Mixed Race Studies

Are you white enough?

Salon.com
2008-11-10

Laura Miller, Senior Writer

From Jim Crow laws to workplace discrimination, the history of race and the American courtroom is incendiary.

Come January, Barack Obama will be sworn in as either the first black president of the United States or the 44th white one, or both, or neither, depending on how you interpret his race. Race is such a monumental force in American culture and politics that the idea that it has to be interpreted may strike many people as bizarre. Of course Obama is black, some might argue, judging by his appearance, or by his self-identification as an African-American or even by his marriage and important relationships with other African-Americans. Yet more than one commentator has complained that he isn’t “black enough,” by which they may mean that his complexion isn’t dark enough, or that he was raised by whites, or that his African father provided him with no heritage in North American slavery, or that he doesn’t sufficiently align himself with the policies of a certain portion of African-American political leadership.

The problem with race as Americans understand it is that it doesn’t really exist. It is a brutal fact of life for millions of citizens, and an inescapable problem for the rest, but it is also, as Ariela J. Gross writes in her densely researched “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” a “moving target,” whose definition and meaning is always in flux. Many of us can avoid encountering this strange truth in the imprecise realms of cultural and social life, but when it comes to the law, imprecision just doesn’t cut it. Gross’ book, a history of cases in which people have challenged their official racial designation, eloquently demonstrates just how difficult it can be to say what race—mine, yours, anybody’s—actually consists of…

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Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction

American Literary History
Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 2011)
pages 574-599
E-ISSN: 1468-4365 Print ISSN: 0896-7148

Ramón Saldívar, Professor of History
Stanford University

Since the turn of the century, a new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a postrace era in American literature. Outlining a paradigm that I term historical fantasy, I argue that in the twenty-first century, the relationship between race and social justice, race and identity, and indeed, race and history requires these writers to invent a new “imaginary” for thinking about the nature of a just society and the role of race in its construction. It also requires the invention of new forms to represent it. In this light, I address the topic of race and narrative theory in two contexts: in relation to the question of literary form and in relation to history. Doing so will allow me to explain the reasons for what I take to be the inauguration of a new stage in the history of the novel by twenty-first-century US ethnic writers.

At the outset, I wish to make one thing clear about my use of the term “postrace”: race and racism, ethnicity and difference are nowhere near extinct in contemporary America. W. E. B. Du Bois’s momentous pronouncement in 1901 that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” could not have been a more accurate assessment of the fate of race during the twentieth century (354). Today race remains a central question, but one no longer defined exclusively in shades of black or white, or in the exact manner we once imagined. That is, apart from the election of Barack Obama, one other matter marks the present differently from the racial history of the American past: race can no longer be considered exclusively in the binary form, black/white, which has traditionally structured racial discourse in the US. If for no other reason than the profoundly shifting racial demographics of early twenty-first-century America, a new racial imaginary is required to account for the…

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Between Two Worlds: Consequences of Dual-Group Membership among Children

University of Texas, Austin
May 2008
98 pages

Katherine Vera Aumer-Ryan

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Increasing numbers of individuals are simultaneously members of two or more social categories. To investigate the effects of single- versus dual-identity status on children’s group views and intergroup attitudes, elementary-school-age children (N = 91) attending a summer school program were assigned to novel color groups that included single-identity (“blue” and “red”) and dual-identity (“bicolored,” or half red and half blue) members. The degree to which dual-identity status was verified by the authority members was also manipulated: teachers in some classrooms were instructed to label and make use of three social groups (“blues,” “reds,” “bicolors”) to organize their classrooms, whereas teachers in other classrooms were instructed to label and make use of only the two “mono-colored” groups (“blues” and “reds”). After several weeks in their classrooms, children’s (a) views of group membership (i.e., importance, satisfaction, perceived similarity, group preference), (b) intergroup attitudes (i.e., traits ratings, group evaluations, peer preferences), and (c) categorization complexity (i.e., tendency to sort individuals along multiple dimensions simultaneously) were assessed. Results varied across measures but, in general, indicated that dual-identity status affected children’s views of their ingroup. Specifically, dual-identity children in classrooms in which their status was not verified were more likely to (a) perceive themselves as similar to other ingroup members (i.e., bicolored children), (b) want to keep their shirt color, and (c) assume that a new student would want their shirt color more than their single-identity peers. They also showed higher levels of ingroup bias in their competency ratings of groups than their single-identity peers, and demonstrated greater cognitive flexibility when thinking about social categories than their single-identity peers. Overall, these results suggest that dual-identity children experience identity issues differently than their single-identity peers and that additional theories are needed to address the complexities of social membership and bias among children with dual memberships.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Chapter One: Introduction and Literature Review
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical Background
  • Single- Versus Dual-Group Identity
  • Contextual, Individual Differences and Developmental Factors
• Chapter Two: Method
  • Participants
  • Overview of Procedure
  • Experimental Conditions
  • Posttest Measures
  • Views of Group Membership
  • Categorization Complexity
  • Conformity
• Chapter Three: Results
  • Overview
  • Effects of Identity Status and Condition on Views of Group Membership
  • Effects of Identity Status on Intergroup Attitudes
  • Categorization Task
  • Individual and Developmental Differences
• Chapter Four: Discussion
• Figure
• Tables
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Intergroup Outcome Measures
  • Appendix B: Conformity
  • Appendix C: Sample of Presidential Poster
  • Appendix D: Novel Categorization Stimuli
• References
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1: Average Scores of Similarity to a Child’s In-Group Across Conditions and Identities

List of Tables

• Table 1: Participant Characteristics Across Conditions
• Table 2: Means (and Standard Deviations) for Posttest Measures Across Conditions and Identities
• Table 3: HLM Results for the Predictors of Children’s Ratings for Group Importance, Happiness, and Similarity
• Table 4: HLM Results for the Interactions of Predictors of Children’s Ratings of Similarity
• Table 5: HLM Results for Predictors of Children’s Ratings for Peer Preferences and Traits
• Table 6: HLM Results for Predictors of Children’s Ratings of Group Competencies
• Table 7: HLM Results for Predictors of Children’s Novel Categorization Task
• Table 8: Percentage of Children who Desired to Change their Shirt to Red, Blue, or Bicolored Across Identities
• Table 9: Percentage of Children who Desired to Change their Shirt to Red, Blue, or Bicolored Across Conditions
• Table 10: Percentage of Children Wanting to Keep their Group Membership
• Table 11: Percentage of Children Wanting to Keep their Group Membership Across Conditions
• Table 12: Percentage of Children Predicting a New Student’s Preference of Shirt Color Across Identities
• Table 13: Percentage of Children by Condition Predicting a New Student’s Preference of Shirt Color Across Conditions
• Table 14: Percentage of Children Predicting a New Student’s Preference of Shirt Color Across Conditions and Identities
• Table 15 Means and Standard Errors of Self-Group Similarity Across Identity
• Table 16: Means and Standard Errors of In-Group Peer Preference Across Conditions
• Table 17: Intergroup Correlation Matrix
• Table 18: Betas of Age, Conformity, and Manipulation on Dependent Variables

Read the entire dissertation here.