Mixed Race Studies

Mixed emotions: The multiracial student experience at UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley News
University of California, Berkeley
2005-03-07

Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter

BERKELEY – “What are you?”

That’s the question Robert Allen, adjunct professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, writes on the chalkboard when students first file in for his “People of Mixed Racial Descent” class. It’s also the question that complete strangers have asked Ai-Ling Malone, a third-year business administration and economics major, all her life; Ai-Ling, whose mom is Chinese and whose dad is African-American, says it has never bothered her. Josh Fisher (Chinese and white), an environmental sciences Ph.D. student, almost never hears it. Third-year industrial engineering major Rey Andrew Perocho Doctora (Filipino and Chinese/Japanese) mostly hears it only from Asian people: “I have Chinese eyes but my skin is dark, so they find it hard to figure me out.”…

…At UC Berkeley, an eye-opening 22.9 percent of all respondents identified themselves as “multi-racial or multi-ethnic” on the 2004 UC Undergraduate Experience Survey. Across the UC system, the average was 25.8 percent. Thanks to the growing numbers of mixed young people, a journey that often begins in college as a personal quest for identity is starting to gather force as a political movement.

It’s a movement still in its infancy, however. The “What are you?” question aside, “mixed” students like Ai-Ling, Josh, Rey, and Amina are struggling with the same question – “Who am I?” – as their monoracial classmates. The difference is, they can face racism on two fronts: both from white-dominated society and, more upsettingly, from their own racial peer groups, for whom they are not “black enough” or “Asian enough.”…

…Much of the academic research on the mixed-race community began at Berkeley. The “People of Mixed Racial Descent” class was the first of its kind in the nation. It was started in 1980 by Terry Wilson, a Berkeley professor of Native American Studies and the son of a Potawatomi Indian father and a white mother. Several of the course’s early teachers, like Ph.D. student Cynthia Nakashima, have gone on to write landmark texts about the multiracial experience.

The class is even more heavily subscribed now. “For many of the students it’s the first chance they’ve had to talk about their experience in a supportive environment,” says Allen. When he teaches the class – alternating with African-American Studies chair Stephen Small – he emphasizes the artificiality of the idea of race, reminding students that it has no scientific basis. In 1998 the Anthropological Association of America actually released a formal statement to that effect: “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94 percent, lies within so-called racial groups.This means that there is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race, mixed emotions

The Arizona Republic
2005-05-13

Janie Magruder

Multiracial children face challenges of identity, community

Aaron Foster was 3 years old the first time the question came.

“What are you?” asked the barber, out of earshot of his mother.

“I’m a boy,” Aaron replied, bewildered.

“No, what are you? Black? Chinese?”

“I do gymnastics.”

That exchange, in 1997, made Christina Cooper-Foster, the preschooler’s Taiwanian-born mom, realize that issues of race haven’t changed much. Cooper-Foster was raised by White adoptive parents in rural Florida in the 1970s, and the same hurtful queries and curious stares she got were now plaguing her son, who is mixed race…

…They also are more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, sleep problems and various illnesses, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Their 2003 study of 90,000 U.S. adolescents found students who called themselves biracial were more likely to have sex at younger ages, access to guns and poorer experiences at school.

“It did not matter what races the students identified with,” said J. Richard Udry, a professor of maternal and child health and lead researcher. “The risks were higher for all of them if they did not identify with a single race.”

Udry concluded that multiracial children live with stress that their single-race peers do not…

…Who are they?

They’re people like Nathalie Conte, a past president of SIMBA—Students Identifying Multiracial and Biracial at Arizona State University—who helped host a mixed-race event last month on campus. Tempe was among 15 cities on the Generation MIX tour, aimed at focusing attention on the challenges of multiracial people. It ended Tuesday in Seattle.

Conte, a 22-year-old ASU senior, has a Black mother and a Caucasian father.

“The biggest issue is we have to choose our race on application forms, and it’s kind of frustrating when you have to pick ‘other,’ because you don’t think of yourself as ‘other,’ ” she said…

Read the entire article here.

What Racial Hybridity? Sexual Politics of Mixed-Race Identities in the Caribbean and the Performance of Blackness

Lucayos
The School of English Studies of The College of The Bahamas’ Journal of Caribbean and Postcolonial Criticism and Creative Work
Volume 1 (2008)
pages 90-105

Papers from the 26th West Indian Literature Conference, March 8-10, 2007

Angelique V. Nixon, Assistant Professor in Residence of Woman’s Studies
University of Connecticut

for our blood, mixed
soon with their passion in sport,
in indifference, in anger,
will create new soils, new souls, new
ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed
to the star by which this ship floats
to new worlds, new waters, new
harbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed
with the wind and the water
the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed
fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.

~ Kamau Brathwaite “New World A-Comin’”

The authenticity of “Blackness” has continuously been challenged in the debates over identity politics, specifically within Black Cultural Studies, Black feminisms, African American Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. The meaning of the word “Black” often depends upon the social, historical, cultural, and geographical context, but it is almost invariably political. In the United States, Black refers to African Americans (including mixed people of African descent because of the “one drop” rule), while in Britain, the term Black politically generally categorizes all non-white people—Asians, Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans (Kanneh 86). In the Caribbean, the word “Black” is usually used to describe people of African descent, but its history remains complex given the array of reactions to racial mixing by different colonial powers (meaning the development of racial categories determined by blood and coded by law). Each European colony had legal codes and categories for mixed race identities, which created different “classes” of people determined by skin color. Today, the word “Black” has different political and social meanings, but at the same time, we cannot deny the realities of race and racism for Black people and other people of color around the world. Furthermore, mixed-race Black identities continue to have a major affect on how we think about race and identity. And considering the different political and social connotations of the word “Black” and the massive consumption of Black culture, “Blackness” as a signifier remains elusive and subject to appropriation and commodification; hence, Blackness has been and continues to be constructed and commodified by all kinds of people and places.

Therefore, any essential notion of ‘the Black subject or experience’ has been contested by a number of theorists; however, Stuart Hall argues for a “new politics of representation” that engages in difference and recognizes Black experience as Diaspora experience (170). In essence, he argues that we must remain committed to engaging in the politics of Black representation, while simultaneously recognizing the differences within our difference. The challenges to “identity politics, recent debates over ‘mixed race’ identities, forms of racism, and class complicate the broad terrain of ‘racial difference’ on which ‘Blackness’ is identified” (Kanneth 94). In these debates, postmodernism has been helpful to Black Cultural Studies insomuch as it allows for multiple Black identities, but as bell hooks recognizes in “Postmodern Blackness,” the postmodern critique of identity appears at first glance to threaten any opportunity for those who have suffered from oppression, domination, or colonization (hooks 23). But hooks argues that a postmodern critique of essentialism is useful in opening up constricting notions of Blackness, and this would be a radical and serious challenge to racist discourse that uses the notion of a Black authentic experience (28). She asserts that “such a critique allows us to affirm multiple Black identities, varied Black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of Black identity which represent Blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy” (28). While hooks does posit that we critique and abandon essentialist notions of Blackness, at the same time, she says that we must still “struggle for radical Black subjectivity”—where the lived and diverse experiences of Black people complicate our sense of identity (29). Although hooks does not specifically discuss mixed-race identities, I use her insights to discuss the possibilities around the signification of “Blackness.”

Given the recent media attention on mixed-race and bi-racial identities (including Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Kamora Lee [Kimora Lee Simons], Alicia Keys, and others) and the historical fetishization of “exotic” women of color, I am interested in how racial performance and performativity operates in a mixed-race body, and most specifically, how these complicate the signification of Blackness. Thus, how is the Blackness of a mixed-race person embodied? What does this embodiment of Blackness mean for a mixed-race person? Are mixed-race Black identities normalized through choosing a race, passing, or legal codes that regulate race? How is mixed race situated in the discourse of racism? When a racially mixed person claims or asserts Blackness through performance or a speech act utterance (I am Black, but I’m mixed, or I’m mixed and Black, or I identify as Black) does this destabilize racism or essentialist notions of race? In this project, I offer a theoretical framework about what I call the sexual politics of mixed-race identities and performance of Blackness in the Caribbean context, which I argue through using both personal narrative and literary representations….

Read the entire article here.

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published online: 2010-11-22
DOI: 10.1037/a0021562

Arnold K. Ho
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Daniel T. Levin, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies
Vanderbilt University

Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
Harvard University

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian–White and Black–White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian–White and Black–White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black–White social categorization. Experiments 2A and 2B used a speeded response task and again revealed evidence of hypodescent in both cases, as well as a stronger effect in the Black–White target condition. In Experiments 3A and 3B, social perception was studied with a face-morphing task. Participants required a face to be lower in proportion minority to be perceived as minority than in proportion White to be perceived as White. Again, the threshold for being perceived as White was higher for Black–White than for Asian–White targets. An independent categorization task in Experiment 3B further confirmed the rule of hypodescent and variation in it that reflected the current racial hierarchy in the United States. These results documenting biases in the social categorization and perception of biracials have implications for resistance to change in the American racial hierarchy.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Historical Treatment of Biracial Individuals
• Empirical Studies of Biracial Individuals: Identification, Categorization, and Perception
• Overview of the Experiments
• Experiment 1: A Blatant Test of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2A: A Test of the Automaticity of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2B: A Replication
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3A: Evidence of Hypodescent in Visual Face Perception
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3B: A Replication and Extension
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• General Discussion
• Conclusions
• References

The “mixing of races” in America provides a natural laboratory for measuring perceptions of new racial identities that diverge from older and simpler notions of race purity (Shih & Sanchez, 2009). Although social psychologists have studied how humans think about ingroups and outgroups for decades, relatively little is known about the perception of individuals who, by the fact that they embody mixtures of social identities within a single individual, blur traditional group boundaries. Such individuals provide intriguing test cases for social categorization and social perception. We focus on one aspect of such mixtures by studying how humans who meld two seemingly distinct racial groups are categorized and perceived, and thereby test how socially meaningful lines that determine inclusion into desired group memberships are drawn. Fundamentally, the categorization and perception of biracial and multiracial individuals more broadly can reveal how culturally entrenched social categories and norms guide, and even limit, social perception.

From a sociostructural perspective, miscegenation and biracial identity have profound implications for understanding the stability and permeability of extant racial group boundaries. In the United States, there is a clear and consensually agreed upon racial status hierarchy—members of dominant and subordinate groups alike agree that Whites have the highest social status, followed by Asians, Latinos, and Blacks (see Fang, Sidanius, & Pratto, 1998; Kahn, Ho, Sidanius, & Pratto, 2009; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, pp. 52–53). However, many have argued that the increasing rate of interracial dating and marriage between racial minorities and Whites, and resulting patterns of biracial identification of their offspring, will lead to a fundamental change in the American racial hierarchy (e.g., Alba & Nee, 2003; J. Lee & Bean, 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Sears & Savalei, 2006; Thornton, 2009). For example, J. Lee and Bean (2004) suggested that “based on patterns of immigration, intermarriage, and racial/multiracial identification…, Latinos and Asians may enjoy the option to view themselves as almost white or even white, and consequently, participate in a new color line that is still somewhat exclusionary of blacks” (p. 237). Others, like Thornton (2009), have documented how the mainstream media perceives the significance of multiracial identification: “For mainstream [news] papers, we are in a new era, sans racial determinants, and in this context multiracial people embody a color-blind America…” (p. 121). These sentiments assume that biracials will be accepted as part of their dominant parent group and not limited by their minority parent group status. However, are biracial targets perceived accurately as equal members of both parent groups or more in terms of their dominant or subordinate group lineage? The five experiments reported here are aimed at addressing this question…

Read or purchase the publication here.

Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage in the United States [Interview with Daniel T. Lichter]

Population Reference Bureau
2010-05-20

Questions and Answers with:

Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology
Cornell University

Donghui Yu:
Could you please tell us some features of Asian American(partucularly Chinese American)’s intermarriage with other race? Thanks.

Daniel T. Lichter:
Asian women have among the highest rates of interracial marriage in the United States. My colleague, Yujun Wang, has shown with the 2007 American Coummunity Survey that roughly 55 percent of U.S. born Asian women (aged 18-34) married non-Asians, mostly white men. That’s a lot of out-marriage.

Compared with Asian women, Asian men have much lower rates of marriage to whites or other races. My Asian male students sometimes complain that white guys are dating Asian women, but that white women seem uninterested in them. There is lots of debate about why this is the case, and the empirical evidence is too weak to draw strong conclusions. Antecdotal explanations sometimes emphasize cultural definitions of masculinity (e.g., shorter height of Asian men) or gender roles (e.g., perceptions that Asian men may hold patriarchal gender role attitudes). We just don’t have enough hard data on these sorts of questions, which deal with highly sensitive issues that often strike a nerve.

To your last question, Chinese Americans overall have higher rates of outmarriage to whites than some other Asian groups (e.g., Asian Indians or Vietnamese). This probably reflects that fact that they have been in the U.S. for many generations (and a large percentage share common cultural traits of the majority white population, including language). But among recent Chinese immigrants—the first generation—rates of intermarriage are much lower and perhaps lower than in the past. Some of this seems to reflect the recent influx of Chinese with lower education levels from new sending areas(e.g., from Fujian province).

Chinyere Osuji:
Does interracial marriage really demonstrate a blurring of racial boundaries? If so, in what ways can we see this happening? Does this impact the lives of black-white couples? If so, in what ways?

Daniel T. Lichter:
From my perspective, the growth of interracial marriages has definitely blurred racial boundaries in the U.S. In fact, I often think of interracial marriage as the spoon that stirs the “melting pot.” For example, interracial couples bridge the family and social networks of each partner. They span racial boundaries by interacting on both sides of the racial divide and, more importantly, they bring other friends and family members with them. Of course, this assumes that both sides of the racial divide accept the interracial couple, which isn’t always the case.

Also, the mixed race children of interracial couples, by definition, blur the racial line. These children are more likely than single race children to have cross-racial friends and to marry interracially themselves. Most children of black-white couples, however, are still likely to identify themselves as black or African American rather than as mixed-race or some other racial label. President Obama identified himself as black on the 2010 decennial census, even though his mother was white and his father was black…

…Yang Jiang:
Dr Lichter,
How do you think the increase of biracial/multiracial population in the U.S affect the overall interracial marriage rates? Compared to single race counterparts, are they more likely to to inter marry or intra-marry? How should we distinguish inter- vs intra-marriages for biracial/multiracial individuals?

Daniel T. Lichter:
This is a more difficult question to answer than it appears at first blush. On the one hand, mixed-race individuals are more likely to than single-race persons to marry someone other than another mixed-race person. So if mixed-race people are treated as a separate racial category, then this would increase the overall share of interracial marriages in the United States. Zhenchao Qian and I have treated black-white mixed-race persons as black or white or mixed race in separate analyses. In the end, regardless of classification, it doesn’t have much effect on overall rates of racial intermarriage.

This is likely to change in the future. Only 2-3 percent of the population today self-identifies as having more than one race. Of course, many people who self-identify as having only one race (President Obama) may in fact be multi-racial. Is President Obama’s marriage to Michelle Obama interracial? This question makes clear the conceptual challenges of this sort of research and the subjective nature of racial self-identification…

Read the entire interview here….

Raising Multiracial Awareness in Family Therapy Through Critical Conversations

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
Volume 31, Issue 4 (October 2005)
pages 399–411
DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2005.tb01579.x

Teresa McDowell, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Counseling Psychology
Lewis & Clark University, Portland Oregon

Lucrezia Ingoglia
Greater Lakes Mental Healthcare

Takiko Serizawa
Family Service Associates

Christina Holland
Behavioral Medicine Clinic

John Wayne Dashiell, Jr.
Tacoma, Washington

Christopher Stevens
Renton Area Youth and Family Services

Multiracial families are uniquely affected by racial dynamics in U.S. society. Family therapists must be prepared to meet the needs of this growing population and to support racial equity. This article includes an overview of literature related to being multiracial and offers a framework for working with multiracial identity development in therapy. A critical conversation approach to working with multiracial identity is shared along with case examples. The authors’ experiences developing the model via a practitioner inquiry group are highlighted.

Read or purchase the article here.

Ethnic identity, ego identity, and psychological well-being among mixed-ethnic Arab-European adolescents in Israel

British Journal of Developmental Psychology
Volume 24, Issue 4 (November 2006)
pages 669–679
DOI: 10.1348/026151005X59196

Hisham Motkal Abu-Rayya
The Unit of Psychology
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

This study explored the relationship between ethnic identity, ego identity, and psychological wellbeing among mixed-ethnic adolescents with European mothers and Arab fathers in Israel. One hundred and twenty-seven mixed-ethnic adolescents (13 to 18 years) were instructed to respond to a modified version of Phinney’s (1992) Multigroup ethnic identity measure (MEIM), to Bennion and Adams’ (1986) ego identity measure (EOM-EIS) and to Ryff’s (1999) psychological well-being scale. It was found that Arab and European ethnic identities, composed of ethnic behaviours, affirmation and belonging, and achievement of a sense of oneself as part of an ethnic group, were significantly positively correlated with participants’ psychological well-being. Findings revealed also that the ego identity statuses Achievement and Moratorium were associated with higher levels of psychological well-being, while the statuses Foreclosure and Diffusion were associated with lower levels of well-being. Arab and European ethnic identities and ego identity were found to be formed independently among the participants.

Read or purchase the article here.

SOCY 57: Identity and Social Interaction of Multiracial Americans

Dartmouth College
Department of Sociology
Upper Division

Currently being taught as of Spring 2011

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology

The 2000 Census revealed that nearly 4% of youth and 2% of adult Americans belong to more than one racial category. What are the social, historical, and biological meanings of the term multi-racial? What are the challenges and benefits associated with belonging to more than one race group? How do multi-racial youth negotiate the path to developing a healthy identity differently than mono-racial youth? How has the social context of race changed the way multiracial people identify? We will consider how schools, families, peer groups, and neighborhoods influence the development of biracial Americans. (Course syllabus)

Passage to identity is still a struggle

Kansas City Star
2010-12-17

Commentary by: Jeneé Osterheldt

I’ve always known I wasn’t white like my mama. Even as a little girl, I could feel adults stare as we passed by.

I was different. But was I black like my daddy? It took me much of my young life to figure that out.

Earlier this year, we took the census. The hardest of the 10 questions revolved around racial identity.

President Barack Obama, born to a white mother and a black father from Africa, checked one box: Black, African Am. or Negro.

I checked it, too. But I also marked the ones next to white and Native American. The president and I are both mixed.

So, who chose the right answer?

More and more black-and-white mixed Americans are “passing” for black, according to a recent study in the current issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, titled “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans.” That’s a reverse form of what biracial and fair-skinned blacks did in the Jim Crow era, when they denied their race altogether.

It’s claptrap. Yes, Obama is mixed, but he’s also black. It’s possible to be both. How can people “pass” for something they already are?..

Read the rest of the commentary here.

Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
Volume 2, Issue 2 (May 2009)
pages 139-167
DOI: 10.1080/17513050902759512

Stephanie L. Young, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
University of Southern Indiana

This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mother’s experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of one’s identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.

Read or purchase the article here.