Mixed Race Studies

The identity development of mixed race individuals in Canada

University of Alberta
Spring 2010
131 pages

Monica Das

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Psychological Studies in Education

The purpose of this study was to explore the identity development of mixed race individuals in a Western Canadian context. The case study methodology was used to guide the overall procedure and participant selection. A thematic analysis was used to analyze patterns in the data. Four individuals of mixed race parentage were interviewed and five themes emerged: (a) the influence of family, (b) the influence of childhood experiences, (c) the influence of physical appearance, (d) the influence of racism, and (e) the influence of adult experiences. The detailed explorations of the participants’ experiences add to the Canadian literature on mixed race identity development, which provides several counselling implications and directions for future research.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

CHAPTER TWO
Literature Review
A Sociological Analysis of Race
A Historical Overview of Race Mixing
A Review of the Contemporary Mixed Race Experience
Identity Development
Racial Identity Development
Mixed Race Identity Development Model
Key Presenting Issues and Counselling Implications
Summary and Research Question

CHAPTER THREE
Methodology
Research Paradigm
Case Study Approach
Participants
Procedure
Data Analysis
Trustworthiness: An Evaluation of the Study
The Researcher
Ethical Considerations

CHAPTER FOUR
Findings from the Within-Case Analyses
Ko
Jessica
Alina
Steven

CHAPTER FIVE
Findings from the Cross-Case Analysis
The Influence of Family
The Influence of Childhood Experiences
The Influence of Physical Appearances
The Influence of Racism
The Influence of Adult Experiences

CHAPTER SIX
Discussion
Implications for Counselling and Education
Future Research Directions
Conclusions
References

Appendix A: Recruitment Handout
Appendix B: Information Letter to Participants and Informed Consent Form
Appendix C: Demographics Form
Appendix D: Interview Guide
Appendix E: Pre-Interview Activity Form

…My interest in this research topic stems from my personal experiences as a mixed race individual. My mother is from Czechoslovakia, my father is from India and I was born and raised in Canada. As a child, I was unaware of terms like interracial marriage or mixed race. Once I became aware of my mixed heritage as a young adult, I became curious as to why my racial and cultural identity were so different from either my Bengali or Czech relatives, or from most of the people around me. As I started to ask questions, I found deep commonalities with other mixed race individuals regardless of their particular racial mix. Additionally, I was amazed at the range and depth of opinions I encountered in casual conversations. It seemed that everyone had an opinion about mixed race individuals.

With this diversity in opinions, I was certain that I would find an overwhelming amount of academic data on the mixed race experience. I did find a significant volume of research on American Black-and-White mixed race people and the American history of anti-miscegenation. However, I was surprised at the minute amount of information available on non-Black-and-White mixed race individuals in general and the Canadian perspective in particular. When given the opportunity to conduct my own research as a Master’s student, I decided to explore the topic of non-Black-and-White mixed race individuals in a Canadian context. I hope that this information can be used to increase awareness of the unique issues that mixed race individuals face.

Consequently, the purpose of the present study is to explore the mixed race experience within its complex contemporary framework. The goal is to investigate the factors that influence the development of a mixed race identity. The information gathered from this study will provide a Canadian contribution to theories relating to racial identity development and a post-modern analysis of race as a socially constructed category. Moreover, this study explores the experiences of mixed race individuals that are not of Black and White parentage, which is a topic that is under-represented in the mixed race literature (Mahtani, 2001). A deeper understanding of the factors that influence the mixed race identity will add to the current literature by enhancing our knowledge of the Western Canadian, non-Black-and-White mixed race individual’s lived experience. Additionally, the results of the present study may help counsellors to increase their own awareness of mixed race issues by encouraging them to challenge any qualms they may consciously or unconsciously harbour about mixed race individuals. Considering the increasing mixed race population, it is important that researchers begin to focus on supportive measures to promote healthy mixed race identity development…

Read the entire thesis here.

Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

Atlantic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 97 – 110
DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499

Isabel Soto

This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 28–31 October 2004.

This essay argues that while Langston Hughes‘s short story “Red-Headed Baby” (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the Euro-American paradigm of a dehistoricized “modernist construction of authorship through displacement” (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel—figurative and literal—as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy‘s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora—not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks.

Read or purchase the article here.

Memories of My Ghost Brother

Bo-Leaf Books
1997
284 pages
trade paper ISBN: 0-9768086-0-9

Heinz Insu Fenkl, Associate Professor of English
State University of New York, New Paltz

Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Book Finalist, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction

A young Amerasian comes of age as he grows up in the Korean city of Inchon and struggles to come to terms with his own identity and with his memories of a lost half-brother, whom his Korean mother sacrificed to marry his American father.

Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 35, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
E-ISSN: 1946-3170 Print ISSN: 0163-755X
DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0078

David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English
University of St. Thomas

Passing narratives have long been a fixture of American literature. For African American authors, plots of racial mobility have been used to expose the permeability of racial boundaries and to reveal the irrationality of racial categorization, while for many white authors, passing narratives have expressed fears of racial contamination as well as voyeuristic fantasies of blackness. Our interest in stories of passing, whether fictional or autobiographical, has not waned, and the popularity of recent memoirs, novels, and films depicting passing and mixed raciality attests to this fact. Baz Dreisinger‘s study, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (2008), capitalizes on the enduring curiosity surrounding the transgression of racial boundaries. While passing has mostly been thought of as a black-to-white affair, Dreisinger focuses on those crossing the color line in the direction of white-to-black. Her investigation of white-to-black passing provides a compelling perspective on past and current perceptions of race in American culture.

Dreisinger sets the parameters of her study by positing white-to-black passing as a commonality rather than an anomaly. She distinguishes between black and white passing, explaining that white passing is about neither deception nor survival. White passing is not even exactly about successfully becoming black. For Dreisinger, white-to-black passing is about those “moments of slippage in which whites perceive themselves, or are perceived by others as losing their whiteness and ‘acquiring’ blackness”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Triumphant Miscegenation: Reflections on Beauty and Race in Brazil

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
pages 83-97
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082954

Alexander Edmonds, Professor of Medical Anthropology and Sociology
University of Amsterdam

In Brazil racial mixture, mestiçagem has been a dominant theme in the political and cultural re-imagination of the nation in the twentieth century. This paper approaches the role of mixture in Brazilian social life from the angle of aesthetics, looking both at Brazilian intellectual history and the commercial and medical beauty industry. It first discusses the aesthetics of race in the works of Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre. Second, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how cultural constructions of race are reflected in the clinical practice of plastic surgery. Analysing cosmetic practices illuminates central tensions in the ideal of mestiçagem, but also reveals it as a distinct logic of race and beauty that contrasts with multiculturalism. As the beauty industry expands in the developing world, such cultural logics may not be erased but rather incited.

Read or purchase the article here.

“Des couleurs primitives”: Miscegenation and French Painting of Algeria

Visual Resources
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2008)
pages 273 – 298
DOI: 10.1080/01973760802284638

Peter Benson Miller, Art Historian
Rome Art Program

The Romantic concept of “local color” refers to a site of painterly experimentation, the application of pigment in the chromatic construction of a picture. The term also identifies a detail authenticating an exotic subject considered typical of a particular region. This article zeroes in on the convergence of these two aspects of local color, interrogating the dialogue between subject and technique in the representation of North Africans. In their paintings from the late 1840s depicting “primitive” racial types from the Maghrib, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856) shifted to a color system that emphasized contrasts of distinct zones of color derived from an ethnological spectrum over smooth transitions and harmonies between hues. Unpacking the coordinates, including the trope of the mixed-blood, and the unstable classificatory schemas of physical anthropology suggests that these painters’ unconventional colorism and formal daring indexed the pervasive anxiety that miscegenation would lead to racial chaos. 

…Initially, though, the apparent prevalence of mixed races in Algeria did not inspire concern. In an influential text published in 1826, the American consul general in Algiers, William Shaler (1778–1833), while ambivalent about miscegenation, praised the hybrid ancestry of the ‘‘Moors’’: ‘‘an amalgamation of the ancient Mauritanians, various invaders, the emigrants from Spain, and the Turks,’’ which created a vigorous blend. Proof of the positive effect of such interbreeding, according to Shaler, was the fact ‘‘that there are few people who surpass them in beauty of configuration; their features are remarkably expressive, and their complexions are hardly darker than those of the inhabitants of the South of Spain.’’ While specialists would later question Shaler’s claims, and continue to debate the viability of mixed races, the impulse to discern origins, filiation and racial identity—whether mixed or pure—through skin color and physiognomy would remain a constant…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed feelings about mixed-race census option

The Stanford Daily
2010-03-31

Brianna Pang

The 2010 census, which hit mailboxes this month, is causing scholars and mixed-race people to debate, for just the second time in the count’s history, the dilemma of whether or not to check multiple “race” boxes.

One Stanford professor, Michele Elam, the director of the Program in African and African-American Studies, wrote in a recent op-ed in The Huffington Post that people should consider “thinking twice, but checking once,” since the goal of the census is to diagnose the resources the federal government should offer.

Elam said that the question of whether or not to check more than one box is not about meeting some level of “mixedness.”

“[The question is] a recognition that ‘race’ is and has always been a broad political category that has had and continues to have real impacts,” Elam wrote in e-mail to The Daily, “and most important, in this context, is being invoked to help track inequities based on race and to distribute economic resources.”

Matthew Snipp, the director of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity program, also commented on the effects of checking more than one box. According to Snipp, who has been involved in the census since the 1980s, census data is used to allocate $400 billion per year…

…As determined by the Department of Justice in the 2000 Census, if one were considered a member of a protected minority group and also a majority group, then for civil rights enforcement purposes, the person is counted as the minority…

Read the entire article here.