Mixed Race Studies

Racial Ambiguity and Relationship Formation in the United States: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
Volume 20, Number 2 (April 2003)
pages 153-169
DOI: 10.1177/02654075030202002

Angela D. James, Associate Professor of African American Studies
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

M. Belinda Tucker, Social Psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
University of California, Los Angeles

This article explores in conceptual terms the nature of romantic relationship formation and maintenance when a potential or actual partner does not fit into the dominant racial schema – a situation we define as ‘racial ambiguity.’ When a potential other cannot be classified according to one’s existing notions of racial organization, how does this ambiguity affect approach and maintenance? In the discussion, we first explore the concept of racial ambiguity as a function of the peculiar and distinctive American construction of race. Next, we examine conceptual perspectives that can be used to understand the role of racial classification and racial ambiguity in personal relationship formation and maintenance. And, finally, we discuss strategies for incorporating more fluid understandings of race into research on personal relationships.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
Volume 5, Number 2, 2005
pages 1-29
E-ISSN: 1547-8424
Print ISSN: 1536-6936
DOI: 10.1353/mer.2005.0013

Miriam Thaggert, Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies
University of Iowa

In Passing Nella Larsen seems to suggest that identity is a hazy fiction one tells that outward appearances and surface events only partly confirm. Rather than directly stating their thoughts, characters communicate through an exchange of looks—particularly her two light-skinned female characters, Irene and Clare. These subtle forms of expression heighten the sense of uncertainty throughout the novel. The reader never learns explicitly the reason for Clare’s fall out of a window, the reality of a homosexual longing between Clare and Irene, or the true nature of the relationship between Clare and Irene’s husband. This indeterminacy extends to the racial identity of Larsen’s characters, an identity not always easily discernible because of the characters’ mixed racial background and their inclination to “pass.”  Without adequate markings or clues, any reading, whether of identities or situations, is flawed or incorrect.

A brief, almost offhand, remark Irene makes refers to a legal trial in which these issues of knowledge, passing, and the gaze combined in a process to interrogate the race and veracity of a woman. The Rhinelander case was an annulment proceeding in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, for fraud. Leonard claimed he did not know that his light-skinned wife was “colored,” the daughter of a white woman and a dark-skinned cab driver.  Larsen’s reference to the Rhinelanders occurs only once, near the end of the novel, after Irene suspects that her husband, Brian, is having an affair with Clare…

Read or purchase the article here.

Gothic Discourse Meets Hybridity in the United States [Book Review]

H-net Reviews
July 2003

Jeanne Cortiel

Justin D. Edwards. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. xxxiii + 145 pp., ISBN 978-0-87745-824-1.

In the past decade, gothic studies have produced a number of new readers, research handbooks, and student guides, and launched a new scholarly journal, Gothic Studies, developments which have, among other things, consolidated and somewhat stabilized the field (if one can speak of stability in the context of the gothic). At the same time, however, the question of what “gothic” really means routinely comes up for fundamental scrutiny and reevaluation in scholarly debates{which the above-mentioned guides also gleefully participate in. This is a good moment, therefore, to be moving in new directions with well-tried problems: the field provides solid theoretical and methodological grounding, yet the new definitional openness of the “gothic” also allows explorations of unfamiliar “gothicisms” and “gothicizations.”

Justin Edwards’s Gothic Passages makes use of precisely this possibility by intersecting two established fields, the scholarly exploration of the American Gothic and the analysis of passing and racial ambiguity in American literature and culture. Thoroughly researched and well argued, the book identities the “gothicization of race” and the “racialization of the gothic” as two interrelated phenomena throughout the nineteenth century. Edwards’s intersection of scholarly concerns suggests that recent reconsiderations of the “gothic” may require further complication, particularly in the study of the American literary and cultural gothic…

Read the entire review here.

Black or Biracial? Who Gets to Decide?

The Huffington Post
2009-03-04

Abby L. Ferber, Associate Professor, Director of the Matrix Center and Co-Director of Women’s and Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Is Obama Black? Biracial? And why do we care so much? A new book by George Yancey and Richard Lewis, Jr., Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies, is a nice primer on the subject, and argues that an historical context is necessary for understanding why questions of racial identity are so heated in the U.S.

I had the good fortune recently of sitting down and discussing the issue with two young, bi-racial women, both sociologists, who have had ample opportunity to reflect upon this issue both personally and intellectually. We can all learn from their experience and insight. Why is the issue so contentious? According to Chandra Waring “It is difficult for black and white people to understand that when they label black/white biracial people as black or as white, they are asking—no, telling—that person to deny, ignore or even disown one parent.”…

…Chandra, like Obama, has one black parent and one white parent. While she self-identifies as both black and white, she explains “people still see me as black and that is because society teaches us that black and white equals black (unless the biracial person can pass, then maybe, they can be white). President Obama is a prime example of this ridiculous racial mathematics. He is just as white as he is black, yet he is celebrated and overwhelmingly understood to be black. Obama illustrates how being biracial works—or does not work—because he was raised by his white mother and white grandparents, yet still is viewed as black. If a biracial American who was raised entirely by his white family is not acknowledged as half white, who will be?”…

Read the entire article here.

‘It’s like I’m part of every race’

The Straits Times
Malaysia
2010-08-08

Edora Mayangsari Lopez, 18
Eurasian-Malay

The psychology student at the Management Development Institute of Singapore has a Eurasian father and a Malay-Javanese mother. Both of them are Singaporeans.

She is the younger of two children and has relatives in Europe, Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia. Her family lives in Marsiling.

She studied at Si Ling Primary School and Woodlands Secondary School.

Q: How has your mixed heritage shaped your identity?

I did go through an identity crisis phase in my early years of growing up, but I’ve learnt that race is just one aspect of my identity.

I’m not a stereotypical Malay and neither am I too ‘Eurasian’. I am a blend of these two cultures and their values.

Q: What are the pros and cons of having a mixed heritage? What kind of challenges have you encountered?

One possible advantage would be the number of festivals I get to celebrate – Christmas, Hari Raya and even Chinese New Year.

It’s like I’m part of every race. I get presents and red packets more than once a year, a double plus point.

Being mixed also means that your relatives have different religions.

For example, I am a Muslim and there are certain food and drinks that I can’t consume when I attend family functions. But I’m never excluded because of that. I’m very thankful for a thoughtful and understanding extended family who takes me for who I am.

I have encountered some hurtful remarks and discrimination with regard to my looks. People tend to think that Eurasians are Caucasians and some have asked me why I’m not fair or why I have black hair. I cope by simply ignoring them or just letting the comments pass…

Read the entire article here.

Davidson Welcomes New Professors into the Fold

Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-08-30

Rachel Andoga

Davidson welcomes five new assistant professors into tenure-track positions this semester. Here are  profiles of their careers and academic interests.

Caroline Beschea-Fache, a native of northern France, joins the French Department as a specialist in Métissage, the study of biracialism, multiracialism, and diversity as applied to literature, social studies, and political science. Her research and teaching interests also include modern Francophone literature, cinema, and the construction of identity in France for immigrants. Beschea-Fache holds a master’s degree in movie translation from the University of Lille, where she also completed her undergraduate work. In 2000, she began her pursuit of a master’s degree in French at Indiana University, where she wrote her dissertation on the representation of biracial characters in Francophone literature…

Read the entire article here.

Voices from the Gaps: Kym Ragusa

Voices from the Gaps
University of Minnesota
2007-04-24

Shalee Dettmann
Joey Grihalva
Jenna Fodness
Gaushia Thao

I don’t know where I was conceived, but I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighborhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the borderlines enforced by fear and anger, and transgressed by desire. The streets crossing east to west, north to south, like the web of veins beneath my skin.

 The Skin Between Us (26)

In the prologue of her acclaimed memoir, The Skin Between Us, Kym Ragusa writes of a journey she took in 1999 to her paternal ancestors’ home of Messina, Italy. A year after the death of her two grandmothers—the central figures in her personal life, each representing her Italian and African-American heritage respectively—Ragusa embarks on a search for clues about her identity. This journey is symbolic of her artistic work as she is constantly involved in the formulation and explication of what it means to be multicultural.

Kym Ragusa was born February of 1966 in Manhattan, NY. Ragusa comes from a mixed background: her mother is African American and her father is Italian. Ragusa’s ancestors on her mother’s side were brought to the United States as African slaves…

Read the entire article here.

The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 66, Issue 2 (January 2008)
pages 349-361
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.08.034

Linda M. Hunt, Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

Mary S. Megyesi, M.Sc.
Michigan State University

Many researchers are currently studying the distribution of genetic variations among diverse groups, with particular interest in explaining racial/ethnic health disparities. However, the use of racial/ethnic categories as variables in biological research is controversial. Just how racial/ethnic categories are conceptualized, operationalized, and interpreted is a key consideration in determining the legitimacy of their use, but has received little attention. We conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 30 human genetics scientists from the US and Canada who use racial/ethnic variables in their research. They discussed the types of classifications they use, the criteria upon which they are based, and their methods for classifying individual samples and subjects. We found definitions of racial/ethnic variables were often lacking or unclear, the specific categories they used were inconsistent and context specific, and classification practices were often implicit and unexamined. We conclude that such conceptual and practical problems are inherent to routinely used racial/ethnic categories themselves, and that they lack sufficient rigor to be used as key variables in biological research. It is our position that it is unacceptable to persist in the constructing of scientific arguments based on these highly ambiguous variables.

…A number of serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research have emerged in our analysis of our interviews with this group of genetic scientists. At the most basic level, the common racial/ethnic classifications they routinely use are of questionable value for delineating genetically related groups. The ubiquitous OMB categories in fact were designed for political and administrative purposes; they were not designed for use as scientific variables (Kertzer & Arel, 2002; Shields et al., 2005). These are notably ambiguous and arbitrary categories, based on strikingly diverse criteria such as skin color, language, or geographic location. They do not compose clear classifications, but instead are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. In the absence of clear principles for applying the labels, in practice, different aspects of an individual’s identity are arbitrarily prioritized, in order to fit individual cases into the schema.

A serious conceptual problem that reinforces the use of these questionable categories is that many of the researchers presume racial admixture is relatively rare and recent, and that specific geographically defined groups, such as Finnish or Japanese, can unproblematically be equated with broad socially designated racial/ethnic groups, such as white or Asian. However, this logic relies on several unsubstantiated assumptions: that historically there were pure racial types associated with particular geographic locations; that migrations were sporadic and relatively rare; and that racial/ethnic groups are primarily endogamous. (A recent study of the views of genetics journals editors reports similar findings: Outram & Ellison, 2006.) These assumptions are contrary to much of what is known about human population history. Genetic isolation among humans is in fact quite rare: human populations have always exchanged mates across broad geographic areas throughout time, producing clinal variation (gradual variation between places), rather than clearly distinct genetic stocks. Furthermore, racial admixture is not an exceptional event; indeed, there has been significant intermarriage between socially designated groups throughout history (Weiss, 1998; Harry & Marks, 1999; Race Ethnicity and Genetics Working Group, 2005). Compounding these conceptual problems is the practical fact that assigning these labels to individuals is often done in the absence of any specific knowledge of their actual familial migration histories.

Heavy reliance on self-identification, as reported by these researchers, further amplifies the imprecision to these variables. Despite its popularity, this method for classifying cases is extremely problematic. Racial/ethnic identities are inherently amorphous constructs; they are multiple and fluid, and may change as a person moves between social, economic and geographic contexts (Berry, 1993; Hunt, Schneider & Comer, 2004). There is no way to know what criteria an individual may apply when classifying their own racial/ethnic identity, and the criteria is likely to vary dramatically from person to person. Although some researchers collect additional information about parents and grandparents, this is only done for certain racial/ethnic groups, and never with others, and there appears to be no standard criteria for assigning group membership based on the additional information…

Read the entire article here.

Perceptions, Representation, and Identity Development of Multiracial Students in American Higher Education

Journal of Student Affairs at New York University
Volume VI, 2010
pages 1-6

Roberta Garbarini-Philippe
New York University

In my article I first examine some historical facts and policy issues related to multiracial individuals, giving a few examples of how this population has been perceived and stereotyped by institutions, the media, and American culture. I then look at some of the research on biracial identity development and show how one of the assumptions regarding people of mixed-race heritage, the inability to fit in any monoracial group, has been refuted by many studies that predict healthy and positive psychological outcomes for multiracial individuals. Finally, I discuss multiracial identity development in the higher education context and suggest some ways in which colleges and universities can create inclusive environments and utilize the potential of these border-defying students to introduce a new discourse on race.

Read the entire article here.

Transcending “The Box”: Multiracial Subjects as the New Face of Reality

CSW Update Newsletter
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
February 2008
pages 24-27

Kunti Dudakia

I hate it. I hate the feeling I get when I am forced in online surveys, job applications, or school admissions to check a box to identify my racial background. A feeling of confusion and uncertainty overwhelms me in an internal battle to check just one box.

I am not one box.

I am two. Maybe three or four if I want to be completely accurate. But I wonder: what is the purpose of “the box”? When we check a box, we are claiming a race, an ancestry, and even a status. Race as an organizing principle in society has been a source of hegemony and hierarchy for centuries. Its origins are unknown and unreliable. Historically dominant groups have used race as a basis to divide and distinguish themselves from “the other.” In the United States, the legal and scientific definition of race has continued to alter according to societal standards. In some ways we have moved forward from the “check one box only” of the 1850 census, which included three categories: white, black, and mulatto. However, we still attempt to check one box when many of us are biracial or multiracial. The reality in America is hybridity. In the definition that I use, hybridity means the blending of two or more cultures into a unified whole. Hybrids are chameleons adjusting to the shifting landscapes and isms that may reject nonconformity. Moreover, evidenced by the increasing amount of interracial marriages and ethnically ambiguous subjects is the realization that racial purity is a myth…

…Authenticity is constructed within the racial paradigm as both a marker and tool for inclusion and exclusion. We hear statements like “He isn’t really black” as assumptions based on essentialist ideas of race—usually and unfortunately reinforcing biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. Multiracial subjects are the ‘antithesis of authenticity’ inasmuch as they do not fit into one group or culture. This begs the question, are multiracial subjects changing the landscape of racial classification?…

Read the entire article here.