Mixed Race Studies

Black, white or multicultural: constructing race in two countries

The University of Utah News
2017-09-18

New study compares how people in U.S. and Brazil determine someone’s race

A new study demonstrates the strong influence ancestry plays in Americans’ interpretation of whether someone is black, white or multiracial, highlighting differences in the way race is socially constructed in the U.S. compared to other parts of the world.

The three-phase study, led by Jacqueline M. Chen of the University of Utah and published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, compared how Brazilians and Americans assessed the race of another person. Brazilians were more likely to decide what race a person was based on his or her appearance, while Americans relied most heavily on parentage to make that determination.

“Our results speak to completely different definitions of what race is and whether ancestry or family background is even relevant to race,” said Chen, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. “It is ingrained in Americans to think about race in terms of heritage. In the U.S., people ask about where your family is from as a way to ascertain your race. But in Brazil, people don’t focus on family history when determining someone’s race.”

Co-authors of the study are Maria Clara P. de Paula Cuoto of the Ayrton Senna Institute in São Paulo, Brazil (her involvement in the study is not related to her work at the institute); Airi M. Sacco of the Federal University of Pelotas, Pelatos, Brazil; and Yarrow Dunham of Yale University.

The researchers conducted three different experiments in the U.S. and Brazil to assess cultural differences in how participants determined race. Both countries have a history of European settlement, Native American displacement and African slavery, but have adopted different strategies and practices to address racial diversity, the researchers said.

The U.S. historically attempted to maintain racial hierarchy through formal rules that denied rights and resources to African Americans. Brazil encouraged interracial marriage as a way for individuals to move up the social hierarchy and to reduce the number of people who strongly self-identified as black…

Read the entire article here.

To Be or Not to Be (Black or Multiracial or White): Cultural Variation in Racial Boundaries

Social Psychological and Personality Science
First Published 2017-08-28
DOI: 10.1177/1948550617725149

Jacqueline M. Chen, Assistant Professor, Social Psychology
University of Utah

Maria Clara P. de Paula Couto
Ayrton Senna Institute, São Paulo, Brazil

Airi M. Sacco
Department of Psychology
Federal University of Pelotas, Pelatos, Brazil

Yarrow Dunham, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Yale University

Culture shapes the meaning of race and, consequently, who is placed into which racial categories. Three experiments conducted in the United States and Brazil illustrated the cultural nature of racial categorization. In Experiment 1, a target’s racial ancestry influenced Americans’ categorizations but had no impact on Brazilians’ categorizations. Experiment 2 showed cultural differences in the reliance on two phenotypic cues to race; Brazilians’ categorizations were more strongly determined by skin tone than were Americans’ categorizations, and Americans’ categorizations were more strongly determined by other facial features compared to Brazilians’ categorizations. Experiment 3 demonstrated cultural differences in the motivated use of racial categories. When the racial hierarchy was threatened, only Americans more strictly enforced the Black–White racial boundary. Cultural forces shape the conceptual, perceptual, and ideological construal of racial categories.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racism is real, race is not: a philosopher’s perspective

The Conversation
2017-08-31

Adam Hochman, Lecturer in Philosophy
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

from www.shutterstock.com

There are no races – biological or social – only racialised groups.

We live in a richly diverse country, populated by Indigenous Australians, recent immigrants, and descendants of relatively recent immigrants. Some feel threatened by this diversity; some relish it.

Most of us, I think, are unsure quite how to talk about it.

We have many words to describe diversity. We ask people about their ancestry, their ethnicity, and – most awkwardly – their “background”. We seem least comfortable asking people about their “race”, and with good reason.

Racial classification has been used to justify some of the most heinous crimes of modernity, including those committed on our own shores. Asking people about their “race” can make you sound a bit, well, racist…

Read the entire article here.

The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race

Stanford University Press
September 2017
224 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804792585
Paper ISBN: 9781503603370

Neda Maghbouleh, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto

When Roya, an Iranian American high school student, is asked to identify her race, she feels anxiety and doubt. According to the federal government, she and others from the Middle East are white. Indeed, a historical myth circulates even in immigrant families like Roya’s, proclaiming Iranians to be the “original” white race. But based on the treatment Roya and her family receive in American schools, airports, workplaces, and neighborhoods—interactions characterized by intolerance or hate—Roya is increasingly certain that she is not white. In The Limits of Whiteness, Neda Maghbouleh offers a groundbreaking, timely look at how Iranians and other Middle Eastern Americans move across the color line.

By shadowing Roya and more than 80 other young people, Maghbouleh documents Iranian Americans’ shifting racial status. Drawing on never-before-analyzed historical and legal evidence, she captures the unique experience of an immigrant group trapped between legal racial invisibility and everyday racial hyper-visibility. Her findings are essential for understanding the unprecedented challenge Middle Easterners now face under “extreme vetting” and potential reclassification out of the “white” box. Maghbouleh tells for the first time the compelling, often heartbreaking story of how a white American immigrant group can become brown and what such a transformation says about race in America.

Brazil In Black And White

Rough Translation
National Public Radio
2017-08-14

Two radically different ways of seeing race come into sudden conflict in Brazil, provoking a national conversation about who is Black? And who is not Black enough?

Listen to the podcast (00:32:23) here. Download the podcast here.

Fact and Fiction in Mixed-Race Marriages

Talking Apes: How natural selection reprogrammed the brain for language
Psychology Today
2017-07-30

David Ludden Ph.D., Professor of Psychology
Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville Georgia

“Virginia is for lovers” may be the state’s travel slogan, but 50 years ago one couple was banished from the state for committing the crime of getting married. Richard Loving, a man of European descent, had fallen in love with Mildred Jeter, a woman of African and Native American origins. They wanted to marry, but Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws forbade mixed-race marriages. So they crossed the Potomac and said their vows in the nation’s capital, which had no such restrictions.

When they returned home, Mr. and Mrs. Loving were arrested. Instead of going to prison, the couple agreed to leave the state permanently. With the help of the ACLU, the Lovings sued the Commonwealth of Virginia. However, it wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. At that time, 16 states still had such laws on the books.

Since then, the number of mixed-race marriages has increased steadily. In 1970, just three years after the Supreme Court decision, surveys showed there were about 900,000 mixed-race couples living in the United. Three decades later, studies showed a five-fold increase to 4.9 million. These numbers include not just black-white marriages but rather all biracial couplings—any mixture of black, white, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American—and regardless of whether the pair is legally married or cohabiting.

Ironically, Virginia now has a higher percentage of black-white marriages than any other state. So maybe now Virginia really is for lovers after all…

Read the entire article here.

Journal of Intercultural Studies: Call for Papers: Special Issue

Journal of Intercultural Studies
2016-11-04

Deadline: 2017-07-31

Studying mixed race in a global perspective is an increasingly important phenomenon. The global economy, growing rates of migration, and rapidly advancing information and communication technologies have brought diverse groups in closer contact in more areas of the globe, even those previously regarded as racially and ethnically homogenous. Intermarried couples and mixed race celebrities are often heralded in media reports as examples of a growing phenomenon where race, culture and colour are argued to no longer matter, even when that is far from the reality. Amidst these widespread claims of a post-racial or colourblind world, the Othering of certain groups and racialized discourse remains, and is often most clear in debates over the possibility or perceived threat of intimacy and sex with racialized Others. In an ever-changing globalised world, mixing across established boundaries of race, ethnicity, religion or tribe can be celebrated, yet it can also be constructed as very dangerous, and these complexities need to be studied globally. While countless academic studies and media reports have been devoted to investigating, documenting and/or explaining this phenomenon of mixed identities and relationships, many questions remain unanswered.

• What does mixed race mean across the globe?
• What are the lived experiences of mixed couples and mixed race individuals in different countries and contexts?
• What are attitudes toward ‘mixing’?
• How do the children of mixed couples identify?
• Is there a way to understand the experiences of mixed people and families in a global context, or is there too much difference – different histories, different populations and different contexts – to find common ground?

Submission Instructions

We are looking for original papers that critically address the issue of mixed race globally from new and innovative perspectives to make up this Special Issue.

Papers to be between 7,000–8,000 words in length, and submitted to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cjis (when submitting please label your manuscript a ‘Special Issue Paper’).

The Critical Mixed Race special issue will be published early–2018: we are accepting papers up until the 31st July 2017

Editorial information

Guest Editor: Erica Chito Childs, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Centre

For more information, click here.

What kind of mixed race/ethnicity data is needed for the 2020/21 global population census round: the cases of the UK, USA, and Canada

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2017-07-26
pages 1-19
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1346267

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

In western countries the mixed race/ethnicity population is experiencing a rapid increase in numbers and growing diversity, raising challenges for its capture in censuses and surveys. Methods include exact combinations of interest, multi-ticking, and open response, as exemplified by the censuses of England and Wales, the USA and Canada, and Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively. However, investigations of question face validity, reproducibility of findings, and efficacy of capture reveal quality problems with all three approaches. The low reporting reliability of this population urgently requires research and testing to identify optimal strategies. While there is clearly no one gold standard method of capture and current approaches have developed within national contexts, it is timely to review these methods across the three countries and to make recommendations for the upcoming 2020/21 censuses.

Introduction

Throughout much of the twentieth century the salient view in ethnicity data collection was that people belonged in separate and mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories,¹ an approach termed ethnic absolutism (Gilroy 2004). This status quo was maintained by some statistical agencies in the UK through the claim that persons of mixed race/ethnicity preferred to identify with a single group (Sillitoe and White 1992). Moreover, in the USA, the “one drop rule” privileged the minority ethnic component in a mixed person’s racial identity, requiring only one race to be assigned to a person (Davis 1991). Mixed persons who utilized “other” categories or unofficially multi-ticked went uncounted. However, as the mixed population began to increase in recent decades and respondents in censuses and surveys demonstrated their wish to self-identify their mixedness in free-text (Aspinall 2010), this approach was no longer sustainable. In consequence, census and other official organizations across the world and especially in western countries have been faced with the challenge of how to count this mixed/multiple population. This has led to the adoption of a plurality of measures (Morning 2008) that belies the complexities with respect to conceptualization and the proliferation in type of mixes or combinations. Moreover, several countries are now approaching their second or third decennial census in which the mixed population has been measured, yielding an evidence base on optimal strategies. It is therefore timely to take stock of these practices and to explore what kind of mixed race/ethnicity data is needed for the upcoming 2020/21 global population census round…

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Pakistani, white, Sindhi, Canadian, black: What do you identify as?

The Express Tribune
Karachi, Pakistan
2017-07-22

Shanel Khaliq

Jazzmine Raine mother is a third generation Canadian, with Irish, English, Scottish and Spanish bloodlines whereas her father is a second generation Canadian with an Antiguan father and St Lucian mother. PHOTO: KENDA AL YAKOB

With unprecedented levels of immigration, globalisation and the forced displacement of populations worldwide, the intermingling of races, cultures and ethnic groups may become the ‘norm’ in the decades to come. Many countries in the world are now host to a multiplicity of racial groups, particularly countries such as the US and Canada, due to their distinct historical path towards constructing a national identity.

Ironically, over the years, phenomena such as racial profiling have become even more widespread. Is this owed to the ever-changing global order, an increasingly narrow and stringent concept of national security, or is it simply age-old racism disguising itself in new clothes?

In order to protect the purity of races historically, many parts of the world had anti-miscegenation laws in place. The US is one good example where anti-miscegenation laws came under considerable heat for making interracial unions illegal. The ‘one-drop rule’ also persisted in the country for a long time whereby anyone with a single Black ancestor would be considered Black…

…In most parts of the Global North, it is speculated to be the fastest growing group. Nonetheless, scholars such as Minelle Mahtani, warn against the romanticisation of mixed race people as the dawn of a new world since the racialization of bodies continues to persist and affect their experiences even in the Global North, and in a world where even the label ‘mixed’ inevitably evokes the idea of partial ‘Whiteness’ in popular imagination.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race in Asia: Past, Present and Future

Routledge
2017-06-15
250 pages
1 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 9781138282674
eBook ISBN: 9781315270579

Edited by:

Zarine L. Rocha, Managing Editor
Current Sociology and the Asian Journal of Social Science

Farida Fozdar, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Sociology
University of Western Australia

Mixed racial and ethnic identities are topics of increasing interest around the world, yet studies of mixed race in Asia are rare, despite its particular salience for Asian societies.

Mixed Race in Asia seeks to reorient the field to focus on Asia, looking specifically at mixed race in China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and India. Through these varied case studies, this collection presents an insightful exploration of race, ethnicity, mixedness and belonging, both in the past and present. The thematic range of the chapters is broad, covering the complexity of lived mixed race experiences, the structural forces of particular colonial and post-colonial environments and political regimes, and historical influences on contemporary identities and cultural expressions of mixedness.

Adding significant richness and depth to existing theoretical frameworks, this enlightening volume develops markedly different understandings of, and recognizes nuances around, what it means to be mixed, practically, theoretically, linguistically and historically. It will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and other researchers interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Sociology and Asian Studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mixed Race in Asia / Zarine L. Rocha and Farida Fozdar
• Section One: China and Vietnam
  • Chapter One: “A Class by Themselves”: Battles over Eurasian Schooling in Late-19th-Century Shanghai / Emma J. Teng
  • Chapter Two: Mixing Blood and Race: Representing Hunxue in Contemporary China / Cathryn Clayton
  • Chapter Three: Métis of Vietnam: An Historical Perspective on Mixed-Race Children from the French Colonial Period / Christina Firpo
• Section Two: South Korea and Japan
  • Chapter Four: Developing bilingualism in a largely monolingual society: Southeast Asian marriage migrants and multicultural families in South Korea / Mi Yung Park
  • Chapter Five: Haafu Identity in Japan: half, mixed or double? / Alexandra Shaitan and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis
  • Chapter Six: Claiming Japaneseness: recognition, privilege and status in Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ ethnic identity constructions / Fiona-Katharina Seiger
• Section Three: Malaysia and Singapore
  • Chapter Seven: Being “Mixed” in Malaysia: Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity / Caryn Lim
  • Chapter Eight: Chinese, Indians and the Grey Space in between: Acceptance of Malaysian Chindians in a plural society / Rona Chandran
  • Chapter Nine: ‘Our Chinese’: The Mixedness of Peranakan Chinese Identities in Kelantan, Malaysia / Pue Giok Hun
  • Chapter Ten: Eurasian as Multiracial: mixed race, gendered categories and identity in Singapore / Zarine L. Rocha
• Section Four: India and Indonesia
  • Chapter Eleven: Is the Anglo-Indian ‘Identity Crisis’ a Myth? / Robyn Andrews
  • Chapter Twelve: When Hybridity Encounters Hindu Purity Fetish: Anglo-Indian Lived Experiences in an Indian Railway Town / Anjali Gera Roy
  • Chapter Thirteen: Sometimes white, sometimes Asian: Boundary-making among transnational mixed descent youth at an international school in Indonesia / Danau Tanu
  • Chapter Fourteen: Class, Race and Being Indo (Eurasian) in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia / Ros Hewett
• Afterword / Paul Spickard