Mixed Race Studies

Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil.  Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out.  But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time.  I find a suggestive emblem of such disjunctive or hybrid temporality in “the miscegenation of time,” a phrase from which the state of racialist thinking can never be fully removed.  The hybridization of genre implied in the miscegenation of time entails not simply the splicing together of different forms but the encounter of genre with its law and therein its indeterminancy.  Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory…

Nyong’o Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 12.

Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture.  This article explains the history of hybridity and its major theoretical discussion amongst the discourses of race, post-colonialism, Identity (social science), anti-racism & multiculturalism, and globalization. This article illustrates the development of hybridity rhetoric from biological to cultural discussions.

Hybridity as racial mixing

Hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used to classify the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture.  As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans and Asians were racially inferior to Europeans.  The fear of miscegenation that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race.  Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation.  Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment, social hierarchy was beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit…

Wikipedia

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.

“What Are You?” Biracial Children in the Classroom

Childhood Education
Volume 84, Number 4
Summer 2008
pp.230-233
Association for Childhood Education International

Traci P. Baxley, Assistant Professor
College of Education
Florida Atlantic University

Over the last 30 years, biracial individuals have become one of the fastest growing populations in the United States. Despite this rapid growth, these citizens are only slowly beginning to be acknowledged among monoracial groups and in academia.  Because biracial identities “potentially disrupt the white/”of color” dichotomy, and thus call into question the assumptions on which racial inequality is based,” society has a difficult time acknowledging this section of the population.  Biracial heritage can mean mixed parentage of any kind.  This can include, but is not limited to, African American, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American.  “Biracial,” “interracial,” “multiracial,” and “mixed–race” are used interchangeably and are often self-prescribed by individuals and their families.  As this group increases in the general population, teachers are beginning to see more of these children in their classrooms. In this article, the author provides a historical glance at biracial children and offers classroom practices to support these children.  (Contains 35 print resources and 5 online resources.)

Read the entire article here.

Black Chinese: History, Hybridity, and Home
(Original Title: Black Chinese: Historical Intersections, Hybridity, and the Creation of Home)

Chinese America: History and Perspectives
Chinese Historical Society of America
2007-01-01

Wendy Thompson Taiwo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences
Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York

In entering into the twenty-first century, one might affirm that the face of Chinese America has changed or has it? Chineseness has been constantly conceptualized through the measure of phenotype, the quantity of blood, the preservation of language, or the possession of surname.  But what happens when African American bodies and other nonwhite cultural sites are introduced into dialogue with Chineseness and Chinese American history in order to create a different story?…

…Regarding sexual relations, with the ban on immigration and entry of Chinese women into the country, Chinese men were encouraged to seek out arrangements with local women but with a catch.  Stringent antimiscegenation laws made this endeavor a severely limited one due to restrictions that made involvement with white women illegal. And so if not with white women, Chinese men took up freely with Spanish, indigenous, and African American women. (4) In terms of relationships built around the institution of the small Chinese store, it was found common for the owner to shack up with hired African American women who assisted around the store, many of these relationships having moved organically from employer-employee to that of live-in partner.

This added benefit of having an African American woman around the store begged to legitimize the Chinese store owner’s place within a black community where he made his business. It also opened up the opportunity for the Chinese owner to start a family where immigration blockage inhibited reentry or fatherhood within a Chinese family context. For most, it was a matter of a long gap in time until they returned to China, if they returned at all. Also of benefit was the African American female partner whose marriage promised small social accommodations, such as courtesy from whites when they learned of her last name, class, status, and relation…

…This is where my own personal investment in this topic comes from as it is not likely obvious from my name or in photographs where my mother is absent; it is that I am an African American Chinese living in the center of two cultural imaginations.

My birth occurred in January 1981 to a Burmese Chinese woman and her African American husband in the California Bay Area exactly fifteen years after antimiscegenation laws meant to prevent black-white sexual relations and intermarriage in the United States were struck down by a Supreme Court ruling in the case of Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I was born the eldest of three girls who all hold a different skin tone, phenotype, hair texture, and relationship to race and cultural identity. However, what we share is an individual relationship to Chineseness, a personal quarrel with having to prove that we owned a biracial space outside of a generalized assumption of what we were and where we should stay because of it.  Since childhood, we tended to identify culturally with our mother–who we spent most of our time with, who we felt comforted by, who we loved dearly, and who conversely saw her offspring as Chinese Americans…

Read the entire article 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

Read or purchase the article here.

Juggling Multiple Racial Identities: Malleable Racial Identification and Psychological Well-Being

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 15, Issue 3, July 2009
pages 243-254
DOI: 10.1037/a0014373

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

Margaret Shih, Professor in Management and Organizations
Anderson School of Management
University of California, Los Angeles

Julie A. Garcia, Associate Professor of Psychology
California Polytechnic State University

The authors examined the link between malleable racial identification and psychological well-being among self-identified multiracial adults.  Malleable racial identification refers to the tendency to identify with different racial identities across different social contexts. Results across three studies suggested that malleable racial identification was associated with lower psychological well-being. Study 2 found that unstable regard (i.e., fluctuating private regard about their multiracial background) was the mechanism through which malleable racial identification predicted lower psychological health.  Results of Study 3 suggested that dialectical self-views played an important moderating role that determines whether malleability is associated with negative psychological outcomes.  The present studies uniquely show that malleable racial identification among multiracial people is maladaptive for psychological health, but that this may depend on whether or not people have tolerance for ambiguity and inconsistency in the self.

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.