Mixed Race Studies

The Risks of Multiracial Identification

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2006-11-10

Naomi Schaefer Riley

The comment period has closed on proposed new guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education on how colleges should ask students about race. No longer, the guidelines say, should applicants simply be given the choice of black, white, Asian, American Indian (or Alaska Native), or native Hawaiian (or other Pacific Islander). Now they should be allowed to check off more than one box, as well as note whether they identify as Hispanic. Eugene L. Anderson, an associate director of the American Council on Education, told Diverse, a higher-education magazine, that he expected colleges would be pleased with the new guidelines: “They make sense; they respect peoples’ individual notion of racial identity, which is important.”

No doubt colleges also appreciate the department’s instructions for practical reasons. The proliferation of multiracial options on a variety of forms, including college applications, reflects the new demographic reality in America. On the 2000 census, nearly seven million Americans checked off two or more racial boxes. And a study last year by researchers at Cornell University found that the number of interracial marriages involving white people, black people, or Hispanics each year in the United States has jumped tenfold since the 1960s.

In a sense, these developments represent the realization of the dream of a melting pot. In 1963 Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, penned a controversial essay called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” expressing despair about the chances for real racial integration in this country. That could not occur, he wrote, “unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.”…

…But even those mixed-race groups cannot satisfy some students. One told the Crimson that her acquaintances at Harvard’s Hapa group focused too much on East Asian identities, instead of South Asian ones. They went out, she complained, for dim sum, “which I enjoy, but don’t identify with culturally.” But she didn’t feel welcome in the regular South Asian group, either, because in a theatrical performance the group’s leaders cast her in the role of a white person.

The level of specificity that seems to be required for many young men and women to feel comfortable today is bordering on the absurd. Ultimately it’s sad. Advocates of diversity on college campuses insist that they are not just assembling faces of different colors for aesthetic purposes; they are trying to offer students a model of how to live in a multiracial, multiethnic society. But students do not seem to be learning to be more tolerant of people unlike them. They are demanding that they be surrounded and sheltered by people who are exactly like them.

Colleges have long experienced what sociologists refer to as the “lunch-table problem.” That tendency toward racial self-segregation may find its origins in students’ upbringings, but it is surely furthered by campus multiculturalists. Over the years, I have had many students I’ve interviewed tell me that they were never encouraged to identify themselves by their race so much as when they set foot on a college campus. Both administrators and student-run organizations often pressured them to engage in activities that put them in a particular racial box. So it’s not surprising that students now want activities that conform to every contour of their ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Familial Ethnic Socialization Among Adolescents of Latino and European Descent: Do Latina Mothers Exert the Most Influence?

Journal of Family Issues
Volume 27, Number 2 (February 2006)
Pages 184-207
DOI: 10.1177/0192513X05279987

Andrea G. González
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Associate Professor, School of Social and Family Dynamics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University

Mayra Y. Bámaca-Colbert, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
Pennsylvania State University

This article examines gender and family composition differences in 98 biethnic adolescents’ reports of familial ethnic socialization and ethnic identity. Using analysis of variance, four groups (i.e., adolescent males with Latina mothers and European American fathers, adolescent females with Latina mothers and European American fathers, adolescent males with European American mothers and Latino fathers, and adolescent females with European American mothers and Latino fathers) are compared on the above measures. Results indicate that sons of Latina mothers reported the highest levels of familial ethnic socialization. No significant differences emerge between groups on a measure of ethnic identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Opinion: Are you mixed up?

Malayasian Insider
2010-07-08

Praba Ganesan

JULY 8 — Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is the poster child for Malaysians with mixed parentage. Not that he epitomises multiculturalism, the misguided doctor is far from that.

He does however mirror the difficulties and challenges anyone of that situation experiences in a Malaysia averse to real diversity.

Don’t mention your mixed heritage, overemphasise your commitment to the heritage you do associate with and disassociate with all your might any connection to the heritage you are trying to lose. And marry further away from the ashamed heritage.

Not everyone behaves like that, but the themes remain.

I’m all Tamil. But my nephew and niece are not. One is a quarter Chinese and the other is half Nordic-Irish-English-and a degree of uncertainty. So my nephew goes on as a constitutional Indian though everyone thinks him Malay in school, and my niece well she goes all over the house wrecking things — in her two-year-old shoes. But her Malaysian birth certificate states her ethnicity as Australian, a nationality becomes her ethnicity according to the good people at the National Registration Department.

So what are they, and how should they grow up in Malaysia?

In Malaysia there are no halves, just wholes. This might be illogical to people outside Malaysia or anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of genealogy, but in our tropical paradise when your parents are of different ethnicities (or even mixes) you can only be of an ethnicity. Worse if one of the parents is Muslim then the other parent’s identity, past and history has to evaporate…

Read the entire article here.

Part Asian, Not Hapa

Open Salon
Thoughts from a Third Culture: on being mixed in America
2010-07-27

Mia Nakaji Monnier

My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There’s a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

From the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole” (“half white”), the word “hapa” has come to be a label that many multiracial people with some Asian heritage incorporate into their identities, whether they wear it with pride or with ambivalence.

I don’t wear it at all.

It’s not that I think “hapa” is an offensive word, though my parents took issue with it as my brothers and I were growing up, their reason being that it means, literally, “half.” “Haafu,” the Japanese equivalent has the same literal meaning and I’ve even heard people skip over both these words entirely, going straight to “half.” As in, “You look a little Japanese. Are you half?” or “Why do you work at the Japanese American National Museum? OH, are you half?!”…

Read the entire essay here.

A Biracial Identity or a New Race? The Historical Limitations and Political Implications of a Biracial Identity

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society
Volume 3, Number 4 (Fall 2001)
pages 83-112

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Over the past fifteen years in the United States, there has emerged a concerted push to racially reclassify persons with one Black and one white parent as biracial.  Advocates of racial reclassification are calling for the establishment of a biracial identity that is both socially and officially recognized.  They are joined by a cohort of scholars, many of whom are themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for persons of mixed parentage than a Black one. Social scientist have dominated these discussions, concerned primarily with the experiences and identity of people of mixed parentage. They maintain that a biracial identity would better recognized the complete racial background of persons of mixed parentage and offer a more mentally healthy racial identity than a Black racial identity.  Moreover, the exalt a biracial identity as a positive step in moving society beyond issues of race and towards the realization of a color-blind society.

Focusing on the scholarship advocating a biracial identity for people with one Black and one white parent, I argue that such an identity has no historical basis, and would have a negative political impact on African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Christian]

The Western Journal of Black Studies
Volume 27, Number 4 (2003)
pages 279-280

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

This book comes out the school of thought that advocates for the “multiracial identity” classification in the US. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order offers a postmodern analysis of “race” and issues a call for the acknowledgement of what can be deemed the multifaceted racialized heritages of many Black peoples located in the African Diaspora. In this sense the book offers little other than what is largely akeady known. Indeed many peoples of African descent do have claim to other heritages. For example it is broadly accepted now that at least two-thirds of African Americans have some Native American and European heritage. However, it is erroneous to run away with this idea as if it is the sole criteria for establishing a “new racial order” based on what is in fact unlikely to have any impact on white supremacy and its continued dominance over the socially constructed “peoples of color.”…

Read or purchase the book review here.

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 30, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 1167-1181

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães
Department of Sociology, University of Sao Paulo

In his recent comparative study G. Reginald Daniel looks at the convergence in race relations patterns between Brazil and the US with a reasonable amount of historical information extracted from an extensive literature, yet adds almost no empirical research. His narrative takes a descriptive, reading-notes-like mode as he passes over both countries’ history from colonial times to the present, following too closely different authors’ arguments. His metanarrative, the one that ties together his diverse sources, is a Gramscian–Marxist theory of hegemony and race formation borrowed mainly from Omi and Winant (1986), and Hanchard (1994)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Is there ‘a’ mixed race group in Britain? The diversity of multiracial identification and experience

Critical Social Policy
Volume 30, Number 3 (August 2010)
pages 337-358
DOI: 10.1177/0261018310367672

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

In contemporary British society, references to ‘mixed race’ people and to various forms of mixing abound. But to what extent can we say that there is ‘a’ mixed race group in Britain today? If such a group exists, what commonalities underlie the experience of being mixed? In addressing this question, I draw on a study of the racial identifications of different types of mixed young people in Britain. I find that the meanings and significance of race and mixedness in these young people’s lives can vary considerably both across and within specific mixed groups. In conclusion, I argue that while there is evidence of a growing consciousness and interest in being mixed, we cannot (yet) speak of a coherent mixed group or experience in Britain.

Read or purchase the article here.

Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the “Tragic Mulatta” Tradition

African American Review
Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998)
pages 673-689

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

I am writing the story of my life as a statue… I wish they had carved me from the onyx of Elizabeth Catlett.  Or molded me from the dark clay of Augusta Savage.  Or cut me from mahogany or cast me in bronze.  I wish I were dark plaster like Meta Warrick Fuller’s Talking Skull.  But I appear more as Edmonia Lewis’s Hagar—wringing her hands in the wilderness—white marble figure of no homeland—her striations caught within.  (Cliff, Land 85)

In “The Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,” Michelle Cliff invokes past stereotypes of the mulatto and the sculptors who remolded them. From Edmonia Lewis (1844-1909)—the half-black, half-Chippewasculpor who gained international fame with the help of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child—to Augusta Savage (1892-1962)—the Harlem Renaissance artists who sculpted busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey—black artists have been reconstructing images of African Americans.  The speaker of “The Laughing Mulatto” identifies with racial “betweeenness,” yet she also subverts racist conventions that privilege the whiteness within biracial African Americans. She wishes that her skin were darker: onyx, mahogany, or bronze, not white marble (Cliff, Land 85).  Her wish implicitly compares race to workable materials, as if racial identity were something that could be chiseled and molded by an artist…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Self-Categorization in Adolescence: Multiracial Development and Social Pathways

Child Development
Volume 77, Number 5, September/October 2006
Pages 1298–1308
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00935.x

Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

J. Scott Brown, Associate Professor of Gerontology, Scripps Research Fellow
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Glen H. Elder, Jr.
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research on multiracial individuals is often cross-sectional, obscuring the fluid nature of multiracial selfcategorization across time. Pathways of racial self-identification are developed from a nationally representative sample of adolescents aged 14 – 18, measured again 5 years later. A significant proportion of multiracial adolescents change racial self-identification across time. Youth who ever report being multiracial are 4 times as likely to switch self-identification as to report consistent multiracial identities. Across this time, more multiracial adolescents either add a racial category (diversify) or subtract one (consolidate) than maintain consistent multiracial self-categorization. Exploratory multinomial analyses show few differences between these pathways on select psychological and social characteristics. Results lend quantitative support to qualitative studies  indicating the fluidity of racial self-categorization.

Read the entire article here.