Mixed Race Studies

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues

University of Texas Press
2002
6 x 9 in.
324 pp., 4 photos, 1 chart
ISBN: 978-0-292-74348-9
Print-on-demand title

Edited by

Monika Kaup, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington, Seattle

Debra Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of English
John Carroll University

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Mixed-Blood Epistemologies
  1. Werner Sollors, Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?
  2. Doris Sommer, Who Can Tell? The Blanks in Villaverde
  3. Zita Nunes, Phantasmatic Brazil: Nella Larsen‘s Passing, American Literary Imagination, and Racial Utopianism
• II. Métissage and Counterdiscourse
  1. Françoise Lionnet, Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé‘s La Migration des coeurs
  2. Michèle Praeger, Créolité or Ambiguity?
• III. Indigenization, Miscegenation, and Nationalism
  1. Priscilla Archibald, Gender and Mestizaje in the Andes
  2. Debra J. Rosenthal, Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes: Cumandá, Aves sin nido, The Last of the Mohicans, and Ramona
  3. Susan Gillman, The Squatter, the Don, and the Grandissimes in Our America
• IV. Hybrid Hybridity
  1. Rafael Pérez-Torres, Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice
  2. Monika Kaup, Constituting Hybridity as Hybrid: Métis Canadian and Mexican American Formations
• V. Sites of Memory in Mixed-Race Autobiography
  1. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Living on the River
  2. Louis Owens, The Syllogistic Mixedblood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians
• Coda: From Exoticism to Mixed-Blood Humanism
  1. Earl E. Fitz, From Blood to Culture: Miscegenation as Metaphor for the Americas
• Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index

Read the entire introduction here.

Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

University of Texas Press
2004
6 x 9 in.
225 pages
ISBN: 978-0-292-74345-8
Print-on-demand title

Edited by:

SanSan Kwan, Associate Professor of Dance, Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley

and

Kenneth Speirs (1964-2013), Professor of English
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack’s “American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues” to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger’s “Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance,” this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society’s discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the “one drop” rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

Table of Contents

• Preface (Naomi Zack)
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs)
• I. Issues and Trends
  • 1. American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues (Naomi Zack)
  • 2. Misceg-narrations (Raquel Scherr Salgado)
• II. Multiracial Subjects
  • 3. A Passionate Occupant of the Transnational Transit Lounge (Adrian Carton)
  • 4. Miscegenation and Me (Richard Guzman)
  • 5. “What Is She Anyway?”: Rearranging Bodily Mythologies (Orathai Northern)
  • 6. Resemblance (Alice White)
  • 7. “Brown Like Me”: Explorations of a Shifting Self (Stefanie Dunning)
  • 8. Toward a Multiethnic Cartography: Multiethnic Identity, Monoracial Cultural Logic, and Popular Culture (Evelyn Alsultany)
  • 9. Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance (Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger)
  • 10. Against Erasure: The Multiracial Voice in Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (Carole DeSouza)
• About the Contributors

The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses

Defining difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology
2004
Edited by Andrew Winston
pages pp. 79-108
American Psychological Association

Thomas Teo, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
York University

This paper reconstructs techniques of problematization regarding “mixed race” from Enlightenment inspired anthropological discourses to the North-American psychological discourses of the present time. Two central techniques of problematization are discussed. The conceptual technique of problematization, used in bio-psychological discourse at the beginning of the 20th century, transformed a lack of evidence into invoking metaphysical concepts such as disharmony. Sociological and social-psychological discourses changed problems of society with hybridity into problems of individuals. The empirical technique of problematization refers to the repeated testing of the inferiority of hybrid groups, for example of the “mulatto hypothesis.” Finally, it is shown how multiracial academics in the contemporary discourse shifted the discourse by focusing on problems that biracial people experience within society. It is suggested that the reconstruction of hybridity illustrates the epistemological and ethical shortcomings of a paradigm that considers humans as objects and not as subjects of research.

Read the entire chapter here.

Our Problems with Race: Addressing Biological Versus Social Definitions

Appalachian State University
Blue Ridge Ballroom PSU
Wednesday, 2009-10-28 19:00 EDT (Local Time)                                   

Joseph L. Graves, Jr, Dean of University Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

What does evolution tell us about race and what are we taught to believe about race? What are the implications for how we view, group, and value others?  Using his research background in evolutionary biology, Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr. explains how most Americans still believe that there is some biological legitimacy to our socially constructed racial categories despite the modern scientific evidence that discredits all of our social stereotypes. Dr. Graves has written two books that address the myths and theories of race in American society. He has published over 50 papers and book chapters and has appeared in six documentary films and numerous television interviews on these general topics.

I’m not White but You Treat Me that way: The Role of Racial Ambiguity in Interracial Interactions

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Jessica D. Remedios
University of Toronto

Alison L. Chasteen
University of Toronto

Interracial interactions are complicated by concerns that both majority and minority group members hold. Although a large body of work has examined interactions between Whites and minorities, no research has examined the complications that racial ambiguity may introduce into these already anxiety-provoking situations. Unlike other minorities, people who belong to multiple racial groups (multiracial people) cannot always be categorized as members of a particular race. Furthermore, their physical ambiguity may have consequences for how they are perceived and how they perceive others. In two studies, we examined the role of racial ambiguity in individuals’ expectations for an upcoming interracial interaction. Participants in Study 1 were led to believe that they would interact with a White, Black, or multiracial individual. The results revealed that participants expecting to meet a Black partner rated him more positively and anticipated a more positive interaction than those expecting to meet a White or multiracial partner. In Study 2, multiracial, monoracial non-White and White participants expected to interact with a White person during the study. Multiracial participants expressed the greatest concern that others would be confused by their appearance; the more concern they expressed, the more negative emotions they experienced. Taken together, these findings suggest that although multiracial people express concerns about how others perceive them, monoracial people ignore these concerns and expect to treat multiracial people in the same way that they would treat White people. The results also imply that monoracial people may not accommodate the worries that multiracial people hold about interracial interactions.

Different prejudices toward different types of interracial couples: Examining alternative explanations

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Stephen A. Mistler
Arizona State University

Angela G. Pirlott
Arizona State University

Steven L. Neuberg
Arizona State University

Between 1992 and 2000, the prevalence of interracial marriage in the United States more than doubled, increasing from 2.2% to 4.9%. How do people feel about such relationships, and what accounts for these feelings? Undergraduate students rated relationships of Asian, Black, and White men with Asian, Black, and White women; each participant answered the same questions for all nine possible heterosexual pairings of the above groups, as well as items designed to assess, for each race-gender type (e.g., Asian female), beliefs about their long-term mate value, short-term mate value, and scarcity as potential mates. Given issues of sample size, we report only findings from White participants. In general, White participants expressed more prejudice against interracial couples than same-race couples, even for couplings not involving members of their own race. This apparently simple bias, however, masks a more complex psychology based on interactions of specific race-gender pairings with perceiver gender. As one example, White participants were less accepting of White women with minority men than of White men with minority women, and reacted particularly negatively to the pairing of White women with Black men than to the pairing of White women with Asian men; these patterns of antipathy were especially strong for White male participants. We assess the broader range of findings in light of frameworks suggesting that negative reactions toward interracial couples arise from concerns with “race-mixing,” from concerns about potential lost resources for one’s group, and from assessments of valuable reproductive opportunities potentially gained and lost.

Evidence for Hypodescent and Racial Hierarchy in the Perception of Biracial Individuals

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Arnold K. Ho
Harvard University

Daniel T. Levin
Vanderbilt University

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

Mahzarin R. Banaji
Harvard University

Many have argued that the increasing rate of intermarriage between racial minorities and Whites and resulting patterns of biracial identification will lead to the dissolution of the American racial hierarchy (e.g., Alba & Nee, 2003; Lee & Bean, 2004; 2007a; 2007b; Thornton, 2009). However, little empirical evidence exists on perceptions of new racial identities that diverge from older notions of race purity and the “one drop” rule. We tested whether a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial targets are assigned the status of their subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian-White and Black-White targets. Participants morphed faces from Asian to White, Black to White, White to Asian, and White to Black. Consistent with a rule of hypodescent, a face needed to be lower in proportion minority to be considered minority than proportion White to be considered White. In addition, the threshold for being considered White was higher for Black-White biracials than for Asian-White biracials, a pattern consistent with the structure of the current racial hierarchy. Finally, an independent racial categorization task confirmed that hypodescent and the current racial hierarchy guide how biracial targets are perceived. Potential distal (e.g., fear of contagion) and proximate (e.g., racism) causes of these phenomena are discussed.

A Multidimensional Framework for Examining Racial Identity across Different Biracial Groups

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Evelina Lou
York University

Richard N. Lalonde
York University

Carlos Wilson
York University

Recent research has adopted a multidimensional view initially proposed by Rockquemore and colleagues (2002, 2009) for examining racial identity among Black/White biracials. This approach has acknowledged the social construction of and has widened the range of racial identity options beyond the two “traditional” options of “Black” or “biracial.” This study was designed to further assess this framework by examining a more diverse multiracial sample from Canada and the U.S. (N = 122). Results indicated that similar to Black/White biracials (n = 38), Asian/White biracials (n = 40) showed great variability in their selection of Rockquemore’s biracial identity categories, but the pattern of responses differed across the two groups. Specifically, Asian/White individuals were most likely to have a protean identity (i.e., sometimes Asian, sometimes White, and sometimes biracial), whereas Black/White individuals were most likely to have an exclusively biracial identity that they perceived as either validated or unvalidated by other people. In addition, variations in racial identity were in line with cognitive measures of self-concept clarity (SCC) and bicultural identity integration (BII), such that individuals with a validated biracial identity scored higher on SCC and BII than those with a protean or an unvalidated biracial identity. These findings suggest that having a clearly-defined, stable, and integrated bicultural self-concept is associated with the extent to which individuals’ biracial identity is validated by others in their social network. Theoretical implications for extending Rockquemore’s model to other biracial groups are discussed.

Natural Ambiguities? Perceptions of Multiracial Individuals by Monoracial Perceivers

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Jacqueline Chen
University of California, Santa Barbara

David Hamilton, Professor of Psychology
University of Californi, Santa Barbara

Understanding Multiracial person perception is becoming increasingly important in today’s diverse society. The present research investigates the nature of the racial categorization of Multiracials. We hypothesize that, due to the legacy of the Black-White dichotomy and the automaticity of monoracial categorization, perceivers will make more errors in categorizing Multiracials and that categorization as “Multiracial” will take longer than monoracial categorizations such as “Black” or “White.” Using a novel categorization task, we find support for these hypotheses in two studies. In addition, in Study 2, we demonstrate that cognitive load detrimentally affects Multiracial, but not monoracial, categorizations. Importantly, in both studies, perceivers are able to categorize Multiracials at a rate significantly above chance, suggesting that monoracial perceivers can perceive multiracialism relatively quickly and accurately. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Black and White and Read All Over: If you’re mixed-race, they never stop asking ‘What are you?’

Village Voice
Tuesday, 2006-01-24
 
Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

It’s back in the ’90s in San Francisco. I’m undergoing a wisdom tooth extraction, hovering happily in nitrous oxide–land, when I vaguely hear a voice beam in. The dentist has asked me something. I attempt to focus—has my blissed-out fog really been penetrated by that question, that dreaded demand of the racially ambiguous: “What are you”?.

“Ummm, uhhhh,” I mumble in universal dental garble. “Well, one thing I am is not so high anymore.”

As the product of extensive mixing and moving, I hardly know where to begin or end in alleviating people’s curiosity (even yours, dear reader). Let’s just say that if you appear racially indeterminable, you are read all over. As in from head to toe, as in wherever you go. Like any other unstraightforward or indecipherable text, ambiguous bodies are given a close reading, between the lines. And if that fails to clarify matters, any serious reader will consult a primary source: you. You become an informant, other people’s resource for more information. It’s an intervention into your everyday existence that can happen anyplace, anytime, by anyone. You are interpreted, your body a sign, forever decoded and discerned…

…But what exactly is this so-called “Generation Mix” and this would-be “mixed-heritage baby boom”? Kelley suggests that while there have of course been mixed-race people for as long as different races have resided together, we now see the first critical mass of adamantly multiracial people in America—teens and twentysomethings like these. I agree that race mixing, and not just in the well-known crime of white-on-black rape, has been more prevalent than is generally acknowledged, and that at first glance mixing seems to be a common enough occurrence these days. It is true that intermixing is on the rise, especially in places like New England and more so on the West Coast. But once talk turns to population “booms” and “generations,” we need to note that the numbers remain much smaller than one might think.

This is especially true for black and white mixing. Currently, approximately 5 percent of all American marriages are between people of different races. And since 1967, the year the Supreme Court legalized marriage between blacks and whites, rates of black-white intermarriage have jumped radically indeed, from 1 percent to around 5 percent of all marriages involving a black person. The relatively small numbers don’t take away from the social significance of race mixing, but rather add to it. That the overwhelming majority of people still stick to “their own” makes the exceptions stand out and seem more common than they actually are, while also exacerbating the widespread fetishization of all things interracial…

Read the entire article here.