Mixed Race Studies

The Colors of Love: Multiracial People in Interracial Relationships

New York University Press
December 2021
312 Pages
24 b/w illustrations
6.00 x 9.00 x 0.00 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781479802418
Hardcover ISBN: 9781479802401
eBook ISBN: 9781479802425

Melinda A. Mills, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology; Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies
Castleton University, Castleton, Vermont

How multiracial people navigate the complexities of race and love

In the United States, more than seven million people claim to be multiracial, or have racially mixed heritage, parentage, or ancestry. In The Colors of Love, Melinda A. Mills explores how multiracial people navigate their complex—and often misunderstood—identities in romantic relationships.

Drawing on sixty interviews with multiracial people in interracial relationships, Mills explores how people define and assert their racial identities both on their own and with their partners. She shows us how similarities and differences in identity, skin color, and racial composition shape how multiracial people choose, experience, and navigate love.

Mills highlights the unexpected ways in which multiracial individuals choose to both support and subvert the borders of race as individuals and as romantic partners. The Colors of Love broadens our understanding about race and love in the twenty-first century.

Making Mixed Race: A Study of Time, Place and Identity

Routledge
2021-11-24
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780367462918

Karis Campion, Legacy in Action Research Fellow
Stephen Lawrence Research Centre
De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom

By examining Black mixed-race identities in the city through a series of historical vantage points, Making Mixed Race provides in-depth insights into the geographical and historical contexts that shape the possibilities and constraints for identifications.

Whilst popular representations of mixed-race often conceptualise it as a contemporary phenomenon and are couched in discourses of futurity, this book dislodges it from the current moment, to explore its emergence as a racialised category, and personal identity, over time. In addition to tracing the temporality of mixed-race, the contributions show the utility of place as an analytical tool for mixed-race studies. The conceptual framework for the book – place, time, and personal identity – offers a timely intervention to the scholarship that encourages us to look outside of individual subjectivities and critically examine the structural contexts that shape Black mixed-race lives.

The book centres around the life histories of 37 people of Mixed White and Black Caribbean heritage born between 1959 and 1994, in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham. The intimate life portraits of mixed identity, reveal how colourism, family, school, gender, whiteness, racism, and resistance, have been experienced against the backdrop of post-war immigration, Thatcherism, the ascendency of Black diasporic youth cultures, and contemporary post-race discourses. It will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students who work on (mixed) race and ethnicity studies in academic areas including geographies of race, youth identities/cultures, gender, colonial legacies, intersectionality, racism and colourism.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Introducing Birmingham
3. The making of mixed-race in place
4. From bun down Babylon to melting pot Britain: the manifestations of mixed-race over time
5. Mixed-race privilege and precarious positionalities: the personal politics of identity
6. The making of mixed-race families: past, present and future
7. Conclusion

Do genetic ancestry tests increase racial essentialism? Findings from a randomized controlled trial

PLOS ONE
Published 2020-01-29
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227399

Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Şule Yaylacı, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow
Identity and Conflict Lab
University of Pennsylvania

Kaitlyn Jaffe, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Lindsey Richardson, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Genetic ancestry testing is a billion-dollar industry, with more than 26 million tests sold by 2018, which raises concerns over how it might influence test-takers’ understandings of race. While social scientists argue that genetic ancestry tests may promote an essentialist view of race as fixed and determining innate abilities, others suggest it could reduce essentialist views by reinforcing a view of race as socially constructed. Essentialist views are a concern because of their association with racism, particularly in its most extreme forms. Here we report the first randomized controlled trial of genetic ancestry testing conducted to examine potential causal relationships between taking the tests and essentialist views of race. Native-born White Americans were randomly assigned to receive Admixture and mtDNA tests or no tests. While we find no significant average effect of genetic ancestry testing on essentialism, secondary analyses reveal that the impact of these tests on racial essentialism varies by type of genetic knowledge. Within the treatment arm, essentialist beliefs significantly declined after testing among individuals with high genetic knowledge, but increased among those with the least genetic knowledge. Additional secondary analysis show that essentialist beliefs do not change based on the specific ancestries reported in test-takers’ results. These results indicate that individuals’ interpretations of genetic ancestry testing results, and the links between genes and race, may depend on their understanding of genetics.

Read the entire article in PDF or HTML format.

Majority of Latinos Say Skin Color Impacts Opportunity in America and Shapes Daily Life

Pew Research Center
Washington, D.C.
2021-11-04
63 pages

Latinos with darker skin color report more discrimination experiences than Latinos with lighter skin color

The perceived impact of skin color in the lives of U.S. Latinos is broad. From impacting their ability to get ahead in the country to shaping their daily life experiences to dealing with discrimination, skin color is seen by Latinos as an important factor affecting their lives and life chances.

A majority (62%) of Hispanic adults say having a darker skin color hurts Hispanics’ ability to get ahead in the United States today at least a little. A similar share (59%) say having a lighter skin color helps Hispanics get ahead. And 57% say skin color shapes their daily life experiences a lot or some, with about half saying discrimination based on race or skin color is a “very big problem” in the U.S. today, according to Pew Research Center’s National Survey of Latinos, a bilingual, national survey of 3,375 Hispanic U.S. adults conducted in March 2021.

Colorism is a form of discrimination based on skin color, usually, though not always, favoring lighter skin color over darker skin color within a racial or ethnic group. While it can be tied to racism, it is not necessarily the same. (Racism is prejudice directed at members of a racial or ethnic group because of their origin.) For example, Hispanics in the U.S. may face discrimination because they are Hispanic (a form of racism), but the degree of discrimination may vary based on skin color, with those of darker shades experiencing more incidents (a form of colorism). And because of colorism’s deep roots in the histories of Latin America and the United States, discrimination based on skin color can occur among Hispanics just as much as it can be directed at Hispanics by non-Hispanics.

To measure this dimension of Latino identity in the United States, the survey asked respondents to identify the skin color that best resembled their own using a version of the Yadon-Ostfeld skin-color scale. Respondents were shown ten skin colors that ranged from fair to dark (see text box below for the images and scale used). Fully 80% of Latino adults selected a color between one and four, or lighter skin colors, while 15% selected a color between five and ten on the scale, or darker skin colors.¹…

Table of Contents

• Majority of Latinos Say Skin Color Impacts Opportunity in America and Shapes Daily Life
  • Discrimination and skin color
  • Impact of race, skin color is a topic of conversation with relatives and friends for Hispanics
  • Half of Latinos say there is too little national attention on racial issues concerning Latino people
  • Hispanics often hear other Hispanics make racially insensitive comments and jokes about Hispanics and non-Hispanics alike
  • While Hispanics say skin color affects their ability to get ahead in America, other factors are seen as important as well
  • For Latinos, discrimination experiences and views about skin color and race are linked
• 1. Half of U.S Latinos experienced some form of discrimination during the first year of the pandemic
• 2. For many Latinos, skin color shapes their daily life and affects opportunity in America
• 3. Latinos divided on whether race gets too much or too little attention in the U.S. today
• 4. Measuring the racial identity of Latinos
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology
• Appendix: Additional tables

Read the entire report in PDF or HTML format.

Conservatives More Likely To See Vice President Harris as ‘White’ than Liberals

CSUN Today
California State University, Northridge
2021-10-26

Media Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler, Director of Media Relations

As the fight for the White House heated up last year and Kamala Harris became the first woman of color on a major party ticket, California State University, Northridge researchers wondered if political ideology would influence how people perceived her biracial ancestry.

What they found surprised them. Conservatives labeled now-Vice President Harris — whose mother is South Asian and was born in India and father is Black and was born in Jamaica — as “white” much more often than liberals, who tended to categorize her as multiracial.

“There were some theories out there suggesting that conservatives were less willing to acknowledge that she is Black — she identifies herself as a Black woman and frequently references her Indian heritage — than liberals, who would be more willing to recognize her multiracial ancestry,” said CSUN psychology professor Debbie Ma…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond blanqueamiento: black affirmation in contemporary Puerto Rico

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 13, 2018 – Issue 2
pages 157-178
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2018.1466646

Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

Read or purchase the article here.

The politics of identity: The unexpected role of political orientation on racial categorizations of Kamala Harris

Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy
22 pages
First published 2021-06-29
DOI: 10.1111/asap.12257

Debbie S. Ma, Professor of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

Danita Hohl
Department of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

Justin Kantner, Assistant Professor of Psychology
California State University, Northridge

The 2020 US Presidential election was historic in that it featured the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, on a major-party ticket. Although Harris identifies as Black, her racial identity was widely scrutinized throughout the election, due to her mixed-race ancestry. Moreover, media coverage of Harris’s racial identity appeared to vary based on that news outlet’s political leaning and sometimes had prejudicial undertones. The current research investigated racial categorization of Harris and the role that political orientation and anti-Black prejudice might play in shaping these categorizations. Studies 1 and 2 tested the possibility that conservatives and liberals might mentally represent Harris differently, which we hypothesized would lead the two groups to differ in how they categorized her race. Contrary to our prediction, conservatives, and liberals mentally represented Harris similarly. Also surprising were the explicit racial categorization data. Conservatives labeled Harris as White more than liberals, who tended to categorize Harris as multiracial. This pattern was explained by anti-Black prejudice. Study 3 examined a potential political motivation that might explain this finding. We found that conservatives, more than liberals, judge having a non-White candidate on a Democratic ballot as an asset, which may lead conservatives to deny non-White candidates these identities.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Playing the White Card

The Racial Imaginary
The Whiteness Issue (September 2017)

Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Through prose and performance, Martha S. Jones examines the cruel, curious, and comical dimensions of the mixed-race experience. With the pathos of the tragic mulatto in mind, she gets beyond simple renderings of the one-drop rule by exploring family history, her ambiguous appearance, and shifting ideas about racial categories. If race is a social construction it is also a lie, one that Jones exposes through reflections on everyday scenes of race-making. Her work is for those for who checking boxes elicits a shudder, while also speaking to anyone who finds themselves in-between and misunderstood by the sociological categories that organize our world.

What is at the Root of White Anxiety?

Three-Fifths: Voice of Clarity
2021-10-08

Frank Robinson
Austin, Texas

The most recent US Census reports a significant decline in the white population, while non-white and mixed-race categories notably increased. Researchers anticipate a reduction of white wealth and power. They expect this to trigger gerrymandering efforts while giving white extremists, oblivious to massive disparities non-whites experience daily, new opportunities to exploit. White fragility? Say hello to white anxiety.

There are layers of this for white people, especially those insulated in homogeneous communities, and whose worship of God, instead of being focused on unselfishly loving and elevating one’s neighbor, including strangers, has instead conserved their own power and dominance. Every undeserved, misinformed sense of superiority is at risk of exposure. But there’s a more visceral dread.

There’s a deep sense of apprehension that something’s wrong, it’s coming, and we deserve it. For, if there is a God anywhere, if Justice exists in this universe, evil is stalking us. Sooner or later, it’ll find us. It must. And we brought it on ourselves…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond being either-or: identification of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 47, 2021 – Issue 4: Special Issue: Re-constructing Ways of Belonging: Cross-country Experiences of Multiethnic and Multiracial People
pages 802-820
DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654155

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare
Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

Yuna Satob
Graduate School of Human Relations
Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

Although the number of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese who are socially recognised and identified as haafu (mixed) has increased due to a rise in intermarriages, the identities and experiences of mixed persons in Japan are seldom critically analysed. Based on interviews with 29 multiracial and multiethnic individuals residing in Japan, this article explores not only how multiracial and multiethnic Japanese identify themselves but also how they feel they are identified by others in society. The analysis shows that multiracial and multiethnic persons self-identify in a way that goes beyond either-or categories and the binary notions of Japanese/foreigner. It also reveals how both multiracial and multiethnic persons face a gap between self-identity and ascribed identity and that they negotiate this gap in various ways. However, the gap and the negotiation process that multiracial persons face differ to those of multiethnic persons. Multiracial persons whose mixedness is phenotypically visible experience more constraints in their ethnic options and have more difficulty in passing as Japanese, whereas multiethnic persons whose mixedness is invisible can pass as Japanese more easily but face constraints in their ethnic option to be identified as mixed and in claiming their multiethnic background.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.