Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Strategies Multiracial College Women Use to Navigate Monoracial Systems

    Strategies Multiracial College Women Use to Navigate Monoracial Systems

    Education and Human Sciences, College of (CEHS) Open Access Theses and Dissertations from the College of Education and Human Sciences
    University of Nebraska, Lincoln
    May 2009
    248 pages

    Minisa Michiko Chapman-Huls
    University of Nebraska – Lincoln

    A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

    An exploration of the college experiences of multiracial women uncovered the strategies they used to navigate the monoracial system of predominately white institutions. A purposeful sample of 18 women who were multiracial was chosen. Data was collected through semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Participants’ stories represented multiracial experiences at thirteen different undergraduate institutions. A participant’s precollege experiences, identity and the college’s peer culture impacted how she approached social situations in the highly homogenous and monoracial setting at college. Participants took on the roles of pacifist, non-conformist, and activist to successfully navigate college environments and social scenarios. The findings also support prior study on the identity development of multiracial college students. Childhood experiences shaped the racial identity of participants that was affirmed and challenged, but not changed by college factors and experiences. Significant factors to the identity development of participants at college were academic courses, faculty and peers. Implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.

    Table of Contents

    CHAPTER 1: Introduction
    Significance of research
    Statement of the Problem
    Purpose of the study
    Definitions
    Limitations and delimitations

    CHAPTER 2: Review of Literature
    Identity Development of Multiracial Individual
    Psychological Studies of Impact of Multiracial Identity
    Racial Categorization of Mixed-race Persons
    Racial Attitudes towards multiracial Individuals
    Experiences of Multiracial College Students
    Summary

    CHAPTER 3: Methods
    Purpose
    Characteristics of Qualitative Research
    Research Design
    Data Collection
    Managing and Recording Data
    Data Analysis Strategies
    Ethical Considerations
    Validity
    Particiment Vignettes
    Findings

    CHAPTER 4: Foundations for Success: Development of Strategies to Successfully Naviage Monoracial Systems
    Racial Identity and formation
    Childhood Experiences
    Summary

    CHAPTER 5: The College Experience: Test of Strategy
    Challenges to identity
    Resources for support
    Summary

    CHAPTER 6: Strategies for Success
    Playing the role of Pacifist
    Playing the role of NonConformist
    Playing the role of Activist
    Summary

    CHAPTER 7: Thoughts and Suggestions
    Implications
    Further Research
    Conclusion

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    APPENDICES
    Appendix A: Participant Consent Form
    Appendix B: E-Mail Invitation to Participants
    Appendix C: Interview Protocol

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Opting for White: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America

    Opting for White: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America

    Race & Society
    Volume 5, Issue 1 (2002)
    Symposium on The Latin Americanization of Race Relations in the United States edited by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
    Pages 49–64

    Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
    Univerisity of Illinois, Chicago

    Patricia Arend, Lecturer in Sociology
    Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts

    Historically, racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent assumed the development of a Black identity in accordance with the one-drop rule. However, empirical research on the multiracial population suggests that there exists wide variation in racial identification. We explore the interpretive power of [Eduardo] Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization model to explain racial identity construction among a sample of 259 mixed-race respondents.We highlight case studies of individuals who have constructed a White identity in order to illustrate how structural changes in race relations have increased the range of racial identities available to multiracial people. While we observe variation in racial identification among our respondents, their “choices” continue to be differentially available due to their physical appearance and social context.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Hapas: Emerging Identity, Emerging Terms and Labels & the Social Construction of Race

    Hapas: Emerging Identity, Emerging Terms and Labels & the Social Construction of Race

    Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
    Volume II (October 2009)
    20 pages

    Adriane E. Gamble

    Adriane E. Gamble presents part of her honors thesis in her paper “Hapas: Emerging Identity, Emerging Terms and Labels, and the Social Construction of Race.” Her paper shows how emerging trends in community, terms and labels, and role models are seen in the growing population in the United States. She writes of how this can be observed both in the development of individuals’ identities and communities as well as a new racial category that offers a contemporary example of the social construction of race.

    The first time I heard hapa, I went to this club fair [on campus]… I heard this voice, “We’re cool, cause we check the other box!” … I realized, oh my god, there are more people like me.

    Originally a Native Hawaiian word, “hapa” is defined as “part” or “mixed,” with no racial or ethnic meaning. The current use of hapa stems from the phrase hapa haole, meaning “half foreigner” or “half White” (Dariotis, 2003). Today, the term is commonly used to describe Asian Pacific Islanders of mixed race heritage.

    Conducted in 2004, this research studies how hapa has become a racial identity of its own, distinct from the classically recognized American racial categories of Asian or White. Based on the premise that racial identity is significantly informed by a racial community, and given the historical absence of a hapa community, the question emerges: how does one develop a hapa identity, without a hapa community with which to identify? Trends from the turn of the millennium show the racial landscape has changed, as a community emerged in American society of individuals self-identifying as hapa. Student and community groups have provided communities for hapas, which in turn inform racial identity, leading to an increased population of individuals self-identifying as hapa. The construction of hapa communities and hapa identity as a new racial category offer a contemporary example of the social construction of race…

    Read the entire article here.

  • A Phantom Childhood: Memories of my Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl [Book Review]

    A Phantom Childhood: Memories of my Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl [Book Review]

    Korean Quarterly
    Spring 1998

    Marie Lee

    Setting a novel from a child’s point of view can be as risky a venture as, say, writing a novel in dialect. How to wrest an adult meaning from a child’s unformed thoughts? But if the author can pull off such a feat, the rewards are ample, as evidenced by works such as Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Reidar Jönsson’s My Life as a Dog, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (which manages to successfully render both a boy’s point of view and his dialect).

    Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl should be added to this list. The eponymous narrator, Heinz/Insu is a young boy growing up as an Amerasian in Korea in the ‘60s and early ‘70s…

    Read the entire review here.

  • The identity development of mixed race individuals in Canada

    The identity development of mixed race individuals in Canada

    University of Alberta
    Spring 2010
    131 pages

    Monica Das

    A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Psychological Studies in Education

    The purpose of this study was to explore the identity development of mixed race individuals in a Western Canadian context. The case study methodology was used to guide the overall procedure and participant selection. A thematic analysis was used to analyze patterns in the data. Four individuals of mixed race parentage were interviewed and five themes emerged: (a) the influence of family, (b) the influence of childhood experiences, (c) the influence of physical appearance, (d) the influence of racism, and (e) the influence of adult experiences. The detailed explorations of the participants’ experiences add to the Canadian literature on mixed race identity development, which provides several counselling implications and directions for future research.

    Table of Contents

    CHAPTER ONE
    Introduction

    CHAPTER TWO
    Literature Review
    A Sociological Analysis of Race
    A Historical Overview of Race Mixing
    A Review of the Contemporary Mixed Race Experience
    Identity Development
    Racial Identity Development
    Mixed Race Identity Development Model
    Key Presenting Issues and Counselling Implications
    Summary and Research Question

    CHAPTER THREE
    Methodology
    Research Paradigm
    Case Study Approach
    Participants
    Procedure
    Data Analysis
    Trustworthiness: An Evaluation of the Study
    The Researcher
    Ethical Considerations

    CHAPTER FOUR
    Findings from the Within-Case Analyses
    Ko
    Jessica
    Alina
    Steven

    CHAPTER FIVE
    Findings from the Cross-Case Analysis
    The Influence of Family
    The Influence of Childhood Experiences
    The Influence of Physical Appearances
    The Influence of Racism
    The Influence of Adult Experiences

    CHAPTER SIX
    Discussion
    Implications for Counselling and Education
    Future Research Directions
    Conclusions
    References

    Appendix A: Recruitment Handout
    Appendix B: Information Letter to Participants and Informed Consent Form
    Appendix C: Demographics Form
    Appendix D: Interview Guide
    Appendix E: Pre-Interview Activity Form

    …My interest in this research topic stems from my personal experiences as a mixed race individual. My mother is from Czechoslovakia, my father is from India and I was born and raised in Canada. As a child, I was unaware of terms like interracial marriage or mixed race. Once I became aware of my mixed heritage as a young adult, I became curious as to why my racial and cultural identity were so different from either my Bengali or Czech relatives, or from most of the people around me. As I started to ask questions, I found deep commonalities with other mixed race individuals regardless of their particular racial mix. Additionally, I was amazed at the range and depth of opinions I encountered in casual conversations. It seemed that everyone had an opinion about mixed race individuals.

    With this diversity in opinions, I was certain that I would find an overwhelming amount of academic data on the mixed race experience. I did find a significant volume of research on American Black-and-White mixed race people and the American history of anti-miscegenation. However, I was surprised at the minute amount of information available on non-Black-and-White mixed race individuals in general and the Canadian perspective in particular. When given the opportunity to conduct my own research as a Master’s student, I decided to explore the topic of non-Black-and-White mixed race individuals in a Canadian context. I hope that this information can be used to increase awareness of the unique issues that mixed race individuals face.

    Consequently, the purpose of the present study is to explore the mixed race experience within its complex contemporary framework. The goal is to investigate the factors that influence the development of a mixed race identity. The information gathered from this study will provide a Canadian contribution to theories relating to racial identity development and a post-modern analysis of race as a socially constructed category. Moreover, this study explores the experiences of mixed race individuals that are not of Black and White parentage, which is a topic that is under-represented in the mixed race literature (Mahtani, 2001). A deeper understanding of the factors that influence the mixed race identity will add to the current literature by enhancing our knowledge of the Western Canadian, non-Black-and-White mixed race individual’s lived experience. Additionally, the results of the present study may help counsellors to increase their own awareness of mixed race issues by encouraging them to challenge any qualms they may consciously or unconsciously harbour about mixed race individuals. Considering the increasing mixed race population, it is important that researchers begin to focus on supportive measures to promote healthy mixed race identity development…

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

    Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

    Atlantic Studies
    Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006)
    pages 97 – 110
    DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499

    Isabel Soto

    This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 28–31 October 2004.

    This essay argues that while Langston Hughes‘s short story “Red-Headed Baby” (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the Euro-American paradigm of a dehistoricized “modernist construction of authorship through displacement” (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel—figurative and literal—as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy‘s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora—not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Memories of My Ghost Brother

    Memories of My Ghost Brother

    Bo-Leaf Books
    1997
    284 pages
    trade paper ISBN: 0-9768086-0-9

    Heinz Insu Fenkl, Associate Professor of English
    State University of New York, New Paltz

    Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Book Finalist, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction

    A young Amerasian comes of age as he grows up in the Korean city of Inchon and struggles to come to terms with his own identity and with his memories of a lost half-brother, whom his Korean mother sacrificed to marry his American father.

  • Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

    Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

    MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
    Volume 35, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
    E-ISSN: 1946-3170 Print ISSN: 0163-755X
    DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0078

    David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English
    University of St. Thomas

    Passing narratives have long been a fixture of American literature. For African American authors, plots of racial mobility have been used to expose the permeability of racial boundaries and to reveal the irrationality of racial categorization, while for many white authors, passing narratives have expressed fears of racial contamination as well as voyeuristic fantasies of blackness. Our interest in stories of passing, whether fictional or autobiographical, has not waned, and the popularity of recent memoirs, novels, and films depicting passing and mixed raciality attests to this fact. Baz Dreisinger‘s study, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (2008), capitalizes on the enduring curiosity surrounding the transgression of racial boundaries. While passing has mostly been thought of as a black-to-white affair, Dreisinger focuses on those crossing the color line in the direction of white-to-black. Her investigation of white-to-black passing provides a compelling perspective on past and current perceptions of race in American culture.

    Dreisinger sets the parameters of her study by positing white-to-black passing as a commonality rather than an anomaly. She distinguishes between black and white passing, explaining that white passing is about neither deception nor survival. White passing is not even exactly about successfully becoming black. For Dreisinger, white-to-black passing is about those “moments of slippage in which whites perceive themselves, or are perceived by others as losing their whiteness and ‘acquiring’ blackness”…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Triumphant Miscegenation: Reflections on Beauty and Race in Brazil

    Triumphant Miscegenation: Reflections on Beauty and Race in Brazil

    Journal of Intercultural Studies
    Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
    pages 83-97
    DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082954

    Alexander Edmonds, Professor of Medical Anthropology and Sociology
    University of Amsterdam

    In Brazil racial mixture, mestiçagem has been a dominant theme in the political and cultural re-imagination of the nation in the twentieth century. This paper approaches the role of mixture in Brazilian social life from the angle of aesthetics, looking both at Brazilian intellectual history and the commercial and medical beauty industry. It first discusses the aesthetics of race in the works of Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre. Second, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how cultural constructions of race are reflected in the clinical practice of plastic surgery. Analysing cosmetic practices illuminates central tensions in the ideal of mestiçagem, but also reveals it as a distinct logic of race and beauty that contrasts with multiculturalism. As the beauty industry expands in the developing world, such cultural logics may not be erased but rather incited.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • “Des couleurs primitives”: Miscegenation and French Painting of Algeria

    “Des couleurs primitives”: Miscegenation and French Painting of Algeria

    Visual Resources
    Volume 24, Issue 3 (2008)
    pages 273 – 298
    DOI: 10.1080/01973760802284638

    Peter Benson Miller, Art Historian
    Rome Art Program

    The Romantic concept of “local color” refers to a site of painterly experimentation, the application of pigment in the chromatic construction of a picture. The term also identifies a detail authenticating an exotic subject considered typical of a particular region. This article zeroes in on the convergence of these two aspects of local color, interrogating the dialogue between subject and technique in the representation of North Africans. In their paintings from the late 1840s depicting “primitive” racial types from the Maghrib, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856) shifted to a color system that emphasized contrasts of distinct zones of color derived from an ethnological spectrum over smooth transitions and harmonies between hues. Unpacking the coordinates, including the trope of the mixed-blood, and the unstable classificatory schemas of physical anthropology suggests that these painters’ unconventional colorism and formal daring indexed the pervasive anxiety that miscegenation would lead to racial chaos. 

    …Initially, though, the apparent prevalence of mixed races in Algeria did not inspire concern. In an influential text published in 1826, the American consul general in Algiers, William Shaler (1778–1833), while ambivalent about miscegenation, praised the hybrid ancestry of the ‘‘Moors’’: ‘‘an amalgamation of the ancient Mauritanians, various invaders, the emigrants from Spain, and the Turks,’’ which created a vigorous blend. Proof of the positive effect of such interbreeding, according to Shaler, was the fact ‘‘that there are few people who surpass them in beauty of configuration; their features are remarkably expressive, and their complexions are hardly darker than those of the inhabitants of the South of Spain.’’ While specialists would later question Shaler’s claims, and continue to debate the viability of mixed races, the impulse to discern origins, filiation and racial identity—whether mixed or pure—through skin color and physiognomy would remain a constant…

    Read the entire article here.