Mixed Race Studies

Passing and Performance in the 21st Century: Black-White Biracial Americans and Passing as Black

American Sociological Association
Annual Meeting 2010
Regular Session: Multi-Racial Classification/Identity
Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Monday, 2010-08-16, 16:30-18:10 EDT (Local Time)
35 pages

Session Organizer: Rebecca C. King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer of Sociology, National University of Ireland-Maynooth 
Presider: Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

Nikki Khanna Sherwin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Drawing on interview data with black-white biracial adults, I examine the considerable agency most have in asserting their racial identities to others. Extending research on “identity work,” I explore the strategies they use to perform race, and the individual and structural-level factors that limit the accessibility and/or effectiveness of some strategies. I further find that how these biracial respondents identify is often contextual – most identify as biracial, but in some contexts, they “pass” as monoracial. Scholars argue that “passing” may be a relic of the past, yet I find that “passing” still occurs today and quite frequently. Most notably, I find a striking reverse pattern of “passing” today – while “passing” during the Jim Crow era involved “passing” as white, I find that these respondents more often report “passing” as black today. Motivations for “passing” are explored, with an emphasis on “passing” as black.

Read the entire paper here.

White Parents – Black Children: How Parents Contribute to the Development of their Biracial Child’s Identity

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Hilton San Francisco
San Francisco, California
2009-08-09
20 pages

Cristina Ortiz
University of Chicago

When a biracial child has one black and one white parent, society tends to identify the child as “black” or “biracial” but rarely as “white”. This study investigates how parents contribute to the development of their biracial child’s identity. Using in-depth, open-ended interviews, my research examines the roles that parents play in negotiating their biracial child’s identity in a racialized society. The findings of my research demonstrate the overwhelming impact that the perceptions of race in society plays in the location, manner, and environment in which parents raise their biracial children. My research has found that these societal perceptions contribute to a shift in a way that parents identify their children and the strategies they use in developing their child’s identity. My findings demonstrate the significance of the one-drop rule in the strategies that these parents use in developing their biracial children’s identity. With the presence of the one-drop rule in our society, the participants in my research have placed more of an emphasis on the development and strengthening of their child’s black identity than their white identity. As the majority of the parents who participated in my research would identify their child as biracial, the strategies utilized in the development of their biracial children’s identity fails to correlate with the way in which they characterized their child’s race.

Read the entire paper here.

“Who Do You Think You’re Border Patrolling?”: Negotiating “Multiracial” Identities and “Interracial” Relationships

Georgia State University
2008
348 pages

Melinda Anne Mills

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University

Research on racial border patrolling has demonstrated how people police racial borders in order to maintain socially constructed differences and reinforce divisions between racial groups and their members. Existing literature on border patrolling has primarily focused on white/black couples and multiracial families, with discussions contrasting “white border patrolling” and “black border patrolling,” in terms of differential motivations, intentions, and goals (Dalmage 2000). In my dissertation research, I examined a different type of policing racial categories and the spaces inbetween these shifting boundaries. I offer up “multiracial interracial border patrolling” as a means of understanding how borderism impacts the lives of “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships. In taking a look at how both identities and relationships involve racial negotiations, I conducted 60 in-depth, face-to-face qualitative interviews with people who indicated having racially mixed parentage or heritage. Respondents shared their experiences of publicly and privately managing their sometimes shifting preferred racial identities; often racially ambiguous appearance; and situationally in/visible “interracial” relationships in an era of colorblind racism. This management included encounters with border patrolling from strangers, significant others, and self.

Not only did border patrolling originate from these three sources, but also manifested itself in a variety of forms, including benevolent (positive, supportive); beneficiary (socially and sometimes economically or materially beneficial); protective, and malevolent (negative, malicious, conflictive). Throughout, I discussed the border patrolling variations that “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships face. I also worked to show how people’s participation in border patrolling encouraged their production of colorblind discourses as a strategy for masking their racial attitudes and ideologies about “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
  • Research Overview and Questions
  • Navigating Multiracial Interracial Borders
• CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODS/METHODOLOGY
  • How Do You Solve A “Problem” Like Racial Mixture? Making Mixture Appear and Disappear
  • What is an “Interracial” Relationship?
  • Measuring Mixture, Exploring Mixed Matters
• CHAPTER THREE: BORDER PATROLLING FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
  • When Strangers Border Patrol Identities
  • When Strangers Border Patrol Both Identities and Partner Choices
  • Conclusions
• CHAPTER FOUR: BORDER PATROLLING FROM OUTSIDERS WITHIN/INSIDER OTHERS/INSIDERS WITHOUT
  • When Significant Others Border Patrol Identities
  • When Significant Others Border Patrol Both Identities and Partner Choices
  • Conclusions
• CHAPTER FIVE: BORDERISM FROM THE INSIDE OUT
  • When People Border Patrol Their Own Identities
  • When People Border Patrol Both Their Identities and Partner Choices
  • Conclusions
• CHAPTER SIX: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
  • Conclusions
  • Future Research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
• APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE
• APPENDIX B: APPROVED INFORMED CONSENT FORM

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Influence of K-12 Schooling on the Identity Development of Multiethnic Students

University of British Columbia, Vancouver
April 2010

Erica Mohan

Thesis submitted in the partial fulfullment of the requirments for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies (Educational Studies)

This study examined the influence of K-12 schooling on the racial and ethnic identity development of 23 self-identified multiethnic students attending high schools across the San Francisco Bay Area. All of the students participated in a semi-structured interview, nine participated in one of two focus groups, and five completed a writing activity. I approached this study with a postpositivist realist conception of identity (Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000a/b) that takes seriously the fluidity and complexity of identities as well as their epistemic and real-world significance. In defining racial and ethnic identity formation, I borrowed Tatum’s (1997) understanding of it as “the process of defining for oneself the personal significance and social meaning of belonging to a particular racial [and/or ethnic] group” (p. 16).

The findings from this study indicate that the formal aspects of schooling (e.g., curriculum and diversity education initiatives) rarely directly influence the racial and ethnic identity development of multiethnic students. They do, however, shape all students’ racial and ethnic understandings and ideologies, which in turn shape the informal aspects of schooling (e.g., interactions with peers and racial and ethnic divisions within the student body) which exert direct influence over multiethnic students’ experiences and identities. Of course, schooling is not alone in shaping the racial and ethnic understandings and ideologies of the general student body; other influences such as family and neighborhood context cannot be discounted. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that schools are sites of negotiation, that these negotiations influence multiethnic students’ identities, and that these negotiations occur in the context of, and are shaped by, both formal and informal aspects of schooling, including, but not limited to, school demographics, curricula, race and ethnicity-based student organizations, and interactions between all members of the school community. Based on the findings, it is recommended that educators infuse the curriculum and classroom discussions with issues of race, ethnicity, multiethnicity, and difference; actively engage in the process of complicating, contesting, and deconstructing racial and ethnic categories and their classificatory power; and end the silence regarding multiethnicity in schools and ensure its authentic inclusion in the curriculum.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
  • Context
  • Problem Statement and Purpose
  • Research Questions and Methods
  • Definitions
    • Schooling vs. Education
    • Race, Ethnicity, and Multiethnicity
  • Limitations and Delimitations
  • Overview of the Dissertation
  • Significance of the Study
• CHAPTER TWO: CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMING OF IDENTITY
  • An Essentialist Approach to Identity
  • Postmodern and Poststructural Approaches to Identity
  • A Postpositivist Realist Approach to Identity
  • A Theory of Multiplicity
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER THREE: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Section I: Multiethnic Identity Development
  • Section II: Problem, Equivalent, and Variant Approaches to Multiethnic Identity
    • Problem Approaches to Multiethnic Identity
    • Equivalent and Variant Approaches to Multiethnic Identity
  • Section III: Schooling and Student Identity Construction
    • Overview of Multicultural and Antiracism Education
    • Critiques of Multicultural and Antiracism Education
  • Section IV: The K-12 Schooling Experiences of Multiethnic Students
  • Section V: Integrating the Literature
• CHAPTER FOUR: METHODOLOGY
  • Participant and Site Selection
  • Research Procedures
    • Semi-Structured Interviews
    • Focus Groups
    • Writing Activity
  • Data Analysis and Presentation
    • Starting Points
    • Generating Participant Profiles
    • Analysis of the Data Relating to K-12 Schooling Experiences
  • The Complexities of Researching Multiethnic Identities
  • Self as Research “Instrument”
    • Insider/Outsider Research
    • Self as Insider/Outsider
    • Additional Methodological Considerations
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER FIVE: PARTICIPANT PROFILES
  • Jill
  • Mialany
  • Dana
  • Andrea
  • Anthony
  • Frank
  • Jasmine
  • David
  • Cara
  • Amaya
  • Raya
  • Barry
  • Christina
  • Kendra
  • Renee
  • Jen
  • Hip Hapa
  • Kelley
  • Josh
  • Jordan
  • Anne
  • Hannah
  • Marie
  • Discussion
• CHAPTER SIX: PARTICIPANTS’ EXPERIENCES AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE FORMAL ASPECTS OF K-12 SCHOOLING
  • Documentation of Racial and Ethnic Identities
  • Race and Ethnicity-Based Student Organizations
  • Relationships and Interactions with Teachers and Administrators
  • Specific Lessons, Projects, and Classroom Activities
  • (Not) Learning about Multiethnicity
  • (Not) Learning about Race and Ethnicity
  • Diversity Education Initiatives
  • Integrating the Data
• CHAPTER SEVEN: PARTICIPANTS’ EXPERIENCES AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE INFORMAL ASPECTS OF K-12 SCHOOLING
  • School Diversity
  • Friendships
  • Diverse Friendship Networks and Boundary Crossing
  • Friends with Similar Identities and Heritages
  • Stereotypes
  • Challenged Identities
  • Racial Tension at School
  • Integrating the Data
• CHAPTER EIGHT: PARTICIPANTS’ BROADER REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLING AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATORS
  • Participant Perspectives
  • Integrating the Data
    • Correcting a “Blindness” Towards Multiethnic Students
    • Talking About Race (and Ethnicity and Multiethnicity)
    • Specifically Addressing Multiethnicity
    • Getting an Early Start
    • We All Have Similar “Needs”
    • A Desire for Awareness and Understanding
• CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION
  • Research Questions and Findings
  • Implications and Recommendations for Educators
  • Future Research Directions
  • Reflections on the Research Methodology
  • Reflections on a Postpositivist Realist Framing of Identity
  • Concluding Thoughts
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
  • Appendix I – Semi-Structured Interview Protocol
  • Appendix II – Writing Activity Prompt
  • Appendix III – Maria Root’s 50 Experiences of Racially Mixed People
  • Appendix IV – Behavioral Research Ethics Board Certificate of Approval

Read the entire thesis here.

Equally Multiracial? A Study of Asian/Whites and Black/Whites

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting
Hilton Atlanta and Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Atlanta, Georgia
2010-08-13
19 pages

Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl
University of Virginia

In a study with 28 individuals with either Asian/White or Black/White descent I find that all the participants prefer some variation of a multiracial identity. However, when investigating how class and gender intersect with race to affect one’s racial identity, I find that Asian/Whites have more positive experiences of their multiracial identity than Black/Whites. This discrepancy is largely due to persistent stereotypical and racist depictions of Blacks and of Asians.

…The Asian/White women in this study spoke of their mixed race identity with pride and ownership, which was often connected to beauty ideals. Their “exotic” look got them attention, most often to White men. One woman, Nancy, 29 years old and a graduate student is often asked “what are you?” When I asked her if that question bothered her, she said:

Uh, honestly I don‘t take offense. I think its kinda cool cause I have people stop me on the streets sometimes or in the elevator or something or when I go to work and meeting new people and they‘ll say,—I‘m sorry, I have to ask you, “what are you?” I always find it intriguing that people can look at me and be like she stands out—she‘s unique. I‘ve been told that I‘m beautiful, that I‘m exotic because I stand out. I actually don‘t mind, I love people questioning.

This woman repeatedly noted that she liked being seen as pretty and that her mixed-race identity did not lead to uncomfortable situations or discrimination. Instead, it was a positive experience for her. All of the Asian/White women noted having predominantly or all White partners (as well as White friends), revealing, I argue that their beauty is acceptable by the standards of the dominant White society. None of them remarked on having problems with dating or finding a partner; in fact one Asian/White woman, Kelly, 22 years old, and an artist, actually remarked that she often found men that have an “Asian fetish” men that were particularly attracted to the cultures and physical looks associated with Asian. This woman also noted that she enjoyed being “ethnically ambiguous” and that others were attracted to this feature; she notes:

I actually kind of take pride in being biracial because it… I kind of get a lot of attention as a result and I think being one or the other doesn‘t give you as much as attention, is that weird? I‘m so conceited. No, I‘m not saying that I love attention all the time but it does, it‘s more gratifying to say that you‘re biracial than to say that you‘re one, it makes you more special.

In this case, she clearly receives positive attention from being biracial and from appearing mixed race. She is attractive both because she is Asian and because she is “ethnically ambiguous” her identity serves her overall in a positive capacity.

In contrast to those of Asian/White descent, women of Black/White descent spoke to more distressing experiences related to their gender. In their case, although their biraciality likewise lent to a more unique look, it also was a point of contention when developing potential friendships with Black women, when having mostly all White friends, and when navigating relationships with men. Many of the women commented on how interactions with other Black women were problematic, teasing about skin color and hair texture were common experiences. Ashley, 24 years old, and a senior in college, noted that she continues to feel some animosity from Black women. In this passage she talks about how she goes to a bar that is often frequented by Black women, she says:

Again, love the music so I‘m going to keep going there but it was like, the Black girls were like, and I get there is this hair thing in the Black community so it‘s like my hair is always a dead give away for them to want to not like me or something like that… then I would assume that… Black people are kind of like ―oh, she‘s the mixed girl, she thinks she‘s better than us…

Read the entire paper here.

Beyond borders: Multiracial identities in the shadow of blackness

53rd Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society
Francis Marion Hotel
Charleston South Carolina
2009-09-24

Fileve Palmer
Indiana University

Within the United States and South Africa the idea of multiracial identity has often been subverted beneath a collective, more powerful Black political identity. The idea of multiracial individuals within the larger realm of Blackness has varied throughout time. Often touted as being less than Black, inauthentic, or simply mimics of White, European culture; multiracial individuals in these two nations have similar experiences that form unique cultural traits. In this paper I compare multiracial communities within the United States and South Africa. Through first hand interviews and an in-depth literature review I will show that multiracial individuals living on either side of the equator share similar experiences and suffered like prejudices despite being worlds apart. From the stereotypical immoral, hypersexualized Coloured South African born from colonizers and colonized to weak, sterile Mulattos in the States born from slaves and masters I will demonstrate how these views affect identity formation and how one learns to be or not to be Coloured, Creole, Mulatto or forsake it to pass as Black or White, further problematizing rigid racial categories. How is the trend of multiculturalism within society and schools allowing for individuals within these categories to express themselves and be taken legitimately?

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

BEYOND ‘OTHER’: A special report.;More Than Identity Rides On a New Racial Category

The New York Times
1996-07-06

Linda Mathews

Edward Cooper, a Portland, Ore., businessman, is black. His wife and business partner, Barbara McIntyre, is white. Their 12-year-old son, Ethan McCooper, is, like his name, a blend of his parents, and harder to classify.

On Ethan’s school forms and other official papers, his parents sometimes check both the “white” and the “black” boxes. If “other” is available, they check that and write in “interracial.” When ordered to choose between “black” and “white,” they resolutely leave the form blank.

What they would like to call the light-skinned, dark-eyed boy with the reddish-brown hair is “multiracial.” They may yet get their way, if the Federal Government yields to growing pressure and adds a “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000.

“This is an issue that isn’t going away,” said Mary Waters, a Harvard professor of sociology who teaches a course on race. “We’re riding such a big wave of interracial marriages that inevitably there are going to be many more people who can claim a multiracial identity if it’s permitted.”…

Read the entire story here.

Immigration’s Racial Complexity

The Washington Post
Political Bookworm: Where tomorrow’s must-read political books are discovered today
2010-07-09

Steven E. Levingston

Will today’s Latino and Asian immigrants become incorporated into American society like their European predecessors? Or will race remain a stumbling block to full assimilation? Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean explore these questions in their new book “The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America,” recently released by the Russell Sage Foundation. What they discover is that second-generation Asians and Latinos are not as constrained by racial categories as are African-Americans. A key to the question may lie in the state of intermarriage.

By Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean

The United States is more racially diverse than ever before. New non-European immigrant groups such as Latinos and Asians made up only 5 and 1 percent of the nation’s population in 1970, but today, they account for 15 and 5 percent, respectively. According to Census projections, by 2050, they will soar to 30 and 9 percent.

Immigration alone, however, is only one factor contributing to the country’s new diversity. Interracial marriages, which increased from 1 percent in 1960 to 7 percent in 2008, are contributing to this growing diversity. According to a Pew Research Center study released June 3, 1 in 6 marriages in the U.S. is interracial.

Along with the growth in intermarriage is the rise in the number of Americans who chose to identify multiracially. Accounting for just 2.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2008, some analysts project that multiracial Americans will account for 1 in 5 Americans by 2050, and 1 in 3 by 2100. Such trends appear to portend a post-racial society where racial divides are disappearing. However, a closer look at racial group differences tells a bleaker story…

Read the entire article here.

Sociologist links poverty and employment to racial identity

University of California, Irvine
2009-01-05

Laura Rico, University Communications

Andrew Penner studies how social status shapes ethnicity

Andrew Penner studies how perception of race can change, depending on one’s social status.Losing your job or doing jail time can affect how people perceive your racial background, according to a recent study co-authored by Andrew Penner, UC Irvine sociology assistant professor. His research shows people who were identified by others as white were significantly less likely to be seen in the same way over time if they had fallen below the poverty line or spent time in prison. Participants who self-identified as white also were less likely to see themselves the same way if they encountered those hardships. The study suggests that racial identity is fluid and changes with one’s position in society. Penner discussed the impact of his research and why race still matters…

Q: What surprised you most about your findings?

A:  The widespread pattern of our results was surprising. Many people assume that our findings apply only to people who don’t fit readily into racial categories, such as those who are multiracial. But we found that roughly 20 percent of the population experiences at least one change in how they are seen by others, which is much higher than you would expect if this were true only for multiracial people. What we actually found is that once we removed all of the multiracial people from the sample, we still got the same pattern of results. The same thing is true for Hispanics; many people assume that we got this pattern of results because people are not sure how to classify Hispanics, but when we looked only at non-Hispanics, the same pattern emerged. This suggests our results say something more general about definitions and perceptions of race in the U.S…

Read the entire article here.