Mixed Race Studies

Study provides insight into children’s race and gender identities

UW Today
University of Washington
2016-11-15

Deborah Bach

Children’s knowledge and use of race and gender labels have been well-explored by researchers, but how kids think about their own identities in those contexts, especially before adolescence, is less clear.

A new study from the University of Washington provides a rare glimpse into how children perceive their social identities in middle childhood. The research found that children age 7 to 12 rate gender as more important than race — and that their perceptions of both are woven together with personal and societal influences.

“Kids are thinking about race and gender, and not just in terms of being able to identify with these social categories, but also what they mean and why they matter,” said lead author Leoandra Onnie Rogers, a former postdoctoral fellow at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) who is now an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University.

Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of I-LABS and co-author on the paper, said, “Children are bombarded by messages about race, gender and social stereotypes. These implicit and explicit messages rapidly influence their self-concepts and aspirations.

“We were able to catch a glimpse of how culture influences children at a tender time in their lives. Kids talk about race and gender in different ways as early as age 7.”…

Read the entire article here.

Is Gender More Important and Meaningful Than Race? An Analysis of Racial and Gender Identity Among Black, White, and Mixed-Race Children

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Published online 2016-10-13
DOI: 10.1037/cdp0000125

Leoandra Onnie Rogers, Research Assistant Professor
College of Education, Department of Learning Sciences and Human Development
University of Washington

Andrew N. Meltzoff, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director
Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences
University of Washington

Objectives: Social categories shape children’s lives in subtle and powerful ways. Although research has assessed children’s knowledge of social groups, most prominently race and gender, few studies have examined children’s understanding of their own multiple social identities and how they intersect. This paper explores how children evaluate the importance and meaning of their racial and gender identities, and variation in these evaluations based on the child’s own age, gender, and race.

Method: Participants were 222 Black, White, and Mixed-Race children (girls: n = 136; Mage = 9.94 years). Data were gathered in schools via 1-on-1 semistructured interviews. Analyses focused on specific measures of the importance and meaning of racial and gender identity for children.

Results: We found that: (a) children rate gender as a more important identity than race; (b) the meanings children ascribe to gender identity emphasized inequality and group difference whereas the meaning of race emphasized physical appearance and humanism/equality; and (c) children’s assessments of importance and meaning varied as a function of child race and gender, but not age.

Conclusion: The findings extend research on young children’s social identity development and the role of culture and context in children’s emerging racial and gender identities. Implications for identity theory and development and intergroup relations are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.

MacKay Lecture Series: “Living Race in the Post-Racial Era? Mixed Race Amnesia in Canada”

Dalhousie University
Room 127 Goldberg Computer Science Building
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 4R2
Thursday, 2016-11-17, 19:00 AST (Local Time)

Dr. Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor of Human Geography and Program in Journalism
University of Toronto, Scarborough

Minelle Mahtani is the author of Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality (2014).

The annual MacKay Lecture Series features four lectures given by internationally renowned speakers, addressing subjects related to the liberal and performing arts. Three of the lectures revolve around a common interdisciplinary theme chosen each year by the Faculty’s Research Development Committee from a selection of faculty proposals. The fourth lecture is on a broadly based historical theme, in recognition of the generous donation funding the lecture series that was given by Gladys MacKay in appreciation of the education that her husband, the Reverend Malcolm Ross MacKay, received at Dalhousie as a B.A. student in History (1927).

For more information, click here.

How To Fix Our Sub-Conscious Racism: A Mixed-Race Perspective | Elizabeth Dobson | TEDxLehighRiver

TEDx Talks
2016-11-15

Elizabeth Dobson

Liz’s TEDxLehighRiver Talk is based on one of the unique perspectives of many multiethnic people, and how that perspective is critical to help all of us learn how to engage and connect with each other across stereotypical race “color lines”. She offers strategies for overcoming sub-conscious racism.

Elizabeth Dobson is a multiracial woman and the youngest of three children adopted into her all white family. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania where she thrived socially and academically despite being one of few minorities in her hometown. Liz recently created a blog to educate and empower a growing demographic of interracial and adoptive families. She understands they have important and unique challenges and perspectives within their families and communities.

Locating black mixed-raced males in the black supplementary school movement

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online 2016-11-08
pages 1-14
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2016.1248838

Remi Joseph-Salisbury
School of Ethnicity and Racism Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

Kehinde Andrews, Associate Professor of Sociology
Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

This article draws upon data from semi-structured interviews conducted with black mixed-race males in the UK and the US, to argue that a revival of the black supplementary school movement could play an important role in the education of black mixed-race males. The article contends that a strong identification with blackness, and a concomitant rejection of the values of mainstream schooling, make black supplementary education a viable intervention for raising the attainment and improving the experiences of black mixed-race males. Whilst blackness was important to participants’ understandings of their lived experiences, this did not engender a disregard for their mixedness. Supplementary schools must therefore find ways of recognising black mixedness within their practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

The reality of being black in today’s Britain

The Guardian
2016-10-29

David Olusoga

David Olusoga at El Mina, a Portuguese-built fort in Ghana. ‘Many black British people, and their white and mixed-race family members, slipped into a siege mentality.’ Photograph: BBC

David Olusoga grew up amid racism in Britain in the 70s and 80s. Now, in a groundbreaking new book and TV series, he argues that the story of black Britons, from Afro-Roman times to the present, is key to showing the depth of their Britishness. And, while we exult in black Britons’ success in culture, fashion and sport, discrimination still blights their lives

When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.

My right, not just to regard myself as a British citizen, but even to be in Britain, seemed contested. Despite our mother’s careful protection, the tenor of our times seeped through the concrete walls into our home and into my mind and into my siblings’ minds. Secretly, I harboured fears that as part of the group identified by chanting neo-Nazis, hostile neighbours and even television comedians as “them” we might be sent “back”. This, in our case, presumably meant “back” to Nigeria, a country of which I had only infant memories and a land upon which my youngest siblings had never set foot..

Read the entire article here.

Reevaluation of the Influence of Appearance and Reflected Appraisals for Mixed-Race Identity: The Role of Consistent Inconsistent Racial Perception

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
October 2016, Volume 2, Number 4
pages 569-583
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216634740

Jennifer Patrice Sims, Adjunct Visiting Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, River Falls

Developed from Cooley’s looking-glass self, the theory of reflected appraisals is frequently used to explain how appearance influences the racial identity development of mixed-race people. However, postulating that racial identity develops via the internalization of the perception of what race one thinks others assume him or her to be rests on the assumption that others consistently perceive the individual in the same manner. Although true for many people, the appearance of mixed-race people is often ambiguous and changeable and is perceived differently depending on context, which results in mixed-race people’s being ascribed to, and interacted with as if a member of, a variety of different races and ethnicities. This fact illuminates a gap in our knowledge of how appearance influences racial identity absent consistent perception by others. Drawing on 30 interviews with mixed-race adults from a variety of racial backgrounds in the United States and United Kingdom, the author examines not only the particular experiences with differential racial perception that mixed-race people have but also the mechanisms by which appearance influences identity when one experiences varying perceptions from others. This work ultimately extends the theory of reflected appraisals by advancing the idea that, under certain conditions, identity can form from experiences being consistently inconsistently perceived when that consistent inconsistency itself functions as a reflected appraisal of a particular identity.

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Remapping Race on the Human Genome: Commercial Exploits in a Racialized America

Praeger
October 2016
645 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4408-4992-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4408-4993-0

Edited by:

Patricia Reid-Merritt, Distinguished Professor of Social Work and Africana Studies
Stockton University, Galloway, New Jersey

Is race simply an antiquated, pseudo-scientific abstraction developed to justify the dehumanization of various categories of the human population?

Focusing on the socially explosive concept of race and how it has affected human interactions, this work examines the social and scientific definitions of race, the implementation of racialized policies and practices, the historical and contemporary manifestations of the use of race in shaping social interactions within U.S. society and elsewhere, and where our notions of race will likely lead.

More than a decade and a half into the 21st century, the term “race” remains one of the most emotionally charged words in the human language. While race can be defined as “a local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics,” the concept of race can better be understood as a socially defined construct—a system of human classification that carries tremendous weight, yet is complex, confusing, contradictory, controversial, and imprecise.

This collection of essays focuses on the socially explosive concept of race and how it has shaped human interactions across civilization. The contributed work examines the social and scientific definitions of race, the implementation of racialized policies and practices, and the historical and contemporary manifestations of the use of race in shaping social interactions (primarily) in the United States—a nation where the concept of race is further convoluted by the nation’s extensive history of miscegenation as well as the continuous flow of immigrant groups from countries whose definitions of race, ethnicity, and culture remain fluid. Readers will gain insights into subjects such as how we as individuals define ourselves through concepts of race, how race affects social privilege, “color blindness” as an obstacle to social change, legal perspectives on race, racialization of the religious experience, and how the media perpetuates racial stereotypes.

Features

• Addresses a poignant topic that is always controversial, relevant, and addressed in mainstream and social media
• Examines the various socio-historical factors that contribute to our understanding of race as a concept, enabling readers to appreciate how “definitions” of race are complex, confusing, contradictory, controversial, and imprecise
• Inspects contemporary manifestations of race in the United States with regard to specific contexts, such as the quest for U.S. citizenship, welfare services, the legislative process, capitalism, and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in the media

White Nonsense

Vice News
2016-10-09

Elspeth Reeve

Alt-right trolls are arguing over genetic tests they think “prove” their whiteness

Andrew remembers feeling a “tinge of apprehension” when he logged on to 23andMe. Several weeks earlier, he’d spit into a tube and mailed it to the genetic testing company, which analyzes customers’ DNA to estimate where their ancestors came from. But when he clicked on his color-coded ancestry chart, he felt relief: 99.7 percent European. He went to the Reddit page /r/WhiteRights, where he’s a moderator, and posted a screenshot: “Finally got around to checking my privilege,” he wrote. At the bottom of the chart, he’d photoshopped in an extra line: “100% Goy.”

“There’s kind of a running joke that everyone works for the JIDF [Jewish Internet Defense Force] or is secretly nonwhite,” explained Andrew, who says he’s a 31-year-old lawyer from Washington, D.C. “So when I posted my 23andMe results, I was playing off that.” (Andrew posts on Reddit as slippery_people, but, like quite a few of the white nationalists I’ve spoken to, he doesn’t want his real identity associated with these views.)…

…23andMe does not test for race. Its main business now is ancestry testing, after some early trouble with the FDA over claims the service could mine your genes to determine risk factors for disease. The company, based in Mountain View, California, received an investment from Google in 2007, a year after its founding. It got another boost in 2012 when PBS began running “Finding Your Roots,” a show where celebrities traced their ancestry with genotyping from 23andMe. By June 2015, the company had analyzed the DNA of 1 million customers, though it has faced some criticism for not having a large enough sample of DNA from people who do not have European heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer

The Guardian
2016-10-18

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, Culture Reporter

Kwame Anthony Appiah says ‘race does nothing for us’. Photograph: BBC

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah says race and nationality are social inventions being used to cause deadly divisions

Two weeks ago Theresa May made a statement that, for many, trampled on 200 years of enlightenment and cosmopolitan thinking: “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.

It was a proclamation blasted by figures from all sides, but for Kwame Anthony Appiah, the philosopher who on Tuesday gave the first of this year’s prestigious BBC Reith lectures, the sentiment stung. His life – he is the son a British aristocratic mother and Ghanian anti-colonial activist father, raised as a strict Christian in Kumasi, then sent to British boarding school, followed by a move to the US in the 1970s; he is gay, married to a Jewish man and explores identity for a living – meant May’s comments were both “insulting and nonsense in every conceivable way”…

Read the entire article here.