Mixed Race Studies

Racial identity development of mixed race college students

Clemson University
2012
216 pages

Helen Diamond Steele

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that influence mixed race college students’ choice of racial identity. This study also explored whether or not there are any differences among each of the racial identity groups’ perceptions of institutional support for mixed race college students. The theoretical framework of this study was formed by Chickering’s Theory of Psychosocial Identity Development, Wijeyesinghe’s Factor Model of Multiracial Identity, and Renn’s Patterns of Multiracial Identity. The eight research questions that guided this study addressed hypothesized factors that may have a relationship with a mixed race student’s racial identity and students’ perceptions of institutional support for mixed race students. The sample included traditional age college students (18-24 at the time of the survey) who are mixed race (which is defined as having biological parents belonging to different racial groups) and enrolled as full-time students (registered for twelve or more credits) at an institution that was a member of the University System of Georgia. This study employed a survey instrument that included 63 multiple-choice and Likert scale questions and was divided into six sections: (a) racial ancestry, (b) racial identity, (c) physical appearance, (d) cultural attachment, (e) other social identities, and (f) institutional characteristics. The following quantitative methods were employed to analyze the collected data: (a) descriptive statistics, (b) Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test, (c) analysis of variance, (d) multinomial logistic regression, and (e) factor analysis. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are included. Keywords: mixed race, racial identity development.

Order the dissertation here.

A True History Full of Romance: Mixed Marriages and Ethnic Identity in Dutch Art, News Media, and Popular Culture (1883-1955)

Amsterdam University Press
2012-04-02
184 pages
Soft Cover ISBN: 9789089644251

Marga Altena, Historian of Visual Culture

This important study about ethnically mixed marriages in the Netherlands of the 1883-1955 period offers a compelling overview on the nature and experience of ethnicity from a wide range of scholarly perspectives.

Drawing from exhaustive research in the Netherlands, Europe and the Americas, Altena offers illuminating new insights into mixed-marriage families as they were depicted in the arts and in news media; and how the families themselves in turn reacted to, and influenced those images. The author focuses on well-documented individuals and shows how they gained a coherent voice in Dutch culture. Altena attributes to them conscious agency in their own self-presentation, rather than just viewing them as victims of racial prejudice.

A timely contribution to the debate surrounding ethnicity and integration in Dutch society, this work demonstrates how that process was mediated by the various agencies, while placing special emphasis on the marginal groups within central news media as crucial in the opinion making.

Marylander of the Year: Benjamin Todd Jealous [Editorial]

The Baltimore Sun
2013-12-28

Our view: Jealous leaves the NAACP a revitalized and relevant institution that is at the forefront of the social justice struggles of our time

In the spring of 2008, as the prospect that America would elect its first black president became more and more likely, the organization that did as much as any to make that watershed possible had fallen on hard times. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, America’s oldest and best known civil rights group, was in disarray. It’s last president and CEO had abruptly quit, and it had laid off half of its staff to balance the books. Its membership and relevance in what many were heralding as a post-racial America seemed destined to wane, and one of the defining institutions of the 20th century had no sure place in the 21st.

The answer to that challenge was an unlikely one: Benjamin Todd Jealous, a 35-year-old, bi-racial foundation president from California who was born a decade after the civil rights movement’s greatest triumphs. To call his selection controversial would be an understatement. Some saw it not just as risky but as a repudiation of a century of sacrifice by the NAACP’s members.

Five years later, he is leaving the NAACP a changed institution. Its finances are stabilized, its membership is up, its social media presence is robust and its role in American public life is clear and forceful. Mr. Jealous brought energy, vision and focus to an organization in need of all three and showed a new generation that the pursuit of social justice remains a vital cause in these and any times. And if we may be parochial for a moment, he kept its headquarters in Baltimore. We are proud to name him The Baltimore Sun’s 2013 Marylander of the Year…

Read the entire editorial here.

Struck by Lightning? Interracial Intimacy and Racial Justice

Human Rights Quarterly
Volume 25, Number 2, May 2003
pages 528-562
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2003.0017

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

Kristina L. Burrows

Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2001), pp. xii, 271. Cloth, $30.

If true love is like lightning, what can romantic choice have to do with racial justice[?].

I. Introduction

Over the last decade, growing attention has been paid to the mixed race population in the United States. Much of the literature on the subject offers compelling stories of the life experiences of persons with African American and white parents. In addition, the controversy over the proper classification of mixed race people for Census 2000 attracted national attention.

Only recently has legal history scholarship begun to analyze the rich history of the legal regulation of racial mixture in the United States and its modern day repercussions. Breaking important new ground in this emerging field, Rachel Moran’s book Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance represents the first comprehensive review of the intricacies of the law and policy of racial mixture, ambitiously surveying wide-ranging legal terrain from the anti-miscegenation laws to transracial adoption. By tackling a much-neglected topic that is central to a full appreciation of civil rights in the modern United States, Interracial Intimacy deserves attention and will likely serve as an influential guide to future research in the field.

As Interracial Intimacy unravels the law’s efforts to regulate and respond to intermarriage, it offers powerful evidence that race is a social and legal construct, a product of our collective mind rather than an immutable biological fact. But Moran goes well beyond that. She demonstrates how intermarriage is inextricably linked to the quest for racial justice. A central theme of Interracial Intimacy is that the prevailing racial segregation in the United States makes intermarriage far less likely than would be the case in an integrated society. The low rate of interracial relationships is a function of pervasive housing, school, and employment segregation, as well as the lack of racial diversity in higher education. Socioeconomic class disparities reflected in residential and employment patterns factor in as well, implicating the connection between race, class, and marriage.

Put simply, people are less likely to select mates of another race if they rarely meet them. Because Americans of different races continue to live separate daily lives, we should expect that people will continue to marry others of their own race. Moran’s reference to love striking “like lightning” makes love seem all the more romantic. However, as we all know, one’s location can affect whether he or she is hit by lightning. So too, location and geography matter for love and romance. The effect of location on love and romance is one of Interracial Intimacy’s powerful insights. Somewhat ironically, Moran proves that, at one level, the segregationists of the old South were entirely correct: segregation and “race mixing” indeed are—and always have been—deeply interrelated. As Gunnar Myrdal observed in his classic study of race relations in the United States, “[e]very single measure [of segregation] is defended as necessary to block ‘social equality’ which in its turn is held necessary to prevent ‘intermarriage.'”

One can only speculate why serious legal scholarship has failed for so long to analyze the connection between love, intimacy, and racial justice. In part, the failure may stem from the view that intensely private and personal decisions are immune from legal purview. By implicating issues of passion and eroticism, intimacy may appear to be beyond rational analysis. Moran’s book breaks the long silence in legal scholarship on this critically important topic.

Interracial Intimacy also identifies deeply perplexing questions worthy of further exploration. Notably, African Americans marry whites much less frequently than Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Native Americans do. Are these other minorities effectively “white,” or at least “whiter,” than African Americans? One can only wonder about the future of interracial marriage between African Americans and whites and what it portends for racial progress.

Ultimately, Interracial Intimacy leaves open whether optimism or pessimism is justified about black/white intermarriage in the next millennium and its impact on civil rights in the United States. In that way, the book proves…

Chinese in Latin America

H-Soz-u-Kult
Außereuropäische Geschichte
2013-12-13

Dorothea A. L. Martin, Professor of History
Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina

• Delgado, Grace: Making the Chinese Mexican. Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2012. ISBN 978-0-8047-7814-5; 304 S.; € 49,93.
• Look Lai, Walton; Chee-Beng, Tan (Hrsg.): The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers 2010. ISBN 978-900418213-4; 242 S.; € 34,57.
• Schiavone Camacho, Julia Maria: Chinese Mexicans. Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2012. ISBN 978-0-8078-3540-1; 226 S.; € 31,57.

These books join a growing body of literature on the importance of transpacific migration to Latin America. Two monographs deal with Chinese on the U.S. – Mexican borderlands, covering overlapping time periods and with different emphases. The third, edited work, is a reprint of Volume 5 Number 1 of the “Journal of Chinese Overseas” and a well deserved first for that journal. All make reference to the earlier period of the “coolie trade” when both Chinese and South Asians workers came on indentured contracts, but mainly focus on the period after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which severely restricted Chinese immigration into the U.S. and redirected many immigrants to other states in the Americas.

These works enhance our understanding of the rich history of global labor migration. Most readers are familiar with migration from Europe to the Americas but less so with the diasprodic experiences of Chinese mostly from coastal areas of South China. Their cultural, linguistic and racial differences set them apart setting the stage for the anti-Chinese movements especially in difficult economic and political times.

Schiavone Camacho has eight chapters organized into four parts. Chapters 1-4 deal chronologically with the arrival and settlement of Chinese in Northwestern Mexico and then their removal. Initially, they came to Sonora to work in mines and help build railroads. They were followed by others excluded from entry into the U.S. Goods from China helped them win local customers and soon they competed with Mexican retailers to serve not only town residents but to supply goods for mining companies. “Chinos” were subjected to a string of derogatory names in all of the areas of Latin America. In the period of the Mexican Revolution (1910-12) nationalist rhetoric dominated by ideas of race and “mestizaje” left no place for Chinese, especially in Sonora, a hotbed of revolutionary zeal and home to many of Mexico’s post-revolutionary leaders. Chinese who legally married or took local women in common union were especially targeted. Such women were openly insulted as sluts and their children were ostracized. Economic stress of the Great Depression, the author argues, caused anti-Chinese sentiment to rise again as many Mexican male workers were forcefully returned home from the U.S. Chinese were blamed for no jobs or available women for then. Expulsion by force of law and violence made most Chinese flee, taking their wives and children with them. Most returned to China, many with the aid of US Immigration Authorities who held them at the border and paid for their transportation back to China. Others re-migrated to other parts of Latin America.

Chapters 5-8 document the struggle of the Mexican wives and their mixed blood children to retain or create their Chinese-Mexican identities in the context of their husbands’ reverse diaspora. Often, Chinese men already had Chinese wives; Mexican wives and their children struggled. Ties to the Catholic Church helped them organize, but neither Mexico nor China saw them as citizens. Prompted by political changes within both China and Mexico in the late 1930s, repatriation attempts began and continued through the war years, increasing after the Communist victory in 1949 and even into the 1960s. Personal stories of women’s struggles in this process give depth to the social and political reality women faced.

Grace Pena Delgado covers similar issues, but mainly from the vantage point across the U.S./Mexican border. The book has six chapters with an insightful introduction that addresses and defines key concepts such as “borderlands” and “fronterizos” and points out the failure of both Mexican and U.S. historians to include the lived experiences of Chinese in this region. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the arrival and establishment of Chinese within the border regions. Initially, new arrivals hoped to use the fluid border to thwart the Chinese Exclusion Act. As security along the Arizona – Sonora border increased, the Mexican side became a settlement area. Nevertheless, extended family and old-country regional connections kept cross border ties strong. Claims to Mexican citizenship also allowed back and forth movements. Chapter 3 chronicles the increased crack-down on illegal Chinese entry into the U.S. in the early 20th century, noting that the Canadian border was also a path for illegal entry.

Chapters 4-6 explore the dynamics of Mexican anti-Chinese movements demonizing Chinese as racial polluters, after Porfirian liberalism yielded to the revolutionary nationalism of 1911-12. Sonora State prohibitions on marriage and loss of citizenship for women who married made the issue a moral as well as political one. Delgado focuses on legal measures used in conjunction with the anti-Chinese rhetoric of politicians, the press and businessmen on both sides of the border. A brief lull in the 1920s ended abruptly in the 1930s as Sonorans began to empty their territory of Chinese. Fleeing across the border resulted in deportation to China and led to the “unmaking” of Chinese Mexicans in border region.

The third book contains a short introduction by Look Lai and eight chapters grouped into three parts. Edward Slack, Jr.’s article constitutes Part I, “The Early Colonial Period”. Slack provides an interesting overview of the earliest Chinese movements into Mexico, when New Spain’s silver was used to purchase Chinese products first from Chinese traders in Manila then later directly from agents in South China. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Slack speculates that over 100,000 Asians [all called “chinos”] came to Mexico as immigrants or sailors. Before the mid-19th century, most of these migrants were in the coastal areas around Acapulco or Veracruz or around Mexico City, Puebla and other population centers in the south. These male migrants married into the indigenous or African populations and over time became part of the lower caste in the colonial social hierarchy even as they “Sinofied New Spain.” Chinese textiles, porcelains, and architectural influences were often of higher quality and volume than what reached Europe…

Read the entire review of the books here.

The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean

Brill
2010
256 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9789004182134
E-ISBN: 9789004193345

Edited by:

Walton Look Lai, Professor of Anthropology
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Chee-Beng Tan, former Lecturer in History
University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago

The Chinese migration to the Latin America/Caribbean region is an understudied dimension of the Asian American experience. There are three distinct periods in the history of this migration: the early colonial period (pre-19th century), when the profitable three-century trade connection between Manila and Acapulco led to the first Asian migrations to Mexico and Peru; the classic migration period (19th to early twentieth centuries), marked by the coolie trade known to Chinese diaspora studies; and the renewed immigration of the late 20th century to the present. Written by specialists on the Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, this book tells the story of Asian migration to the Americas and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the Chinese in this important part of the world.

Contents

• Introduction: The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean / Walton Look Lai
• PART I: THE EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD
  • Chapter One Sinifying New Spain: Cathay’s Influence on Colonial Mexico via the Nao de China / Edward R. Slack, Jr.
• PART II: THE CLASSIC MIGRATIONS
  • Chapter Two Asian Diasporas and Tropical Migration in the Age of Empire: A Comparative Overview / Walton Look Lai
  • Chapter Three Indispensable Enemy or Convenient Scapegoat? A Critical Examination of Sinophobia in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1870s to 1930s / Evelyn Hu-DeHart
  • Chapter Four The Chinese of Central America: Diverse Beginnings, Common Achievements / St. John Robinson
  • Chapter Five Report: Archives of Biography and History in the God of Luck: A Conversation with Ruthanne Lum McCunn / Lisa Yun
• PART III: OLD MIGRANTS, NEW IMMIGRATION
  • Chapter Six Tusans (tusheng) and the Changing Chinese Community in Peru / Isabelle Lausent-Herrera
  • Chapter Seven Old Migrants, New Immigration and Anti-Chinese Discourse in Suriname / Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat
  • Chapter Eight The Revitalization of Havana’s Chinatown: Invoking Chinese Cuban History / Kathleen López

The 10 Best Black Books of 2013 (Non-Fiction)

The AFRO
2013-12-24

Kam Williams, Special to the AFRO

The 10 Best Black Books of 2013 (Non-Fiction)

1. (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race Edited by Yaba Blay, Ph.D. with photography by Noelle Theard
2. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
3. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
4. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Dr. Donald Yacovone…

Read the entire list here.

Biracial Girls Will Be Fine If Their Dolls Don’t Look Like Them

The Root
2013-12-27

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Race Manners: A rainbow of toys is great, but how kids live is much more important than how they play.

“Hello. I’m wondering if you can offer some broad guidance before I head out to the malls for Christmas shopping. I have two beautiful nieces in a very diverse, melting pot family. My sisters and I are white, and one has a daughter who is half-Japanese, and my younger sister’s husband is half-African American. The two little ones are 4 and 6. Both are very much in the girly-girl phase, pink, purple, dolls, etc. and also great friends.

“I’m well aware that there are now, thankfully, dolls in many different ethnicities and even with different hair textures. But what’s the right choice for these two? The 4-year-old is Japanese and Caucasian but has light brown hair and essentially looks more like brunette white dolls. The 6-year-old who is half African American has fair skin and long dark hair and probably looks more like white dolls than African-American dolls. If I purchase dolls for them, should they receive the ones that reflect their nonwhite ethnicity or the way they look, or does it matter if they are at this point unaware of any color-related differences?” —Shopping Sensitively

Well, Christmas is over, but I decided to answer this anyway. After all, the relationship between little girls of color and dolls is by no means limited to the holiday season.

It’s why people were so ecstatic (seriously, what took so long?) when Natural Girls United’s line of dolls with realistic black hair came out and why it was so moving when the mom behind Chocolate Hair/Vanilla Care styled this doll’s hair so its braids (as well as its complexion and outfit) would match her daughter’s exactly.

Generally speaking, it sucks if little girls can’t access dolls that look like what they see in the mirror (that extends beyond race to body shape and size, etc). And when they can, everyone is happy. I think we can all agree on that.

Of course, when it comes to color, hair and background matching, your situation is extra complicated because you’re dealing with kids whose identity is up in the air (it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll see themselves 10 years from now when America’s demographics have changed even more), and who might not look anything like what a factory-made plastic representation of their particular racial mixtures would, even if those existed.

I just read—and can’t stop thinking about—Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop, which explores the way historical definitions of race help shape contemporary identities through a collection of individual stories and accompanying photos. Let’s just say there’s a lot of variation and very little predictability when it comes to people’s actual skin and hair color and how they identify. A doll manufacturer could spend the rest of the year producing all of the variations of complexion and features and textures chronicled in the project, and there would still be people who couldn’t find reflections of themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Why I see myself as a daughter of the Diaspora rather than mixed-race

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-02-12

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

Why this ‘mixed’ girl rejects the ‘mixed-race’ label.

There is nothing like hearing the arguments of members of the multiracial movement and certain ‘mixed-race’ activists to make me want to distance myself from them as much as possible and exclusively identify as black! However, after all these years, I refuse to be pushed into making essentialist identity choices.

‘Mixed-race’ has been both pathologized and celebrated across time and space, often simultaneously.  Whether we are being positioned as the halfcaste underclass—Waynetta Slob’s ‘brown babies,’ endemic of a broken Britain populated by brown-skinned, hooded feral youth, or we are cast in the role as mixed-race messiahs; genetically superior, physically fitter, inheritors of a bright new, beautiful brown post-racial future—like all non-white people, we continue to be racialised.

Both constructions assign mixed race people a specific and limited identity based on their ‘race’, and continue the work of 18th century scientific racism ascribing particular physical and mental attributes to people based on so called racial difference. Further, the myth of a new, beautiful mixed race generation as the epitome of liberal, cool, race-less Britain, masks enduring structural racism and inequalities, which will be allowed to continue unchecked if we are seduced by it.

The media and social studies join forces to perpetuate a damaging and a-historical construction of being ‘mixed-race’, where mixedness is presented as something new. But black and white people have been having children since their first encounters with each other. This is a process that has been in place since the conquests of the Americas at least. The populations of the New World are largely mixed-race populations. Although they are popularly categorised as black or white, their origins are heterogeneous. In such a context, it seems nonsensical to categorise the child of one black Caribbean parent and one white European parent as suddenly and magically ‘mixed-race’, yet we continue to do so…

Read the entire article here.

“I’m an African American,” he said. “But I am somebody, like many African Americans, who has all kinds of stuff in him”…

…“But I self-identify as African American. That’s how I am treated and that’s how I am viewed and I’m proud of it.” —Barack Obama

Jason Horowitz, “Obama: I’m Not Interested in Talking About Race in the Abstract,” The New York Observer, November 26, 2007. http://observer.com/2007/11/obama-im-not-interested-in-talking-about-race-in-the-abstract