Mixed Race Studies

Perceived discrimination, group identification, and life satisfaction among multiracial people: A test of the rejection-identification model.

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 18, Number 4 (October 2012)
pages 319-328
DOI: 10.1037/a0029729

Lisa S. Giamo
Department of Psychology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Michael T. Schmitt, Associate Professor of Psychology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

H. Robert Outten
Department of Psychology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Like other racial minority groups, multiracial people face discrimination as a function of their racial identity, and this discrimination represents a threat to psychological well-being. Following the Rejection-Identification Model (RIM; Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999), we argue that perceived discrimination will encourage multiracial people to identify more strongly with other multiracials, and that multiracial identification, in turn, fosters psychological well-being. Thus, multiracial identification is conceptualized as a coping response that reduces the overall costs of discrimination on well-being. This study is the first to test the RIM in a sample of multiracial people. Multiracial participants’ perceptions of discrimination were negatively related to life satisfaction. Consistent with the RIM, perceived discrimination was positively related to three aspects of multiracial group identification: stereotyping the self as similar to other multiracial people, perceiving people within the multiracial category as more homogenous, and expressing solidarity with the multiracial category. Self-stereotyping was the only aspect of group identification that mediated a positive relationship between perceived discrimination and life satisfaction, suggesting that multiracial identification’s protective properties rest in the fact that it provides an collective identity where one “fits.”

Read or purchase the article here.

Amerasians

Atmo
1998-10-22
52 minutes

Erik Gandini, Director/Producer

In 1988, after the Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, Vietnamese youngsters who could prove they had been fathered by an American were issued with a ticket for the U.S. and granted six months ”upkeep”.

Overnight, society’s lowest ranks became ”golden children”, able to take a whole family to the U.S. But proving one’s paternity wasn.t a simple matter.

For many, all that was left were physical traits suggesting American parentage and, with luck, an old photo of a father in uniform.

To date, 38,000 offsprings have moved to the U.S., and this documentary by Erik Gandini introduces us to a number of Amerasians, some who have moved, and others who are about to leave Vietnam.

The reality that confronts them in the U.S. can be a challenge. Even if their look is no longer a problem in the melting pot of American society, the culture shock is considerable—language, food, culture—so much is strange to them, and they feel themselves to be neither Vietnamese nor American.

For the first time in their lives, they learn to be proud of themselves as Amerasians.

Festivals

• Vue Sur les Docs, Marseille.
• Golden Gate Film Festival, San Francisco.
• Nordic Panorama Festival.
• Leipzig documentary festival etc.

Awards

• Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1999,
• Silver Spire, Golden Gate Filmfestival, San Francisco, USA.
• Golden Antenna, best indipendent documentary of the year, Swedish Television, 1998.

St. Stephen’s launches book about struggles with identity

City Centre Mirror
Toronto, Canada
2012-10-17

Justin Skinner

A group of talented young men and women from St. Stephen’s Community House are hoping their own experiences can help other youth navigate the stereotypes and challenges of growing up biracial.

St. Stephen’s has launched a new book titled It’s Not All Black and White: Multiracial Youth Speak Out, which contains poems, short stories and interviews with multiracial writers.

The book delves into the young authors’ own feelings and life experiences as they struggled with issues of identity.

“Growing up and being mixed race, when I’d hang out with my white friends they’d say I act too black and when I’d hang out with my black friends they’d say I act too white,” said contributor Bianca Craven…

Read the entire article here.

Family Portrait in Black and White: Documentary by Julia Ivanova

Interfilm Productions
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2011
Institutional Use: Double DVD (includes 85 and 52 minute versions)
Private Use: 85 minute DVD

Julia Ivanova, Director

Olga Nenya has 27 children. Four of them, now adults, are her biological children; the other 23 are adopted or foster children. Of those 23, 16 are biracial.

She calls them “my chocolates,” and is raising them to be patriotic Ukrainians. Some residents of Sumy, Ukraine, consider Olga a saint, but many believe she is simply crazy. An inheritance from the Soviet era, a stigma persists here against interracial relationships, and against children born as the result of romantic encounters between Ukrainian girls and exchange students from Africa. For more than a decade, Olga has been picking up the black babies left in Ukrainian orphanages and raising them together so that they may support and protect one another.

The filmmakers interview Neo-Nazis in Ukraine reveals the real dangers for a dark-skinned individual in the street. These white supremacist youth joke about their evening raids and how police seem to let them do it. Prosecutors are not particularly determined to give strict sentences to racially motivated crimes, and young thugs can get away with probation for beating someone nearly to death.

Olga sends her foster children to stay with host families in France and Italy in the summers and over Christmas, where they are cared for by charitable families who have committed to helping disadvantaged Ukrainian youth since the Chernobyl disaster. Olga’s kids now speak different languages, and the older girls chat in fluent Italian with each other even while cooking a vat of borscht. But Olga doesn’t believe in international adoption and has refused to sign adoption papers from host families that wanted to adopt her kids.

“At least when the kids grow up, they’ll have a mother to blame for all the failures that will happen in their lives,” she says.

AWARDS:

• 32nd GENIE AWARDS (Canada) (aka Canadian Oscars) “NOMINEE: Best Feature Documentary”
• 18th HOT DOCS FILM FESTIVAL (Canada) “Grand Prize: Best Canadian Film Award”
• 56TH VALLADOLID INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Spain) “Cultural Diversity Award” and “Time of History Third Prize”
• 6TH MIRADASDOC –DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL (Spain) “Audience Award”
• 6TH ADDIS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Ethiopia) “Jury Award – Best Documentary”

SCREENINGS:

• Sundance Film Festival (USA)
• International Documentary Film Festival (Amsterdam)
• Los Angeles Film Festival (USA)
• Mumbai Film Festival (India)
• Haifa International Film Festival (Israel)
• Hamptons International Film Festival (USA)
• Cleveland International Film Festival (USA)
• Glasgow International Film Festival (UK)
• Thessaloniki Film Festival (Greece)
• Message To Man Documentary Festival (Russia)
• Bergen International Film Festival (Norway)
• Vancouver International Film Festival (Canada)
• New Zealand International Film Festival
• Seattle International Film Festival (USA)
• One World Film Festival (Romania, Czechoslovakia)
• Human Watch Film Festival (UK)
• Watchdocs (Poland)

What are the areas of interest? The major areas of interest covered by the film include:

• human rights
• critical mixed-race studies
• ideology
• institutionalization
• identity politics
• transitional economy
• international adoption
• foster homes

Who can benefit from the film? Family Portrait in Black and White is valuable for anyone with research interest in the following:

• African Studies
• Slavic Studies
• Child and Family Studies
• Sociology
• Women’s Studies
• Film and Media Studies
• Mixed-Race Studies

Under the skin

Havard University Gazette
2012-10-12

Aaron Lester, Harvard Correspondent

Deep experience informs panelists’ views on mixed-race life in U.S.

When Carmen Fields’ future husband asked her to meet his mother, Fields refused. “No way. I didn’t want to be the reason she opened up the front door and dropped the Easter ham,” she told a Harvard audience on Wednesday.
 
An African-American whose spouse is white, Fields knows from experience that life in the United States holds unique challenges for mixed-race couples and their children.
 
Fields and fellow panel members — among them College junior Eliza Nguyen —addressed some of those issues during a discussion called “American Masala: Race Mixing, the Spice of Life or Watering Down Cultures?” at the Student Organization Center at Hilles.

Nguyen, president of the Harvard Half Asian People’s Association (HAPA), distinctly remembers the moment it dawned on her that she was neither white, like her mother, nor Vietnamese, like her father. “I was in the fourth grade, taking a standardized test. And they had that box you were supposed to check off.” There was no box for biracial, and she was instructed to check only one. Nguyen, perplexed, asked her teacher which box to check. She was the only nonwhite student in her school. “Asian, of course,” her teacher told her. “I was confused,” said Nguyen. “Who am I?”…

Read the entire article here.

ITYC Audio Journal #2: What Are You?-Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations

Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color
2012-10-07

Michelle McCrary, Host

Last Thursday, I attended an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society for their “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” series called What Are You? The panel tackled the this perpetual question often aimed at people who are perceived to be ethnically ambiguous.

Presenting their own encounters/experiences with the “what are you?” question were Angela Tucker, creator of the webseries Black Folk Don’t; Heidi Durrow, author of the New York Times Bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and co-host of Mixed Chicks Chat; Jen Chau, founder of Swirl, Inc.; Erica Chito Childs, author of Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture and Ken Tanabe, founder of Loving Day.

Here, in this second installment of ITYC Audio Journal, I share details about the panel discussion and some of my personal thoughts about race, identity and “what are you?”

Download the audio here (00:40:48).

Britain’s first black community in Elizabethan London

BBC News Magazine
2012-07-19

Michael Wood

The black trumpeter John Blanke played regularly at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII

The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain’s first black community. It’s a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood.

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you’ll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane—so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war—Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972.

But, back in Shakespeare’s day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.

Of course, there were fewer, and they drew antipathy as well as fascination from the Tudor inhabitants, who had never seen black people before. But we know they lived, worked and intermarried, so it is fair to say that Britain’s first black community starts here.

There had been black people in Britain in Roman times, and they are found as musicians in the early Tudor period in England and Scotland.

But the real change came in Elizabeth I’s reign, when, through the records, we can pick up ordinary, working, black people, especially in London…

Read the entire article here.

A diverged family converges at Harvard Law

Havard Law School News
2012-10-10

Audrey Kunycky

A chance encounter, a discovery of kin on opposite sides of the world

It wasn’t inevitable that Harvard Law School graduate students Erum Khalid Sattar and Rebecca Zaman would meet so soon, or even at all. Sattar has been at the law school for three years, pursuing a doctorate in juridical science (S.J.D.); Zaman arrived in August to begin a year of study for a master’s in law (LL.M.). Sattar is from Pakistan, and studied law in London; Zaman grew up, earned her law degree and completed a judicial clerkship in Australia. Then again, they’re about the same height, with the same dark brown hair, and that might not be just a coincidence.

In August, a few days into LL.M. Orientation, the two women shook hands and said hello at a Graduate Program reception. “If we hadn’t been wearing nametags, what happened next might never have happened,” says Zaman. Sattar’s large, expressive eyes are glittering, but she wants Zaman to tell the story, because she tells it better.

My surname is Zaman, and it’s a very unusual surname for a white-appearing Australian to have,” explains Zaman. “So when they saw my nametag, a lot of the Indians, Pakistanis and Middle Easterners asked how I could have this name. When I met Erum, it was very similar.  So I said, ‘Oh! My father’s father is a Muslim Indian from Hyderabad.’ And Erum said, ‘Oh, what a coincidence. My family was from Hyderabad, before they moved to Karachi after the partition.’ And she laughed, and said, ‘Maybe we’re related.’ We both laughed, and I said, ‘Maybe. It’s a strange story.’”…

Read the entire article here.

The Elizabeth Warren Situation Is More Complicated Than Many Think

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-10-10

Laura Waterman Wittstock
Seneca Nation

A ton of ink has been spilled on the subject of the Elizabeth Warren run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Most of the writing on the Indian side of opinion is whether or not Warren has a legitimate claim to her Delaware and Cherokee ancestry. Strong language has emerged on the subject, rightly due to the fact that so many Americans claim Indian heritage without any idea of what being an Indian is all about.

But between the Indian and non-Indian sides of the coin are a million slices of what-ifs and others. Example one: I met a woman whose husband was enrolled in Coweta Creek and got support for his considerable higher education costs. Beyond that, he knew next to nothing about his tribe. He was born into an African American family, married an African American and had a couple of wonderful children. His wife’s question to me was how she could get the children enrolled after they had been informed the children lacked sufficient blood quantum. This mother was interested in her children’s education and wanted them to have all the benefits they might be due as a result of their father’s heritage. I did not have good news for them…

Read the entire article here.

Local Filmmaker to Give Voice to Biracial Issues

News Release
Nashville, Tennessee
2012-10-10

Jefferey Martin
615-918-8688

James Southard, Director/Producer

Native Nashville, [Tennessee]  filmmaker, James Southard aims to tackle the subject of what it means to be biracial in his forth-coming documentary, “Half-Caste.” The documentary comes from a mixture of personal experience with being biracial, a desire to help other people tell their story, and a need to increase awareness on the subject.
 
Half-Caste will explore the poignant issues of people who come from multi-racial backgrounds throughout society. This documentary will tackle issues such as personal identity, social identity, basic desire to belong to one group, race identification, government classification, racism, stereotypes, family, dating, difficulties of interaction within races and many other issues specific to the loose multi-racial community.
 
Southard is currently filling new interviews and gathering footage even while in the midst of trying to raise money, using Kickerstarter.com. Southard is aiming to raise awareness on the subject and has set his sights on making an incredible film that will bring this subject into the Public’s focus.

Southard is available for interviews, and can be contacted at: 615-918-8688

For more infomation, click here.