Mixed Race Studies

In mixed-race couples, fathers profoundly influence their children’s racial identifications

Research@Rice
2006-09-15

In mixed-race couples, fathers profoundly influence their children’s racial identifications. Interracial marriage increased seven-fold from 1970 to 2000, and how the children of these marriages view their racial identity has a lot to do with their father’s race and the number of father-child interactions, according to Rice University sociologist Holly Heard. In particular, children in families where the father is African-American are much more likely to identify with their father’s race, compared to children with fathers of other races.

With the rising number of interracial marriages, more children are questioning their racial identity. Currently, 6.4 percent of all U.S. children live in households headed by interracial married couples, and the number of children likely to deal with the racial-identity question will continue to grow.

It’s something that children of same-race parents never have to think about, said Rice University sociologist Holly Heard. Heard and Rice colleague Jenifer Bratter, both assistant professors of sociology, collaborated on research to understand how children from mixed-race families identify themselves. “Children do not racially identify in a vacuum; multiple factors are involved,” Heard explained. “However, the important influence dads have on racial identification became very clear.”…

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The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

College Literature
Volume 22, Number 3 (October 1995)
Race and Politics: The Experience of African-American Literature
pages 50-67

Corinne E. Blackmer, Associate Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

When Nella Larsen, then a prominent young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and final novel, Passing, in 1929, the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” interpretation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had been law for over thirty years. Plessy turned on the issue of the constitutionality of so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated racially-segregated facilities for whites and “coloreds” throughout the South. Homer Plessy, a resident of Louisiana who described himself as “seventh-eights Caucasian and one-eighth African blood” (1138), was forcibly rejected, after he refused to leave voluntarily, from the first-class, whites-only section of a railroad car in his home state. Declaring that “the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race,” Plessy argued that the Louisiana law violated his constitutional rights of habeas corpus, equal protection, and due process. The Supreme Court denied the validity of this reasoning on several counts, among them that various state laws forbade interracial marriage on the grounds, as the State of Virginia later argued unsuccessfully before the Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967), that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Second, in an egregious instance of conceptual blurring of categories of persons that implied, without submitting the proposition toloical scrutiny, that white males were intrinsically more ‘adult’ and ‘able’ than non-whites or women, the Court argued that most states had established “segregated” schools “for children of different ages, sexes and colors, and … for poor and neglected children” (Plessy 114). The Court avoided responsibility for promoting institutional racism and established the constitutionality of de jure segregation by stating that “the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority … is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put the construction upon it” (1143). They made an invidious distinction between the cultural and political rights of whites and ‘coloreds’ on the basis of the intrinsic “reasonableness” of long-established cultural practices. Writing for a majority of seven, Justice Henry Brown allowed that while the officers, empowered to judge racial identity by outward appearances might conceivably err in their judgment, the “object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either” (1140).

In the fifty-eight years between Plessy and the Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), which declared separate public facilities based on race inherently unequal,” many African-American authors pursued an actively critical engagement with the convoluted and contradictory terms of racial identity and identification set forth in Plessy. On the one hand, African-American letters faced the onerous burden of proving the cultural worth of black culture to an often doubting, condescending, and largely white audience. On the other hand, the legal decision and the Social Darwinism underlying it provided an unwelcome opportunity to thematize the willful ignorance and blindness informing racial segregation by exploring how racial stigmas were not founded in the “natural” superiority or inferiority of the races but rather constructed through historical prejudices and arbitrary (often illusory) social distinctions. Moreover, since Plessy not only denied the long if publicly unacknowledged history of interracial sexual unions (which had produced, among others, Homer Plessy as subject) but also strengthened existing miscegenation statutes by forbidding the social commingling of the races, narrative treatments of interracial sexual unions featuring characters who “passed” racially became an ideal vehicle through which to explore the inevitable intersection of racism (and, in some cases, sexism) with sexual taboos.

Seen in the light of the legal and cultural assumptions informing its production, Larsen’s Passing, the curious plot of which has thus far eluded satisfactory analysis, becomes a searching exploration and critique of the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological incoherences that confronted Larsen as an urbane African-American woman author who eschewed racial separatism and nineteenth-century racial uplift, rhetoric – which might in part explain why she abandoned her promising literary career after writing this novel.(5) Indeed, Passing, a relatively late example of this topos of American writing, represents both an original reconfiguration of and commentary on more conventional plots of racial “passing,” which typically center on a psychologically and culturally divided “tragic mulatto” figure, in such novels as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, among others. While these novels offer trenchant critiques of institutional racism, they also emphasize the heavy personal costs of crossing over the color line” and thus in some measure reinforce the consequences of racial division in an equally separatist “national” literature. Passing, in contrast, stresses the interpretive anxieties and sexual paranoias that make convention-bound people reluctant to allow others the freedom to travel freely throughout the many worlds, identities, and sexualities of American society. Larsen’s novel not only explores a legally fraudulent inter racial union in the marriage between Clare Kendry and John Bellew, but also subtly delineates the intraracial sexual attraction of Irene Redfield for Clare, while the former projects her taboo desires for Clare onto her husband Brian. Ironically, Brian Redfield, who the text implies might be homosexual, evinces no sexual interest in women, but Irene nonetheless begins to suspect that Brian and Clare are conducting an illicit, clandestine affair. Since the term “passing” carries the connotation of being accepted for something one is not, the title of the novel serves as a metaphor for a wide range of deceptive appearances and practices that encompass sexual as well as racial “passing.” Focussed principally on the operation of chance and accident as well as the epistemological crises of unknowability that result from self-silencing and self-repression, Larsen’s novel ostensibly passes” for a conventional narrative of racial “passing.” …

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Running Through the Trenches: Or, an Introduction to the Undead Culture Wars and Dead Serious Identity Politics

Journal of Communication Inquiry
Volume 34, Number 3 (July 2010)
pages 210-253

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

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

Part I: A Meditation on a Mutt in the White House

As the press scrutinized his family’s process of choosing a canine companion, President Obama noted his preference for a “mutt,” and playfully characterized himself as “a mutt.” His remarks simultaneously conjure theories of transgressive cultural hybridity and the theory of hybrid vigor. Jon Powell opined that we’d know multiracialism was real when whiteness was not dependent upon purity; when one such as Obama could as easily claim white as black racial identity. The scene at the “mutt” press conference at first glance could be a moment of ascendant hybridity, a rejection of assimilation and purity projects, no longer tying the identity of the nation to homogeneity.

But Obama’s use of “mutt”—particularly within the context of discussing “pure breeds” versus canines without official provenance—reveals the continued, stubborn conflation of race and blood, reifying pure categories even as it celebrates positive outcomes of hybridization. Although Obama’s tongue may have been firmly planted in cheek, does everyone get the joke? It becomes clearer each day that his mutt identity evokes anything but humor from other folks, who see him as a half-bred abomination (Obamanation, anyone?).

Hybridity offers potential to subvert dominant narratives of purity, but these opportunities are neither guaranteed nor the only possibilities that may emerge. Garcia Cancelini sees hybridity as the liminal space where negotiation and struggle occur, and oh, what struggles we are seeing as members of the media, the government, and the public render their own responses to the Age of Obama, an allegedly postracial, postfeminist, post-Marxist, postculture wars time of bliss. These responses come so fast and so furious these days I keep rewriting this introductory essay, inserting newer references to outrageous outbursts and expressions of bigotry, the bigotry that we were supposed to have overcome on November 4, 2008…

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The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Book Review]

Civil War Book Review
Summer 2010

Michael Perman, Professor of History and Research Professor of Humanities
University of Illinois, Chicago

Family and Dissent in the South during and after the Civil War

Bynum, Victoria E. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Victoria Bynum’s new book expands on her 2002 study, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, because it supplements the resistance against the Confederate government in southern Mississippi with two other similar revolts, one in east Texas and the other in central North Carolina. The outcome is not a longer book but a very compact volume of just 148 pages of text that presents, to a wider audience than most scholarly monographs, the little-known story of this local opposition to the Confederacy. Bynum then proceeds to show that, after the war, these same three pockets of resistance generated a pattern of dissidence that continued throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. This “long shadow of the Civil War” consisted of a tradition of dissent that passed through several generations within the families and communities that were involved in these three initial anti-Confederate insurgencies.

…The people who engaged in these overt acts of resistance were, according to Bynum, non-slaveholding farmers who lived outside the plantation areas of their states and who increasingly resented the conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” that was also perceived as “a slaveowners’ war and a non-slaveowners’ fight.” Moreover, these rebels came from the same local communities and were even related to each other. As kinfolk, they banded together, with the women playing a major role in the resistance, protecting their families and communities from Confederate threats to their livelihood and shielding their male kin who were of draft-age. A third characteristic was their independent spirit and their nonconformist behavior. One of the most prominent of them, Newt Knight, lived openly with his racially-mixed family and their offspring, defiantly unconventional conduct that is described in some detail in the book’s sixth and final chapter…

…Victoria Bynum’s interest in Anna Knight is especially understandable, since one of her fields is women’s history and her first book was Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (1992). In fact, two chapters of the six in The Long Shadow of the Civil War focus on women, while a third deals with women and race. Chapter two emphasizes the part played by women, primarily in the Quaker Belt, within the resistance against the Confederacy. Not only did women support this dangerous defiance but they acted on their own in many aspects of it, in particular harboring deserters and encouraging their sons to refuse to enlist. Chapter six is about “The Women of the Knight Family” and it explores the very complicated and independent maneuvers that these mixed-race women employed to deal with the conventions of race and gender in the Jim Crow South. And lastly, chapter three examines the resistance in North Carolina’s Quaker Belt that was mounted during the post-war period of Reconstruction against the former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan who were determined to remove the Republicans from control of their state and to restore the freedmen to the subordinate position they had endured as slaves. In this contest, black women in particular challenged attempts to control their autonomy especially their sexuality, even defending themselves in court, a remarkable development so soon after emancipation…

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Social Construction and the Concept of Race

Philosophy of Science
Volume 72, Number 5 (December 2005)
pages 1208-1219
DOI: 10.1086/508966

Edouard Machery, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh

Luc Faucher, Professor of Philosophy
Université du Québec, Montréal

There has been little serious work to integrate the constructionist approach and the cognitive/evolutionary approach in the domain of race, although many researchers have paid lip service to this project. We believe that any satisfactory account of human beings’ racialist cognition has to integrate both approaches. In this paper, we propose to move toward this integration. We present an evolutionary hypothesis that rests on a distinction between three kinds of groups—kin-based groups, small scale coalitions, and ethnies. Following Gil-White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we propose that ethnies have raised specific evolutionary challenges that were solved by an evolved cognitive system. We suggest that the concept of race is a byproduct of this mechanism. We argue that recent theories of cultural transmission are our best hope for integrating social constructionists’ and cognitive/evolutionary theorists’ insights.

1. Introduction. A dominant view about races today is the so called “social constructionist” view. Social constructionists propose that the concept of race—i.e., the belief that a classification based on skin color and other skin-deep properties like body shape or hair style maps onto meaningful, important biological kinds—is a pseudo-biological concept that has been used to justify and rationalize the unequal treatment of groups of people by others.

Social constructionism became prevalent mainly because from the 1970s on, it has been widely recognized that the biological concept of subspecies, that is, of populations of conspecifics that are genetically and morphologically different from each other, could not be applied to humans. For one thing, it has been shown that there is more genetic variability within human racial groups than between them (Lewontin 1972; Brown and Armelagos 2001). Moreover, assigning an individual to a race does not buy the inferential power you are usually warranted to expect from a biological kind term. Finally, classifications based on different phenotypic traits (skin color, body shape, hair, etc.) usually cross-cut each other (Brown and Armelagos 2001). Thus, the racialist tenet that skin color and other skin-deep properties pick up different biological groups has been assumed to be false.

Biology has thus fuelled the recent racial skepticism of social constructionists, that is, the view that races do not exist. But social constructionists about race are not mere skeptics. They usually underscore the instability and diversity of human beings’ concepts of races. For instance, Omi and Winant note that an “effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (2002, 123; see also Root 2000). Others suggest that the notion is a modern invention, rooted in the eighteenth century taxonomies of Linnaeus and Blumenbach. For them, there were times or places where people did not have any concept of race (Banton 1970).

The constructionist contribution to the understanding of racialism is important (for a critical review, see Machery and Faucher 2005). It rightly suggests that human beings’ concepts of race do not occur in a social vacuum: social environments are important to explain the content of our concepts of race. It also correctly emphasizes the diversity of human beings’ concepts of race across cultures. Any account of racialism has to be consistent with these facts. However, it is not without difficulties either. First, it does not explain why many cultures have developed some concept of race and some classification based on phenotypic features. Moreover, the social constructionist approach does not explain the commonalities between the culture-specific concepts of race, e.g., the concepts of race in contemporary North America, in nineteenth-century France, in Germany during the Nazi era, and so on. Some aspects of the folk concepts of race vary little across cultures (Hirschfeld 1996), while others vary much more. This should be explained.

In recent years, there has been a growing literature in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology about racialism. Although no consensus has yet emerged, several proposals have recently attempted to describe the underlying cognitive mechanisms responsible for the production of racial concepts (e.g., Hirschfeld 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001; Gil-White 1999, 2001a, 2001b; Kurzban et al. 2001; Cosmides et al. 2003; Machery and Faucher 2005). Researchers agree that racialism has not been selected for: it is a byproduct of an evolved cognitive system, which was selected for another function. However, they disagree on the nature of this system.

The cognitive and evolutionary approach to racialism is a needed supplement to the social constructionist approach. The recurrence of racial classification across cultures and the commonalities between them suggest that racial classifications are the product of some universal psychological disposition. However, evolutionary theorists face a challenge that is symmetric to the challenge faced by social constructionists. Since they posit a species-typical cognitive system to explain racial categorization, they have a hard time explaining the cultural diversity of the concepts of race. It has to be shown that the claim that a species-specific human cognitive system underlies racialism is consistent with the evidence that racial concepts vary across cultures and times and are influenced by culture-specific beliefs.

Thus, we are confronted with two explanatory approaches to racial categorization that are symmetrically incomplete. This point has been recognized by several evolutionary-minded researchers. Indeed, they have paid lip service to the project of integrating the constructionist approach and the cognitive/evolutionary approach in the domain of race (e.g., Hirschfeld 1996). However, in the domain of race, few have walked their talk.

In this paper, we propose that the theory of cultural evolution is the proper framework for integrating both approaches to racialism. In line with the social constructionists’ emphasis on the social environment, we claim that the concept of race—how race membership is thought of—is culturally transmitted: one acquires the concept of race from one’s social environment. However, we insist that social learning is determined by several factors. Following Gil-White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we emphasize particularly the importance of an evolved, canalized disposition to think about ethnies in a biological way. We argue that our proposal accounts for the similarities between culture-specific concepts of race as well as for their differences.

Our strategy is the following. In Section 2, we distinguish three kinds of groups, kin-based groups, small-scale coalitions, and ethnies. Following Gil-White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we propose that ethnies have raised specific evolutionary challenges that were solved by an evolved cognitive system. The concept of race is shaped by this mechanism. We thereby meet the challenge faced by the social constructionist view: we account for the similarities between concepts of race. In Section 3, we build on Boyd and Richerson’s theory of cultural evolution (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd 2004) in order to integrate social constructionists’ insights and cognitive/evolutionary theorists’ insights.We thereby meet the challenge faced by the cognitive/evolutionary approach: we account for the differences between concepts of race…

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Aren’t they just black kids? Biracial children in the child welfare system

Child & Family Social Work
Volume 15, Issue 4 (November 2010)
pages 441-45
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2206.2010.00690.x

Rachel A. Fusco, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

Mary E. Rauktis, Research Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

Julie S. McCrae, Research Scientist
Butler Institute for Families
University of Denver

Michael A. Cunningham, Research Specialist
University of Pittsburgh

Cynthia K. Bradley-King, Field Assistant Professor and Academic Coordinator, Child Welfare Education for Baccalaureates (CWEB)
University of Pittsburgh

In the USA, African-American children are overrepresented in the child welfare system. However, little is known about the child welfare system experiences of biracial children, who are predominately both White and African-American. To better understand this population, data from public child welfare in a US county were used to examine biracial children in the child welfare system. Results showed significant racial differences between children in the child welfare system. Despite the common belief that biracial children will have experiences similar to African-American children, the child welfare system seems to view them differently. Biracial children are more likely to be referred, rated as high risk and investigated compared with White or African-American children. Their mothers were younger, and were more often assessed as having physical, intellectual or emotional problems. These caregivers were also considered to have lower parenting skills and knowledge compared with White or African-American caregivers. Although the disproportionate representation of African-American children in the system has been well documented, this study provides evidence that biracial children are also overrepresented. Despite the fact that this is a rapidly growing population in the USA, there is little research available about biracial children and their families.

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Classes You May Have Missed: On Modern Brazilian Literature

Pitt Magazine
January, 1995

Bobby J. Chamberlain, Associate Professor of Brazilian Culture and Literature
University of Pittsburgh

Brazilian culture has always been considered a fusion of three different races: the Europeans (specifically Portuguese), the Indians, and the Africans who were taken to Brazil as slaves. But it is wrong to see this culture as some kind of happy hybridization: There is always a hierarchy in this type of fusion. A much larger percentage of whites, descendants of the Europeans, are in the upper classes, and the great majority of blacks and mulattos, those of mixed race, are in the lower classes. Brazilian literature itself began, as did Spanish-American literature, as a specifically European phenomenon in the New World, with a certain inferiority complex that Brazilians, even those of European descent, were not as good as the Europeans in Europe. I’d like to discuss how several writers dealt with the problem of adapting influences from Europe and the United States to a Brazilian literature.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of this one, is often considered the greatest figure in Brazilian literature. He was a mulatto who rose from the lower classes to become the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The narrators of his novels, middle-class Brazilians, often distort what they tell you to serve their own ends. You start off believing them, but their interpretations of social signs and gestures become strained and paranoid. For instance, in Dom Casmurro (1900), Bento Santiago tells of his childhood with Capitu, whom he later marries and then spurns, accusing her of adultery. From the beginning, he portrays her as a crafty manipulator and himself as her victim, but the evidence of her adultery is flimsy, and Santiago’s coldness to her seems to spring solely from his own neurosis and cruelty…

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Adjustment Problems in Adolescence: Are Multiracial Children at Risk?

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
Volume 70, Issue 4 (October 2000)
pages 433–444
DOI: 10.1037/h0087744

M. Elise Radina, Associate Professor of Family Studies & Social Work
Miami University, Ohio

Teresa M. Cooney, Associate Professor of Human Develpopment and Family Studies
University of Missouri

Data from a national survey were used to compare adjustment between a group of multiracial adolescents and two groups of single-race adolescents, grades seven to twelve. Significant differences were found on fewer than half of the school, behavioral, and psychological dimensions that were assessed. Implications for research and school interventions are discussed.

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Relationship Quality Between Multiracial Adolescents and Their Biological Parents

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
Volume 70, Issue 4 (October 2000)
pages 445–454
DOI: 10.1037/h0087763

M. Elise Radina, Associate Professor of Family Studies & Social Work
Miami University, Ohio

Teresa M. Cooney, Associate Professor of Human Develpopment and Family Studies
University of Missouri

National survey data were used to compare single-race white and minority adolescents with multiracial adolescents in terms of relationships with their parents. Three relational dimensions were considered: association/interaction, communication, and emotional closeness. Comparable relationship quality was found between parents and adolescents in all three groups, except that multiracial boys and their fathers were found to be less emotionally close and communicative. Implications for research are discussed.

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Laughing To Keep From Crying: Resisting “Race” Through Irony

Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies
Number 4, (2000)
issn# 1522-7723

Ronald Sundstrom, Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of San Francisco

He wanted to rise-a malicious, ironic voice insisted that he rise-and, at once, to leave this temple and go out into the world.

“Race,” whatever it may be, is something that we are not yet done with. We may never be done with it. It may be a category that we will always be present in some form or another in our societies. Or, it may be the case that the category is on the verge of extinction, and that it will fade as its social usefulness, importance, and its descriptive and explanatory power fades. Whatever its future is, a case can be made that at present “race” is descriptive of social life and organization in the U.S., as well as other parts of the globe. This is a descriptive, and not a normative claim.

As a human category “race” is invaluable part our attempts to explain and understand the history and realities of oppression, bigotry, and violence in the U.S. Deprived of the use of “race” as a social category, the social sciences would not be able to provide nuanced and insightful explanations of U.S. history and this society’s social landscape. This history and social landscape is what I refer to as the American “racial” politic. In addition plays a role in our attempts to organize communities in our struggle to redress “racial” wrongs, and to end racism and “racial” oppression. For the limited purposes of social science and politics, “race” is legitimate and ought to be conserved. That “race” is useful, descriptive, or explanatory now is not to say that will always be true. The future of “race” is going to be determined by future forms of social organization. What I have argued for above is a pragmatic and limited role for race.

A pragmatic and limited role for “race,” however, does not placate those, like myself, who are leery of it. The conservation of “race,” in any form, is worrisome. Social identities are powerful elements of our social worlds. They are thickly wrapped in complicated and often troublesome histories. Their durations and the twists and turns they make through our worlds during their tenures are unpredictable. Such is the case with “race.” The history of “race” in the U.S. is soaked in blood. Yet, and for good reasons, “race” is the centerpiece of identity for many individuals and communities. Still, worries and doubts remain about the social utility of “race.”…

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