Mixed Race Studies

The Interpretation of Multiracial Status and Its Relation to Social Engagementand Psychological Well-Being

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number1, (March 2009)
pages 35-49
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01586.x

Kevin R. Binning
Stanford University

Miguel M. Unzueta
University of California, Los Angeles

Yuen J. Huo
University of California, Los Angeles

Ludwin E. Molina
University of Kansas

This research examines how multiracial individuals chose to identify themselves with respect to their racial identity and how this choice relates to their self-reported psychological well-being (e.g., self-esteem, positive affect) and level of social engagement (e.g., citizenship behaviors, group alienation). High school students who belong to multiple racial/ethnic groups (N = 182) were asked to indicate the group with which they primarily identify. Participants were then classified as identifying with a low-status group (i.e., Black or Latino), a high-status group (i.e., Asian or White), or multiple groups (e.g., Black and White, etc.). Results showed that, compared with multiracial individuals who identified primarily with a low- or high-status group, those who identified with multiple groups tended to report either equal or higher psychological well-being and social engagement.  Potential explanations and implications for understanding multiracial identity are discussed.

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Is Valuing Equality Enough? Equality Values, Allophilia, and Social Policy Support for Multiracial Individuals

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009)
pages 151-163
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01592.x

Todd L. Pittinsky, Professor of Technology and Society
State University of New York, Stony Brook

R. Matthew Montoya, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

We conducted a field study to investigate positive intergroup attitudes (i.e., allophilia) and equality values as potential antecedents of social policy support for multiracial individuals. Participants (N = 97) reported their social policy support for multiracial individuals in two ways—support for the recognition of “multiracial” as a distinct racial category (recognition) and support for multiracial individuals’ access to programs and policies (assistance). Results revealed that allophilia motivated those who held equality beliefs to support social policies for multiracial individuals. Implications of these findings for theories of positive intergroup relations, as well as the processes that may underlie progress for multiracial individuals, are discussed.

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Educational Policy, Politics, and Mixed Heritage Students in the United States

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009)
pages 165-183
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01593.x

Kristen A. Renn, Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

This article describes local, state, and federal policies related to collecting, aggregating, and reporting data on student race and ethnicity in U.S. K-12 and postsecondary education. It traces data policy from the 1997 decision by the Office of Management and Budget to change from single-race reporting to a format that permits respondents to choose more than one race, to the October 2007 issuance of final guidance from the Department of Education. Taking a K-20 perspective, I consider how policies for data collection and reporting may affect educational and developmental outcomes for students, as well as local, state, and national education policy environments.

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MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons

Eclectica Magazine
July/August 2001

Tim Hashaw

Introduction

They settled in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the Engllish Crown and American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. They lived free in the South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.  Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the developing saga of America’s largest mixed community. Now finally, though stridently denied by some descendants and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia are beginning to emerge from the dim pages of the past to take their rightful places of honor in American history.

One misconception over Melungeon origins comes from confusion over the status of these African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to this mixed community.  Modern scholars mistakenly assume that the African heritage of Melungeons derives from the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves in the years 1780 to 1820.

Wrong on two counts. In fact:

1. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619.

2. Not one single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African ancestors of Melungia were freeborn for more than three hundred years.

This bears repeating.

Melungeons are not the offspring of white southern plantation owners and helpless black slaves. Most of the African ancestors of Melungeons were never chattel slaves. They were frequently black men freed from indentured servitude just like many white servants of the 17th century. Less often, African ancestors of the Melungeons either purchased their freedom from slavery or were freed upon the deaths of their masters.

The black patriarchs of the Melungeons were commonly free African-American men who married white women in Virginia and other southern colonies, often before 1700.  Paul Heinegg in his revealing book, Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, provides strong evidence that less than one percent of all free Africans were born of white slave-owners.

Understanding the status of the African-American ancestors of Melungeons and the era, in which they came to America, is critical to understanding their history and the origin of the name “Melungeon”….

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What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty? An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom

Television & New Media
Volume 10, Number 6 (November 2009)
pages 521-535
DOI: 10.1177/1527476409340906

Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Research, Measurement & Statistics
Georgia State University, Atlanta

This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse is the notion of a “color-blind society” (meaning that we no longer see color or that the color of one’s skin will not determine his or her life chances).  This idea has been has been recently redefined by the media as “postracial” (meaning that we have moved beyond race and that race no longer structures our thinking or our actions). Either discourse silences talk of racial privilege and disadvantage.  As a discursive racial project, the Ugly Betty text helps reify notions of race and difference.

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People of God, Children of Ham: Making black(s) Jews

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
Volume 8, Issue 2 (July 2009)
pages 237 – 254
DOI: 10.1080/14725880902949551

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Davis

Taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century have shaped the discourse surrounding the racial identity and supposed roots of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Through their interactions with just a few colonial actors, some of whom were Christian missionaries, others who were Jewish Zionists, a small group of young Falashas developed an elite status in Ethiopia as the true lost Jews in Africa. While most historians specializing in the history of Ethiopia do not believe the Beta Israel are a “lost tribe” of the ancient Israelites, Ethiopian immigrants have altered their self-conceptions over the past hundred years and come to see themselves as both black and Jewish.  This essay offers an alternative reading of the Beta Israel narrative, and asserts that the transformation of their social identities are embedded in a political process of racialization tied to racial ideology, and both secular and religious institutions and the State. In the process of incorporation into western society, their social identities have been transmogrified from religious others in Ethiopia to co-religionists yet racial others in Israel.

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Dimensions of Self-Identification among Multiracial and Multiethnic Respondents in Survey Interviews

Research supported in part by contract HHS 0009430486 from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Publication Date: 1997-12
ISSN: ISSN-0193-841X

Timothy P. Johnson
University of Illinois at Chicago

Jared B. Jobe
National Center for Health Statistics

Diane O’Rourke
University of Illinois at Urbana

Seymour Sudman
University of Illinois at Urbana

Richard Warnecke
University of Illinois at Chicago

Noel Chavez
University of Illinois at Chicago

Gloria Chapa-Resendez
University of Illinois at Chicago

Patricia Golden
National Center for Health Statistics

This paper reports findings from a laboratory study designed to investigate self identification among 69 multiracial and multiethnic women. Respondent reactions to two current questionnaire formats for collecting racial information, and a third version that includes a “multiracial” response option, were examined. Findings suggest that respondent’s racial identification varies considerably across question formats and that persons of mixed heritage prefer a racial identification question that provides them, at a minimum, with the opportunity to acknowledge their multi-cultural background. In addition, many respondents also expressed the desire to identify each of the specific groups that constitute their racial/ethnic background.

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Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 30, Issue 5 (September-October 2007)
Pages 391-403
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2007.07.003

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This qualitative analysis of interviews with women of Thai and non-Thai parentage throws into question the current celebration of Eur/asianness and multiraciality.  The study describes multiracialisation as an ambivalent and differential process of categorisation which mobilises essentialist ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘breeding’.  A far cry from historical notions of ‘mixed-race degeneracy’, interviewees emerged from this process the ‘best of both worlds’. However, beside the ‘good mix’ there ran the spectre of the ‘bad mix’, and some had more access to celebratory identities than others. Celebratory notions of Eur/asian femininity were further qualified by the competing discourse of the ‘Thai prostitute’.  The precariousness with which interviewees could access normative ideals of desirability was especially visible in narratives of masculinity, non-white parentage, gender variance and childhood.  The article ends by advocating, in the place of a power-evasive celebration, challenges to the multiple overlapping power relations which underlie all acts of evaluation.

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Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
pages 67-90

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Planning
University Toronto

This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’.  The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.

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Metisse Narratives

Soundings: A journal of politics and culture
Issue 5, Spring 1997

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Jayne Ifekwunigwe discusses the testimonies of women of ‘mixed race’ parentage in the English-African diaspora.

Rather than representing a portrait of metisse (‘mixed race’) girls as unruly, at age six Sandra and Aneya have exposed the major problematic of ‘race’.  Their discussion highlights the cultural paradoxes of ‘race’ and colour which multiple generations of women, men and children in England silently negotiate in their everyday lives.  These individuals descend from lineages which cut across so-called different ‘black and white’ ‘races’, ethnicities, cultures, and classes. Their roots are both endogenous and exogenous.

In varied cultural and historical contexts, countless terms are employed to name such individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), metissage which more appropriately describe generations of individuals who by virtue of birth and lineage do not fit neatly into preordained sociological and anthropological categories.  In England, at the moment, there are a multitude of terms in circulation which describe individuals who straddle racial borders.  More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being metis (se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘black’/’white’ racial categories and the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and over-lapping historical traditions.  The lack of consensus as to which term to use, as well as the limitations of this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to metis(se) and metissage…

…Gettin’ into me late teens, I didn’t think much about meself because of all these conflicts that were startin’ to come up from the past. Also new ones that were comin’ in from other communities – black communities – that were really shockin’ me. I mean there were times when I wouldn’t show me legs. I’d go through the summer wearing tights and socks. Cause I thought they were too light and too white-lookin’. There was a lot of pressure. I remember one day I was leanin’ up somewhere and this guy said to me, ‘Boy, aren’t your legs white.’ I just looked in horror, and felt really sick and wanted to just run away. I was thinkin’, God why didn’t you make me a bit darker? Why did you make me so light? It took me years to reconcile that…

Read the entire article here.