Mixed Race Studies

Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides by Vicky Lee [Book Review]

The Asian Review of Books
2004-12-29

John Walsh, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Communications
School of Management, Shinawatra International University, Bangkok

The creation of Empires inevitably entails contact between coloniser and colonised at many different levels. Owing to the prominence of men in empire creation, it is inevitable that at least some of those connections involve establishing one or more relationships with local women, in the absence of women from the home country. A reasonable amount of attention has been placed on these relationships. Rather less attention has been focused on the results of those unions. The children that resulted from the relationships between British and Chinese in Hong Kong are one subset of the whole range of intercultural births and they share some distinctive characteristics. Unlike the Portuguese, who tended enthusiastically to children into the fold as a means of expanding their overseas holdings, the British of course have always rather looked down on those who cavort with the locals and, since we rather dislike even our own children, certainly have little truck with any others who have a reason to be looked down upon.

Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides by Vicky Lee explores some of the experiences and feelings of a small section of the British-Chinese Hong Kong people, especially during the first part of the 20th century. Her book, which has been developed from a PhD thesis, is in the main clearly and appropriately written, although it does suffer a little from the problems of the multidisciplinary approach, which tends to lack the rigor imposed by any single discipline. However, the one or two false notes may be forgiven for the sake of the histories told, which are of great interest…

Read the entire review here.

Many Biracial Students Game Racial-Classification Systems, Study Suggests

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2010-12-14

Peter Schmidt

A study of biracial people with black and white ancestry has found that many identify themselves solely as black when filling out college applications and financial-aid forms, raising new questions about the accuracy of educational statistics and research based on racial and ethnic data derived from students.

The study of 40 biracial people—all of whom reported having one black parent and one white one—found that 29, or nearly three-fourths, reported concealing their white ancestry in applying for college, scholarships, financial aid, or jobs.

“Frequently unaware that being biracial is often sufficient for affirmative-action purposes, they presented themselves exclusively as black,” says a summary of the study’s findings being published this month in Social Psychology Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Sociological Association…

…The new study suggests that many researchers start out with bad data that conflate information on students with two black parents with information on students with one white parent and one black one, even though those biracial students are less likely, on average, to have grown up with the same disadvantages.

The researcher behind the study—Nikki Khanna, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, and Cathryn Johnson, a professor of sociology at Emory University— recruited their 40 research subjects by distributing fliers in an unnamed Southern urban city, asking “Do you have one black parent and one white parent?” They base their analyses on extensive interviews of the respondents conducted by Ms. Khanna in 2005 and 2006…

…Susan Graham, executive director of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally), an advocacy group for multiracial Americans, said she believes the article overstates how much people base their racial identification on self-interest. She also argued that, given how much racial-classification systems have changed in recent years, it is inappropriate to draw conclusions based on interviews conducted four or five years ago…

Read or purchase the article here.

Note by Steven F. Riley: See: Lawrence Wright, “One Drop of Blood”, The New Yorker, July 24, 1994…

Those who are charged with enforcing civil-rights laws see the Multiracial box as a wrecking ball aimed at affirmative action, and they hold those in the mixed-race movement responsible. “There’s no concern on any of these people’s part about the effect on policy it’s just a subjective feeling that their identity needs to be stroked,” one government analyst said. “What they don’t understand is that it’s going to cost their own groups”—by losing the advantages that accrue to minorities by way of affirmative-action programs, for instance. [Susan] Graham contends that the object of her movement is not to create another protected category. In any case, she said, multiracial people know “to check the right box to get the goodies.”

Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work among Biracial Americans

Social Psychology Quarterly
Volume 73, Number 4 (Published online 2010-12-13)
pages 380-397
DOI: 10.1177/0190272510389014

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Cathryn Johnson, Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies
Emory University

Drawing on interview data with black-white biracial adults, we examine the considerable agency most have in asserting their racial identities to others. Extending research on “identity work” (Snow and Anderson 1987), we explore the strategies biracial people use to conceal (i.e., pass), cover, and/or accent aspects of their racial ancestries, and the individual and structural-level factors that limit the accessibility and/or effectiveness of some strategies. We further find that how these biracial respondents identify is often contextual—most identify as biracial, but in some contexts, they pass as monoracial. Scholars argue that passing may be a relic of the past, yet we find that passing still occurs today. Most notably, we find a striking reverse pattern of passing today—while passing during the Jim Crow era involved passing as white, these respondents more often report passing as black today. Motivations for identity work are explored, with an emphasis on passing as black.

…Characteristics of Respondents

Our data collection efforts resulted in a sample of 40 black-white biracial individuals. The ages ranged from 18 to 45, with the average age a little over 24 years of age. More than half of the respondents, 57.5 percent, fell between the ages of 18 and 22, which is typical college age; this is not surprising considering that our recruitment efforts began at local colleges and universities. Of the remaining respondents, 27.5 percent fell between the ages of 23 and 30, and 15 percent were over the age of 30. Regarding gender, 22.5 percent are men and 77.5 percent are women…

…Limitations…

Given the nature of the study and the characteristics of the sample, there are several limitations to be discussed. First, this study examines the phenomenon of passing (among other forms of identity work), yet if biracial people are passing for one race on a day-today basis, they likely would not have answered the advertisements to participate in this study. Hence, we examine those who pass as white or black on an intermittent basis, but not those who may be passing on a continuous basis.

Second, this sample is heavily female, and Storrs (1999) suggests that racial identity may be more salient for women than men; men’s self-concepts may be more tied to other identities, such as those based on occupation rather than race. If racial identity is indeed less salient for men (more work is needed here), then racial identity work and passing may be less frequent for men than women.

Third, these respondents were, for the most part, middle- to upper-middle class and often embedded in predominantly white settings. They were more likely to pass as black rather than white, but it is plausible that working-class biracials may be more motivated to pass as white (if their physical appearance allows it) or, at the very least, they may be more motivated to highlight their white ancestry than their middle-class counterparts; disadvantaged by social class, they may draw on white privilege (if they can) to access opportunities for upward social mobility. Conversely, because of their lower social class status, they may be even more likely than these respondents to present themselves as black. As will be discussed, these middle-class respondents passed as black to fit in with black peers, to avoid what they perceived as a stigmatized white identity, and to benefit from affirmative action programs. It is plausible that working-class biracials are more likely to live and work in minority/black settings and hence pass as black to fit in with black peers and neighbors; in minority/black settings, whiteness may be even more stigmatized as compared to white settings, and hence working-class biracials may feel more pressure to conceal their white ancestry; finally, because they are more disadvantaged financially than their middle class counterparts, affirmative action opportunities may be more crucial to moving up the socioeconomic ladder and so biracial people may be more likely to present themselves as black on admissions, employment, and scholarship application forms…

…Strategies of Identity Work…

…Factors limiting the accessibility/usefulness of identity strategies. Respondents draw on various identity strategies, and clearly these findings indicate that biracial people have considerable agency with regard to how they identify themselves. We find, however, that these options are not without limits. Extending previous research on identity work (Snow and Anderson 1987; see also Killian and Johnson 2006; McCall 2003; Storrs 1999), we discover several factors that limit the accessibility and/or effectiveness of these strategies—one’s phenotype, social class background, and racial networks. For instance, race in American society is intertwined with phenotype (i.e., we are often raced by how we look); depending upon which identity one is presenting, manipulation of one’s phenotype may or may not be an option. The majority of respondents cannot modify their phenotypes to pass as white, and some respondents have difficulty in altering their physical characteristics to pass as black. However, given the phenotypic variation among blacks (due to centuries of mixing with whites), passing as black is arguably less complicated than passing as white. Having light skin or straight hair, for instance, is not unique to those defined as biracial today; many individuals classified as black also share these traits. In contrast, those wanting to pass as white may face more challenges (e.g., hair cannot always be styled straight, skin tones are not easily lightened)…

…DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION…

…Most interesting, however, are not the few respondents who passed as white, but the many that passed as black. Scholars understand the motivations of passing as white in a society dominated by whites, but less is known about motivations for passing as black. We find that biracial people pass as black for several reasons. Most notably, we argue, because they can. While passing as white is difficult for most, passing as black is less difficult given the wide range of phenotypes in the black community regarding skin color and other physical features. With generations of interracial mixing between blacks and whites and the broad definition of blackness as defined by the one-drop rule, Khanna (2010) argues that most Americans cannot tell the difference between biracial and black. Hence, there is little difficulty when many biracial people conceal their biracial background; this is because many ‘‘blacks’’ also have white phenotypic characteristics (because they, too, often have white ancestry). Further, we find that biracial respondents pass as black for additional reasons—to fit in with black peers in adolescence (especially since many claim that whites reject them), to avoid a white stigmatized identity, and, in the post–civil rights era of affirmative action, to obtain advantages and opportunities sometimes available to them if they are black (e.g., educational and employment opportunities, college financial aid/scholarships)…

Read or purchase the article here.
Read a free summary here.

North of America: Racial hybridity and Canada’s (non)place in inter-American discourse

Comparative American Studies: An International Journal
Volume 3, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 79-88
DOI: 10.1177/1477570005050951

Albert Braz, Associate Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world. Yet, for such a territorial behemoth, it is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Even more than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision is regrettable for a series of reasons, notably the fact that the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture, as is illustrated by racial hybridity.

Canada! . . . Canada is so far away, it almost doesn’t exist.
—Jorge Luis Borges

I don’t even know what street Canada is on.
—Al Capone

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world; or, as Richard Rodriguez jokes, at least for the people of the USA, it is ‘the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 161). In any case, for such a territorial colossus, Canada is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Thus, even more so than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision of Canada, I will argue in my article, is regrettable for several reasons. To begin with, you can hardly attain a real understanding of the continent if you exclude such a large portion of its landmass. No less significant, the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture. This is particularly true of racial hybridity. For such prominent figures as Símon Bolívar, José Martí, José Vasconcelos and Roberto Fernández Retamar, racial crossing is one of the key elements that differentiates ‘Nuestra America’ from Anglo-America, the USA. However, what they do not seem to realize is that two racially-mixed communities or nations, the Métis and the Halfbreeds, blossomed in the so-called Great White North. Moreover, the leader of one of those groups, Louis Riel, became one of the great exponents of racial hybridity and continental identity in the Americas. Indeed, as I will try to demonstrate, Riel’s writings underscore the urgency of placing inter-American studies in a truly continental context; that is, of bringing the north of America into America…

Read the entire article here.

Recasting The Half-Caste

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036 Print ISSN: 1042-7961
pages 263-267

Kumari Jayawardena

In Sri Lanka, serious book reviews are not only few and far between, but authors also do not usually reply to reviews of their books. So while it was a real windfall to receive four reviews simultaneously, to comment briefly in reply is a rather unusual task. However, I really appreciate the reviews, and thank Shefali Chandra, Hilary Jones, Shoshana Keller, and Emma Teng for their perceptive insights and for opening up this discussion.

On a personal note, my academic background is multidisciplinary. I am not a “historian” with a degree in history, but a political scientist who specialized in industrial relations. My interests moved on to feminist history and I continue to be active in the women’s movement. Using these experiences, I have written on several issues ranging from working-class agitation to ethno-nationalism, feminism, peasant rebellion, and the rise of capitalism in Sri Lanka. In this book, I combine many of these themes, and as Shefali Chandra noted, I deal with “race, caste, class, sexuality, and nationalism”—a wide sweep, using examples from several countries.

I should also make it clear that my book is not a history of Euro-Asians, but a political study of the roots of colonial dissenting movements, including feminism, and the role of Euro-Asians as pioneers of struggles for democratic rights and against semifeudalism in South Asia. The word “Euro-Asian” is coined to include persons of mixed European and Asian origin in the maternal or paternal line. Emma Teng calls this “an important contribution” and states that the “highly fraught” issue of nomenclature “has been of great symbolic importance for those struggling for recognition,”—especially, if I may add, since those of mixed origin have historically been referred to by derogatory names. In Sri Lanka, the Euro-Asian “public intellectuals,” who had been educated in English, were inspired by the French Revolution and the European “Enlightenment.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Reverse Passing? Kidding… Right?

The Root
2010-12-14

Jenée Desmond-Harris

A report that biracial people are denying their white parents seems absurd to me—but I’m paying attention anyway.

Ever heard of Barack Obama? You know, the first black president? The one who won an election and near-deity status in the African-American community while openly discussing his white mother in books, interviews and stump speeches?

Yeah, me, too. This is just one of the reasons I’m scratching my head at the findings of a new study that people with one white and one black parent “downplay their white ancestry,” in part to gain the acceptance of other black people. The authors dub this phenomenon “reverse passing” and call it “a striking phenomenon.” I’m beyond stumped. In a summary of the results, the sociologists behind “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans” report that this occurs especially in “certain social situations”—ostensibly, around other black people—where having a white parent “can carry its own negative biases.”

Let’s be clear: Although the study does conclude that people are “exercising considerable control over how they identify” racially these days, we’re not talking about having the freedom to elect to call oneself black. Rather, according to the lead author, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna, those who self-identify as biracial or multiracial “adopt an identity that contradicts their self-perception of race.” In other words, they’re being purposely disingenuous. They’re exchanging honesty for social benefits, in a mirror-image version of the well-known phenomenon of passing as white…

…While I don’t relate to the results of this study, I won’t dismiss them. My first reaction—after sheer confusion—was to feel superior to the study subjects. (Maybe they should have gone to an HBCU, where I got the message loud and clear that you can be black in any way that makes sense to you. Maybe they should be in social circles like mine. When polled on Facebook, many black acquaintances said that they always figured I had a white or mixed parent, and—surprise!—they didn’t de-friend me.)…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity

Time Magazine: Healthland
Friday, 2010-12-16

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

The practice of passing—identifying with and presenting oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another—reached its peak during the Jim Crow era. Needless to say, the notion of having to “pass” as white is outdated and offensive, but as sociologists Nikki Khanna and Cathryn Johnson report in a new study, passing is still alive and well today. It just happens in the other direction.

For their study, Khanna and Johnson interviewed 40 biracial American adults about their racial identity, and were surprised by what they found: most people tended to suppress or reject their white ancestry altogether and claim to be entirely African American. It wasn’t simply about calling oneself black, but also aggressively changing one’s behavior, looks and tastes to appear more “black.”…

…The question is whether strongly identifying with a racial minority really qualifies as passing. The researchers argue that it does, because it involves a concerted effort to reveal one portion of ancestry while concealing and rejecting another. The volunteers in the study also behaved strategically to project their race—something that sociologists call “identity work.” The authors of the current study prefer to call it “performing race”: they characterize the racial identities of their subjects as a strategically constructed, outwardly projected performance, and in this sense they liken it to the behavior of those who passed during the Jim Crow era…

Read the entire article here.

Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century [Book Review]

H-Africa
H-Net Reviews
March 2004

Eric S. Ross, Coordinator, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco

George Brooks’s Eurafricans in Western Africa is the sequel to his Landlords and Strangers (1993). This book covers Western African coastal trading networks from the Senegal River to Cape Palmas (including the Cape Verde Islands) from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Brooks uses the term “Eurafrican” to designate Luso-Africans, Franco-Africans, and Anglo-Africans, the offspring of the union of transient European male traders and African women, often of elite social status. The term is meant to emphasize the greater African heritage of the mothers, as opposed to the Portuguese, French, or English heritage of the fathers.

As the subtitle indicates, the book deals extensively with social status, religion, and gender-related issues among Eurafricans. According to Brooks, African laws regarding inheritance and property rights largely determined the social status of Eurafricans, and these laws differed considerably depending on whether a society was acephalous or politically stratified. Religious observances and gender roles, in turn, depended on social status. Brooks makes good use of primary sources, particularly the accounts of Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English travelers and traders, nearly all of them men. In the preface, the author recognizes that his assessment of Eurafricans is limited by these informants and observers, who were “misinformed, self-serving, and imbued with racial prejudice” (p. xi). Also, only the most “successful” Eurafricans, of elite status, have survived in the historical record; porters, mariners, servants, and slaves, as all too often, re main anonymous seen but not heard…

Read the entire review here.

Passings That Pass in America: Crossing Over and Coming Back to Tell About It

The History Teacher
Volume 40, Number 4 (August 2007)
32 paragraphs

Donald Reid, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

TEMPORARILY PASSING as an other is a universal fantasy and a not uncommon practice. From Arab potentates dressed as commoners to check on the governance of their realms, to women going into combat as male soldiers, it has a long history, and passing is a phenomenon of particular resonance in the contemporary United States. In the affluent postwar decades, the belief that the middle class would come to encompass all was challenged by white middle-class exclusion of African-Americans from membership in this classless utopia, and of women from a patriarchal order. Today, this ideology of prosperity has changed; it is now predicated on the permanent existence of extremes in wealth and poverty, the unrelenting insecurity of an unconstrained market society and the emotional costs of gender norms. These are the contexts for the appearance of a number of widely-read accounts of race, class, and gender passing in the United States. 

 American culture glorifies the self-made man and this self-making extends to individual identity. The United States celebrates geographical and social mobility and the very anomie this produces is also the site of secular rebirths. In this essay, I will examine a literary genre that draws upon the American faith in self-transformation in an effort to confront the social boundaries that define its limits: narratives of white middle-class individuals who seek to live as an other for a while with the aim of revealing to their social group of origin its role in creating and sustaining the marginalization and oppression of the other whose identity they temporarily assume. John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and Grace Halsell’s Soul Sister and Bessie Yellowhair were products of an era when the challenges that racial integration presented to white middle-class society gave new impetus to the tradition of participant-observer social scientists and journalists living as workers and reporting on the experience. I conclude with a reading of recent accounts of inter- and intra-class passing: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, and Norah Vincent’s memoir of gender passing, Self-Made Man…

Read the entire article here.

With Shades of Gray

Emory Magazine
Emory University
Spring 2009: Coda: A Changing Country

Reflections on the Inauguration of President Barack Obama

Taharee Jackson, ’10 PhD

The last thing I could afford to do was attend the presidential inauguration at the National Mall, but I simply couldn’t miss it. I had to go and represent my multiracial family. As a multiracial woman, I am seldom presented with the opportunity to see someone just like me in the public eye.

Tiger Woods has made multiraciality somewhat “cool,” yet people still have trouble identifying him in photos. That being said, to have the entire globe’s gaze finally affixed on a biracial person—on Barack Obama—compelled me to travel to Washington, D.C., to support him. He wouldn’t know I was there, but my family and I would . . . and it would mean the world to us.

…I braved subzero temperatures, no sleep, millions of people, closed train stations, and hours of no food or bathroom usage, not because I think of Obama as our first black president. True, I am part black, but so is he. He is part black. Barack Obama is half black and half white—he is biracial. To acknowledge one part of him—his blackness—is certainly not to deny his whiteness, unless we deny him the right to identify himself…

Read the entire article here.