Mixed Race Studies

“Unknown” Students on College Campuses: An Exploratory Analysis

The James Irvine Foundation
December 2005
20 pages

Campus Diversity Initiative Evaluation Project Team (Claremont Graduate University and the Association of American Colleges and Universities):

Daryl G. Smith, Co-principal Investigator
José Moreno, Senior Research Analyst
Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen, Co-principal Investigator
Sharon Parker, Co-principal Investigator
Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi, Research Associate

with

Suzanne Benally, Campus Liaison
Susan E. Borrego, Campus Liaison
Jocelyn Chong, Research Associate
Mari Luna De La Rosa, Research Associate
Mildred García, Campus Liaison
Jennie Spencer Green, Campus Liaison
Belinda Vea, Research Associate

A research brief from The James Irvine Foundation Campus Diversity Initiative Evaluation Project

In response to the increasing number of students who fall into the “race/ethnicity unknown” category of post-secondary demographic data, this exploratory study devised a method to ascertain the racial/ethnic backgrounds of these students by comparing existing enrollment data to a second, independent data set. The method was tested at three small private institutions in California. Our findings suggest that overall, a sizeable portion of students in the unknown category are white, in addition to multiracial students who may have selected white as one of their categories. These findings—while not necessarily generalizable—alert campus leaders of the need to attend to this growing segment of the student population and to how the United States is diversifying in more complex ways than ever before. The brief concludes with recommendations for future research and for both campus and federal data collection and use.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Introduction: The Rise in “Unknown” Students on College Campuses
• Methodology: Identifying the “Unknowns”
• Findings: A Sizeable Portion of “Unknown” Students Are White
• Implications: Accuracy Depends on the “Unknowns”
• Recommendations: Improving Data Collection and Use
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Contributors

Read the entire report here.

Blurred Borders for Some but not “Others”: Racialization, “Flexible Ethnicity,” Gender, and Third-Generation Mexican American Identity

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 53, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
Pages 45–72
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2010.53.1.45

Jessica M. Vasquez, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Kansas

How are the lives of middle-class third-generation Mexican Americans both racialized and gendered? Third-generation Mexican Americans in California experience a racialization process continuum that extends from “flexible ethnicity,” the ability to be considered an “insider” in different racial/ethnic communities, to racialization as nonwhite that is enforced through the deployment of negative stereotypes. Using interview data, the author finds that women are afforded more “flexible ethnicity” than men. Accordingly, men are more rigorously racialized than women. Women are racialized through exoticization, whereas men are racialized as threats to safety. Lighter skinned individuals escaped consistent racialization. These findings have consequences for the incorporation possibilities of later-generation Mexican Americans, as women and light-skinned (often multiracial) individuals are more frequently granted “flexible ethnicity” and less strongly racialized than men and dark-skinned (often monoracial) individuals. Even among the structurally assimilated, contemporary racial and gender hierarchies limit the voluntary quality of ethnicity among third-generation Mexican Americans.

Read or purchase the article here.

Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands

Pacific Historical Review
Volume 79, Number 1 (February 2010)
Pages 50–85
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2010.79.1.50

Julian Lim
Cornell University

In 1920 Manual Lee Chew’s family held a great wedding banquet at the Casa Blanca restaurant, located in the center of Mexicali’s la Chinesca [Chinatown].  All of the Lees, along with their paisanos [countrymen], were there to celebrate. It was a momentous occasion as well, for the bride was one of the first Mexicans to marry a Chinese in Mexicali.  For family friends such as Samuel Lee, it was the perfect event for sharing their good fortune and wishes with the happy couple: Samuel Lee proudly lent his cherished Cadillac to Lee Chew for the wedding.  More that seventy years later, memories about the great celebration and other experiences of Chinese immigrants in the Mexican borderlands…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Nineteenth-Century Literature
Volume 65, Number 1 (June 2010)
Pages 1–37
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2010.65.1.1

Marlene L. Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Although many literary critics have traced the genealogy of the tragic mulatto/a to nineteenth-century U.S. letters, in this essay I argue that the theme of tragedy and the mixed-race character predates the mid-nineteenth-century work of Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown and cannot be considered a solely U.S. American concept. The image can also be traced to early-nineteenth-century French colonial literature, where the trope surfaced in conjunction with the image of the Haitian Revolution as a bloody race war. Through a reading of the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, “Le Mulâtre” or “The Mulatto,” [Read the entire text in French here.] originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, this essay considers the implications of the conflation of the literary history of the tragic mulatto/a with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent.

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Consequences of Racial Intermarriage for Children’s Social Integration

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 53, Number 2 (Summer 2010)
Pages 271–286
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2010.53.2.271

Matthijs Kalmijn, Professor of Sociology
Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Much has been written on ethnic and racial intermarriage, but little research is available on the social consequences of intermarriage. Are the children of mixed marriages more strongly connected to the majority, or are they incorporated in the ethnic or racial minority group? To answer this question, this article uses a minority survey from the Netherlands with data collected from both parents and children. The focus is on Antilleans and Surinamese and children of marriages in which both spouses are black are compared to children of marriages in which one spouse is white and one spouse is black. The analyses provide strong support for the integrative effects of intermarriage on children. These effects are not conditional on the socioeconomic status of the parents. Moreover, the effect on children can be explained in terms of the more diverse meeting opportunities that parents in a mixed marriage provide to their children.

Intermarriage has long been considered a core indicator of the integration of ethnic and racial minorities in society (Kalmijn 1998; Qian and Lichter 2007; Schermerhorn 1970). The most important reason for this is that when members of ethnic and racial groups marry with other groups, this is a sign that these groups accept each other as equals. Intermarriage is also considered important, however, for its potential consequences. Intermarriage may reduce group identities and prejudice in future generations because the children of mixed marriages are less likely to identify themselves with a single group (Saenz, Hwang, and Anderson 1995; Xie and Goyette 1997). In addition, the children of mixed marriages are believed to interact more frequently across group boundaries and they tend to choose a marriage partner from the majority more often (Okun 2004). Finally, high rates of intermarriage make it more difficult to define who is belonging to an ethnic or racial group and this by itself could also weaken the salience of ethnic and racial boundaries in society (Davis 1991). In short, ethnic and racial intermarriages are not only considered a reflection of integration in society, they may also contribute to integration.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixing in the Mountains

Southern Cultures
Volume 3, Issue 4 (Winter 1997)
pages 25-35

John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research in Social Science
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

One January day in 1996, I picked up the Wall Street Journal to find a story headlined “Rural County Balks at Joining Global Village.” It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet.

This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with. A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work. The only town is Sneedville, population 1300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store.

I read this story with a good deal of interest because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, thirty-five miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads. (If you don’t accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville’s a little further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.)

The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County’s citizens are indifferent to the state of Tennessee’s desire to hook them up to the information superhighway—a job that will take some doing, especially for the one household in six that doesn’t have a telephone. The Journal quoted several Hancock Countians to the effect that they didn’t see the point. The reporter observed that the county offers “safe, friendly ways, pristine rivers, unspoiled forests and mountain views,” and that many residents simply “like things the way they are.”

So far a typical hillbilly-stereotype story. But the sentence that really got my attention was this: “Many families here belong to a hundred or so Melungeon clans of Portuguese and American Indian descent, who tend to be suspicious of change and have a history of self-reliance.”…

…Anyway, the Melungeons’ problems, historically, haven’t been due to their American Indian heritage. Like the South’s other triracial groups, they have been ostracized and discriminated against because their neighbors suspected that they were, as one told Miss Dromgoole, “Portuguese niggers.” (Do not imagine that the absence of racial diversity in the mountains means the absence of racial prejudice.) Until recently most Melungeons have vociferously denied any African American connection and have simply refused to accept the attendant legal restrictions. As one mother told Brewton Berry, “I’d sooner my chilluns grow up ig’nant like monkeys than send ’em to that nigger school.” But those neighbors were probably right: DeMarce has now established clear lines from several Melungeon families back to eighteenth-century free black families in Virginia and the Carolinas…

…In her pioneering article on the Melungeons, Miss Dromgoole reveals an interesting misconception: “a race of Mulattoes cannot exist as these Melungeons have existed,” she wrote. “The Negro race goes from Mulattoes to quadroons, from quadroons to octoroons and there it stops. The octoroon women bear no children. Think about that: “Octoroon women bear no children.” Like mules. Who knows how many genteel southern white women held that comforting belief-comforting, that is, to one who accepted the “one drop” rule of racial identification that was enshrined in the laws of many states. But in one sense Miss Dromgoole was right. Not only is there no word for people with one black great-great-grandparent, it’s almost true, sociologically speaking, that there are no such people…

Read the entire article here.

Some Observations on Identity Problems in Children of Negro-White Marriages

Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease
Volume 146, Issue 3 (March 1968)
pages 249-256

Joseph D. Teicher (1912-2000)
University of Southern California School of Medicine

The Los Angeles County General Hospital population includes every case, and, inevitably, many Negro-white families present themselves for service at the hospital’s Child Psychiatry Unit. The problems of the children in these families are directly related to the fact that one parent is Negro and the other Caucasian. Such comments as “Any white woman who marries a Negro man is sick!” and “The children are always a mess!” are common, and yet no systematic research has been done in this area. As some of the unit’s staff began to explore the special problems of the children of Negro-white marriages, they became interested in refining the methods of studying these interracial families. The report that follows presents, in brief, a statement of the problem, a review of the literature, three case histories and a description of the study now in progress.

Read or purchase the article here.

History and Current Status of the Houma Indians

Midcontinent American Studies Journal
Volume 6, Number 2 (Fall 1965)
pages 149-163

Ann Fischer
Tulane University

Brewton Berry, in Almost White, reports that there are some 200 groups of “racial orphans” in the United States. Among these, those who have some claim to Indian ancestry are known as “so-called Indians.” This term is apt, for these peoples have a tenuous racial status. Although so called Indians are of mixed ancestry, they emphasize their Indian identity. Mulatto groups, on the other hand, consider their own status to be midway between white and Negro. Both Mulatto and so-called Indian groups may be found today in Louisiana, living in separate, isolated social units. In these Indian groups in Louisiana, there has been consistent strong resistance to identification with Negroes. Whites, Indians and Negroes agree that as a result of this resistance the Indian groups are more deprived than Negroes who live in the same areas. The racial status of these people varies from parish to parish, and migration can often overcome the problems of racial identity.

The so-called Indians of Louisiana live in settlements which are isolated from the Negro settlements of the same area. Negroes work in the cane fields and usually live in identical unpainted houses in rows perpendicular to the road, surrounded by sugar cane fields. Indians live in houses, often run-down, along the levees in the typical line villages of the bayou country. In many parts of this region white and Indian houses maybe mixed in the line villages, due to the movement of the whites down the line. Negro and Indian housing, on the other hand, is never mixed in the situations which I have observed. Many Indians know no Negroes, and when they compare themselves to any other group it is usually to the white French. They reject the white judgment that they are sexually immoral, pointing out, probably accurately, that the same sexual patterns are common to both groups. It is in sexual behavior and the differences in the standard of living that Indians compare themselves to others. When Indians improve their economic circumstances and these improvements become visible, they feel that the whites resent their successes and think they are not entitled to them…

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Are Mixed-Race Children Better Adjusted?

Time Magazine
2009-02-21

John Cloud

Americans like answers in black and white, a cultural trait we confirmed last year when the biracial man running for President was routinely called “black”.

The flattening of Barack Obama’s complex racial background shouldn’t have been surprising. Many multiracial historical figures in the U.S. have been reduced (or have reduced themselves) to a single aspect of their racial identities: Booker T. Washington, Tina Turner, and Greg Louganis are three examples. This phenomenon isn’t entirely pernicious; it is at least partly rooted in our concern that growing up with a fractured identity is hard on kids. The psychologist J. D. Teicher summarized this view in a 1968 paper: “Although the burden of the Negro child is recognized as a heavy one, that of the Negro-White child is seen to be even heavier.”

But new research says this old, problematized view of multiracial identity is outdated. In fact, a new paper in the Journal of Social Issues shows that multiracial adolescents who identify proudly as multiracial fare as well as—and, in many cases, better than—kids who identify with a single group, even if that group is considered high-status (like, say, Asians or whites). This finding was surprising because psychologists have argued for years that mixed-race kids will be better adjusted if they pick a single race as their own…

…In short, multiracial kids seem to create their own definitions for fitting in, and they show more psychological flexibility than those mixed-race kids who feel bound to one choice or another…

Read the entire article here.