Mixed Race Studies

(An)Other English city: Multiethnicities, (post)modern moments and strategic identifications

Ethnicities
Volume 2, Number 3 (2002)
pages 321-348
DOI: 10.1177/14687968020020030301

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

The interpretive turn in urban studies signals a heightened emphasis on the locus of the city as the site for both the making and unmaking of identities and differences. Juxtaposing examples from British popular culture with narrative extracts from my published ethnographic research on ‘mixed race’ family and memory, this article addresses two key problematics associated with this discursive shift. First, I explore the concept of multiethnicity as another paradigm for understanding the relationship between structures and forms of agency, particularly as multiethnicity forces a rethinking of racialized and essentialist notions of Englishness and non-Englishness; what I refer to as differentiating between the hyphen and the ampersand. Second, I assess the extent to which lived and constructed ideas of `the urban’ in general and `the city’ in particular are preconditions for the performance of multiethnicity. That is, are urban sites ideal laboratories for an illustration of the ways in which `mixed race’ and multiethnic subjectivities are intertwined?

INTRODUCTION

Mulattos may not be new. But the mulatto-pride folks are a new generation. They want their own special category or no categories at all. They’re a full fledged movement. (Senna, 1998: 14)

For as long as humans have populated the earth, intergroup mating and marriages have been commonplace (Gist and Dworkin, 1972: 1). As such, it is argued that there are no discrete or pure biological ‘races’ (Rose et al., 1984). Yet, in the popular folk imagination as well as in interdisciplinary scholarship, the problematized idea of ‘mixed race’1 persists (Alibhai-Brown, 2001; Daniel, 2001; Parker and Song, 2001; Williams-Leon and Nakashima, 2001). In fact, not since the 19th-century Victorian era, when pseudoscientific treatises on the presumed social pathology of the ‘racial’ hybrid abounded, has there been such an academic interest in ‘mixed race’ studies. That said, the intellectual content and social and political contexts of contemporary scholarship are very different. Rather than being objects of the scientific gaze (as speaking subjects), scholars, many of whom identify as ‘mixed race’ or ‘multiracial’, have deployed the idea that ‘race’ is a social construct that shifts across space and time. In so doing, they seek to validate ‘mixed race’ as a legitimate psychosocial and political category.

Over the past decade, and particularly in North America, theoretical, empirical and biographical work on ‘mixed race’ that addresses the fluidity, dynamism, complexity and practices of identity politics has flourished. As we begin a new century, a body of writings is emerging that talks back and to the resurgent literature that gave birth to the ‘multiracial’ nomenclature and its contested politics (Christian, 2000; Gordon, 1995; Mahtani and Moreno, 2001; Masami Ropp, 1997; Njeri, 1997; Spencer, 1997, 1999). By critically engaging with either the problematics or the possibilities of ‘multiracial’ activism, expression and ideology, this latest phase signals the emergence of a critical discourse on ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiraciality’ from which there are no signs of retreat.

This empirical and experiential celebration and contestation of ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiraciality’ is by no means unified or essentialist. The most interesting debates have emerged from different conceptualizations of the canon. For example, conceptual and political disagreements over the categories ‘mixed race’, ‘biracial’ and ‘multiracial’ stem from the dominance of binary ‘black/white’5 paradigms in US and British ‘racial’ discourses (Leonard, 2000; Mahtani and Moreno, 2001; Price, 2000). The emphasis on socially designated ‘black/white mixes’ is said to exclude those who are socially designated and identify as dual minority ‘mixes’ that do not include ‘black/white’ and neglect certain individuals who claim triple or more ‘mixes’:

In the recent explosion of writings about multiraciality, we have seen a plethora of discussion about white/black crossings and white/Asian crossings (and we want to remind you that we are using these terms very suspiciously). But we worry that we have not yet seen a great deal of discussion about people who are of dual minority mixes, or who are not part white. (Mahtani and Moreno, 2001: 67)

This binarism also overlooks the important fact that conceptions of ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social status are historically, geographically and culturally specific and hence do not travel easily (Erasmus, 2000; Torres and Whitten, 1998; Whitten and Torres, 1998). The American ‘one drop’ rule, which subsumes anyone with at least one known African ancestor under the heading ‘black’ whether or not they also have European and/or Native American ancestry, differs remarkably from the more fluid notion of ‘race’ and social hierarchy in Brazil, wherein ascribed gradations between ‘black’ and ‘white’ are varied and many (Daniel, 2000; Twine, 1998; Winant, 1999). In a British context, ‘black’ as a collective ‘multiracial’ identification does not perform the same intellectual, political or cultural labour as it did in previous decades (C. Alexander, 1996; Gilroy, 1987; Mercer, 1994; Mirza, 1997; Modood, 1988). The fact that the Irish have ‘become white’ in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, along with recent racialized class and ethnic conflicts in the north of England as well as the current European/American rhetorical ‘clash of civilizations’ are all powerful indicators of the ways in which ‘blackness’/’non-whiteness’ and ‘whiteness’ are shifting and thus unstable signifiers of exclusion and inclusion (Bonnett, this issue; Hall, 2000; Hesse, 2000).

A broader historical and geographical vantage point also highlights the cross-cutting ways in which the global processes and erotic projects of slavery, imperialism and diaspora(s) have created similar shifts in the local making, management and regulation of status and power as articulated through the everyday discourses and practices of ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social hierarchies. These trends are manifest in the long tradition of intellectual engagement with issues of mestizaje (Latin America, Spanish Caribbean), métissage (French Canada, francophone Caribbean, francophone Africa), mesticagem (Brazil, lusophone Africa) and miscegenation (anglophone Africa, anglophone Caribbean, Australia) as comparative examples of scholarship on the contested notion of ‘race’ mixture. All of these interwoven and historically located positions rupture allegedly stable racialized fault lines and at the same time (paradoxically in the case of some) reinscribe ‘race’ – a term predicated on scientifically dubious criteria.

In the historical moments of slavery and imperialism, ‘mixed race’ communities were socially engineered and managed. Yet, it is worth pausing for a moment to ponder why the circumstances are ripe in certain contemporary social and political milieux for the (re-)emergence of a politicized ‘multiracial’ movement and not in others. For example, in the USA, organizations such as RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and AMEA (Association of MultiEthnic Americans) unsuccessfully lobbied the US Congress and marched on Washington demanding the inclusion of a ‘multiracial’ category on the 2000 census (Fernandez, 1996; Nakashima, 1996). Not wanting to upset the very powerful American caucuses of colour, in particular African Americans, as a compromise solution the Census Bureau introduced the ‘tick all that apply’ option which means that, for ‘statistical’ purposes, those who tick more than one box may be subsumed under one ‘racial’ heading such as ‘black’ or ‘African American’. On the other hand, in Britain, changing demographics suggest that ‘mixed race’ families and their children will be a formidable force in the future. Although this may be demographic fact, other than the support group People in Harmony, the ‘mixed race community’ displays minimal public signs of the degree of politicization evident across the pond. In fact, it was previous responses to the 1991 census as well as consultation with focus groups, and not external pressure, that motivated the Office of National Statistics to deploy the ‘mixed ethnic’ option with a free text field for the 2001 census (Aspinall, 1997; Owen, 2001). Since the 1970s, in Brazil, once heralded as a model of ‘racial’ democracy, political movements such as the movimento negro have re-emerged, suggesting that all is not well in ‘racial paradise’ (dos Santos, 1999; da Silva, 1999; Ribeiro, 1996). In (post-)apartheid South Africa, in light of the ‘official’ dissolution of apartheid categories and the everyday persistence of racism in the new guise of economic apartheid and heightened conflicts among and between Africans, Asians and ‘coloureds’, historically ‘coloured’ communities are having to redefine and reposition themselves (C. Alexander, 1996; Marais, 1996; Rasool, 1996).

Whatever the global context, political motivations for either the social engineering, suppression, dismantling or reconstruction of the ideas and practices of ‘mixed race’ are contingent. As Small reminds us: ‘the analytical enterprise . . . must continue to focus on structural contexts, institutional patterns, and ideological articulations as they are expressed in the light of local histories’ (2001: 129). ‘Multiracial’ or ‘monoracial’ identity politics is frequently governed by unresolved and played out tensions between the sovereignty of the state and the public sphere as they collide with both individualized expressions of multiethnic and/or ‘multiracial’ identities as empowerment, and monoethnic and/or ‘monoracial’ collective mobilization in the competition for economic resources and civic recognition (Body-Gendrot, this issue). This dialectical dance performed by structure and agency is succinctly described by Burroughs and Spickard:

There is a real split, then, as yet unresolved, between the compelling logic of multiethnicity and its promise for mixed individuals on the one hand, and the practical political imperatives of monoethnically defined groups on the other, in an age that has not yet wholly given up monoethnic definitions. (2000: 247)

In the second and third sections of this article, I will explore in greater detail the specific extent to which the restricted and racialized natures of ‘white’ English group membership and the compulsory ‘black’ non-English designation limit the ‘[multi]ethnic options’ (Waters, 1990; see also Song, 2001) of individuals who identify as ‘mixed race’ and/or multethnic as these affiliations and identifications are constructed, played out, maintained and transgressed in the specific contexts of ‘the urban’…

Read the entire article here.

Discovering the life of Afro-Germans

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2012-06-06

Edward Colimore, Inquirer Staff Writer

When she was growing up in Willingboro as the only child of Walter and Perrie Haymon, she felt like “a little princess.” She was the center of her parents’ lives, attended private school, and took piano and ballet lessons.

But Wanda Lynn Haymon “always had something gnawing” at her, she said. Relatives whispered about her at family gatherings and cousins told her that she was not really part of the family.

She had recurrent nightmares, too, of being an infant abandoned on a snowy doorstep with uniformed men – possibly soldiers – standing around her.

“I really had doubts,” she said. “I’d go to my parents and ask if I was adopted and they’d say, ‘Do you feel adopted?’ I would say ‘No’ because I was treated so well.”

She found out—through documentation in 1994—that “I wasn’t who I thought I was.”

Wanda Lynn Haymon was actually Rosemarie Larey, a native of Germany who had been adopted. Her biological father was black, possibly an African American soldier, and her mother was white and a German national.

She was born in 1956, only 11 years after the Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps, where many were subjected to medical experiments and sterilization.

Even after the war, the stigma of having a biracial child caused many mothers – including Rosemarie’s – to give up their children for possible placement with African American families.

Now, as Rosemarie Peña, she heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey ( http://blackgermans.us/), an organization whose name belies its reach: It connects Afro-Germans internationally and seeks to document their experience.

About 200 people attended the group’s convention last year in Washington and a greater number is expected for the second convention, Aug. 10-11 at Barnard College in New York City…

Read the entire article here.

Re-searching Metis Identity: My Metis Family Story

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
April 2010
200 pages

Tara Turner

A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Psychology

This research explores Metis identity through the use of a Metis family story. The participants of this Metis family were my father and his two sisters and his two brothers. As children, they lost both their parents at the same time in a car accident. After the death of their parents my participants all encountered the child welfare system, through adoption, orphanage, and foster care. Through adoption, the two youngest participants were separated from their siblings, and any knowledge of their Metis heritage, until they were adults. Individual interviews were conducted with each participant to gather their life stories. Two additional gatherings of the participants were completed in order to share individual and family stories. The second and final gathering was conducted as a talking circle. A culturally congruent qualitative research process was created with the use of stories, ceremonies, and the strengthening of family relationships. Analysis was completed with the use of Aboriginal storytelling guidelines. The themes examined through my family’s story include trauma, the child welfare system, and Metis identity. A significant piece of the research process was the creation of a ‘Metis psychological homeland’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 56), a psychological space of both healing and affirming Aboriginal identity. This dissertation is an example of how research can be completed in a way that does not perpetuate the mistrust between Aboriginal people and researchers, and that works to improve this relationship.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Race, Ethnicity, and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics

Berghahn Books
Winter 2007
210 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84545-355-8
Paperback ISBN:978-1-84545-681-8

Edited by

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.

Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics / Peter Wade
• 2. Race, Genetics and Inheritance: Reflections upon the Birth of ‘Black’ Twins to a ‘White’ IVF Mother / Katharine Tyler
• 3. Race, Biology and Culture in Contemporary Norway: Identity and Belonging in Adoption, Donor Gametes and Immigration / Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus
• 4. ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’: Transnational Adoptive Families’ Views of ‘Cultural Origins’ / Diana Marre
• 5. Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe / Ben Campbell
• 6. Kinship Language and the Dynamics of Race: The Basque Case / Enric Porqueres i Gené
• 7. The Transmission of Ethnicity: Family and State – A Lithuanian Perspective / Darius Daukšas
• 8. Media Storylines of Culturally Hybrid Persons and Nation / Ben Campbell
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Index

The Impersonator

2nd Story
Chicago, Illinois
2012-03-24

Chris Terry, Writer, Editor, Educator

A biracial man who is often told that he looks like certain celebrities goes to a Brooklyn bar, where he has an encounter with a guy whose strange profession makes him really good at The “You Look Like” Game.

Listen to the podcast here (00:12:36).  Read an earlier draft of “The Impersonator” here.

Understanding the Racial Identity Development of Multiracial Young Adults through their Family, Social and Environmental Experiences

Catholic University of America
2012
184 pages

Lisa Sechrest-Ehrhardt

A DISSERTATION Submitted to the faculty of the National Catholic School of Social Service of The Catholic University of America
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

This study explored the development of healthy racial identity in multiracial young adults.  The design of the study was qualitative with a constructivist epistemology, and data were analyzed via the grounded theory methods of constant comparative analysis.  The conceptual frameworks grounding the study were Symbolic Interaction theory, identity theory, and racial identity theory.  The sample of 15 participants was drawn from a larger non-random purposive sample by their scoring in the “ethnic identity achieved” range on the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM). The researcher engaged the participants in one to two hour face-to-face semi structured interviews in which she explored their lived experiences to understand their perspectives of the process of developing a healthy multiracial identity and to understand their ability to border cross. Border crossings are strategies used by individuals in their daily interactions with others and within the environment of multiple groups.  They include having the ability to carry multiple racial and or ethnic perspectives simultaneously, and being able to shift one’s racial identity with regards to the situational context or the environment (Miville et al., 2005; Root, 1996). From the analysis of the interview data 119 categories emerged that were collapsed into eight subcategories and ultimately three core categories.  From the core categories, three themes emerged: (1) an early supportive environment provided a stable foundation that allowed participants the opportunity to figure out who they are; (2) a strong multiracial identity was facilitated through the frequent challenge in growing up of the ubiquitous question from others, “What are you?”; and, (3) Those with a healthy multiracial identity have developed the capacity to  travel with ease across the borders of different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups of people. Participants appreciated and integrated their racial heritages. They embraced the uniqueness of being multiracial, continued to explore their racial identity, and as a result developed a whole and integrated healthy multiracial identity.

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Myth of Native American Blood

The Hyphenated Life
The Boston Globe
2012-06-01

Francie Latour

The African-American grandmother of a friend of mine once summed up the laws that govern black identity in this country. “If you ever want to know if someone’s black or not,” she would say, “go ask their white neighbor.”

That succinct, small-town Georgia wisdom essentially outlines the rule of hypodescent, also known as the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule emerged during slavery and hardened in Reconstruction, automatically classifying as black anyone with any trace of African ancestry. It is the reason why, in the 1800s, the extremely light-skinned offspring of white fathers and black mothers were deemed slaves. It’s also the reason why, in 2011, the actress Halle Berry, who is biracial but identifies as black, became a lightning rod of controversy for maintaining that her own daughter, with white Canadian actor Gabriel Aubry, is also black.

The fact that Americans with vastly different complexions know they are black by the number of cab drivers who don’t stop for them as much as by any internal measure is a dilemma on many levels. But for Kim Tallbear, an enrolled member of South Dakota’s Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a UC Berkeley professor who studies race, genomics and Native American identity, the tyranny of the one-drop rule poses a specific problem in the ongoing controversy surrounding US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her shifting, dubious claims of Native American identity…

…“If you want to understand Native American identity,” Tallbear said, “you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework. Native Americans do not fit in that binary. We have been racialized very differently in relationship to whites.”

How do we know Native Americans are racialized differently, Tallbear said? Because a white person—say, Elizabeth Warren, for example—can absorb a Native American ancestor and still maintain an identity as white. If Warren had a black ancestor, that fact would threaten her white identity…

Read the entire essay here.

Afro Latinos: everywhere, yet invisible

Our Weekly
2011-10-06

Cynthia Griffin

Struggles with self-image, assimilation mirror Black American experience

Last year, during a discussion on increasing the number of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Angel’s centerfielder Torii Hunter in a USA Today interview called the dark-skinned Latino baseball players “imposters” and said they are not Black.

Hunter’s comments strike at the heart of an issue that is one reason scholar Miriam Jiménez Román is undertaking a three-day conference called “Afro Latinos Now! Strategies for Visibility and Action,” on Nov. 3-5 in New York that will be the biggest such effort her organization, The AfroLatin@ Forum, has undertaken.

“This is the first time we have done such a comprehensive event where we discuss Afro Latinos specifically. We’re going to look at the state of the field and where we want to be, and there is going to be a heavy emphasis on youth, especially those in middle school years.”

Jiménez Román says the confusion Hunter demonstrated about the connection between Africans born in Latin America and those born in the United States is particularly acute for U.S.-based 11- to 15-year-old Afro Latinos. In the context of a racist society like America, they are not only struggling to figure out how they feel about themselves, but also how they connect in relation to others, especially African Americans.

There are millions of Afro Latinos in America who live their lives in what is essentially a “Black” context but identify themselves as White, because of the perceived stigma of being African American, said Jiménez Román, who last year came to the West Coast promoting her newly released book “Afro-Latino Reader,” co-edited with Juan Flores. The 584-page publication, which grew out of the notes the two professors always pulled together for classes they taught, explores people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean…

…“There is the idea that Latino culture is Mestizo and European and Indian, and Black people don’t belong,” said the race and ethnicity professor about how many Latin American countries think about themselves. In fact, Latinos of African descent have been in many countries for at least 200 years.

If they do acknowledge their Black citizens, Jimenez Roman said officials will say “they all live on the coast.”

“This isolates them. Or in Bolivia, for example, there are Black communities in the mountains. They are totally isolated and ignored.”

But in reality, Afro Latinos are everywhere in Latin America as they are in the United States, says the head of the AfroLatin@ Forum…

Read the entire article here.

Cape Verdean identity in a land of Black and White

Ethnicities
Volume 12, Number 3
pages 354-379
DOI: 10.1177/1468796811419599

Gene A. Fisher, Professor Emerita of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Suzanne Model, Professor Emerita of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Cape Verde is an island group off the African coast with a history of slavery. Its residents having both European and African ancestors, they consider themselves a mixed-race people. Residents of the United States, however, observe the one-drop rule: anyone with a perceptible trace of African blood is defined as Black. This difference motivates us to ask: how do Cape Verdean Americans answer questions about their racial identity? Strict assimilationists predict that, as they adapt to their new home, Cape Verdeans will identify less as mixed-race than as White or Black. Others suggest that the quality of race relations at the time immigrants arrive affects their identity. We test these ideas using data from the 2000 US Census and the American Community Survey. Our multivariate analysis shows that some, but not all, forms of assimilation increase the odds of identifying as Black. The odds of identifying as White, on the other hand, have little to do with assimilation. The timing of arrival also has a significant effect on racial identity, with Black gaining popularity among recent immigrants.

Read or purchase the article here.

Does The Heritage Controversy Tell Us More About Warren Or The Media?

Radio Boston
WBUR
2012-05-22

Dan Mauzy, Associate Producer

Hosts

Meghna Chakrabarti, Co-Host

Anthony Brooks, Co-Host

Guests

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law (member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma)
Syracuse University

David Catanese, National Political Reporter
Politico

Here’s a bit of a problem that political reporters have to contend with: How should we handle those stories that appear to distract from what most regard as the big, important issues of the day? When a particular campaign or a political party fans the flames of one of these sidebar stories in an effort to keep a controversy alive, what should the media do?
 
The story about Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry presents one of those challenges.
 
The Harvard law professor who’s challenging Sen. Scott Brown has talked proudly about her Native American heritage, and we’ve learned that she listed herself as a “minority” for nearly a decade back in the late 1980s and early 90s. Warren has tried to explain why and there’s no evidence that Harvard, or any other university, hired her because of her claim…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:25:32) here. Download it here.