Mixed Race Studies

Ethnic Identity Among Mixed-Heritage People In Hawaii

Symbolic Interaction
Volume 14, Number 3 (Fall 1991)
Pages 261–277
DOI 10.1525/si.1991.14.3.261

Cookie White Stephan, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
New Mexico State University

In this study, intensive interviews were used to explore the identity of a sample of mixed-heritage Hawaiian college students from a variety of ethnic groups. The great majority of respondents listed at least one multiple-heritage identity (e.g., Chinese-Japanese). While cultural exposure and ethnic identity were strongly associated, cultural exposure is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for ethnic identity to occur. Differences in perceptions of ethnic identity between respondents with stable and situtionally changing identities were discussed. The conceptions of identity proposed by processual and structural symbolic interactionists both received some support in these data.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial Groups and Educational Inequality: A Rainbow or a Divide?

Social Problems
Volume 56, Number 3 (August 2009)
Pages 425–446
DOI 10.1525/sp.2009.56.3.425

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

How do multiracial groups “fit” into the system of racial oppression and privilege in the United States? Are the outcomes of multiracial individuals explained by the Latin Americanization hypothesis (Bonilla-Silva 2002), or a hardening racial divide between blacks and all other racial groups (Gans 1999; Yancey 2006)? Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I address these questions and show that the educational outcomes of multiracial groups and individuals are not consistently explained by measures of appearance, as suggested by these theories. Although the educational outcomes of Latinos and single-race groups are significantly associated with skin color and the racial perceptions of observers, multiracial young adults’ high school and college educational outcomes are not consistently related to either measure of appearance. Parental education and family income are the most important predictors of educational outcomes for multiracial respondents across different types of outcomes. The implications of these findings for racial inequality and research on multiracial groups are discussed.

One of the key debates about the future of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States is the question of how multiracial Americans will fit into the United States’ system of racial oppression and privilege. These groups may be a bellwether we can use to discern how racial inequality is changing, since they straddle racial boundaries and therefore are often the first to experience changes in those boundaries and systems of racialized advantage. For example, Eduardo Bonilla Silva (2002; Bonilla Silva and Embrick 2006) has argued that the United States is moving towards a three-tier racial stratification system that is increasingly similar to Latin American systems of racial stratification based on skin tone, and thus biracial groups that are lighter skinned will have greater privilege than those that are darker skinned. George Yancey (2006) and Herbert Gans (1999), in a distinct but related argument, contend that we are moving away from a binary system that used a narrow and exclusive definition of “whiteness” to disadvantage anyone perceived as “not white” towards an evolving binary system that systematically disadvantages anyone seen as “black” and advantages anyone seen as “not black” (even those who are not considered “white”). Under this shifting system, biracial individuals perceived as black will experience oppression, while the rest of the multiracial groups will experience positive outcomes that become more similar to whites over time…

Read or purchase the article here.

Who And What You Are

Contexts
Fall 2009
Vol. 8, No. 4
Pages 64–65
DOI 10.1525/ctx.2009.8.4.64

Sangyoub Park, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washburn University

Barack Obama‘s presidency and changes in how the U.S. Census tracks race underline the importance of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States. Changes in our racial landscape, including increases in interracial marriage and childbearing, pose intriguing questions about how future generations will respond to the growth of multiracial identities.

Mixing It Up

Contexts
Volume  4, Number 4 (Fall 2005)
Pages 15–16
DOI 10.1525/ctx.2005.4.4.15

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Jamie Tibbetts is a member of the Generation Mix National Awareness Tour. He and four other mixed-race young adults are driving across the country, making stops in sixteen cities to “raise awareness of America’s multiracial baby boom” and “promote a national dialogue about the mixed-race experience.” The tour is sponsored by the Mavin Foundation, which advocates on behalf of people who identify as being of mixed race in the United States. The Mavin Foundation continues and extends the work of earlier multiracial advocacy groups that coalesced around the issue of census classification in the 1990s and successfully challenged the federal “check one only” policy of racial enumeration. Beginning in 2000, the U.S. Census instructed people to “mark one or more” racial categories, resulting in new statistical measures of the “two or more races” population. (This interview was conducted in April 2005.)

“What are You?”: Explaining Identity as a Goal of the Multiracial Hapa Movement

Social Problems
Volume 56, Number 4 (November 2009)
Pages 722–745
DOI 10.1525/sp.2009.56.4.722

Mary Bernstein, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Marcie De la Cruz
Empirical Education Inc.

This article uses the Hapa movement as a case study in order to provide a framework for understanding identity as a goal of social movements and to expand on a theoretical understanding of multiracial social movements. In contrast to current understandings of identity-based movements, this article argues that the Hapa movement seeks simultaneously to deconstruct traditional notions of (mono)racial identities and to secure recognition for a multiracial “Hapa” identity. Movements that have identity as a goal are motivated by activists’ understandings of how categories are constituted and how those categories, codes, and ways of thinking serve as axes of regulation and domination. The Hapa movement simultaneously challenges (mono)racial categories at both the institutional level through targeting the state and at the micro level through challenging the quotidian enactment of race and promulgating a Hapa identity. Activism by mixed-race individuals and organizations constitutes an important challenge to power that has significant implications for racial categorization and classification in contemporary American society.

An interview with Henry Wiencek: Slaves and Slavery in George Washington’s World

Common-Place: Common Reading
Volume 6, Number 4
July 2006

William Costin (c. 1780-1842), the Washingtons’ mixed-race grandson/nephew. He was the son of Ann Dandridge, enslaved half sister of Martha Washington, and Jacky Custis, Martha’s son. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Henry Wiencek is the author of the acclaimed “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America” (2003), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history and the Best Book of 2003 award from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He has also written The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (1999), which received the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award. In the spirit of rereading, this issue’s Common Reading asks Wiencek to talk about his work on Washington and slavery and to reflect on some of the ways it revises received wisdom about the American past.
 
…Common-place: It seems clear from “Imperfect God” that you learned a great deal from genealogists. For historians working inside the academy, this might seem striking. How was it that you came to be interested in genealogy as a way of addressing larger historical questions about race and slavery?

Henry Wiencek: When I researched my previous book, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, I could not avoid genealogy and genealogists. That book focused on one extended family with a black side, a white side, and family genealogists on every side trying to reconstruct a lost/hidden past. In several instances I came across documents indicating hidden or forgotten blood ties between the whites and blacks. You can’t avoid finding that kind of information if you’re studying plantation families. It happened everywhere and the evidence is thick on the ground—wills, gifts of land, odd emancipations, payments for education, favored treatment for particular people. I had so many of these stories from Hairston documents and oral history that I couldn’t put them all into the book. And after the book came out more people called or wrote to me about other instances. The other part of this is you have to be careful in evaluating this information—not everything is at it seems.

When you encounter evidence of kinship between owners and slaves you have, first of all, learned something new about the complexity of their world, and next you are confronted with the question: did knowledge of his or her kinship to slaves influence the actions of an owner? Martha Washington‘s first father-in-law, John Custis, all but acknowledged his mixed-race son, freed him, and gave him a very generous bequest. In contrast, Martha held her own half sister in slavery. The existence of this half sister, Ann Dandridge, was one of the great shocks of my research, and I discovered her only because genealogists had written to Mount Vernon about Dandridge and their letters were in the files. I pursued the leads in that correspondence and came up with additional evidence. So through the work of genealogists I came up with information that completely changed our view of what slavery was like at Mount Vernon…

…As to “genealogy as a way of addressing larger historical questions about race and slavery”—genealogy teaches us that many white colonial families had mixed-race kin. It would be fascinating to consult Virginia‘s African American genealogists and see how many of them can trace their families back to leading white families such as the Carters, Lees, Byrds, Randolphs, et al. (Right now I can say “yes” to three of those names—I don’t know about the Byrds, but they’re related to the Custises, so I guess they’d be a “yes” too.) That would give us a sense of how closely entwined these leading families were with slaves. Reading the accounts of the very peculiar, very intense relationship between Landon Carter and his slave Nassau, I have wondered if they were half brothers. My point is that, in public statements, the white male leadership of colonial Virginia reviled miscegenation, and we have come to believe that they were genuinely revolted by race mixing. Then how could these same men so avidly practice it? If they were disgusted by mixed-race people, how could the masters and mistresses of the era staff their houses with mulattoes? Wouldn’t you expect mulattoes to be shunned, exiled? Jefferson is a prime example. He spoke forcefully against racial mixing, but his entire household staff consisted of mulatto and all-but-white slaves, many of whom were his relatives. My thinking is that, to some degree, this eighteenth-century racial-purity talk was smokescreen and rationalization for outsiders. It’s an extremely complex issue….

Read the entire interview here.

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
2003
416 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
16 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations/Map/Notes/Index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-52951-2, ISBN10: 0-374-52951-5

Henry Wiencek

L.A. Times Book Prize – Winner, History

A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery

When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his “only unavoidable subject of regret.” In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father’s engagement with slavery at every stage of his life–as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.

Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington’s attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system’s evil.

Wiencek’s revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington’s determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility–as the oral history of Mount Vernon‘s slave descendants has long asserted–that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.

George Washington’s heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era

The University of Michgan Press
2009
320 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-11450-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-03391-1
Ebook Formats ISBN: 978-0-472-02179-6

John Kenneth White, Professor of Politics
Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C

Research and reflections on the American demographic shift that led to the election of President Barack Obama

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency marks a conclusive end to the Reagan era, writes John Kenneth White in Barack Obama’s America. Reagan symbolized a 1950s and 1960s America, largely white and suburban, with married couples and kids at home, who attended church more often than not.

Obama’s election marks a new era, the author writes. Whites will be a minority by 2042. Marriage is at an all-time low. Cohabitation has increased from a half-million couples in 1960 to more than 5 million in 2000 to even more this year. Gay marriages and civil unions are redefining what it means to be a family. And organized religions are suffering, even as Americans continue to think of themselves as a religious people. Obama’s inauguration was a defining moment in the political destiny of this country, based largely on demographic shifts, as described in Barack Obama’s America.

Read the Q&A with the University of Michigan Press and John Kenneth White here.

University of Michigan Press: Was Barack Obama’s election a reflection of change in American attitudes, or more a change in the type of people who make up the country?

John Kenneth White: …The America of the 1950s through the 1980s has come to an end. Whites will be a minority of all Americans by the middle of the twenty-first century. Hispanics will be nearly a third of the population by 2030. The face of America is turning from white into some form of beige or bronze. Even how we define race is an open question. For much of American history, race was categorized into two categories: black or white. Mixed race was frowned upon and degrading terms such as “quadroon” were invented. Now there are more mixed racial marriages than ever before and the children from those marriages are not easily categorized….

Brown Skinned White Girls: class, culture and the construction of white identity in suburban communities

Gender, Place & Culture
Volume 3, Issue 2
July 1996
pages 205 – 224
DOI: 10.1080/09663699650021891

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Feminist scholars theorizing about whiteness and white identity have not examined the pivotal role that middle-class material privilege, residential segregation and US consumer culture play in the social construction of a racialized cultural identity among the African-descent daughters of Asian-American and European-American mothers. There is a dearth of empirical research by feminist scholars which interrogates the shifts in a racialized gender identity which follow from the interaction between class status, ideological communities and residentially segregated communities. The nascent body of social science scholarship on white identity has assumed that a ‘white’ identity is available only to individuals of exclusively European ancestry. This paper provides a specific case-study of African-descent girls, who have been culturally constructed as ‘white’ girls prior to puberty, only to later construct a non-white ‘black’ or ‘biracial’ identity after moving to a different residential, cultural and ideological community-the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Drawing upon transcripts from 16 taped interviews with African-descent university students, who were attending the University of California at Berkeley, this paper delineates the specific cultural conditions under which a racially neutral or ‘white’ identity is acquired, constructed, and then reconstructed by a segment of the African-descent community, the daughters of Asian and European-American women in economically privileged households in suburban communities. 

Read or purchase the article here.

 Mixed Race in the United States

Simpson Center for The Humanities at the University of Washington
Dates (Local Time: 19:30 PST): 2010-01-06, 2010-01-20, 2010-02-03, 2010-02-17, and 2010-03-03
Location: Kane Hall 220

Is it coincidence that the first nonwhite president of the United States comes from a multiracial background? Or was his election, in fact, partially due to his mixed-race background and the idea that it somehow resonated with all Americans, regardless of race? In the twenty-first century United States, mixed-race people, from the chief executive to the family next door, seem to be everywhere. In the past twenty-five years, the period since the decriminalization of interracial marriage, the births of monoracial babies have increased 15%, while multiracial births have increased a dramatic 260%.  But what do these numbers imply?  Has racialized inequality changed with the surging numbers of multiracial Americans?  This course will interrogate what it means to understand mixed-race identity in America, and what representations and histories of U.S. multiracialism can illustrate about changing notions of race, power, and privilege in the United States.

Ralina L. Joseph is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an adjunct assistant professor in the departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington.  She recently completed a book manuscript, Beyond the Binaries?: Reading Mixed-Race Blackness in the New Millennium, and is currently at work on her second book project, Speaking Back: How Black Women Resist Post-Identity Culture. Joseph teaches about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the media, and is a 2009 recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The Wednesday University provides Puget Sound residents with an intellectually stimulating way to continue their education in the humanities.

Each year, the Wednesday University offers three courses taught by distinguished faculty at the University of Washington. These courses, which meet on Wednesday evenings, are open to anyone—from high school students to senior citizens. Please join us and become a part of one of Seattle’s liveliest intellectual and cultural communities.

The Wednesday University is a collaborative program sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Henry Art Gallery. All classes are held at the Henry Art Gallery Auditorium at the University of Washington from 7:30-9 pm.

Course Fee: $80 each or $210 for all three courses. To register, please visit the Seattle Arts & Lectures website or call 206.621.2230 ext. 10.

All course locations are on the University of Washington campus.  The Fall and Winter courses will be in Kane Hall. The Spring course will be in Brechemin Hall in the Music Building.  All courses begin at 19:30 PST (Local Time).

To register for the lecture, click here.