Mixed Race Studies

Priming White identity elicits stereotype boost for biracial Black-White individuals

Group Processes Intergroup Relations
Volume 18, Number 6 (November 2015)
pages 778-787
DOI: 10.1177/1368430215570504

Sarah E. Gaither, Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Jessica D. Remedios, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Jennifer R. Schultz
Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Samuel R. Sommers, Associate Professor of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Psychological threat experienced by students of negatively stereotyped groups impairs test performance. However, stereotype boost can also occur if a positively stereotyped identity is made salient. Biracial individuals, whose racial identities may be associated with both negative and positive testing abilities, have not been examined in this context. Sixty-four biracial Black-White individuals wrote about either their Black or White identity or a neutral topic and completed a verbal Graduate Record Examination (GRE) examination described as diagnostic of their abilities. White-primed participants performed significantly better than both Black-primed and control participants. Thus, biracial Black-White individuals experience stereotype boost only when their White identity is made salient.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial kids will soon have a more colorful toy set for pretend play

The Chicago Tribune
2015-09-23

Sadé Carpenter

The MyFamilyBuilders toy set includes 48 magnetic wooden pieces that snap together. (MyFamilyBuilders)

When Ez Karpf went shopping for a gift for his friends’ children, he thought it would be easy to find a toy set that represented their multiracial family. In the U.S. — Karpf is from Argentina — there are products for everyone, or so he thought.

He quickly realized the store aisles were not overflowing with the toys he hoped to buy. He noticed not only a lack of racial diversity, but also the absence of toys portraying same-sex parents and single-parent households.

“A lot of kids are not reflected in today’s toys; a lot of families are not reflected in today’s toys,” Karpf said. “It’s much easier to learn not to be biased about differences than to unlearn that.”…

…A product developer/designer, Karpf assembled a group that included an education specialist, child psychologist, illustrator and tech entrepreneur to address the lack of diversity in toys. Together, they created MyFamilyBuilders.

“When kids don’t see themselves reflected in toys they play with every day, basically this is like having no mirror of themselves,” Karpf said.

The MyFamilyBuilders toy set includes 48 magnetic wooden block pieces children 3 and up can use to customize their playtime experience. It also includes 25 cards for five different games for children 5 and up. The goal is for parents to join the playing process and create teachable moments for their kids…

Read the entire article here.

To consider the life of Korla Pandit—and that’s what I will call him because that is who he became—is to consider the weight of wearing a mask for 50 years. It is to grasp the fear of exposure, of a revelation that would have killed his career. One slip and he would have gone from being a mirror of white America’s mania for things “exotic” to somebody white America didn’t want to face. He would have been revealed as a fraud, and his fans would have never forgiven him. It is to recognize how he had to cut himself off from a black community that he’d grown up in, from a culture that had shaped the musical skills, and the survival skills, that he drew on for the rest of his life.

RJ Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2001, 76. https://books.google.com/books?id=aF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA73#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Positioning Multiraciality in Cyberspace: Treatment of Multiracial Daters in an Online Dating Website

American Sociological Review
Volume 80, Number 4 (August 2015)
pages 764-788
DOI: 10.1177/0003122415591268

Celeste Vaughan Curington
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Ken-Hou Lin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin

Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Professor of Sociology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The U.S. multiracial population has grown substantially in the past decades, yet little is known about how these individuals are positioned in the racial hierarchies of the dating market. Using data from one of the largest dating websites in the United States, we examine how monoracial daters respond to initial messages sent by multiracial daters with various White/non-White racial and ethnic makeups. We test four different theories: hypodescent, multiracial in-betweenness, White equivalence, and what we call a multiracial dividend effect. We find no evidence for the operation of hypodescent. Asian-White daters, in particular, are afforded a heightened status, and Black-White multiracials are treated as an in-between group. For a few specific multiracial gender groups, we find evidence for a dividend effect, where multiracial men and women are preferred above all other groups, including Whites.

Read or purchase the article here.

Guadalupe and the Castas: The Power of a Singular Colonial Mexican Painting

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
Volume 31, Number 2
pages 218-247
DOI: 10.1525/mex.2015.31.2.218

Sarah Cline, Research Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

A mid-eighteenth-century casta painting by Luis de Mena uniquely unites the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and casta (mixed-race) groupings, along with scenes of everyday life in Mexico, and the natural abundance of New Spain. Reproduced multiple times, the painting has not been systematically analyzed. This article explores individual elements in their colonial context and the potential meanings of the painting in the modern era.

Una pintura de Luis de Mena sobre las castas, de mediados del siglo xviii, reúne de manera singular la imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, los agrupamientos de castas y escenas de la vida cotidiana en México, junto con la abundancia natural de Nueva España. Aunque reproducida en múltiples ocasiones, la pintura no ha sido analizada sistemáticamente. Este artículo explora sus elementos individuales en el contexto colonial y los significados potenciales de la pintura en la época moderna.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Many Faces of Korla Pandit

Los Angeles Magazine
June 2001
pages 73-77, 146-151

RJ Smith, Senior Editor

He was a handsome holy man, an organ virtuoso, a star from the East. Korla Pandit mesmerized generations–while keeping a secret until his dying day

Korla Pandit wandered the West, from big cities to hamlets, throughout his life. Wherever he went, he made the ground beneath his feet seem like the center of a vast turning wheel. However much he was on the move, he let those surrounding him feel they were the ones in motion. People—intersting, glamorous, bizarre people—came to him hoping he’d show them how to get to where he so blissfully stood. They wanted to feel his peace.

He was in his mid seventies when I met him seven years ago. We talked at a coffee shop that no longer exists, in what was the first of many conversations. I was interviewing him about the lounge music revival, which had led to a modest boost in the old man’s career. Soon I became one more neophyte snared by his beatific smile, his mysterious eyes, his strange stories of séances with Marilyn Monroe and how Liberace had stolen his very soul. When you got near Korla Pandit, he took you to some synthetic place.

He came, he explained, from halfway around the world. He had a privileged childhood in New Delhi, where his father, a Brahman, was a government bureaucrat and friend of Gandhi’s. His mother mas a French opera singer. Korla was playing the piano at the age of two; by five he was a prodigy. able to perform complicated pieces after hearing them only once. He studied in Europe, then came to the United States when he was 12. and later attended the University of Chicago.

As Korla prepared to leave his family behind and begin the life of a professional musician on the stages of the West, his father gave him a warning: “Son. get your education first. Show business is a dangerous world. You’re a hero today and a bum tomorrow.” In recounting the story Korla would pause and then add, “Well, he sure knew what he was talking about.” Korla came anyway, and he conquered the West, or at least the West Coast, and especially Los Angeles. His TV show, Adventures in Music with Korla Pandit, was the first all-music show on television, and Korla was one of the first stars of the medium.

As it happened, I attended the last performance Korla ever gave. It was in 1998 in San Francisco, at a lounge renovated to 1950s vintage called Bimbo’s. There were paintings of clowns, and the carpet, banquettes. and walls were as red as tenderloin. A mermaid swam in a large aquarium over the bar. Bimbo’s was a lot like Korla himself. an exemplar of a distant time that once embodied suave sexuality but now registered as camp…

…There was a joke made often in the vicinity of Korla, passed along by any who spent time with him. Everybody who told it seemed to think they were the first to make the crack. The thing about Korla, we’d say, was that while he never spoke on his television show, in person he was hard put to stay quiet. Korla loved to talk, about India and his past and the meaning of life. But for all the talking he did, he kept a secret, one that he protected all his life. Korla Pandit wasn’t his real name, and he wasn’t Indian at all. He was African American…

Read the entire article here.

Race: An Introduction

Cambridge University Press
August 2015
272 pages
13 b/w illus. 4 tables
245 x 190 x 12 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107034112
Paperback ISBN: 9781107652286

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Taking a comparative approach, this textbook is a concise introduction to race. Illustrated with detailed examples from around the world, it is organised into two parts. Part One explores the historical changes in ideas about race from the ancient world to the present day, in different corners of the globe. Part Two outlines ways in which racial difference and inequality are perceived and enacted in selected regions of the world. Examining how humans have used ideas of physical appearance, heredity and behaviour as criteria for categorising others, the text guides students through provocative questions such as: what is race? Does studying race reinforce racism? Does a colour-blind approach dismantle, or merely mask, racism? How does biology feed into concepts of race? Numerous case studies, photos, figures and tables help students to appreciate the different meanings of race in varied contexts, and end-of-chapter research tasks provide further support for student learning.

• Combines a broad historical overview (from the ancient world to the present day) with wide geographical and comparative coverage to show that race means different things in different contexts
• Detailed historical and ethnographic material in textboxes, figures, photos and tables demonstrates the operation of race in everyday life
• Offers an up-to-date, critical overview of a fast-changing field

Contents

• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Knowing ‘race’
  • 1.1 Chronology of race
  • 1.2 Is race defined by appearance, biology and nature?
  • 1.3 Culture, appearance and biology revisited
  • 1.4 Race, comparatively and historically
  • 1.5 Comparisons
  • 1.6 Race in the history of Western modernity
  • Conclusion: so what is race?
  • Further research
• Part I race in time
  • 2 Early approaches to understanding human variation
    • 2.1 Nature and culture
    • 2.2 Ancient Greece and Rome
    • 2.3 Medieval and early modern Europe
    • 2.4 New World colonisation
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 3 From Enlightenment to eugenics
    • 3.1 Transitions
    • 3.2 Changing racial theories
    • 3.3 The spread of racial theory: nation, class, gender and religion
    • 3.4 Nature, culture and race
    • 3.5 Black reaction
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 4 Biology, culture and genomics
    • 4.1 Darwin (again), genetics and the concept of population
    • 4.2 Boas and the separation of biology and culture
    • 4.3 Nazism, World War II and decolonisation
    • 4.4 UNESCO and after
    • 4.5 The persistence of race in science
    • 4.6 Race and IQ
    • 4.7 Race and sport
    • 4.8 Race, genomics and medicine: does race have a genetic basis?
    • 4.9 Race, genomics and medicine: racialising populations
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 5 Race in the era of cultural racism: politics and the everyday
    • 5.1 Introduction
    • 5.2 The institutional presence of race
    • 5.3 Race, nature and biology in the everyday world of culture
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
• Part II Race in practice
  • 6 Latin America: mixture and racism
    • 6.1 Introduction
    • 6.2 Latin America and mestizaje
    • 6.3 Colombia: racial discrimination and social movements
    • 6.4 Structural disadvantage, region and mestizaje: lessons from Colombia
    • 6.5 Brazil: variations on a theme
    • 6.6 Guatemala: racial ambivalence
    • 6.7 Performing and embodying race in the Andes
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 7 The United States and South Africa: segregation and desegregation
    • 7.1 Changing US demographics
    • 7.2 Caste and class in segregated Southern towns
    • 7.3 Black reaction and ‘desegregation’
    • 7.4 Segregation in practice: ‘the ghetto’
    • 7.5 Latinos and brownness
    • 7.6 South Africa
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 8 Race in Europe: immigration and nation
    • 8.1 European histories of race
    • 8.2 Issues in post-colonial migration in Europe
    • 8.3 White Britons in Leicestershire
    • 8.4 Asian Leicester
    • 8.5 The Asian gang in London
    • 8.6 Geographies of race in black Liverpool
    • 8.7 Algerians in France
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 9 Conclusion
    • 9.1 Theorising race
    • 9.2 Globalising race
    • 9.3 The future of race
  • References
  • Index

Color film was built for white people. Here’s what it did to dark skin

Vox
2015-09-18

Estelle Caswell

The biased film was fixed in the 1990s, so why do so many photos still distort darker skin?

For decades, the color film available to consumers was built for white people. The chemicals coating the film simply weren’t adequate to capture a diversity of darker skin tones. And the photo labs established in the 1940s and 50s even used an image of a white woman, called a Shirley card, to calibrate the colors for printing:

Concordia University professor Lorna Roth has researched the evolution of skin tone imaging. She explained in a 2009 paper how the older technology distorted the appearance of black subjects:

Problems for the African-American community, for example, have included reproduction of facial images without details, lighting challenges, and ashen-looking facial skin colours contrasted strikingly with the whites of eyes and teeth.

How this would affect non-white people seemingly didn’t occur to those who designed and operated the photo systems. In an essay for Buzzfeed, writer and photographer Syreeta McFadden described growing up with film that couldn’t record her actual appearance:

The inconsistencies were so glaring that for a while, I thought it was impossible to get a decent picture of me that captured my likeness. I began to retreat from situations involving group photos. And sure, many of us are fickle about what makes a good portrait. But it seemed the technology was stacked against me. I only knew, though I didn’t understand why, that the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera — the film — got your likeness right.

Many of the technological biases have since been corrected (though, not all of them, as explained in the video above). Still, we often see controversies about the misrepresentation of non-white subjects in magazines and advertisements. What are we to make of the fact that these images routinely lighten the skin of women of color?…

Read the entire article here.

Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity

Canadian Journal of Communication
Volume 34, Number 1 (2009)
pages 111-136

Lorna Roth, Professor of Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblematic “Shirley” norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some prototypical changes in the field. The author contextualizes the history of these changes using three theoretical categories: the ‘technological unconscious’ (Vaccari, 1981), ‘dysconsciousness’ (King, 2001), and an original concept of ‘cognitive equity,’ which is proposed as an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic range of skin tones into image technologies, products, and emergent practices in the visual industries.

Jusqu’à récemment, en raison d’un préjugé favorisant la peau claire dans les films couleurs et dans la conception des caméras numériques, la reproduction des couleurs de peaux non-caucasiennes a été très déficiente, exigeant le développement de diverses techniques de compensation et d’amélioration. Utilisant la carte de référence normative « Shirley » comme métaphore pour refléter l’évolution des rapports entre les races et leurs pratiques esthétiques, cet essai analyse les processus d’ajustement de la couleur dans les industries de la représentation visuelle et identifie certains prototypes de changements dans le domaine. L’auteur situe ces changements historiquement en se rapportant à trois concepts théoriques : « l’inconscient technologique » (Vaccari, 1981), la « dysconscience » (« dysconsciousness » – King, 2001), et un concept original, « l’équité cognitive », proposé comme stratégie intelligente pour créer et promouvoir l’équité en inscrivant un plus grand éventail de couleurs de peau dans les technologies et produits de l’image et dans les pratiques émergeantes des industries visuelles.

Read the entire article here.

Raising a Biracial Child as a Mother of Color

The Atlantic
2015-09-19

Lara N. Dotson-Renta

A mother’s reflection on her own childhood and that of her biracial child—and the inevitable differences of the two.

A few months ago, I was walking home from the bus stop with my eldest daughter during the last week of kindergarten. She was lagging behind as usual, picking up sticks and shiny rocks, when she casually asked, “Mama, are the kids with browner skin more trouble? Why can some of them not read too well? Why do some people think Spanish is not good?”

In that moment, the heart that lives in my stomach jumped, and a mild nausea set in. At six years old, my now first-grade daughter is privileged, more than she understands, in ways that are painful and complicated for me to discern as both a highly educated, upper-middle-class parent, and as a woman of color who did not start out with such advantages.

…My daughter is half white, has a non-Latino last name, and navigates a space in between, of mixed heritage and lineage. She is frequently complemented on how “beautifully tanned” her skin is in the winter. When I say we speak Spanish in the home and our family is together, we are complimented on our efforts to make her bilingual. But, when I am out alone with my two daughters, the youngest yet too little to notice, we are looked askance at for not using English. Sometimes at the park I am mistakenly assumed to be their nanny, suddenly keenly aware of how the sun catches the blond streaks in their hair. It is strange that language can stake so many claims; so often are my children presumed not to be my own…

Read the entire article here.