Black mixed-race men, perceptions of the family, and the cultivation of ‘post-racial’ resilience

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Work, United Kingdom, United States on 2017-11-03 14:37Z by Steven

Black mixed-race men, perceptions of the family, and the cultivation of ‘post-racial’ resilience

Ethnicities
First Published 2017-11-02
DOI: 10.1177/1468796817739667

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
School of Education and Childhood
Leeds Beckett University, Headingley Campus, Leeds, United Kingdom

Historically and contemporarily, popular discourses have pathologised Black mixed-race men as the embodiment of a ‘clash of cultures’. In centring the voices of Black mixed-race men in the UK and the US, this article offers a refutation to these discourses. With a specific focus on secondary schooling, the article draws upon accounts from semi-structured interviews in order to demonstrate how Black mixed-race men perceive their families as offering a source of strength and support. In order to understand how the family supports Black mixed-race men in overcoming the challenges posed by a hostile, ‘post-racial’ white supremacist environment, I develop a conceptualisation of ‘post-racial’ resilience. Through this concept, I highlight the creative and innovative ways Black mixed-race men and their families respond to the lived realities of pervasive racial inequities that are occluded by ‘post-racialism’. The article considers the role that parents play in three, inextricably linked, aspects of Black mixed-race men’s lives: schooling, identity formation, and experiences of racism.

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Attitudes toward interracial marriages and the role of interracial contacts in Sweden

Posted in Articles, Europe, Media Archive, Social Science on 2016-11-23 21:29Z by Steven

Attitudes toward interracial marriages and the role of interracial contacts in Sweden

Ethnicities
Volume 16, Number 4, August 2016
pages 568-588
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638400

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmo University, Sweden; Sophia University, Japan

This paper examines attitudes toward interracial marriages and the relationship between the amount of prior interracial contact and attitudes in Sweden. The analysis is based on an anonymous postal survey conducted in Malmö, Sweden answered by 461 white-European respondents. Several studies in the US address the question of contact and attitudes and find that those who have more interracial contact, especially interracial friendships, have more positive attitudes toward intermarriage. The results show that the majority of the white European respondents can imagine marrying interracially; however, there are clear preferences toward different racial groups. Moreover, as in the US context, respondents who reported interracial friendships, and not general or superficial contacts, are more apt to answer the question about interracial marriage positively.

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“What are you?”: Mixed race responses to the racial gaze

Posted in Articles, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science on 2016-06-14 01:34Z by Steven

“What are you?”: Mixed race responses to the racial gaze

Ethnicities
Published online before print 2015-12-16
DOI: 10.1177/1468796815621938

Jillian Paragg
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Mixed race scholarship considers the deployment of the term “mixed race” as an identification and theorizes that the operation of the external racial gaze is signaled through the “what are you?” question that mixed race people face in their everyday lives. In interviews conducted with mixed race, young adults in a Western Canadian urban context, it was evident that the “what are you?” question is the verbal form of the external racial gaze’s production of ambivalence on mixed race bodies. However, this study also found that mixed race people have “ready” identity narratives in response to the “what are you?” question. This paper shows the importance of these narratives (the very existence of the “ready” narratives, as well as the content of the “ready” narrative) for fleshing out the operation of the external racial gaze in the Canadian context. Respondents draw on two closely related modes of narrating origin when responding to the “what are you?” question: they respond through a kinship narrative that is heteronormative and they narrate that they inherit “national origin” “through blood.” I argue that these responses point to how the gaze produces the multiracialized body through the desire to imagine and “know” its originary point of racial mixing. Yet, the “ready” narratives are also agential: while at times they narrate to the expectations of the gaze, they also “play on” the gaze.

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Toward building a conceptual framework on intermarriage

Posted in Articles, Canada, Europe, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom, United States on 2016-04-10 02:38Z by Steven

Toward building a conceptual framework on intermarriage

Ethnicities
Volume 16, Number 4, August 2016
pages 497-520
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638402

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmö University, Sweden; Sophia University, Japan

Nahikari Irastorza, Marie Curie Research Fellow
Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare
Malmö University, Sweden

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Increasing migration worldwide and the cultural diversity generated as a consequence of international migration has facilitated the unions of people from different countries, religions, races, and ethnicities. Such unions are often celebrated as a sign of integration; however, at the same time as they challenge people’s idea of us and them, intermarriages in fact still remain controversial, and even to some extent, taboo in many societies. Research and theorizing on intermarriage is conducted predominantly in the English-speaking North American and British contexts. This special issue includes empirical studies from not only the English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, and the UK, but also from Japan, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Spain and demonstrate the increasingly diverse directions taken in the study of intermarriage in regards to the patterns, experiences, and social implications of intermarriages. Moreover, the articles address the assumed link between intermarriage and “integration.”

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Preference and prejudice: Does intermarriage erode negative ethno-racial attitudes between groups in Spain?

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Europe, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Social Science on 2016-03-30 15:24Z by Steven

Preference and prejudice: Does intermarriage erode negative ethno-racial attitudes between groups in Spain?

Ethnicities
Published online before print 2016-03-28
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638404

Dan Rodríguez-García, Associate Professor
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Miguel Solana-Solana
Department of Geography
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Miranda J. Lubbers, Ramón y Cajal Researcher
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

This paper challenges the idea – rooted in classic assimilation theory – that intermarriage clearly erodes social and ethno-racial boundaries and negative attitudes between groups. Drawing on narratives from 58 immigrants of seven different origin countries residing in Catalonia, Spain, who are in romantic partnerships with Spanish-born people, we focus on preferences and prejudices related to mixing. We find that the members of exogamous couples both suffer social discrimination regarding the crossing of ethnocultural borders, particularly from their respective family members – a rejection that is based on negative stereotypes and preconceptions linked to the partner’s origin, phenotype or ethnocultural characteristics, such as religion, in intersection with gender. More significantly, we also find that ethno-racial prejudices (particularly when referring to marriage preferences for the respondents and their children) and discriminatory attitudes (towards one’s own and other immigrant minority groups) also exist among intermarried couples themselves. In sum, we question the role of mixed unions as a diluter of differences and an accelerator of integration.

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Multiracial people and their partners in Britain: Extending the link between intermarriage and integration?

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2016-03-22 15:06Z by Steven

Multiracial people and their partners in Britain: Extending the link between intermarriage and integration?

Ethnicities
Published online 2016-03-21
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638399

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

There are now a growing number of studies on intermarriage in Western multi-ethnic societies, especially in countries with post-colonial migrants (and their descendants). Intermarriage is of great interest to analysts because a group’s tendency to partner across ethnic boundaries is a key indicator of the social distance between groups in a multi-ethnic society. However, theorizing on intermarriage is typically premised upon the union (usually) of a White and non-White individual. We know little, therefore, about what happens the next generation down: the unions of multiracial people, who are the children of intermarried couples. With whom do multiracial people partner? Furthermore, are multiracial individuals who are partnered with White people different in their outlooks, identifications, and socialization of their children, from those who have ethnic minority partners? I draw upon some findings from a Leverhulme-funded research project on multiracial people and their experiences as parents in Britain.

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‘Stretching out the categories’: Chinese/European narratives of mixedness, belonging and home in Singapore

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Science on 2014-03-20 20:45Z by Steven

‘Stretching out the categories’: Chinese/European narratives of mixedness, belonging and home in Singapore

Ethnicities
Volume 14, Number 2 (April 2014)
pages 279-302
DOI: 10.1177/1468796813505554

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

Racial categorization is important in everyday interactions and state organization in Singapore. Increasingly, the idea of ‘mixed race’ and new conceptions of mixedness are challenging such classification along racial lines. Although contemporary Singapore is extremely diverse, the underlying ideology of multiracialism remains grounded in distinctly racialized groups, leaving little space for more complex individual identities. This paper explores the identifications of individuals of mixed Chinese and European descent in the Singaporean context, looking at how complexity is lived within firmly racialized structures. Drawing on a series of 20 narrative interviews, this research examines the relationship between categorization and identity, focusing on the identities of individuals with multiple national, cultural and ethnic ties. The practical impacts of racial categorization shape many aspects of life in Singapore, and individuals of mixed descent illustrated a constant tension between official categorization and personal mixedness, seen in the frustrations experienced and strategies developed by individuals around race and belonging. Individuals negotiated their connections around race and nationality both in practical terms around language, social policies and culture, and personally in terms of symbolic feelings of connection.

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‘It’s not written on their skin like it is ours’: Greek letter organizations in the age of the multicultural imperative

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-09-19 22:05Z by Steven

‘It’s not written on their skin like it is ours’: Greek letter organizations in the age of the multicultural imperative

Ethnicities
Volume 13, Number 5 (October 2013)
pages 519-543
DOI: 10.1177/1468796812471127

Joanna S. Hunter, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Radford University, Radford, Virginia

Matthew W. Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Today’s students wrestle with the continued salience of racial identity on campuses that encourage the celebration of ‘diversity’ while at once digesting messages that the USA is now largely ‘post-racial’. Based on data collected through fieldwork observation, focus groups and in-depth interviews with a local Multicultural Greek Council for fraternities and sororities, we argue that ‘multicultural’ student organizations engage in a variety of racial identity tactics that simultaneously constrain and enable the perception of their racial identities. By relying on the two cultural narratives of multiculturalism—abstract and organizational—members of Greek organizations that do not conform to the White/Black binary can construct identities and a movement understood as rational, progressive and generally innocuous. Yet, in practice, the dominant expectations to perform ‘multiculturalism’ were manifest in narrow, essentialist and singular expressions of ethnic pride as an oppositional identity to Anglo-conformity and color-blindness, rather than an embrace of pluralism and multiculturalism per se. By highlighting how members of multicultural student organizations navigate this troubling paradox, our study raises important questions about the concept of multiculturalism, especially as it is constructed and enacted by the millennial generation.

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What’s in a name? Exploring the employment of ‘mixed race’ as an identification

Posted in Articles, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, Women on 2013-04-03 03:48Z by Steven

What’s in a name? Exploring the employment of  ‘mixed race’ as an identification

Ethnicities
Volume 2, Number 4 (December 2002)
pages 469-490
DOI: 10.1177/14687968020020040201

Minelle Mahtani, Professor of Geography and Journalism
University of Toronto

In the last 20 years, we have witnessed an explosion in scholarship and popular media accounts about the experience of ‘mixed race’ identity. Despite the increasing numbers of people who now identify as ‘mixed race’, relatively little research has been conducted on how ‘mixed race’ individuals consider this particular label of identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews with self-identified women of ‘mixed race’ living in Toronto, this article interrogates attachments to the identification of `mixed race’. The article begins by examining the popular discourse surrounding `mixed race’ identity, suggesting that the public imaginary positions the ‘mixed race’ woman as ‘out of place’ in the social landscape. It then explores how many women create cartographies of belonging by identifying as `mixed race’, reading the label as a `linguistic home’. It can provide a way to identify outside of constraining racialized categories of identity. The article also points out that many of the same women in this study effectively challenge, contest and discard the identification, dependent on a myriad of factors.

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(An)Other English city: Multiethnicities, (post)modern moments and strategic identifications

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2012-07-08 01:02Z by Steven

(An)Other English city: Multiethnicities, (post)modern moments and strategic identifications

Ethnicities
Volume 2, Number 3 (2002)
pages 321-348
DOI: 10.1177/14687968020020030301

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

The interpretive turn in urban studies signals a heightened emphasis on the locus of the city as the site for both the making and unmaking of identities and differences. Juxtaposing examples from British popular culture with narrative extracts from my published ethnographic research on ‘mixed race’ family and memory, this article addresses two key problematics associated with this discursive shift. First, I explore the concept of multiethnicity as another paradigm for understanding the relationship between structures and forms of agency, particularly as multiethnicity forces a rethinking of racialized and essentialist notions of Englishness and non-Englishness; what I refer to as differentiating between the hyphen and the ampersand. Second, I assess the extent to which lived and constructed ideas of `the urban’ in general and `the city’ in particular are preconditions for the performance of multiethnicity. That is, are urban sites ideal laboratories for an illustration of the ways in which `mixed race’ and multiethnic subjectivities are intertwined?

INTRODUCTION

Mulattos may not be new. But the mulatto-pride folks are a new generation. They want their own special category or no categories at all. They’re a full fledged movement. (Senna, 1998: 14)

For as long as humans have populated the earth, intergroup mating and marriages have been commonplace (Gist and Dworkin, 1972: 1). As such, it is argued that there are no discrete or pure biological ‘races’ (Rose et al., 1984). Yet, in the popular folk imagination as well as in interdisciplinary scholarship, the problematized idea of ‘mixed race’1 persists (Alibhai-Brown, 2001; Daniel, 2001; Parker and Song, 2001; Williams-Leon and Nakashima, 2001). In fact, not since the 19th-century Victorian era, when pseudoscientific treatises on the presumed social pathology of the ‘racial’ hybrid abounded, has there been such an academic interest in ‘mixed race’ studies. That said, the intellectual content and social and political contexts of contemporary scholarship are very different. Rather than being objects of the scientific gaze (as speaking subjects), scholars, many of whom identify as ‘mixed race’ or ‘multiracial’, have deployed the idea that ‘race’ is a social construct that shifts across space and time. In so doing, they seek to validate ‘mixed race’ as a legitimate psychosocial and political category.

Over the past decade, and particularly in North America, theoretical, empirical and biographical work on ‘mixed race’ that addresses the fluidity, dynamism, complexity and practices of identity politics has flourished. As we begin a new century, a body of writings is emerging that talks back and to the resurgent literature that gave birth to the ‘multiracial’ nomenclature and its contested politics (Christian, 2000; Gordon, 1995; Mahtani and Moreno, 2001; Masami Ropp, 1997; Njeri, 1997; Spencer, 1997, 1999). By critically engaging with either the problematics or the possibilities of ‘multiracial’ activism, expression and ideology, this latest phase signals the emergence of a critical discourse on ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiraciality’ from which there are no signs of retreat.

This empirical and experiential celebration and contestation of ‘mixed race’ and ‘multiraciality’ is by no means unified or essentialist. The most interesting debates have emerged from different conceptualizations of the canon. For example, conceptual and political disagreements over the categories ‘mixed race’, ‘biracial’ and ‘multiracial’ stem from the dominance of binary ‘black/white’5 paradigms in US and British ‘racial’ discourses (Leonard, 2000; Mahtani and Moreno, 2001; Price, 2000). The emphasis on socially designated ‘black/white mixes’ is said to exclude those who are socially designated and identify as dual minority ‘mixes’ that do not include ‘black/white’ and neglect certain individuals who claim triple or more ‘mixes’:

In the recent explosion of writings about multiraciality, we have seen a plethora of discussion about white/black crossings and white/Asian crossings (and we want to remind you that we are using these terms very suspiciously). But we worry that we have not yet seen a great deal of discussion about people who are of dual minority mixes, or who are not part white. (Mahtani and Moreno, 2001: 67)

This binarism also overlooks the important fact that conceptions of ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social status are historically, geographically and culturally specific and hence do not travel easily (Erasmus, 2000; Torres and Whitten, 1998; Whitten and Torres, 1998). The American ‘one drop’ rule, which subsumes anyone with at least one known African ancestor under the heading ‘black’ whether or not they also have European and/or Native American ancestry, differs remarkably from the more fluid notion of ‘race’ and social hierarchy in Brazil, wherein ascribed gradations between ‘black’ and ‘white’ are varied and many (Daniel, 2000; Twine, 1998; Winant, 1999). In a British context, ‘black’ as a collective ‘multiracial’ identification does not perform the same intellectual, political or cultural labour as it did in previous decades (C. Alexander, 1996; Gilroy, 1987; Mercer, 1994; Mirza, 1997; Modood, 1988). The fact that the Irish have ‘become white’ in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, along with recent racialized class and ethnic conflicts in the north of England as well as the current European/American rhetorical ‘clash of civilizations’ are all powerful indicators of the ways in which ‘blackness’/’non-whiteness’ and ‘whiteness’ are shifting and thus unstable signifiers of exclusion and inclusion (Bonnett, this issue; Hall, 2000; Hesse, 2000).

A broader historical and geographical vantage point also highlights the cross-cutting ways in which the global processes and erotic projects of slavery, imperialism and diaspora(s) have created similar shifts in the local making, management and regulation of status and power as articulated through the everyday discourses and practices of ‘race’, ‘mixed race’ and social hierarchies. These trends are manifest in the long tradition of intellectual engagement with issues of mestizaje (Latin America, Spanish Caribbean), métissage (French Canada, francophone Caribbean, francophone Africa), mesticagem (Brazil, lusophone Africa) and miscegenation (anglophone Africa, anglophone Caribbean, Australia) as comparative examples of scholarship on the contested notion of ‘race’ mixture. All of these interwoven and historically located positions rupture allegedly stable racialized fault lines and at the same time (paradoxically in the case of some) reinscribe ‘race’ – a term predicated on scientifically dubious criteria.

In the historical moments of slavery and imperialism, ‘mixed race’ communities were socially engineered and managed. Yet, it is worth pausing for a moment to ponder why the circumstances are ripe in certain contemporary social and political milieux for the (re-)emergence of a politicized ‘multiracial’ movement and not in others. For example, in the USA, organizations such as RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and AMEA (Association of MultiEthnic Americans) unsuccessfully lobbied the US Congress and marched on Washington demanding the inclusion of a ‘multiracial’ category on the 2000 census (Fernandez, 1996; Nakashima, 1996). Not wanting to upset the very powerful American caucuses of colour, in particular African Americans, as a compromise solution the Census Bureau introduced the ‘tick all that apply’ option which means that, for ‘statistical’ purposes, those who tick more than one box may be subsumed under one ‘racial’ heading such as ‘black’ or ‘African American’. On the other hand, in Britain, changing demographics suggest that ‘mixed race’ families and their children will be a formidable force in the future. Although this may be demographic fact, other than the support group People in Harmony, the ‘mixed race community’ displays minimal public signs of the degree of politicization evident across the pond. In fact, it was previous responses to the 1991 census as well as consultation with focus groups, and not external pressure, that motivated the Office of National Statistics to deploy the ‘mixed ethnic’ option with a free text field for the 2001 census (Aspinall, 1997; Owen, 2001). Since the 1970s, in Brazil, once heralded as a model of ‘racial’ democracy, political movements such as the movimento negro have re-emerged, suggesting that all is not well in ‘racial paradise’ (dos Santos, 1999; da Silva, 1999; Ribeiro, 1996). In (post-)apartheid South Africa, in light of the ‘official’ dissolution of apartheid categories and the everyday persistence of racism in the new guise of economic apartheid and heightened conflicts among and between Africans, Asians and ‘coloureds’, historically ‘coloured’ communities are having to redefine and reposition themselves (C. Alexander, 1996; Marais, 1996; Rasool, 1996).

Whatever the global context, political motivations for either the social engineering, suppression, dismantling or reconstruction of the ideas and practices of ‘mixed race’ are contingent. As Small reminds us: ‘the analytical enterprise . . . must continue to focus on structural contexts, institutional patterns, and ideological articulations as they are expressed in the light of local histories’ (2001: 129). ‘Multiracial’ or ‘monoracial’ identity politics is frequently governed by unresolved and played out tensions between the sovereignty of the state and the public sphere as they collide with both individualized expressions of multiethnic and/or ‘multiracial’ identities as empowerment, and monoethnic and/or ‘monoracial’ collective mobilization in the competition for economic resources and civic recognition (Body-Gendrot, this issue). This dialectical dance performed by structure and agency is succinctly described by Burroughs and Spickard:

There is a real split, then, as yet unresolved, between the compelling logic of multiethnicity and its promise for mixed individuals on the one hand, and the practical political imperatives of monoethnically defined groups on the other, in an age that has not yet wholly given up monoethnic definitions. (2000: 247)

In the second and third sections of this article, I will explore in greater detail the specific extent to which the restricted and racialized natures of ‘white’ English group membership and the compulsory ‘black’ non-English designation limit the ‘[multi]ethnic options’ (Waters, 1990; see also Song, 2001) of individuals who identify as ‘mixed race’ and/or multethnic as these affiliations and identifications are constructed, played out, maintained and transgressed in the specific contexts of ‘the urban’…

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