Mixed Race Studies

Being Raced, Acting Racially: Multiracial Tribal College Students’ Representations of Their Racial Identity Choices

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
September 2010
208 pages

Michelle Rene Montgomery

DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies

In recent years, many studies have clearly documented that mixed-race people are currently engaged in the process of self validation (DaCosta. 2007; Dalmage, 2003; McQueen, 2002; Root, 1996 & 2001; Spencer, J, M., 1997; Spencer, R., 2006a; Thorton, 1992). There is not a lot of empirical research that examines how schools influence the racial identity of multiracial students, in particular mixed-race students that identify as Native American. Even more troubling is the lack of literature on experiences of mixed-race students using racial identity choice as a social and political tool through race discourse and actions. The aim of this qualitative case study was to look at the relationship between the racial agency of multiracial students and the larger white supremacist social structure. The research questions addressed in this study are as follows: (1) How do the formal and informal schooling contexts shape the identity choices of multiracial students? (2) How do the identity choices of multiracial students conform to an/or resist the racialized social system of the United States?

This study was conducted at a tribal college in New Mexico with selected mixed-race participants who identified as Native American, or acknowledged Native American ancestry. At the time of data collection, the school enrollment was 513 students, representing 83 federally recognized tribes and 22 state recognized tribes. The presence of a multi-racial body of students created a unique contributing factor of multiracial participants for a broader understanding of mixed-race experiences in cultural and traditional learning environments. The study was conducted using qualitative case study methodology of mixed-race students interviewed in the last weeks of the fall semester (pre-interview) and once during the last few weeks of the spring semester (post interviews). Mixed-race students were asked to discuss nine group sessions during the spring semester their lived experiences that influenced their identity choices. The sample for this study represented mixed-race participants from various tribal communities. In an eight-month time period of the study, nine participants were interviewed and participated in-group sessions. Of the nine total in sample, two were male, seven were female; three were Native American/white, two were black/white/Native American, three were Hispanic/white/Native American, and one were Hispanic/Native American.

From my analysis of the nine participants’ mixed-race experience, three overarching themes emerged: (a) racial(ized) self-perceptions, (b) peer interactions and influences, and (c) impact on academic experiences. Of the nine participants, how a students’ race was asserted, assigned, and reassigned appears to be determined by being mixed-race with black versus white or non-black. According to the participants, this particular tribal college did not provide a supportive or welcoming environment. As a result, students were highly stratified based on experiences tied to their phenotype and racial mixture; the more “black” they appeared, the more alienated they were. In the classroom, there was often a divide between black/Native mixed-race students versus white/Native mixed-race students, similar to the differences between monoracial white and black student experiences. As a result of dissimilar experiences based on mixedness, there were group association conflicts during their schooling experiences that included feeling vicitimized when their whiteness did not prevail as an asset or being alienated due to blackness. The study also found a clear distinction between the mixed-race black experience versus the mixed-race with white experience based on phenotypic features. Overall, mixed-race with black schooling experiences indicated situations of racial conflict. The findings of this study have policy implications for tribal colleges and other institutions to develop programs and services to help mixed-race students identify and bond with their learning environments.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
  • Introduction
  • Statement of the Problem
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Significance of the Study
  • Research Questions
  • Definition of Key Terms
  • Overview of Methodology
  • Limitations of the Study
• CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
  • Introduction
    • The Politics of Multiracialism
    • Empirical Research On The Identity Politics of Multiracial Students40
• CHAPTER 3 METHODS
  • Focus of the Research
  • Research Design
  • Research Participants
  • Setting
  • Portrait of Participants
  • Data Collection
  • Data Analysis
  • Ethics
  • Validity
  • Trustworthiness
• CHAPTER 4 ANALYSIS OF MIXED-RACE EXPERIENCES
  • Theme One: Racial(ized) Self-Perceptions
    • Identity Politics of Blood Quantum
      • Black/Native American Experience
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
    • Summary
    • Self-Perceptions of Race Being Asserted, Negotiated and Redefined
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Black/Native American Experience
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
        • Black/Native American Experience
        • Non-Black/Native American Experience
    • Disadvantages: Mixed-race Identity Choice
      • Black/Native American Experience
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
    • Advantages: Mixed-race Identity Choice
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
    • Summary
  • Theme Two: Peer Interactions and Influences
    • Perceivable Differences
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Black/Native American Experience
    • Summary
    • Surviving the Losses
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
      • Black/Native American Experience
    • Summary
  • Theme Three: The Impact on Academic Experiences
    • The Role of Tribal Colleges
    • Schooling Experiences
      • Black/Native American Experience
      • Non-Black/Native American Experience
    • Summary
• CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
  • Discussion
    • Major Findings
      • Research Question #1
      • Research Question #2
    • Summary
    • Recommendations
      • Administrators
      • Faculty and Staff
      • Future Research
      • Conclusion
• APPENDICES
• APPENDIX A CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN RESEARCH
• APPENDIX B PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRE
• APPENDIX C FIRST PARTICIPANT INTERVIEW
• APPENDIX D SECOND PARTICIPANT INTERVIEW
• REFERENCES

Chapter 1: Introduction

Introduction

Dark brown skin with wavy hair, I am accustomed to being asked, “What are you?” Often I am mistaken for being reserved despite my easy, sincere grin. My facial expression perhaps does not show what I have learned in my life: reluctant people endure, passionate people live. Whether it is the glint of happiness in my eyes or what I call “using laughter to heal your soul,” my past experience as a mixed-race person has been significantly different from my current outlook on life. I am at ease with my lived experiences, very willing to share and even encouraging others to probe more into my racialized experience. Like many mixed-race people, I experienced an epiphany: disowning a need to belong and disengaging from the structure of race has given me the confidence to critique race discourse.

I identify as Native American with mixed-race heritage. I am mixed-race black/white, Native American, and mixed-race Korean/Mongolian. My father is mixedrace black/white and Native American, and my mother is mixed-race Korean/Mongolian. We are enrolled members of the Haliwa Saponi Tribe. When I was growing up, my father taught me that I am a multiracial person. So, I can personally relate to the idea that monoraciality does not fit my multiracial identity or those of other multiracials in our socalled “melting pot” society.

However, countless numbers of times I have been raced in ways that have forced me to choose a group association. My own experiences illustrate how racial designation and group association plays itself out in society, including in classroom learning environments. My siblings and I grew up in a predominantly mixed-race Native American community in northeastern North Carolina that included black, Native American, and white ancestry. I attended a rural high school that contained mixed-race black/Native American, mixed-raced white/Native American, monoracial blacks, and monoracial white students. It was not unusual for mixed-race black/Native American and monoracial blacks to create close group associations, which were exhibited through social interactions that occurred when sitting together in the cafeteria, classrooms, or in designated lounging areas around campus. However, mixed-race white/Native American students, especially those who seemed phenotypically white, did not want to be associated with monoracial black students. Most mixed-race white/Native American students created group associations with monoracial white students. As a brown complexioned multiracial person in this racially polarized environment, I was placed in a situation where I had to choose a group association to keep mixed-race black/Native American and monoracial black students from viewing me as acting white. On the other hand, the mixed-raced white/Native Americans and monoracial whites viewed my actions as acting black.

Because of my Korean and Mongolian ancestry, I was not perceived phenotypically as a true member of the black or Native American groups. My Koreanness caused friction between me and the monoracial black and mixed-race black/Native American groups with which I most commonly associated because it gave me an inroad to the white/r groups that they did not have. Because I did not acknowledge and challenge my advantage, I allowed myself to be used as an agent of racism. This happened in a number of ways. For instance, monoracial white and mixed-race Native American groups asked me to sit with them in the cafeteria, but they did not invite monoracial blacks and mixed-race black/Native Americans. And I accepted their invitation. As a consequence, the group with which I most associated viewed me as a race traitor, as a racial fraud. And I felt like one, too. I am ashamed that I actively participated in the denigration of blacks, which is the most denigrated part of my own ancestry. A multiracial person with black ancestry who accepts not being identified as black in an effort to subvert white privilege (i.e., resisting racial categorization as a way of challenging the notion of race) can actually be reinforcing it, as was the case for me. The problem is how the context and meaning of being a race traitor or committing racial fraud arises out of and is bounded by the social and political descriptions of race. Both social and political constructs are then used as a justification for policing the accuracy of racial identification or political alliance. In most instances, being cast as a race traitor, or as an alleged racial fraud, is a constitutive feature of the dynamics of the informal school setting, and is further developed in the formal schooling setting Since racial identity is a social and political construct, it requires meaning in the context of a particular set of social relationships. In a tribal college setting, the identity politics of blood quantum often influences the multiracial experience of students (i.e., learning environment…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Home and Identity for Young Men of Mixed Descent

Queen Mary University of London
2009
319 pages

Akile Ahmet

Mixed descent identities span ethnic, religious, and cultural identities as well as race. This thesis addresses the multi-layered identities embodied by young men of mixed descent in relation to their ideas and lived experiences of home. I have adopted a feminist methodological approach to my research and have used three different types of methods to conduct this research: one to one interviewing (with repeat interviews), written electronic diaries and photo-voice.

Previous research on mixed descent and the home has located people of mixed descent as ‘homeless’ (see Ifekwuingwe, 1999, Garimara, 2002 and Carton, 2004). I place young men of mixed descent aged between 16-19 in homes, both in terms of dwelling spaces and wider ideas about belonging. The space of the home becomes a cultural site of their own identities and their family identities. Religious and cultural identities both via material possessions and emotional signifiers affect the identity of these young men and their definitions and experiences of home. These multiple identities are seen within the space of the home, particularly for those inhabiting the parental home. I address the multiple web of identity which these young embody via their religion, culture, ethnicity, and in some cases language. I move beyond the location of mixed race households and place this research inside the home space for young men of mixed descent. Alongside which I explore the idea of home as stretching’ (Gorman-Murray, 2006) beyond the scale of the private domestic into the public realm.

Table of Contents

• TITLE PAGE
• DECLARATION OF PhD
• ABSTRACT
• IMAGES AND TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDEGMENTS
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Methods and Methodology
• Chapter Three: Autobiographies of Participants
• Chapter Four: Understanding Mixed Descent and Gender
• Chapter Five: Understanding Home and Identity
• Chapter Six: Meanings of Mixed Descent: How do young Men of mixed descent ‘narrate their identities?
• Chapter Seven: Exploring the Parental home: Experiences of Home and Mixed Descent
• Chapter Eight: Definitions of Home for Young Men of Mixed Descent
• Chapter Nine: Conclusions
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX

IMAGES AND TABLES

• Images
  • 7.1 Tariq’s photo-voice: image of his hallway
  • 7.2 Tariq’s photo-voice: image of his hallway
  • 7.3 Tariq’s photo-voice: image of his front room
  • 8.1 Tariq’s photo-voice: image of his bedroom
  • 8.2 David’s photo-voice: image of his bedroom
  • 8.3 Craig and David’s photo-voice: image of their bedroom
  • 8.4 David’s photo-voice: image of his bedroom wall
  • 8.5 David’s photo-voice: image of his playstation games
  • 8.6 David’s photo-voice: image of David’s college
• Tables
  • 2.1 Methods employed by each participant
  • 2.2 Timing of research
  • 2.3 Location of interviews
  • 2.4 Breakdown of participant backgrounds and living arrangements
  • 6.1 Outline of participants
  • 7.1 Outline of participants homes and living arrangements

Read the entire dissertation here.

Rena’s Two Bodies: Gender and Whiteness in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars

Studies in the Novel
Volume 43, Numbers 1 (Spring 2011)
pages 38-54
E-ISSN: 1934-1512 Print ISSN: 0039-3827

Melissa Ryan, Associate Professor of English
Alfred University, Alfred, New York

In a letter thirty years after The House Behind the Cedars was published, Charles Chesnutt referred to the novel as his “favorite child,” because its protagonist, Rena Walden, “was of ‘mine own people’. Like myself, she was a white person with an attenuated streak of dark blood, from the disadvantages of which she tried in vain to escape, while I never did” (An Exemplary Citizen 257). That he should refer to his character in such personal terms, so many years later, suggests that Rena functioned as his imagined second self, offering a way for him to try out in fiction what he chose not to do in life. Able but not willing to pass, he sent Rena across the color line in his stead. But while there is nothing unusual about such a relationship between author and protagonist, it is interesting that he cast himself as a tragic mulatta. In other words, in this tale of passing he is in some sense himself crossdressed.

Despite this provocative possibility, there has been little critical exploration of gender issues in the novel. At its most basic level, it is a love story whose fundamental conflict, as many critics have observed, is that between natural affection and unnatural law. Given this framework, perhaps Chesnutt’s treatment of gender roles seems to be so conventional as to merit scant attention; his tragic heroine may strike readers as insufficiently complex, a flat character whose femininity is shaped by the demands of sentimental fiction and the limitations of the masculine imagination. A closer look, however, suggests that there is more to be said. Gender difference is central not only to the plot but also to the larger questions of identity Chesnutt pursues, both in this novel and in tales of the color line like “Her Virginia Mammy” and “The Wife of His Youth.” Taken…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Stakes of Race, Color, & Belonging

Thursday Afternoon Forum Series
University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race and Gender
691 Barrows
Thursday, 2011-09-29, 16:00-17:30 PDT (Local Time)

Skin Tone Stratification Among Black Americans, 2001-2003
Ellis Monk Jr., Sociology

“I’m Mixed and Mixed”: Narrating Identities of Individuals with Mexican and Other Ancestries
Jessie Turner, Ethnic Studies

For more information, click here.

Pauline Black launches her autobiography

Louder Than War
2011-08-04

Miles Barter

Pauline Black launches her autobiography, ‘Black By Design’
 
Music was hardly mentioned as Selecter frontwoman Pauline Black launched her autobiography at Houseman’s radical bookshop in London on Wednesday evening (last night 3 Aug).
 
She told the 70 people packed into a sweltering store that Black by Design was the story of her journey from being a mixed race baby adopted by a white family in Romford, Essex, to Top of the Pops and reconciliation with her own black culture.

Her family refered to her as “coloured” because they thought it was the most polite term available.

Pauline described adoption as “legalised identity theft” and said she had changed her surname from Vickers to Black so people “had to call me black”.
 
She read excerpts from the book about her struggle to find her true self.
 
Her birth mother was white British, her father was black Nigerian. She had originally been named Belinda Magnus…

…Many audience members talked of their own experiences as black and mixed race youngsters in Britain.
 
There was a discussion on whether things were better or whether prejudice was just more hidden now…

Read the entire article here.

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Serpent’s Tail
2011-07-14
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781846687907

Pauline Black

Powerful autobiography from the front woman of influential ska band, The Selecter

Lead singer for platinum-selling 2-tone band The Selecter, Pauline Black has been in the music business for over thirty years. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she was very much the Queen of British Ska. She saw The Specials, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and all the other top bands of that generation at their very best… and worst. Black was born in 1953 of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents. Adopted by a white, working class family in Romford in the fifties, Pauline was always made to feel different, both by the local community and members of her extended family, who saw her at best as a curiosity, at worst as an embarrassing inconvenience. Weaving her rise to fame and recollections of the 2-tone phenomenon with her moving search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening memoir of music and roots.

Born in Romford, Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2-tone band The Selecter. After the band split in 1982, Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All.

Exploring Grays in a Black-and-White World

Miller-McCune
2011-07-19

Julia M. Klein

Two new books explore the intersection of race and identity in America by investigating families whose biracial members might—or might not—“pass” as white.

Defining racial identity in the United States has always been a fraught enterprise, involving shifting intersections of law, custom, class, ancestry and choice. Physical appearance and money have mattered, but so have family history and community attitudes—and not always in the ways we might suspect.

Two intriguing new books—Daniel J. Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White and Julie Winch’s The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America—underline the fluidity of racial categories over nearly three centuries of American history. And, thanks to legal records and other archival evidence, they offer illuminating detail about precisely how—and often why—individuals circumvented or manipulated these categories.

The destabilization of racial identity begins with a fact: Sexual relationships between blacks and whites, both romantic and coercive, have existed since the earliest days of slavery. Edward Ball’s National Book Award-winning 1998 volume, Slaves in the Family, recounted his search for descendants of slaves owned by his family of South Carolina planters—and his discovery that some of them were his cousins. A decade later, Annette Gordon-Reed imaginatively reconstructed the lives of the mixed-race Hemings family and their ties to Thomas Jefferson in her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family…

Read the entire review of the books here.

Books of The Times: One Nation, Still Divisible by Race

The New York Times
2011-08-11

Dwight Garner

Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. 322 pp.

August is not half over, and already it’s been a punishing month for Barack Obama: the debt limit fiasco; the Standard & Poor’s downgrade; the deaths of Navy Seals and other troops in Afghanistan. This powerful and ruminative book by Randall Kennedy, “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency,” is unlikely to put the president in a more cheerful mood.

Mr. Kennedy, who is African-American, has long been among the most incisive American commentators on race. His books, which include “Race, Crime, and the Law” (1997) and the best seller “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word” (2002), tend to arrive in full academic dress (his new one has footnotes and endnotes) and seem to be carved from intellectual granite, yet they have human scale. When it suits him, he can deploy references to Stevie Wonder and Kanye West as well as to Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mahalia Jackson and Malcolm X. He has the full panoply of the black experience in America at his fingertips…

…Mr. Kennedy is, deep down, an admirer of the president’s. (Mr. Obama, a Harvard Law graduate, signed up for, but did not ultimately take, one of Mr. Kennedy’s courses.) When he lists the many things black people love best about the president, it’s apparent that he’s speaking for himself as well. Among these reasons: Mr. Obama identifies himself as black, when he could have, like Tiger Woods, spoken of himself as mixed race; he married a black woman, while other powerful black men often marry white ones; he is dignified, “the most well-spoken, informed, gracious, cosmopolitan, agile, and thoughtful politician on the American political landscape.”…

…Once all that is out of the way, Mr. Kennedy is free to get down to business. He’s frustrated by many aspects of Mr. Obama’s leadership and is not shy about expressing himself. About Mr. Obama’s evolving stance on same-sex marriage, for example, Mr. Kennedy declares: “That the nation’s first black president defends separate but equal in the context of same-gender intimacy is bitterly ironic.”…

Read the entire article here.

The multiple dimensions of racial mixture in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: from whitening to Brazilian negritude

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Available online: 2011-08-01
18 pages
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.589524

Graziella Moraes D. Silva
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Elisa P. Reis, Professor of Political Sociology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

The notion that racial mixture is a central feature of Latin American societies has been interpreted in different, if not strictly opposite, ways. On the one hand, scholars have presented it as evidence of weaker racial boundaries. On the other, it has been denounced as an expression of the illusion of harmonic racial relations. Relying on 160 interviews with black Brazilians, we argue that the valorization of racial mixture is an important response to stigmatization, but one that has multiple dimensions and different consequences for the maintenance of racial boundaries. We map out these different dimensions—namely, ‘whitening’, ‘Brazilian negritude’, ‘national identification’ and ‘non-essentialist racialism’—and discuss how these dimensions are combined in different ways by our interviewees according to various circumstances. Exploring these multiple dimensions, we question any simplistic understanding of racial mixture as the blessing or the curse of Latin American racial dynamics.

Read or purchase the article here.

For black Britons, this is not the 80s revisited. It’s worse

The Guardian
2011-08-11

Joseph Harker, Assistant Comment Editor

Our MPs are ‘on message’, our media in decline and the Commission for Racial Equality abolished. Who speaks for us?

This is not 1981. Nor 1985. As has been pointed out over the past few days, things have changed a lot since the “inner-city unrest”—as it was quaintly named back then—erupted in Brixton, Tottenham, Toxteth, Handsworth and other parts of Britain.

But with each passing day, the old maxim, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”, has increasing relevance. In the 80s, as now, rioting was sparked by a confrontation between black people and the police and spread to the rest of the country, including to “white” areas. In 1981, the Conservative prime minister dismissed suggestions that the Brixton riot was due to unemployment and racism. Time proved that she was badly wrong. But fast forward three decades, and David Cameron tells the House of Commons that this week’s rioting was “criminality, pure and simple”.

In the years up to 1981, tension had been building between black people and the police over the “sus” laws, which gave officers powers to arrest anyone they suspected may be intending to steal. For them, a black youngster glancing at a handbag was enough. After Brixton, this law was repealed. Today, however, black people are seven times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. And under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act—which allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion—the racial discrepancy rises to 26 times. This is symptomatic of the many ways in which, for black Britons, life seemingly improved but has steadily descended again…

…Over the last three decades we’ve allowed ourselves to be fooled that, with greater integration, plus a few black faces in sport and entertainment, things have improved. People gush about the growing mixed-race population, supposedly Britain’s “beautiful” future. Well, Mark Duggan had a white parent but it didn’t make much difference to his prospects…

Read the entire article here.