Mixed Race Studies

Drawing Battle Lines

Sarah Lawrence College Magazine
Spring 2003: Who Are You

Catherine McKinley[-Davis] was one of only a few thousand African-American and biracial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her consciousness grew as she did. Her very identity—composed both of the whiteness and blackness mixed in her genes, and of the whiteness of her adoptive parents—began to tear her apart, and she eventually embarked on a quest to find her birth parents and move toward self-acceptance. In this excerpt from “The Book of Sarahs”, her new memoir, McKinley pinpoints a crucial moment: that time when her home became the field on which the combats of race, of identity, of being the outsider, began to be fought in earnest.

With my parents’ move to Vermont, it seemed as though a very final, pronounced line had been drawn between us. It was different from the boundaries I had drawn in the past, acting against the surety that they would still be standing right there no matter how firm I drew and redrew the battle lines.

In Attleboro, those lines were drawn like this: In our house, I built a haven for myself, constructing my bedroom the way I thought it would have been if I had grown up in a Black family. My shelves were filled with Black books, replacing the artifacts of a former self—the dolls from my grandmother’s travels, the complete Laura Ingalls Wilder boxed library, the collections of Scottish verse, the Peterson’s guides to wildflowers and the seashore. I stowed them in the crawl space under the eaves of the house and moved my mother’s copies of The Black Child: A Parent’s Guide, the SNCC freedom movement songbooks, Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman and The Slave, the row of James Baldwin paperbacks, and Stokely Carmichael and James Hamilton’s Black Power out from between the Rachel Carson and Thoreau and Henry Beston books, the trail guides, and my father’s engineering manuals in the den. I covered my walls with clippings from Essence and Ebony and turned up the dial on the “civil rights station” (read: Black radio, aired only on late night and Sunday slots, picked up from the Boston airways) to let everyone know who was living there. And I put a ban on my room. My father, who was my ally, if only for his silence and quiet amusement at my lobbies against the family, was the only one allowed in, and only so that he could tend the African violets he grew on shelves he built into my bedroom windows. I liked the flowers; they were African, despite how suspicious they seemed to me, sitting in the living room of every old white lady in town…

Read the entire article here.

Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities (Book Review)

Sites: a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies
University of Otago, New Zealand
Volume 5, Number 2 (2008)
pages 180-182

Kate Bagnall

Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities, Manying Ip, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2008, 255pp. ISBN 978-1-86940-399-7

Manying Ip makes it clear from the outset that Being Māori-Chinese: Mixed Identities is a very personal book. It begins with an explanation of her own inspiration for the project – the emergence of tantalising snippets about Māori-Chinese families that kept popping up in her wider research on New Zealand Chinese – and her own process of locating subjects and conducting interviews. Ip tells of being warned by a ‘well-meaning elder’ from Te Wānangao-Raukawa about the difficulties she would encounter in her project, due to the sensitivity of the subject matter and the reticence that Māori-Chinese as a group would have towards sharing in-depth information with her. ‘Are you sure you wish to pursue this study on Māori-Chinese relations? I don’t think people will tell you much’, he said.

The publication of Being Māori-Chinese is, then, an acknowledgement of Ip’s reputation as a researcher and community advocate. It is only through mutual trust that she has been given access to the personal stories of the seven Māori-Chinese families whose experiences make up the heart of the book.  Each chapter focuses on a particular family and presents an intimate journey into the family culture and individual identities of family members. The book is further testament to the courage and generosity of her subjects, who shared memories and thoughts on many aspects of their lives. Their generosity is particularly moving because, as Ip states, ‘those memories involve a struggle against social discrimination and, in many cases, family disapproval’…

…Family stories, such as those told in Being Māori-Chinese, are at the core of the growing body of Australasian scholarship that explores mixed race lives, families and communities. Such stories counter the assumptions of previous generations that interracial encounters were either unthinkable due to race prejudice or occurred under unsavoury conditions that were detrimental to one or both parties. Ip is to be commended for encouraging the Māori-Chinese families included in the book to share their experiences, and also for carefully structuring each chapter so that her voice takes a secondary place to those of family members themselves. As she notes in her Introduction, the book explores lives that ‘have been largely overlooked in the formal historical and sociological discourse of New Zealand’. This book is an important step in inserting Māori-Chinese into the story of New Zealand’s past, present and future…

Read the entire review here.

Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

Natural History Magazine
December 1994
pp. 32–35

Jonathan Marks, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

While reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times one morning last February, my attention was drawn by an editorial inconsistency. The article I was reading was written by attorney Lani Guinier (Guinier, you may remember, had been President Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division at the Department of Justice in 1993. Her name was hastily withdrawn amid a blast of criticism over her views on political representation of minorities.) What had distracted me from the main point of the story was a photo caption that described Guinier as being “half-black.” In the text of the article, Guinier had described herself simply as “black”

How can a person be black and half black at the same time? In algebraic terms, this would seem to describe a situation where x = 1/2 x, to which the only solution is x = 0.

The inconsistency in the Times was trivial, but revealing. It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories—namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity. When Guinier is described as “half-black,” that is a statement of biological ancestry, for one of her two parents is black. And when Guinier describes herself as black, she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both.

Race—as the term is commonly used—is inherited, although not in a strictly biological fashion. It is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different front the quantifiable heredity of biology. But the incompatibility of the two notions of race is sometimes starkly evident—as when the state decides that racial differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category. The resulting formula stated that anyone with one-eighth or more black ancestry was a “negro.” (A similar formula, defining Jews, was promulgated by the Germans in the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.).

Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white. Here, race and biology are demonstrably at odds. And the problem is not semantic but conceptual, for race is presented as a category of nature…

…Unlike graduated biological distinctions, culturally constructed categories are ultrasharp. One can be French or German, but not both; Tutsi or Hutu, but not both; Jew or Catholic, but nor both; Bosnian Muslim or Serb, but not both; black or white, but not both. Traditionally, people of “mixed race” have been obliged to choose one and thereby identity themselves unambiguously to census takers and administrative bookkeepers—a practice that is now being widely called into question…

Read the entire article here.

Family Identity: Black-White Interracial Family Health Experience

Journal of Family Nursing
(2006)
Vol. 12, No. 1
Pages 22-37
DOI: 10.1177/1074840705285213

Marcia Marie Byrd, PhD, RN
College of St. Catherine

Ann Williams Garwick, PhD, RN, LP, LMFT, FAAN
University of Minnesota

The purpose of this interpretive descriptive study was to describe how eight Black-White couples with school-aged children constructed their interracial family identity through developmental transitions and interpreted race to their children. Within and across-case data analytic strategies were used to identify commonalities and variations in how Black men and White women in couple relationships formed their family identities over time. Coming together was the core theme described by the Black-White couples as they negotiated the process of forming a family identity. Four major tasks in the construction of interracial family identity emerged: (a) understanding and resolving family of origin chaos and turmoil, (b) transcending Black-White racial history, (c) articulating the interracial family’s racial standpoint, and (d) explaining race to biracial children across the developmental stages. The findings guide family nurses in promoting family identity formation as a component of family health within the nurse-family partnership with Black-White mixed-race families.

Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

QBR The Black Book Review
February/March 1996

Lise Funderburg

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler
by Kathryn Talalay
Oxford University Press (317 pp.)
Hardcover ISBN 0-19-509608-8

As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

…Talalay places Philippa’s racial identity at the center of this biography and rightfully so. Here was a woman whose parents placed tremendous expectations on her to transcend race, even as her music career was constantly limited by it. Philippa had few opportunities to make real friends among any racial group and never developed a community of support beyond her immediate family, which had its own tensions and estrangements. Her father, who adored her, was frequently away on reporting trips. As Philippa grew older, she began to see his politics and his color as embarrassments. When he ventured to spend five pages of a 150-word manuscript, The Negro in America, on his daughter, she wrote to her mother from Europe: “Get me OUT of that book. Everyone here thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it. Anyone who had any paternal sentiments would want a child to escape suffering.” Her mother, whom the author describes as “forever Machiavellian,” collaborated on Philippa’s many acts of racial passing. As Talalay found in her research into George Schuyler’s papers, to this day the manuscript has not one, but three blank pieces of paper taped over each of the five pages concerning Philippa…

Read the entire book review here.

Health and Behavior Risks of Adolescents with Mixed-Race Identity

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 93, Number 11 (November 2003)
Pages 1865-1870

J. Richard Udry, PhD, Kenan Professor of Maternal and Child Health and Sociology
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Rose Maria Li, PhD
Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Janet Hendrickson-Smith, MA
Analytical Sciences, Inc.

Objectives. This study compared the health and risk status of adolescents who identify with 1 race with those identifying with more than 1 race.

Methods. Data are derived from self-reports of race, using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which provides a large representative national sample of adolescents in grades 7 through 12. Respondents could report more than 1 race.

Results. Mixed-race adolescents showed higher risk when compared with single-race adolescents on general health questions, school experience, smoking and drinking, and other risk variables.

Conclusions. Adolescents who self-identify as more than 1 race are at higher health and behavior risks. The findings are compatible with interpreting the elevated risk of mixed race as associated with stress.

Read the entire article here.

Ethnic Identity Among Mixed-Heritage People In Hawaii

Symbolic Interaction
Volume 14, Number 3 (Fall 1991)
Pages 261–277
DOI 10.1525/si.1991.14.3.261

Cookie White Stephan, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
New Mexico State University

In this study, intensive interviews were used to explore the identity of a sample of mixed-heritage Hawaiian college students from a variety of ethnic groups. The great majority of respondents listed at least one multiple-heritage identity (e.g., Chinese-Japanese). While cultural exposure and ethnic identity were strongly associated, cultural exposure is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for ethnic identity to occur. Differences in perceptions of ethnic identity between respondents with stable and situtionally changing identities were discussed. The conceptions of identity proposed by processual and structural symbolic interactionists both received some support in these data.

Read or purchase the article here.

The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance”

Nineteenth-Century Literature
Volume 56, Number 4 (March 2002)
Pages 495–517
DOI 10.1525/ncl.2002.56.4.495

Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English
John Carroll University

In this essay I construct a literary genealogy that situates William Dean Howells in the middle of a call-and-response literary conversation with popular women writers about race, gender, and genre. Since Howells correlated racial questions with realism, his only novel that treats intermarriage, An Imperative Duty (1891), offered Howells an opportunity to deploy his presumably objective, scientific, realist knowledge about race in order to challenge women’s romantic miscegenation plots found in Margret Holmes Bates’s The Chamber over the Gate (1886) and Alice Morris Buckner’s Towards the Gulf (1887), two novels that he had recently read and reviewed. Yet the tragic mulatta stereotype, a stock figure of romanticism and sentimentality that was resistant to scientific discourse, ruptures Howells’s goal of representing the figure according to the tenets of realism. In Iola Leroy (1892), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper cunningly recasts the tragic mulatta stereotype both to critique Howells’s project and to represent the potential of black womanhood. Knowledge of Bates and Buckner can change critical conversation about the influence of women writers on Howells, the understanding of the role of the racialized woman in his fiction, and his conception of the link between the romantic mulatta and realist representation. Likewise, Harper takes issue with Howells’s supposed ironic sophistication about race, and in Iola Leroy she rewrites many of his views in order to show the ways that miscegenation is at once a novelistic and a national problem.

Multiracial Groups and Educational Inequality: A Rainbow or a Divide?

Social Problems
Volume 56, Number 3 (August 2009)
Pages 425–446
DOI 10.1525/sp.2009.56.3.425

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

How do multiracial groups “fit” into the system of racial oppression and privilege in the United States? Are the outcomes of multiracial individuals explained by the Latin Americanization hypothesis (Bonilla-Silva 2002), or a hardening racial divide between blacks and all other racial groups (Gans 1999; Yancey 2006)? Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I address these questions and show that the educational outcomes of multiracial groups and individuals are not consistently explained by measures of appearance, as suggested by these theories. Although the educational outcomes of Latinos and single-race groups are significantly associated with skin color and the racial perceptions of observers, multiracial young adults’ high school and college educational outcomes are not consistently related to either measure of appearance. Parental education and family income are the most important predictors of educational outcomes for multiracial respondents across different types of outcomes. The implications of these findings for racial inequality and research on multiracial groups are discussed.

One of the key debates about the future of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States is the question of how multiracial Americans will fit into the United States’ system of racial oppression and privilege. These groups may be a bellwether we can use to discern how racial inequality is changing, since they straddle racial boundaries and therefore are often the first to experience changes in those boundaries and systems of racialized advantage. For example, Eduardo Bonilla Silva (2002; Bonilla Silva and Embrick 2006) has argued that the United States is moving towards a three-tier racial stratification system that is increasingly similar to Latin American systems of racial stratification based on skin tone, and thus biracial groups that are lighter skinned will have greater privilege than those that are darker skinned. George Yancey (2006) and Herbert Gans (1999), in a distinct but related argument, contend that we are moving away from a binary system that used a narrow and exclusive definition of “whiteness” to disadvantage anyone perceived as “not white” towards an evolving binary system that systematically disadvantages anyone seen as “black” and advantages anyone seen as “not black” (even those who are not considered “white”). Under this shifting system, biracial individuals perceived as black will experience oppression, while the rest of the multiracial groups will experience positive outcomes that become more similar to whites over time…

Read or purchase the article here.

Who And What You Are

Contexts
Fall 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
Pages 64–65
DOI 10.1525/ctx.2009.8.4.64

Sangyoub Park, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washburn University

Barack Obama‘s presidency and changes in how the U.S. Census tracks race underline the importance of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States. Changes in our racial landscape, including increases in interracial marriage and childbearing, pose intriguing questions about how future generations will respond to the growth of multiracial identities.