Mixed Race Studies

Racial Socialization, Identity, and Adjustment in Black and Biracial Youth

National Council on Family Relations
73rd NCFR Annual Conference (“Families and the Shifting Economy”)
Rosen Centre Hotel, Orlando, Florida
2011-11-16 through 2011-11-19

Session ID# 330
2011-11-08, 15:30-17:30 EST (Local Time)

Chair: Annamaria Csizmadia, Assistant Professor, Human Development & Family Studies
University of Connecticut, Stamford

Ethnic Identity Development and its Association With Behavioral Functioning During Early Childhood

Catherine Anicama
Departments of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Inst for Prevension Sci)
Langone Medical Center
New York University

Esther J. Calzada, Assistant Professor
Departments of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Inst for Prevension Sci) and Psychiatry
Langone Medical Center
New York University

An Examination of Biracial Identity Development Using a Qualitative Research Design

Shannon Bert, Professor of Human Relations
University of Oklahoma

Racial Socialization, Identification, and Black-White Biracial Children’s Behavior Trajectories

Annamaria Csizmadia

This symposium examines ethnic identity, socialization, and adjustment among Black and part-Black youth. The first paper investigates ethnic identity, socialization, and behavior problems among Black and Afro-Caribbean elementary-age children. Using a cross-sectional qualitative design, the second paper investigates personal and contextual predictors of Black-White biracial youth’s biracial identity development. The third paper uses growth modeling to study racial identification, cultural socialization, racial discussions, and Black-White children’s internalizing and externalizing behavior trajectories K through 5th grade. Together these papers highlight the dynamic interplay between ethno-racial identity, socialization practices, and adjustment in mono-and multiracial Black youth between the elementary and adult years.

For more information, click here.

PSY 519B: Social Psychology of Biracial Identity

Antioch University, Los Angeles

This workshop explores the idea of race as a social construction and its psychological impact on individuals, particularly as it relates to the concept of a biracial or multiracial identity in the U.S. Among other issues, we will investigate how a bi- or multi-racial identity develops for individuals and how it evolves historically. Students must have access to The AULA email system as some online postings and readings are required.

For more information, click here.

Victoria Bynum to be Featured 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) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #220-Victoria Bynum
When: Wednesday, 2011-08-10, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Professor Victoria Bynum, a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, is a historian of gender, race, and class relations in the Civil War Era South. Her blog, Renegade South, and her numerous publications feature true stories about mixed-race families, anti-Confederate guerrillas, and other unconventional Southerners.

Listen to the episode here or download it here (00:35:59, 14.4 MB).

Selected Bibliography

• The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.  The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.  Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.  xvi + 316 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. (hardcover).  ISBN 0-878-2636-7.
• “Race and the ‘One Drop Rule’ in the Post-Reconstruction South,” Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners on March 17, 2009, http://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/race-and-the-one-drop-rule-in-the-post-reconstruction-south/.
• “‘White Negroes’ in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” The Journal of Southern History, Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998): 247-276.

Conversations with Artists… Between Races

In the Mix: Conversations with Artists… Between Races
Public Radio International
2009-01-31

Dmae Roberts, Host

Actor Lou Diamond Phillips, poet Robert Krimi, musican Phillip Blanchett and others talk about what it means to be of Mixed Race.

Mixed Race is the fastest growing minority in America. The arts have opened up new ideas through colorblind casting, fusion in music, the visual arts and literature. Just as each racial/ethnic group influences and changes artistic styles and movements, Mixed Race artists help to create fusion and bridges cultural and traditional differences.

Hosted and produced by Dmae Roberts, “In the Mix: Conversations with Artists… Between Races” is a personal exploration of Mixed Race. This hour-long documentary explores how artists and performers of Mixed Race deal with issues of identity, history and perspective, and how their art reflects these issues in different ways.

The idea that people can be of many races and also claim any of them, that our President is mixed race and African-American, is a stumbling block to many people’s understanding of what it means to be a person of color.

Through the voices of artists who have dedicated their lives to building bridges and bringing to light interracial issues and themes, Roberts takes listeners on a journey to understanding what it means to be of Mixed Race…

Download the interview here (00:59:00, 27MB).

Roundtable with Fanshen Cox, Dr. Ulli Ryder, and Dr. Marcia Dawkins

Blogtalk Radio
Tuesday, 2011-08-09, 22:00Z (18:00 EDT)

Michelle McCrary, Host
Is That Your Child?

Fanshen Cox, Actress, Educator, Founder and Producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, co-host Mixed Chicks Chat

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ulli K. Ryder, Visiting Scholar
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

From the New York Times to CNN to Hollywood actresses, it seems that everyone is talking about mixed race people and interracial relationships. Amidst the celebratory tones of much of this coverage and ill-advised celebrations of a “post-racial” America,  there seems to be a slow-burning backlash. 

The mainstream’s problematic framing of mixed race identity and of the “mixed experience” seems to be stoking the fires of this discontent.  In this podcast roundtable hosted by ITYC, we hope analyze the mainstream coverage of mixedness and multiracial identity to find out where it goes off the rails and what, if anything, it gets right.  This podcast roundtable is only a small piece of the kind of meaningful exchange we hope that people will continue to have about the issue both on and offline.

Each of our panelists will share their personal experiences with the mainstream treatment of multiracial/mixed identity as well as any backlash they’ve experienced.   They’ll also offer some strategies for having more nuanced, contextual  conversations about “the mixed experience.”

To download the audio of the roundtable discussion, click here (01:01:12, 14MB).

Texas bucks U.S. trend on standardized scoring

Houston Chronicle
2011-07-25

Jennifer Radcliffe
 
It will tally multiracial students but not report their scores separately

Multiracial students are being tallied for the first time in Texas history, but their standardized test scores won’t appear as a separate group when accountability ratings are released Friday.

As it grapples with increasing diversity, Texas has opted not to measure the scores of the state’s 78,419 multiracial, non-Hispanic students as an ethnic subgroup whose performance matters in determining whether a school made “adequate yearly progress.”
 
Instead, they’ll join the ranks of the 180,000 Asian students lumped in with their schools’ entire student body for accountability purposes…

…Some scores moved
 
As Texas transitions to the new categories this year, state officials have opted to return some multiracial students’ scores to their previous category, if records indicate that the student was originally listed as white or African American. Their scores will only count in that previous category if they improve the school’s rating…

Read the entire article here.

From Invisible Man to “New People”: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 46, Number 2 (2nd Quarter, 1985)
pages 106-122

Patricia Morton

It might well seem obvious what the following persons have in common: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Horace Mann Bond, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, and Langston Hughes.

Although such a list could be expanded indefinitely, the point is that most of these are familiar enough names that they will readily be identified as Afro-Americans who have acted in some capacity as spokespeople for black Americans. Therefore, the obvious answer to the question suggested above is that these persons share their racial identity, as black American people. It might also be recognized, however, that this answer is based upon a distinctive North American perspective. In Latin American societies, for example, they would be identified instead as “mulattoes,” and in several cases, on the basis of physical appearance and status, as “white.”

It is essentially only during the last decade that this kind of distinction has been explicitly recognized in the publication of a number of studies which explore the historical experience of Americans of mixed black and white ancestry. It was observed recently that “As a field of enquiry with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, Afro-American history came of age during the past two decades.” In one sense these mulatto studies might be seen as part of that coming of age; however, in another sense they hearken back to what Black History has attempted to do for black Americans until recently, namely, to write the mulatto into American history. What does seem clear is that such studies represent a new direction in American historiography, and that the scholars engaged in this field are far from arriving at any consensus regarding their conceptual and methodological concerns. Indeed, they have remained largely unaware of one another’s work, and have arrived largely independently at conclusions which are sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to compare and contrast their accounts, to offer some tentative suggestions as to their strengths and weaknesses, and where possible, to integrate their conclusions. In addition, this recent upsurge of scholarly interest in Americans of mixed black and white ancestry is a striking phenomenon in itself, which deserves some comment in the context of modern North American attitudes to race and race relations…

…Both miscegenation and mulatto are emotion-charged and value-laden terms, and both have been employed by North American whites in a variety of ways in accordance with their views on race. However, the mulatto figure has also been employed by Afro-Americans as a defense against white racism. Certainly Berzon demonstrates that during the Jim Crow era, Afro-American writers revived the “superior mulatto” for this purpose, consistently and repeatedly portraying the respectable and virtuous character of the person of mixed ancestry to counter the image of Negro degradation. These novels depict exemplary “Victorian” mulatto women, and equally bourgeois mulatto men who are also educated, refined, patriarchal, self-reliant, and devoted to acquiring all the marks of middle-class status. They are race leaders and role models who are both distinct from and an inspiration to the black masses, and particularly during the turn-of-the-century years, Afro-Americans themselves emphasized mulatto distinctiveness, John Mencke’s thesis notwithstanding….

Login to read the entire article here.

My academic research is on racial categories in national censuses.  When I first started reading about the push to get a “mixed-race” category on the U.S. census in the 1990s, I was absolutely on the side of the multiracial movement. I thought the census should recognize our identities, no matter how complicated they may be.  Then I kept reading and realized that the multiracial activists were only concerned with recognition and didn’t care that it potentially came at the expense of civil rights agendas.  Being counted is crucial in the U.S.—and elsewhere. It is linked to money, political power, grassroots mobilization and even community cohesion.  Having a separate mixed-race category threatened all that—and the hard-fought victories of the civil rights movement.  The multiracial organizations that testified before Congress in the 1990s were mostly white mothers of multiracial children who did not want their children to have to choose one race over another.  But they failed to recognize what else was at stake—though the census was once an instrument used to manage and control racial populations, it now has a political power that racial minorities can access and use to advance their claims. The entire U.S. civil rights regime rests on the idea of discrete racial categories. One group’s recognition could lead to another’s oppression.  But the mixed-race activists didn’t care—they went on to argue (unsuccessfully) for their cause and even struck alliances with Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, whose ten steps for better race relations in the U.S. included adding a multiracial category to the census and doing away with affirmative action.

Debra Thompson, “The language and the Ethics of Mixed Race,” In Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010), 267.

Latinos are “Mixed,” Too

News Taco: The Latino Daily
2011-07-14

Chantilly Patiño, blogger
Bicultural Mom

Most times, Americans don’t think of Latinos as being mixed or multicultural, but in reality Latinos are leaders of multiculturalism and mixed families.  Start off with the fact that most Latinos come from a combination of European and Native ancestry, a mixing that began with the colonization of the Americas.

But beyond that there are other historical mixings, including African ancestry, Latinos in the U.S. are also in the unique position of straddling the borders of two dominating cultures, popular American culture and that of their own Latino heritage.  This puts Latinos in an excellent position to understand a variety of perspectives and address multiculturalism with ease…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Season

BBC Press Office
BBC Two Summer & Autumn 2011
Diverse, stimulating and rewarding television on BBC Two
2011-06-22

Mixed-race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn in a collection of revealing new programmes. With a mix of drama and documentaries, the season provides a window into the varied lives of mixed-race people living in the UK and helps us understand what the increase in mixed-race people means for the way we live in Britain today.

Mixed Britannia

George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community in a new three-part series uncovering a tale of illicit love, tragedy and triumph.

With previously unseen material and unheard testimony, charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George examines the social factors that have influenced the shape of today’s mixed-race Britain. He discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making it one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK…

…Mixed Race

This documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing. From the strict application of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the USA and South Africa to the emergence of Mestizo cultures in the colonies of South America, the programme examines the complex history of interracial relationships around the world…

For more information, click here.