Mixed Race Studies

Bicultural Identity Negotiation, Conflicts, and Intergroup Communication Strategies

Journal of Intercultural Communication Research
Volume 42,  Issue 2, 2013
pages 112-134
DOI: 10.1080/17475759.2013.785973

Adrian Toomey
California State University, Fullerton

Tenzin Dorjee, Assistant Professor of Human Communications Studies
California State University, Fullerton

Stella Ting-Toomey, Professor of Human Communications Studies
California State University, Fullerton

This qualitative study explores the significant yet understudied topic of bicultural identity and intergroup-intercultural communication. Ting-Toomey’s identity negotiation theory and Giles’ communication accommodation theory guide this investigation into the meaning construction of “bicultural identity” of Asian/Caucasian individuals and their intergroup communication strategies. Bicultural identity development is a multilayered, complex lived experience. Response analysis to the research questions revealed eight thematic patterns such as bicultural construction of integrated identity, distinctive communication practice, and identity buffering strategies. These patterns culminate to the proposed idea of a “double-swing bicultural identity” model. The study concludes with a discussion on contributions, limitations, and future directions.

Read or purchase the article here.

Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity

Temple University Press
May 2013
218 pages
5.5 x 8.25; 1 halftone
Paper EAN: 978-1-43990-980-5
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-979-9
eBook EAN: 978-1-43990-981-2

Edited by:

Jeffrey A. Brune, Assistant Professor of History
Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C.

Daniel J. Wilson, Professor of History
Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Passing—an act usually associated with disguising race—also relates to disability. Whether a person with a psychiatric disorder struggles to suppress aberrant behavior to appear “normal” or a person falsely claims a disability to gain some advantage, passing is a pervasive and much discussed phenomenon. Nevertheless, Disability and Passing is the first anthology to examine this issue.

The editors and contributors to this volume explore the intersections of disability, race, gender, and sexuality as these various aspects of identity influence each other and make identity fluid. They argue that the line between disability and normality is blurred, discussing disability as an individual identity and as a social category. And they discuss the role of stigma in decisions about whether or not to pass.

Focusing on the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, the essays in Disability and Passing speak to the complexity of individual decisions about passing and open the conversation for broader discussion.

Contributors include: Dea Boster, Allison Carey, Peta Cox, Kristen Harmon, David Linton, Michael Rembis, and the editors.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction • Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson
• 2. Passing in the Shadow of FDR: Polio Survivors, Passing, and the Negotiation of Disability • Daniel J. Wilson
• 3. The Multiple Layers of Disability Passing in Life, Literature, and Public Discourse • Jeffrey A. Brune
• 4. The Menstrual Masquerade • David Linton
• 5. “I Made Up My Mind to Act Both Deaf and Dumb”: Displays of Disability and Slave Resistance in the Antebellum American South • Dea H. Boster
• 6. Passing as Sane, or How to Get People to Sit Next to You on the Bus • Peta Cox
• 7. Athlete First: A Note on Passing, Disability, and Sport • Michael A. Rembis
• 8. The Sociopolitical Contexts of Passing and Intellectual Disability • Allison C. Carey
• 9. Growing Up to Become Hearing: Dreams of Passing in Oral Deaf Education • Kristen C. Harmon
• Contributors
• Index

I’m a kosher burrito, says new mixed-race LA mayor

The Jewish Chronicle Online
London, England
2013-05-30

Tom Tugend

Eric Garcetti, the first Jewish mayor elected by Los Angeles voters, jokingly refers to himself as a “kosher burrito”, the latter word referring to a popular Mexican dish.

The son of a Jewish mother and a father of Mexican and Italian descent, the hip, good-looking Garcetti, 42, was a popular figure at Oxford’s L’Chaim Society when he attended the university as a Rhodes Scholar between 1993 and 1995.

LA, incorporated as a municipality in 1850, has had Mexican-American, African-American and lots of Anglo mayors, but in this year’s race the top three contenders all had strong Jewish ties…

Read the entire aritcle here.

This Is The Mixed-Race Cheerios Ad All The Idiots Are Complaining About

Business Insider
Advertising
2013-05-30

Judith Grey

A new commercial for Cheerios featuring a mixed-race family has become a target for idiots on the internet.

The anodyne spot features a Caucasian mother, an African-American father and their biracial daughter, but contains no overt messaging, politically correct or otherwise (except that Cheerios are good for you).

Nonetheless, Adweek noted the spot had been propelled onto the front page of Reddit, where it received a plethora of racists remarks. Concreteloop.com noted a YouTube commentator who allegedly called the spot an “abomination.”…

Read the entire article here.

Why We Need to Talk About Race in Adoption

Bitch Magazine
2013-05-29

Nicole Callahan

Two years ago, on vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains, I saw a white couple at a restaurant with their Asian daughter. Though her father told her to quit staring, I felt the girl’s eyes on me all through the meal. I smiled at her, feeling a strong sense of kinship, a pang of sympathy.  As a child, whenever I saw another Asian person—which I hardly ever did—I used to stare, too, hungry for the sight of someone, anyone, who looked like me.

Adoption has changed in the 32 years since a social worker told my parents “not to worry” about my ethnicity. Thanks to many transracial adoptees who have shared their experiences, there is a greater emphasis on the importance of racial and cultural identity. Numerous books have been written on the subject, and excellent blog posts abound. Transnational adoption has inspired documentary films such as First Person Plural, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, Wo Ai Ni Mommy, and Somewhere Between.  

While “colorblindness” in adoption has been widely challenged, however, not everyone is convinced—like the adoptive mother who recently told me, “I don’t see my son’s color. Race is just not an issue for us.”

Some people maintain that any cultural loss is unimportant compared to what children gain through adoption. But in both mainstream media and personal conversations about adoption, cultural and racial identity need not be pitted against a child’s right to love, safety, and security…

…We cannot have an honest discussion about transracial adoption if we aren’t willing to discuss race, prejudice, and privilege. Adoptees need to feel safe when we talk about the instances of racism we encounter. This may not sound easy—because it isn’t easy for white parents to raise children of color. But as the mother of two multiracial children, I can say that it’s not easy for parents of color, either…

Read the entire article here.

Black woman rises to leadership in Daughters of the American Revolution

theGrio
2013-05-26

Donovan X. Ramsey

This month, Autier Allen-Craft was elected to the position of regent in the Norwalk–Village Green chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Connecticut. Allen-Craft, a black woman, says the organization has come a long way since its years of controversy related to racial exclusion.

Allen-Craft rose up the ranks in the organization, serving as vice regent of her Connecticut chapter two years ago before being elected to her current, high-level position. Just a few decades prior, she began the search into her family tree that would eventually lead her to membership in DAR.

“I attended Benedict College in South Carolina and I while I was there I lived with my maternal grandmother,” Allen-Craft told theGrio. “I was always interested in why my older ancestors looked they way they did. They were very fair. So I began to ask her questions about who her parents were, and who her grandparents were, and she would tell me as far back as she could remember.”

Before long, Allen-Craft’s curiosity led her to the South Carolina archives in Columbia.

An amazing ancestral discovery

After years of research, in about 1990, she stumbled upon records of her great-great grandfather — a white plantation owner, who was her third-great grandfather. She says after getting over the initial shock, she looked deeper into his ancestry and found that his grandfather, her fifth-great grandfather, had fought in the American Revolution. “He was one of the few plantation owners that would claim his offspring with a black woman,” she said of her great-great grandfather. “Because of that, I’ve been able to trace back as far as I have.”

According to historical record, blacks played a significant role the American Revolution. One of the first “martyrs” of the American Revolution was Crispus Attucks, a man of African Descent who was killed in the Boston Massacre. Black Minutemen fought at the battles of Lexington and Concord as early as April 1775. And when Rhode Island needed soldiers, the state legislature passed a law in 1778 that said “every able-bodied Negro, mulatto, or Indian man-slave” could fight. An estimated 200 men enlisted with the promise of freedom as a reward…

Read the entire article here.

The United States of Mestizo

John F. Blair, Publisher
2013-01-01
48 pages
4¼ x 5½
978-1-58838-288-7
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-200-8

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

This powerful manifesto attests to the fundamental changes the nation has undergone in the last half-century. Ilan Stavans meditates on the way the cross-fertilizing process that defined the Americas during the colonial period—the racial melding of Europeans and indigenous people—was a foretelling of the current miscegenation that is the most salient profile of America today. If, as W. E. B. DuBois once argued, the 20th century was defined by a color fracture, Stavans believes that the 21st will be shaped by the multicolor line that will make us all a sum of parts.

Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race

University of Illinois Press
2014
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.
5 black & white photographs
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03811-2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07959-7

Wanda A. Hendricks, Associate Professor of History
University of South Carolina

The biography of a key activist of the Progressive Era

Born shortly before the Civil War, activist and reformer Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) became one of the most prominent educated African American women of her generation. In this first biography of Williams, Wanda A. Hendricks focuses on the critical role of geography and social position in Williams’s life, illustrating how the reform activism of Williams and other black women was bound up with place and space.

Growing up in Brockport, New York, a mostly white society that encouraged social equality and embraced her and her family, Williams was insulated from the political turmoil surrounding the debates about slavery and black rights. Hendricks shows how Williams became “raced” for the first time in early adulthood, when she became a teacher in Missouri and Washington, D.C., and faced the injustices of racism and the stark contrast between the lives of freed slaves and her own privileged upbringing. She carried this new awareness with her to Chicago, where she joined forces with women’s clubs, the Unitarian church, and various other interracial social justice organizations to become a prominent spokesperson for Progressive economic, racial, and gender reforms.

By highlighting how Williams experienced a set of freedoms in the North that were not imaginable in the South, this clearly-written, widely accessible biography expands how we understand intellectual possibilities, economic success, and social mobility in post-Reconstruction America.

Kings for Three Days: The Play of Race and Gender in an Afro-Ecuadorian Festival

University of Illinois Press
May 2013
216 pages
6 x 9 in.
16 black & white photographs, 3 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03751-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07901-6

Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African Diaspora Studies
Florida International University

A vibrant study of symbol and social significance in one of Ecuador’s black populations

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. In this book, Jean Muteba Rahier delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas—Ecuador’s province most associated with blackness—engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. Rahier shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location’s perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spatial order of Esmeraldas and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

Contents

• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Setting Up the Stage: Contextualizing the Afro-Esmeraldian Festival of the Kings
• 2. The Village of Santo Domingo de Ónzole and the Period of Preparation of the Festival of the Kings: The Centrality of Sexual Dichotomy and Role Reversal
• 3. The Festival of the Kings in Santo Domingo de Ónzole
• 4. The Festival of the Kings in La Tola
• 5. Race, Sexuality, and Gender as They Relate to the Festival of the Kings
• 6. Performances and Contexts of the Play in January 2003
• Conclusion: From the Centrality of Place in Esmeraldian Ethnography to Theoretical and Methodological Considerations for the Study of Festivities
• Glossary of Esmeraldian Spanish Terms
• Notes
• References
• Index

Seeing Race in Modern America

University of North Carolina Press
November 2013
Approx. 264 pages
6.125 x 9.25
10 color plates., 97 halftones, notes, index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-1068-9

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
Brown University

In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color–away from brown and yellow and black and white–and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.

Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing—and believing in—race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.