Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial People of Black-White Backgrounds needed for Dissertation on the Effects of Racial Microaggressions

Hello! My name is Claire Anne (“Daanee”) Touchstone, and I am a doctoral student at Loyola Marymount University, writing a dissertation on the effects of racial microaggressions on multiracial black-white university students between the ages of 18-25. While I am most interested in people of black-white mixed backgrounds, I will gladly accept any applicant who is of mixed black background.

Racial microaggressions are defined by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues (2007) as: “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to people of color because they belong to a racial minority group.” Some examples include (Sue et al, 2007):

• Alien in Own Land: When assumed to be foreign-born based on race: “Where are you from?” “Where were you born?” “You speak good English.”
• Ascription of Intelligence: “You are a credit to your race.” “You are so articulate.”
• Color Blindness: Statements that indicate that a person does not want to acknowledge race: “When I look at you, I don’t see color.” “There is only one race, the human race.”
• Assumption of Criminal Status: A person of color is presumed to be dangerous, criminal, or deviant on the basis of their race: For example, a man or woman clutching their purse or checking their wallet as a person of color approaches or passes. Also, a store owner following a customer of color around the store.
• Denial of Individual Racism: A statement made when people deny their racial biases: “I’m not racist. I have several Black friends.” “As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority.”

Can you think of a microaggression that has happened to you in your life, particularly as a result of being of mixed racial backgrounds?

For this study, I am particularly interested in multiracial microaggressions, defined by Johnston and Nadal (2010) as “daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, enacted by monoracial person that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights toward multiracial individuals or groups.” Some examples include:

• “What are you?
• “You have to choose, you can’t be both.”
• “One day, everybody will be mixed.”
• “Were you adopted? Is that your mother, father?”
• Being accused of “acting white”
• Forms that allow only one racial choice
• Tokenism: being the racial spokesperson for your minority race: “Why do all black people ______ (fill in the blank)?”
• Subjected to minority stereotypes and microaggressions

Study Procedures:

This three-part study consists of reading a vignette of a microaggressive experience and discussing in a focus group interview (of 6-8 people), three individualized interviews (each to take place 3-7 days apart), and writing a short narrative/reflection (1-2 pages) of a personal microaggressive experience based on being of mixed backgrounds.

Participation is voluntary and anonymous, and participants may withdraw at any time from the study without penalty. All participants will be given an Informed Consent Form and Subject’s Bill of Rights. All participants will be compensated with a gift card to either Starbuck’s or Target; the amount of the gift card will vary depending on partial or complete participation (up to $25.00 USD), but all participants will receive some compensation for their time.

If you are a person of African-American mixed heritage (particularly with one African-American parent and one Caucasian parent) and are interested in participating in this study, please contact me at daancer@hotmail.com. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to hearing from you!

Ms. Claire Anne (“Daanee”) Touchstone, Ed.D. Candidate
Loyola Marymount University

California’s Multiracial Population

Public Policy Institute of California
California Counts: Population Trends and Profiles
Volume 6, Number 1 (August 2004)
20 pages

Laura E. Hill, Associate Director and Research Fellow
Public Policy Institute of California

Hans P. Johnson, Editor; Director of Research and Thomas C. Sutton Chair in Policy Research
Public Policy Institute of California

Sonya M. Tafoya, Research Associate
Pew Hispanic Center

Summary

Before Census 2000, Americans were asked to choose just one race when identifying themselves and their children. With the advent of the option to choose one or more races in Census 2000, there was a great deal of uncertainty about just how many Americans consider themselves to be multiracial. As with other issues related to racial and ethnic diversity, California is leading the nation—5 percent of the state’s population is identified as being of more than one race, about twice the rate as in the rest of the nation. In this issue of California Counts, we explore this newly identified population. We find that California’s multiracial population is hard to characterize with any basic summary statistics. Overall, people who identify themselves as multiracial are younger, less educated, slightly more likely to be foreign-born, and more likely to be living in poverty than single-race Californians. However, multiracial Californians are of many racial combinations, with very different characteristics according to the particular combination. For example, the median age of individuals identified as both black and white is only 12 years, compared to 36 years for American Indian and white Californians. The poverty rates for individuals identified as Asian and white is less than half that of Hispanics who identify as both white and some other race. For the most part, biracial Asian and whites, American Indian and whites, and black and whites have socioeconomic characteristics intermediate to those of their monoracial counterparts. However, both black and whites and Asian and whites are significantly younger than their monoracial counterparts, suggesting that the characteristics of the multiracial population could change as more and more children are born to parents of different races and potentially retain multiracial identity as they grow into adulthood and have their own children. In the near term, the presence of this new multiracial option presents some challenges for the collection and analysis of demographic data at the state and national levels. We already see evidence that demographic rates calculated using different data sources can lead to implausible results for multiracial populations. Ultimately, the size and significance of the multiracial population of California will depend at least partly on future preferences with respect to identity. The ability to choose more than one race on state forms and future censuses along with increasing rates of intermarriage could lead more Californians to choose a multiracial identity. As the multiracial population grows, it has the power to challenge and even transform our understanding of race in California.

…What is especially notable about California’s multiracial population is how few of the state’s 58 counties have less than 3 percent of their population that is multiracial (recall that the national average was 2.4%). Indeed, only Mono county has a lower proportion of its residents that are multiracial than the national average (2.2%). The six most multiracial cities in the state each have multiracial population shares of 7 percent or higher (Table 4).

More than 10 percent of Southern California’s Glendale population is multiracial, as is over 7 percent of the population in a number of cities in the wider San Francisco Bay Area (Hayward, Fairfield, Pittsburg, South San Francisco, and Antioch). In Glendale, most multiracial residents are SOR  (some other race)+white, with ancestry data indicating many of Armenian descent. Newport Beach, in Southern California, has the lowest percentage of multiracial residents (1.7%).

Because Hispanic SOR+whites are the most common multiracial group statewide, they also tend to dominate the multiracial population in any given locale. When we examine California’s ten largest cities (Table 5), we find that Hispanic SOR+whites are the most common multiracial group in nine of them.

San Francisco, California’s tenth largest city, is the one exception, where Asian+whites are the most common multiracial group. Los Angeles, the largest city in the state, has the greatest number of multiracial individuals of any city statewide, and this is true for each of the five most common biracial groups…

Read the entire report here.

What Being Biracial Means Today

The New York Times
The Opinion Pages
2011-02-05

Jordan Awan

Re “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above” (“Race Remixed” series, front page, Jan. 30):

To the Editor:

Oh, big deal! In 1947, as college students, we used to answer the race question with “human.” Each generation thinks it’s inventing the wheel!

Amalia Jacobucci
Centerville, Mass., Jan. 30, 2011…

Read all of the letters here.

Revisioning Black/White Multiracial Families: The Single-Parent Experience

American Sociological Association,
Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
2003-08-16
18 pages, 5,006 words

Rachel Sullivan

In the literature on Black/White multiracial families, there is a significant group of families missing from most research. These are households that are lead by a single parent of a biracial child. While data on the relative prevalence of single parenthood in multiracial populations is sparse, my research indicates that a significant percentage of multiracial families are headed by single parents. Nearly half of the Black/White biracial infants and toddlers in my study where born to a unmarried parent (National Maternal and Infant Health Survey 1988, 1991). This study also indicates that these families are much like other single parent families demographically. In most cases they fall somewhere between black and white single parent households; however, in areas where there are differences they tend to be closer to African American families.

…Since so much of the research is narrowly focused on identity and marriage,  single parents of biracial children, who are divorced, widowed, or never married, are rarely discussed. One reason this group is overlooked is because of the methodological  techniques used to analyzed multiracial families. Research on marriage uses often uses Census data to find intermarried couples; however, the level of analysis is generally the couple, so married couples are identified and then sorted into various racial combinations. Since so much of the research is narrowly focused on identity and marriage,  single parents of biracial children, who are divorced, widowed, or never married, are  rarely discussed. One reason this group is overlooked is because of the methodological  techniques used to analyzed multiracial families. Research on marriage uses often uses Census data to find intermarried couples; however, the level of analysis is generally the couple, so married couples are identified and then sorted into various racial combinations…

Read the entire paper here.

In Census, Young Americans Increasingly Diverse

The New York Times
2011-02-04

Sabrina Tabernise

WASHINGTON — Demographers sifting through new population counts released on Thursday by the Census Bureau say the data bring a pattern into sharper focus: Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift that demographers say creates a culture gap with far-reaching political and social consequences.

Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey and Louisiana all had declines in their populations of white residents ages 18 and under, according to the bureau’s first detailed report on the 2010 Census.

…Growth in the number of white youths slowed sharply in the 1990s, up by just 1 percent in the decade, as the number of white women of childbearing age fell, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

More recently, it has dipped into a decline. The number of whites under the age of 20 fell by 6 percent between 2000 and 2008, Mr. Johnson said, citing countrywide census estimates.

Instead, growth has come from minorities, particularly Hispanics, as more Latino women enter their childbearing years. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics accounted for about 79 percent of the national population growth between 2000 and 2009, Mr. Johnson said.

The result has been a changed American landscape, with whites now a minority of the youth population in 10 states, including Arizona, where tensions over immigration have flared, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution…

…Even in Virginia, a largely suburban state whose white adult population rose considerably over the decade, the young white population registered a decline.

In contrast, the number of mixed-race children doubled, Hispanic children doubled, and Asian children were up by more than two-thirds, according to Mr. Johnson…

Read the entire article here.

Parent and Child Influences on the Development of a Black-White Biracial Identity

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2009-10-07
286 pages

Dana J. Stone Harris

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human Development

In this qualitative study, the interactive process of exploring and developing shared, familial meanings about biracial identity development was investigated from the perspectives of both parents and children in Black-White multiracial families. Specifically, this study examined how monoracial parents and their biracial children describe the influence parents have on the biracial children’s identity development process from the biracial individuals’ youth into adulthood. Monoracial parents and their children were also invited to share how they negotiated the uniqueness of a biracial identity in both the parents’ and the children’s social arenas. Data were obtained through in-person, semi-structured interviews with 10 monoracial mothers and 11 of their adult (ages 18 to 40) biracial children. The data were analyzed using phenomenological methodology. The analysis of participants’ experiences of biracial identity development revealed four major themes: that family interactions and relationships contribute to the creation of identity for biracial individuals, that mothers intentionally worked to create an open family environment for their biracial children to grow up in, that parents and children affect and are affected by interactions with American culture and society throughout their development, and finally that growing up biracial is a unique experience within each of aforementioned contexts. While there were many shared experiences among the families, each family had its own exceptional story of strength and adjustment to the biracial identity development process. Across cases, the overarching theme was one of togetherness and resiliency for the mothers and their adult children. Data from this study has important implications for research and practice among a number of human service professionals.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE
  • JUSTIFICATION: BLACK-WHITE INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES
  • STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
  • PURPOSE STATEMENT
  • CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
  • DEFINITIONS OF KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
  • RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
  • IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • RACIAL IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • BIRACIAL IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • RACIAL SOCIALIZATION: THE ROLE OF FAMILIES
  • INTERRACIAL COUPLES: ATTITUDES AND EXPERIENCES
  • INTERRACIAL PARENTS AND RACIAL SOCIALIZATION
  • THE PRESENT STUDY
• CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
  • PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY
  • SAMPLE
  • PROCEDURES
  • MEASURES
  • ROLE OF THE RESEARCHER
  • DATA ANALYSIS
  • TRUSTWORTHINESS
• CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS
  • INTRODUCTION OF THE PARTICIPANT FAMILIES
    • Participant Demographics: Mothers
    • Participant Demographics: Biracial Adults
    • Descriptions of Participant Families
  • MULTIGENERATIONAL FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
    • Family Constellations and Parental Dating Practices
    • Supportive and Close Parent-Child Relationships
    • Supportive Siblings: Sharing the Biracial Experience
    • Grandparents and Great-Grandparents
  • FAMILIAL INFLUENCES ON THE BIRACIAL IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
    • Raising Biracial Children: An Intentionally Unique Responsibility
    • Racially Labeling Children
    • Acknowledging Potential Challenges for Biracial Children
    • Family pride: We are Comfortable and Proud to be an Interracial Family
  • NEGOTIATING OUR RACIAL IDENTITY WITH THE “OUTSIDE” WORLD
    • Friendships
    • Neighborhoods and Local Communities
    • Trying to Fit Me into a Box: Pressure to Choose Black or White
    • Fighting Discrimination and Racism as a Family
    • The Impact of Racially Historical Events
  • THE EXPERIENCE OF GROWING UP WITH A UNIQUE RACIAL HERITAGE
    • How I Describe My Racial Identity
    • The Color of My Skin Matters
    • “The Biggest Issue I’ve had is Hair”
    • Stuck in the Middle and “The Best of Both Worlds”
    • Resiliency: My Racial Identity Makes me a Stronger Person
  • SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
• CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
  • OVERVIEW
  • REFLEXIVITY AND PERSONAL PROCESS
  • DISCUSSION OF THE FINDINGS
    • Mother’s Perceptions of their Influence on Biracial Identity Development
    • Biracial Children Describe the Influence of their Parents and Families
    • Biracial Identity from Childhood into Adulthood
    • Negotiating Biracial Identity in the Social Arenas of Mothers and Children
  • LIMITATIONS
  • PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS
    • Mental Health Implications
    • Treatment Suggestions
    • Social and Political Implications
    • Community
    • Social Change
  • RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
  • FINAL CONCLUSIONS
• REFERENCES
  • APPENDIX A: ADVERTISEMENT FLYER
  • APPENDIX B: RECRUITMENT EMAIL/LETTER
  • APPENDIX C: IRB APPROVAL LETTER VIRGINIA TECH
  • APPENDIX D: IRB APPROVAL LETTER UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
  • APPENDIX E: INFORMED CONSENT
  • APPENDIX F: INTERVIEW GUIDES
  • APPENDIX G: DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRES
  • APPENDIX H: THEMES DRAFT 1
  • APPENDIX I: THEMES DRAFT 6
  • APPENDIX J: EMAIL LETTER FOR MEMBER CHECKS

LIST OF TABLES

• TABLE 1 SUMMARY OF THEMES
• TABLE 2 MOTHER DEMOGRAPHICS
• TABLE 3 BIRACIAL ADULT DEMOGRAPHICS

LIST OF FIGURES

• FIGURE 1 VINCENT FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 2 NELSON FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 3 SIMON FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 4 EDWARD FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 5 RULE FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 6 COLLINS FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 7 JACOBS FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 8 OLSON FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 9 MONROE FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 10 BROOKS FAMILY GENOGRAM

Read the entire dissertation here.

Julianne Jennings: The mixed blood of Indians explained

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
2009-01-30

Julianne Jennings
Willmantic, Connecticut

EUROPEAN EXPLORERS discovered a land inhabited by an agricultural people who grew corn, beans and squash and who had a sophisticated system of government that, some would argue, would later be adopted by the United States. The settling of a hostile “wilderness” and the near-extinction of Native Americans is now an annual American celebration called Thanksgiving. Every year, school-age children are taught the legend of the first encounter between Indians and the Pilgrims.

Included in the mythical story is a description of what an “authentic” Indian looked like and how he or she behaved. These false images are promulgated in children’s literature and in film and have become the death of many Native Americans who do not fit the popular stereotype, especially Indians who live along the Eastern Seaboard and whose physical features reflect blood mixing.

In New England, after the Pequot War (1636-1637) and the King Philip’s War (1675-1676), the Pequots were either executed, forced into indentured servitude in colonial households, divided among other Eastern tribes, or shipped to Bermuda and the Caribbean as slaves. Today, eight out of ten Native Americans are of mixed blood as a result of slavery and post-slavery intermarriage, particularly in New England. Further, the infamous “one-drop rule,” which is also tied to the colonial slave system, decreed that a single drop of black blood, or a single ancestor who was African, in an individual of mixed race defined that person as black.

After the Pequot War and the King Philip’s War, slavery was a booming business in Bermuda in the late 1600s. The English conducted a census of the population living on the island. There were five categories of race: white, negro, Indian, mulatto and mustees. Mustees were people who were of mixed race but passed for white. During the late 1700s another census was conducted. There were still five categories; however, Indians were now classified as “colored.” After emancipation in 1834, the classification of mustees were dropped, people of color were either negro, colored or mulatto, depending on their features, skin color and hair texture…

Read the entire article here.

Dr. Rainier Spencer to be Guest on MSNBC NewsNation with Tamron Hall

NewsNation
MSNBC TV
Wednesday, 2011-02-02, 19:00-20:00Z (14:00-15:00 EST, 11:00-12:00 PST) (Recheduled due to a White House news conference on the situation in Egypt from 2011-01-31.)

Tamron Hall, Host

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Dr. Spencer is the author of the new book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011) in where he argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

View the video here.

Selected bibliography:

• “Mixed-Race Chic,” The Chronicle Review, May 19, 2009.
• Challenging Multiracial ldentity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006.
• Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

Changing Census, Changing America

Southern Changes: The Journal of the Southern Regional Council
Volume 22, Number 4 (2000)
pages 24-26

Edward Still

Every census is different from the last, but there are some big changes in store with Census 2000. Beginning in early March 2001, the Bureau will publish census data for each state to use in redistricting. What new things can we expect from this census? To begin with, we will have access to census data more easily via computer. The Census Bureau will be posting census data on its website, www.census.gov and a separate site for the American Factfinder, www.factfinder.census.gov. More importantly, the data will be different from past censuses. I want to discuss two changes: the racial data and the sampling controversy.

Reporting One or More Races

For the first time, Census 2000 allowed respondents to identify themselves as a member of more than one race. The census asked, “What is this person’s race? Mark one or more races to indicate what this person considers himself/herself to be.” The races which the Census Bureau will report are: white; black, African American, or Negro; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; and, “Some other race.” (In the 1990 Census, the Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander groups were combined.)

Because the respondents were allowed to choose more than one race, there are fifty-seven possible combinations of racial groupings-ranging from people who mark two races (ten possible combinations) to people who claim all six racial categories…

Read the entire article here.

Asian American Studies: Building Academic Bridges – Nitasha Sharma

The Department of African American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois
October 2010

Ronald Roach

NITASHA TAMAR SHARMA Title: Assistant Professor of African-American and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University Education: Ph.D., Anthropology, University of alifornia at Santa Barbara; M.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara; B.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz Age: 35

With a dual appointment in the African-American Studies department and the Asian American studies program at Northwestern University, Dr. Nitasha Sharma is well positioned to produce scholarship that bridges the two disciplines. Sharma’s forthcoming book, based on her anthropology dissertation, Claiming Space, Making Race: South Asian American Hip Hop Artists, examines the influence that African-American-inspired hip hop culture has had on young musicians of South Asian descent, developing what some scholars see as fertile ground in ethnic studies—cross-cultural and comparative inquiry on U.S. racial and ethnic groups.

In her third year as an assistant professor at Northwestern, Sharma is regarded as a skillful and popular teacher. Her courses have included “The Racial and Gender Politics of Hip Hop”; “Race, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, Prisons, and Post-9/11 Detentions”; and “Cracking the Color Lines: Asian and Black Relations in the U.S.” Sharma has also done considerable work on mixed-race populations, including those in the U.S. and Trinidad. The African-American Studies department has awarded its Outstanding Teaching Award to Sharma in both her first and second years.

In addition, Sharma’s dual appointment has attracted the attention of Asian American studies scholars as well as Asian American student groups nationally and has resulted in numerous speaking engagements for the young professor. “(These individuals and organizations) really want to have the framework to understand the collaborations that my appointment symbolizes,” she says…

…“Nitasha is especially attractive in the way that she complicates our understanding of how race is constructed… And she is very good at demonstrating the impact of African-American culture and history on diverse populations around the globe,” Hine adds.

Sharma’s personal background may help explain her rise as a young scholar. She knew as a youngster growing up in Hawaii that she wanted to follow in the footsteps of her parents, both professors. Her father, a retired University of Hawaii history professor and Indian immigrant, and mother, a still-active University of Hawaii anthropologist in Asian studies and Brooklyn, N.Y., native of Russian Jewish descent, met and married in the United Kingdom and settled in Hawaii. “I wanted the life that my parents had. They had summers off and traveled around the world; they were frequently at home during the week days… The talk at the dinner table was largely about academic life and their work,” Sharma says…

Read the entire article here.