Mixed Race Studies

A Theory of Race

Routledge
2008-12-04
182 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-99073-8

Joshua Glasgow, Lecturer of Philosophy
Somona State University, California

Social commentators have long asked whether racial categories should be conserved or eliminated from our practices, discourse, institutions, and perhaps even private thoughts. In A Theory of Race, Joshua Glasgow argues that this set of choices unnecessarily presents us with too few options.

Using both traditional philosophical tools and recent psychological research to investigate folk understandings of race, Glasgow argues that, as ordinarily conceived, race is an illusion. However, our pressing need to speak to and make sense of social life requires that we employ something like racial discourse. These competing pressures, Glasgow maintains, ultimately require us to stop conceptualizing race as something biological, and instead understand it as an entirely social phenomenon.

Appropriating the One-Drop Rule: Family Guy on Reparations

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
Volume 7: Open Issue (2010)

Jason Jones
University of Washington

The one-drop rule, or the notion that one drop of African blood renders a person black, once played a vital role in the expansion of the nineteenth-century American slave population and segregation under Jim Crow. Media, communication, and rhetorical studies, however, have yet to consider the extent to which the one-drop rule continues to function in contemporary American discourse on race. There are, nonetheless, scholars in other fields who have turned a critical eye to the one-drop rule and the ways Americans have taken up or challenged the one-drop rule in their language. Ronald Sundstrom studied the obstacles multiracial individuals have encountered in their efforts to assert their multiracial identities in the face of various parties who deny such identities on grounds informed by the one-drop rule and other perspectives that refuse the existence of mixed race (110-116). Joshua Glasgow and his colleagues performed an experiment in which participants were asked to racially classify a woman who looked white and self-identified as such, but discovered that she had a black ancestor; the overwhelming majority of participants categorized her as white (64). However, as Glasgow went on to point out, many Americans identify President Barack Obama as black despite common knowledge of his white mother. Given such observations, it is clear that there are vestiges of the one-drop rule in American racial discourse. But as Michel de Certeau explained, people appropriate discourses to achieve ends that do not always coincide with the ideological implications originally associated with some facet of language use (48). Being no exception, the one-drop rule no longer works to expand the ranks of dehumanized chattel nor does it serve as grounds for the legal removal of peoples from segregated areas, yet many still rely on it, though less rigidly, to identify some biracial Americans as black. The one-drop rule’s discursive utility, however, is not confined to regressive forms of racial identification and has been used for other strategic purposes as is the case in an episode of Seth MacFarlane’s Emmy-nominated Family Guy (“Peter Griffin…”) that parodies the slavery reparations debate, a veritable minefield for anyone willing to partake in the dispute…

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Utilizing the Strengths of Our Cultures: Therapy with Biracial Women and Girls

Women & Therapy
Volume 27 Issue 1 & 2 (January 2004)
pages 33-43
ISSN: 1541-0315 (electronic); 0270-3149 (paper)
DOI: 10.1300/J015v27n01_03

Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
California Polytechnic State University

Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
Marquette University

Historically, psychology has operated from a pathology-based perspective. In the last several years, however, efforts have been made to balance this view with an acknowledgement of individual strengths and assets. For biracial women and girls, this approach may be particularly useful. Through the utilization of several techniques, including solution-focused interventions and narrative approaches to treatment, therapists can empower their female biracial clients through development of their strengths.

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