Mixed Race Studies

Are multiracial adolescents at greater risk? Comparisons of rates, patterns, and correlates of substance use and violence between monoracial and multiracial adolescents.

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
Volume 76, Number 1 (January, 2006)
pages 86-97
DOI: 10.1037/0002-9432.76.1.86

Yoonsun Choi, Associate Professor of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Tracy W. Harachi, Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Washington

Mary Rogers Gillmore, Director and Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Richard F. Catalano, Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Director, Social Development Research Group
University of Washington

Rates and patterns of substance use and violent behaviors among multiracial adolescents were examined and compared with 3 monoracial groups, European, African, and Asian Americans. The relationships between ethnic identity and the subjective experience of racial discrimination, substance use, and violent behavior were also examined. The authors found multiracial adolescents reporting higher rates of problem behaviors. Several significant relationships between ethnic identity and racial discrimination were found with these problem behaviors.

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Under and Beyond Constraints: Resource Allocation to Young Children from Biracial Families

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 112, Number 4 (January 2007)
pages 1044–1094
ISSN: 0002-9602/2007/11204-0003
DOI: 10.1086/508793

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Brian Powell, Rudy Professor of Sociology
Indiana University

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99, the authors examine the extent to which biracial families differ from monoracial families in their transmission of resources to young children. In these analyses, the authors demonstrate the utility of distinguishing not only between white—biracial and nonwhite—biracial families and but also between even more refined measures of biracial families (e.g., white father/Asian mother). The authors find that, in most cases, biracial families provide comparable or greater economic and cultural resources to their children than do their monoracial counterparts, but offer fewer advantages in interactional/social resources. This overall pattern remains even after sociodemographic factors are taken into consideration. Exceptions to this pattern also are identified and explored. Implications for our understanding of racial stratification, interracial relations, and the role of both human agency and constraints on intergenerational transmission of resources are discussed.

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Biracial identity and social marginality

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal
Issue Volume 7, Number 4 (August, 1990)
Pages 319-337
Print ISSN: 0738-0151, Online ISSN: 1573-2797
DOI 10.1007/BF00757029

Philip M. Brown
Phoebe Hart House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

This comparative analysis of classic and recent literature explores the developmental and social implications of biracial identity in the U.S. Though specific attention was given to Black-White biracial persons, a broader analysis yielded some surprising insights into the nature and implications of the biracial personality and the accompanying differences in interpersonal styles and social relationships.

Despite the persistent cultural stereotypes depicting the United States as a cultural melting pot, rigid divisions between economic, class, racial and ethnic groups endure. Ours is a heavily stratified society with distinct boundaries and rigid barriers around socially defined groups, roles and status positions. These circumstances are difficult enough for Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other groups who do not fit neatly into mainstream White society (and are, therefore, socially marginal). However, what happens to those individuals whose racial and cultural heritage is rooted in both White and non-White groups? These individuals belong to both while simultaneously not fully belonging to either (e.g. Black and Caucasian). Dual racial identity likewise implies a dual ethnic and cultural focus as well. For the biracial person these two cultural connections are reflected in the type of life one leads; the nature of one’s achievements and failures; as well as other social attitudes and aspirations…

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A Clearer Picture of Multiracial Substance Use: Rates and Correlates of Alcohol and Tobacco Use in Multiracial Adolescents and Adults

Race and Social Problems
Volume 2, Number 1 (March 2010)
Published online: 2010-03-12
18 pages
Print ISSN: 1867-1748, Online ISSN: 1867-1756 (Online)
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-010-9023-1

George G. Chavez
Rutgers University

Diana T. Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
Rutgers University

Existing studies indicate that multiracial adolescents face greater substance use rates than monoracial adolescents. However, it is unclear whether the risk identified in adolescence persists into adulthood. The current study uses data from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey to analyze the alcohol and tobacco use of multiracial adolescents and adults compared to European American, African American, Native American, Asian/Pacific Islander American, and Latino American individuals. Results generally support the hypothesis that multiracial adolescents and adults face higher rates of substance use than African American and Asian/Pacific Islander American individuals, though this pattern of results was reversed in comparison with Native Americans and European Americans, and less consistent compared to Latino Americans. We further establish and discuss the correlates of drinking and smoking behavior for mixed-race individuals—comparing them to other racial groups. We review the limitations of our design and the implications for future research on multiracial substance use.

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Race Card: Corinne Bailey Rae and Zadie Smith Navigate Race and Art

Bitch Magazine
2010-01-21

Nadra Kareem

Works by two mixed-race Brits—musician Corinne Bailey Rae and writer Zadie Smith—have recently been profiled in the New York Times. Both women navigate their collective white and Caribbean ancestry by embracing hybridity instead of relegating themselves to one group. Their doing so challenges entrenched American notions of race that say that multiracial people must choose one ethnicity or another, not all.

The English-Jamaican Smith, who rose to fame upon the publication of her 2000 bestselling book White Teeth, regards Zora Neale Hurston and Barack Obama as her sister and brother in arms. In her new book of essays, Changing My Mind, Smith praises Hurston for making “‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.”…

…For singer Corinne Bailey Rae, whose mother is white and father is from the West Indian island of St. Kitts, being mixed-race had a direct impact on her music. Now, 30, Bailey Rae gravitated towards grunge in her teens…

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‘A Yellow-Ass Nigga’?: Hip Hop and the ‘Mixed-Race’ Experience

Intermix
Academic Papers
February 2010

Dr. Kevin Searle

Hip Hop has always engaged with the politics of ‘race’ and racism. From the Black Panther Party-inspired Marxism of acts such as The Coup and Immortal Technique, to the Nation of Islam-influenced stance of Public Enemy and Ice Cube, to the black feminism of Ursula Rucker and MeShell Ndgeocello, socially conscious emcees have approached the issues from a number of angles. In the context of this engagement with the politics of ‘race’ and racism, the topics of ‘mixed race’ and interracial relationships have often featured.

This article explores some of the lyrics about the ‘mixed-race’ experience in Hip Hop. It does not aim to provide an exhaustive list of songs which have engaged with issues of ‘mixed-race,’ but to serve as an introduction. The article is borne out of my longstanding interest in Hip Hop, and much of the research involved me consulting my ever-growing record collection, and songs which have come to my attention over the years.

Hip Hop provides the soundtrack to the lives of many ‘mixed-race’ youth and adults. The genre is perhaps more relevant to the ‘mixed-race’ experience than any other form of music. Charlie Owen (2001: 138) has noted how ‘mixed-race’ people constitute a relatively young population. This population has been at its largest, at a time when Hip Hop has taken its greatest share of record sales. However, as many emcees have pointed out, in rhymes which engage with such themes as the division of labour on slave-plantations in the American South, this does not in anyway mean that ‘mixed race’ people somehow constitute a ‘new racial group.’

The present article is structured into four main sections. The first engages with songs about the ‘mixed-race’ experience, the second looks at lyrics about interracial relationships, the third about colour/shade and the final part focuses on tracks about women and colour. It is perhaps worth noting that a number of artists, from different musical genres, have commented on all of these themes, prior to the dawn of Hip Hop in the 1970s.3 In his book On Racial Frontiers…, Gregory Stephens (1999: 170) argues that Bob Marley was, ‘a master of employing double-voiced lyrics,’ and Marley’s line: ‘I’m a rainbow too,’ on the track Sun is Shining constitutes a comment on the artists’ ‘biraciality.’ Nina Simone described a woman who was the product of interracial rape in her song Four Women. The blues artist, Big Bill Broonzy drew upon the African-American expression: If you’re white, you’re all right, If you’re brown stick around, if you’re black, get back’, in the song Black, Brown and White. And, socially conscious soul singer, Curtis Mayfield, admonished ‘high yellow girls’ in We the People who are Darker than Blue, additionally, as Mike Rugel (2007) shows, the theme of women and colour has also been present in a number of blues songs…

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Telling a Tall Tale, Family-Style—Author and Cultural Historian Scott Sandage Delivers 17th Annual Levine Lecture

Rider University News
Rider University, New Jersey
2008-10-16

For all his traditional academic rearing, Scott Sandage readily concedes that the revival of narrative has brought a new vitality to the discipline of history. “It was long considered unintellectual to tell stories,” explained Sandage, an associate professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But today, with the rise in history writers like David McCullough, it’s become a way to compete with them for people’s attention.”

Sandage, who presented the 17th Annual Levine Lecture at Rider University on October 16, arrived with a new twist on a story that had been often told on the old American frontier, but was unfamiliar to the capacity audience in the Sweigart Auditorium. In doing so, Sandage not only shone a new light on the social conceptions of race, but framed it in a surprisingly personal context.

A noted author and cultural historian, Sandage specializes in the 19th century United States and in the changing aspects of American identity. He spoke in support of his current book project, Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, which focuses on a little-known, mixed-race Native American reservation in southeast Nebraska and investigates how family folklore has shaped racial identity in the United States.

“This is a story of what race is and how Americans have determined what race a person belongs to based on what stories can be told about them,” Sandage began. He set the scene of the so-called Half-Breed Creek, a reservation established by the United States government in 1856 as a place for those who claimed partial, but not full, Native American lineage. “The thinking was that the smart, educated half of the half-breed would organize the Indians into making trouble” in the already tenuous location, situated in the only spot in the United States where slave, free and Indian territories met at the same time, he explained…

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Interview with Ngozi Onwurah

African Women in Cinema
African Literature Association Conference
April 1997
East Lansing, Michigan

Originally published in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film Video and Television. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ,  2000.

In another conversation, we talked about your identity as an African woman filmmaker based in London.  You stated that you wanted to describe some of the ways that you find that portrayal problematic, especially when it is imposed externally.

As a black woman filmmaker, I get invited to a lot of different things and sometimes they want me to wear different hats.  Sometimes I am a woman filmmaker and that’s the priority at that particular event.  Where it gets particularly muddy is when it has to do with being an African filmmaker.  Because the way that black America has appropriated the word African American, the context in which people refer to Africa gets very muddy.

As a filmmaker who works out of London, the problems that I have making films are completely different to a woman who, say, lives in Nigeria, who lives and works in Zambia, or Zaire, or Tanzania.  The problems that she has as a filmmaker are completely different to the problems that I have as a filmmaker, or the people who we make the films for are different.  So, in terms of who I am on a professional level, it gets very complicated.

It is less complicated on a personal level.  On a personal level, I know who I am; I know where I am from.  But in terms of talking about it, you cannot lump together a woman who lives in London, who gets funding from the BBC to make films, with someone who is living in Nigeria, where literally the budgets, the facilities, everything, would be completely different in terms of how she has to work.  So it gets complicated and sometimes I don’t think there is enough differential made between black people or people of African descent working outside of Africa and people of African descent working in Africa.  It is two different experiences.

In terms of how you bring your identity into your work, would you say that your work often centers around being of mixed race within the context of being British as well as Nigerian?

The fact that I have a white mother and a black father is essential to my identity.  Obviously, it gives me a unique perspective politically.  Politically I am black; emotionally I’m black.  But once you say that “unequivocally, I’m black,” there are specifics that come out of the fact that I have a white mother and a black father and that I lived half my childhood in Africa and half my childhood in an all-white neighborhood in Newcastle in England, that give me a specific viewpoint on everything I see.

On another level, there are issues around a kind of polarization, especially in America, but also in England, though nowhere near to the extent as in America: The two races are incredibly polarized in America, there’s black and there’s white and they seem to very rarely mix.  They seem to very rarely live in the same neighborhoods, and that’s not the case in England.

If I had to choose…if someone says to me, choose…if there was a war between black people and white people and someone says choose who you are going to shoot, obviously I’d go over to the black side, but I don’t particularly want my mother to be my enemy and I think that informs a lot of what I do.  Basically, the woman, the person who has loved me most in my life—who has loved me more than Malcolm X, who has loved me more than Mandela, has loved me more than any person on the face of this earth—is my mother; second my grandmother.  These are two white women.  These are the people who have formed me.  And yet I am completely removed from them culturally and politically, there is a whole world between us.  This is a strange place to be.  It informs everything you do basically.

In the context of African cinema, how do you situate yourself as a filmmaker in terms of being African, in terms of being black British?  You talk about different hats, I had not before necessarily associated you as an African woman filmmaker, I am familiar with you more as a black British filmmaker.  A lot of your work appears to address your experiences as a black British, as a mixed-race woman, where, as the director of Monday’s Girls, you are viewed as an African woman filmmaker.

It’s more complicated than that.

Could you talk about these complicated identities?

It is incredibly complicated.  All I can say is that my whole life has been a training ground to live this life.  Basically, since I came out of my mother’s womb it’s been a chameleon situation for me.  It’s much more complicated than saying I have a lot of hats I wear.  I have a lot of hats I have to wear but I wear them all simultaneously…

Read the entire interview here.

IC Documentarians: Incongruities Investigator – Nisma Zaman

Ithica College Quarterly
2006/4

Mbeti Hyess

Nisma Zaman ’92 solidified her passion for documentary filmmaking at IC, where she began work on a short 16mm film exploring mixed-race identities. Beyond Black and White went on to debut at the Asian American International Film Festival in 1995 and remains in distribution with Women Make Movies.

After graduating, Zaman began a four-year stint at the New York Center for Visual History, a nonprofit arts and culture documentary organization, where she worked on a variety of productions including the PBS series American Cinema. Simultaneously she moonlighted on the postproduction of Jennifer Fox’s acclaimed film series American Love Story, following the lives of an interracial family. In 1996 Zaman served as a production coordinator on Walk This Way, a program exploring children’s experiences of race and difference for USA Network’s “Erase the Hate” campaign. This provided a perfect segue into her ever-increasing role on Nickelodeon’s Little Bill, a 52-episode digital animation series based on Bill Cosby’s children’s books, for which she won an Emmy as a coordinating producer…

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Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Number 1 (2008)
pages 37-50
E-ISSN: 1536-0334 Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0004

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled-the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”21 wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned.

Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautifuloperates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.” And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences.

Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost. . . but not quite” the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity.

Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model. But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”

Incidentally, the mixed-race woman of African and European descent has long functioned as a recognizable signifier for illicit sexuality and racial ambiguity in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In early modern travel narratives dealing with the African coast and the Caribbean, European men often made careful observations about mixed race women. And the mulatta character appears with enough frequency in British novels to betray an ongoing British fascination with that figure. By critiquing her own stereotypical role as an eroticized/exoticized mixed-race woman, Onwurah also challenges the problematic iconography of the mulatta figure. Since the very process of identification is fraught, that is, “lodged in contingency,” the self-identification or self-representation of the mixed-race subject becomes a useful starting point for understanding and theorizing (white-black) mixedness. The Body Beautiful, a rare example of a film with a mixed-race woman behind and in front of the camera, literally speaks to these exigencies where representations of interraciality are concerned…

Read the entire article here.