Mixed Race Studies

Race and Social Problems: Interview with Dean Larry E. Davis

The Social Work Podcast
2008-03-24

Jonathan B. Singer, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Temple Univerisity

Interview with
Larry E. Davis, Dean and Donald M. Henderson Professor of Social Work and Director of the Center on Race and Social Problems
University of Pittsburgh
 
[Episode 36] Today’s podcast is on Race and Social Problems. On January 15, 2008, I spoke with Dr. Larry E. Davis, Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh, the Donald M. Henderson Professor, and Director of the Center on Race and Social Problems. In our conversation, Dean Davis defined racism, the role of race in understanding social problems, and about how issues of race may or may not change as the percentage of whites in the United States continues to decrease discussed. We talked about some of the racial and gender issues in the current election and talked about how race is different from gender as a point of diversity. We also talked about race and social work, and what social workers can do to fight racism. We ended our conversation with a discussion of the Center on Race and Social Problems and what the Center is doing to fight racism.

1. Beginning of the interview and definition of Race and Social Problems: [01:58]
2. “The major definition of race has been color” [02:31]
3. Mulattos and Octaroons [3:30]
4. The New Ingredient in the Identity of Black Biracial Children [4:49]
5. “African Americans are a multi-racial people.” [5:13]
6. “America may have biracial children, but there are no biracial adults.” [5:37]
7. What makes race a social problem? [9:36]
8. How will issues of race change now that Hispanics are the majority minority group? [11:06]
9. There is less than a percentage point difference between the number of African American and Hispanics in the United States according to the 2000 Census [11:59]  (Note: In the 2000 US Census, 75.1% of Americans identified as White. 12.5% identified as Hispanic or Latino. 12.3% identified as Black or African American.)
10. Why should social workers be concerned about race? [15:00]
11. How can race be a more defining issue for America than gender? [18:19]
12. Will people vote with their racial or gender identities in the presidential election? [21:47]
13. Is it detrimental to the Democrats to have two traditionally oppressed groups represented in the front-runners? [24:10]
14. Dean Davis defines and discusses his concept “Psychological Majority” [26:43]
15. What can social workers do to fight racism? [31:25]
16. Should other schools of social work have a center on race and social problems? [36:29]
17. Center on Race and Social Problems lecture series [38:26]

Listen to the podcast here (Due to large file size, right-click and save to your computer).  Running Time: 00:45:17.

Singer, J. B. (Host). (2008, March 24). Race and social problems: Interview with Dean Larry E. Davis [Episode 36]. Social Work Podcast. Podcast retrieved April 17, 2010, from http://socialworkpodcast.com/2008/03/race-and-social-problems-interview-with.html

The Aftermath of “You’re Only Half”: Multiracial Identities in the Literacy Classroom

Language Arts
Volume 83 Number 2 (November 2005)
pages 96-106

Elizabeth Dutro, Assistant professor of Literacy
University of Colorado

Elham Kazemi, Associate Professor of Mathematics Education
University of Washington

Ruth Balf, Fourth/Fifth-Grade Teacher
Seattle Public Schools

Children grapple with the complexities of race and what it means to claim membership in racial categories.

The children in Ruth’s fourth/fifth grade classroom had been engaged for weeks in a literacy project in which they researched and shared an aspect of their cultural background. The children interviewed their parents, consulted books and the Internet, wrote reports, gathered artifacts, created art projects, and, finally, put together a poster presentation to share with peers from other classrooms. The project seemed to be an important curricular move in this highly diverse urban classroom. Ruth wanted to demonstrate that knowledge from home cultures is valued, allow children time to share that knowledge with one another, and make visible the rich array of life experiences represented by children in this classroom.

For the public presentations of their projects, the students stood beside their posters and answered questions as children visiting from other classrooms walked around the room. It seemed to have gone well—an observer would have seen students speaking knowledgeably and comfortably about their work as guests wound their way through the room, pausing to ask questions of individual children. It was only after the visitors left that Ruth discovered that the afternoon had not been a positive celebration for some students. Zack lingered in the classroom after school, looking upset. He shared that two girls from another class had said, “He’s only half. He’s not really from South Africa,” when they viewed his project. He said, “Why would they say that? That makes me mad. Just because I’m not all African.” While they were talking, Stephanie walked over and said that people had said the same thing to her. She said that sometimes people think she’s Indian, but she’s black and white. Ruth asked Zack and Stephanie what they would like to do. She offered to call a class meeting the next day if they wanted to discuss these issues with their classmates. They agreed that they would like to share their experiences. The next morning, Zack, Stephanie, and their classmate Jeff (who identified as Filipino/white) led their peers in a discussion that engaged complex issues of race and identity.

The public presentations of the project resulted in feelings of hurt and frustration for these three biracial students as other children questioned their claims to their own racial identities. However, it was also the public presentations of the projects—specifically the issues of multiracial identity that the presentations raised—that transformed the culture project from a rather straightforward attempt to acknowledge and celebrate diversity into a critical literacy project in which children grappled with the complexities of race and what it means to claim membership in racial categories. In this article, we share these children’s experiences and reflect on what it takes to value multiracial identities and support children as they tackle important issues of race that those identities raise…

…When the children met on the rug the morning after the poster presentations, the biracial children launched a discussion that raised critical and complex issues of race, racial identity, and racial categories.  Excerpts from that debrief discussion represent how the children and Ruth grappled with these issues and illustrate the role that multiracial identities played in shaping the nature of their talk about race. These children’s words and experiences provide the basis for our implications regarding the role that multiraciality might play in engaging issues of race in elementary classrooms…

Read the entire article here.

Faces of the Future: An Exploration of Biracial Identity Development and Racial Identification in Biracial Young Adults

Smith College School for Social Work
Northampton, Massachusetts
2009
119 Pages

Dana L. Benton

A project based upon an independent investigation, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work.

This research study examines how biracial young adults experience the process of racial identification and racial identity development. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the growing body of knowledge budding around this topic. This study utilized a mixed methods approach to explore the racial demographics and quality of relationships in bi racial young adults social networks across their life span; experiences with ascribed and self declared racial identifications, as well as, thoughts, feelings and attitudes about being biracial. The experiences of N=53 biracial young adults, 18 to 35 years of age, were collected through an anonymous, online survey created by the research. The results of this study suggest that (1) Racial self identification in biracial people can vary across person, time and place (2) Social Factors and Racial Group Membership can be important to biracial peoples racial identity development and racial self identification (3) Inquiry into a biracial persons racial identification can evoke a variety of emotions (4) Biracial people’s attitudes about being biracial can range from negative to positive. This study considers these findings and offers clinical practice as well as research implications for future best practices.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
CHAPTER IV FINDINGS
CHAPTER V DISCUSSION
REFERENCES

APPENDICES
Appendix A: Human Subjects Committee Approval Letter
Appendix B: Informed Consent Form
Appendix C: Recruitment Tool
Appendix D: Referral List
Appendix E: Questionnaire
Appendix F: Figure 1: Age of Respondents
Figure 2: Gender of Respondents
Appendix G: Figure 3: Respondent U.S. Region Reared In
Figure 4: Respondents Country Reared In
Appendix H: Figure 5: Educational Level of Respondents
Figure 6: Income Level of Respondents
Appendix I: Figure 7: Change in Racial Self Identification
Appendix J: Table 1: Racial Composition of Social World
Appendix K: Figure 8: Race of Biological Parents
Figure 9: Quality of Parental Relationship
Appendix L: Figure 10: Quality of Relationships with Extended Family
Figure 11: Familial Acceptance & Participants’ Mixed Race Ancestry
Appendix M: Table 2: Respondents’ Racial Identifications (1)
Table 3: Respondents’ Racial Identifications (2)
Appendix N: Table 4: Respondents’ Racial Identifications (3)
Table 5: Respondents’ Monoracial Identifications
Appendix O: Table 6: Comparison of Racial Self Identifications
Appendix P: Figure 12: Emotional Responses & Racial Inquiries
Figure 13: Emotional Responses & Ascribed Racial Identifications
Appendix Q: Table 7: Grouping of Racial Self Identification Options

Read the entire project here.

Strategies Multiracial College Women Use to Navigate Monoracial Systems

Education and Human Sciences, College of (CEHS) Open Access Theses and Dissertations from the College of Education and Human Sciences
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
May 2009
248 pages

Minisa Michiko Chapman-Huls
University of Nebraska – Lincoln

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

An exploration of the college experiences of multiracial women uncovered the strategies they used to navigate the monoracial system of predominately white institutions. A purposeful sample of 18 women who were multiracial was chosen. Data was collected through semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Participants’ stories represented multiracial experiences at thirteen different undergraduate institutions. A participant’s precollege experiences, identity and the college’s peer culture impacted how she approached social situations in the highly homogenous and monoracial setting at college. Participants took on the roles of pacifist, non-conformist, and activist to successfully navigate college environments and social scenarios. The findings also support prior study on the identity development of multiracial college students. Childhood experiences shaped the racial identity of participants that was affirmed and challenged, but not changed by college factors and experiences. Significant factors to the identity development of participants at college were academic courses, faculty and peers. Implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: Introduction
Significance of research
Statement of the Problem
Purpose of the study
Definitions
Limitations and delimitations

CHAPTER 2: Review of Literature
Identity Development of Multiracial Individual
Psychological Studies of Impact of Multiracial Identity
Racial Categorization of Mixed-race Persons
Racial Attitudes towards multiracial Individuals
Experiences of Multiracial College Students
Summary

CHAPTER 3: Methods
Purpose
Characteristics of Qualitative Research
Research Design
Data Collection
Managing and Recording Data
Data Analysis Strategies
Ethical Considerations
Validity
Particiment Vignettes
Findings

CHAPTER 4: Foundations for Success: Development of Strategies to Successfully Naviage Monoracial Systems
Racial Identity and formation
Childhood Experiences
Summary

CHAPTER 5: The College Experience: Test of Strategy
Challenges to identity
Resources for support
Summary

CHAPTER 6: Strategies for Success
Playing the role of Pacifist
Playing the role of NonConformist
Playing the role of Activist
Summary

CHAPTER 7: Thoughts and Suggestions
Implications
Further Research
Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDICES
Appendix A: Participant Consent Form
Appendix B: E-Mail Invitation to Participants
Appendix C: Interview Protocol

Read the entire dissertation here.

Opting for White: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America

Race & Society
Volume 5, Issue 1 (2002)
Symposium on The Latin Americanization of Race Relations in the United States edited by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Pages 49–64

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
Univerisity of Illinois, Chicago

Patricia Arend, Lecturer in Sociology
Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts

Historically, racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent assumed the development of a Black identity in accordance with the one-drop rule. However, empirical research on the multiracial population suggests that there exists wide variation in racial identification. We explore the interpretive power of [Eduardo] Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization model to explain racial identity construction among a sample of 259 mixed-race respondents.We highlight case studies of individuals who have constructed a White identity in order to illustrate how structural changes in race relations have increased the range of racial identities available to multiracial people. While we observe variation in racial identification among our respondents, their “choices” continue to be differentially available due to their physical appearance and social context.

Read the entire article here.

Hapas: Emerging Identity, Emerging Terms and Labels & the Social Construction of Race

Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume II (October 2009)
20 pages

Adriane E. Gamble

Adriane E. Gamble presents part of her honors thesis in her paper “Hapas: Emerging Identity, Emerging Terms and Labels, and the Social Construction of Race.” Her paper shows how emerging trends in community, terms and labels, and role models are seen in the growing population in the United States. She writes of how this can be observed both in the development of individuals’ identities and communities as well as a new racial category that offers a contemporary example of the social construction of race.

The first time I heard hapa, I went to this club fair [on campus]… I heard this voice, “We’re cool, cause we check the other box!” … I realized, oh my god, there are more people like me.

Originally a Native Hawaiian word, “hapa” is defined as “part” or “mixed,” with no racial or ethnic meaning. The current use of hapa stems from the phrase hapa haole, meaning “half foreigner” or “half White” (Dariotis, 2003). Today, the term is commonly used to describe Asian Pacific Islanders of mixed race heritage.

Conducted in 2004, this research studies how hapa has become a racial identity of its own, distinct from the classically recognized American racial categories of Asian or White. Based on the premise that racial identity is significantly informed by a racial community, and given the historical absence of a hapa community, the question emerges: how does one develop a hapa identity, without a hapa community with which to identify? Trends from the turn of the millennium show the racial landscape has changed, as a community emerged in American society of individuals self-identifying as hapa. Student and community groups have provided communities for hapas, which in turn inform racial identity, leading to an increased population of individuals self-identifying as hapa. The construction of hapa communities and hapa identity as a new racial category offer a contemporary example of the social construction of race…

Read the entire article here.

Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

Atlantic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 97 – 110
DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499

Isabel Soto

This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 28–31 October 2004.

This essay argues that while Langston Hughes‘s short story “Red-Headed Baby” (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the Euro-American paradigm of a dehistoricized “modernist construction of authorship through displacement” (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel—figurative and literal—as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy‘s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora—not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks.

Read or purchase the article here.

Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 35, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
E-ISSN: 1946-3170 Print ISSN: 0163-755X
DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0078

David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English
University of St. Thomas

Passing narratives have long been a fixture of American literature. For African American authors, plots of racial mobility have been used to expose the permeability of racial boundaries and to reveal the irrationality of racial categorization, while for many white authors, passing narratives have expressed fears of racial contamination as well as voyeuristic fantasies of blackness. Our interest in stories of passing, whether fictional or autobiographical, has not waned, and the popularity of recent memoirs, novels, and films depicting passing and mixed raciality attests to this fact. Baz Dreisinger‘s study, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (2008), capitalizes on the enduring curiosity surrounding the transgression of racial boundaries. While passing has mostly been thought of as a black-to-white affair, Dreisinger focuses on those crossing the color line in the direction of white-to-black. Her investigation of white-to-black passing provides a compelling perspective on past and current perceptions of race in American culture.

Dreisinger sets the parameters of her study by positing white-to-black passing as a commonality rather than an anomaly. She distinguishes between black and white passing, explaining that white passing is about neither deception nor survival. White passing is not even exactly about successfully becoming black. For Dreisinger, white-to-black passing is about those “moments of slippage in which whites perceive themselves, or are perceived by others as losing their whiteness and ‘acquiring’ blackness”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed feelings about mixed-race census option

The Stanford Daily
2010-03-31

Brianna Pang

The 2010 census, which hit mailboxes this month, is causing scholars and mixed-race people to debate, for just the second time in the count’s history, the dilemma of whether or not to check multiple “race” boxes.

One Stanford professor, Michele Elam, the director of the Program in African and African-American Studies, wrote in a recent op-ed in The Huffington Post that people should consider “thinking twice, but checking once,” since the goal of the census is to diagnose the resources the federal government should offer.

Elam said that the question of whether or not to check more than one box is not about meeting some level of “mixedness.”

“[The question is] a recognition that ‘race’ is and has always been a broad political category that has had and continues to have real impacts,” Elam wrote in e-mail to The Daily, “and most important, in this context, is being invoked to help track inequities based on race and to distribute economic resources.”

Matthew Snipp, the director of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity program, also commented on the effects of checking more than one box. According to Snipp, who has been involved in the census since the 1980s, census data is used to allocate $400 billion per year…

…As determined by the Department of Justice in the 2000 Census, if one were considered a member of a protected minority group and also a majority group, then for civil rights enforcement purposes, the person is counted as the minority…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Fancy

Legal Affairs – The Magazine at the Intersection of Law and Life
September/October 2003

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

In the Jim Crow South, courts understood that rigidly enforcing the rules against mixed marriage would have been a disaster—for whites.

In 1903, a Young North Carolina farmer named Frank Ferrell went a-courting. Nineteen years old and working on his father’s farm in the town of Zebulon, Frank settled his attentions on Susie Patterson, a quiet woman in her early 20s whose family had lived in nearby Riley since the 1880s. Riley was a town on two borders, smack on the line separating Franklin and Wake counties, in the rolling hills where the Atlantic Coastal Plain meets the Piedmont Plateau.

Evidently, a third boundary ran through Riley as well. While Frank wooed her, rumors circulated that she had some Indian or Portuguese ancestry—and some suggested that her blood ran a few shades darker. Perhaps because she feared the rumors would one day bring trouble, Susie refused Frank’s marriage proposal. But her suitor persisted and won her over. The couple married in January 1904 at the home of a justice of the peace on the Wake County side.

By April of the following year, the couple had a daughter, and Frank had become a drunk. He beat his wife, stopped providing for her and their baby, and in early 1907 abandoned them entirely. Soon after, he hired a lawyer and filed a complaint alleging that he had unwittingly married a black woman…

…During the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895, Congressman George Dionysus Tillman, older brother of the notorious segregationist politician “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, argued strenuously against a proposal to prohibit marriage between whites and people who had “any” African ancestry. Tillman said that the provision would affect “at least 100” families in his district that had sent their boys to fight for the Confederacy—and that no delegate on the floor could claim to be a “full-blooded Caucasian.” The convention adopted a one-eighth rule. Such actions prompted Charles Chesnutt to muse, “I could almost write a book about these laws, their variations, their applications and curious stories that one hears continually concerning them.” The color line is palpably present in many of the short stories that he published in The Atlantic Monthly at the turn of the century. And a character in one of Chesnutt’s novels became white simply by moving to a state with a more forgiving definition…

Read the entire article here.