Mixed Race Studies

Bicultural Identity Formation of Second-Generation Indo-Canadians

Canadian Ethnic Studies
Volume 40, Number 2, 2008
pages 187-199
E-ISSN: 1913-8253
Print ISSN: 0008-3496

Pavna Sodhi, Ed.D, CCC
Abundant Living Counselling Group, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

This article examines the bicultural identity formation and cultural experiences internalized by second-generation Indo-Canadians in their efforts to accommodate the “best of both worlds” into their lifestyle. The objectives of this article are to educate the reader to become cognizant of the bicultural issues encountered by second-generation Indo-Canadians; to demonstrate interventions suitable for the second-generation Indo-Canadian populations; and to increase the readers’ understanding of bicultural identity formation. What becomes evident is that intergenerational dialogue has a profound impact on the bicultural identity formation of this population. It will serve to guide these individuals to find a third space (Bhabha 2004) or zone of proximal development (ZPD) to encourage evolvement of their bicultural identity (Cummins 1996; Gutiérrez et al. 1999).

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Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity

News at Princeton
Princeton University
2009-12-17

Jennifer Greenstein Altmann

For three decades, history professor Martha Sandweiss had wondered about a little-noticed detail in the life of Clarence King, a well-known figure in the history of the American West. King, a 19th-century geologist and author, was a leading surveyor who mapped the West after the Civil War.

Back in graduate school, Sandweiss had read a 500-page biography of King that devoted just five pages to a secret, 13-year relationship that King, who was white, had with a black woman.

“Thirteen years, five pages? It just didn’t seem right to me,” said Sandweiss, a historian of the American West who joined the Princeton faculty last year.

A few years ago, Sandweiss decided it was time to investigate. Poring through census documents that were available online, she was able to discover in a matter of minutes that King, who was blond and blue eyed, had been leading a double life as a white man passing as a black man.

“Once I uncovered that, I knew I had to try to unravel the story,” she said.

The result is “Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line,” published earlier this year by The Penguin Press…

…But the most amazing part of King’s story is that someone with fair hair and blue eyes was accepted as a black man. He managed it, Sandweiss said, because of the so-called “one-drop” laws passed in the South during Reconstruction, which declared that someone with one black great-grandparent was considered legally black.

“The laws were meant to make it very difficult to move from one racial category to the other,” Sandweiss said. “Ironically, they made it very possible to do that, because you could claim an ancestry — or more often hide an ancestry — that was invisible in the color of your skin.”…

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The Effect of Interracial Media Portrayals on Perceptions of Multiracialism

XULAneXUS: Xavier University of Louisiana’s Undergraduate Research Journal
Research Manuscript
Volume 5, Number 1, April 2008
9 pages

Ashley E. Winston
Department of Psychology

The notion that context has an effect on perceptions of multiracialism was investigated. Context was manipulated in terms of exposure to interracial harmony and interracial disharmony in the form of a movie clip from the movie Something New (2006). The effect of the clip on participants’ perceptions of multiracial people was measured by the Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children Scale, and the racial identification of the participants was measured by the Racial Identity Scale. The results from the two measures were calculated with an independent-samples t-test to compare the mean scores of the two groups. Results show that the mean of the group who received the disharmony clip was significantly lower than the mean of the group who received the harmony clip. The results imply an importance of the media portrayal of interracial interaction and racial stereotyping on the perceptions of society for the multiracial community.

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Mapping race: Multiracial people and racial category construction in the United States and Britain

Immigrants & Minorities
Volume 15, Issue 2 (July 1996)
pages 107-119
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1996.9974883

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

The social construction of what are often called ‘racial’ categories has proceeded differently in different places. The bases of ascription and group identity, the placement of the boundaries between groups, and the power dynamics between groups have changed dramatically over time and social and political circumstance in each place. This article is a meditation and speculation on the ways that racial categories have been constructed and have changed in the United States and Britain over the course of the twentieth century.’ It uses the identity situations of people of multiple ancestries – Black and White, Asian and African and so on – as a tool to deconstruct the meanings assigned to racial categories and the power dynamics that underly those categories. The article lays out some things that the situation of multiracial people – people some of whose ancestors were Africans and some of whose ancestors came from somewhere else – tells us about the ways racial categories and meanings have evolved over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and in Britain. It finds, in sum, that White Americans have long had clearer ideas than White Britons about what they wanted to do with race; that those clear categories in the US are now breaking down, partly because of the rise of a multiracial consciousness on the part of some people of mixed parentage; and that a British innovation of the 1970s and the 1980s, a common Black identity for all non-White Britons, is no longer working very well, either.

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American Lives: The ‘Strange’ Tale Of Clarence King

National Public Radio
2010-08-18

Steve Inskeep, Host
Morning Edition

U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library

Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time — a Pullman porter.

They hit it off, and eventually married. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true.

“James Todd was really not black, he was not a Pullman porter, and he was not even James Todd,” author Martha Sandweiss tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “He was in fact Clarence King, a very well-educated white explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America.”…

…Sandweiss’ book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, examines why King chose to live a double life — and how his experience reflects and represents how Americans, both past and present, have thought about race. In the aftermath of the Civil War, particularly, the U.S. had to recast some of the ways it thought about questions of race and identity…

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Mixed Messages, Mixed Memories, Mixed Ethnicity: Mnemonic Heritage and Constructing Identity Through Mixed Parentage

New Zealand Sociology
Volume 25, Number 1 (2010)
pages 75-99

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

This article explores the concept of mixed ethnic identity from a social memory-based perspective. Drawing on the personal testimonies of individuals of mixed ethnic heritage in New Zealand, the UK, Australia and Canada, the complex influence of collective memory on the construction of a mixed ethnic identity is drawn out, highlighting the contradictions and reconciliations negotiated by those who feel a strong sense of belonging to two groups, with potentially contrasting stories and memories. Participants express their feelings of belonging in multiple ways, showing how appreciation of heritage and internalization of family memories do not have to be equal nor experienced in the same way for both sides of the family. Rather, the unpredictable way in which collective memory shapes mixed ethnic identity indicates that each collectivity can have its own way of being understood for the individual, without reducing or denying its importance.

…The lingering idea of marginalization and internal conflict is particularly interesting from the memory perspective. Do individuals of mixed heritage experience internal conflict due to the different experiences and mnemonic heritages of their parents? Is it possible to reconcile “mixed memories”? Vivero and Jenkins (1999, p. 12) describe the “cultural homelessness” of mixed heritage, indicating that the lack of a coherent memory framework can lead to psychological distress: “Culturally homeless individuals may have the intense feeling and longing to ‘go home’; however, they cannot, because they have never had a cultural home… they cannot rely on memories of having had a cultural home”. In contrast, a number of recent studies have found that individuals of mixed descent have multiple and positive senses of identity, identifying to different extents with both sides of their heritage (Binning, et al., 2009; Root, 1992; Stephan & Stephan, 1989; Ward, 2006).

The reconciliation of mixed memories is illuminated by [Homi] Bhabha’s concept of a “third space” of hybridity, which illustrates new forms of identity and belonging where different cultures collide and collude (Ang, 1999, p. 558; Bhabha, 1994). In contrast to historical discourses of “hybrids” as the mingling of biologically separate “races”, this antiessentialist understanding of identity can instead highlight different forms of cultural recombination, whether based in ancestry or interaction (Bolatagici, 2004, p. 75; Gomes, 2007; Parker & Song, 2001, p. 4). Hybridity thus emphasises the fluidity and multiplicity of mixed ethnic identity, as constructed through memory and experience – suggesting that “cultural homelessness” may not be a lack of a home, but rather “…belonging at one and the same time to several ‘homes’ (and to no one particular ‘home’)” (Hall, 1992, p. 310)…

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The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the US Population: Emerging American Identities

Population and Development Review
Volume 35, Issue 1 (March 2009)
pages 1-51
DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2009.00260.x

Anthony Daniel Perez, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington, Seattle

Images and interpretations of the past, present, and future of the American racial and ethnic landscape are contradictory. Many accounts focus on the increasing diversity that results from immigration and differential natural increase as well as the proliferation of racial and ethnic categories in census data. Less attention has been paid to the formation and erosion of racial and ethnic identities produced by intermarriage and ethnic blending. The framers and custodians of census racial classifications assume a “geographic origins” definition of race and ethnicity, but the de facto measures in censuses and social surveys rely on folk categories that vary over time and are influenced by administrative practices and sociopolitical movements. We illustrate these issues through an in-depth examination of the racial and ethnic reporting by whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the 2000 census. The emerging pattern, labeled here as the “Americanization” of racial and ethnic identities, and most evident for whites and blacks, is of simplified racial identities with little acknowledgment of complex ancestries. National origin is the predominant mode of reporting racial and ethnic identities among Asians and Hispanics, especially first-generation immigrants. The future of racial and ethnic identities is unknowable, but continued high levels of immigration, intermarriage, and social mobility are likely to blur contemporary divisions and boundaries.

…America was a multiethnic and multicultural society from the outset. The original American colonies were formed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as frontier societies composed of multiple founding populations (Klein 2004: Ch. 2). First among these were the indigenous peoples of North America, who were gradually displaced or absorbed by the more numerous European settlers and indentured servants from various parts of the world. Africans were imported primarily as slave labor from the Caribbean and West Africa, although some arrived as indentured servants on terms similar to whites. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, some blacks became free settlers, but by the close of the seventeenth century, slavery and African heritage became nearly synonymous (Fredrickson 1981). With unbalanced sex ratios in frontier settings, large populations of mixed ancestry soon emerged, particularly in Southern colonies (Davis 1991). While some unions were the result of intermarriage or consensual liaisons, there was also widespread sexual exploitation of black women by white slave owners (Fredrickson 1981: Ch. 3).

The ethnic and racial landscape became even more complex during the nineteenth century. Continental expansion added lands that had been home to Native Americans and peoples of mixed indigenous and Spanish origin, and successive waves of immigration from Europe and Asia fueled the rapid growth of an increasingly diverse population. Tracking the mixed and un-mixed descendants from these many threads is a theoretical possibility, but not one that can be easily accomplished with historical or contemporary data. The problem is that the differential rates of settlement, natural increase, and intermarriage (or sexual unions) that produced progeny of mixed ancestry are largely unknown. Small differences in assumptions about the relative magnitudes of these processes can lead to greatly different estimates of the ancestral origins of the contemporary American population.

An even greater obstacle to describing the ethnic makeup of the American people is the assumption that most people are able and willing to accurately report the origins of their parents, grandparents, and more distant ancestors. In many cases, knowledge of ancestral origins is passed along in families or communities, but in some cases these narratives are suppressed or simply lost to history. As a result, the racial and ethnic composition recorded in censuses, surveys, and administrative records reflects a large degree of subjectivity and even speculation, in addition to actual patterns of genealogical descent. Methodological studies of census questions about race and ethnicity, for instance, show that responses are affected, often remarkably so, by the format of questions, the listed choices, and the examples included in questionnaire instructions (Farley 1991; Hirschman, Alba, and Farley 2000)…

Read an excerpt of this article here.
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Biracial Utahns seeking identity

Deseret News
Salt Lake City, Utah
2005-03-12

Elaine Jarvik

They’re biracial — equally Polynesian and white. But most prefer to think of themselves as Polynesian, says University of Utah graduate student Kawika Allen, who recently studied 84 Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns.

Allen, who grew up with an Hawaiian mother and a Caucasian father, presented his findings Friday at the ninth annual Pacific Islander Awareness Week at the University of Utah…

…Growing up in Utah, Allen’s Polynesian friends sometimes thought he wasn’t Polynesian enough, and he wasn’t sure if he fit in his father’s white world either. That angst later led to a master’s thesis on biracial identity among Utah’s biracial Polynesians, who now number more than 3,000.

Although previous research of other biracial Americans found that children tend to identify more with the same-sex parent, regardless of ethnicity, Allen found that among Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns, children tended to identify more with the Polynesian parent, regardless of gender.

He also found that biracial Polynesians were more likely to receive negative messages about being biracial if their fathers, rather than mothers, were Polynesian…

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Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 114, Number 3 (November 2008)
pages 577–614
DOI: 10.1086/592859

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries.  The Brazilian state traditionally embraced mixed-race classification, but is adopting racial quotas employing a black/white scheme.  To explore potential consequences of that turn for beneficiary identification and boundary formation, the author analyzes attitudinal survey data on race-targeted policy and racial classification in multiple formats, including classification in comparison to photographs. The results show that almost half of the mixed-race sample, when constrained to dichotomous classification, opts for whiteness, a majority rejects mixed-race individuals for quotas, and the mention of quotas for blacks in a split-ballot experiment nearly doubles the percentage choosing that racial category.  Theories of how states make race emphasize the use of official categories to legislate exclusion.  In contrast, analysis of the Brazilian case illuminates how states may also make race through policies of official inclusion.

At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).  Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

…The Brazilian census has used the categories branco (white), pardo (brown or mulatto), preto (black), and amarelo (yellow or Asian descent) since 1940 and added the indígena (indigenous) category in the 1991 census. According to its 2000 census, Brazil’s racial or color composition is 54% white, 39% mulatto, 6% black, 0.5% yellow, and 0.4% indigenous. The correspondence of Brazilian census terms with a color continuum is often contrasted with the U.S. use of ancestry for classifying its population (Nogueira 1985). In the United States, ancestry has been historically understood via the rule of hypodescent (Davis 1991). According to that rule’s logic, for any person of mixed ancestry that includes some ponderable African extraction, all other ancestries are generally obviated.

In Brazil, the mulatto and black census categories are considered by negro movement actors, as well as by many scholars, to comprise persons of some discernible degree of African ancestry, whom they view as members of a negro racial group (Guimara˜es 2001; Ribeiro 2007). Prominent negro politician, movement actor, and scholar Abdias do Nascimento clarifies this specific vision of ancestry, color, and race in Brazil:

Official Brazilian census data use two color categories for African descendants: preto (literally, “black”) for the dark-skinned and pardo (roughly, mulatto and mestizo) for others. It is now accepted convention to identify the black population as the sum of the preto and pardo categories, referred to as negro, afro-brasileira, or afro-descendente. In English, “black,” “African Brazilian,” and “people of African descent” refer to this same sum of the two groups. (Nascimento and Nascimento 2001, p. 108)

In contrast to the traditional color classification scheme, this new system approximates the U.S. understanding of racial group membership (Nobles 2000, p. 172; Guimarães 2001, p. 173). That is, the negro-versus-white dichotomous classification scheme in Brazil similarly joins together individuals with some discernible degree of African ancestry into one racial group for race-targeted policy administration, in essence representing an attempt to clarify ambiguous boundaries by “unmixing” the population.

Mulattos and blacks in Brazil, however, may not view themselves as common members of a negro racial group (Agier 1993; Marx 1998). Winant writes of nonwhites’ tendency in Brazil “not only to deny, but to avoid their own [black] racial identity” (Winant 2001, p. 246; emphasis in original). Hanchard, too, calls attention in his work to Brazilian nonwhites’ “negation of their [black] identity” (Hanchard 1994, p. 22). The term negro, then, may be more a classification attributed to nonwhites by movement actors than a real social group embraced by the general nonwhite population (Nobles 2000; Telles 2004)…

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The Race Construct and Public Opinion: Understanding Brazilian Beliefs about Racial Inequality and Their Determinants

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 108, Number 2 (September 2002)
pages 406–39

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Researchers hold that the racial democracy ideology fosters a rejection of discrimination-based explanations for racial inequality, thereby affecting antiracist mobilization. This study finds that Brazilians understand the discriminatory basis of inequality and that an attitudinal dimension associated with racial democracy strongly increases the likelihood of that understanding. Negative stereotyping produces a smaller opposite effect, and “race” is not a significant predictor. Finally, Brazilian and American racial attitudes differ considerably in explaining black disadvantage. These findings question perceptions of Brazilian racial attitudes and the efficacy of
dominant theories for their analysis, suggesting a context-driven approach to theorizing and for antidiscrimination strategizing.

…BRAZILIAN RACIAL ATTITUDES AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL DEMOCRACY
Historical Background

Gilberto Freyre (1946) is credited with popularizing the notion of racial democracy in Brazil in the 1930s. Confronted with scientific racism beliefs in the superiority of a white race and that “mixed” blood created degeneracy, Freyre proposed instead that “cross-breeding” produced hybrid vigor in humans, thereby enabling a bright future for the otherwise condemned “dark” Brazilian nation. He emphasized an uncommon flexibility on the part of Portuguese colonizers that made possible extensive miscegenation, and he claimed that “mixed” Brazilians (of three races: Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous) gave birth to a new metarace, constituting a new world in the tropics (Freyre 1959).

In this ideological construct, miscegenation became the motor behind Brazilian racial dynamics and racial democracy. Due to the extensive mixing, potential group boundaries blurred, rendering racism in the manner of U.S. segregation and polarization unintelligible. Unlike nations where ethnic and racial identities were stubbornly ascribed or asserted, in Brazil a universal national identity transcended particularist racial identification. What in other societies were considered incompatible social segments, and where group interests were national organizational principles, in Brazil they were united into Brazilianness. In sum, Brazilians viewed their society through “anti-racialism” lenses, as opposed to those of “racialism” in the United States (Guimarães 1999)…

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