Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Shifting Whiteness: A Life History Approach to U.S. White Parents of “Biracial” or “Black” Children

    Shifting Whiteness: A Life History Approach to U.S. White Parents of “Biracial” or “Black” Children

    Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

    Joshua Carter Woodfork, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005

    This research examines how the experiences of parenting “biracial” or “black” children have affected the beliefs of white parents who have published books and essays regarding their situations.  The participating parents claim that because of their relationship with their children of African descent their self-understandings, including their own sense of their racial identity, are altered.  They now speak of themselves as “not quite white,” “black by proxy,” or as a “bridge” (between the races).  My dissertation, “Shifting Whiteness: A Life History Approach to U.S. White Parents of ‘Biracial’ or ‘Black’ Children,” explores how such parents talk about and conceptualize their experiences, including the implications of these parents’ claims of racial identity transformation.

    This dissertation posits that the white parents’ shift in attitudes and beliefs reflects their vivid engagement with the racism and racial experiences that their children endure.  The discord between the parents’ claim of racial transformation and their continued benefiting from white privilege is also examined. Consideration of the parents’ shifts provides a better understanding of racial beliefs and transformations at the individual, micro-level, which contributes to society’s general knowledge about the conception of race.

    Understanding white parents’ decisions to write about their identity transformations as—to use Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1994) phrase—a “racial project,” I investigate its aims and limits, exploring which racial projects are presented by this group of U.S. white parents of biracial and black children. John L. Caughey’s (1994) approach to how individuals operate with “cultural traditions” and ideas of “border crossing” also provide theoretical frameworks.  Tools of analysis include ethnographic life history methods, textual analysis, critical race theory, and intersectional analysis.  My research method involves complementing a close reading of the writings of these authors that are white and parents with qualitative ethnographic life history interviews that gather detailed information from each of these individuals. I treat their publications together with my transcribed interviews as case studies through which I compare and contrast the similarities and differences in the belief changes and shifting that these informants have undergone, as well as their current constructions of race.

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

    Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

    Women’s Studies International Forum
    Volume 30, Issue 5 (September-October 2007)
    Pages 391-403
    DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2007.07.003

    Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
    York University, Canada

    This qualitative analysis of interviews with women of Thai and non-Thai parentage throws into question the current celebration of Eur/asianness and multiraciality.  The study describes multiracialisation as an ambivalent and differential process of categorisation which mobilises essentialist ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘breeding’.  A far cry from historical notions of ‘mixed-race degeneracy’, interviewees emerged from this process the ‘best of both worlds’. However, beside the ‘good mix’ there ran the spectre of the ‘bad mix’, and some had more access to celebratory identities than others. Celebratory notions of Eur/asian femininity were further qualified by the competing discourse of the ‘Thai prostitute’.  The precariousness with which interviewees could access normative ideals of desirability was especially visible in narratives of masculinity, non-white parentage, gender variance and childhood.  The article ends by advocating, in the place of a power-evasive celebration, challenges to the multiple overlapping power relations which underlie all acts of evaluation.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Beyond Racial Exceptionalism: Explaining the Convergence of Mixed-Race Census Categorizations in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain

    Beyond Racial Exceptionalism: Explaining the Convergence of Mixed-Race Census Categorizations in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain

    Canadian Political Science Association
    81th Annual Conference
    2009-05-27 through 2009-05-29

    Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
    Ohio University

    By examining racial classifications in national censuses this paper will explore moments of policy convergence that defy domestic explanations of the state’s regulation of racial identities. During the same time period, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada all moved towards ‘counting’ mixed-race on their national censuses; given their previous divergences in other areas of racial regulation, even in terms of previous modes of racial classification, this recent convergence is puzzling. In the United States, this move is largely attributed to the existence of a mixed-race social movement that pushed Congress for the change – but parallel developments in Canada and the U.K. occurred without the presence of a politically active civil society devoted to making the change. This begs an interesting question: Why the convergence? When domestic explanations prove insufficient, what can comparisons tell us? This paper will demonstrate the political salience of global trends surrounding race and racialism – specifically, the transnational discourses of multiculturalism and recognition that have pervaded ethnopolitics since the 1990s. Ultimately, it seeks to challenge conventional domestic explanations for institutional racial categorization, rejecting ‘exceptionalism’ in the sphere of problematic race relations and demonstrating the ways in which race can be studied in comparative context.

  • Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

    Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

    Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
    Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
    pages 67-90

    Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
    Department of Geography & Planning
    University Toronto

    This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’.  The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Metisse Narratives

    Metisse Narratives

    Soundings: A journal of politics and culture
    Issue 5, Spring 1997

    Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
    Duke University

    Jayne Ifekwunigwe discusses the testimonies of women of ‘mixed race’ parentage in the English-African diaspora.

    Rather than representing a portrait of metisse (‘mixed race’) girls as unruly, at age six Sandra and Aneya have exposed the major problematic of ‘race’.  Their discussion highlights the cultural paradoxes of ‘race’ and colour which multiple generations of women, men and children in England silently negotiate in their everyday lives.  These individuals descend from lineages which cut across so-called different ‘black and white’ ‘races’, ethnicities, cultures, and classes. Their roots are both endogenous and exogenous.

    In varied cultural and historical contexts, countless terms are employed to name such individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), metissage which more appropriately describe generations of individuals who by virtue of birth and lineage do not fit neatly into preordained sociological and anthropological categories.  In England, at the moment, there are a multitude of terms in circulation which describe individuals who straddle racial borders.  More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being metis (se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘black’/’white’ racial categories and the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and over-lapping historical traditions.  The lack of consensus as to which term to use, as well as the limitations of this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to metis(se) and metissage…

    …Gettin’ into me late teens, I didn’t think much about meself because of all these conflicts that were startin’ to come up from the past. Also new ones that were comin’ in from other communities – black communities – that were really shockin’ me. I mean there were times when I wouldn’t show me legs. I’d go through the summer wearing tights and socks. Cause I thought they were too light and too white-lookin’. There was a lot of pressure. I remember one day I was leanin’ up somewhere and this guy said to me, ‘Boy, aren’t your legs white.’ I just looked in horror, and felt really sick and wanted to just run away. I was thinkin’, God why didn’t you make me a bit darker? Why did you make me so light? It took me years to reconcile that…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Nation and Miscegenation: Comparing Anti-Miscegenation Regulations in North America

    Nation and Miscegenation: Comparing Anti-Miscegenation Regulations in North America

    Canadian Political Science Association
    80th Annual Conference
    2008-06-04 through 2008-06-06

    Paper Dated: 2008-05

    Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
    Ohio University

    Nearly forty years after Loving v. Virginia, the historical prohibition of interracial relationships in the United States exemplifies the state’s regulation of intimate life.  Anti-miscegenation laws were not simply about the prevention interracial sexual relations; rather, the discourse also concerned the transgression of gendered/raced social boundaries, the exposure of raced/gendered sexualities, the threat of non-white access to white capital, and the potential of mixed-race progeny and the predicament of racial categorization.  While a number of legal and historical studies consider the emergence and existence of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States (Williamson, 1980; Davis, 1991;) comparative studies on this subject in political science are virtually non-existent.  However, the Canadian state also enacted antimiscegenation laws in the same era throughout various Indian Act regimes and informally regulated other white/non-white sexual relations.  This paper will explore the similarities and differences among discourses of anti-miscegenation in North America, seeking to demonstrate that: a) the decision to enact formal legislation can be partially attributed to a number of factors, including the demographic size of the non-white population and the threat posed by mixed-race progeny to the dominant group’s access to power, privilege and resources; b) contrary to the popular belief of the so-called ‘tolerance’ of Canadians, racist sentiments towards non-whites existed during the same era that anti-miscegenation laws were created and implemented in the United States; and c) the differences in anti-miscegenation regulation in Canada and the United States are strongly linked to discourses of white masculine nationalism.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • The (Mono-) Racial Contract: Mixed-Race Implications

    The (Mono-) Racial Contract: Mixed-Race Implications

    Canadian Political Science Association
    79th Annual Conference
    2007-05-30 through 2007-06-01

    Paper Dated: 2007-05-17

    Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
    Ohio University

    Nearly a decade ago, Charles Mills brought ‘race’ into mainstream political theory through his theory of the Racial Contract; namely, that all social contracts are underwritten by the meta-political system of domination which privileges whites over nonwhites. Yet in Mills’ analysis – like most literature in the social sciences – the subjectivity of mixed-race identities is scarcely considered. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the Racial Contract for (s)he who is neither white nor nonwhite: the mixed-race subject. I contend applying the terms of the Racial Contract within the context of multiraciality in Canada will demonstrate both the unique racial positioning of the mixed-race subject and will further solidify Mills’ contention that the Racial Contract is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract.  Using The Racial Contract as a theoretical and methodological guide, this paper will follow three of Mills’ main arguments, incorporating mixed-race subjectivities and proving that: the Racial Contract has unique political, moral and epistemological implications for multiracials in Canada; the Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing not just personhood and subpersonhood, but also liminal personhood; and the ideological conditioning required by the Racial Contract involves a solidification of discrete racial categories, thus rendering the mixed-race subject as theoretically and vernacularly invisible. Using historical and contemporary examples from Canadian law and society, the scholarly contribution of this work is its merging of Canadian content and foci with the emerging, American-dominated literature known as critical mixed-race theory…

    …Though a powerful legal paradigm in the U.S. dictated the racial identities of mixed-race children as ‘nonwhite’ from birth, the phenomenon of ‘passing’ erupted while miscegenation laws were still firmly in place. The lighter one’s skin happened to be, the finer his or her hair, the further away from a nonwhite racial identity (s)he could move, the less stigmatisation from dominant society (s)he faced. ‘Passing,’ therefore, always refers to passing as white. This phenomenon reinforces racial aesthetics as one of the means through which the biological construction of ‘race’ was able to negate the existence of multiraciality.  If a multiracial person could pass for white and gain access to social and economic opportunities denied to people of colour, self-identifying as such was never a solidification of mixed-race heritage. Rather, it was a forced denial borne from the necessity to identify as something – but the choice of categories were strictly divided in broad strokes of black, white, yellow and red, leaving no room for anything that was some (or even all) of the above. Further, this phenomenon elucidates another aspect of multiraciality deemed threatening by the dominant race: that of identifiability. Using ‘race’ to distinguish between persons and subpersons, the Racial Contract requires a means of identifying each from the other. Those who blur this distinction indeed pose a problem for the maintenance of the racial hierarchy itself. Subpersons must be kept firmly in place through proactive measures; being able to identify them was crucial to the Racial Contract’s continued existence. The alleged racial determinants of identity (and therefore destiny) were superficial morphological characteristics such as hair texture, eye, nose, and mouth shape and size, and, above all else, skin colour. Without these tell-tale signs of inferiority, the hierarchy itself would be in danger…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Mixed Race Gay Men and HIV: A Community History

    Mixed Race Gay Men and HIV: A Community History

    Format: Single Authored Book
    Anticipated Publication Date: 2010

    Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
    San Fransisco State University
    Center for Health Disparities Research and Training

    Mixed Race Gay Men and HIV: A Community History will document the contemporary experiences of mixed race gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area through extensive individual and focus group interviews.  To date, a tremendous amount of research examines the socio-cultural and psychological factors that contribute to the experiences of gay men of color and gay white men, especially as these experiences relate to HIV/AIDS.  However, the literature on the experiences of mixed race gay men is pretty much non-existent.  Dr. Jolivétte is conducting this research to address the gap in the academic literature on mixed race gay men and HIV/AIDS health disparities.

    To read more about this research study, click here.

  • The one drop rule & the one hate rule

    The one drop rule & the one hate rule

    Dædalus, Winter 2005

    David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
    University of California at Berkeley

    Two portentous practices within the public discussion of ‘race’ in the United States since the late 1960s are rarely analyzed together. One is the method by which we decide which individuals are ‘black.’ The other is our habit of conflating the mistreatment of blacks with that of nonblack minorities. Both practices compress a great range of phenomena into ostensibly manageable containers.  Both function to keep the concept of race current amid mounting pressures that threaten to render it anachronistic.  Both invite reassessment at the start of the twenty first century.  The prevailing criterion for deciding who is black is of course the principle of hypodescent. This ‘one drop rule’ has meant that anyone with a visually discernable trace of African, or what used to be called ‘Negro,’ ancestry is, simply, black.  Comparativists have long noted the peculiar ordinance this mixture denying principle has exercised over the history of the United States. Although it no longer has the legal status it held in many states during the Jim Crow era, this principle was reinforced in the civil rights era as a basis for antidiscrimination remedies.

    Today it remains in place as a formidable convention in many settings and dominates debates about the categories appropriate for the federal census. The movement for recognition of ‘mixed race’ identity has made some headway, including for people with a fraction of African ancestry, but most governments, private agencies, educational institutions, and advocacy organizations that classify and count people by ethnoracial categories at all continue to perpetuate hypodescent racialization when they talk about African Americans.

    This practice makes the most sense when antidiscrimination remedies are in view. If discrimination has proceeded on the basis of the one drop rule, so too should antidiscrimination remedies. But even when antidiscrimination remedies are not at issue, most Americans of all colors think about African American identity in either/or terms: you are black, or you are not. It is common for people to say, “I’m half Irish and half Jewish” without one’s listener translating the declaration into terms other than the speaker’s. One can even boast, “I’m one-eighth Cherokee” without causing the listener to quarrel with that fraction or to doubt that the speaker is basically a white person. But those who say things like “I’m half Irish and half black” are generally understood really to be black, and “I’m one-eighth African American” is not part of the genealogical boasting that infuses American popular culture.

    The second portentous practice is the treating of all victims of white racism alike, regardless of how differently this racism has affected African Americans, Latinos, Indians, and Asian Americans, to say nothing of the subdivisions within each of these communities of descent.  When federal agencies developed affirmative action programs in the late 1960s, they identified Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Indians along with African Americans as eligible groups.  As John Skrentny has shown, entitlements for nonblack groups were predicated on the assumption that such groups were like blacks in their social experience.  Other disadvantaged groups, including women, impoverished Anglo whites, impoverished European ethnics, and gays and lesbians, were less successful in gaining entitlements during the socalled minority rights revolution because they were not perceived as victims of white racism. Yet the officials who designed entitlement programs for the purposes of remedying white racism often homogenized those descent groups colloquially coded as black, brown, red, and yellow. There was a good reason for this. White racism was real, had expressed itself against every one of these color-coded groups, and was a problem in American life that demanded correction…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future

    Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future

    Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters
    Volume 31, Number 4 (2008)
    pages 1033–1037
    DOI: 10.1353/cal.0.0282

    David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
    University of California at Berkeley

    The focus of media depictions of Barack Obama as a “post-racial,” “post-black” or “postethnic” candidate is usually limited to two aspects of his presidential campaign.  First is his self-presentation with minimal references to his color. Unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, whose presidential candidacies were more directed at the significance of the color line, Obama has never offered himself as the candidate of a particular ethnoracial group. Second, the press calls attention to the willingness of millions of white voters to respond to Obama.  Some of his greatest margins in primary elections and caucuses were in heavily white states like Idaho and Montana.  He even won huge numbers of white voters in some states of the old Confederacy, and in the November election carried Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.

    But there is much more to it…

    …Obama’s mixed ancestry generates some of the new uncertainty about blackness.  The white part of his genetic inheritance is not socially hidden, as it often is for “light-skinned blacks” who descend from black women sexually exploited by white slaveholders and other white males. Rather, Obama’s white ancestry is right there in the open, visible in the form of the white woman who, as a single mother, raised Obama after his black father left the family to return to his native Kenya. Press accounts of Obama’s life, as well as Obama’s own autobiographical writings, render Obama’s whiteness hard to miss.  No public figure, not even Tiger Woods, has done as much as Obama to make Americans of every education level and social surrounding aware of color-mixing in general and that most of the “black” population of the United States, in particular, are partially white. The “one-drop rule” which denies that color is a two-way street is far from dead, but not since the era of its legal and social consolidation in the early 1920s has the ordinance of this rule been so subject to challenge….

    Read the entire article here.