Mixed Race Studies

Reducing Race: News Themes in the 2008 Primaries

The International Journal of Press/Politics
Volume 15, Number 4 (October 2010)
pages 375-400
DOI: 10.1177/1940161210372962

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Sarah J. Jackson
University of Minnesota

This article presents a content analysis exploring how racial issues were addressed in newspaper and news magazine coverage of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Despite the presence of Latino and biracial candidates, discussion of race was limited by binary racial frames, resulting in the construction of racial groups as competing voting blocs (including frequent references to white voters) and few references to Barack Obama’s biracial heritage. The dominant framing constricted the range of racial issues to matters of interpersonal insensitivity and misguided statements and ignored matters of public policy and racial equity.

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Filling in the Chasm Between Black and White

The Siskiyou
Southern Oregon University
2006-02-27

Shannon Luders-Manuel

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the lecture by James McBride, having read his memoir a few years ago when I was at my most-heightened search for identity. Without retaining much of the details of his life story, what has remained with me is the knowledge that someone else had experiences similar to my own. To know that he too struggled with feelings of shame over his white mother and questions over whether he, as a black child, had been adopted, brought down the wall of alienation I felt was between me and the rest of the world…

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Diverse Identities in Interracial Relationships: A Multiethnic Interpretation of “Mississippi Masala” and “The Wedding Banquet”

Xchanges
Volume 4, Number 1 (September 2004)

Lan Dong, Assistant Professor of English
University of Illinois, Springfield

In their introduction to the collection Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out “much of the work on race within the United States has tended to emphasize a discussion of particular ethnicities. There has not been much engagement with the interrelations among such communities, nor with how the multicultural debates cross various national borders” (Shohat and Stam 3). In the past decade, nevertheless, discussions of ethnicity and identity among U.S. critics frequently note the prominent multiethnic and interethnic relations among racial groups [1].

In this paper, I build upon theories of multiethnicity and interethnicity in my examination of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity within the body we label “Asian diaspora.” In particular, my argument is focused on the realization and construction of the diverse identities of Asian diaspora living in contemporary America in the context of interracial relationships. I choose to analyze Mississippi Masala (1991) directed by Mira Nair and The Wedding Banquet 喜宴(1993) directed by Ang Lee since interracial romance in both films functions as the primary plot. The struggle for love and individuality is intertwined with the protagonists’ complicated identities by way of negotiation between personal, familial, communal, and social concerns. I use this film analysis to suggest the intersection of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism in Asian diaspora’s pursuit of their reconstructed, rather than prescribed, identities…

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The Election of Barack Obama and the Politics of Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage

History News Network
2009-02-23

Peggy Pascoe, Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
University of Oregon

Peggy Pascoe is the author of “What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America”, (winner of 5 literary prizes).

The election (and now the inauguration) of Barack Obama has inspired a widespread sense of awe at the scope and scale of change in race relations in America—and more than a hint of self-congratulation.

The news media just can’t seem to resist trumpeting the example of interracial marriage. When Barack Obama’s white mother married his black father in 1961, reporters remind us, their marriage would have been illegal in more than a dozen states. See how far we’ve come, they enthuse, falling into the trap of assuming that the legality of interracial marriage is proof that racism and white supremacy have disappeared into thin air and a colorblind utopia is on the way.

As someone who has spent nearly two decades studying the history of interracial marriage in America, I want to suggest that at a moment when talk of change seems to be everywhere, we could use a bit less celebration—and a lot more reflection…

…It does not, however, follow that interracial marriage is synonymous with colorblindness or that the end of racism is at hand. Generations of lawyers had to fight to make interracial marriage a legal right. Many of them thought colorblindness was a wonderful idea, but few were naive enough to believe it actually existed. Today the assertion that America is a colorblind nation is so commonplace that even the most conservative of Supreme Court justices are eager to wrap themselves in its mantle. Yet forty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, marriages between blacks and whites are still the rarest form of interracial marriage, and interracial couples still face a host of challenges, from stares on the street to confusion on the faces of their children’s teachers and playmates. And in yet another example of racism’s shape-shifting power, America’s prisons, police, schools, and housing markets offer daily evidence of how easy it is for claims of colorblindness to co-exist with, and even enable, new forms of white entitlement…

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“Being a Half-breed”: Discourses of Race and Cultural Syncreticity in the Works of Three Metis Women Writers

Canadian Literature
“Native, Individual, State”
Number 144, Spring, 1995
pages 82-96

Jodi Lundgren

In his introduction to All My Relations, Thomas King asserts that “being Native is a matter of race rather than something more transitory such as nationality”: “one is either born an Indian or one is not.” While King adds that there is no “racial denominator” among Natives and that it is important to “resist the temptation of trying to define a Native,” at least until the body of work by authors of Native ancestry reaches some sort of critical mass,” he contends that Indianness is an inborn genetic trait (x-xi). The danger of King’s position is elucidated by ethnohistorian James Clifton:

the uncritical use of Indian, White, and Black, and the associated ethnocentric assumptions about ancient differences in behaviour and potentialities, history, and culture effectively block analytic thinking. These historically derived, culturally patterned, institutionally reinforced convictions include such persistent ideas as being and becoming Indian is a matter largely of biological ancestry, that Indianness is fixed by blood. A related assumption is that the labels White and Indian mark sharply defined categories—culturally defined ways of sorting diverse people into a few classes. A further assumption is that these differences are primordial, inevitable, original, durable and natural. (23)

In other words, when race is considered anything more than an “accident of birth” (King xi), biological determinism soon follows and is inevitably used to justify and perpetuate the disempowerment of oppressed groups. Historically, as Noel Elizabeth Currie asserts, Europeans constructed the different “races’ they encountered in their colonialist and imperialist ventures as “inferior” and “savage’ in order to exploit them economically; contemporary Canadian society, internalized racism is a key element in Native people’s oppression. Beatrice Culleton’s novel April Raintree demonstrates the way in which a light-skinned Metis girl, for whom assimilation into white society appears a possibility, is convinced by her teachers, foster family, and social workers that Native people are responsible for their own disempowerment and that their social positioning is unalterable. Growing up isolated from any Metis community, April Raintree perceives her options as dichotomous: either become the drunken Indian Other or assimilate. In contrast, Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed illustrates the validating effects of having been raised in a family with a strong sense of Metis identity. Situating the Metis historically, Campbell characterizes their identity as a cultural construct; her emphasis is thus on ethnicity rather than race. In I Am Woman and Sojourner’s Truth, Lee Maracle too focusses not on race but on cultural heritage and political disempowerment as determinant of Metis experience. Hybrid by definition, Metis identity is predicated upon what is “an inescapable and characteristic feature of all post-colonial societies,” namely, cultural syncreticity (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 30). Thus, a positivist emphasis on race such as that put forth by Thomas King is peculiarly problematic for the Metis. That racial stereotyping has had a devastating impact on the Metis and other Native peoples is, however, undeniable. Its operation is thoroughly explored in April Raintree…

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Persistence and Change in Asian Identity among Children of Intermarried Couples

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 38, Number 2 (Summer, 1995)
pages 175-194

Rogelio Saenz, Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

Sean-Shong Hwang, Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Benigno E. Aguirre, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
University of Delaware

Robert N. Anderson

In recent years, a significant amount of attention has been devoted to the survival of ethnicity among multiracial people in the United States. This concern is especially evident in the case of the offspring of Asian-Anglo couples. While scholars have speculated on the extent to which Asian ethnicity will continue to persist among multiracial children, little empirical work has addressed this concern. In this analysis, we use a multilevel model to examine the ethnic identification (as reported by parents) of children of Asian-Anglo couples. Data from the 1980 Public-Use Microdata Sample for California are used in the analysis. The results indicate that the majority of the children had Anglo ethnic identities. The multivariate findings also identify several variables that are related to children’s ethnic identification.

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Being between: can multiracial Americans form a cohesive anti-racist movement beyond identity politics and Tiger Woods chic?

ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action
2003-06-22

Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Assistant Professor Anthropology & Women Studies
University of Washington

So much of being mixed race these days seems about having to explain, always answering “What are you?” for others and for one’s self. And I’m tired of it. This variation of identity politics confronts the annoying question, but then gets hung up on the self in a way that hinders the collaborations necessary for fighting racism in all its mutating forms. In my mind, the problem of how to move from individual experience to collective action defines the current struggle of the multiracial movement.

I grew up in St. Louis, where race was mostly black and white, and where it seemed clear enough in schoolyard politics that I had slanted eyes and was neither. In St. Louis, the police arrived at our burglarized house and questioned my mother about the Hong Kong gang connections they assumed she had used to rip off her own husband, whom they assumed she had married in a bid for a nice white slice of American pie. Never mind that my mother was born and raised in Indiana or that my father hails from working class Ontario. Being mixed race means you elicit fears of loss all around (of status for whites and culture for people of color) and accusations—sometimes justified—that multiracial identity is just about passing.

When I moved to California, I discovered the labels had shifted on me. An Asian American woman took one look at my face, and said, “You’re hapa haole, aren’t you.” Ignorant of her terms, I snapped back, “I don’t think so.” I soon learned, however, that hapa, from hapa haole or half-white in Hawaiian, was my mixed race category between categories of race in America. Two syllables dismissed me from belonging to the Asian America I had always imagined from my St. Louis schoolyard. I started to look at myself differently. I began a quest to become a real hapa, whatever that might be, not just one who was passing. But, passing for what? I’ve been Chicana in the eyes of Missourians, white in San Francisco Chinatown, and a Uighur minority on the streets of Beijing, where I landed after years of learning Chinese to prove myself to my own Chinese American family.

Multiracial identity, being between, challenges the biological essence of race and exposes it as a construction designed to create social hierarchy. But progressives find themselves resisting those who naively claim that the existence of multiracial people effectively ends racist thinking. A character in Afroasian playwright Velina Hasu Houston’s 1988 play Broken English declares that she lives in a “no passing zone.” She suggests a space of possibility for mixed folks to embrace composite identities as part of an inter-ethnic, anti-racism struggle…

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Panel discusses race, identity

Indiana Daily Student
2009-11-06

Therese Kennelly

Graduate student Fileve Palmer said though her parents always talked about their diverse backgrounds with her, she still struggled to find a way to relay her identity to others.

She struggled throughout her life to retain her African-American identity, while society viewed her as Puerto Rican.

“I have always been dealing with this,” Palmer said. “I always was familiar with what I was.“

She was part of a group of panelists who spoke Thursday on “Race and Ethnic Classification: Can Identity be Negotiated?” the final installment of the Choices of Color Series. The panel began with questions about how each of the participants acquired their own sense of identity while growing up in a multi-racial household.

Joseph Stahlman, interim director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, served as moderator. He said his life has been a struggle preserving his Native  American heritage because people would often simply see him as white…

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Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone

Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences
Volume 106, Number 48 (2009-12-01)
pages 20168-20173
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905362106

Eugene M. Caruso, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

Nicole L. Mead, Researcher
Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research
Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Emily Balcetis, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

Edited by Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, hereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election. This effect persisted when controlling for political ideology and racial attitudes. These results suggest that people’s visual representations of others are related to their own preexisting beliefs and to the decisions they make in a consequential context.

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BEYOND ‘OTHER’: A special report.;More Than Identity Rides On a New Racial Category

The New York Times
1996-07-06

Linda Mathews

Edward Cooper, a Portland, Ore., businessman, is black. His wife and business partner, Barbara McIntyre, is white. Their 12-year-old son, Ethan McCooper, is, like his name, a blend of his parents, and harder to classify.

On Ethan’s school forms and other official papers, his parents sometimes check both the “white” and the “black” boxes. If “other” is available, they check that and write in “interracial.” When ordered to choose between “black” and “white,” they resolutely leave the form blank.

What they would like to call the light-skinned, dark-eyed boy with the reddish-brown hair is “multiracial.” They may yet get their way, if the Federal Government yields to growing pressure and adds a “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000.

“This is an issue that isn’t going away,” said Mary Waters, a Harvard professor of sociology who teaches a course on race. “We’re riding such a big wave of interracial marriages that inevitably there are going to be many more people who can claim a multiracial identity if it’s permitted.”…

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