Mixed Race Studies

Race-specific norms for coding face identity and a functional role for norms

Journal of Vision
Volume 10, Number 7, Article 706 (2010-08-02)
doi: 10.1167/10.7.706

Regine Armann
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany

Linda Jeffery
School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, Australia

Andrew J. Calder
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK

Isabelle Bülthoff
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany

Gillian Rhodes
School of Psychology, The University of Western Australia, Australia

High-level perceptual aftereffects have revealed that faces are coded relative to norms that are dynamically updated by experience. The nature of these norms and the advantage of such a norm-based representation, however, are not yet fully understood. Here, we used adaptation techniques to get insight into the perception of faces of different race categories. We measured identity aftereffects for adapt-test pairs that were opposite a race-specific average and pairs that were opposite a ‘generic’ average, made by morphing together Asian and Caucasian faces. Aftereffects were larger following exposure to anti-faces that were created relative to the race-specific (Asian and Caucasian) averages than to anti-faces created using the mixed-race average. Since adapt-test pairs that lie opposite to each other in face space generate larger identity aftereffects than non-opposite test pairs, these results suggest that Asian and Caucasian faces are coded using race-specific norms. We also found that identification thresholds were lower when targets were distributed around the race-specific norms than around the mixed-race norm, which is also consistent with a functional role for race-specific norms.

…The Korean word for a bi or multiracial person, despite the composition of their mixture, is honhyeol (in), which literally translates into impure blood. There has been a “pride” instilled in Koreans for their “ethnic homogeneity” which has resulted in “fear and distrust of outsiders” (The Economist, 2006). The connotation for Korea, which bases its national identity upon the notion of Koreans descending from one common ancestor and speaking one language, is that these offspring of interracial relationships are not Korean, because they have more than Korean blood coursing through their veins. It makes sense then that the oppositional identity of these “pure blooded” Koreans came about as a sort of resistance to the first Chinese invasion, then Japanese imperialism, and then finally Western imperialism in the form of American occupation after the Korean War. Korean nationalism was wrapped up in the idea of “consanguinity” to link “ethnic homogeneity” to a “profound sense of cultural distinctiveness and superiority.” (Kim, 2007) As these countries made their presence known, Korea began to rely on internal colonialism, which economically exploited and political excluded groups different from the dominant group, becoming a reminder there can be “colonial subjects – on the national soil.” (Gordon, 2006; Blauner 1972, p. 52) For many then, international marriages were “associated with the invasion of Korea by other countries” and were subsequently seen as “betrayals of nationalism” where the children resulting from those unions became physical reminders of that betrayal (Lee). Kim Sok-soo believes that the coupling of nationalism with ethnic homogeneity ultimately has became a “useful tool for the South Korean government when the country was embroiled in ideological turmoil. It was used as an effective tool to make its people obedient and easy to govern” (Park, 2006). The way the bodies of these bi and multiracial Koreans are, in both social and political realms, recognized, regulated, and ultimately utilized through relationships maintained by various institutions of the state is essential to a particular form of governmentality…

Washington, Myra. “More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 95th Annual Convention, Chicago Hilton & Towers, Chicago, IL, Nov 11, 2009 Online <PDF>. 2010-08-09 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p368501_index.html>

Institutions, Inculcation, and Black Racial Identity: Pigmentocracy vs. the Rule of Hypodescent

Social Identities
Volume 14, Issue 5 (September 2008)
pages 567-585
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802343390

Richard T. Middleton IV, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Missouri, St. Louis

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures—a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis—vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.

Read or purchase the article here.

Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico

University of Oklahoma Press
December 2010
400 pages
30 B&W Illus., 2 Maps
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806140537

Shirley Boteler Mock, Research Fellow
Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin

Explores a unique and eclectic culture rooted in African traditions

Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women’s roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider’s perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In Dreaming with the Ancestors, Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences.

Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language—even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the “warrior women”—keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, Dreaming with the Ancestors combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

The Risks of Multiracial Identification

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2006-11-10

Naomi Schaefer Riley

The comment period has closed on proposed new guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education on how colleges should ask students about race. No longer, the guidelines say, should applicants simply be given the choice of black, white, Asian, American Indian (or Alaska Native), or native Hawaiian (or other Pacific Islander). Now they should be allowed to check off more than one box, as well as note whether they identify as Hispanic. Eugene L. Anderson, an associate director of the American Council on Education, told Diverse, a higher-education magazine, that he expected colleges would be pleased with the new guidelines: “They make sense; they respect peoples’ individual notion of racial identity, which is important.”

No doubt colleges also appreciate the department’s instructions for practical reasons. The proliferation of multiracial options on a variety of forms, including college applications, reflects the new demographic reality in America. On the 2000 census, nearly seven million Americans checked off two or more racial boxes. And a study last year by researchers at Cornell University found that the number of interracial marriages involving white people, black people, or Hispanics each year in the United States has jumped tenfold since the 1960s.

In a sense, these developments represent the realization of the dream of a melting pot. In 1963 Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, penned a controversial essay called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” expressing despair about the chances for real racial integration in this country. That could not occur, he wrote, “unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.”…

…But even those mixed-race groups cannot satisfy some students. One told the Crimson that her acquaintances at Harvard’s Hapa group focused too much on East Asian identities, instead of South Asian ones. They went out, she complained, for dim sum, “which I enjoy, but don’t identify with culturally.” But she didn’t feel welcome in the regular South Asian group, either, because in a theatrical performance the group’s leaders cast her in the role of a white person.

The level of specificity that seems to be required for many young men and women to feel comfortable today is bordering on the absurd. Ultimately it’s sad. Advocates of diversity on college campuses insist that they are not just assembling faces of different colors for aesthetic purposes; they are trying to offer students a model of how to live in a multiracial, multiethnic society. But students do not seem to be learning to be more tolerant of people unlike them. They are demanding that they be surrounded and sheltered by people who are exactly like them.

Colleges have long experienced what sociologists refer to as the “lunch-table problem.” That tendency toward racial self-segregation may find its origins in students’ upbringings, but it is surely furthered by campus multiculturalists. Over the years, I have had many students I’ve interviewed tell me that they were never encouraged to identify themselves by their race so much as when they set foot on a college campus. Both administrators and student-run organizations often pressured them to engage in activities that put them in a particular racial box. So it’s not surprising that students now want activities that conform to every contour of their ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Part Asian, Not Hapa

Open Salon
Thoughts from a Third Culture: on being mixed in America
2010-07-27

Mia Nakaji Monnier

My mother is Japanese from Osaka; my father, American from a small town in Western Oregon. There’s a word for people like me, used especially on the West Coast and popularized in recent years, maybe most notably by artist Kip Fulbeck:

Hapa.

From the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole” (“half white”), the word “hapa” has come to be a label that many multiracial people with some Asian heritage incorporate into their identities, whether they wear it with pride or with ambivalence.

I don’t wear it at all.

It’s not that I think “hapa” is an offensive word, though my parents took issue with it as my brothers and I were growing up, their reason being that it means, literally, “half.” “Haafu,” the Japanese equivalent has the same literal meaning and I’ve even heard people skip over both these words entirely, going straight to “half.” As in, “You look a little Japanese. Are you half?” or “Why do you work at the Japanese American National Museum? OH, are you half?!”…

Read the entire essay here.

A Biracial Identity or a New Race? The Historical Limitations and Political Implications of a Biracial Identity

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society
Volume 3, Number 4 (Fall 2001)
pages 83-112

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Over the past fifteen years in the United States, there has emerged a concerted push to racially reclassify persons with one Black and one white parent as biracial.  Advocates of racial reclassification are calling for the establishment of a biracial identity that is both socially and officially recognized.  They are joined by a cohort of scholars, many of whom are themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for persons of mixed parentage than a Black one. Social scientist have dominated these discussions, concerned primarily with the experiences and identity of people of mixed parentage. They maintain that a biracial identity would better recognized the complete racial background of persons of mixed parentage and offer a more mentally healthy racial identity than a Black racial identity.  Moreover, the exalt a biracial identity as a positive step in moving society beyond issues of race and towards the realization of a color-blind society.

Focusing on the scholarship advocating a biracial identity for people with one Black and one white parent, I argue that such an identity has no historical basis, and would have a negative political impact on African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Black, White and Other… Worldwide

The Huffington Post
2010-07-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Even though the 21st century is seeing an exponential increase in reports of multiracial ancestry worldwide, exactly what makes a person multiracial remains a puzzling concept. According to the Association of Multiethnic Americans and Project RACE, the definition of a multiracial/interracial person is either someone whose parents were of more than one race or racial background, or someone who had parents that were of different racial groups. But what about those who identify with more than one racial background, irrespective of their parents’ identities? Or, those who identify with a racial background completely different from those of their parents?

Case in point: Nmachi Ihegboro, a blond haired and blue-eyed white baby born earlier this month to proud black Nigerian parents Ben and Angela Ihegboro in London UK. Nmachi’s parents are somewhat mystified about how they could create a white child and they are not the only ones. According to the New York Post, genetics experts are also baffled. So far they have offered three theories: (1) Nmachi “is the result of a gene mutation unique to her. If that is the case, Nmachi would pass the gene to her children — and they, too, would likely be white. (2) She’s the product of long-dormant white genes… that might have been carried by” her ancestors “for generations without surfacing until now.” Genetics professor Sykes of Oxford University thinks that some form of mixed race ancestry would seem to be necessary, and notes that sometimes multiracial women can carry some genetic material for white children and some genetic material for black children. It is also conceivable that the same holds true for multiracial men. (3) “While doctors have said Nmachi is not an outright albino, or lacking in all pigment, they added that the child may have some kind of mutated version of the genetic condition — and that her skin could darken over time.”…

Read the entire article here.

More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity

NCA 95th Annual Convention
Chicago Hilton & Towers
Chicago, Illinois
2009-11-11

Myra Washington
College of Media, Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois

When Hines Ward was named MVP of Super Bowl XL, his Black and Korean biracial status became the touchstone for conversations about mixed-race people in Korea. His “homecoming” trip generated a frenzied discourse around the limits of Korean identity and the location of bi/multiracial individuals within it. Ward’s racial representation allows for the analysis of nationhood, citizenship, difference and race as imagined through blood metaphors.

Read the entire paper here.

Black and White, or Shades of Gray? Racial Labeling of Barack Obama Predicts Implicit Race Perception

Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy
Volume 10, Issue 1 (December 2010)
pages 207–222
DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-2415.2010.01213.x

Lori Wu Malahy
University of Washington

Mara Sedlins
University of Washington

Jason Plaks, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Toronto

Yuichi Shoda, Professor of Psychology
University of Washington

The present research capitalized on the prominence and multiracial heritage of U.S. 2008 presidential election candidate Barack Obama to examine whether individual differences in classifying him as Black or as multiracial corresponded to differences in implicit perception of race. This research used a newly developed task (Sedlins, Malahy, & Shoda, 2010) with digitally morphed mixed-race faces to assess implicit race perception. Participants completed this task four times before and one time after the election. We found that people who labeled Obama as Black implicitly perceived race as more categorical than those who labeled Obama as multiracial. This finding adds to the growing literature on multiracial perception by demonstrating a relationship between the explicit use of multiracial and monoracial race classification and implicit race perception. The results suggest potential implications for governmental, educational, and judiciary usage of racial categories.

Read or purchase the article here.