Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Generations: (Mis)Identification & Socialization Experiences of Interminority Multiracials and Half-White Multiracials

EON Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume 02: Issue 05, May 2024

Joie Lynn Haydel
Sceptre Ganasi
Samantha Yim
Torin Perreyclear
Lizzie Hernandez
Haochen Zheng
Kaitlyn Jubera
Taylor Pauley
Xinzhuo Gao
Yiyue Lin
Rosi Vera
Zhihui Sheng
Alisa Panichkina
Mel Markley
Jarryd Willis

Multiracials were the fastest growing ethnoracial group in America according to the 2020 United States Census, and our investigation sought to contribute to the growing body of literature on the (mis)identification and ethnoracial socialization experiences of various half-White Multiracial groups (Wasian, Whitino, Whindian, half Middle Eastern-half White, and half Black-half-White Multiracials) and interminority Multiracial groups (Blasian, Latinasian, and Blatino Multiracials). We took an interdisciplinary approach in our literature review of Multiracial experiences, incorporating historical contexts that influenced Multiracials experiences, cross-cultural research (e.g., how phenotypically ambiguous Multiracials have become commodified in the advent of globalization and international marketing), critical race studies, and social psychology. We asked Multiracial groups about their experiences of identity (mis)categorization, parents’ approach to ethnoracial socialization, and how their personal, phenotypically influenced, and socially perceived identities influence experiences with coracial and non-coracial peers. We found that phenotypically ambiguous Multiracials were the most likely to experience misidentification. Interminority Multiracials were more likely to be misperceived as a higher-status ethnoracial group and half-White Multiracials were more likely to be misperceived as a lower-status ethnoracial group. Moreover, phenotypically ambiguous Multiracials reported a marginally higher proportion of non-coracial friends. Furthermore, interminority Multiracials were more likely to be socialized in both parents’ cultures than half-White Multiracials. We discuss our findings in the context of cultural pluralism and identity development, and hope our research contributes to the literature on the experiences of various Multiracial groups.

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Excerpts from The Space Between by Herb Harris

CRAFT: Exploring the Art of Prose
2024-06-07

These excerpts from Herb Harris’s memoir, The Space Between, form one of two pieces picked as an editors’ choice selection for the 2023 CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. Our editors chose work that demonstrates the unlimited vibrancy and scope of creative nonfiction.

Mirrors and reflections appear throughout these outstanding memoir excerpts from Herb Harris. In a setting as innocuous as a local barbershop, Harris strikes out on a journey not only to assess his own identity, but also to examine how he is perceived by the world around him—no matter how disorienting that quest might prove. Harris opens the piece: “I must begin by telling you that I am Black.” He makes this declaration in the space between pride and confession. By focusing on hair and optical illusions, he affirms that identity is not a singular concept; it is many selves—mirrored individuals and slightly altered reflections—that compose a person and make them who they are and who they will become.

Recognizing simplicity as a tool to dissect multigenerational issues is one of the many strengths Harris displays in his writing. Innocent details such as ear wiggling, hair clippings scattered on the floor, and “bottles containing mysterious liquids and powders” open the essay to larger themes of racial identity, belonging, and the bleak injustices foundational to a country built upon slavery. A simple haircut or catching your own image in a mirror might be infinitely more complex than expected. Herb Harris discovers that a reflection takes many forms, including a tool to prosecute the long chronicle of cultural erasure pervasive in the United States. —CRAFT

Prologue

I must begin by telling you that I am Black. This is a very strange thing to have to say out loud. It is usually something self-evident that goes without saying. But my light skin and blur of African and European features are rarely recognized as Black.

This racial ambiguity reflects many generations of mixed heritage that go back to the beginning of the slave trade. My ancestors were both the enslaved and the enslavers who sexually exploited them. I have many white ancestors, but their identities are almost entirely unknown. These perpetrators and their victims still live inside me, where their violent entanglement continues. I am an outlier among people who identify as Black, but most of Black America has some degree of white ancestry. This painful heritage is an aspect of slavery that is seldom discussed, but the white man is among the foremost absent fathers of history.

My family has lived on the edge of the color line for more than three centuries. This dangerous neighborhood has always been my home. In my childhood, the color line was like a concrete wall topped with barbed wire and brutally policed on both sides. Still inviolable, it is now drawn in the shifting sands of culture, fashion, and opinion. The wind blows, and I cross it without moving. I am constantly guilty of these motionless transgressions.

How do I know who I am? Almost everything we know about ourselves comes to us through the eyes of others. Throughout our lives, other people are the psychological mirrors that inform us as we work to figure out who we are. Our identities are manifested in the gazes of others. We are revealed in their attitudes and actions. Unfortunately, what they show us is always distorted and fragmented. We must build a collage of ourselves from the reflections we see in our families and communities. Too soon, we enter a society afflicted by the pathology of race. We are no longer seen as individuals but as racist projections, delusions, and hallucinations. We become objects in the white gaze and begin a lifelong battle to defend our identities from its withering effects.

I had to search for clues about who I am among looks of confusion, perplexity, and skepticism. I learned to read the most subtle signs to know how others identified me. My racial camouflage often makes me invisible, but race keeps finding new ways to blindside me with contradictory messages. My first consciousness of race began in a Black preschool in the early 1960s. My best friend, David, compared my light brown skin to his dark brown skin and proudly announced that he was Black and I was white. Suddenly, I felt like an outsider, different from all my classmates. Living in a segregated community, I had never seen a white child before, and I had no idea what David meant. But later, in a predominantly white elementary school, a classmate called me a nigger. I don’t know how I knew the meaning of this word, but it triggered an anger I had never felt before.

W. E. B. Du Bois called it “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Who do I see reflected in the warped and broken mirrors of our race-obsessed culture? What do I mean when I say that I am Black?…

Read the entire excerpt here.

Populations, individuals, and biological race

Biology and Philosophy
Volume 39, article number 10, (2024)
24 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s10539-024-09946-0

M.A. Diamond-Hunter, Teaching Associate
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Research Associate, Sidney Sussex College
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races.

Read the entire article here.

An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box

The New York Times
2023-10-16

K.K. Rebecca Lai and Jennifer Medina

Census categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. Here’s how they have changed over the last 230 years.

Since 1790, the decennial census has played a crucial role in creating and reshaping the ever-changing views of racial and ethnic identity in the United States.

Over the centuries, the census has evolved from one that specified broad categories — primarily “free white” people and “slaves” — to one that attempts to encapsulate the country’s increasingly complex demographics. The latest adaptation proposed by the Biden administration in January seeks to allow even more race and ethnicity options for people to describe themselves than the 2020 census did.

If approved, the proposed overhaul would most likely be adopted across all surveys in the country about health, education and the economy. Here’s what the next census could look like…

Read the entire article here.

New CDG-produced Video tells the history of the Winton Triangle’s Greatest Institution

Chowan Discovery Group
2023-10-15

Marvin Tupper Jones

C.S. Brown School and Auditorium’s story

C.S. Brown Auditorium needs restoration work and a new video production has come to its aid. We hope this effort will help raise the resources needed for the restoration. Please donate.

Titled, “The C.S. Brown Auditorium Story” is a documentary video about C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC, one of the largest Rosenwald Schools. It can be viewed online and was funded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Chowan Discovery Group…

Read the entire article here.

The Kidnapped Child Who Became a Poet

The New York Times Magazine
2023-07-27

Wyatt Mason

At age 3, Shane McCrae was taken from his Black father by his white grandparents — a rupture he explores in a new memoir.

“The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” Shane McCrae, the 47-year-old American poet, told me in his melodious, reedy voice one rainy afternoon in May, “is if it happens early enough, there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.”

There was no reason for McCrae to have known. What unfolded in McCrae’s childhood — between a June day in 1979 when his white grandmother took him from his Black father and disappeared, and another day, 13 years later, when McCrae opened a phone book in Salem, Ore., found a name he hoped was his father’s and placed a call — is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity. It loops through the American landscape, from Oregon to Texas to California to Oregon again, and, even now, wends through the vaster emotional country of a child and his parents. And because so much of what happened to McCrae happened in homes where he was beaten and lied to and threatened, where he was made to understand that Black people were inferior to whites, where he was taught to hail Hitler, where he was told that his dark skin meant he tanned easily but, no, not that he was Black, it’s a story that’s been hard for McCrae to piece together.

“My grandparents,” McCrae explained in a somewhat gloomy, book-laden office at Columbia University, where he teaches poetry in its M.F.A. program, “were so actively keeping my father away from me — they didn’t want me to investigate him at all — it was just normal.” Normal, McCrae explained, because the story he had been told by his grandparents was that McCrae’s father, whose name he didn’t even know, abandoned him before he was born. “They had been doing it my whole life,” McCrae said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t think of it as, Oh, this is pretty strange.”…

Read the entire article here.

André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

The New York Times
2023-07-14

Javier C. Hernández

One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.

André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.

Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.

“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”

“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”.

Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color…

Read the entire obituary here.

White Dads and Biracial Black Kids: Concerns and Challenges

Chinyere Osuji, PhD, Author, Professor, Speaker
2023-06-08

Chinyere Osuji, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rutgers University, Camden

There are some stories that live in your head rent-free years after hearing them.

For my first book Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Love (2019, NYU Press), I conducted over 100 interviews in Brazil and the United [States] with people in interracial marriages or longterm cohabiting marital unions. There was a smorgasborg of themes that emerged in this cross-national comparison, so only the biggest or most striking ones made it into the book. Yet there are some stories that still gnaw at me.

Around 2010, I interviewed a Black woman, Felice, who married a White man, named Bob. I came to their quiet suburban home and they were kind enough to let me interview them separately AND together! When I spoke to Felice, she said that right before she met Bob, she had dated a different White man before him. His name was– let’s call him Aaron. They were native Angelinos, had grown up together, and had many friends in common. (Note for the haters: she had also dated Black men, she didn’t discriminate.) However, Bob rushed in out of nowhere, winning her heart and sealing the deal…

Read the entire article here.

Not White But Not (Entirely) Black: On the Complex History of “Passing” in America

Literary Hub
2023-05-03

Herb Harris

Herb Harris Explores How His Grandparents’ Defied Racial Categorization

Via New England Review

Read the entire article here.

Topsy-Turvy

New England Review
Volume 44, Number 1 (2023)

Herb Harris

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”
—Nella Larsen, Passing

I started with a group of boxes that looked like the oldest ones in the attic. The packing tape easily lifted away, no longer sticking to the cardboard, and wine glasses and dishes emerged from pages of the Washington Post from the 1970s. Several heavy boxes contained papers and photographs belonging to my grandparents, but there was one surprisingly light box. I opened it to find a collection of hand-sewn dolls and animal puppets, just a dozen or so of the thousands I knew my grandmother had made when she was a volunteer at Children’s Hospital over the years.

Among the clowns, frogs, and bunnies was one doll that had clearly been sewn with greater care and detail than the others. I recognized it as Grandma’s work, but it had a design I’d never seen before. It was a girl with light pink skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, wearing a long floral dress with a lace collar and a pink bow. I flipped it over to reveal another girl, this one with very dark brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. The two figures were joined at the torso, and the exaggerated contrast between their features gave the second doll a blackface quality. I remembered that toys like these were called Topsy-Turvy dolls and vaguely associated them with offensive Jim Crow cartoons and minstrel shows. Why would my grandmother, a Black woman, make such a thing? Grandma had died more than twenty years before, and, holding this strange doll in my hands, I had the sense that this was her last word on race.

A little research reveals that Topsy-Turvy dolls originated during the time of slavery. No one can ascribe a single meaning or purpose to them, but their dual identity suggests a connection to the mixed-race children who were a part of the plantation world. These children were enslaved people who could be bought or sold by law. They were also relatives of their owners: cousins, half-siblings, sons, and daughters. These relationships were usually denied, but they were often open secrets. The children might be symbols of the master’s potency or shameful reminders of his transgressions, or they might be objects of love or victims of abuse, but their existence was always charged with hidden meanings and deep conflicts. They could only be talked about with code words filled with ambiguity, like the language my grandparents used when they talked about race. Topsy-Turvy dolls were part of this language. They embodied many things that could never be said…

Read the entire article here.