Mixed Race Studies

Ethnicity and family – Relationships within and between ethnic groups: An analysis using the Labour Force Survey

Equality and Human Rights Commission
2009-01-19

Lucinda Platt, Professor of Sociology
Institute of Education, University of London

This paper outlines the ethnic composition of families in Britain today using the Labour Force Survey household data. That is, it explores whether adults from different ethnic groups are living with someone from the same ethnic group (co-ethnic or ‘same race’ partnerships) or are living with someone from a different ethnic group (inter-ethnic or mixed race’ partnerships), or are living on their own. It also looks at the experience of children living with parents of the same or different ethnic groups (to each other and to the child).  Given the growth of those defining themselves in terms of mixed or multiple ethnicities, the prevalence of adults and children of mixed ethnicity is also summarised. Religious affiliation as well as ethnicity may also be a point of similarity or difference within couples. The report also considers the extent to which men and women of different religious affiliations are in co-religionist and interreligionist partnerships. Finally, some indication of trends is given by comparison with earlier analyses of family composition and ethnic group…

Read the entire report here.

…However, if we start to look across generations there are indications of change and increases in diversity of the population.  Almost 20 per cent (or one in five) children under 16 were from minority groups, and nearly 3 per cent of children under 16 were from one of the mixed ethnicity groups.  Around 9 per cent of children were living in families which contained mixed or multiple heritages. While population ageing is the story for the majority, the minority groups tend to be younger.  This is particularly true for the mixed groups . The majority of mixed ethnicity children are under 16. Half of the White British group are over 40 and half are under 40, but the median age for all the minority groups is younger than this. Half of Caribbeans are under the age of 36, for Indians the median age is 33, it is 32 for Chinese, 26 for Black Africans, 24 for Pakistanis and half of Bangladeshis in Great Britain are aged 21 or under. Conversely, nearly a quarter of White British are aged 60 or more, but only 16 per cent of Black Caribbeans, 11 per cent of Indians and fewer than 10 per cent of the other minority groups are (with the exception of the Other White group). This suggests that minorities will make up a larger proportion of the population in the future, and the numerical significance of those claiming a mixed or multiple heritage in particular is set to increase if current trends continue…

…The analysis showed that overall these expectations were fulfilled. Rates of inter-ethnic partnership were lower among the majority White population (three per cent for men and four per cent for women) than among minorities
(where they ranged among couples from the non-mixed groups between seven per cent for Bangladeshi men, to 48 per cent of Caribbean men, and between five per cent of Bangladeshi women, to 39 per cent of Chinese women). Those groups, such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis which tend to be more geographically concentrated had lower rates of inter-ethnic partnership (seven and eight per cent among men and five and six per cent among women) than more geographically dispersed groups such as Chinese (17 per cent among men and 39 per cent among women in couples), or Black Caribbeans (48 per cent among men and 34 per cent among women).  Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are also those which tend to be the most economically marginalised of the minority groups, which could also have been reflected in their lower rates of inter-ethnic partnerships…

…At the other end of the spectrum, Black Caribbean men and women were the most likely of any group to be in an inter-ethnic partnership (48 per cent of men and 34 percent of women in couples were in an inter-ethnic partnership); and this increased between first and second (or subsequent) generations and between older and younger men and women. Rates were also higher among couples with children. For 55 per cent of Caribbean men living with a partner and children under 16, and 40 per cent of Caribbean women, that partner was from a different ethnic group. It therefore appears a trend that is set to continue and that will result in an increasing number of people with diverse identities of which Caribbean heritage forms a part…

Read the entire report here.

Mixed Race Organisations in the UK: Joint Statement
2009-09-13

People in Harmony in consultation with:
Multiple Heritage Project
MixTogether
Sputnik
Inheritance Project
Planet Rainbow Project
MOSAIC Black and Mixed Parentage Family Group
Intermix
Starlight Black Child Mixed Heritage Group

As a coalition of mixed race organisations we seek to advance the social well being of people, couples and families of mixed race.  One of our main objectives is to influence and improve ways in which public services such as education, health, social care and criminal justice are delivered to the mixed race population though discussion and debate, research, campaigns and the arts.

In the past mixed race people, couples and families have frequently been portrayed as occupying a problematic position in our social fabric and life.  They have been described as marginal, isolated, and confused, burdened with identity problems, and disadvantaged in their life chances. In the last decade or so much fresh thinking has shifted the ground from that of problematising our various communities to celebrating their diversity.  New cultures of human rights, equality and diversity, and the positive duties expected of our public bodies have created an environment in which our coalition is seeking positive engagement with the various sectors in society, including government, voluntary bodies and NGOs, and the private sector: we are uniquely placed to share our knowledge and experience and to represent the interests of this community. We are aware, too, that disadvantage and discrimination persist, some of which is mediated by differences in socio-economic position across our different communities, and we seek positive change to ameliorate these drawbacks…

Read the joint statement here.

Mixed Race in Britain: A Survey of the Preferences of Mixed Race People for Terminology and Classifications (Interim Report)

Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent at Canterbury
July 2006

Peter Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

Ferhana Hashem, Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent

…This research project into the preferences for terminology and classifications was initiated in 2004 and put into the field in summer 2005.  Its main purposes were: (i) to help inform terminology and classifications for ethnic group for the upcoming 2011 Census and (ii) to serve as a pilot study for an ESRC application: ‘The ethnic options of mixed race people in Britain’ (which also had a focus on official terminology and classifications).  This application was funded by ESRC and the project began on 1st March 2006.  A small dataset on official terminology and classifications is also accruing via this route…

…On issues of terminology, the salient general term of choice amongst respondents was ‘mixed race’.  The only other terms that attracted significant support were ‘mixed heritage’ and ‘mixed parentage’. Very few preferred ‘dual heritage’.  Respondents identified eleven different terms as offensive, most frequently ‘dual heritage’, ‘half-caste’ and ‘mixed origins’.  The reasons for the dislike of ‘dual heritage’ focussed mainly on its limitation to two groups.  ‘Half-caste’ was regarded as pejorative by several respondents, on the ground of partial recognition & historical connotations.  The largest number of respondents felt that terms like ‘mixed race’ and ‘mixed parentage’ should refer to ‘people who are mixes of white and any minority racial/ethnic group’.  Significant numbers also felt that the terms should refer to people who are mixes of minority racial/ethnic groups, people who are mixes of white and black groups only, and people of disparate ethnic origins…

Read the entire report here.

The United Colors of Family (Interview with Charmaine Wijeyesinghe)

UMass Amherst, The Magazine for Alumni and Friends
University of Massachusettes
Summer 2007

Interviewed by Faye S. Wolfe

…Tell us about your work on racial identity.

For my dissertation I interviewed people who were black, white, or biracial. I came up with a model for how people form a sense of racial identity. Many factors are involved: racial ancestry, physical appearance, cultural attachment, early experience, spirituality…

Identity is a matter of choice to some degree.  Multiracial people may choose to identify themselves as that, or as monoracial: black, white, Asian. I had three grandparents who were white. My mother was Dutch Portuguese, my father Sri Lankan. Filling out forms, I’ve checked off Asian, I’ve checked off black. Do you check one box or two? There was a time when you could check only one; society constrained one’s choices. It’s still controversial, the idea of racial identity as a choice. Some people would say, choice is a luxury.

I’m interested in working with “helping agents”—teachers, counselors—on questions this idea raises: What do you think race is based on? What do you bring to an interaction with a multiracial child? With the parents? With a multiracial person who says, I’m white? The idea of racial identity as a choice lends itself to great, sometimes painful conversations…

Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies: the Regulation of Interracial Relationships in North America

Social & Legal Studies
Volume 18, Number 3 (September 2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909339087
pages 353-371

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

This article compares the regulation of interracial intimacies in North America, contending that anti-miscegenation laws in the United States and Canada’s Indian Act regimes are both striking and comparable examples of the state’s regulation of the intimate sphere. The author argues that the social signifiers of race and gender, tied together with sexuality, are interlocking sets of power relations and these intersecting discourses are integral to understanding the comparative regulation of interracial intimacy in North America.  In the circumstances of anti-miscegenation laws and the Indian Act, the transgression of gendered/raced social boundaries, the control of raced/gendered sexualities, the interlocking and mutually reinforcing nature of patriarchal, white supremacist and capitalist systems of domination, the threat of non-white access to white capital, and the predicament of racial categorization exist as a corollary of the state’s regulation of interracial intimate life. This article reveals the law and state as important sites of the creation and manipulation of racial boundaries, acting as producers and reproducers of racial ideas, and demonstrates that the interracial transgressions of sexual space were also perceived as transgressions of social, economic, and political boundaries between races, posing a threat to the dominant white and masculine hegemony in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Read or purchase the article here.

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

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.