Mixed Race Studies

The motivational dynamics of social memory: Identification with a mixed-race group replaces own-race bias with own-group bias

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Jay Van Bavel
New York University

Rachel O’Connor
The Ohio State University

William Cunningham
The Ohio State University

Dozens of studies have documented own-race bias – superior recognition memory for own-race faces compared to other-race faces. According to the perceptual expertise model, people are more likely to interact with members of their own race and therefore become more expert at distinguishing the physiognomy of own-race faces. According to the social cognitive model, own-race bias occurs because people perceive in-group members as individuals and out-group members according to their social category membership. We contrasted these two models and examined the effects of motivational salience, goal strength and situational affordances on social memory. Participants were randomly assigned to a mixed-race minimal group or a control condition in which participants merely learned about two mixed-race groups. Consistent with the social cognitive model, participants assigned to a mixed-race group had less own-race bias than participants in the control condition. Instead, participants assigned to a mixed-race group had own-group bias – superior recognition memory for in-group faces compared to out-group faces. Follow-up experiments showed that own-group bias was moderated by the strength of participants’ commitment to their minimal group and situational affordances. Specifically, participants who reported the strongest identification with their mixed-race minimal group had the largest own-group memory bias. However, own-group bias was attenuated among participants who were assigned to a role that directed their attention toward out-group members: they showed equal recognition memory for in-group and out-group faces. These experiments provide evidence that the motivational aspects of our social identities help organize social memory and can override the robust effects of race.

Self-Perceived Minority Prototypicality and Identification in Mixed Race Individuals: Implications for Self-Esteem and Affirmative Action

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Jessica J. Good, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

George F. Chavez
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University

In 2008, Barack Obama became the first multiracial individual to be elected President of the United States. Multiracial individuals are in the unique position of having multiple racial backgrounds with which to identify, ranging from monoracial (i.e. identifying with only one racial group) to extraracial (i.e. identifying with the human race; Renn, 2004). However, little research has examined the psychological processes linked to racial identification in mixed-race individuals. We proposed that the extent to which multiracial individuals identify as minority depends on their perceptions of their own prototypicality (similarity to the prototype of the minority group), which may be linked with feelings of connectedness to the minority group and perceived similarity in physical appearance to other members of the minority group. Data were collected from 107 mixed race minority-White participants using online sampling methods. Results from structural equation analysis supported our hypotheses; connectedness to the minority community and perceived similarity in physical appearance to members of the minority group predicted self-identification as minority due to perceived prototypicality. Additionally, minority identification was positively predictive of both psychological (self-esteem) and practical/real world (comfort applying for affirmative action) benefits. Implications for perceived affirmative action eligibility are discussed. These results add to a growing literature on the affective and behavioral consequences of multiracial individuals’ identity choices.

Specialist mixed-race training event

Mix-d: Professionals,

The Multiple Heritage Project is proud to present two specialist mixed-race training events for Black History Month 2009, in Manchester and London.

Are you a professional working with young people?
Want to really understand the complex issues around ‘mixed-race’?

If the answer is yes, then come and join us:

• Manchester: (on 2009-10-06 from 09:00Z to 12:00Z) – Lancashire Cricket Club
• London: (on 2009-10-21 from 09:00Z to 11:30Z) – North London Business Park

Who Should Attend?
Professionals working with young people, whether in education, criminal justice service, looking after care, youth work and foster care.

Aims of the day:

• Learn more about our work with young people across the country.
• What young people have to say on the subject.
• Six things to understand when developing positive racial literacy.
• Input from three leading specialists.
• Do’s and don’ts for developing student voice.
• Creating an action plan for your organisation.
• The ‘latest’ street terminology.
• Useful books and resources.
• Free DVD from our 1st National Youth Conference.

Key Speakers:
Bradley Lincoln, Dr. Chamion Caballero, Denise Williams

For more details visit: www.multipleheritage.co.uk

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race

Princeton University Press
2004
376 pages
6 x 9, 142 halftones.
Paperback ISBN: 9780691113050

Susan Courtney, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
University of South Carolina

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film.  From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the [Motion Picture] Production Code‘s nearly thirty-year ban on depictions of “miscegenation,” to the contemplation of mixed marriage in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), this book demonstrates a long, popular, yet underexamined record of cultural fantasy at the movies.

With ambitious new readings of well-known films like D.W. Griffith‘s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation and of key forgotten films and censorship documents, Susan Courtney argues that dominant fantasies of miscegenation have had a profound impact on the form and content of American cinema.

What does it mean, Courtney asks, that the image of the black rapist became a virtual cliché, while the sexual exploitation of black women by white men under slavery was perpetually repressed? What has this popular film legacy invited spectators to remember and forget? How has it shaped our conceptions of, and relationships to, race and gender?

Richly illustrated with more than 140 images, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation carefully attends to cinematic detail, revising theories of identity and spectatorship as it expands critical histories of race, sex, and film. Courtney’s new research on the Production Code’s miscegenation clause also makes an important contribution, inviting us to consider how that clause was routinely interpreted and applied, and with what effects.

Read the introduction in HTML or PDF format.

Black and White and Read All Over: If you’re mixed-race, they never stop asking ‘What are you?’

Village Voice
Tuesday, 2006-01-24
 
Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

It’s back in the ’90s in San Francisco. I’m undergoing a wisdom tooth extraction, hovering happily in nitrous oxide–land, when I vaguely hear a voice beam in. The dentist has asked me something. I attempt to focus—has my blissed-out fog really been penetrated by that question, that dreaded demand of the racially ambiguous: “What are you”?.

“Ummm, uhhhh,” I mumble in universal dental garble. “Well, one thing I am is not so high anymore.”

As the product of extensive mixing and moving, I hardly know where to begin or end in alleviating people’s curiosity (even yours, dear reader). Let’s just say that if you appear racially indeterminable, you are read all over. As in from head to toe, as in wherever you go. Like any other unstraightforward or indecipherable text, ambiguous bodies are given a close reading, between the lines. And if that fails to clarify matters, any serious reader will consult a primary source: you. You become an informant, other people’s resource for more information. It’s an intervention into your everyday existence that can happen anyplace, anytime, by anyone. You are interpreted, your body a sign, forever decoded and discerned…

…But what exactly is this so-called “Generation Mix” and this would-be “mixed-heritage baby boom”? Kelley suggests that while there have of course been mixed-race people for as long as different races have resided together, we now see the first critical mass of adamantly multiracial people in America—teens and twentysomethings like these. I agree that race mixing, and not just in the well-known crime of white-on-black rape, has been more prevalent than is generally acknowledged, and that at first glance mixing seems to be a common enough occurrence these days. It is true that intermixing is on the rise, especially in places like New England and more so on the West Coast. But once talk turns to population “booms” and “generations,” we need to note that the numbers remain much smaller than one might think.

This is especially true for black and white mixing. Currently, approximately 5 percent of all American marriages are between people of different races. And since 1967, the year the Supreme Court legalized marriage between blacks and whites, rates of black-white intermarriage have jumped radically indeed, from 1 percent to around 5 percent of all marriages involving a black person. The relatively small numbers don’t take away from the social significance of race mixing, but rather add to it. That the overwhelming majority of people still stick to “their own” makes the exceptions stand out and seem more common than they actually are, while also exacerbating the widespread fetishization of all things interracial…

Read the entire article here.

Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes

University of Minnesota
College of Liberal Arts Today
Spring 2002

Judy Woodward

Naomi Pabst (B.A. ’93 summa cum laude, English & African-American Studies) is the intellectual enemy of the stereotype, the easy generalization, and the sweeping statement. As a newly-minted scholar of African-American studies and the history of consciousness, she defines her subject loosely as “what people think of when they say the word ‘black.’”…

…What engages Pabst is what she finds on the margins of the black experience.

It’s a territory that she knows fairly well from personal experience. Although the 33-year-old scholar insists, “I don’t want to reduce what I do to my own experience of marginality,” nevertheless she concedes that, as a biracial child growing up in Canada and Germany, her experience was not typical of conventional definitions of black culture.

But then, her point is that many African-Americans—including black cultural icons—did not have “typical” experiences…

Read the entire article here.

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City

Princeton University Press
November 2004
320 pages
6 x 9; 23 halftones. 4 maps.
Paperback ISBN: 9780691130484

Mary Ting Yi Lui, Assistant Professor of American Studies and History
Yale University

2005 AAAS Book Award, History category

In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman’s strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling.

Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel’s murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that attempts to maintain geographical and social boundaries between the city’s Chinese male and white female populations had failed.

When police discovered Sigel and Leon Ling’s love letters, giving rise to the theory that Leon Ling killed his lover in a fit of jealous rage, this idea became even more embedded in the public consciousness. New Yorkers condemned the work of Chinese missions and eagerly participated in the massive national and international manhunt to locate the vanished Leon Ling.

Lui explores how the narratives of racial and sexual danger that arose from the Sigel murder revealed widespread concerns about interracial social and sexual mixing during the era. She also examines how they provoked far-reaching skepticism about regulatory efforts to limit the social and physical mobility of Chinese immigrants and white working-class and middle-class women.

Through her thorough re-examination of this notorious murder, Lui reveals in unprecedented detail how contemporary politics of race, gender, and sexuality shaped public responses to the presence of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese exclusion era.

The Mulatto In The United States: Including A Study Of The Role Of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout The World

Greenwood Press Reprint
918 (Reprint Publication Date: 1969-05-08)
417 pages
ISBN: 0-8371-0938-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-8371-0938-1
DOI: 10.1336/0837109388

Edward Byron Reuter (1880-1946)

An historical study of the role of the mulatto in American society, with a discussion of the mixing of races in other parts of the world. Edward Byron Reuter (1880-1946) received his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1919 for this dissertation. He served (in 1933) as the 22nd President of the American Sociological Society.

Read the entire book here.

Commentary by Steven F. Riley

For 21st century readers this book will most likely considered a racist trope on ‘racial mixing’.

On page 103 in Rainier Spencer‘s Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, he discusses Reuter and says…

…It would be best to begin with a frank examination of Reuter’s racial views.  With absolute bluntness Reuter assured his readers that the “lower culture of the Negro people is of course a simple observational fact and is to be accepted as such.  To question is to deny the obvious.”  He was quite clear about the relative cultural merits of the Negro and white races, which he posited as representing “the antipodal degrees of human culture: at the one extreme are the standards of West Africa; at the other, those of Western Europe.”  Nor did Reuter seem to think that there was any bias inherent in this arrangement, feeling certain enough of it to write that “no Negro questioned the superior ability of the white, and probably there is no Negro today who does not subconsciously believe the white man superior”…

It would be easy (and perhaps desirable) to dismiss the influence of Reuter, but according to his biography at the American Sociological Association:

…Reuter was an active and influential participant in the development of the sociological profession, serving as president of the American Sociological Society in 1933, as secretary-treasurer of the Sociological Research Association from 1936 to 1938 and as president of this group in 1939. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. From 1928 until a few months before his death in 1946, he was consulting editor of the McGraw-Hill “Publications in Sociology” series. He served approximately ten years as an advisory editor of The American Journal of Sociology….

From Black to Biracial: Transforming Racial Identity Among Americans

Praeger Publishers an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group
1998
160 pages
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 0-275-96744-1; ISBN-13: 978-0-275-96744-4

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Is a person with both a white and African American parent black?  Thirty years ago in American society the answer would have been yes. Today, the answer most likely depends on whom you ask. According to the U.S. Census, a person with both a black and a white parent is, in fact, black. However, most young persons who fit this description describe themselves as biracial, both black and white. Most young Americans, whatever their racial background, agree.  Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signaled the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement, a transformation has occurred in the racial self-definition of Americans with both an African American and a white parent. This book describes the transformation and explains why it has occurred and how it has come about. Through extensive research and dozens of interviews, Korgen describes how the transformation has its roots in the historical and cultural transitions in U.S. society since the Civil Rights era. A ground breaking book, From Black to Biracial will help all Americans understand the societal implications of the increasingly multiracial nature of our population. From affirmative action to the present controversy over the U.S. Census 2000, the repercussions of the transformation in racial identity related here affect all race-based aspects of our society. Students and faculty in sociology and multicultural studies, business leaders, and general readers alike will benefit from reading this work.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Transformation of Racial Identity
• Biracial Americans: White, Black, Both, Neither
• Black by Definition or The Best of Both Worlds?
• The Transformation: From Black to Biracial
• Turning Points: Biracial College Students and Dating
• Marginality and the Biracial American
• Identities and Transformation
• Public Policy Implications
• Appendix: Notes on Methodology
• Bibliography
• Index

Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era

Praeger
2000-11-30
208 pages
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-89789-760-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-313-06507-1

Marion Kilson, Dean of the Graduate School
Salem State College, Massachusetts

Born in the 1960s, the middle-class Biracial Americans of this study are part of a transitional cohort between the hidden biracial generations of the past and the visible blended generations of the future. As individuals, they have variously dealt with their ambiguous status in American society; as a generation, they share common existential realities in relation to White culture.

During the last decade of the 20th century public awareness of mixed race Americans increased significantly, in no small part because there has been a substantial increase in interracial marriages and offspring since 1960. This study, based on ethnographic interviews, provides an historical overview of the study of Biracial Americans in the social sciences, a sociological profile of project participants, sociocultural discussions of family and race as well as racial identity choices, and examinations of racial realities in adult lives and of recurrent systemic and personal life themes. The textual part of the book demonstrates the diversity of perception and experience regarding race and identity of these biracial young adults. The Epilogue not only reviews major findings pertaining to this transitional generation of Biracial Americans but discusses biraciality and the deconstruction of race in contemporary American society. An extensive bibliography of popular and scholarly sources concludes the book.

Table of Contents:

Preface
Biracial American Experience in Post-Civil Rights Era
Biracial Americans
Biracial Americans and Their Families
Biracial American Identity Choices
Racial Realities in Adult Biracial American Lives
Biracial American Life Themes
Biracial American Voices
Development of Racial Identities
Childhood Memories of Race
Family Relationships Remembered
Assessments of Biracial American Experiences
Epilogue
Bibliography