Mixed Race Studies

Counseling Multiracial Families

SAGE Publications
1999
208 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780761915911
Hardcover ISBN: 9780761915904

Bea Wehrly, Professor Emeritus of Counselor Education
Western Illinois University

Kelley R. Kenney, Professor of Counseling & Human Services
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Multicultural Education and Consulting, Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania

Mark Kenney, Adjunct Professor
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Multicultural Education and Consulting, Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania

Multiracial families (families in which one member of the family has a different racial heritage than the other member(s) of the family) comprise a rapidly growing U.S. population. Counseling Multiracial Families addresses this population that has been neglected in the counseling literature. In the first chapter, readers are given a comprehensive history of racial mixing in the United States special needs and issues of multiracial families as well as special strengths of multiracial families are addressed. Challenges of interracially married couples are explored as are the social and cultural issues related to parenting and child rearing of multiracial children in today’s society. The results of biracial identity development research are translated into counseling practice with the children, adolescents, and adults in multiracial families.

Table of Contents

• Historical Overview
• Multiracial Individuals, Interracial Couples and Families
• Interracial Marriage
• Current Conditions and Challenges
• Multiracial Individuals
• Issues across the Lifespan
• Other Multiracial Families
• Intervention and Treatment of Multiracial Individuals, Couples and Families
• Case Studies

Phillip Handy examines how children form racial identities in multiracial families

Research Highlights
Rutgers University
2009-04-22

The election of America’s first mixed-race president has created new interest in what it’s like to grow up as a multiracial child. A Rutgers senior majoring in sociology and psychology has already received input from about 930 multiracial people from across the country to help provide some answers.

Phillip Handy, who grew up in Howell and has a white mother and an African-American father, was actually pondering the phenomenon before the presidential campaign ever began. In 2006, he helped form an organization called Fusion, the Rutgers Union of Mixed People, aimed at uniting people who identify with, or are interested in, the multiracial experience. A year ago, Handy was included in a New York Times article and video about mixed race.

Handy’s early interest in the field has now blossomed into academic research, which he will discuss in a panel presentation at the Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium called Race and Gender in the Family: A Mixed-Race Perspective.

Handy’s work explores how the strength of the relationship between a multiracial child and his or her parent of the same gender impacts racial identity and awareness. He hypothesizes that the children closer to the same-gender parent will gravitate toward that parent’s characteristics. In addition, he predicts that this effect will be more prominent in families where gender roles are more clearly defined…

Read the entire article here.

How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity

Temple University Press
1999
264 pages
6×9
EAN: 978-1-56639-651-6
ISBN: 1-56639-651-4

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

This compelling account of racial identity takes a close look at the question “Who is a Latino?” and determines where persons of mixed Anglo-Latino heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Kevin Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino-Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in contemporary United States.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. A “Latino” Law Student? Law 4 Sale at Harvard Law School
3. My Mother: One Assimilation Story
4. My Father: Planting the Seeds of a Racial Consciousness
5. Growing Up White?
6. College: Beginning to Recognize Racial Complexities
A Family Gallery
7. A Corporate Lawyer: Happily Avoiding the Issue
8. A Latino Law Professor
9. My Family/Mi Familia
10. Lessons for Latino Assimilation
11. What Does It All Mean for Race Relations in the United States?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

I-Dentity: The Biracial Woman as a Bridge In Third-Wave Feminism

Erica Jackson
Fall 1993

This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive discussion of the biracial experience in America, which is in no way monolithic.  In fact, it is inspired by the belief that race (whether singular or plural)  is an outdated concept and so it alone does not determine self-image, and if it does, not necessarily in the ways we stereotype each other, nor to the degree of signifigence generally attached to it in the mass media. 

Toward that end, this paper will suspend disbelief in the concept of race, in order to explore the dimensions and constructions of race.  If nothing else, I hope it raises questions about the assumptions we  carry with us.  A biracial person is first and foremost a person, with all the shared and unique qualities of any other.

Assumptions about the biracial become self-fulfilling prophecies. Like all assumptions (regarding women, or blacks, for example), they limit the possibilities of both the person making them and the person about whom they are made, and in their ability to connect.  While mixed race people are a natural link between the races of which they are a part, images of them have  instead been used for divisive purposes.

This is especially disturbing as it applies to relationships among and between white, biracial and black women.  Rather than connecting on the basis of interests or other shared experience, the relationship between blacks and biracials is often predicated upon the latter’s partial denial of heritage.  This illustrates a basic problem in race relations.  By viewing race as a fundamental identification, it becomes defined in very narrow terms and experiences, alienating blacks both from non-blacks with whom they might share profound experiences and from other black/part black biracial individuals whose experience is very different from their own.
 
Theories aside, the author questions the ability of one so tied to the issue as herself to be objective.  Are my assertions and reflections simply based on the idealism with which I judge events?  Could I be reinventing my experience to accommodate my beliefs?  Am I nit-picking or merely whining about realities I should simply accept?  Perhaps objectivity is overrated and empiricism does not always apply.  After all, if we don’t tell our own stories, who will tell them for us?  So far, no one…

Read the entire article here.

The New Color Complex: Appearances and Biracial Identity

Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research
2001
Volume 3, Number 1
Pags 29-52

David L. Brunsma, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Missouri, Columbia

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Ethnic identity research has largely focused on the identity choices of White ethnics (Alba, 1990; Ignatiev, 1995; Waters, 1990). One key factor in these choices is bodily appearance. We extend this research to Black and White Biracial individuals and examine the role that physical appearance plays in their “choices” of racial identity.  We test Rockquemore’s (1999) taxonomy of Biracial identity using survey data from a sample of 177 Biracial respondents. The results indicate that Biracial individuals do make choices within circumscribed cultural contexts and these understandings are influenced not by skin color, but by an actor’s assumption of how others perceive his or her appearance.

Read the entire article here.

The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier

SAGE Publications
1995
512 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780803970595

Edited by Maria P. P. Root

In her bold new edited volume, The Multiracial Experience, Maria P. P. Root challenges current theoretical and political conceptualizations of race by examining the experience of mixed-race individuals. Articulating questions that will form the basis for future discussions of race and identity, the contributors tackle concepts such as redefining ethnicity when race is less central to the definition and how a multiracial model might dismantle our negative construction of race. Researchers and practitioners in ethnic studies, anthropology, education, law, psychology, nursing, social work, and sociology add personal insights in chapter-opening vignettes while providing integral critical viewpoints. Sure to stimulate thinking and discussion, the contributors focus on the most contemporary racial issues, including the racial classification system from the U.S. Census to the schools; the differences between race, ethnicity, and colorism; gender and sexuality in a multicultural context; ethnic identity and identity formation; transracial adoption; and the future of race relations in the United States. The Multiracial Experience opens up the dialogue to rethink and redefine race and social relations in this country. This volume provides discussions key to all professionals, practitioners, researchers, and students in multicultural issues, ethnic relations, sociology, education, psychology, management, and public health.

Table of Contents

The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as a Significant Frontier in Race Relations – Maria P. P. Root

PART ONE: HUMAN RIGHTS

• A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People –  Maria P. P. Root
• Government Classification of Multiracial/Multiethnic People – Carlos A. Fernandez
• The Real World – Susan R. Graham
• Multiracial Identity in a Color-Conscious World – Deborah A. Ramirez
• Transracial Adoptions: In Whose Best Interest? – Ruth G. McRoy and Christine C. Iijima Hall
• Voices from the Movement: Approaches to Multiraciality – Cynthia L. Nakashima

PART TWO: IDENTITY

• Hidden Agendas, Identity Theories, and Multiracial People –  Michael C. Thornton
• Black and White Identity in the New Millenium: Unsevering the Ties That Bind – G. Reginald Daniel
• On Being and Not-Being Black and Jewish – Naomi Zack
• An `Other’ Way of Life: The Empowerment of Alterity in the Interracial Individual – Jan R. Weisman

PART THREE: BLENDING AND FLEXIBILITY

• LatiNegra Lillian: Mental Health Issues of African –  Lillian Comas-Diaz
• Race as Process: Reassessing the `What Are You?’ Encounters of Biracial Individuals – Teresa Kay Williams
• Piecing Together the Puzzle: Self-Concept and Group Identity in Biracial Black/White Youth – Lynda D. Field
• Changing Face, Changing Race: The Remaking of Race in the Japanese American and African American Communities – Rebecca Chiyoko King and Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Without a Template: The Biracial Korean/White Experience – Brian Chol Soo Standen

PART FOUR: GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY

• In the Margins of Sex and Race: Difference, Marginality, and Flexibility – George Kitahara Kich
• (Un)Natural Boundaries: Mixed Race, Gender, and Sexuality – Karen Maeda Allman
• Heterosexual Alliances: The Romantic Management of Racial Identity-  Francine Winddance Twine
• Ambiguous Bodies: Locating Black/White Women in Cultural Representations – Caroline A. Streeter

PART FIVE: MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

• Making the Invisible Visible: The Growth of Community Network Organizations – Nancy G. Brown and Ramona E. Douglass
• Challenging Race and Racism: A Framework for Educators – Ronald David Glass and Kendra R. Wallace
• Being Different Together in the University Classroom: Multiracial Identity as Transgressive Education – Teresa Kay Williams et al
• Multicultural Education – Francis Wardle

PART SIX: THE NEW MILLENIUM

• 2001: A Race Odyssey – Christine C. Iijima Hall

Author Dr. Bonnie M. Davis Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.  Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #135 – Bonnie M. Davis, Ph.D.
When: Wednesday, 2010-01-06, 22:00Z

Bonnie M. Davis, Ph.D., Author and Educator
Educating For Change^®

Bonnie M. Davis is a veteran teacher of 37 years who is passionate about education. She has taught in middle schools, high schools, universities, homeless shelters, and a men’s prison. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including Teacher of the Year, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Anti-Defamation League’s World of Difference Community Service Award. Davis has presented at numerous national conferences and provides services to schools through her consulting firm, A4Achievement. Her publications include The Biracial and Multiracial Student Experience: A Journey to Racial Literacy (2009), How to Coach Teachers Who Don’t Look Like You (2007), How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You (2006), African-American Academic Achievement: Building a Classroom of Excellence (2001) and numerous articles on literacy instruction. Dr. Davis will be the keynote and featured speaker at the National Association of African-American Studies (NAAAS) 2010 Teacher Summer Conference, June 27-30, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.  She received her BS in education, her MA in English, her MAI in communi­cations, and her PhD in English.

Puerto Rican Phenotype: Understanding Its Historical Underpinnings and Psychological Associations

Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
(2008)
Vol. 30, No. 2
pages 161-180
DOI: 10.1177/0739986307313116

Irene López, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Kenyon College

The following is a historically informed review of Puerto Rican phenotype. Geared toward educating psychologists, this review discusses how various psychological issues associated with phenotype may have arisen as a result of historical legacies and policies associated with race and racial mixing. It discusses how these policies used various markers to demarcate an “authentic” Puerto Rican identity, and how we continue to reference these variables when defining Puerto Rican identity, despite the fact that identity is contextual and fluid. In reviewing the historical underpinnings and contextual nature of phenotype, it is hoped that the reader will gain a greater appreciation of the role of phenotype in the lives of Puerto Ricans and understand how phenotype, and, most importantly, historical trauma can be related to a host of psychological concerns.

Multiculturalism in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru

Race & Class
(2008)
Vol. 49, No. 4
pages 1-21
DOI: 10.1177/0306396808089284

Felipe Arocena (farocena@fcs.edu.uy), Professor of Sociology
Universidad de la República-Uruguay

The different strategies of resistance deployed by discriminated ethnic groups in Brazil, Peru and Bolivia are analysed here. In Brazil, Afro movements and indigenous populations are increasingly fighting against discrimination and developing their cultural identities, while demystifying the idea of Brazil’s national identity as a racial democracy. In Peru and Bolivia, indigenous populations are challenging the generally accepted idea of integration through miscegenation (racial mixing). Assimilation through race-mixing has been the apparent solution in most Latin American countries since the building of the nation states. Its positive side is that a peaceful interethnic relationship has been constructed but its negative side, stressed in recent multicultural strategies, is that different ethnicities and cultures have been accepted only as parts of this intermingling and rarely recognised as the targets of discrimination.

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

W. W. Norton
May 2006
240 pages
5.8 × 8.6 in
ISBN: 978-0-393-05890-1

Kym Ragusa, Professor of Nonfiction &  Professor Writing
Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Inistitute of Technology

A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty.

Kym Ragusa’s stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa’s working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them.

From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker’s observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa’s sensuous memories are a reader’s delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.