Mixed Race Studies

Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies: the Regulation of Interracial Relationships in North America

Social & Legal Studies
Volume 18, Number 3 (September 2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909339087
pages 353-371

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

This article compares the regulation of interracial intimacies in North America, contending that anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and Canada’s Indian Act regimes are both striking and comparable examples of the state’s regulation of the intimate sphere. The author argues that the social signifiers of race and gender, tied together with sexuality, are interlocking sets of power relations and these intersecting discourses are integral to understanding the comparative regulation of interracial intimacy in North America.  In the circumstances of anti-miscegenation laws and the Indian Act, the transgression of gendered/raced social boundaries, the control of raced/gendered sexualities, the interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of patriarchal, white supremacist and capitalist systems of domination, the threat of non-white access to white capital, and the predicament of racial categorization exist as a corollary of the state’s regulation of interracial intimate life. This article reveals the law and state as important sites of the creation and manipulation of racial boundaries, acting as producers and reproducers of racial ideas, and demonstrates that the interracial transgressions of sexual space were also perceived as transgressions of social, economic, and political boundaries between races, posing a threat to the dominant white and masculine hegemony in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Tilting at Windmills: The Paradox of Researching Mixed-Race

Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New Orleans, LA,  2000-04-24 through 2000-04-28)

Kristen A. Renn, Associate Professor
Michigan State University

This paper addresses the growing interest among social scientists in studying the experiences of so-called mixed-race (or multiracial, biracial, or mixed heritage) individuals, when the study of multiraciality risks reinforcing the notion of fixed races.  Distinguishing mixed-race people as a category assumes that there are pure races to begin with and that there are people who are not mixed-race.  The paper begins with a brief review of the history of the study of multiraciality, then it poses questions raised by the study of the experiences of mixed-race people.  It presents five alternative philosophical approaches to addressing this question, and it suggests how the study of multiraciality might be done without further reinforcing the notion of static racial categories. The paper maintains throughout that race does not exist except as a social construction. (Contains 69 references.)

Read the entire paper here.

Black/White Biracial Identity: The Influence of Colorblindness and the Racialization of Poor Black Americans

Theory in Action
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2009)
DOI: 10.3798/tia.1937-0237.08027

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

This article focuses on the influence of colorblindness, the interaction of class and culture, and the racialization of poor Black culture on the racial identity of Biracial Americans with both a Black and a White parent. In doing so, it makes the following points: 1) Despite the fact that almost all Biracial persons experience racism (particularly during adolescence), the ideology of colorblindness promotes a non-racial or “honorary white” racial identity among middle and upper-middle class Biracial persons who live in predominantly white settings, 2) Many middle and upper-middle class Biracial persons have more in common with their White neighbors than with poor Black Americans.  3) The common stereotype of “true” Blackness connects it to the culture of poor, marginalized Black Americans.  These points are conceptually distinct, yet all promote the distance many middle- and upper-class Biracial Americans feel from a Black racial identity.

Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute.  E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org

Signs of Race in Poststructuralism: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race

University Press of America, Inc.
March 2009
176 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7618-4505-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7618-4506-5

Robert Young, Associate Professor of English
University of Alabama

This book presents a class-based analysis of poststructuralism and race.  The author positions this fundamental question at the heart of his project: why does race still work if it is commonly misunderstood to be a social construct?  The answer is that race works because it operates like a commodity, and like any commodity, as long as it generates value (understood in the widest possible sense: economic, political, and cultural-ideological value), it will remain in circulation.  This study should contribute to our understanding of race by linking questions of use value to exchange value.

Robert Young is associate professor of English at University of Alabama.  He specializes in African-American literary and cultural theory.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Race as Commodity Fetish
• Chapter 2: Putting Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race
• Chapter 3: The Linguistic Turn, Materialism, and Race: The Postmodern Crisis in African-American Literary Theory and Richard Wright‘s Critique of Ideology
• Chapter 4: The Politics of Race and Psychoanalysis: Richard Wright’s Critique of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Savage Holiday
• Chapter 5: Oral Textualities, Oral (Blues) Poetics, and Oral Erotics: Disabling the Exchange Economy in Gayl Jones‘ Corregidora
• Bibliography

The friendship networks of multiracial adolescents

Social Science Research
Volume 38, Issue 2, June 2009
pages 279-295
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2008.09.002

Lincoln Quillian, Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University

Rozlyn Redd
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
Columbia University, USA

We investigate the friendship networks of multiracial adolescents through a comparison of the size and composition of the friendship networks of multiracial adolescents with single-race adolescents.  We consider three hypotheses suggested by the literature on multiraciality and interracial friendships: (1) that multiracial adolescents have smaller friendship networks than single-race adolescents because they are more often rejected by their single-race peers, (2) that multiracial adolescents form more racially diverse friendship networks than single-race adolescents, and (3) that multiracial adolescents are especially likely to bridge (or socially connect) friendships among members of their single-race heritage background groups.  Using data on adolescent friendship networks from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we find that multiracial adolescents are as popular as non-white adolescents and have social networks that are as racially diverse as the single-race groups with the most diverse friendship networks. Biracial adolescents with black ancestry have an especially high rate of friendship bridging between black persons and persons of other races, relative to black or white adolescents.  The results hold using both self-identified and parental race definitions. 

1. Introduction
2. Background
2.1. Social science studies of multiraciality
2.2. Racial friendship segregation and multiracial adolescents
2.3. Social rejection or social acceptance?
2.4. The racial composition of multiracial social networks
2.5. Research questions and our approach
3. Data
3.1. Construction of the self-assessed race and parental race samples
3.2. Measures of race
3.3. Social networks measurement
3.4. Analytic procedures
4. Analysis and results
4.1. The popularity of multiracial adolescents
4.2. Multiraciality and friendship diversity
4.3. Do multiracial adolescents bridge social networks of single-race students?
5. Discussion
References

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Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

Korean Studies
Volume 32 (2008)
pages 56-85
DOI: 10.1353/ks.0.0010
E-ISSN: 1529-1529; Print ISSN: 0145-840X

Mary Lee, Director
Pacific Policy Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

This article discusses the production of “mixed-race” subjectivity in South Korea.  It asks: how can we understand the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race people as integral to the logic of national governance, both past and present?  Instead of regarding mixed-race people in Korea as an aberration or regrettable phenomenon, this article contends that their “otherness” is an outcome of the intensions, contradictions, and insecurities of national governance which coheres around discourse and legislation on the family.  The testimony of various mixed-race people living in Korea reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discursive modalities through which they were rendered outside the scope and meaning of Koreanness.  Their testimony also corresponds with the discursive limits set forth by the government, particularly in the establishment of laws that govern desired familial relations within the climate of Cold War militarism, industrialization, and the post-democratization era of globalization and official multiculturalism.  The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without exploring the intersection between a racial politics of “blood purity” and a gendered politics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity.

Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics: The Challenge of Hypodescent

Ethnicities
Volume 4, Number 3 (September 2004)
pages 357-379
DOI: 10.1177/1468796804045239

Rainier Spencer, Professor
Department of Anthropology & Ethnic Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

It is increasingly possible to detect a split in regard to current analyses of multiracial identity in the United States. On the one hand there remains a relatively naive brand of multiracial activism and identity politics that has deep roots in the recent movement to institute a US federal multiracial category; while on the other hand we find a steadily maturing body of scholarship on mixed-race identity that is several levels removed in terms of intellectual rigor and objectivity.  As this latter movement continues to mature, it increasingly forces the former to acknowledge and to confront important issues of logical consistency in the multiracial identity debate. This article represents an effort to guide and shape that discussion in assessing the ideological foundation of multiracial identity politics in the United States.

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A ‘Marginal Man’ is a fictional archetype created in 1927 by sociologist Robert Ezra Park (1864-1944) (and further developed by Everett Stonequist (1901-1979)) as a way  to describe a person descended from two “opposing” ethnic or racial groups.  He stated, “The marginal man…is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic cultures….his mind is the crucible in which two different and refractory cultures may be said to melt and, either wholly or in part, fuse.”   The arc for ‘Marginal Man’ was similar to that of  the ‘Tragic Mulatto‘ because he too, attempted to “pass” as white, however he could change course and take a hypodescendent path and if he were fortunate become a leader of his “lesser” lot.

See, Everett V. Stonequist’s July 1935 article “The Problem of the Marginal Man.”

Policing the Borderlands: White- and Black-American Newspaper Perceptions of Multiracial Heritage and the Idea of Race, 1996–2006

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009)
pages 105-127
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01590.x

Michael C. Thornton
University of Wisconsin-Madison

By employing a new policy of “check all that apply,” the Census Bureau accommodated a mushrooming multiracial lobby demanding that its members be allowed a right to self-identification. With its implied shifting meaning of race, newspapers portrayed the reaction to this change as a firestorm of debate along racial fault lines, highlighted by Black-American inferences that this was a perilous decision. Using textual analysis, I examine from 1996 to 2006 how five Black-American and three White-American newspapers characterized multiracial people. White-American papers framed the discussion in two ways: (a) multiracial people epitomize a new era in which race has lost its bite, and (b) Black America stands in the way of their gaining their civil rights.  There were also two frames for the Black-American papers: (a) The lobby advocates individual identity and is undergirded by denial or distancing from Blackness, and (b) that focus undermines Black America’s future by playing into the misguided notion that race is socially insignificant.

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When Race Becomes Even More Complex: Toward Understanding the Landscape of Multiracial Identity and Experiences

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009)
pages 1-11
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01584.x

Margaret Shih
University of California, Los Angeles

Diana T. Sanchez
Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey

The explosion in the number of people coming from a multiracial heritage has generated an increased need for understanding the experiences and consequences associated with coming from a multiracial background. In addition, the emergence of a multiracial identity challenges current thinking about race, forcing scholars to generate new ideas about intergroup relations, racial stigmatization, social identity, social perception, discrimination, and the intersectionality of race with other social categories such as social class.  The present issue brings together research and theory in psychology, sociology, education, culture studies, and public policy surrounding multiracial identity and introduces new advances in thinking about race, intergroup relations, and racial identity.  In exploring multiracial identity, the issue will reexamine conceptualization of race and racial identification by examining the social experiences of multiracial individuals.

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