Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Sociological Significance of President Barack Obama

    The Sociological Significance of President Barack Obama

    The American Sociological Association
    Mini-Symposium
    San Francisco, California
    2009-08-08 through 2009-08-09

    The historic campaign and election of Barack Obama constitutes a compelling and timely context for examining the program theme. In response, the 2009 ASA Program Committee and ASA President Patricia Hill Collins have organized a mini-symposium, a meeting within the general meeting, which explores how the historic election of Barack Obama might signal a new politics of community in action. The mini-symposium consists of a cluster of sessions that are scheduled throughout the meetings that will examine how the 2008 presidential election engages the conference theme The New Politics of Community.

    1. Plenary Session. Why Obama Won (and What that Says About Democracy and Change in America)
    2. Presidential Panel. A Defining Moment? Youth, Power and the Obama Phenomenon
    3. Presidential Panel. Through the Lens of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Class: The Obama Family and the American Dream
    4. Thematic Session. Understanding Democratic Renewal: The Movement to Elect Barack Obama
    5. Thematic Session. The Future of Community Organizing During an Obama Presidency
    6. Thematic Session. Asian-American Movements, Identities, and Politics: A New Racial Project in the Obama Years?
    7. Professional Workshop. The Next Generation of MFP Scholarship in Service to Social Justice
    8. Open Forum. Does the Obama Administration Need a Social Science Scholars Council?: A Public Forum

    Read the entire description here.

  • Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

    Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

    University of Notre Dame Press
    2004
    376 pages
    Cloth ISBN 10: 0-268-04103-2
    Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04103-8
    Paper ISBN 10: 0-268-04104-0
    Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04104-5

    Edited by:

    Paul Spickard, Professor of 20th Century U.S. Social and Cultural History
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
    University of California at Santa Barbara

    Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

    The collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawai`i, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Chicana/o movement, the Asian American movement, Afrocentricity, and the White studies movement. Part four explores the multiracial movement which developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and assesses whether it constitutes a successful challenge to racial hierarchy and binary racial thinking.

    Racial Thinking in the United States provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism. It will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American history.

    Contributors: Paul Spickard, G. Reginald Daniel, Stephen A. Small, Hanna Wallinger, Lori Anne Pierce, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, William Wei, Michael C. Thornton, and Zipporah G. Glass.

  • Mix-d: uk (Photography Exhibition)

    Mix-d: uk (Photography Exhibition)

    New Walk Museum & Art Gallery
    2009-10-17 through 2009-12-31

    Opening Times:
    Monday – Friday: 10:00 – 19:00
    Saturday: 10:00 – 17:00
    Sunday: 11:00 – 17:00
    Closed: 24th, 25th, 26th, 31st December.

    Address:
    53 New Walk
    Leicester
    LE1 7EA
     
    Telephone: +44 (0)116 225 4900
    Email: museums@leicester.gov.uk

    Looking at mixed-race identities on its own terms. The exhibition puts people from mixed-race backgrounds at the centre of the discussion, looking at the subject through their shared, similar and sometimes completely different experiences.

    The Multiple Heritage Project based in Manchester has developed this thought-provoking exhibition under the leadership of Bradley Lincoln.
     
    The Multiple Heritage Project has successfully brought the thoughts and feelings of the mixed race community into the public realm.
     
    Partnering a mixture of photographic images taken by Richard Milnes together with brief captions explaining how the individuals regard themselves.

    A powerful view of many different faces, of different ages, describing their shared identity in very different ways.
     
    Providing the viewer an understanding of how diverse mixed raced backgrounds are, and the terminology chosen by the people themselves. Prompting the viewer to question how they would like to be described.
     
    Not just a collection of images, the exhibition places people of mixed race backgrounds at the centre of the discussion and looks at the subject through their shared, similar and different experiences.

  • Raiding The Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race

    Raiding The Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race

    Pluto Press an imprint of MacMillan Publishing
    February 2002
    ISBN: 978-0-7453-1764-9
    ISBN10: 0-7453-1764-2
    5.5 x 8.25 inches
    224 pages

    Jill Olumide, Researcher
    Swansea University, School of Health Science

    High profile ‘mixed race’ stars like Tiger Woods have brought the politics of identity into the mainstream. Jill Olumide argues that we must examine the contradictions inherent in the term “mixed race” in order to reach a fuller understanding of the variety in human experience and identity. Olumide demonstrates that there are distinctive features of mixed race experience that span time and place. By comparing contemporary experiences of mixed race, collected through interviews and workshops, with those of past populations in different parts of the world, she explains how its meaning alters with national boundary, historical context, class, gender and ethnicity. Showing how different communities are linked by social ambiguity, dependency and the denial of social space, she reveals that the underlying ideology is transformed by social, economic and political change. As mixed race groups across the world call for the right of self-definition, this book reveals that it is through understanding the plurality of the category of mixed race that we are best able to transcend the idea of ‘race’ and challenge the racial axes of social division. The book includes an examination of the folklore around racism and anti-racism, and the agencies through which ideologies of race are propagated, including social welfare groups, religious groups, scientific texts, and the family.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • 1. A Spell to Make Them Balance: Introduction
      • Dangerous Knowledge
      • Importance of Studying Mixed Race
      • Divisions
      • The Mixed race Condition
      • Group Identity
      • A Theory of Lived Experience
      • Social Construction: Passing and Being Passed
      • Passing As…
      • Structure of the book
    • 2. The Hall of Mirrors: Structures of Power
      • The Babalawo and the Sociologist
      • Ideology and State
      • Ideology For What?
      • Race and its Provenance
      • Religion and Race
      • Ethnocentricism
      • European Roots of Race Thinking
      • Spain
      • Classification and Race
      • The Ground of Racialisation in the Capitalist Era
      • A Missing Link: Whiteness as a Racial Category
      • Ethnicity
      • Women and the Racial Order
      • Endpiece
    • 3. Parallel Fictions: Writing About Mixed Race
      • ‘Natural’ Science.
      • Politics of Biology
      • Eugenics
      • UNESCO and Race
      • Stonequist and the Psychologising Tendency
      • Marginal Man Goes East
      • Mixed Race and the Question ofIdentity
      • Fostering Mixed Race
      • Proving that Mixed Race Works
      • The Mothers of Mixed Race Children
      • Counting Mixed Race
      • Multiracial People
      • Biographical and Autobiographical Writing
    • 4. Changing Illusions: Some Excerpts From the History of Mixed race
      • Patterns in the Career of mixed Race
      • Heredity
      • Division and Exploitation:Slavocracy Style
      • White Women and Black Women
      • Losing Caste
      • Group Consciousness
      • Metissage
      • Divide and Rule
      • The Mixed Race Condition and Genocide
      • The Purposeful Concept of Mixed Race
    • 5. Behind the Facade: Race Mixing
      • Background to the Research Population
      • Access and Understanding
      • Difference as Liberation
      • Bridging
      • No Positive Images
      • Parents Must Prepare
      • Knowledge is Power
      • The Wrong Parents
      • Set Up to Fail
      • Terminology
      • Not White/Black Enough
      • Siblings and step-Families
      • Conclusion
    • 6. The Balancing Act: Race Separating
      • Sanctions
      • Rejection
      • ‘Looks’
      • Abuse
      • Reputation
      • Pigeonholing
      • Repatriation
      • Suspicion of Unsuitable Combinations
      • Strategies
      • Hold Hands and Stick Together
      • Challenge-Cure Ignorance
      • Hard Work and Rightful Expectations
      • The Goodness of Mixture
      • Pass Amongst
      • Imaginary Homelands
      • Keep Your Distance
      • Humour
    • 7. The Very Foundation of Order: Social Origins of Mixed Race
      • Theorising Mixed race
      • Ethnic Leakage
      • The Slimy Category
      • Mixed race Undermines Black and White
      • Women and the Reproduction of Own-Kind
      • Family
      • Religion
      • Professionals
      • Welfare Professionals in Particular
      • Race Does Not Always Over-Determine Class
      • and Gender
      • The Need to Talk
    • 8. Communities to Conjure With: Concluding Remarks
      • Five Features of Mixed Race Ideology
      • An Ambiguous Social Location
      • A Contested Site
      • A Measure of Induced Dependency is Inolved
      • It is a Conditional State
      • It is a Point of Articulation in the Ordering of Race Gender and Other Divisions
      • Emotional Subjects
      • Giving Voice to Mixed Race
    • Notes
    • Index

  • Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices

    Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices

    Berg Publisher
    November 2003
    212pp, 10 bw illus bibliog index
    Paperback ISBN: 9781859737705
    Hardback ISBN: 9781859737651
    Ebook ISBN: 9781845205553

    Suki Ali, Lecturer in Sociology
    London School of Economics

    Social scientists claim that we now live in a post-race society, where race has been replaced by ‘ethnicity’. Yet racism is endemic to British society and people often think in terms of black and white. With a marked rise in the number of children from mixed parentage, there is an urgent need to challenge simplistic understandings of ‘race’, nation and culture, and interrogate what it means to grow up in Britain and claim a ‘mixed’ identity.

    Focusing on mixed-race and inter-ethnic families, this book not only explores current understandings of ‘race’, but it shows, using innovative research techniques with children, how we come to read race. What influence do photographs and television have on childrens ideas about ‘race’?  How do children use memories and stories to talk about racial differences within their own families?  How important is the home and domestic culture in achieving a sense of belonging? Ali also considers, through data gathered from teachers and parents, broader issues relating to the effectiveness of anti-racist and multicultural teaching in schools, and parental concerns over the social mobility and social acceptability of their children.

    Rigorously researched, this book is the first to combine childrens accounts on ‘race’ and identity with contemporary cultural theory. Using fascinating case studies, it fills a major gap in this area and provides an original approach to writing on race.

  • Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons

    Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons

    The Women’s Press
    2001
    336 pages
    9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
    Paperback ISBN-10: 0704347067; ISBN-13: 978-0704347069

    Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

    Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s new book offers the sharpest and most informed insight yet on mixed-race Britain. Opening with an historical perspective, she traces up to the twenty-first century the reactions – often rabid – to mixed-race relationships, and the influences of imperialism and large-scale immigration. With research drawn from coupls, parents and children, she offers unique insight into the stresses as well as the strengths of links across the racial divide. In a penetrating, constantly questioning text, she asks why social policy makers have been so slow to deal with the particular problems of this growing and significant group.

    The influence of race on national identity is a crucial current debate and this book gives voice to the issue, addressing difficult dilemmas but also suggesting positive solutions to the often instinctive reactions aroused by the breaking down of old barriers. An essential report into the future of the nation.

  • Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy

    Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy

    Sociology Compass
    Volume 3 Issue 5
    Pages 847 – 852
    2009-07-29
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00231.x

    Katharine Tyler, Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity
    University of Surrey

    Over the last 20 years, there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects. These developments include a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This aspect of genetic research is of interest to sociologists and others working in the field of race and ethnicity studies. While the consensus among sociologists is that race is a social construction with no biological foundations, innovations in genetic research have pushed sociologists and other social scientists to reflect upon the ways in which ideas of biology mediate everyday understandings of race. Anthropologists, cultural geographers and sociologists have begun to study the complex and ambivalent ways in which laypeople think about the biological and genetic constitution of racial identities. Central to this area of inquiry has been analysis of laypeople’s engagements with the new reproductive technologies, such as IVF. In addition, social scientists have begun to study laypeople’s uses of genealogical technologies that claim to trace family ancestries, including racial descent and ethnic origins. Ultimately, such studies enable a deeper understanding of the social construction of ‘race’, and in the course of so doing provide an important research avenue to challenge racism.

    Author recommends
    …Wade, Peter (ed.) 2007. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics. Oxford: Berghahn, New York.

    This book brings together a collection of essays written by scholars who worked collaboratively for 3 years exploring everyday articulations of race, ethnicity and genetics across Europe in the face of innovations in genetic science. The book draws upon a rich array of anthropological studies of ‘assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed-race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building’ to explore how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation and nature are lived and experienced by people within differing European social contexts….

    Post-race: The end of race?

    Lecture 10 – Interracial Identities

    With a marked rise in the number of children of mixed parentage, there is a growing body of literature that explores the experiences and identities of the members of interracial families. This body of literature challenges simplistic understandings of ‘race’, nation and culture through an interrogation of what it means to be the parent of mixed-race children and/or to grow up and claim a ‘mixed’ identity.

  • Ali, S. 2003. Mixed-Race, Post-Race. Berg.
  • Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 2001. Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons. The Women’s Press.
  • Brah, A. and Coombes, A. 2000. Hybridity and its Discontents. Politics, Science and Culture. Routledge (see Part 1 of this book titled ‘Miscegenation and Racial Purity’ that include essays by Stoler, Labanyi, Phoenix and Owen, Treacher).
  • Frankenberg, R. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Routledge (chapter 5).
  • Howell, S. 2001. ‘Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption’, in Franklin, S. and Mckinnon, S. (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke University Press.
  • Ifekwunigwe, J. 1999. Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of ‘Race’, Nation and Gender. Routledge.
  • Parker, D. and Song, M. 2001. Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’. Pluto Press.
  • Root, M. (eds) 1992. Racially Mixed People in America. Sage.
  • Tizard, B. and Ann Phoenix 1993. Black, White or Mixed-Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage. New York: Routledge.
  • Twine, F. W. 2000. ‘Bearing Blackness in Britain: The Meaning of Racial Difference for White Birth Mothers of African-Descent Children.’ Pp. 76–108 in Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism, edited by H. Ragone and F. W. Twine. Routledge.
  • Tyler, K. 2005. ‘The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Interracial Identities.’The Sociological Review 53 (3): 475–94.
  • Wilson, A. 1987. Mixed Race Children: A Study of Identity. Allen and Unwin.
  • Zack, N. (ed). American Mixed-Race: The Culture of Microdiversity. Rowman and Littlefield Pub….

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  • Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture

    Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture

    Routledge
    2000-08-24
    320 pages
    Trim Size: 234×156
    Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-19402-0
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-19403-7

    Edited by

    Avtar Brah, Professor in Sociology
    Birbek University of London

    Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture
    Birkbeck University of London

    Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of ‘hybridity’ – the mixing of peoples and cultures – in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and ‘race’, in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging.

    The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial ‘contamination’, from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of ‘mixed parentage’, contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture?  The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and ‘race’.

    The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.

    Contributors

    Avtar Brah, Annie Coombes, Donna Haraway, Sandra Klopper, John Kraniauskas, Jo Labanyi, Charlie Owen, Anne Phoenix, S. Sayyid, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Anne Stoler, Nicholas Thomas, Amal Treacher, Lola Young

  • A Premonition of Obama: La Raza Cosmica in America

    A Premonition of Obama: La Raza Cosmica in America

    New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ)
    Volume 26 Issue 4
    Pages 100 – 110
    Published Online: 2009-10-26
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01119.x

    Ryszard Kapuscinski

    Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in 2007, was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary journalists. He personally witnessed the dramatic post-World War II upheavals of decolonization and revolution across what we used to call “the Third World” and set down his reflections in such best-selling books as The Emperor, about the fall of Haile Selassie [I] of Ethiopia, and Shah of Shahs, about the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He served on NPQ’s editorial board until his death.

    When I last saw Kapuscinski for coffee at the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw in the summer of 2005 he was busy preparing a lecture on Herodotus, the ancient Greek traveler and historian regarded as “the father of journalism.”

    In 1987, NPQ brought Kapuscinski to Los Angeles to roam around and observe North America’s largest “Third World city.” He stayed at the New Seoul Hotel in the heart of Koreatown, venturing from there all the way down to Disneyland, Hispanic East L.A. and the wealthy Westside. At the end of each day, we sat down to gather his impressions.

    Kapuscinski saw the United States as the place where the idea of “la raza cosmica”—the cosmic race—would be realized. For him, America was a premonition of the plural, racially mixed, culturally hybrid civilization the whole world would one day become. In a way, his insight was also a premonition of the presidency of Barack Obama, a self-described cultural and racial “mutt.” In a world where the contamination of globalization has sparked troubling yearnings for a return to purity, being a nation of mutts, Kapuscinski understood, is America’s competitive advantage.

  • Working with multiracial clients in therapy: Bridging theory, research, and practice

    Working with multiracial clients in therapy: Bridging theory, research, and practice

    Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
    Vol 39(2)
    Apr 2008
    pages 192-201

    Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
    California Polytechnic State University

    Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
    Marquette University

    Shane J. Lopez

    The growing multiracial population has resulted in a need for professional psychologists to become knowledgeable about unique identity issues that may influence therapy with multiracial clients. The overarching goal of this article is to provide clinicians with current theory and research, as well as particular therapeutic strategies that will be useful in their work with multiracial clients. Specifically, this article (a) provides a brief review of some prevalent models of multiracial identity; (b) discusses several common themes derived from theory and research about multiracial identity, which should be taken into account when working with this population; and (c) offers some specific techniques and strategies that may be used in therapy to develop more accurate conceptualizations of multiracial clients.

    Read the entire article here.