Mixed Race Studies

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
146 pages
Hardback ISBN 978-1-4331-0803-7

Edited by

Cybelle H. McFadden, Assistant Professor of French
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Sandrine F. Teixidor, Assistant Professor of French Studies
Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Corporeal Performance and Visible Gender Position in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Marion Krauthaker
2. After-Images of Muslim Women: Vision, Voice, and Resistance in the Work of Assia Djebar. Mary Ellen Wolf
3. The Gaze beneath the Veil: Portrait of Women in Algeria and Morocco. Sandrine F. Teixidor
4. Vision, Voice, and the Female Body: Nina Bouraoui’s Sites/Sights of Resistance. Adrienne Angelo
5. The Métis Body: Double Mirror. Caroline Beschea-Fache
6. The Body, Sexuality, and the Photo in L’Usage de la photo. Cybelle H. McFadden

Contributors
Index

From: The Métis Body: Double Mirror

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM THE ONE YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE.  The one who puzzles you, intrigues you.  I am the original definition of “exotic.” Acceptable in many ways, the cafe au lait of life, more palatable because I am diluted…  They call me white, they call me black… they’ve called me everything in between.
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar

In their novels Garçon manqué (2000) and 53cm (1999), Nina Bouraoui and Sandrine Bessora, respectively, portray characters born of parents belonging to different racialized groups and raise the issues defining métissage.  As they form corporeal representation of the concept, they describe the métis experience in the Francophone context.  The complexity of defining the concept of métissage involves examining both races, since they shape the perception of the métis by the Other and by the subject itself; it also entails discussing the racial tensions that play out in corporeal ways.  Using the work of Bouraoui and Bessora, I will analyze how the conception of a world based on dichotomies and binary oppositions, reinforced by racial categorization, affects and disturbs the construction of métis identities in the texts…

Perceptions, Representation, and Identity Development of Multiracial Students in American Higher Education

Journal of Student Affairs at New York University
Volume VI, 2010
pages 1-6

Roberta Garbarini-Philippe
New York University

In my article I first examine some historical facts and policy issues related to multiracial individuals, giving a few examples of how this population has been perceived and stereotyped by institutions, the media, and American culture. I then look at some of the research on biracial identity development and show how one of the assumptions regarding people of mixed-race heritage, the inability to fit in any monoracial group, has been refuted by many studies that predict healthy and positive psychological outcomes for multiracial individuals. Finally, I discuss multiracial identity development in the higher education context and suggest some ways in which colleges and universities can create inclusive environments and utilize the potential of these border-defying students to introduce a new discourse on race.

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Transcending “The Box”: Multiracial Subjects as the New Face of Reality

CSW Update Newsletter
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
February 2008
pages 24-27

Kunti Dudakia

I hate it. I hate the feeling I get when I am forced in online surveys, job applications, or school admissions to check a box to identify my racial background. A feeling of confusion and uncertainty overwhelms me in an internal battle to check just one box.

I am not one box.

I am two. Maybe three or four if I want to be completely accurate. But I wonder: what is the purpose of “the box”? When we check a box, we are claiming a race, an ancestry, and even a status. Race as an organizing principle in society has been a source of hegemony and hierarchy for centuries. Its origins are unknown and unreliable. Historically dominant groups have used race as a basis to divide and distinguish themselves from “the other.” In the United States, the legal and scientific definition of race has continued to alter according to societal standards. In some ways we have moved forward from the “check one box only” of the 1850 census, which included three categories: white, black, and mulatto. However, we still attempt to check one box when many of us are biracial or multiracial. The reality in America is hybridity. In the definition that I use, hybridity means the blending of two or more cultures into a unified whole. Hybrids are chameleons adjusting to the shifting landscapes and isms that may reject nonconformity. Moreover, evidenced by the increasing amount of interracial marriages and ethnically ambiguous subjects is the realization that racial purity is a myth…

…Authenticity is constructed within the racial paradigm as both a marker and tool for inclusion and exclusion. We hear statements like “He isn’t really black” as assumptions based on essentialist ideas of race—usually and unfortunately reinforcing biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. Multiracial subjects are the ‘antithesis of authenticity’ inasmuch as they do not fit into one group or culture. This begs the question, are multiracial subjects changing the landscape of racial classification?…

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CRN 47519/47520-Mixed Race Asian Americans

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2008

Kent Ono, Professor of Asian American Studies, Communication, and Institute of Communications Research

Part of Asian American Ethnic Groups (AAS-450)

This course provides an introduction to the study of mixed race Asian Americans. From discussions of famous mixed race people, such as Tiger Woods, Keanu Reeves, Kristin Kreuk, Dean Cain, and Rob Schneider to research about interracial dating, interracial families, mixed race children, and multiracial activism, the course provides an understanding of theories of race, identity, and culture as they relate to biracial and multiracial Asian Americans. The course provides a theoretical understanding of racial identity formation, focusing at first on more general theories of race, and then moving to the more specific issues of multiracial identity and politics. Analysis of TV, film, and cyberspace images of mixed race Asian Americans will also lead to an understanding of the social context of our everyday experiences. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and course assignments, students will gain a broader understanding of race and its application to people of mixed racial heritage.

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 61-69

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love does not directly take “any specific ethnicity as its central concern,” nor deal explicitly with the “identity issue” (165, 179).  Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses.  While Kadohata’s novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novel’s “futuristic” American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white “richtowns” and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference.  What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions.

…Kadohata’s indictment of current racial understanding goes further as Francie, the mixed race narrator, is marginalized by our current monoracial understanding of race as the determinant factor of identity. She says, “I enjoyed the feeling of the heat making my loose shorts billow around my yellow-brown legs—the yellow from my Japanese mother, the brown from my Chinese-black father” (22). Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests in Race and Resistance that Francie embodies “the novel’s conception of nonwhite identity as being a mélange of different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (150). While the narrator does occupy the space of the raced majority within the novel, her value as a mixed race character does not end at being the embodiment of the “novel’s conception” of a “nonwhite identity.” Francie as a mixed-race subject maintains her position as marginalized in our current understanding of racial categorization. Keeping with the notion of the body, Kadohata locates Francie’s indeterminacy in her yellow-brown skin, which is not easily identified as one race or another, until Francie herself declares where she “belongs.” Knowing what races and ethnicities Francie belongs to serves a purpose beyond making her a mixture of incongruent elements of race and therefore some sort of representative of everything “nonwhite” as Nguyen suggests; her “parts” are named, and so while she may embody the majority within the text, she is still marginalized by our current understanding of race along monoracial lines. By making the protagonist a “mélange,” Kadohata renders this multiracial character incapable of being assigned identity by physical racial markers and forces Francie to seek a different means by which she must forge an identity…

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AAS 436–Politics of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Fall 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary American black/white multiracial identities, including analyses and assessments of the “multiracial identity movement” in the United States.

New England Identities: Black New England Conference

University of New Hampshire
2009-06-11 thorugh 2009-06-13

New England: Beyond Black & White

Moving beyond rigid racial identities, this year’s conference will explore the contemporary as well as historic interactions between Black and Indigenous communities, the presence of “passing” mixed race individuals, and the more recent immigrant experience, within a New England context. These complex interactions, connections, conflicts, experiences, and resistant efforts of Black, white, Indigenous, and multi-racial citizens will be explored through scholarly research, presentations on books, shared personal stories, and imagery.

The Black New England Conference is a 2-day conference that gathers scholars, teachers, researchers, community members and members of local organizations to share their work and insights on the Black experience past and present in New England. It is both an academic conference and a celebration of Black life and history in New England.

Navigating Racial Boundaries: The One-Drop Rule and Mixed-Race Jamaicans in South Florida

Florida International University
2010
343 pages

Sharon E. Placide

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparitive Sociology

Like many West Indians, mixed-race Jamaican immigrants enter the United States with fluid notions about race and racial identifications that reflect socio-political events in their home country and that conflict with the more rigid constructions of race they encounter in the U.S. This dissertation explores the experiences of racially mixed Jamaicans in South Florida and the impact of those experiences on their racial self-characterizations through the boundary-work theoretical framework. Specifically, the study examines the impact of participants’ exposure to the one-drop rule in the U.S., by which racial identification has been historically determined by the existence or non-existence of black forebears. Employing qualitative data collected through both focus group and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes mixed-race Jamaicans’ encounters in the U.S. with racial boundaries, and the boundary-work that reinforces them, as well their response to these encounters. Through their stories, the dissertation examines participants’ efforts to navigate racial boundaries through choices of various racial identifications. Further, it discusses the ways in which structural forces and individual agency have interacted in the formation of these identifications. The study finds that in spite of participants’ expressed preference for non-racialism, and despite their objections to rigid racial categories, in seeking to carve out alternative identities, they are participating in the boundary-making of which they are so critical.

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
  • Theoretical Framework
  • Rationale for Population and Location of Study
  • Research Methodology and Data Analysis
  • Defining Terms
  • Challenges and Limitations
  • Chapter Descriptions
• II. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A RACIAL DICHOTOMY IN THE U.S
  • Race as a Social Construction
  • Section 1 Race and Mixed-Race During Slavery: The Social Construction of the One-Drop Rule
    • The Construction of Race During Slavery
    • Miscegenation and the Emergence of the One-Drop Rule
  • Section 2 The Rise and Crystallization of Bright Boundaries
    • Contesting Racial Boundaries: Abolitionists, Free Negroes and Slaves Oppose Slavery
    • White Response: Entrenchment of Racist Ideology
    • Emancipation and Reconstruction Blur Boundaries
    • Southern Whites Defend their Status, Strengthening Racial Divides
    • Crystallization of the Bright Boundary: The One-Drop Rule
    • Mulattoes, Blacks, and Boundary-Work
    • Science Supports the One-Drop Rule
  • Section 3 Blurring Racial Boundaries
    • The Civil Rights Movement and its Impact
    • The Multi-Racial Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
    • Why the One-Drop Rule Persists
    • Chapter Conclusion
• III. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A COLOR HIERARCHY IN JAMAICA
  • Clarification of Terms: Color and Race
  • Section 1 Construction of Bright Boundaries: Formation of a Tripartite Color Hierarchy During Slavery (1655 to 1834)
    • African Slavery and the Beginnings of Race Ideology
    • The Impact of Demography
    • Miscegenation, Free Browns, and the Status Mixed Progeny (Slave and Free)
    • Free Browns Become Buffer
  • Section 2 Boundary Blurring: Color and Social Status from Abolition to the Independence (1834 to 1962)
    • Loss of Labor and Decline of the White Planting Class
    • Boundary-Blurring Continues: Rise of the Brown Class And Black Social Mobility
    • Complicating the Color Hierarchy: East Indians, Chinese, “Syrian” Immigrants
    • Creole Multiracialism Versus Black Nationalism
    • Persistence of a Color Hierarchy
  • Section 3 Boundary-Shifting: Race, Color and Social Status after Independence (1962 to present)
    • Boundary-Blurring: Race, Color, and Social Location
    • Color as Symbolic and Social Boundary
    • Chapter Conclusion
• IV. OUT OF MANY, ONE PEOPLE: RACE AND COLOR IN JAMAICA
  • Race is Not Important
  • Intersectionality: Class Plus Race
  • Color Draws Boundaries in Jamaica
  • Chapter Conclusion
• V. ENCOUNTERING BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY-WORK IN THE U.S
  • Race Draws Bright Boundaries in the U.S.: The Centrality of Race Boundary Maintenance: Two Worlds
  • South Florida: Three Worlds?
  • Theoretical Discussion
  • Chapter Conclusion
• VI. NAVIGATING RACIAL BOUNDARIES IN THE U.S.
  • I am Jamaican – Ethnic (Post-Racial) Identification
  • Racial Identification Choices
  • Factors Affecting Jamaicans’ Immigrants Racial Identifications
  • Choice or No Choice? The Impact of Structure on Agency and Vice Versa
  • Mixed-Race Jamaicans Doing Boundary-Work
  • Chapter Conclusion
• VII. CONCLUSION
  • Findings
  • Limitations and Directions for Future Research
  • REFERENCES
  • APPENDICES
  • VITA

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Thinking outside the box: Racial self-identification choice among mixed heritage adolescents

University of Pennsylvania
2009
234 pages
ISBN: 9781109236088

Michele Munoz-Miller

A Dissertation in Education Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to explore how and why adolescents of mixed racial heritage racially self-identify the way they do. Identification choice was defined using an adult-based identity typology (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 2001): (a) consistently monoracial (singular), (b) consistently multiracial (border), or (c) inconsistent (protean). Three sub-groups of multiracial adolescents were analyzed separately, based on their self-reported racial parentage: non-Blacks, Black/non-American Indians, and Black/American Indians. Using an identity-focused cultural ecological model (Spencer, 2006), adolescents’ perceptions of their risks and protective factors (sociodemographics), as well as their beliefs about the oppression of non-Black minorities in the United States, were investigated in terms of how well (and in what combination) they predicted self-identification choice, both across race question formats and over time.

Findings suggested that there were different personal and contextual factors implicated in self-identification choice for each sub-group of adolescents. For non-Blacks, generational proximity to racial mixture, the percentage of Blacks in one’s neighborhood, and attitudes about racial oppression in the United States were strong predictors of racial self-identification choice. Among Black/non-American Indians, these characteristics were joined by self-perceived skin tone, academic achievement level, and age in their predictive effects. Among Black/American Indians, age, self-perceived skin tone, and attitudes about racial oppression exhibited strong main effects. There was an additional interaction effect found within this group between neighborhood diversity, skin tone, and the perception of the oppression of non- black minorities in the U.S.

This work suggests that self-identification choice is linked to adolescents’ perceptions of their risks and protective factors as well as their attitudes regarding the racial climate of the United States. Providing additional nuance to the literature are the differences found across racial parentage groups. By engaging a phenomenologically focused cultural ecological framework, both self-appraisal and reactive coping processes are revealed as central to racial identity development for this understudied population. Representing a mere slice of a broader research agenda, this project contributes a unique and important perspective to the emergent body of research on the rapidly growing population of multiracial Americans.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables viii
• List of Figures x
• Chapters
  • I. Introduction
    • Racial self-identification
    • Complications of race research
    • Race versus ethnicity
    • Methodological qualifications of the present study
  • II. Literature review
    • The United States multiracial population
    • Multiracial identity research
    • Methodology: How multiracial individuals racially self-identify
    • Process: Why multiracial individuals racially self-identify the way they do
    • Identity Typology
    • Factors that influence racial self-identification choice
    • The special case of Black/American Indians
    • Symbolic ethnicity 82
    • Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
    • The Present Study
      • Component 1: Net vulnerability level
      • Component 2/3: Primary reactive coping processes
      • Component 3: Reactive coping response
    • Strengths of the present study
  • III. Method
    • Study background
    • Procedure
    • Sample
  • IV. Results
    • Preliminary Analyses
    • Research questions and hypothesis testing
  • V. Discussion
    • Overview of findings
    • Population breakdowns
    • Incidence and proportion of identity types
    • Predictive effects of independent variables
      • Component 1: Net vulnerability variables
      • Component 2/3: Primary reactive coping process variable
    • Limitations of the study
    • Implications for future research
    • Conclusion
• References

List of Tables

1. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Age, gender, academic achievement, and city
2. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Generational proximity to racial mixture
3. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Skin tone
4. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Neighborhood diversity
5. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Racial combination group
6. Rotated factor pattern for entire sample
7. Oppression perception mean scores
8. Multiracial populations by question format
9. Incidence and proportion of identity types across all datasets and racial combinations
10. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Format variability
11. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Format variability
12. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Format variability
13. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Format variability
14. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Format variability
15. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Format variability
16. Log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Temporal variability
17. Log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Temporal variability
18. Log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Temporal variability
19. Summary of findings for non-Blacks across variability types
20. Summary of findings for Black/non-American Indians across variability types
21. Summary of findings for Black/American Indians across variability types

List of Figures

1. Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
2. Engaged components of PVEST

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The physical and mental health of multiracial adolescents in the United States

University of Pennsylvania
2007
101 pages
ISBN: 9780549117445

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

A dissertation in Demographic Presented to Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in partial fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Healthy People 2010 objectives cite the need to eliminate racial disparities in health by the year 2050. However, with increases in intermarriage and migration, a growing number of individuals are self-identifying with more than one race. It is unclear whether they constitute a growing, at-risk population that policy interventions currently overlook. This analysis evaluates the physical and mental health status of multiracial adolescents, particularly in comparison to single race groups. The data are from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of approximately 20,000 youth ages 12-18 interviewed in 1995 and re-interviewed 6 years later. The main outcome measures for physical health include weight status (Body Mass Index) and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). For mental health, the measures include depression (CES-D) and self-esteem (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale). Sexual debut was also examined. Generalized Estimating Equations are used for all analyses using logistic regression and Generalized Linear Mixed Models are used for continuous dependent variables to correct for the Add Health study design. Overall, findings from this dissertation demonstrate that socioeconomic privilege does not necessarily confer positive physical and/or mental health. Interracial families have a mid- to high-socioeconomic profile; yet Asian-White multiracials exhibit a poor mental health profile and Black-White multiracials exhibit the highest risk of having STDs as adults. Moreover, most multiracial subgroups resemble their single-race minority counterparts on most outcomes considered. In terms of physical health, Asian-White and Black-White mutltiracials are not at a disproportionately high risk of being obese as young adults, irrespective of how races are categorized. This thesis has uncovered several mediated mechanisms for these patterns–yet this diverse area of research on multiracials is still in infancy. The role of peer networks, culture, and school contexts in shaping the physical and mental health of multiracials are all interesting avenues for a future researcher to pursue.

Table of Contents

Purchase the dissertation here.