Mixed Race Studies

One Drop, No Rule: Identity Options among Multiracial Children in the U.S.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA,
2005-08-12

Anthony Daniel Perez, Assistant Professor
Chapel Hill Department of Sociology
University of North Carolina

This paper examines the links between family background characteristics and patterns of identification among multiracial children in the U.S. I improve upon previous studies of multiracial classification by expanding the identity choice set to include a broader and more thorough range of classificatory options. In undertaking this analysis, I examine the large, nationally representative 5% Public Use Microdata from the Census 2000 long form. I find that children living in two-parent households with one white parent and one non-white parent are almost equally likely to identify (or be identified) as white, non-white, or multiracial. I further note that: 1.) Patterns of identification vary widely by mixed race subgroup and socioeconomic status. 2.) Racial differences in identification vary by socioeconomic status. 3.) The pathways to “white passing” are related but distinct from pathways to multiracial identification.

To read the entire paper, click here.

The Social Process of Racial Identity Development Across Adolescence: Monoracial vs. Multiracial Pathways

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA
2005-08-12

33 pages

Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

J. Scott Brown
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Glen H. Elder, Jr.
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research on multiracial individuals has been increasing recently, partly due to the advent of a new racial measurement convention in the 2000 Census. However, the cross-sectional nature of this work obscures a vital aspect of multiracial identity; multiracial identity appears much more fluid than monoracial identity. Using a longitudinal, nationally representative sample of adolescents, we find that a significant percentage of American adolescents demonstrate fluidity in racial self-reports as they make the transition to adulthood. We identify six possible pathways of multiracial identity development and find that significant numbers of adolescents report racial identification consistent with each pathway. Importantly, over time many more adolescents add a racial identity (Diversify) or subtract one (Consolidate) than remain consistently multiracial. We then turn to exploring mean differences between pathways along a number of psychological and social characteristics. Finally, we attempt to predict developmental pathways of racial identification within a multinomial framework. Ultimately, our study attempts to re-frame a developmental perspective by focusing on the demonstrated fluidity inherent in multiracial identity development. 

Read the entire paper here.

The Formation of Multiracial Identities

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting,
Sheraton Boston and the Boston Marriott Copley Place
Boston, MA
2008-07-31

Crystal Bedley
Rutgers University

Since the 1970s, research on the multiracial population has been largely theoretically driven without substantial empirical investigation into how mixed-race people form a multiracial identity. This project articulates the historical, political, and cultural contexts that multiracial people experience living in the United States in order to build a foundation for exploring the particular social and cultural factors that influence multiracial identity development in mixed-race persons. In addition, this project bridges the psychological and sociological literatures on the multiracial population through its discussion of social/ecological influences on identity and identity theory.  The author will conduct in-depth interviews (starting this spring) with 30-50 mixed-race respondents to better understand not only the multiracial identity formation process, but also to grasp the ways in which Hispanic/Latino identities complicate the formation of a multiracial identity, as well as exploring how context influences the expression of this identity.

Read the entire paper here.

The Relationship Between Multiracial Identity Variance, Social Connectedness, Facilitative Support, and Adjustment in Multiracial College Students

University of Oregon
June 2008
151 pages

James Lyda

A Dissertation presented to the Department of Counseling Psychology and Human Services and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Research has suggested that multiracial individuals may vary in how they racially identify depending on the context in which they operate (Renn, 2004; Root, 1998, 2003).  To examine this assertion, multiracial identity and variance in multiracial identity were examined in this exploratory study of a nationally representative sample of 199 multiracial college students.  Additionally, the relationship of multiracial identity variance with factors common to adult transitional development and to the college student experience, including social connectedness, various forms of facilitative support, college adjustment, and depression, were also examined in this study.  Sex differences among these study variables were also explored.

The results of descriptive analyses revealed that this generally connected, adjusted, and non-depressed sample consistently varied their racial identity depending on their context.  Results of Pearson product-moment correlations among study variables for the whole sample demonstrated that this multiracial identity variance was not related to adjustment, social connectedness, facilitative supports, or depression. But results differed when breaking down the sample by sex. For males, increased variance in multiracial identity across contexts was related to lower perceived availability of, support from, and connectedness to student support groups. For females, increased multiracial identity variance was related to lower participation in ethnic and cultural student support groups.  A series of subsequent simultaneous multiple regression analyses revealed that increased involvement in one form of facilitative support in the college environmentethnic/cultural student support groups- actually predicted lower multiracial identity variance for the sample.

Regarding connectedness, for the entire sample, higher social connectedness was related to higher college adjustment but lower participation in ethnic and cultural student support groups.  Sex differences also emerged for connectedness. For males, social connectedness was directly related to availability of student groups, adjustment, and institutional attachment, and for females social connectedness was directly related to college adjustment, but inversely related to participation in ethnic/cultural groups.

Table of Contents

I. RATIONALE
Historical, Political, and Social Implications of Mixed Race Identity
Racial and Ethnic Identity
Multiracial Identity Models
Monoracial Identity Development Models
Biracial and Multiethnic Identity Development Models
Ecological Models of Multiracial Identity Development
Wardel and Cruz-jansen’s Model
Root’s Model
Multiracial Identity Variance
Social Connectedness
Social Connectedness and Multiracial Identity: Influence of Sex
Facilitative Support
College Adjustment
Depression
Purpose of This Study
Research Questions

II. METHODOLOGY
Participants
Measures
Demographics
Multiracial Identity Variance
Social Connectedness
Facilitative Supports
College Adjustment
Chapter
Depression
Procedures
Pmticipant Recruitment
Data Collection
Sample Size

III. RESULTS
Overview
Preliminary Analyses
Descriptive Analyses
Multiracial Identity Variance
Sex Differences
Social Connectedness
Sex Differences
Perceptions of Facilitative Student Supports
Sex Differences
College Adjustment
Sex Differences
Depression
Sex Differences
Correlation Analyses
Multiracial Identity Variance
Social Connectedness
Facilitative Supports
College Adjustment
Depression
Regression Analyses
Explaining Multiracial Identity Variance.
Explaining Social Connectedness.
Explaining Depression
Summary of Results

IV. DISCUSSION
Main Findings: Relationship Among Variables
Demographics
Multiracial Identity Variance
Social Connectedness
Facilitative Supports
College Adjustment
Depression
Sex Differences
Implications of the Findings
Study Limitations
Future Research and Intervention
Conclusion

APPENDICES
A. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
B. INFORMED CONSENT STATEMENT
C. MEASUREMENT INSTRUMENTS
REFERENCES

….Overall the sample was racially diverse, predominantly female, and came from highly educated parents.  The sample was racially diverse in the sense that multiple combinations of multiracial heritage were represented.  This is important in validating the sample as a cross section of the multiracial population, which distinguishes the current study from previous multiracial identity research that has focused specifically on a limited representation of specific bi- or multiracial sub-groups, such as black/white biracial individuals (Shih & Sanchez, 2005; Wardle & Cruz-Jansen, 2004). The sample tended to consist of participants with highly educated parents and as a result were likely to be of higher socioeconomic status. It is unknown if the general socioeconomic status of the sample is representative of the multiracial college student population as a whole.  Also, women outnumbered men three to one. These factors are important when considering the generalizabiity of these results…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Essentialism and the Perception of Mixed-Race Individuals: Implications for the Sociopolitical Assimilation of Ethnic Minorities

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting
Trinity College
Dublin, Ireland
2009-07-14

Arnold Ho
Harvard University

James Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Previous work examining hypodescent, the process whereby persons of mixed-race descent are assigned to their socially subordinate racial status, showed that hypodescent may be applied to both Asian-White and Black-White targets (Ho & Sidanius, 2008).  However, no research has uncovered attitudinal covariates of hypodescent.  Thus, while hypodescent has been shown to occur, little is known about its antecedents.  Across two survey studies, we show that essentialism, or the tendency to see racial group boundaries and differences as being biological rather than socially constructed, can lead to hypodescent. Establishing essentialism as a precursor to hypodescent further establishes the role of essentialist thinking in intergroup relations, a topic of recent interest in social and political psychology (Prentice & Miller, 2007).  The relationship between essentialism and classical (“old fashioned”) racism, as well as the implications of hypodescent for the sociopolitical assimilation of African- and Asian-Americans, are discussed.

Read the entire paper here.

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race

Routledge
2004-03-04
280 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780789021441; Hardback ISBN-10: 0789021447
Paperback ISBN: 9780789021458; Paperback ISBN-10: 0789021455

Editor: Cathy A. Thompson, Psychologist
Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)
University of California at San Diego

Editor: Angela R. Gillem, Professor & Clinical Psychologist
Arcadia University

Get a unique perspective on the female biracial experience!

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race examines how physical appearance, cultural knowledge, and cultural stereotypes affect the experience of mixed-race women in belonging to, and being accepted within, their cultures. This unique book combines empirical research, theoretical papers, and first-person narrative to address issues relevant to providing therapy to biracial women and girls, helping therapists and counselors develop a treatment framework based on sociocultural factors. Researchers, practitioners, and academics provide insight into the biracial reality, taking multiple aspects of clients’ lives into account rather than looking for simple hierarchies of well-being based on race.

Biracial Women in Therapy is a building block for mental health practitioners in the construction of theory and practice in working with biracial females. The book examines how a biracial women’s racial/ethnic identity intersects with her gender and sexual identity to affect her sense of belonging and acceptance, addressing issues of appearance, social class, disability, power and guilt, and dating and marriage. Topics addressed in the book include:

• the complexities of multiple minority status
• how ethnic differences affect biracial adolescents
• issues encountered by biracial women from a sociohistorical context
• biracial women’s attitudes toward counseling
• stereotypes of marginalization and identity confusion
• a multicultural feminist approach to counseling
• and a first-person narrative of one author’s racial and sexual identity development

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race
• From Exotic to a Dime a Dozen – Maria P. P. Root
• Utilizing the Strengths of Our Cultures: Therapy with Biracial Women and Girls
• Biracial (Black/White) Women: A Qualitative Study of Racial Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for Therapy
• Understanding and Assisting Black/White Biracial Women in Their Identity Development
• Negotiating Racial Identity: Biracial Women and Interactional Validation
• Dating Practices, Racial Identity, and Psychotherapeutic Needs of Biracial Women
• When Face and Soul Collide: Therapeutic Concerns with Racially Ambiguous and Nonvisible Minority Women
• Counseling Biracial Women: An Intersection of Multiculturalism and Feminism
• Depressive Symptoms and Attitudes Toward Counseling as Predictors of Biracial College Women’s Psychological Help-Seeking Behavior
• Biracial Lesbian and Bisexual Women: Understanding the Unique Aspects and Interactional Processes of Multiple Minority Identities
• Conversations, Not Categories: The Intersection of Biracial and Bisexual Identities
• Out of the Closet but Still in Hiding: Conflicts and Identity Issues for a Black-White Biracial Lesbian
• Therapeutic Considerations in Work with Biracial Girls
• Fitting In and Feeling Good: Patterns of Self-Evaluation and Psychological Stress Among Biracial Adolescent Girls
• Mixed Race Women: One More Mountain to Climb
• Index
• Reference Notes Included

Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

Duke University Press
1997
232 pages
Cloth – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1975-7
Paperback – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1971-9

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Professor
Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa

How do adult children of interracial parents—where one parent is Jewish and one is Black—think about personal identity?  This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay’s Black, Jewish, and Interracial.  Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities.

Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, “passing,” intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness.  Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.

Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
pages 67-90

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Planning
University Toronto

This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’.  The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.

Read the entire article here.

Metisse Narratives

Soundings: A journal of politics and culture
Issue 5, Spring 1997

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Jayne Ifekwunigwe discusses the testimonies of women of ‘mixed race’ parentage in the English-African diaspora.

Rather than representing a portrait of metisse (‘mixed race’) girls as unruly, at age six Sandra and Aneya have exposed the major problematic of ‘race’.  Their discussion highlights the cultural paradoxes of ‘race’ and colour which multiple generations of women, men and children in England silently negotiate in their everyday lives.  These individuals descend from lineages which cut across so-called different ‘black and white’ ‘races’, ethnicities, cultures, and classes. Their roots are both endogenous and exogenous.

In varied cultural and historical contexts, countless terms are employed to name such individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), metissage which more appropriately describe generations of individuals who by virtue of birth and lineage do not fit neatly into preordained sociological and anthropological categories.  In England, at the moment, there are a multitude of terms in circulation which describe individuals who straddle racial borders.  More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being metis (se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘black’/’white’ racial categories and the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and over-lapping historical traditions.  The lack of consensus as to which term to use, as well as the limitations of this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to metis(se) and metissage…

…Gettin’ into me late teens, I didn’t think much about meself because of all these conflicts that were startin’ to come up from the past. Also new ones that were comin’ in from other communities – black communities – that were really shockin’ me. I mean there were times when I wouldn’t show me legs. I’d go through the summer wearing tights and socks. Cause I thought they were too light and too white-lookin’. There was a lot of pressure. I remember one day I was leanin’ up somewhere and this guy said to me, ‘Boy, aren’t your legs white.’ I just looked in horror, and felt really sick and wanted to just run away. I was thinkin’, God why didn’t you make me a bit darker? Why did you make me so light? It took me years to reconcile that…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race in Britain: A Survey of the Preferences of Mixed Race People for Terminology and Classifications (Interim Report)

Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent at Canterbury
July 2006

Peter Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

Ferhana Hashem, Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

…This research project into the preferences for terminology and classifications was initiated in 2004 and put into the field in summer 2005.  Its main purposes were: (i) to help inform terminology and classifications for ethnic group for the upcoming 2011 Census and (ii) to serve as a pilot study for an ESRC application: ‘The ethnic options of mixed race people in Britain’ (which also had a focus on official terminology and classifications).  This application was funded by ESRC and the project began on 1st March 2006.  A small dataset on official terminology and classifications is also accruing via this route…

…On issues of terminology, the salient general term of choice amongst respondents was ‘mixed race’.  The only other terms that attracted significant support were ‘mixed heritage’ and ‘mixed parentage’. Very few preferred ‘dual heritage’.  Respondents identified eleven different terms as offensive, most frequently ‘dual heritage’, ‘half-caste’ and ‘mixed origins’.  The reasons for the dislike of ‘dual heritage’ focussed mainly on its limitation to two groups.  ‘Half-caste’ was regarded as pejorative by several respondents, on the ground of partial recognition & historical connotations.  The largest number of respondents felt that terms like ‘mixed race’ and ‘mixed parentage’ should refer to ‘people who are mixes of white and any minority racial/ethnic group’.  Significant numbers also felt that the terms should refer to people who are mixes of minority racial/ethnic groups, people who are mixes of white and black groups only, and people of disparate ethnic origins…

Read the entire report here.