Mixed Race Studies

An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse)
Volume 1, Number 2 (2008)
pages 75-111
ISSN: 1718-9748

Temitope Oriola
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

This study utilizes in-depth interviews of five interracial heterosexual couples to explore how couples live, and re/de/construct their everyday lives within a multiethnic society. I examine how couples experience public spaces, negotiate their identities, raise biracial children and confront cultural differences. The study also investigates the process of acceptance of partners by couples’ respective families and the media representation of interracial relationships. This paper demonstrates that minority families are more likely to raise strong objections or resistance to their children marrying Whites. Another major finding of this study is that subjects experience gradual shifts in their identities and changes in their worldviews as a result of their relationships with their spouses regardless of whether they adopt a ‘colourblind’ or ‘colour-conscious’ approach. Subjects’ narratives are also laced with intermingling discourse of race and culture.

Introduction

More than most concepts, ‘race’ and its concomitant outcomes like racism, racialization and racial profiling have been subjects of intense debate by the academia and laity. Amid widespread issues of marginalization and inequality, it is easy to dismiss the ties that bind some members of the various groups—dominant or dominated—together. One of these is interracial intimacy like common-law heterosexual unions and marriages. Why do some individuals in spite of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule, widespread stereotypes, social (mis)construction of the Other, potential loss of privilege and historically entrenched and societally enforced boundaries cross the colour line when it comes to love and/or marriage? How do interracial couples negotiate their way in public spaces and raise biracial kids? What influence does their relationship have on their worldview and identities? How does society encompassing significant others like family, friends, neighbours, and the sea of unknown faces they encounter daily relate with them? How do interracial couples assess the representation of interracial unions on Canadian television? These are the questions this study attempted to explore through in-depth interviews conducted with five interracial couples in Canada between February and March, 2008.

Integration and Social Construction of Interracial Unions

Most studies done on interracial unions are American or British in origin, even though Canada, compared to the United States, has a higher proportion of interracial couples (Milan and Hamm, 2004). There are, however, some Canadian studies on the unease over mixed race offspring from heterosexual relations between First Nations’ women and White men in British Colombia by Mawani (2002) and the experiences of White women involved with Black men by Deliovsky (2002). From issues such as the media representations of interracial relationships as aberration, events and/or spectacles Perry and Sutton, 2006) to the contestedness of the identity of children of interracial ouples (Barn and Harman, 2006), to why young, upwardly mobile and career-driven lack men ostensibly prefer White women regardless of class (Craig-Henderson, 2006) to short (melo-dramatic) autobiographical accounts of interracially-involved young eople (Alderman, 2007) to the making of ‘multiracials’ and the problematic of the intersticial space of mixedness (DaCosta, 2007), to the ironic and paradoxical contradiction of ‘talking Black, sleeping White’ among some activists in post-bellum United States (Romano, 2003); interracial relationships have come to stay as evidenced in the ‘proliferation’ of those called a myriad of names like ‘coloured’, ‘mulattoes,’ ‘halfcaste’ and ‘mixed race’ (Barn and Harman, 2006: 1314) but are still largely seen as problematic. There is an urgent need to fill the intriguing lacuna in the Canadian literature on the experiences of interracial couples…

…Data Analysis—Interviews

In this section, findings from the interviews with all five couples are presented under thematic issues. These include reaction of subjects’ families to their choice of spouses, experiences in public spaces, shifts in identities and changes in the worldview of subjects, concerns about the identities of their biracial children, experiences in public spaces and media representation. The results show how divergent subjects’ experiences were when they introduced their partners to their families, how they began to learn, adopt and adapt to otherwise ‘alien’ cultures, and what impact these have had on their identities. The results indicate that except in one case, minority families are generally reluctant to accept their children’s White partners. Subjects also opine that the medium of television and movies seldom cast couples that look like them preferring to depict more ‘conventional’ couples…

Read the entire article here.

The Rise and Decline of Hybrid (Metis) Societies on the Frontier of Western Canada and Southern Africa

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 3, Number 1 (1983) (Special Issue on the Metis)
ISSN  0715-3244

Alvin Kienetz

A comparison of the development of the Metis in Canada and similar peoples in Southern Africa reveals some remarkable similarities between the two groups. The existence of these parallels suggests that a more extensive comparative study of peoples of mixed race throughout the world would be of value.

Une comparaison de l’évolution des Métis au Canada et de celle de certains peuples similaires dans le Sud africain révèle des ressemblances frappantes entre les deux groupes. Ce parallèle suggère qu’une étude comparative plus complete des peuples de race mixte dans le monde entier présenterait une valeur incontestable.

Read the entire article here.

The Other Hafu of Japan

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanses Daily News
2011-01-14

Brett Fujioka, Rafu Intern

A new documentary examines the lives of racially mixed individuals as they explore their own identities.

Is a ship the same if you take it apart piece by piece and replace its frame? No simple answer exists, as anyone who has tackled this philosophical Rubik’s cube knows.

The ethno-national equivalent to this riddle grows exceedingly more complicated with the swelling number of international unions each year. Statistics in 2004 chart that 1 in 15 marriages in Japan were international and that 1 in 30 children born there possesses a parent of non-Japanese descent. Japan’s ethnic constituency is rapidly changing and its people may need to rethink what it means to be Japanese in a country where blood and national identity are considered one and the same.

The same applies for the hafu (mixed Japanese) community. The lives for each individual half-Japanese vary from person to person and the filmmakers for the upcoming documentary, “Hafu,” and their subjects best represent this.

“Hafu” is the tentative title for an upcoming documentary in Japan following the lives of several half-Japanese individuals as they explore their identities.

Both Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi spent most of their lives away from Japan. Takagi is half Spanish and stayed in Madrid, Sydney, Washington D.C., and Ottowa due to her diplomat father’s itinerant career. She eventually completed her higher education at the Francisco de Vitoria, Complutense and Waseda Universities before finally returning to Japan.

Nishikura, likewise, lived her childhood spread throughout the world. She stayed in Beijing, Manila, Honolulu, DC, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles and graduated from New York University.

“Lara and I have unusual stories and come from international backgrounds,” said Nishikura in an interview with the Rafu. “I don’t know if that’s representative of a lot of the mixed Japanese community.”

There’s a reason why they’re so hesitant to pinpoint a grand narrative for the hafu experience. There is no all-encompassing hafu story and the eclectic subjects of the documentary are indicative of this…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race

Studies in American Political Development
Volume 22, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pages 59-96
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X08000047

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell, Associate Director
Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation
Stanford University

Between 1850 and 1930, demographic upheaval in the United States was connected to reorganization of the racial order. Socially and politically recognized boundaries between groups shifted, new groups emerged, others disappeared, and notions of who belonged in which category changed. All recognized racial groups—blacks, whites, Indians, Asians, Mexicans and others—were affected. This article investigates how and why census racial classification policies changed during this period, only to stabilize abruptly before World War II. In the context of demographic transformations and their political consequences, we find that census policy in any given year was driven by a combination of scientific, political, and ideological motivations.

Based on this analysis, we rethink existing theoretical approaches to censuses and racial classification, arguing that a nation’s census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole; censuses both create the image and provide the mirror of that image for a nation’s self-reflection. We conclude by outlining the meaning of this period in American history for current and future debates over race and classification.

Read the entire article here.

The Hapa Project: How multiracial identity crosses oceans

UH Today
University of Hawai`i
Spring 2007

Alana Folen and Tina Ng

Hawai`i—often overlooked as nothing more than a scenic paradise—recently started to live up to its “melting pot” reputation when a U.S. senator representing Illinois formally announced his presidential candidacy. With personal ties to Hawai`i, Sen. Barack Obama inadvertently put Hawai`i in the spotlight.   

It was his physical appearance that separated Obama from his competitors. Obama is hapa. His father was black and from Kenya; his mother was white and from Kansas. His unique look brought attention to the hapa population in Hawai`i.

Although the growing population of hapa people is beginning to get recognized, their experiences in Hawai`i and the continental United States vary from each individual. The cultural implications of having multiple identities have surfaced and more hapa people have needed to defend who and what they are…

Read the entire article here.

Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race

The New York TImes
2008-03-31

Mireya Navarro

Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read “100 percent black woman.” Her African-American friends would not have it.

“I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn’t 100 percent black,” said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.

“I was very hurt by that,” said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. “I remember feeling like, Isn’t this what everybody expects me to think?”

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own.

They recalled the friends, as in Ms. Bratter’s case, who thought they were not black enough. Or the people who challenged them to label themselves by innocently asking, “What are you?” Or the relatives of different races who can sometimes be insensitive to one another.

“I think Barack Obama is going to bring these deeply American stories to the forefront,” said Esther John, 56, an administrator at Northwest Indian College in Washington, who identifies herself as African-American, American Indian and white.

“Maybe we’ll get a little bit further in the dialogue on race,” Ms. John said. “The guilt factor may be lowered a little bit because Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person’s racial appearance.”

Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is “too black” or “not black enough,” as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.

“There’s this notion that there’s an authentic race and you must fit it,” said Ms. Bratter, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families. “We’re confronted with the lack of fit.”…

Read the entire article here.

He’s Black, Get Over It

The American Prospect
2008-12-05

Adam Serwer

We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In a provocatively titled op-ed for The Washington Post last Sunday, Marie Arana declared that President-elect Barack Obama is “not black” because he’s also “half white.” Arana argues, using a naïve and idealized evaluation of how race operates in Latin America, that identifying Barack Obama as black is “racist,” and “racially backward,” and pleads with the reader to stop “using labels that validate the separation of races.”

If identifying biracial people as black “validates the separation of the races” then there is perhaps no one contributing more to the cause of these neo-segregationists than Barack Obama himself. “My view has always been that I’m African-American,” Obama told Chicago Tribune reporter Dawn Turner Trice back in 2004. “African Americans by definition, we’re a hybrid people.” In seeking a validation of her own ideas about race and racial identity, and by casting Obama as the victim of a reductive racial vocabulary, Arenas simply ignores the will of her subject. But racial categories are only unjust insofar as they prevent people from identifying how they wish. Arenas is doing exactly what she is attempting to prevent, forcing Obama into the racial category of her, rather than his own, choosing.

Part of the problem with the American conversation on race is the bizarre license that people take when writing about it on the basis of their own biography. But being “biracial” does not make one an expert on race, or on racial hybridity, any more than being a Republican or a Democrat makes one an expert on politics. So much of the writing on Obama’s racial identity, or on his political impact is muddled by our own subconscious racial desires. We want Obama to mean something specific, either to us or to others, with little regard for how he actually sees himself. As it stands, Arenas seems ill-prepared to talk about how biraciality operates in the African-American context. The black community in America has always accepted people of varying shades, cultures and backgrounds. Originally, this was a consequence of racial oppression; racist laws that determined that anyone with black ancestry was black. We may not have chosen to be a hybrid people, anymore than we chose to come here in the first place, but that’s what we are now. And it’s a beautiful thing…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

He’s Not Black

The Washington Post
2008-11-30
 
Marie Arana

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that—he calls himself that—because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius to be Featured Guests on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #188 – Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius
When: Wednesday, 2011-01-12, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Arnold K. Ho
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius is a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published more than 150 scientific papers and books discussing the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.

Arnold K. Ho is interested in social perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs that function to maintain social hierarchies.  In one line of research, he examines the perception of multiracial individuals and its implications for racial hierarchies.  In another line of research, he examines hierarchy enhancing attitudes and beliefs and individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy (i.e., social dominance orientation).

Selected Bibliography:

• “Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2011), DOI: 10.1037/a0021562.

Listen to the episode here.

Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1735-1737
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1735

Mary C. Waters, M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
Harvard University

This commentary reviews recent demographic trends in immigration and intermarriage that contribute to the complexity of measuring race and ethnicity. The census question on ancestry is proposed as a possible model for what we might expect with the race question in the 2000 census and beyond. Through the use of ancestry data, changes in ethnic identification by individuals over the course of their lives, by generation, and according to census question directions are documented. It is pointed out that the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred. All of these changes are posited as becoming more likely for groups we now define as “racial.” While it is acknowledged that race and ethnicity will become increasingly difficult to measure as multiple racial identities become more common and more likely to be reported, it is argued that monitoring discrimination is crucial for the continued collection of such data.

Read the entire article here.