Mixed Race Studies

Role of Identity Integration On the Relationship Between Perceived Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment of Multiracial People

Society for Social Work and Research
Sixteenth Annual Conference
“Research That Makes A Difference: Advancing Practice and Shaping Public Policy”
2012-01-11 through 2012-01-15
Grand Hyatt Washington, Washington, DC
Saturday, 2012-01-14, 14:30-16:15 EST (Local Time)

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

Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Rudy Guevarra, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Racial discrimination is a pervasive social problem that has a negative impact on the physical and mental health of ethnic minority groups. Yet few researchers have examined this phenomenon within the growing population of multiracial persons, which according to the 2010 census has dramatically increased by 32% since 2000. This is particularly troubling in lieu of new evidence that multiracial persons may be more vulnerable to racial discrimination and other mental and behavioral health risks. This highlights the need for social workers to understand the risks and strengths associated with multiracial identity and navigating multiple racial and ethnic ties within a racialized society.

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between perceived racial discrimination, multiracial identity integration, and psychological adjustment of diverse multiracial persons.

Three hypotheses guided this study: (1) perceived racial discrimination would negatively correlate with psychological adjustment (i.e., lower depression, anxiety, stress, negative affect, and higher positive affect); (2) individuals with high multiracial identity integration (who identify strongly with two or more racial groups) would positively correlate with psychological adjustment; and (3) strong multiracial identity integration would buffer the effect of perceived racial discrimination on psychological adjustment…

For more information, click here.

For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

The New York Times
2012-01-13

Mireya Navarro

Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”

More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories—indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs…

…A majority of Latinos identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A. Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because “I am light-skinned” and that is how she is viewed in her native Dominican Republic.

But she says there is no question that she is seen as different from the white majority in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”

Some of the latest research, however, shows that many Latinos—like Irish and Italian immigrants before them—drop the Latino label to call themselves simply “white.” A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found that the parents of more than a quarter of third-generation children with Mexican ancestry do not identify their children as Latino on census forms.

Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents married to non-Mexicans, usually non-Hispanic whites. These Latinos tend to have high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. That means that many successful Latinos are no longer present in statistics tracking Latino economic and social progress across generations, hence many studies showing little or no progress for third-generation Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study…

…On the other side of the spectrum are black Latinos, who say they feel the sting of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging among many black Latinos who are now coming together in conferences and organizations.

Miriam Jiménez Román, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says that issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and dark-skinned Latinos led her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census encouraging Latinos of African descent to “check both: Latino and black.” “When you sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Latinos who identified as black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population…

Read the entire article here.

Jean Toomer: Fugitive

American Literature
Volume 47, Number 1 (March, 1975)
page 84-96

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

As a young boy, Jean Toomer attended a dinner party during which someone asked his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, if he indeed had “colored” blood. The light-skinned former lieutenant governor of Louisiana answered enigmatically, “That is what I have claimed.” According to Toomer in his unpublished autobiography, Pinchback never cleared up the matter for his grandson. Toomer insisted that he never knew for sure whether or not he was part Negro.

If Toomer’s racial identity was a puzzle to himself, his attitudes toward himself as Negro have also puzzled his critics. Before the publication of Cane (1923), he seemed to advertise his dark blood. After 1923 he ambiguously referred to himself as “an American, simply an American”; and around 1930 he refused to be included in several Negro anthologies. In the same year he let it be known that he was actually “white,” blaming the confusion on Waldo Frank, who had given the impression in his introduction to Cane that Toomer was a Negro. What mystifies everyone, as Darwin Turner pointed out, is why in the summer of 1923 Toomer rejected “a racial identification which a few months earlier he had accepted as a matter of slight importance.”

Explanations have been offered for Toomer’s apparent apostasy…

Read or purchase the article here.

Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 35, Number 2, Anxieties of Identity in American Writing (Summer 1993)
pages 226-250

George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington

The culture which will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be one which does equal justice to each, but one which looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors.

Knowledge of what cannot be said… signals the rock-bottom shape, the boundaries, of our situation in the world; it is the ethical, in the classical sense of the term.

An undated poem kept in a tin box that no one but the author ever saw in his lifetime bears haunting witness to the great lack of Jean Toomer’s existence:

Above my sleep
Tortured in deprival
Stripped of the warmth of a name
My life breaks madly. . . .
Breaks against world
Like a pale moth breaking
Against sun.

In their biography of the poet, The Lives of Jean Toomer, Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge discuss the relationship of this poem to Toomer’s sense of lacking a permanent and certain name, deriving from the fact that his name had changed during his childhood and that different family members called him by different names. His grandfather, for example (the patriarch with whom he lived to young adulthood and who died, Toomer claimed, the day after he completed the first draft of “Kabnis”), would not acknowledge the name he had been given at birth. “Jean Toomer” itself is a later fabrication of the author…

Author, Yaba Blay, to appear on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon

CNN NewsRoom: Weekend Primetime
2012-01-14, 19:00-20:00 EST

Don Lemon, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Lafayette College

(1)ne Drop author, Yaba Blay, will appear on the weekend edition of CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon on Sunday, January 15, 2012 during the 7:00 pm-8:00 pm hour (EST).

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

Harvard University Press
January 1996
560 pages
6-3/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674372627

George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies;  Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington

It wasn’t all black or white. It wasn’t a vogue. It wasn’t a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance—or blamed for corrupting it—George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas’s anthropology, Park’s sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism—ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the “New Negroes.” This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson’s analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro—any more than the growing sense of “Negro” national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.
 
A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.

An Overview of the Event: Jean Toomer and Politics at the 2012 MLA

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-01-12

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This is my general overview of the “Jean Toomer and Politics” special session roundtable at the 2012 MLA Annual Convention. First, I want to thank Professors Barbara Foley, Charles Scruggs, and Belinda Wheeler for their excellent presentations, and a special thanks to Professor George Hutchinson for starting the Q & A. I am very much looking forward to continuing this conversation!

In her presentation, Belinda Wheeler focused on the “documents” (census, marriage, and draft) that Byrd and Gates include in the second Norton Critical Edition of Cane to support their claim that Toomer was a Negro who passed as white. Wheeler discussed how the documents, when examined carefully and in aggregate, weaken their claim. The documents show (and this is a point that Barbara Foley also made) that Toomer sometimes identified as black and sometimes as white at different junctures in his life, and this assumes that it was Toomer who actually authored the documents. In countering their claim, Wheeler also drew upon interviews that she had conducted with Susan Sandberg, the daughter of Marjorie Content, Toomer’s second wife, as well as with Jill Quasha, a friend of Sandberg and Content who knew the family well and authored a book on Content’s photography. Toomer was married to Content from 1934 until his death in 1967, and Wheeler’s important bibliographic research sheds light on how Toomer, post-Cane, identified and lived. Her interviews suggest that Toomer did not waver from his basic position that he was an American, neither black nor white, and that he tried to live his life free from the influence of racial categories and standards…

Read the entire overview here.

Exploring the lived experience of biracial identity development in males of late adolescence and emerging adulthood

Northern Illinois University
2010
239 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3404842
ISBN: 9781124023625

Amy Kane-Williamson

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF COUNSELING, ADULT AND HIGHER EDUCATION

The study explored the lived experience of Black/White biracial males. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 participants to; understand the experiences that shaped biracial identity development, elucidate strategies employed to facilitate biracial identity development and ascertain the saliency of biraciality in overall self-concept. Key experiences were discovered that shaped biracial identity development. Specific strategies used to facilitate biracial identity development were found. Four themes emerged from the data that made clear the degree to which biraciality was part of the self-concept. Recommendations are proposed for counselors and clinicians, counselor educators, families, teachers and schools.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• LIST OF APPENDICES
• I. INTRODUCTION
  • Past and Present for Biracial Individuals
  • Fluidity of Biracial Identity
  • Self-Concept of Biracial Individuals
  • Challenges in Establishing Identity
  • Ambiguity in the Research
  • Statement of the Problem
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Research Questions
    • Qualitative Research Design
  • Significance of the Study
  • Limitations of the Study
  • Definitions of Terms
• II. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
  • Historical Background
  • Identity Development
    • Racial Identity Development Models
    • Rethinking Biracial Identity Development as Problematic
  • Choosing Among Identity Options
    • Identity and Self-Concept
  • How Does Society Facilitate or Impede Development?
  • How Does Schooling Facilitate or Impeded Development?
  • How the Family Can Facilitate or Impede Development
  • How Gender and Sex Differences Impact Identity Development
  • Summary
• III. METHODOLOGY
  • Design of the Study
  • Research Questions
  • Research Participants
  • Procedure for Participant Selection
  • Data Collection Procedure
    • Data Collection Methods
  • The Research Instrument
    • Validity and Reliability
  • Role of the Researcher
  • Analysis of the Data
  • Theme Analysis
    • Henriksen Model analysis
    • Epoche
• IV. FINDINGS
  • Introduction
  • Overview of Findings
  • Understanding Lived Experiences
    • The Experience of First Noticing
    • Giving Differences a Label
    • Experiencing the Social/Political Meaning of Difference
    • Experiences of Disconnection from Fathers and African American Culture
    • Experiencing Racial Slights or Prejudice
  • Strategies Used to Facilitate Biracial Identity Development
    • Making Concessions to Black and White Worlds
  • Living with Unknowable Conundrums
  • Managing Self in a World of Differences
    • Active Strategies
    • Passive Strategies
  • Saliency of Biracial Identity in Overall Self-Concept
  • Biracial Identity Expressed Through Multiple Channels
    • Physical Expression of Identity
    • Behavioral Expression of Identity
    • Social Expression of Biracial Identity
    • Identity Expression Within Romantic Relationships
    • Ways to Racially Self-Identify
    • Self-Concept and Biracial Identity
  • Summary
  • BRID Model Analysis
    • Henriksen Model
    • Neutrality
    • Acceptance
    • Awareness
    • Experimentation
    • Transition
    • Recognition
    • Observations
• V. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
  • Summary of Results
    • Understanding and Elucidating Identity-Shaping Experiences
    • Strategies Used to Facilitate Biracial Identity Development
    • Saliency of Biraciality in Overall Self-Concept
  • Comparisons to Current Literature
    • Fluidity in Identity
    • Self-Concept and RGO
    • Problems Biracial Youth Are Assumed to Encounter
    • Differential Findings Based on Gender
    • Points of Agreement or Disagreement with Identity Development Models
    • Concessions Made to the Black and White Worlds
    • Implications for Counselors, Clinicians, Educators and Parents
  • Suggestions for Future Research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES

LIST OF APPENDICES

• A. CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE
• B. INTERVIEW PROTOCOL
• C. STUDY PARTICIPANTS WANTED
• D. APPLICATION LETTER

Purchase the dissertation here.

Color and Cultural Identity

BlogTalkRadio
Bruce Hurwitz Presents
2012-01-12, 18:00Z (13:00 EST, 10:00 PST)

Bruce Hurwitz, Host

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ph.D. Forum introduces listeners to doctoral and post-doctoral students and their cutting-edge research in the arts, sciences, or humanities.

As part of our Ph.D. Forum, I will be joined by Marcia Dawkins.  Marcia received her doctorate from the University of Southern California, Annenberg.  We will be discussing her dissertation which focused on racial passing—pretending to be a member of a race different from the one to which you actually belong—and multi-racial identity.

Listen to the episode here.

What Does the Brazilian Census Tell Us About Race?

Psychology Today
2011-12-06

Jefferson Fish, Ph.D.

Problems with Brazilian and U.S. census data on race.

In 2010 I posted a six-part series on the U. S. census and race (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). In it I pointed out numerous changes in race categories and sub-categories over the 23 censuses, and multiple contradictions between scientific knowledge about human variation and the census race categories. I also offered a simple solution that would allow the government to collect the information it needs without contradicting science and offending or perplexing many citizens.

Because race is a cultural concept, beliefs about race vary dramatically from one culture to another. In this regard, America and Brazil are amazingly different in the categories they use. The United States has a small number of racial categories, based overwhelmingly on ancestry. Thus, it is possible for an American who “looks white” to “really be black” because he or she has “black blood.”

In contrast, Brazilians classify people according to what they look like, using a large number of different terms. For example, one study in the Brazilian northeast conducted by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)—the entity responsible for the census—asked people what color (cor) they were, and received 134 different answers! (Other studies have found even larger numbers; and the results vary regionally, with much fewer categories used in the south of the country.) In many Brazilian families different racial terms are used to refer to different children, while such distinctions are not possible in the United States because all the children—no matter what they look like—have the same ancestry.

Thus, I was fascinated to read that “For the first time, non-white people make up the majority of Brazil’s population, according to preliminary results of the 2010 census.”…

Read the entire article here.