Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Identity [Movie] to be screened at the  Portland, Maine International Film Festival

Portland, Maine International Film Festival
Saturday, 2010-08-21, 12:00 – 13:30 EDT (Local Time)
Space Gallery
538 Congress Street, Portland, Maine 04101
Phone: 207.828.5600

Year: 2010
Director: Brian Chinhema
Writer: Brian Chinhema
Producer: Brian Chinhema (Abacus Production)
Running Time: 01:22:00

Multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic in America, yet there is no officially political recognition for mixed-race people. Multiracial Identity examines what it means to be multiracial in America and explores the social, political, and religious impact of the multiracial movement.

The film is produced and directed by Brian Chinhema and features commentary from noted scholars, Rainier Spencer, Naomi Zack, Aliya Saperstein, Aaron Gullickson, Susan J. Hayflick and Pastor Randall Sanford.

Forsaking All Others: A True Story of Interracial Sex and Revenge in the 1880s South

University of Tennessee Press
2010-11-10
160 estimated pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-57233-724-4; 1572337249
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-57233-740-4; 1-57233-740-0

Charles F. Robinson, Vice Provost for Diversity; Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies
University of Arkansas

The electronic book (E-Book) is available now.

An intensely dramatic true story, Forsaking All Others recounts the fascinating case of an interracial couple who attempted—in defiance of society’s laws and conventions—to formalize their relationship in the post-Reconstruction South. It was an affair with tragic consequences, one that entangled the protagonists in a miscegenation trial and, ultimately, a desperate act of revenge.

From the mid-1870s to the early 1880s, Isaac Bankston was the proud sheriff of Desha County, Arkansas, a man so prominent and popular that he won five consecutive terms in office. Although he was married with two children, around 1881 he entered into a relationship with Missouri Bradford, an African American woman who bore his child. Some two years later, Missouri and Isaac absconded to Memphis, hoping to begin a new life there together. Although Tennessee lawmakers had made miscegenation a felony, Isaac’s dark complexion enabled the couple to apply successfully for a marriage license and take their vows. Word of the marriage quickly spread, however, and Missouri and Isaac were charged with unlawful cohabitation. An attorney from Desha County, James Coates, came to Memphis to act as special prosecutor in the case. Events then took a surprising turn as Isaac chose to deny his white heritage in order to escape conviction. Despite this victory in court, however, Isaac had been publicly disgraced, and his sense of honor propelled him into a violent confrontation with Coates, the man he considered most responsible for his downfall.

Charles F. Robinson uses Missouri and Isaac’s story to examine key aspects of post-Reconstruction society, from the rise of miscegenation laws and the particular burdens they placed on anyone who chose to circumvent them, to the southern codes of honor that governed both social and individual behavior, especially among white men. But most of all, the book offers a compelling personal narrative with important implications for our supposedly more tolerant times.

The Invisible Minorities: Identity Construction of Multiracial Asian Americans

San Jose State University
August 2003
136 pages

Jennifer Huyhn Thi Ahn Morrison, Lecturer AY-A of Communication Studies
San Jose State University

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies at San Jose State University in partial fulfulliment of the requriements for the degree Master of Arts.

A review of the literature found that Ethnic Studies focused on multiracial Asian American identity more than any other field. However, multiracial Asian Americans are still in need of further research because of the many different types of identity construction that may occur. From the array of literature found in Communication Studies, only a few encompass how a multiracial individual communicates her or his identity construction. Thus, in my Master’s thesis I found that the complexity of multiracial identity construction encompasses three types of communication cues in relation to familial closeness. Through the analysis of five in-depth interviews I found there to be a profound influence on how the double minority multiracial individual is raced and how she or he identifies. Therefore, after examining the construction of double minority multiracial Asian Americans, there is a greater ability to understand how a complex multiracial identity is communicated.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: THE WORLD OF MULTIRACIALITY

• Introduction
• Rationale
• Key Terms
• Ethnicity & Race
• Monoracial
• Multiracial
• Minority Group
• Majority Group
• Literature Review
• Identity
• Multiracial Identity
• Identity of Multiracial Asian Americans

CHAPTER 2: INTERVIEWS FROM THE DOMAIN OF MULTIRACIALITY

• Qualitative In-depth Interviews
• Research Questions
• Procedures
• Mode of Analysis

CHAPTER 3: SELECTIVE MONORACIAL IDENTITY

• Selective Monoracial Identity
• Familial Closeness

CHAPTER 4: THE ISSUES OF PASSING & BEING RACED

• Authenticity
• Racial Status

CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION

• Inclusion of The Invisible Minority
• SMI
• Familial Communicative Cues
• A Visual Represention of Multiracial Identity Development
• Limitations
• Implications for Future Research

REFERENCES

Read the entire thesis here.

The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the US Population: Emerging American Identities

Population and Development Review
Volume 35, Issue 1 (March 2009)
pages 1-51
DOI: 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2009.00260.x

Anthony Daniel Perez, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington, Seattle

Images and interpretations of the past, present, and future of the American racial and ethnic landscape are contradictory. Many accounts focus on the increasing diversity that results from immigration and differential natural increase as well as the proliferation of racial and ethnic categories in census data. Less attention has been paid to the formation and erosion of racial and ethnic identities produced by intermarriage and ethnic blending. The framers and custodians of census racial classifications assume a “geographic origins” definition of race and ethnicity, but the de facto measures in censuses and social surveys rely on folk categories that vary over time and are influenced by administrative practices and sociopolitical movements. We illustrate these issues through an in-depth examination of the racial and ethnic reporting by whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics in the 2000 census. The emerging pattern, labeled here as the “Americanization” of racial and ethnic identities, and most evident for whites and blacks, is of simplified racial identities with little acknowledgment of complex ancestries. National origin is the predominant mode of reporting racial and ethnic identities among Asians and Hispanics, especially first-generation immigrants. The future of racial and ethnic identities is unknowable, but continued high levels of immigration, intermarriage, and social mobility are likely to blur contemporary divisions and boundaries.

…America was a multiethnic and multicultural society from the outset. The original American colonies were formed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as frontier societies composed of multiple founding populations (Klein 2004: Ch. 2). First among these were the indigenous peoples of North America, who were gradually displaced or absorbed by the more numerous European settlers and indentured servants from various parts of the world. Africans were imported primarily as slave labor from the Caribbean and West Africa, although some arrived as indentured servants on terms similar to whites. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, some blacks became free settlers, but by the close of the seventeenth century, slavery and African heritage became nearly synonymous (Fredrickson 1981). With unbalanced sex ratios in frontier settings, large populations of mixed ancestry soon emerged, particularly in Southern colonies (Davis 1991). While some unions were the result of intermarriage or consensual liaisons, there was also widespread sexual exploitation of black women by white slave owners (Fredrickson 1981: Ch. 3).

The ethnic and racial landscape became even more complex during the nineteenth century. Continental expansion added lands that had been home to Native Americans and peoples of mixed indigenous and Spanish origin, and successive waves of immigration from Europe and Asia fueled the rapid growth of an increasingly diverse population. Tracking the mixed and un-mixed descendants from these many threads is a theoretical possibility, but not one that can be easily accomplished with historical or contemporary data. The problem is that the differential rates of settlement, natural increase, and intermarriage (or sexual unions) that produced progeny of mixed ancestry are largely unknown. Small differences in assumptions about the relative magnitudes of these processes can lead to greatly different estimates of the ancestral origins of the contemporary American population.

An even greater obstacle to describing the ethnic makeup of the American people is the assumption that most people are able and willing to accurately report the origins of their parents, grandparents, and more distant ancestors. In many cases, knowledge of ancestral origins is passed along in families or communities, but in some cases these narratives are suppressed or simply lost to history. As a result, the racial and ethnic composition recorded in censuses, surveys, and administrative records reflects a large degree of subjectivity and even speculation, in addition to actual patterns of genealogical descent. Methodological studies of census questions about race and ethnicity, for instance, show that responses are affected, often remarkably so, by the format of questions, the listed choices, and the examples included in questionnaire instructions (Farley 1991; Hirschman, Alba, and Farley 2000)…

Read an excerpt of this article here.
Read or purchase the entire article here.

Biracial Utahns seeking identity

Deseret News
Salt Lake City, Utah
2005-03-12

Elaine Jarvik

They’re biracial — equally Polynesian and white. But most prefer to think of themselves as Polynesian, says University of Utah graduate student Kawika Allen, who recently studied 84 Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns.

Allen, who grew up with an Hawaiian mother and a Caucasian father, presented his findings Friday at the ninth annual Pacific Islander Awareness Week at the University of Utah…

…Growing up in Utah, Allen’s Polynesian friends sometimes thought he wasn’t Polynesian enough, and he wasn’t sure if he fit in his father’s white world either. That angst later led to a master’s thesis on biracial identity among Utah’s biracial Polynesians, who now number more than 3,000.

Although previous research of other biracial Americans found that children tend to identify more with the same-sex parent, regardless of ethnicity, Allen found that among Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns, children tended to identify more with the Polynesian parent, regardless of gender.

He also found that biracial Polynesians were more likely to receive negative messages about being biracial if their fathers, rather than mothers, were Polynesian…

Read the entire article here.

American novelist & memoirist Danzy Senna to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

University of Richmond
Richmond, Virginia
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Wednesday, 2011-03-16 19:00 EST (Local Time)

Danzy Senna is the author of two novels and a memoir that focus on issues of race, gender and cultural identity. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” the story of two biracial sisters growing up in racially charged Boston during the 1970s, became an instant national bestseller. It won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and an Alex Award from the American Library Association, was named Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Of mixed-race heritage, Senna writes extensively on the experience of being mistaken for white. Her latest work is a collection of short stories.

For more information, click here.

Werner Sollors to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

University of Richmond
Westhampton Living Room, Westhampton Center
Richmond, Virginia
2010-09-30 16:30 EDT (Local Time)

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His major publications include “Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture;” “Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature;” and a book-length contribution on “Ethnic Modernism” in Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Cambridge History of American Literature.” With Greil Marcus he wrote “Ethnic Modernism and A New Literary History of America.”

Sollors is the recipient of a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Constance Rourke award for the best essay in American Quarterly in 1990. In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie. His talk is entitled “The Rise of Ethnic Modernism in the US, 1910-1950.”

For more information, click here.

Looking in the Cultural Mirror: How understanding race and culture helps us answer the question: “Who am I?”

Psychology Today
2010-07-06

Jefferson M. Fish, Ph.D.

The Census and Race—Part I–Key Issues: What can science tell us about the census’s race questions? (2010-07-06)

The 2010 Census is well on its way to completion. Its controversial questions about race have raised many issues that deserve to be explored in depth. This is the first post in a multi-part series dealing with the census’s race questions and what we can learn from them about science, politics, and American culture…

The Census and Race—Part II—Slavery (1790-1860): How did the census deal with race during slavery? (2010-07-13)

…The term “color”–not “race”– first appeared in the 1850 census, with three options: white, black, or mulatto; and these options were repeated in 1860. Whatever folk beliefs about “race” Americans may have held prior to the Civil War, they were of secondary importance. Instead, the census questions were organized around the institution of slavery, and were aimed at getting the information needed to apportion taxes and allocate congressional representation.

The key to understanding these questions is political, not biological. The Three-Fifths Compromise, was the deal that made possible the formation of a national government consisting of both free states and slave states; and it did so by counting each slave as 3/5 of a person. (The constitution euphemistically avoided the words “slave” or “slavery” by referring to “other Persons.”) The interrelatedness of the three critical issues of congressional representation, the distribution of taxes, and the creation of the census is embodied in the way they are bound together in just two sentences. Here is the relevant part of Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:..

Read part II here.

The Census and Race—Part III— Reconstruction to the Great Depression (1870-1940): How did the census deal with race during segregation? (2010-07-20)

…The terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon reify the non-scientific American folk concept of blood. Blood is a biological entity, and many people inaccurately believe that it is the same as genes. The following explanation shows why they are wrong.

Suppose that there are eight genes for race, so that a mulatto has four black genes and four white genes, a quadroon has two black genes and six white genes, and an octoroon has one black gene and seven white genes. Now suppose that a mulatto man and a mulatto woman have a lot of children. Each child would get half its genes from the father and half from the mother. One child might get all four white genes from each parent and be 100% white, another might get all four black genes from each parent and be 100% black, and other children might wind up with all the other possible combinations of white and black genes. However, American culture views mulattos as black (e.g., President Obama); and believes that two blacks cannot have a 100% white baby. This is why the folk concept of blood does not act like genes…

• The Census and Race—Part IV— Civil Rights and the Cold War (1950-1980): What is special about the census categories White, Japanese, and Chinese? (2010-07-27)
• The Census and Race—Part V—(1990-2010): How do Samoans differ from Tahitians on the census? (2010-08-03)
• The Census and Race—Part VI—Summary of Trends/Lessons Learned: What have we learned from comparing all of the censuses since 1790? (2010-08-10)

President Obama checks the “Black” box Evidently it’s official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

Psychology Today
2010-04-04

Samantha Smithstein, Psy.D., Clinical and Forensic Psychologist and Co-Founder
Pathways Institute for Impulse Control, San Francisco

This week, the New York Times reported that “It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.” Evidently, President Obama chose to check the “African-American” box when defining his race for the 2010 census

…From the perspective of science and biological anthropology, race does not exist. In other words, there is not one gene, trait, or characteristic that distinguishes all members of one race from all members of another. In fact, eighty-five percent of all human variation can be found in any local population, and a full ninety-four percent can be found on any continent. In other words, there are no sub-species when it comes to humans; we are, in truth, one of the most genetically similar to each other species of all species on earth…

Read the entire article here.

When the Options Are Open: Racial Identification of Part-American Indian Children in Census 2000 

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Atlanta Hilton Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia
2003-08-16
23 pages

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

I will use data on part-American Indian children in the 2000 Census 1 percent- PUMS data (expected March 2003) to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. I use the case of American Indians because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by similar analyses using 1990 data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family. However, additional analyses using Census 2000 data are necessary because people of mixed heritage could mark multiple races (or a single race) in 2000. This freedom of choice in racial identification opens the door for new insights into patterns in and reasons behind racial identification among mixed-race people.

Read the entire paper here.