama’s text—is to examine the various rhetorical maneuvers that the author deploys in order to render maximally persuasive his odyssey to self-knowledge. I shall engage in a study not just of literary devices—which Obama handles with considerable skill—but of the ideology of form. This project will involve textual analysis on both the macro-level—the text’s apparatus of prefaces and postscripts, its tripartite division, the structuring of its individual units—and the micro-level—its narrative voice, methods of characterization, deployment of metaphor. To a significant extent, however, the effect of Dreams from My Father is contingent upon what the text does not say—the structured silences that allow it to minimize or, on occasion, exclude material that might impede its ideological work. In order to read the text fully, I shall as needed move outside it—not just to events and situations in Obama’s own life that are elided in his narrative, but also to events in the life of the mysterious father who inhabits the core of the narrative. Although readers may find most provocative the occlusions and obfuscations discussed in the final portion of this essay, they are urged to view these in the context of Obama’s overall rhetorical project, in which the said and the not-said are indissolubly linked…

…“A broader public debate”: Narrative frames

The teleological structure of Dreams from My Father can be described in various terms: a narrative of ascent and quest; a record of redemption, reinvention and rebirth; an odyssey from isolation to belonging, alienation to community. Obama’s story is distinctly gendered—unabashedly Oedipal in its focus on fathers and sons—and raced—it places front and center the identity dilemma of a young man of mixed descent coming to terms with the dualisms and hierarchies of a society obsessed with racial categorization. As Obama puts it in his 1995 Introduction, the text records “a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American” (xvi). Dreams from My Father thus invokes such classic accounts of black male self-discovery as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Malcolm X’s Autobiography, as well as various autobiographical and fictional writings of James Baldwin and Richard Wright—many of which are referenced, implicitly and explicitly in the course of Obama’s narrative. Where these earlier explorations of selfhood characteristically end in defeat or ambivalence, however, Obama’s journey—described throughout the text by means of a trope of voyaging, charting, and traveling the seas—ends in a triumphal homecoming. The text assures its readers that, although not without a few false starts that were soon corrected, its protagonist has moved from a child’s non-racial consciousness through an ambivalent Third Worldism to a confident blend of cosmopolitanism and American nationalism, bolstered by an ecumenical optimism that Obama loosely terms “faith.”…

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Choosing Race: Multiracial Ancestry and Identification

Social Science Research
Volume 40, Issue 2 (March 2011)
pages 498–512
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.12.010

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Ann Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New York University

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government’s new “check all that apply” method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population of multiracial individuals as the “biracial” children of single-race parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples of the U.S. Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple race identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classification regime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work on multiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracial ancestry groups.

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University of Vermont study examines biracial identity

Burlington Free Press
2010-12-28

Tim Johnson, Free Press Staff Writer

Even though he was born of a white mother and an African father, Barack Obama is commonly referred to as the first black president. That’s a sign, sociologists say, that America’s “one-drop rule”—a vestige of the United States’ segregationist past—is still with us.

Under the one-drop rule, a person with even minimal African ancestry (one drop of black blood) was considered black. In the Jim Crow South, such people were denied the rights and opportunities accorded to—unless they had sufficiently light skin and Caucasian features to conceal their African ancestry and “pass” themselves off as white.

Racial “passing” still takes place today, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna reports in a new study, but in different ways. Light-skinned people with African ancestry might pass themselves off as white or as black, depending on the situation. And biracial people with one white parent and one black parent are more likely for various reasons to identify themselves as black and even to conceal their white ancestry, Khanna said…

A person’s racial identity is determined not just by society; it also can be self-defined. Even people who regard themselves as biracial often are inclined to pass themselves off as monoracial, Khanna reports in an article, co-written with Cathryn Johnson of Emory University, published recently in Social Psychology Quarterly…

..The fact that “biracial” and “multiracial” have entered common American parlance suggests that the “one-drop rule” might be weakening, Khanna said. The U.S. census, beginning in 2000, allowed respondents to choose more than one race.

Still, the widespread perception that people with one black parent are black has its roots in a historically racist attitude that “one drop of black blood made one black, but one drop of white blood did not make one white,” as Khanna and Johnson put it.

Khanna, daughter of an Indian father and a white mother, grew interested in interracial studies in graduate school. She said she noticed that research was lacking on the offspring of interracial couples…

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Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White

New York Times
2010-12-26

Felicia R. Lee

Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”…

…Toomer’s racial complexity has long been intriguing to critics and scholars, but Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd’s assertion about his identity is certain to spark debate. Richard Eldridge, a Toomer biographer, said recently that he had not read the new edition — and will stand corrected if its case is persuasive — but that Toomer never “passed” in the classic sense of pretending to be white. Rather, he said, Toomer (whose appearance was racially indeterminate) sought to transcend standard definitions of race.

“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press…

…Yet this new edition of “Cane” documents that over the course of his life Toomer variously denied ever living as a black person; called himself racially mixed; and said he was a new kind of American, transcending old racial terms. Toomer did not want to be featured as a Negro in the marketing of “Cane” and later did not want his work included in black anthologies…

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The Cajuns of Southern Alabama: Morphology and Serology

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 47, Issue 1 (July 1977)
pages 1-6
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330470103

William S. Pollitzer
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Kadambari K. Namboodiri
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

William H. Coleman
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Wayne H. Finley
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Webster C. Leyshon
Laboratory of Developmental Biology and Anomalies
National Institute of Dental Research, Bethesda, Maryland

Gary C. Jennings
University of Florida, Gainesville

William H. Brown
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

A survey was conducted of 324 members of the Cajun isolate of Southern Alabama. Tradition and appearance suggest that this population of about 3,000 are not entirely White, Black, or Indian but constitute a triracial community somewhat reproductively isolated and inbred. The earliest American settlement in the area, along the banks of the Mobile and Tombigbee Rivers, lay between Spaniards to the South and Indian tribes on the other sides: Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee.

Physical measurements are reported for 71 adults, plus color of skin, eyes, and hair. X-rays were taken of wrist and ankle bones of some 253 children. Red blood samples were typed on adults and children, and haptoglobin, Gm, and Gc types were determined from serum. History and physical examinations were also made.

Physical measurements and observations suggest predominantly White ancestry, and D² analysis confirms this, with least similarity to Indians. Analysis of serological traits implies almost 70% White, almost 30% Black, and very little Indians genes. Few defects of clear genetic etiology were discovered. Growth patterns judged from X-rays appeared normal. All genetic loci testable were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium except Gc. While history and some common surnames suggest endogamy in the past, the medical and serological findings, plus some additional surnames, indicate that the isolate has already been largely diluted or dissolved.

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