Mixed Race Studies

Overall, I understand the feeling of need to tell our own personalised story about our ‘mixed-race’ identity, but we need to be thinking a lot harder about how we communicate these issues and how they should be attentive to intersectional specificities as well entangled proximities to whiteness.

Chantelle Lewis, “Please can we stop talking about ‘mixed-race’ identity (on its own)?” Discover Society, August 23, 2019. https://discoversociety.org/2019/08/23/please-can-we-stop-talking-about-mixed-race-identity-on-its-own/.

The UC [University of California] system needs to allow mixed students to be fully seen through their statistics. It might be hard for the UC system to find a way to record the specific ethnicities that mixed-race students identify with. But it’s a complicated issue worth tackling because as an institution that prides itself on diversity, the UC system must ensure each of its students is validated for all of their identities. UC Berkeley can, and should, take initiative to pioneer this change.

Genevieve Xia Ye Slosberg, “UC Berkeley must redesign data practices to give visibility to mixed-race students,” The Daily Californian, August 22, 2019. https://www.dailycal.org/2019/08/22/uc-berkeley-must-redesign-data-practices-to-give-visibility-to-mixed-race-students/.

Assessing Multiracial Ethnic Identity Status and Mental Health in Hawaiʻi

University of Hawai’i at Manoa
April 2019
104 pages

David A. Stupplebeen

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PUBLIC HEALTH

The multiracial population, or people who identify as two or more races, is one of the fastest growing segments of the population nationally, and about one-quarter of people in Hawai‘i are multiracial. How multiracial people identify racially or ethnically has been explored by researchers for nearly 100 years. Many theories developed during this time suggest that multiracial people develop an identity in a linear fashion, though others contend that ethnic and racial identity is situational and in reaction to a number different factors, ranging from individual-level factors like skin color to policy-level factors related to data collection. In addition, ethnic and racial identity have a demonstrated relationship with self-esteem and mental health outcomes. However, much of this research has been conducted on the continental United States. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the relationship between ethnic and racial identity and mental health across the lifespan in Hawaiʻi.

Study 1: In the first study, the psychometric properties of the Multiracial-Heritage Awareness and Personal Affiliation scale (M-HAPA), which measures identity status, was tested with a cohort of multiracial Hawaiʻi-based adolescents. After iterative exploratory factor analyses and confirmatory factor analysis, this study found that the cohort endorsed five different identity statuses.

Study 2: The second study examined the relationship between identity status, self-esteem, and depression via structural equation modeling. This study found a highly significant relationship between identity status, self-esteem and depression, and that identity status and self-esteem mediated one another.

Study 3: A qualitative study that employed a timeline method examined the relationship between ecological factors that affect identity status and mental health across time in a sample of multi-racial adults in Hawai‘i. Thematic results from this study reflected the racism and health model and common factors across the lifespan that affect identity and mental health. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate the relationship between ethnic identity and mental health for multiracial individuals across the life course in Hawaiʻi. Implications for public health practice, educators, and mental health practitioners include considerations for multiracial identity status in culturally grounded interventions, shifting practice to include cultural humility, and supporting multiracial individuals in their identity development through increased practitioner awareness of multiracial identity issues.

Read the entire dissertation here.

UC Berkeley must redesign data practices to give visibility to mixed-race students

The Daily Californian
Berkeley, California
2019-08-22

Genevieve Xia Ye Slosberg | Staff

Every mixed-race person is familiar with this moment — you fill out some sort of form, and it asks for your race. You check one of them, and then when you attempt to check another, it either unchecks the first or tells you you are unable to select more than one. So you begrudgingly either choose just one or click “Other.”

This dilemma relates to a common complaint of multiracial individuals — being forced to “choose a side,” as if one of our races should automatically carry more weight than others. And in data collection and aggregation, choosing a side becomes ever more important, as it could determine resource allocation for diversity and inclusion work.

Diversity and inclusion is trending in higher education at the moment. But it is difficult to envision being inclusive of a group as diverse as multiracial students when race data collection hardly recognizes our existence…

Read the entire article here.

How Slavery Changed the DNA of African Americans

Pacific Standard
2016-07-19

Michael White, Assistant Professor of Genetics
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

(Photo: John-christopher-bowers/Flickr)

Widespread sexual exploitation before the Civil War strongly influenced the genetic make-up of essentially all African Americans alive today.

Our genetic make-up is the result of history. Historical events that influenced the patterns of migration and mating among our ancestors are reflected in our DNA — in our genetic relationships with each other and in our genetic risks for disease. This means that, to understand how genes affect our biology, geneticists often find it important to tease out how historical drivers of demographic change shaped present-day genetics.

Understanding the connection between history and DNA is especially important for African Americans, because slavery and discrimination caused profound and relatively rapid demographic change. A new study now offers a very broad look at African-American genetic history and shows how the DNA of present-day African Americans reflects their troubled history…

Read the entire article here.

Aaron Burr — villain of ‘Hamilton’ — had a secret family of color, new research shows

Retropolis
The Washington Post
2019-08-24

Hannah Natanson

A depiction of the duel between then-Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken, N.J., in 1804. The fight would end Hamilton’s life and forever soil Burr’s reputation. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

The vice president is best known for killing rival Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel. But he was also a notorious rake, historians say.

Within a week of her arrival at Princeton University, Sherri Burr received a puzzling phone call.

The caller, another student, said Sherri was invited to a Burr family meeting — “Burr” as in Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States and villain of “Hamilton,” the astronomically popular musical. Aaron Burr’s father co-founded Princeton, the caller told her, so all descendants who attend the school are summoned to regular gatherings.

“I took a look down at my brown skin and thought, ‘Well, that doesn’t apply to me,’ ” said Sherri Burr, who was getting her graduate degree from Princeton. “So I never went.”…

Read the entire article here.

Investigating Identity

City Scene
Columbus, Ohio
2013-04-02

Cindy Gaillard

Exploration of womanhood inspires painter

To this day, a family secret has shaped Jesse Chandler’s work.

Her mother, Carlene Bochino, was African-American, but passed for white. It was the early 1960s and the stakes were high.

The secret was so buried that rumors and whispers swirled around Chandler’s home life, but the truth was never clear.

“She looked like Lena Horne,” says Chandler. “I missed it. I don’t know how I missed it.”…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Campus Professionals’ Experiences with Racial Authenticity

Equity & Excellence in Education
Published online: 2019-08-02
DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2019.1631232

Jessica C. Harris, Assistant Professor of Higher Education and Organizational Change
University of California, Los Angeles

Utilizing critical Multiracial theory, this study explores how Multiracial campus professionals’ experiences with racial authenticity influence their work in postsecondary contexts. Three themes were generated from 24 Multiracial campus professionals’ narratives, including encountering racial authenticity tests, navigating the authenticity trap, and Black Lives Matter and professionals’ internalization of racial authenticity tests. This study explores how Multiracial professionals’ experiences with racial authenticity often constrain their ability to foster inclusion and educational equity on campus and mediates their connections with students and colleagues.

Read or purchase the article here.

Alternate lives: Korean orphans’ quests for answersAlternate lives: Korean orphans’ quests for answers

France 24
2019-08-23

Seoul (AFP)

On a summer’s day in 1985 a seven-year-old boy sat alone at a crowded bus station in Seoul, sobbing as he waited desperately for his mother to return.

Jo Youn-hwan was wearing a baseball uniform that his mother had bought him a few days before — the only gift she had ever given him.

She told him to wait for her before leaving him at the terminal. So he did, increasingly terrified as day turned to dusk.

“I’ll be a really good kid if only she chooses to return,” he promised himself, over and over again. “I’ll be a really, really good kid.”

She never did…

…International adoption from South Korea began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race children, born to local mothers and American GI fathers, from a country that emphasized ethnic homogeneity.

More recently the main driver has been babies born to unmarried women, who still face ostracism in a patriarchal society, and according to historians, are often forced to give up their children.

Most children remain institutionalised till adulthood as many South Koreans are reluctant to adopt. The country has sent some 180,000 children overseas over the years, mostly to the US…

Read the entire article here.

Jackie Kay on putting her adoption on stage – and getting a pay rise for her successor

The Guardian
2019-08-07

Peter Ross

‘I think it’s really scandalous to pay your national poet five grand’ … Kay in Glasgow. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

When Scotland’s national poet travelled to Nigeria to ask her birth father if he ever thought of her, he said no. Does it hurt to put this on stage? And should the next ‘makar’ be on £30,000?

Before Jackie Kay was a writer, she was a character. “When you’re adopted,” she explains over lunch in a Glasgow cafe, “you come with a story.” Her adoptive mother Helen – fascinated by her possible origins – encouraged young Kay to speculate about her birth parents. It was known that her father was Nigerian, her mother a white woman from the Scottish Highlands. Were they, perhaps, torn apart by racial prejudice in 1960s Scotland?

There was tragic romance to that idea, and a fairytale quality in the notion that Kay, offspring of forbidden love, should come to live with John and Helen, two people who had plenty of love – not to mention songs and stories – to share. Little wonder that Kay has come to think of herself as a creature not only of genetics but of the imagination. As Scotland’s national poet writes in her beautiful memoir Red Dust Road, she is “part fable, part porridge”.

Red Dust Road, adapted for the stage by Tanika Gupta, is to be presented at the Edinburgh international festival. I catch some scenes in a National Theatre of Scotland rehearsal room: Stefan Adegbola and Sasha Frost are running through the moment when Kay, visiting Nigeria, meets her birth father Jonathan. “Did you ever think of me in all those years?” Frost asks. “No, of course not,” Adegbola replies. “Why would I? It was a long time ago.” This exchange feels brutal, but Kay looks on impassive. She lived it…

Read the entire interview here.