Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Identity

The Lion’s Roar
Issue 27-2 (September 2010)
Student-Run Newspaper of Newton South High School
Newton, Massachusetts

Caroline Rosa, Managing Editor

Rachel Leshin, Managing Editor

Approaching the lunch table where her black friends were seated, sophomore Kayla Burton tried beginning to bridge the racial gap between her friend groups. But when she tried to introduce her white friend, one black girl at the table told her “we don’t want her over here.”

She asked Burton to either tell her friend to go away or to leave with her. Burton, a biracial student who identifies as half black and half white, said she was shocked. “It was the most immature thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. She then told her friends, who were laughing, that it was the most judgmental thing she had ever heard in her life.

Burton, along with many other biracial students at South, has a unique viewpoint concerning race relations.

Despite the racism she has witnessed first hand, Burton said she embraces her identity. “I love being biracial because you get to see both points of views,” she said.

Senior George Kurosawa also said he finds being biracial beneficial. Kurosawa said it allows him to have “more in common with more people.”

Senior Jenny Gerstner said she is glad that she is is grateful for her half Korean, half white background as well. “I think when you grow up with having two different races it does make you more aware of other people, just because you’re exposed to more,” she said.

Burton thinks her mixed identity allows her to understand both sides of race issues. “It’s definitely helpful to be biracial because if a black person got mad at me, and they say ‘you white people’ they can’t say that because I’m black too,” she said.

Though Gerstner is mixed racially, people often classify her as white at first glance while acknowledging that “there’s something a little off about it,” she said. Gerstner herself identifies more as white.

Like Gerstner, Kurosawa said he connects more to one half of his background. “We live in America, so more often I fit into the white role,” he said. Kurosawa said the extent of his connection to Japanese culture is visiting family in Japan and eating large amounts of rice at home.

Contrastingly, junior Sam Russell, who has a black father and a white mother, connects more with his black identity. Having grown up in Newton, Russell often stood out as the one of the only black students in his elementary and middle school classes, and peers often assume him to be fully black. Russell identifies this way because “growing up in a white society, anyone with a different color kind of gets separated.”…

Read the entire article here.

In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010)

Perspectives on History
November 2010

Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

Scholar of gender, race, and the U.S. West; 2009 winner of AHA’s William H. Dunning Prize and Joan Kelly Prize

Peggy Pascoe, the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon, died at home in Eugene, Oregon, on July 23, 2010. She leaves behind an exceptional professional legacy, not only in her prize-winning scholarship on women and multicultural relations in the West, but also through the careers of the students and colleagues she mentored over the decades…

Pascoe was part way through the manuscript for her book on miscegenation law when she learned in 2005 that she had ovarian cancer. Initially she did not think that she would be able to complete the study. In 2007, at a panel held in her honor at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, several colleagues commented on her draft chapters, which helped inspire her to go back to work on the book even as she endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy. The scholarly result was stunning. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2009) provides a sweeping and detailed account of the criminalization of interracial marriage and resistance to that process from the 1860s through the 1960s. It is also a superb history of the shifting meaning of “race” in American culture and the ways that gender and race are always mutually constructed. One of the most acclaimed books in U.S. social, cultural, and legal history, it received the Ellis W. Hawley and the Lawrence W. Levine Prizes from the Organization of American Historians; the John H. Dunning Prize and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association…

Read the entire article here.

Sources of Self-Categorization as Minority for Mixed-Race Individuals: Implications for Affirmative Action Entitlement

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 16, Issue 4 (October 2010)
Pages 453-460
DOI: 10.1037/a0020128

Jessica J. Good, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

George F. Chavez
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University

Multiracial individuals are in the unique position of being able to categorize themselves as members of multiple racial groups. Drawing on self-categorization theory, we suggest that similarity to the minority ingroup depends on self-perceptions of physical appearance and connectedness to the minority ingroup. Moreover, we argue that similarity to the ingroup determines self-categorization as minority, which predicts category-based entitlements such as perceived eligibility for minority resources (e.g., affirmative action). Using path analysis, we found support for this model on a convenience sample of 107 mixed-race minority–White participants. The results suggest that affective processes rather than observable characteristics such as prototypical physical appearance better predict self-categorization among mixed-race individuals.

Read or purchase the article here.

Students manage social lives amidst diversity

The Dartmouth
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
2010-11-11

Marina Villeneuve, The Dartmouth Staff

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series investigating race at the College. The experiences and opinions expressed are the views of individual students, and should not be considered representative of wider communities.

When Marian Gutierrez ’13 stepped onto Dartmouth’s campus as a freshman, she said found she herself a member of a student population strikingly different than the one that existed in her hometown of Los Angeles.

“It wasn’t as diverse as I thought it would be,” she said. “It was a bit of a culture shock.”

The College’s efforts to widen the diversity of the student body have resulted in an undergraduate population increasingly reflective of national demographics — as of this fall, the undergraduate population is 8 percent African-American, 14 percent Asian-American, 7 percent Latino, 4 percent Native American, 7 percent international and 53 percent white, according to the Office of Institutional Research…

…Students of mixed race said their backgrounds allowed them to mediate between different groups on campus.

“Being half black and half Mexican has made my life more interesting here — I feel two ways at same time,” Chris Norman ’13 said. “There’s more than one group I can go to and relate with. For me, it’s easier to branch out to the mainstream community being mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

Inside Fordham Online
Fordham University
In Focus: Faculty and Research
2010-11-15

Patrick Verel

Already the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos will be an even bigger presence in the years to come, according to demographic studies. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is making sure their stories are told.

Through 10 books, dozens of papers and consulting projects with Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, Rodriguez has developed a deep knowledge about a group that now accounts for 15 percent of the population.

Her analyses of United States census data have resulted in papers such as “Contestations Over Classifications: Latinos, the Census and Race in the United States” (Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2009) and “Implications and Impact of Race on the Health of Latinos,” a chapter in Health Issues in Latino Males: A Social and Structural Approach (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

As part of her study of census data, Rodriguez cast a critical eye on racial classifications in the decennial censuses. Examining how respondents who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino reported their race, she found that 40 percent chose “some other race,” and many of them wrote in what is known as a Latino identifier, such as Dominican, Panamanian or Chicano.

This happened in the last three decennial censuses, despite the fact that the census allowed them to choose more than one racial category in the last census…

…“People who could choose more than one race didn’t choose white and black; they still chose the category ‘some other race.’ This 40 percent has increased—I think this time it was 42 percent—even though the Census Bureau has really tried to discourage this response,” she said.

“This raises the question, ‘What is race?’ Science was raising that question. Children of mixed-race families were raising that question. So are people from all over the world who came here with very different identities and are now being folded into one of our five major groups.”…

Read the entire article here.

Trends in the Naming of Tri-Racial Mixed-Blood Groups in the Eastern United States

American Speech
Volume 22, Number 2 (April, 1947)
pages 81-87

A. R. Dunlap
University of Delaware

C. A. Weslager
University of Delaware

In the eastern part of the United States, particularly in the southern and middle-Atlantic portions, are a number of populations groups, so-called ‘ethnic-island,’ whose members combine, in varying degrees, the characteristics of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Indian racial stocks. To quote W. H. Gilbert, Jr., who has written extensively of mixed-blood groups, these racial islands

seem to develop especially where environmental circumstances such as forbidding swamps and inaccessible and barren mountain country favor their growth.  Many are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic coast where swamps or island and peninsulas have protected them… Others are farther inland in the Piedmont area and are found with their backs up against the wall of the Blue Ridge or Alleghenies.  A few… are to be found on the very top of the Blue Ridge and on the several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

A sufficient number of these tri-racial groups has now been reported in various sociological and ethnological journals to make possible a study of the names employed to distinguish this type of mixed-bloods from mixed-bloods of bi-racial origin, such as mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, etc., or from ‘pure’ bloods of one of the three principal racial stocks, i.e., whites, Indians, and Negroes. From the alphabetical list which follows have been excluded names of ethnic groups which perpetuate Indian tribal names for example, the Nanticokes and Houmas mentioned in Gilbert’s ‘Memorandum’; or the surviving Powhatan tribes of Virginia, the Cherokee, and other Algonkian and Iroquoian descendants in the Eastern Woodlands area with tribal organizations.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.

Multiracial and Adopted Asians

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
Volume 3, Number 2 (Fall 2001)
Theme: Interracial and Mixed-racial Relationships and Families

C. N. Le, Senior Lecturer Professor
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In the 1980s Asian Americans became the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the United States in terms of percentage growth.  As part of this growth, the number of those who are multiracial and adopted from Asia is increasing significantly.  These particular Asian Americans face unique political and cultural challenges from Asians and non-Asians alike.  While many struggle to fit into both cultures, many are creating their own identity that unites, rather than separates, their experiences. 

Table of Contents

• All Mixed Up?
• All Asians Alone or with Other Races
• Room to Grow
• Much More Than the Sum of the Parts
• References
• Editor’s Note

Read the eniter article here.

Ethnic, Multi-Ethnic, and Nationalist Identity in Belize: Voices of Belizean Children

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
Volume 3, Number 1 (Spring 2001)
Theme: International Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This paper discusses ethnicity and nationalism in children in the rural community of Punta Gorda, Belize. Ethnicity and nationalism are important aspects of identity in Belize because of a deliberate government policy to teach about these identities in the schools. My purpose in this paper is to contrast what is taught in schools about ethnicity and nationalism with how children describe their own identities.

Table of Contents

• The Government’s Plan
• Methodology
• Ethnicity in Punta Gorda
• Working in the Schools
• Voices of Ethnically Mixed Children
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• References

Read the entire article here.

Ethnicity and Ethnically “Mixed” Identity in Belize: A Study of Primary School-Age Children

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Volume 29, Issue 1 (March 1998)
pages 44–67
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1998.29.1.44

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This article focuses on the ehtnic identity of children in Belize. Belizean nationalism, as taught in the primary schools, is both pan-ethnic and multiethnic. However, because the increasingly widespread practice of ethnic mixing is unacknowledged, there is a discrepancy between what is taught in school and the daily life of children. This has resulted in a paradox. Whereas the overt intent is to recognize and celebrate difference, the result has been to silence children’s voices.

Teacher: “Everyone here belongs to an ethnic group. You will draw the clothing of your group.”
Mixed Mestizo/Garifuna girl: “What if you are mixed?”
Teacher: “It doesn’t matter if you are mixed… you draw the Creole outfit.”
[Teacher tells four other children of mixed ethnicity which clothing they will draw.]
Anthropologist to teacher: “What ethnic group are you?”
Teacher: “I am mixed with Creole and Spanish but my husband is an East Indian.”
Anthropologist: “What ethnic group do your children belong to?”
Teacher [laughs and waves her hand dismissively]: “They are just mixed.”
Anthropologist: “Oh. What did you do with the mixed children in your class?”
Teacher: “Well, I assigned them to a group.”

This article illuminates the subjective nature of ethnic identification in a nation-state that promotes multiculturalism and ethnic diversity within its borders. The government of Belize supports the cultures of all its ethnic groups and teaches about them in schools as part of its program of nationalism. The scene above illustrates the combination of issues that are involved in locating children of mixed ethnicity within the government’s ethnic framework in Punta Gorda, a small town of 3,500 people on the southern coast. Because ethnic mixing is unacknowledged by the Belizean government and not discussed in schools, there is a great discrepancy between what is taught in the schools, and the daily life of such children. What schools teach and what children understand are not the same. The silence on the part of the government, however, speaks loudly to children as they attempt to place themselves within the ethnic framework of their community and country.

To many adults, not only Punta Gordans, children are reflections of the adult world. They are thought of as simple creatures who absorb all that is taught to them (Jenks 1996:2; Stephens 1996:12), or viewed as a means of measuring the values of society (Ndebele 1996:322). They are not, as Stephens writes, “social actors in their own right, engaged in making sense of and recreating the social worlds they inherit” (1996:23-24). However, my research shows that children clearly are active participants in the construction of their own identity, even if their constructions are not recognized by the adult community and even if children are labeled by adults according to adult needs and perceptions…

Read the entire article here.