Mixed Race Studies

Somebody Always Singing You

University Press of Mississippi
1997
160 pages
ISBN: 0878059814 (9780878059812)

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

The story of a multi-racial woman coming to understand her identity

As the child of African-American and Native American parents, Kaylynn TwoTrees grew up hearing herself called “half breed” and “mixed blood,” terms which now, after many transforming experiences, have positive and powerful meanings for her. This book spanning the first fifty years of her life is the account of her extraordinary journey into an understanding of her rich and complex heritage.
 
TwoTrees’s poignant, honest memoir tells of her birth to a Lakota father from a South Dakota reservation and a black mother from an urban neighborhood in Des Moines. She spent summers during her early childhood visiting the Pine Ridge reservation. Her grandmother’s teachings from those days sustained her throughout the subsequent years. She always has remembered her grandmother’s saying “You going/coming back being. Grandmothers always singing you going. Grandchildren always singing you coming back. Somebody always singing you.”
 
After the murder of her mother, she was adopted by her black grandparents, who had worked hard to achieve a middle-class life. TwoTrees was later sent to a Catholic boarding school where she was the only person of color. After she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she released to the care of relatives, she set out on her own. The ensuing journey took her from Chicago to a life in Europe, where she lived for some years as a dancer and a manager of dance companies. Returning to the United States, she lived first in New York, and then in the Southwest, where she spent recent years learning about the landscape and the indigenous cultures and giving workshops and performances.
 
TwoTrees, whose fascinating life journey has been filled with exhilarating as well as painful moments, writes movingly of her efforts to incorporate the diverse strands of her identity. Always carrying with her the love and lessons from her Indian grandmother and many others, she has come to understand the value of her multiple heritages.

Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America

University of Chicago Press
2010
208 pages
37 line drawings, 7 tables
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226793825; Paperback ISBN: 9780226793832; E-Book ISBN: 9780226793849

Michael Tesler, Doctoral Student in Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

Barack Obama’s presidential victory naturally led people to believe that the United States might finally be moving into a post-racial era. Obama’s Race—and its eye-opening account of the role played by race in the election—paints a dramatically different picture.

The authors argue that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record—and perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. As Obama’s campaign was given a boost in the primaries from racial liberals that extended well beyond that usually offered to ideologically similar white candidates, Hillary Clinton lost much of her longstanding support and instead became the preferred candidate of Democratic racial conservatives. Time and again, voters’ racial predispositions trumped their ideological preferences as John McCain—seldom described as conservative in matters of race—became the darling of racial conservatives from both parties. Hard-hitting and sure to be controversial, Obama’s Race will be both praised and criticized—but certainly not ignored.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Obama as Post-Racial?
• Chapter 1: Background: Race in Presidential Elections
• Chapter 2: Racialized Momentum: The Two Sides of Racialization in the Primaries
• Chapter 3: The General Election: The Two Sides of Racialization and Short-Term Political Dynamics
• Chapter 4: The Spillover of Racialization
• Chapter 5: The Racialized Voting Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
• Chapter 6: The Paradox of Gender Traditionalists’ Support for Hillary Clinton
• Chapter 7: Beyond Black and White: Obama as “Other”
• Chapter 8: Is the Obama Presidency Post-Racial? Evidence from His First Year in Office
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index

‘The suffering black male body and the threatened white female body’: ambiguous bodies in Candyman

The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
Issue 9, February 2011

Lucy Fife Donaldson
University of Reading

Race is not a subject often directly encountered in the horror film, despite the highly charged conflict of black and white constituting a central oppositionary structure in American culture and in its cinema. That this conflict is dramatised in specifically physical terms, as in the threat of miscegenation that permeates the dramatic chase scenes of D. W. Griffith’s films, resonates with the emphasis on the body’s importance for horror’s excesses, so that opposition of black and white bears a suggestive relationship to the poles of monster and victim. Linda Williams, writing on race and melodrama, suggests that there are two key icons which articulate the moral dilemma of race for America: ‘the suffering black male body and the threatened white female body’. Williams’ articulation of these embodiments as entwined, presents a correspondence between aspects of black and white experience (as well as between male and female) which destabilises the more common impulse to see race as opposed, polarised as the language around black and white suggests.

Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) marks the introduction of an African-American monster to the horror mainstream. As well as combining a threatening physical presence and gruesome method of attack, Candyman (Tony Todd) seemingly offers an embodiment of divided racial stereotypes based on fears of miscegenation through his attention to the film’s blonde heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen). Elspeth Kydd maintains that ‘Candyman takes the fear of miscegenation to an extended monstrous form when the black male body becomes the grotesque site for the eruption of these racial/sexual fears and the white woman’s body the site where these fears are played out’. Although Kydd suggests that ambiguity is created in the film’s treatment of racial stereotyping, ‘the excess of these representations point to both the contradictions and the attractions that allow these stereotypes to perpetuate’, the general tenor of her argument is to see the film as perpetuating the usual oppositions of race and gender. I would like to suggest that the apparent duality of gender, race and character types in the film are challenged by much more complex strategies of embodiment and representation. In particular, the film places emphasis on the connectedness of Candyman and Helen, of monster and victim, who are both ambiguously embodied, becoming more like doubles than clearly defined binary figures. Exploring the roles of monster and victim as experienced through the body points to the way physicality is being used and presented, particularly through performance, to offer further layers of complexity that undermine straightforward binaries of black/white or male/female. From this basis, the article will consider how the relationship between violence and the body affects the presentation of horror’s central roles of victim and monster.

Prefacing his discussion of the embodiment of whiteness, Richard Dyer observes that ‘to represent people is to represent bodies’. Through attention to the physical—the details of the body in movement and expression, as well as its placement within the visual style of the film—I intend to explore how the seemingly fixed roles of monster and victim are in fact more fluid than first apparent, and that these can co-exist in the same body. Candyman’s physicality and the way it is presented foregrounds the oscillations between violence and suffering, the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted on and by it, ambiguities which are also found  in Helen’s development, thus  enhancing the film’s striking preoccupation with the shifting parallels between monster and victim.

Candyman is centred on the investigations of two research students writing a joint thesis on urban legends: Helen, who is white, and Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons), who is a light skinned African–American or possibly of mixed race. Helen is introduced to the Candyman legend by a white middle-class undergraduate at the University of Chicago, who places him in a suburban setting killing white middle-class teenagers who invoke his presence in the mirror, and then by a couple of African-American cleaners at the university who claim he killed Ruthie-Jean, another African-American woman, in the projects. The tonal and generic contrasts between the stories, as well as the three told later in the film, are central to building ambiguity about the monster before we see him. They also efficiently dramatise a divide between race and class that pervades the film, setting up a striking play of visibility/invisibility between white and black communities as well as increasing the sense of anxiety and intrusion when they cross. Making such a point, however does not deny that the film employs an oppositional structure and certain types within certain social contexts that go with it: smug white male academics; aggressive black males in gangs; there are no white inhabitants of Cabrini Green, just as there are no black inhabitants of Helen’s condominium…

Read the entire article here.

Somewhere between Jim Crow & Post-Racialism: Reflections on the Racial Divide in America Today

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Volume 140, Number 2, Spring 2011, Race, Inequality & Culture, Volume 2
pages 11-36

Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences
Harvard University

In assessing the results of the Negro revolution so far, it can be concluded that Negroes have established a foothsold, no more. We have written a Declaration of Independence, itself an accomplishment, but the effort to transform the words into a life experience still lies ahead.
–Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? (1968)

By the middle of the twentieth century, the color line was as well defined and as firmly entrenched as any institution in the land. After all, it was older than most institutions, including the federal government itself. More important, it informed the content and shaped the lives of those institutions and the people who lived under them.
–John Hope Franklin, The Color Line (1993)

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy–particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
–Barack H. Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (May 18, 2008)

The year 1965 marked an important inflection point in the struggle for racial justice in the United States, underscoring two fundamental points about race in America. First, that racial inequality and division were not only Southern problems attached to Jim Crow segregation. Second, that the nature of those inequalities and divisions was a matter not merely of formal civil status and law, but also of deeply etched economic arrangements, social and political conditions, and cultural outlooks and practices. Viewed in full, the racial divide was a challenge of truly national reach, multilayered in its complexity and depth. Therefore, the achievement of basic citizenship rights in the South was a pivotal but far from exhaustive stage of the struggle…

…A second and no less controversial view of post-racialism takes the position that the level and pace of change in the demographic makeup and the identity choices and politics of Americans are rendering the traditional black-white divide irrelevant. Accordingly, Americans increasingly revere mixture and hybridity and are rushing to embrace a decidedly “beige” view of themselves and what is good for the body politic. Old-fashioned racial dichotomies pale against the surge toward flexible, deracialized, and mixed ethnoracial identities and outlooks.

A third, and perhaps the most controversial, view of post-racialism has the most in common with the well-rehearsed rhetoric of color blindness. To wit, American society, or at least a large and steadily growing fraction of it, has genuinely moved beyond race–so much so that we as a nation are now ready to transcend the disabling racial divisions of the past. From this perspective, nothing symbolizes better the moment of transcendence than Obama’s election as president. This transcendence is said to be especially true of a younger generation, what New Yorker editor David Remnick has referred to as “the Joshua Generation.” More than any other, this generation is ready to cross the great river of racial identity, division, and acrimony that has for so long defined American culture and politics…

…Consider first the matter of group boundaries. The 2000 Census broke new ground by allowing individuals to mark more than one box in designating racial background. Indeed, great political pressure and tumult led to the decision to move the Census in a direction that more formally and institutionally acknowledged the presence of increasing mixture and heterogeneity in the American population with regard to racial background. Nearly seven million people exercised that option in 2000. The successful rise of Obama to the office of president, the first African American to do so, as a child of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, has only accelerated the sense of the newfound latitude and recognition granted to those who claim more than one racial heritage.

Despite Obama’s electoral success and the press attention given to the phenomenon, some will no doubt find it surprising that the overwhelming majority of Americans identify with only one race. As Figure 1 shows, less than 2 percent of the population marked more than one box on the 2000 Census in designating their racial background. Fully 98 percent marked just one. I claim no deep-rootedness or profound personal salience for these identities. Rather, my point is that we should be mindful that the level of “discussion” and contention around mixture is far out of proportion to the extent to which most Americans actually designate and see themselves in these terms. Moreover, even if we restrict attention to just those who marked more than one box, two-thirds of these respondents designated two groups other than blacks (namely, Hispanic-white, Asian-white, or Hispanic and Asian mixtures), as Figure 2 shows. Some degree of mixture with black constituted just under a third of mixed race identifiers in 2000. Given the historic size of the black population and the extended length of contact with white Americans, this remarkable result says something powerful about the potency and durability of the historic black-white divide.

It is worth recalling that sexual relations and childbearing across the racial divide are not recent phenomena. The 1890 U.S. Census contained categories for not only “Negro” but also “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” and even “Octoroon”; these were clear signs of the extent of “mixing” that had taken place in the United States. Indeed, well over one million individuals fell into one of the mixed race categories at that time. In order to protect the institution of slavery and to prevent the offspring of white slave masters and exploited black slave women from having a claim on freedom as well as on the property of the master, slave status, as defined by law, followed the mother’s status, not the father’s. For most of its history, the United States legally barred or discouraged racial mixing and intermarriage. At the time of the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, seventeen states still banned racial intermarriage…

…Does that pressure for change foretell the ultimate undoing of the black-white divide? At least three lines of research raise doubts about such a forecast. First, studies of the perceptions of and identities among those of mixed racial backgrounds point to strong evidence of the cultural persistence of the one-drop rule. Systematic experiments by sociologists and social psychologists are intriguing in this regard. For example, sociologist Melissa Herman’s recent research concluded that “others’ perceptions shape a person’s identity and social understandings of race. My study found that partblack multiracial youth are more likely to be seen as black by observers and to define themselves as black when forced to choose one race.”…

…Third, some key synthetic works argue for an evolving racial scheme in the United States, but a scheme that nonetheless preserves a heavily stigmatized black category. A decade ago, sociologist Herbert Gans offered the provocative but wellgrounded speculation that the United States would witness a transition from a society defined by a great white–nonwhite divide to one increasingly defined by a black–non-black fissure, with an in-between or residual category for those granted provisional or “honorary white” status. As Gans explained: “If current trends persist, today’s multiracial hierarchy could be replaced by what I think of as a dual or bimodal one consisting of ‘nonblack’ and ‘black’ population categories, with a third ‘residual’ category for the groups that do not, or do not yet, fit into the basic dualism.” Most troubling, this new dualism would, in Gans’s expectations, continue to bring a profound sense of undeservingness and stigma for those assigned its bottom rung.

Gans’s remarks have recently received substantial support from demographer Frank Bean and his colleagues. Based on their extensive analyses of population trends across a variety of indicators, Bean and colleagues write: “A black-nonblack divide appears to be taking shape in the United States, in which Asians and Latinos are closer to whites. Hence, America’s color lines are moving toward a new demarcation that places many blacks in a position of disadvantage similar to that resulting from the traditional black-white divide.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race in America: Restructuring Inequality: Intergroup Race Relation

Center on Race & Social Problems
School of Social Work
The University of Pittsburgh
2010
29 pages

Editors:

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

Ralph Bangs, Associate Director
Center on Race and Social Problems
University of Pittsburgh

The Third of Seven Reports on the Race in America Conference (June 3-6, 2010)

Despite significant progress in America’s stride toward racial equality, there remains much to be done. Some problems are worse today than they were during the turbulent times of the 1960s. Indeed, racial disparities across a number of areas are blatant—family formation, employment levels, community violence, incarceration rates, educational attainment, and health and mental health outcomes.

As part of an attempt to redress these race-related problems, the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work and Center on Race and Social Problems organized the conference Race in America: Restructuring Inequality, which was held at the University of Pittsburgh June 3–6, 2010. The goal of the conference was to promote greater racial equality for all Americans. As our entire society has struggled to recover from a major economic crisis, we believed it was an ideal time to restructure existing systems rather than merely rebuilding them as they once were. Our present crisis afforded us the opportunity to start anew to produce a society that promotes greater equality of life outcomes for all of its citizens.

The conference had two parts: 20 daytime sessions for registered attendees and three free public evening events. The daytime conference sessions had seven foci: economics, education, criminal justice, race relations, health, mental health, and families/youth/elderly. Each session consisted of a 45-minute presentation by two national experts followed by one hour of questions and comments by the audience. The evening events consisted of an opening lecture by Julian Bond, a lecture on economics by Julianne Malveaux, and a panel discussion on postracial America hosted by Alex Castellanos of CNN.

This report provides access to the extensive and detailed information disseminated during the intergroup race relations sessions at the conference. This information will be particularly helpful to community and policy leaders interested in gaining a better understanding of race relations and finding effective strategies for improving these conditions.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• In the Mix: Multiracial Demographics and Social Definitions of Race
  • Race: Changing Composition, Changing Definition Howard Hogan
  • Leveraging America’s Increasing Diversity Patricia Gurin
• Coming Together: Promoting Harmony among Racial Groups
  • Obama and the Durable Racialization of American Politics Lawrence D. Bobo
  • Somewhere Over the Rainbow?: Postracial and Panracial Politics in the Age of Obama Taeku Lee
• The White Way?: Discussing Racial Privilege and White Advantage
  • Where and Why Whites Still Do Blatant Racism: White Racist Actions and Framing in the Backstage and Frontstage Joe Feagin
  • The Future of White Privilege in Post-Race, Post-Civil Rights, Colorblind America Charles Gallagher

Race: Changing Composition, Changing Definition

Presenter: Howard Hogan, Associate Director for Demographic Programs, U.S. Census Bureau

Moderator: Pat Chew, Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh

America’s categorization of race is more of a definition of how America chooses to see individuals and less the result of how people categorize themselves. Our concept of race in the United States has evolved over the country’s history. In America’s first census in 1790, the country viewed itself racially as comprising only three groups: Whites, slaves, and others. American Indians were not identified as a distinct group for this census. As immigration increased, our racial composition changed rapidly, and it was for this reason that in 1850 and 1860, the United States felt that it was necessary to gather information on the birthplaces of individuals. The term “Black” was first used as a census race category in the census of 1850, and the term “Negro” did not appear as a census race category until 1930…

…The concept of race and identification of racial origin continue to serve a role in the United States with regard to monitoring and enforcing civil rights legislation for employment, educational opportunities, and housing. It was for this reason the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1980s, declared Judaism to be a race for purposes of antidiscrimination. Data on race also are used to study changes in the social, economic, and demographic characteristics and changes in our population. But there is no reason to assume that it will get easier for OMB and the U.S. Census Bureau to make the kind of distinctions they need to be able to collect this information…

…Obama and the Durable Racialization of American Politics

Presenter: Lawrence D. Bobo, W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University

Moderator: Lu-in Wang, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh

There are some in American society who are unable to assess issues of racial discord because they accept the concept that the United States has become a postracial nation. There are others who consider postracialism to be a politically neutralizing falsehood that veils how the racial divide is constructed and maintained in American society. The prevalence of racial dissonance has waned over time in comparison to the racial conflicts America faced in the past. However, in order for this recuperation to continue, American society has to be forthright about current race relations conditions and open to developing new ways to improve relations in the future. The United States has adopted a new contemporary form of racism, because the blatant Jim Crow discrimination of years past is not as socially acceptable. The characteristics of this contemporary form, called laissez-faire racism, are the widespread and consequential harboring of negative stereotypes and the collective racial resentment of African Americans. Laissez-faire racism is very prevalent in today’s society despite the belief by many that the United States has transitioned into postracialism, spearheaded by Barack Obama’s presidential election. However, the majority of White voters chose not to vote for Barack Obama for president. An overwhelming majority of minority voters chose to vote for him.

There are several reasons why America has not reached the point where the color line between Blacks and Whites has become blurred beyond recognition. First, only 14.6 percent of U.S. marriages in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity, and only 11 percent of these mixed marriages were White-Black. Second, only 7 million (2 percent) of the U.S. population in 2000 marked more than one race on the census. One-quarter of these were Black. Third, Black-White wealth gaps have grown, even among educated Blacks.

In order to relieve some of the racial discord in society, progressive dialogue on the current realities of race relations in the United States is needed, as well as structural and cultural change…

…The anti-Black cultural project of “erasing Blackness” has not destabilized the core racial binary. Although many believe that miscegenation—the mixing of races through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation—an overwhelming majority of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians still marry within their racial group.

Miscegenation

Many Americans buy into the notion that miscegenation is causing the end of the Black and White races and that eventually the color line between Whites and Blacks will become blurred beyond recognition. The data show:

• African Americans are the least likely of all races to marry Whites.
• Although the pace of interracial marriage increased more rapidly in the 1990s than it did in other periods, the social boundaries between Blacks and Whites remained highly rigid and resistant to change.
• Although interracial marriages have increased greatly in recent years, they still only account for 15 percent of marriages in the U.S.
• Only 7 million Americans (2 percent) identified more than one race when given the option to do so on the 2000 Census. Of those 7 million, one-quarter identified having any mixture with African Americans.
• Biracial African American-White individuals have historically identified themselves as Black and typically married other African
  Americans…

Read the entire report here.

Science must not invent new myths about race

London Evening Standard
2009-11-16

Lindsay Johns

Science and race have never been easy bedfellows. Since Victorian times, when Western scientific advancement was used as an intellectual and moral justification for European colonial expansion, science or pseudo-science has occupied an uncomfortable place in our understanding of race.

Yet today, as Professor Steve Jones will argue at a debate tonight, it is commonly held by scientists that, genetically, there is no such thing as race.

It has been proven that there is a negligible amount of difference between the DNA of different “races”. Rather, race is a social construct, a fluid and malleable entity.

In America, the “one drop” rule of black blood still effectively renders anyone with any in them, even if they are quite light skinned, as “black”.

Elsewhere, race being such a nebulous entity, it can often be confusing. For example, many mixed-race people, myself included, are often mistaken for Arabs…

…Yet it would be naive to deny that race, although biologically inconsequential, is still very much a social reality.

Many social and economic disparities still arise from it: people use race to define themselves.

Scientists of all backgrounds have a duty to interpret data responsibly: their pronouncements on race have ethical, legal and social implications…

Read the entire article here.

Reactions in the Field: Interviews with Helping Professionals Who Work with Biracial Children and Adolescents

University of Cincinnati
2002
277 pages

Michele Neace Page

A dissertation submitted to the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF EDUCATION (Ed.D.)

The number of interracial couples and marriages are growing in the United States, and it is expected that the number of biracial children will also increase. It is estimated that within five years, a third of America’s youth will be the offspring of an interracial relationship (Synder, 1996). The future design of support services to meet the needs of the biracial population is obviously crucial.

The literature review has revealed a lack of training of helping professionals and a framework for identifying and understanding biracial populations. Counseling professionals have recognized the need to increase research in the area of working with biracial children, but no previous study has gathered information from helping professionals in the field.

This study was designed to explore the knowledge, skills, attitudes and expectations of professionals who work with biracial children. Twenty male and female participants were interviewed from various helping professions including social work, mental health and school counseling. Each participant was required to have two years work experience with biracial children. Data was collected through a structured interview. Years of experience for helping professionals ranged from two to twenty-five with 85% of the respondents being Caucasian.

Helping professional’s top concerns for working with biracial adolescents and children were a lack of training, real-life experiences, awareness or comfort with identity, and acceptance of biracial children by others. The expectation for the future professional development and growth included the desire for more interaction of all people within their community.

This study supported the identified area of need in previous literature regarding a lack of training and experience. Long range sociopolitical issues appear to be upcoming issues for biracial individuals as well as the desire of helping professionals to be better prepared and supportive to biracial children and adolescents.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• CHAPTER I Introduction and Review of the Literature
  • Introduction
    • Statement of Problem
  • Review of the Literature
    • Characteristics of Biracial Children
    • Commonalities and Differences for Adolescent Biracial and Monoracial Children
      • Developmental stages
      • Physical Characteristics, language and socioeconomic status
  • Identity
    • Cultural influence on identity
    • Family influence on identity
    • Peer influence on identity
    • Counselor Education and Training Issues
      • Helping professionals working with biracial children and adolescents
      • Counselors education and training with biracial children and adolescents
      • Multiculturalism in counseling
      • Multicultural competency training
    • Challenges of Counseling and Working with Biracial Children
      • Knowledge
      • Skills
      • Attitudes
    • Summary
    • Research Questions
    • Significance of the Study
      • Increasing Biracial Population
      • New Issues in the Helping Professions
      • Recognizing the Need to Act
• CHAPTER II Methods
  • Population and Sample
  • Design of the Questionnaire
  • Procedures
  • Approaches to Recruitment
  • Securing Permission to Conduct the Study
  • Recruiting Participants
  • Data Storage
  • Conducting the Interviews
  • Data Analysis
• CHAPTER III Results
  • Initial Analysis
  • Data Analysis Steps
  • Sample Demographics
  • Experience Working with Biracial Children
    • How Do You Get Ready to Work with Biracial Children?
    • What Special Training has the Counselor Obtained
    • Attitudes Regarding Working with Biracial Children
    • Expectations for the Future
  • Summary
• Chapter IV: Summary, Discussion, Future Implications
  • Summary
  • Discussion
    • Basic of Problems and Issues for Biracial Adolescents and Children
    • Factors most Important When Working With Biracial Adolescents and Children
    • Comfort With Biracial Children and Adolescents
  • Limitations of the Study
  • Helping professional perspectives
    • Sample Size
    • Sample Selection
    • Survey methodology
  • Future Implications
    • Implications for research
    • Implications for Training Counselor Education Programs
    • Implications for Practice
• REFERENCES
• APPENDIXES
  • Appendix A: Informed Consent Letter
  • Appendix B: Interview Questionnaire (Part I)
  • Appendix C: Interview Data

List of Tables

• 3.1: Degrees Held by Helping Professionals
• 3.2: Helping Professionals’ Customary Practices When Working with Any Child or Student
• 3.3: Helping Professionals’ Customary Practices Working with Biracial Child or Student
• 3.4: Difficult Issues when Working with Biracial Children
• 3.5: Special Training Obtained by the Helping Professional for Work with Biracial Children
• 3.6: Areas Where More Knowledge or Information Is Needed
• 3.7: Of the Sorts of Biracial Children Who Come to Your School/Community Center, Which Do You Think You Understand the Least Well and Have (Or Would Have) the Most Difficulty Working With?
• 3.8: Biracial Children’s Needs Versus Monoracial Children’s Needs Regarding Their Passage Through Puberty
• 3.9 In the Next Ten Years, What Trends Do You See in the Your Community Regarding the Prevalence of Biracial Children?

Read the entire dissertation here.

To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing

University of Missouri Press
2006
296 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1619-9

Steven J. Belluscio, Associate Professor of English
Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference.

To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and George Schuyler’s Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, and Guido d’Agostino’s Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative’s exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself.

When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and “white ethnic” (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity.

The desire “to be suddenly white” serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. By examining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.

Racial Socialization of Biracial Adolescents

Kent State University
May 2006
158 pages

Ja’Nitta Marbury
Marbury & Associates, University Heights, Ohio

A dissertation submitted to the Kent State University Graduate School of Education, Health and Human Services in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The purpose in conducting this research was to develop grounded theory regarding the racial socialization process of Biracial adolescents who were the offspring of an African American father and a European American mother. The participants in the study were eight European American mothers of Biracial adolescents ranging in age from 10 to 17 years old. This study was conducted in a qualitative format using individual and focus group interviews to gather data. The study was conducted to lay the foundation for the development of grounded theory on the Biracial socialization process. The grounded theory foundation developed from the results was the Biracial Socialization Spectrum. The Biracial Socialization Spectrum is a tetrahedron with the dynamic process as the base, side one representing the Black/African American parent spectrum, Side two representing the White/European American parent spectrum, and side three representing the Biracial Socialization Spectrum.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• I. INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW
  • History of Biracial People in America
  • Politics of a Biracial Identity
  • Biracial Childhood and Adolescence
  • The Development and Socialization of White Adolescents
  • Racial Socialization
    • Black Racial Socialization
    • Biracial Socialization
  • Parental Racial Socialization Messages
    • White Racial Identity
• II. METHODOLOGY
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Researcher Description
  • Research Design
  • Participants
  • Procedures
    • Individual Interviews
    • Focus Groups
  • Data Analysis
  • Limitations
• III. RESULTS
  • Recruitment
  • Participants
    • Gayl
    • Ananda
    • Kalpana
    • Bridgette
    • Patricia
    • Sandy
    • Ella
    • Sharon
  • Demographics
  • Individual Interviews
  • RQ₁: Research Question 1
    • IQ₁: What does the term Biracial mean to you?
    • IQ₂: What do you think being Biracial means to your child?
  • RQ₂: Research Question 2
    • IQ₃: What strategies, if any, of parenting a Biracial child are you using?
    • SQ₃: How do you process both negative and positive cross-racial encounters with them?
    • IQ₄: How does your child respond to the socialization methods you have tried?
    • IQ₆: How does your family aid in the socialization of your child?
  • RQ₃: Research Question 3
    • IQ₅: What impact does the difference in physical characteristics between you and your child have on how you socialize your child?
  • Focus Group Interview
    • Member Checking
  • Emerging Themes
  • Data Triangulation
    • Peer Reviewers and Researcher
    • Peer Reviewers’ Perceptions
    • Researcher’s Perceptions
  • Delimitations
• IV. DISCUSSION
  • Convergent & Divergent Socialization Process
  • Grounded Theory
    • Biracial Socialization Spectrum
  • Conclusions
    • White Racial Identity
    • Acceptance
    • Family of Origin and Immediate Family Acceptance
    • Social Political Environment
    • Implications For Counselors and Counselor Educators
  • Recommendations
  • The Intention Behind the Study
• APPENDICES
  • APPENDIX A: WHITE RACIAL IDENTITY EGO STATUSES
  • APPENDIX B: DIVERSEGRAD-L LIST-SERV POSTING
  • APPENDIX C: INTRODUCTORY LETTER
  • APPENDIX D: DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRE
  • APPENDIX E: INFORMATION INDEX CARD
  • APPENDIX F: PEER REVIEWING CONSENT FORM (PARTICIPANT)
  • APPENDIX G: PARTICIPANT CONSENT FORM
  • APPENDIX H: AUDIO AND VIDEO TAPE CONSENT FORM
  • APPENDIX I: STRUCTURED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
  • APPENDIX J: PEER REVIEWING CONSENT FORM (PEER REVIEWER)
  • APPENDIX K: RESEARCH QUESTION 1: INDIVIDUAL INTERVIEW
  • APPENDIX L: RESEARCH QUESTION 1: FOCUS GROUP
  • APPENDIX M: RESEARCH QUESTION 2: INDIVIDUAL INTERVIEW
  • APPENDIX N: RESEARCH QUESTION 2: FOCUS GROUP
  • APPENDIX O: RESEARCH QUESTION 3: INDIVIDUAL INTERVIEW
  • APPENDIX P: TREE NODE DIAGRAM FOR RESEARCH QUESTION 1
  • APPENDIX Q: TREE NODE DIAGRAM FOR RESEARCH QUESTION 2
  • APPENDIX R: TREE NODE DIAGRAM FOR RESEARCH QUESTION 3
• REFERENCES

List of Figures

1. Methodology flow chart
2. Biracial Socialization Spectrum
3. Parental Spectrums (Side 1 & Side 2 Tetrahedron)
4. Dynamic process

List of Tables

1. Participant Education Level
2. Participant Marital Status
3. Participant Annual Household Income
4. Demographic Information Listed by Participant

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Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Solution to the Race Problem

Negro American Literature Forum
Volume 3, Number 2 (Summer, 1969)
pagess 52-56

June Socken

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, the first American Negro short story writer and novelist of recognized professional quality, squarely faced the problem of Negro-White relations in America.   Although his short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) and his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) have been credited as bold treatments of the race issue, particularly miscegenation, all of the implications of Chesnutt’s fiction have not been explored. The Negro’s acceptance of the white man’s culture as well as the identity crisis of the mulatto are two crucial themes that have not received adequate attention. Chesnutt’s non-fictional writings, in which he stated quite forthrightly that total assimilation was the only solution to the race problem, have not been studied at all.   The following pages will attempt to describe and explore some of the perceptive, and still relevant, ideas put forth by Charles Chesnutt.

Born in Cleveland in 1858, but raised and educated in North Carolina, Chesnutt was the prototype of the self-made man. Fair skinned, he consciously identified himself as a Negro and became a teacher and then principal of a colored school in North Carolina. Later, he trained himself to become a stenographerand lawyer; at the age of twenty-five, he moved back to Cleveland. His hometown, he believed, judged men according to their merit ana not their color. Chesnutt always wanted to become a writer but practiced stenography and law so as to earn a living, thus providing himself with the means to write.   His plan worked, and by 1900, Chesnutt was devoting himself largely to writing. However, the novels he produced during the 1900-1905 period did not sell sufficient copies to allow him to remain a full-time writer.   He had to return to stenography after 1905 in order to earn a living.

Miscegenationwas the dominant theme in Chesnutt’s fiction. However, white audiences and critics who repeatedly discussed this fact failed to appreciate that Chesnutt was satirizing the mulattoes, his major characters, as well as the intolerant whites.He mocked the light-skinned Negroes’ aping of white man’s habits; he poked fun at the mulattoes who imitated all of the white American’s fashions and prejudice The protagonists in Chesnutt’s stories “A Matter of Principle” and “The Wife of His Youth,” for example, formed an exclusive society called the Blue Vein society (the members being so light that you could see the blue veins in their faces.); the purpose of the group was to remove themselves from the mass of black men and to create a mulatto aristocracy. This first group of assimilated Americans, Chesnutt seemed to be saying, still believed in the superiority of the white man’s value system; they had not broken out of the cultural restraints sufficiently to recognize that the white man’s value; were not American or human values. The mulattoes lauded whiteness and deplored blackness because they lived in a white society that did so.   They believed, based upon their experience, that the only way to advance was to become whiter; the thought that two races, one black and one white, could live side by side harmoniously was beyond their vision of possibilities.

Chesnutt’s reproof of his mulatto characters was often gentle, but nevertheless, firm.   The rich mulatto restaurateur in “A Matter of Principle” lost the opportunity to marry his daughter to a substantial Negro Congressman who was light skinned (and therefore an appropriate match) because of a case of mistaken identity; the restaurateur thought that a black-skinned Negro bishop was the Congressman, and thus hurriedly prevented the meeting between the suitor and his…

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