Mixed Race Studies

PSY 519B: Social Psychology of Biracial Identity

Antioch University, Los Angeles

This workshop explores the idea of race as a social construction and its psychological impact on individuals, particularly as it relates to the concept of a biracial or multiracial identity in the U.S. Among other issues, we will investigate how a bi- or multi-racial identity develops for individuals and how it evolves historically. Students must have access to The AULA email system as some online postings and readings are required.

For more information, click here.

Conversations with Artists… Between Races

In the Mix: Conversations with Artists… Between Races
Public Radio International
2009-01-31

Dmae Roberts, Host

Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, poet Robert Krimi, musican Phillip Blanchett and others talk about what it means to be of Mixed Race.

Mixed Race is the fastest growing minority in America. The arts have opened up new ideas through colorblind casting, fusion in music, the visual arts and literature. Just as each racial/ethnic group influences and changes artistic styles and movements, Mixed Race artists help to create fusion and bridges cultural and traditional differences.

Hosted and produced by Dmae Roberts, “In the Mix: Conversations with Artists… Between Races” is a personal exploration of Mixed Race. This hour-long documentary explores how artists and performers of Mixed Race deal with issues of identity, history and perspective, and how their art reflects these issues in different ways.

The idea that people can be of many races and also claim any of them, that our President is mixed race and African-American, is a stumbling block to many people’s understanding of what it means to be a person of color.

Through the voices of artists who have dedicated their lives to building bridges and bringing to light interracial issues and themes, Roberts takes listeners on a journey to understanding what it means to be of Mixed Race…

Download the interview here (00:59:00, 27MB).

Mixed Race Season

BBC Press Office
BBC Two Summer & Autumn 2011
Diverse, stimulating and rewarding television on BBC Two
2011-06-22

Mixed-race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn in a collection of revealing new programmes. With a mix of drama and documentaries, the season provides a window into the varied lives of mixed-race people living in the UK and helps us understand what the increase in mixed-race people means for the way we live in Britain today.

Mixed Britannia

George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community in a new three-part series uncovering a tale of illicit love, tragedy and triumph.

With previously unseen material and unheard testimony, charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George examines the social factors that have influenced the shape of today’s mixed-race Britain. He discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making it one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK…

…Mixed Race

This documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing. From the strict application of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the USA and South Africa to the emergence of Mestizo cultures in the colonies of South America, the programme examines the complex history of interracial relationships around the world…

For more information, click here.

Creating Frames and Crossing Borders: An Autobiographical Exploration of Race and Identity

University of New Brunswick
July 1998
131+ pages

Diane Ho-Fatt

This study is an exploration of the cultural constructions of race using theoretical perspectives of postmodernism through the methodology of autobiography. I explore the constructions of race and identity in my own life by deconstructing the stories of mixed-race that have been applied to me and posing an alternative to the construction of identity. The discourse of race, I argue, fits a modernist notion of self and identity which reduces and frames identity in terms of race. I propose a postmodern definition of identity which provokes difference rather than fixes it and which views identity as multiple and fluid, a notion which makes sense to me and my experiences. Important to this study is the dominance of whiteness in marginalizing others, like myself, who do not fit that norm. Racial discourse has silenced me as mixed-woman, and a critical notion underscores the need and the fruitfulness of self-empowerment and voice.

The study raises questions about deconstructing race, multiculturalism, identity, politics, curriculum and instruction, and the use of autobiography as a research methodology. It makes no claims to have definitive answers but hopefully provides some insight for parents, teachers, and others who are in pedagogical relationships in the context of a white world.

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Education in the Graduate Academic Unit of Curriculum and Instruction

Table of Contents

• 1. Breaking My Silence
• 2. Constructing Identity
  • The Dilemma of Difference
  • A Modernist Discourse Constructs Identity
  • Postmodern Discourse Constructs (and Deconstructs) Identity
  • Reading and Writing My Life
  • Politicizing The Personal
  • A Critical Narratology
• 3. Mixed Messages: What the Literature Says About Mixed-Race
  • A Name to Call Myself
  • Mixed Messages
  • The “Tragic Mulatto“
  • Hybrid Vigour and the “Tragic Mulatto”
  • Sexuality
  • The “Exotic”
  • “The Hope of the Future”: Do Mixed-Race Subjects Really Challenge Race?
  • The Politics of Representation
• 4. The Stories I Live By
  • Childhood
  • Pieces of the Past
    • Fragments: Memory and the Imagination
    • Constructing Reality: A Child Interprets
    • Grandma’s Shadow
    • Little China Girl
    • Growing up “Chinese”
    • Getting An Education: School Constructs Identity
  • Another World
    • Leaving Home
    • This Isn’t New England!: Whiteness
    • Making Friends: School/Community/Nationality Construct Identity
    • The Seduction of Whiteness
  • Higher Learning: My Education Continues
  • A Piece of the Puzzling: Finding Others Like Me
  • Having Many Homes
• 5. Crossing Borders
  • Frames of Identity
  • Recommendations
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

“Roots Germania” A Personal Search for Identity (Film Screening and Panel Discussion)

The German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.
Thursday, 2011-08-18, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

RSVP (acceptances only) by August 12, 2011
Telephone: 202-387-3355, FAX: 202-387-6437
E-Mail: events@ghi-dc.org

The Grimme award nominated documentary “Roots Germania” was directed by Mo Asumang, the daughter of a German and Ghanaian. She decided to search for her own roots and identity, after she received a death threat by the neo-Nazi band White Aryan Rebels, who sing in one song: “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.” Her search leads her through Germany and then to Ghana, where she speaks with family and friends, but she also engages with NPD party representatives and racist groups to ask questions many would not dare to ask.

In cooperation with the Black German Cultural Society, NJ (A New Jersey nonprofit organization) and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

For more information, click here.

Tune Your Engine – What is a New Zealander?

Afternoons with Jim Mora
Radio New Zealand National
2011-08-02, 03:10Z (15:10 NZT)

Jim Mora, Presenter

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

Zarine Rocha is a research Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She’s exploring the issues of mixed race and mixed ethnic identity in New Zealand and Singapore. (00:19:25)

Listen to the interview here in (MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format).

It’s not easy being green: stress and invalidation in identity formation of culturally-complex or mixed-race individuals

Texas A&M University
May 2008
159 pages

Samaria Dalia Roberts Perez

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS

This is an exploratory study to examine a population which has not been widely researched, mixed-race or “culturally-complex” individuals and identification. In the interest of this study, “culturally-complex” refers to individuals who report parents being from two or more different races/ethnicities; i.e. Black, White, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, etc. Current literature reveals through quantitative methods that mixed-race adolescents often report more stress and are at greater health risks than most mono-racial adolescents. However, past studies have not thoroughly investigated why and how this stress exists and at times is inconsistent, which points to the need for qualitative inquiry. Although most of the previous literature focuses on mixed-race adolescents, this study focused on an adult population. Study participants were recruited through snowball sampling for in-depth, open-ended interviews. The data was analyzed by searching for common themes that illustrate the possible causes for stress in culturally-complex individuals.

Though this study cannot be representational of all culturally-complex individuals it did provide for noteworthy findings. Race and ethnicity, and particularly being culturally-complex are topics that are often not spoken about in the family or between siblings. In general, culturally-complex individuals are not provided with space for dialogue and so thus, having a place to voice ideas, experiences, and opinions was appreciated by all participants. In all interviews, frustration and confusion was expressed towards box-checking. Though stress and invalidation was inconsistent in past literature surrounding mixed-race and culturally-complex individuals, only some participants in this study reported stress and invalidation, while other participants did not report having ever experienced stress or invalidation. While literature had posed that often culturally-complex individuals would identify with the ethnicity of the father, in this study most of those who identified as one culture over another had identified as the ethnicity of the mother. Participants additionally had ―hierarchies of identities‖ where being culturally-complex was not always their most important role. Future research should examine populations from different socioeconomic groups and other demographics.

Read the entire thesis here.

Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 5, Number 3 (November 2010)
pages 273-299
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2010.513829

Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness in Afro-Latin American countries, much less attention has been paid to how blackness functions in mestizo American countries. Furthermore, in mestizo America, the theoretical emphasis has oftentimes been placed on the mestizo/Indian divide, leaving no conceptual room to explore the issue of blackness. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on blackness in the western Caribbean cities of Port of Veracruz and Boca del Río, which lie in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Specifically, it looks at the racial-based and color-based identification of individuals of African descent, societal construction of the ‘black’ category, and the relationship between national and racial identities. This article relies on data from participant observation conducted over the course of one year and 112 semi-structured interviews.

…Blackness in Mexico

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mexico and Peru were the largest importers of African slaves in Spanish America (Palmer, 1976). Most scholars estimate that approximately 200,000 African slaves reached Mexico’s shores, although the number may be higher since many slaves were imported illegally (Aguirre Beltrán, 1944). When the slave system collapsed in the early 1700s, the biological integration of the population increased as the African-origin population increasingly mixed with the Indian and Spanish groups (Cope, 1994). After 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain, legal distinctions pertaining to race were terminated (González Navarro, 1970). By this time it was generally assumed that the black population had ‘disappeared’ through biological integration with the broader population.

Mexico’s early-20th-century post-revolutionary ideology further solidified the narrative of the disappearance of Mexico’s black population. This ideology promoted the mixed-race individual (mestizo) as the quintessential Mexican (Knight, 1990; Vasconcelos, 1925). In doing so, however, it not only glorified the mestizo, but sought to assimilate the Indigenous (Knight, 1990) and African (Hernández Cuevas, 2004, 2005) components of Mexico’s population through integration. The erasure of the African element in Mexico continued in the following decades through the Eurocentric re-interpretation of particular aspects of Mexican culture (Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005).

The supposed disappearance of the African-origin population was first questioned in the 1940s when Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1946, 1958) studied what he defined as a ‘black’ population in the Costa Chica region of Mexico’s southern coast. Aguirre Beltrán’s pioneering study set the stage for the re-emergence of the issue of blackness in Mexico. In the past few decades, there has been a surge of scholarly work on the topic, much of which has focused on the historical experience of Africans and their descendants (Aguirre Beltrán, 1944; Alcántara López, 2002; Bennett, 2003; Carroll, 2001; Chávez Carbajal, 1997; García Bustamante, 1987; Gil Maronã, 1992; Herrera Casasús, 1991; Martínez Montiel & Reyes, 1993; Martínez Montiel, 1993; Motta Sánchez, 2001; Naveda Chávez-Hita, 1987, 2001; Palmer, 1976; Rout, 1976; Vincent, 1994; Vinson III, 2001; Winfield Capitaine, 1988) and the African contribution to Mexican culture (Díaz Pérez et al., 1993; Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hall, 2008; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005; Malcomson, forthcoming; Martínez Montiel, 1993; Ochoa Serrano, 1997; Pérez Montfort, 2007; for more general overviews and/or discussions of Afro-Mexicans, see Hoffman, 2006a, 2008; Martinez Montiel, 1997; Muhammad, 1995; Vinson III & Vaughn 2004); less attention has been paid to the contemporary experience of Mexicans of African descent. When the contemporary experience is addressed, most scholars focus on the Costa Chica region (Aguirre Beltrán, 1946, 1958; Althoff, 1994; Campos, 2005; Díaz Pérez et al., 1993; Flanet, 1977; Gutiérrez Ávila, 1988; Hoffman, 2007a; Lewis, 2000, 2001, 2004; Moedano Navarro, 1988; Tibón, 1961; Vaughn, 2001a). However, Hoffman (2007a, 2007b) argues that the Costa Chica represents an exceptional case in Mexico, and that identity formation in this region is not based on negotiation with state-sponsored institutions due to their limited presence in the area…

Read or purchase the article here.

Campus Colorlines: The Changing Boundaries of Race Within Institutions of Higher Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era

University of Southern California
August 2007
675 pages

Patricia Elizabeth Literte, Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Southern California In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

The post-Civil Rights era has been characterized by numerous challenges to traditional understandings of race. The dismantling of legalized segregation and discrimination, ongoing immigration from Asia and Latin America, increasing acceptance of interracial contact and relationships, and relatively unceasing conflict between the Western and Arab world, are just some of the socio-political trends and events which have yielded an increasingly fluid, complex, and intricate racial terrain. Given the increasing fluidity of race in U.S. society, the overarching goal of this dissertation is to illuminate the nature and implications of changing racial identity boundaries in the post-Civil Rights era. In order to fulfill this goal, I examine (1) the experiences of university students who defy conventional racial identity categorizations, (2) the processes of organization/mobilization in which these students engage, and (3) the role universities play in shaping and responding to these students, whose racial identities and politics are often incongruent with the institutions’ views of race. The majority of research on college students’ racial identities and racialized political activity focuses on conventional understandings of racial identity, which rely on the assumption that there are five singular racial categories – black/African American, Latino/a, white, Asian American, and Native American. Less is known about racial identities and corollary political activity which falls outside these boundaries. My dissertation addresses this gap through a two-tieredanalysis. First, I comparatively examine how students come to organize/mobilize around two identities which challenge singular or “monoracial” conceptualizations of race: (1) biracial identity and (2) “people of color” identity. Second, I examine how monoracially oriented student services (i.e., black student service offices) respond to such organization/mobilization. Study of these processes within the particular domain of higher education can assist student service practitioners in the formulation and implementation of programming on increasingly diverse campuses and can provide insight into how students can more fully participate in their universities’ public life. My methods of data collection include interviews (N = 90) with students and administrators, student focus groups, observation, and archival research.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Changing Nature of Race in Post-Civil Rights Society
• Part 1: Institutional Histories: Understanding the Racial Dynamics of Three Universities
  • Chapter 2: Western University: The Long, Strange Path from Racial Leftism to Colorblindness
  • Chapter 3: California University: A Bastion of Conservatism Rethinks its Identity in the Post-Affirmative Action Era
  • Chapter 4: Bay University: A Majority-Minority School Struggles and Embraces Multiculturalism
• Part 2: The Construction and Mobilization of Biracial Identity: Disrupting the Monoracial Landscape of Universities
  • Chapter 5: Western University and California University: Biracial Students: Facing Double Consciousness, Otherness, and the Complexities of Organizing
  • Chapter 6: Bay University: The Force of Working Class Status, the One Drop Rule, and Mestizaje: The Absence of Biracial Students
• Part 3: “We all share the same struggle”: Coalition Building and the Formation of People of Color Identity among University Students
  • Chapter 7: Western University: The Power of Students of Color: A Tradition of Resistance Continues in the Wake of Proposition 209
  • Chapter 8: California University: Contesting Apathy and the Strength of Monoracialism: Students of Color Struggle to Engage New Racial Politics
  • Chapter 9: Bay University: Working Class Obligations, Segregation, and the Black-Brown Conflict: The Diminishment of Coalitions and People of Color Identity among Students
  • Chapter 10: Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Half-white is an insult

The Guardian
2008-11-13

Michael Paulin

The debate over how black Obama is obscures the racial reconciliation his election represents

Barack Hussein Obama’s stunning victory against what was a thoroughly cynical Clinton campaign and a confused and morally bankrupt conservative Republican opposition is as historically significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall. His victory has revealed that a radical new form of political discourse and dialogue is possible, and that the tired dichotomies the political class have sustained for so long can be challenged by the people.

We now have our first black president. The most powerful man in the world is a black man. A man partly raised by his white grandparents. We have the first black president of the United States and, simultaneously, our first mixed-race president.

In Britain, Obama’s victory has exposed a predominantly white minority’s inherent suspicion and mistrust of black people. Christopher Hitchens, appearing on Newsnight last week, declared: “We do not have our first black president. He is not black. He is as black as he is white. He is not full black.” Rod Liddle, writing in the current edition of the Spectator under the headline “Is Barack Obama really black?”, suggested that “coloured“—a term of reference used in apartheid South Africa—would be more appropriate…

…These commentators are ignorant of the realities of the black experience and of the possibility of being of mixed heritage. Hitchens’s reliance on the concept of being “full black”, which harks back to the age of eugenics, exposes just how reactionary he has become. At this great moment in the global struggle for genuine democracy and racial unity, such commentators wriggle in discomfort, clinging to Obama’s “whiteness” in order to appease their own anxieties about the fact that we now have a black president. Even Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an atrocious piece in the Evening Standard suggesting it was an insult to Obama’s mother to call him black…

…It is unfortunate that this needs to be said but, for the avoidance of doubt: Barack Hussein Obama is black. Yet he is also mixed-race. Perhaps more important, he is a black, mixed-race intellectual…

Read the entire article here.