Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Communication, Race, and Family: Exploring Communication in Black, White, and Biracial Families

    Communication, Race, and Family: Exploring Communication in Black, White, and Biracial Families

    Routledge
    1999-08-01
    Pages: 264
    Trim Size: 6 x 9
    Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8058-2938-9
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8058-2939-6

    Edited by:

    Thomas J. Socha

    Rhunette C. Diggs

    This groundbreaking volume explores how family communication influences the perennial and controversial topic of race. In assembling this collection, editors Thomas J. Socha and Rhunette C. Diggs argue that the hope for managing America’s troubles with “race” lies not only with communicating about race at public meetings, in school, and in the media, but also—and more fundamentally—with families communicating constructively about race at home.

    African-American and European-American family communication researchers come together in this volume to investigate such topics as how Black families communicate to manage the issue of racism; how Black parent-child communication is used to manage the derogation of Black children; the role of television in family communication about race; the similarities and differences between and among communication in Black, White, and biracial couples and families; and how family communication education can contribute to a brighter future for all. With the aim of developing a clearer understanding of the role that family communication plays in society’s move toward a multicultural world, this volume provides a crucial examination of how families struggle with issues of ethnic cultural diversity.

    Table of Contents

    • M.K. Asante, Foreword. Preface
    • T.J. Socha, R.C. Diggs, At the Crossroads of Communication, Race, and Family: Toward Understanding Black, White, and Biracial Family Communication
    • J.L. Daniel, J.E. Daniel, African-American Childrearing: The Context of a Hot Stove
    • I.B. Ferguson, African-American Parent-Child Communication About Racial Derogation
    • S.L. Parks, Race and Electronic Media in the Lives of Four Families: An Ethnographic Study
    • R.A. Davilla, White Children’s Talk About Race and Culture: Family Communication and Intercultural Socialization
    • R.C. Diggs, African-American and European-American Adolescents’ Perceptions of Self-Esteem as Influenced by Parent and Peer Communication and Support Environments
    • M. Dainton, African-American, European-American, and Biracial Couples’ Meanings for and Experiences in Marriage. M.P. Orbe, Communicating About “Race” in Interracial Families
    • B.K. Alexander, H.P. LeBlanc, III, Cooking Gumbo–Examining Cultural Dialogue About Family: A Black-White Narrativization of Lived Experience in Southern Louisiana
    • T.J. Socha, J. Beigle, Toward Improving Life at the Crossroads: Family Communication Education and Multicultural Competence
    • K. Galvin, Epilogue: Illuminating and Evoking Issues of Race and Family Communication

  • The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

    The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

    University of Texas Press
    1990
    143 pages
    10 b&w illus.
    6 x 9 in.
    ISBN: 978-0-292-73857-7

    Edited by

    Richard Graham, Emeritus Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History
    University of Texas, Austin

    With chapters by Thomas E. Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight

    From the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s, many Latin American leaders faced a difficult dilemma regarding the idea of race. On the one hand, they aspired to an ever-closer connection to Europe and North America, where, during much of this period, “scientific” thought condemned nonwhite races to an inferior category. Yet, with the heterogeneous racial makeup of their societies clearly before them and a growing sense of national identity impelling consideration of national futures, Latin American leaders hesitated. What to do? Whom to believe?

    Latin American political and intellectual leaders’ sometimes anguished responses to these dilemmas form the subject of The Idea of Race in Latin America. Thomas Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight have each contributed chapters that succinctly explore various aspects of the story in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico. While keenly alert to the social and economic differences that distinguish one Latin American society from another, each author has also addressed common issues that Richard Graham ably draws together in a brief introduction. Written in a style that will make it accessible to the undergraduate, this book will appeal as well to the sophisticated scholar.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • 1. Introduction (Richard Graham)
    • 2. Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940 (Thomas E. Skidmore)
    • 3. Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction (Aline Helg)
    • 4. Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940 (Alan Knight)
    • Bibliography
    • Index

    Read the intrduction here.

  • Resolving “Other” Status: Identity Development of Biracial Individuals

    Resolving “Other” Status: Identity Development of Biracial Individuals

    Women & Therapy
    Volume 9, Issue 1 & 2 (May 1990)
    pages 185 – 205
    DOI: 10.1300/J015v09n01_11

    Maria P. P. Root

    The current paper describes the phenomenological experience of marginal socio-ethnic status for biracial individuals. A metamodel for identity resolution for individuals who struggle with other status is proposed. Subsequently, multiple strategies in the resolution of ethnic identity development are proposed among which the individual may move and maintain a positive, stable self-image.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Racial Identification of the Biracial Preschool Child in a Single parent Family: Implications for Study

    Racial Identification of the Biracial Preschool Child in a Single parent Family: Implications for Study

    Family Science Review
    Volume 4, Number 3 (August 1991)
    pages 81-92

    Z. Lois Bryant, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
    University of Missouri, Columbia

    Johnetta Wade Morrison, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
    University of Missouri, Columbia

    This article addressess some previously unexplored factors related to the racial identity and self-concept formation of biracial preschool children of single female parents. Empirically based research literature on this population is limited although numerous authorities have emphasized the importance of self-concept and racial identity to the total development of the preschool child. The self-concepts and racial identity and attiudes of the mothers of these children, as well as the influence of the preschool setting also are addressed.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Strangeness of Passing: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

    The Strangeness of Passing: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

    Psychoanalytic Dialogues
    Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
    pages 442-449
    DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088377

    Annabella Bushra
    The Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

    Christopher Bonovitz gives us a rich landscape of the theoretical, historical, and relational aspects of his work with his mixed-race patient. In my response I explore what seems missing: a stronger sense of the patient as a person, more of her own history in her family, more of the clinical back and forth with her therapist, a sense of what is being played out in the transference, and particularly what “passing” is for her. I show how his choices about how to think about her story and how to tell it are oversaturated with awareness of identity and race at the expense of the basic human relationship. In the face of such racial anxiety, there is a pull to rely too strongly on countertransference as a way to gain privileged access to knowledge about the other. I attribute many of these problems to the inescapable power of race in our culture. Furthermore, I address the themes of hatred, silence, secrecy and transgression as they relate to the history of transgenerational trauma for this patient and invite our broadening our awareness about how they play out in the therapeutic process. We are faced with the difficult, yet the essential task of holding and living out the patient’s anger and outrage at the racial hatred that has been endured.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Biracial Females’ Reflections on Racial Identity Development in Adolescence

    Biracial Females’ Reflections on Racial Identity Development in Adolescence

    Journal of Feminist Family Therapy
    Volume 18, Issue 4 (February 2007)
    pages 53 – 75
    DOI: 10.1300/J086v18n04_03

    Karia Kelch-Oliver
    Department of Counseling and Psychological Services
    Georgia State University

    Leigh A. Leslie, Associate Professor and Graduate Director
    Department of Family Studies
    University of Maryland

    As the number of biracial youth grows, understanding their experience becomes increasingly important. A qualitative study was conducted to learn about the experience of racial identity development in biracial adolescent females. Nine Black-White biracial college-age women participated in focus groups, reflecting on their adolescence. Results indicated the most prevalent experience was a feeling of being marginal between two cultures. Further, competing messages over standards of beauty in the two cultures complicated the normal identity struggle of adolescence. Implications for parents and practitioners include recognizing the unique issues biracial girls experience and how race and gender combine to affect their identity development.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

    Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

    Psychoanalytic Dialogues
    Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
    pages 426 – 441
    DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088021

    Christopher Bonovitz
    William Alanson White Institute; New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis

    The author uses contemporary psychoanalytic theory in further understanding the negotiation of conflict and dissociation in biracial patients who are both African-American and White. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists who have made efforts to navigate the relationship between inner and outer worlds in our understanding of race from a psychoanalytic perspective, the author examines the relationship between race, culture, and internalized self-other relationshow they interact with each other and impact splitting and dissociative processes among self-states. The author argues for a notion of the unconscious as one that contains historical trauma related to race relations that influences the developing capacity to sustain internal conflict between opposing self-states borne out of this trauma. The author shows how society works against the integration of racialized self-states and interferes with the capacity to contain conflict. Through an extended clinical vignette from an analysis of a mixed-race patient, the author looks at the interplay of self-states between a White analyst (author) and a mixed-race patient (African-American and White) as manifested through a series of enactments and the unconscious mating between dissociated self-states in both patient and analyst. The author argues that the analyst’s engagement of his or her own dissociated self-states and containment of internal conflict is critical to aiding the patient in moving toward greater integration.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Myth of Post-Racial America: Biracial novelist says America still has a long way to go

    Myth of Post-Racial America: Biracial novelist says America still has a long way to go

    Northwestern University
    News Center
    2010-03-08

    Wendy Leopold, Education Editor

    EVANSTON, Illinois — In a speech titled “The Myth of Post-Racial America,” writer Danzy Senna warned members of the packed audience in Fisk Hall against the urge to view America as having moved past issues of privilege, race and class.

    Delivering the annual Leon Forrest Lecture last week, Senna, who is biracial, called such thinking “a dangerous impulse” that seeks to “stop conversation” about racism and genocide that are at the very heart of American history and culture…

    …Senna, whose novels and memoirs address biracial and multiracial identity, is the daughter of a Boston blue-blood mother and a black father who grew up “dirt-poor” in the Deep South. She won acclaim for her debut novel, “Caucasia,” which told the story of biracial sisters growing up in the 1970s in racially charged Boston…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Couple finds a more than a century old gravestone

    Couple finds a more than a century old gravestone

    Beaumont Enterprise
    2009-12-13

    Kyle Peveto

    Beneath a tool shed behind her house, Mallary Sanders and her fiance found a 118-year-old piece of history they are begging someone to take.

    Last weekend, Sanders’ fiance, Justin Trusty, 24, was cleaning beneath the pier-and-beam shed when he came across the intact gravestone of a woman who died in 1891.

    He told Sanders, 23, he found something that “will scare you.”

    “I wasn’t at all scared,” Sanders said. “I didn’t think there was a grave under there. Now, if I had felt weird about the house….”

    The couple had no idea what to do with the stone.

    “I just wanted it to go back to where it belongs,” Trusty said.

    The gravestone stands about 2-feet tall and is specked with mud from lying flat on the ground. Carved marble reads: in memory of DELIEDE, wife of Wm Ashworth. Deliede died June 27, 1891, at 85, according to the gravestone…

    …The Ashworth family name has a well-recorded history in Jefferson and Orange counties. During the Republic of Texas and after statehood, the mixed-race Ashworth family owned thousands of acres of land and large cattle herds in an area that did not welcome free people of color.

    “What I thought was interesting was their ability to prosper in a place like Texas that made it illegal to be a free black,” said Jason Gillmer, a professor of law at Texas Wesleyan University who has studied the family…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Shades of Gray: The Life and Times of a Free Family of Color in Antebellum Texas

    Shades of Gray: The Life and Times of a Free Family of Color in Antebellum Texas

    Jason A. Gillmer, Professor of Law
    Texas Wesleyan University School of Law

    2009-08-13
    64 pages

    The history of race and slavery is often told from the perspective of either the oppressors or the oppressed. This Article takes a different tact, unpacking the rich and textured story of the Ashworths, an obscure yet prosperous free family of color who came to Texas beginning in the early 1830s. It is undoubtedly an unusual story; indeed in the history of the time there are surely more prominent names and more famous events. Yet their story reveals a tantalizing world in which–despite legal rules and conventional thinking – life was not so black and white. Drawing on local records rather than canonical cases, and listening to the voices from the community rather than the legislatures, this Article emphasizes the importance of looking to the margins of society to demonstrate how racial relations and ideological notions in the antebellum South were far more intricate than we had previously imagined. The Ashworths never took a stand against slavery; to the contrary, they amassed a fortune on its back. But their racial identity also created complications and fissures in the social order, and their story ultimately tells us as much about them as it does about the times in which they lived.

    Read the entire article here.