Mixed Race Studies

Students Create Course About Mixed Identities

A&S Perspectives
College of Arts and Sciences
University of Washington
Editor: Nancy Joseph
July 2009

Last fall, students in the UW Mixed Club—a campus group for students of mixed race—discussed how rarely mixed-race issues were being addressed in their courses. Then they decided to do something about it.

That experience whet the students’ appetite for a more formal offering. They developed a proposal for a student-led course, “Mixed Identities and Racialized Bodies,” and floated the idea by several department chairs. The first to respond with an enthusiastic “yes” was Women Studies Chair David Allen, who agreed to offer the course as Women Studies 256, a course number reserved for credit/no-credit student-led courses.

With Women Studies on board, the students moved into high gear. “It was like, ‘Remember that great idea we had? Now we need to follow through,’” recalls Jessica Norberg, one of the students who developed and facilitated the course.

Coming up with assigned readings was particularly daunting. “There’s no mixed-race canon, so we had to come up with that,” says Norberg, who credits classmate Samantha Gonzalez with taking the lead on reviewing the available literature. “Samantha was kind of our librarian,” says Norberg. “The girl can read a book in half an hour. She did a lot of the research.”…

…Of course, everyone in class felt they knew at least one person with a mixed-race identity: President Obama. “This class really came together at an awesome time,” says Norberg, referring to Obama bringing greater visibility to mixed race issues. Norberg is quick to add that mixed race is among the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S…

Read the entire article here.

Identity and Health in the Narratives of People of Mixed Race

Center for the Advancement of Health Disparities Research
2nd Annual Teach-In: Health Disparities Awareness
2004-05-21

Cathy J. Tashiro, PhD, MPH, RN
Nursing Program
University of Washington, Tacoma

…Why Study People of Mixed Race?

• A rapidly growing part of the population
• Seldom acknowledged in studies, though this is improving with new census rules.
• Represent a challenge to existing constructions of race.
• Recent study showed increased health and behavioral risk factors for mixed adolescents. (Udry, et al, AJPH, November 2003)

View the entire presentation here.

Salt-sweat & Tears

Cinnamon Press
March 2007
80 pages
21 x 14 x 0.8 cm
Paperback ISBN 10: 1905614187; ISBN-13: 978-1905614189

Louisa Adjoa Parker

Of Ghanaian-British descent Louisa Adjoa Parker explores issues of identity, belonging, family and relationships in raw, honest, but crafted pieces.

Mulatto Girl

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her
head held high, her skin the colour
of caramel boiling on the stove.  See her smile
in the knowledge she is not the first
to walk this green and pleasant
countryside, she has history stirring within her limbs
she has Africa’s heat and England’s cold rain
pumping through her blood, her
DNA a beautiful mix of gene pools
scattered across continents.  She is strong.
She show Africa in a way the English hide.
She shows an eighteenth century master’s love for slaves.
She shows a slave’s contempt.
She shows twentieth century people brave enough
to cross a line made of different tones of skin,
to love in spite of hate.

See the mulatto girl walking
down country lanes and fields, her head
held high, her quadroon baby girls
held on her hips, her hair thick and frizzed, lips
half full, there are no
white men dressing her in robes and jewels,
but see her smile, see her sway, as she walks
with her head held high.

Toward a Sociology of Racial Conceptualization for the 21st Century

Social Forces
Volume 87, Number 3, 2009
Pages: 1167-1192
DOI: 10.1353/sof.0.0169

Ann J. Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York Univeristy

Despite their longstanding interest in race, American sociologists have conducted little empirical research on sociodemographic patterns or longitudinal trends in “racial conceptualization” – that is, notions of what race is, how races differ, and the origins of race. This article outlines key empirical, methodological and theoretical considerations for a research agenda on racial conceptualization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than 50 college students, I describe the variety of race concepts among respondents, illustrate the importance of using multiple measures of conceptualization, and demonstrate the malleability of conceptualization, linking it to demographic context and thereby raising the question of its future evolution in the changing United States of the 21st century.

The color line, “problem of the twentieth century” as Du Bois (1986[1903]) famously put it, has long been a prominent concern of American sociologists (Calhoun 2007).  The ways in which they have engaged the topic of race, however, reflect the preoccupations of their times. Early work on “race relations” (Park 1949) gave way to theories of “racism” in the civil-rights era, drawing new attention to institutional structures of racial oppression (Winant 2000). Large-scale surveys began to track attitudes – toward groups and policies – that might pose obstacles to achieving racial equality (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo and Krysan 1997). And in the wake of diversifying immigration inflows and rising intermarriage rates, scholars have revisited longstanding assumptions about racial identity and classification, launching new research on the categorization of mixed-race people and immigrant groups (Lee and Bean 2004).  By the end of the 20th century, American sociology had acquired a significant body of knowledge on race relations, attitudes, stratification and classification…

Read the entire article here.

The multiple-race population of the United States: Issues and estimates

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
2000-05-23
vol. 97 no. 11
pages 6230-6235

Joshua R. Goldstein

Ann J. Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New York University

This paper presents national estimates of the population likely to identify with more than one race in the 2000 census as a result of a new federal policy allowing multiple racial identification. A large number of race-based public policies—including affirmative action and the redistricting provisions of the Voting Rights Act—may be affected by the shift of some 8–18 million people out of traditional single-race statistical groups. The declines in single-race populations resulting from the new classification procedure are likely to be greater in magnitude than the net undercount in the U.S. census at the center of the controversy over using census sampling. Based on ancestry data in the 1990 census and experimental survey results from the 1995 Current Population Survey, we estimate that 3.1–6.6% of the U.S. population is likely to mark multiple races. Our results are substantially higher than those suggested by previous research and have implications for the coding, reporting, and use of multiple response racial data by government and researchers. The change in racial classification may pose new conundrums for the implementation of race-based public policies, which have faced increasing criticism in recent years.

Read the entire article here.

A Contested Identity: An Exploration of the Competing Social and Political Discourse Concerning the Identification and Positioning of Young People of Inter-Racial Parentage

British Journal of Social Work
Volume 36, Number 8 (2006)
pages 1309-1324
DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bch390

Ravinder Barn, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work
Royal Holloway, University of London

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
Royal Holloway, University of London

The development of racial and ethnic identity of minority ethnic children and young people in contemporary multi-racial Western society remains an important academic concern. More recently, a relatively new debate about the identity and ‘correct’ labelling of children of inter-racial relationships has been brewing in British academic literature. Nowhere is this more vociferous and intense than in the field of social work. This paper identifies two competing perspectives vying for position in this ideological and political battle. It is argued that whilst overall consensus may not be possible or even desirable, it is important to explore these ideological positions as they play a key role in influencing social work policy and practice.