Mixed Race Studies

Looking Black or Looking Back? Using Phenotype and Ancestry to Make Racial Categorizations

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Available online: 2014-12-01
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2014.11.011

Allison L. Skinner
Department of Psychology
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Gandalf Nicolas
Department of Psychology
College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

Highlights

• We examine effects of racial ancestry and phenotypicality on race categorization.
• Both factors influence categorization, but phenotipicality effects are larger.
• Low Black phenotypicality targets were perceived as warmer and more competent.
• Bias against low Black phenotypicality targets was perceived as less discriminatory.
• All biracial targets were categorized as biracial.

When it comes to the racial categorization of biracial individuals, do people look at phenotypicality (i.e., a race consistent appearance) for clues, or do they look back at racial ancestry? We manipulated racial ancestry and racial phenotypicality (using morphed photos) to investigate their influence on race categorizations. Results indicated that while ancestry and phenotypicality information both influenced deliberate racial categorization, phenotypicality had a substantially larger effect. We also investigated how these factors influenced perceptions of warmth and competence, and racial discrimination. We found that Black-White biracials with low Black phenotypicality were perceived as warmer and more competent than biracial targets with moderate and high Black phenotypicality. Moreover, given identical instances of racially discriminatory treatment, low Black racial phenotypicality targets were significantly less likely to be perceived as victims of racial discrimination. Our findings shed light on how ancestry and phenotype influence perceptions of race and real world social judgments such as perceptions of discrimination. Previous studies have shown that low minority ancestry biracials are presumed to have experienced less discrimination, our findings indicate that racial cues impact perceptions of discrimination even in incidences of known racial discrimination.

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Being a White Latina: A Reflection on Racial And Ethnic Identities

The Huffington Post
Latino Voices
2014-12-01

Nicholle Lamartina Palacios, Writer, activist, and community organizer

We live in a country where race is a dichotomy and people are literally separated into categories of black and white — but human identities are not that simple. When speaking about my own racial identity, it is impossible not to also talk about my ethnic identity. These two concepts go hand-in-hand. How one regards themselves ethnically and the cultural background that one has grown up with, will inevitably shape the way one sees themselves through a racial lens; it will also affect the way they are perceived from the outside. When talking about my own racial identity I cannot just speak about the color of my skin nor the box I check off on applications. Not only would that would be an injustice to myself, but it would also negate the reality of the complexities and nuances that arise when we try to essentialize and simplify people’s ethnological narratives.

My racial and ethnic identification have been majorly affected by the fact that I grew up in New York City, “the central diasporic location for [many] transnational communities historically and in our times” according to scholar Juan Flores, the director of Latino Studies at NYU. I was born and raised in Queens to an Argentine mother and an Italian-American father, but spent my formative years with my grandmother and mother in a Spanish speaking home. Growing up in Queens, the most diverse borough of New York, almost every single one of my friends was either an immigrant or the child of immigrant parents. Because of the wide variety of races and ethnicities, while living in Queens “where are you from?,” “what’s your nationality?,” and “what are you?” are common questions to receive and to ask starting at a very young age. Even if the person’s nationality is American and they were born in the States, they automatically connect themselves to their parent’s or grandparent’s countries, since this is what is expected. I have never heard anyone say “I am American” even if they technically were…

…Although I certainly cannot complain about being in a position of privilege when it comes to my skin color and Anglo features, I have realized it has shaped the way in which I connect to my latinidad and to the community at large. After a few Latino studies courses, I became aware that in order to be regarded as “Latina” I have to assert my latinidad and constantly prove it — either through my use of Spanish, my ability to dance to Latin dances, or by explaining my family history. This contrasts greatly with the lived experiences of many other Latinos, especially those of color…

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Photography in Economies of Demonstration: The Idea of the Jews as a Mixed-Race People

Jewish Social Studies
Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 2013
pages 150-183
DOI: 10.1353/jss.2013.0015

Amos Morris-Reich, Director of the Bucerius Institute
Department of Jewish History
University of Haifa, Israel

Photographs played an important role in the development of the idea of the Jews as a mixed-race people. This article tracks the trajectory of this idea from the 1880s, when it was first introduced by the liberal Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist Felix von Luschan, through the works of American Jewish physician Maurice Fishberg and German Jewish linguist Sigmund Feist, to its appropriation and inversion by the prominent Nazi theoretician of race Hans F. K. Günther in the 1920s. By tracing the circulation of one photograph, analyzing the roles of photographs in argumentation, comparing their status with other types of empirical sources, and arguing that the key to their analysis is performative, pertaining to the relationships photographs form, I argue for the essential contingency of ideas that in retrospect have been identified as fundamental to antisemitic arguments.