Mixed Race Studies

Good Question: Is Obama The First Black President?

WCCO-TV
Good Question
2008-11-05

Jason Derush, Reporter

You can’t turn on television or read a newspaper without seeing a reference to Sen. Barack Obama, the first black President. But wait a minute, said Naomi Banks, if Obama has a white mother, “My question is… why isn’t he the first biracial American President?” asked Banks.

“I think it’s more representative of reality,” she added. “It represents our country and how it’s changing with demographics.”

Banks said she has a special interest in the question, because she considers herself to be multiracial.

“My mother is Caucasian, my father is Native American and African-American,” she explained. “I’m proud of all aspects of my heritage,” said Banks, who said she couldn’t imagine leaving part of it out.

“I think of him as being an African-American of multiracial ancestry,” said Enid Logan, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.

Logan’s team has been interviewing University of Minnesota students about their racial attitudes in relation to the candidacy of President-Elect Obama…

…”Is the black/white binary still the primary axis around which races relations in the U.S. revolve?” asked Logan. “I think for the most part it absolutely is.”

Logan said that people feel a need to label others in terms of race, because along with gender, race is one way that American society has been historically organized. It’s a shortcut.

“It’s a society that sees itself as colorblind, but race is important. And people feel disoriented if they can’t figure out what race other people are, they don’t know how to interact with them,” explained Logan…

Read the entire article here.

Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place

Duke University Press
September 2010
400 pages
21 photographs, 14 tables, 4 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4787-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4803-0

Edited By:

Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mount Holyoke College

Justin Wolfe, William Arceneaux Associate Professor of Latin American History
Tulane University

Contributors: Paul Lokken, Russell Lohse, Karl H. Offen, Rina Cáceres Gómez, Catherine Komisaruk , Juliet Hooker, Lara Putnam, Ronald Harpelle, Mauricio Meléndez Obando

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African roots and participation in favor of Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of a region considered by many to be one of the most successful cases of African American achievement, political participation, and power following independence from Spain in 1821.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction / Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe

Part I. Colonial Worlds of Slavery and Freedom

 
• Angolans in Amatitlán: Sugar, African Immigrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala / Paul Lokken
• Cacao and Slavery in Matina, Costa Rica, 1650-1750 / Russell Lohse
• Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1600-1787 / Karl H. Offen
• Slavery and Social Differentiation: Slave Wages in Omoa / Rina Cáceres Gómez
• Becoming Free, Becoming Ladino: Slave Emancipation and Mestizaje in Colonial Guatemala / Catherine Komisaruk

Part II. Nation Building and Reinscribing Race 

• “The Cruel Whip”: Race and Place in Nineteenth-Century Nigaragua / Justin Wolfe
• What Difference did Color Make? Blacks in the “White Towns” of Western Nicaragua in the 1880s / Lowell Gudmundson
• Race and the Space of Citizenship: The Mosquito Coast and the Place of Blackness and Indigeneity in Nicaragua / Juliet Hooker
• Eventually Alien: The Multigenerational Saga of British Western Indians in Central America, 1870-1940 / Lara Putnam
• White Zones: American Enclave Communities of Central America / Ronald Harpelle
• The Slow Ascent of the Marginalized: Afro-Descendents in Costa Rica and Nicaragua / Mauricio Meléndez Obando

Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities

Ashgate Publishing
May 2010
Illustrations: Includes 24 (including 5 tables) line drawings
234 x 156 mm
224 pages
Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7860-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7546-9691-9
BL Reference: 305.8’0083-dc22
 
Sultana Choudhry, Principal Lecturer in Psychology and Director of Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health
London Metropolitan University, UK

The number of interethnic individuals is one of the most striking demographic changes in Britain over the last decade. Demonstrating both that identity is fluid and multifaceted rather than fixed, and that people of an interethnic background do not necessarily experience identity conflict as proposed by some social scientists, Multifaceted Identity of Inter-ethnic Young People explores the manner in which interethnic young people define their identities. In doing so, it also looks at their parents and their experiences as interethnic couples in society. Presenting rich new empirical information relating to young people of Black, White, Asian and Chinese interethnic backgrounds, this book also examines the impact that inter-religious relationships have upon young people’s sense of identity, whilst also discussing the implications of the election of America’s first interethnic president. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists working in the fields of race, ethnicity and identity.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Placing Identity Theory and Research in Context
Introduction
Social science theories and research on identity
The science of ethnic and inter-ethnic identity

Part 2: The Research
How the research was carried out

Part 3: Voices – Non Inter-Ethnic and Inter-Ethnic
Non-inter ethnic parents and children
Inter-ethnic couples

Part 4: The Coming of the Chameleons
Who am I? Identities adopted
A chameleon identity
The fine art of choosing an identity
The impact of being inter-ethnic
Conclusions: the future is inter-ethnic

Appendices
References
Index

Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future (Revised and Updated)

W. W. Norton & Company
June 2010
288 pages
5.5 × 8.25 in
Paperback ISBN 978-0-393-33685-6

by

Angela Glover Blackwell

Stewart Kwoh

Manuel Pastor, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of California, Santa Cruz

With a mixed-race president, a Latino population that is now the largest minority, and steadily growing Asian and Native American populations, race is both the most dynamic facet of American identity and the defining point of American disunity.

By broadening the racial dialogue, Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink; Kwoh, president of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center; and Pastor, professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, bring new perspective to this essential American issue.

Ethical Considerations in Social Work Research with Multiracial Individuals

Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics
Volume 7, Number 1 (2010)
10 pages

Kelly F. Jackson, MSW, PhD, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Growing diversity in the U.S. has prioritized social work’s ethical obligation to develop specialized knowledge and understanding of culture and its function in human behavior and society. One ethnic minority group that is receiving growing attention in the social sciences is multiracial persons, or persons who identify with more than one race or ethnic group. This population represents one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in the United States.  The growing presence and visibility of multiracial persons in the US demands that social work researchers critically examine and understand the complexity of identity as it applies to people who identify with more than one race. This article will discuss both past and present conceptualizations of multiracial identity, and the methodological challenges specific to investigations with multiracial participants. This article will conclude with recommended strategies for ensuring ethically responsible and culturally sensitive research with multiracial persons.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 1, 2010
Pages 142-165
E-ISSN: 1536-0334
Print ISSN: 0160-9009
DOI: 10.5250/fronjwomestud.31.1.142

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Associate Professor
Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

How is it that people know when they belong and to what they belong? This question, about the epistemology of belonging, carries a particular complexity for mixed-race women. How is it that mixed-race women create a sense of identification with others? What are the unities and disjunctures? What can we understand about epistemologies of belonging through examining how mixed-race women create belonging? Through qualitative work based on the life stories of women of mixed heritage, in this paper I examine how the navigation of hybridity, as it is experienced in the lives of six “hybrid” mixed-race women, illuminates the complexities of identity construction and epistemologies of belonging. I use the term epistemology to signify the nature of knowledge, how we come to know things, in this case knowledge, or knowing, related to belonging. Belonging in human relations is connected to identity, both self-identification and identification with others…

Read or purchase the article here.

Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey Toward Acceptance

The New York Times
2009-11-09

John Branch

PITTSBURGH — Steelers receiver Hines Ward surrounded himself with old friends at the dinner table on a recent Saturday night. The bond was as obvious as the look on everyone’s faces — half Korean, half something else. The shared experience was far more than skin deep.

There was a boy who was bullied into depression and tried to commit suicide. There was a girl ordered by a teacher to keep her hair pulled back tight, to straighten the natural curls she inherited from her black father. There was another too intimidated by her taunting classmates to board the bus, choosing instead the humiliating and lonely walk to school. There were the boys who were beaten regularly and teased mercilessly. There were college-age girls who broke into tears when telling their stories of growing up biracial in South Korea.

But when they looked around the table, they saw familiarity. And a future…

…“It was hard for me to find my identity,” Ward said. “The black kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I had a Korean mom. The white kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. The Korean kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. It was hard to find friends growing up. And then once I got involved in sports, color didn’t matter.”

But there is no such relief valve for most of the estimated 19,000 biracial children in South Korea. The fast-growing majority of them are Kosians, with a parent from a different Asian country.

The number of Amerasians — those generally with white or black American fathers, often from the military — is slowly shrinking. But their mere appearance leads to harsher discrimination, officials said.

“Korea is traditionally a single blood,” said Wondo Koh, a Korean who met up with the group in Pittsburgh while doing business. “We Koreans are not comfortable with this mixed-blood situation. We have become familiar now, but we did not know how to cope.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Identity and Self-Esteem: Problems Peculiar to Biracial Children

Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry
Volume 24, Issue 2, (March 1985)
Pages 150-153
DOI: 10.1016/S0002-7138(09)60440-4

Michael R. Lyles, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
University of Kentucky College of Medicine

Antronette Yancey, M.D.
University of Kentucky College of Medicine

Candis Grace, M.D.
University of Kentucky College of Medicine

James H. Carter, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Duke University Medical Center

This report illustrates several identity problems peculiar to a child of black and white parentage, who was reared by a white maternal grandmother in the South. The pervasive racial bigotry of the child’s family and community is contrasted with the child’s intrapsychic struggle for positive identity and self-esteem. The course of dynamic psychotherapy with this child is portrayed, with pertinent treatment issues dilineated and recommendations for therapy proposed.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Celtic Samurai’ Tells Story of Hapa Family Life

Hokubei.com – North America’s Japanese Newsource
2010-06-18

“Celtic Samurai,” a storytelling program by Dr. Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu on the family life of a Japanese mother and American-born Irish father, will be presented by the Japanese American National Library and the Nichi Bei Weekly on Saturday, June 19, [2010] at 1:30 p.m. in the Union Bank Hospitality Room, located in the Japan Center’s East Mall, Post and Buchanan streets in San Francisco.

The subtitle, “A Boy’s Transcultural Journey Searching for Shamrocks in Zen Gardens,” expresses the playful nature of the stories that illuminate how political, legal and ideological forces influence the lives of families and individual identities

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Developing a positive racial identity–challenges for psychotherapists working with black and mixed race adopted adults

The Psychotherapist
Spring 2010
pages 10-12

Esther Ina-Egbe, Psychotherapist, Counsellor and Trainer

In this article, Esther Ina-Egbe argues that psychotherapists need to explore the repetitions and lack of mirroring that may be present in the therapeutic relationship

There is a huge body of knowledge on the development of racial identity. This article has been influenced by notable writers and critics, such as Schwartz, and Armstrong and Slaytor, who have carried out extensive work on this topic. I have also consulted other writers and formed my own opinion and judgments based on my experience in private practice.

What is racial identity?
Before addressing how to develop a positive racial identity, we must first look at what racial identity is. Armstrong and Slaytor consider that children as young as two and a half years old are aware of racial differences, and that development of a positive racial identity does not just happen but must be cultivated. Bath and North-East Somerset Council has defined racial identity as ‘one’s self perception and sense of belonging to a particular group including not only how one describes and defines oneself, but also how one distinguishes oneself from other ethnic groups’. According to this definition, racial and ethnic group differences will certainly impact on children’s social development, although that impact may differ according to age and specific ethnicity. Hence, social context, immediate surroundings and historical heritage are underpinning factors in the development of a child’s race awareness and identity…

…Mixed race heritage
Having a mixed ethnic heritage has a different effect on a child’s development (Herring, 1992), and it is therefore very important to actively help mixed race children acquire a positive self-concept. They need exposure to models of all the ethnicities they embrace. They need to understand what it means to be mixed race and to acquire coping skills linked to their cultures, including ways to deal with racism and discrimination (Wardle, 1987).  Referring to the American experience, where there is dearth of fully integrated, stable and tension-free racially mixed communities, Miller and Rotheram-Borus (1994) advise that ‘families and schools must work hard to provide a supportive community that affirms multi-racialism’. A key factor in the lives of mixed race children and adults is how they are labelled by themselves, their families and society in general. Root (1996) views labels as a motivating factor, stating that ‘labels are important vehicles for self-empowerment as there has been an increase in the self-determination of interracial families’. Many have become active politically to ensure that they are accepted as a group with special concerns separate from other racial or ethnic populations. A recent example is the current president of the USA, Barack Obama.

Mixed race children and adults need to work through internal conflicts and guilt about having to develop an identity that might not incorporate all aspects of their heritage and to resist internalising society’s negative attitudes, mixed racialism and minority status. Ultimately, successful identity formation, or a satisfying feeling of wholeness, requires that mixed race people appreciate and integrate all components of their heritage into their lives (Poston, 1990). Furthermore, while some families help their children develop a biracial identity based on the components of their particular background, it is important for children to take equal pride in all their heritages and to maintain equal connections with all members of their family. According to Pinderhughes (1995), some of these families recognise that their children’s appearance reflects their dual heritage and they want the family’s culture to embody that. However, other families foster their children’s identification with only one race. Single parents, especially, may want to emphasise the culture of their own race because that is what they know best and because their children resemble them (Mills, 1994). Some parents of children with African ancestry may assume that society will consider the children black, so they raise them as black to better prepare them for their treatment in later life (Morrison and Rodgers, 1996). In addition, society may encourage children only to identify with their minority group in an effort to maintain the ‘racial purity’ of whites. Conversely, some mixed race children may be urged to assume a white identity on the assumption that if they can ‘pass’ as white they can avoid experiencing racism (Miller and Rotheram-Borus, 1994)…

Read the entire article here.