Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Mix-d: uk: A Look at Mixed-Race Identities

    Mix-d: uk: A Look at Mixed-Race Identities

    Pelican Press, Manchester, United Kingdom
    September 2008
    32 pages
    ISBN: 978-0-9559505-0-6

    Bradley Lincoln, Editor & Designer

    Richard Milnes, Photographer

    Mix-d: uk is a publication looking at mixed race identities from the Multiple Heritage Project [now mix-d] and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust. It celebrates the UK’s diverse Multiple Heritage population through portraits of people of mixed background. This beautiful book is a positive representation of this growing population with personal quotes reflecting the multiple heritage experience.

    You may order the book here.

  • Raising Chicanos in the Great White North: A White Mother’s Muse

    Raising Chicanos in the Great White North: A White Mother’s Muse

    Qualitative Inquiry
    Volume 15, Number 7, (July 2009)
    pages 1155-1177
    DOI: 10.1177/1077800409338033

    Traci Fordham-Hernández, Assistant Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
    St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY

    This article explores paradoxes in being the White mother of Mexican American children and discusses how some of its attendant issues contrast one another.  The author, an American scholar, believes she is taught to think and to write, not from the heart, but from a detached and “objective,” cerebral cortex, and she sees the places, the prism through which the world is seen, are constantly shifting.  The author writes of liminality and simultaneity, “I’m ‘swimming in the sea’ as both the swimmer, struggling, and part of the sea, itself, pulling myself under, drowning in between-ness . . .”  The headings, “From the Shore,” provide a detached, theoretical reflection upon the author’s experiences as a White mother of mixed-race children: “I’m standing on the banks, looking into my experiences and speaking from my ’head’,” and the headings, “In the Sea,” provide stories: “I’m immersed in the depths of my experiences and reflecting from my ‘heart’.”

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Dr. Maria P. P. Root Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Dr. Maria P. P. Root Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow
    Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
    Episode: #113 – Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D.
    Wednesday, 2009-08-07, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

    Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D.

    Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D., born in Manila, Philippines, grew up in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from the University of California at Riverside in 1977 with degrees in Psychology and Sociology. She subsequently attended Claremont University in Claremont, California receiving her Masters degree in Cognitive Psychology in 1979. She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1983 with an emphasis in minority mental health. Dr. Root resides in Seattle, Washington where she is an independent scholar and clinical psychologist. She has been in practice for over 20 years. Her general practice focuses on adult and adolescent treatment therapy, which includes working with families and couples. Dr. Root’s working areas of knowledge are broad with emphasis on culturally competent practice, life transition issues, trauma, ethnic and racial identity, workplace stress and harassment, and disordered eating. In the early 1980s, she established a group treatment program for bulimia that grew out of her dissertation work. Subsequently, she trained other professionals to recognize and treat people with a range of disordered eating symptoms. She continues to treat people with eating disorders. Dr. Root’s practice also includes formal psychological evaluation. She works as a consultant to several law enforcement departments. She also works as an expert witness in forensic settings performing evaluations and offering expert testimony in matters that require cultural competence and/or knowledge of racism or ethnocentrism. Dr. Root is a trainer, educator, and public speaker on the topics of multiracial families, multiracial identity, cultural competence, trauma, work place harassment, and disordered eating. She has provided lectures and training in New Zealand, England, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States for major universities, professional organizations, grassroots community groups, and student organizations. Dr. Root’s publications cover the areas of trauma, cultural assessment, multiracial identity, feminist therapy, and eating disorders. One of the leading authorities in the field of racial and ethnic identity, Dr. Root published the first contemporary volume on mixed race people, Racially Mixed People in America (1992). Including this book, she has edited two award-winning books on multiracial people and produced the foundational Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People. The U.S. Census referred to these texts in their deliberations that resulted in an historic  “check more than one” format to the race question for the 2000 census. Dr. Root is past-President of the Washington State Psychological Association and the recipient of national and international awards from professional and community organizations. She is also a clay artist, and maintains a website about her work at Primitiva Pottery and Tile.

    Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

  • When Race Matters: Racially Stigmatized Others and Perceiving Race as a Biological Construction Affect Biracial People’s Daily Well-Being

    When Race Matters: Racially Stigmatized Others and Perceiving Race as a Biological Construction Affect Biracial People’s Daily Well-Being

    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
    Volume 35, Number 9 (September 2009)
    pages 1154-1164
    DOI: 10.1177/0146167209337628

    Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
    Rutgers University

    Julie A. Garcia, Associate Professor of Psychology
    California Polytechnic State University

    Stigmatized group members experience greater well-being in the presence of similar others, which may be driven by the perception that similar others value their shared stigmatized identities (i.e., high public regard). Using experience sampling methodology, this hypothesis is tested with biracial people (29 Asian/White, 23 Black/ White, and 26 Latino/White biracial participants). This study proposes that the greater percentage of stigmatized similar others in one’s daily context would predict greater daily well-being for biracial people through higher public regard, but only if biracial people believe that race has biological meaning. These findings add to a growing, but limited, literature on biracial individuals.  These findings are situated within the broader literature on stigma and similar others, as well as new theories regarding the consequences of believing race has biological meaning.

    Read or purchae the article here.  Read the pre-published draft here.

  • Mixed-Race Looks

    Mixed-Race Looks

    Contemporary Asthetics
    Special Volume 2, 2009

    Ronald Sundstrom, Associate Professor of African American Studies
    University of San Francisco

    The multiracial population is growing larger and so is popular awareness about multiracial or mixed-race identity. Simmering beneath the growing public recognition of multiracial identity are questions about the legitimacy of mixed race, multiracial, or biracial as social categories, and further questions about the ethics and politics of those identities. Behind some of these questions are worries about how multiracial identity interacts with racialized aesthetic standards. This essay addresses these issues by investigating whether those affirmations are racist and betray monoracial groups. This essay concludes that such affirmations are not necessarily racist or traitorous. Instead, they are consistent with modern expressions of individuality, and arise from self-assertions of personal authenticity and autonomy. All the same, these affirmations and assertions do risk participating in, and contributing to, racist aesthetic standards. The arguments presented in this essay are part of a broader project on mixed race and the ethics of identity.

    Read the entire article here.

  • “Our Duty to Conserve”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philosophy of History in Context

    “Our Duty to Conserve”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Philosophy of History in Context

    South Atlantic Quarterly
    Volume 108, Number 3 (2009)
    pages 519-540
    DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2009-006

    Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
    Pennsylvania State University

    When restored to its historical context, W. E. B. Du Bois‘s “The Conservation of Races” emerges less as a contribution to the debate about the legitimacy of the concept of race, which is how it tends to be read today, and more as an intervention in the debate about the impact of so-called miscegenation on the African American population. Du Bois’s contribution is situated in relation to the positions held by Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden, and Alexander Crummell. Particular attention is paid to the way Du Bois and Kelly Miller used the inaugural meeting of the American Negro Academy to respond to Frederick Hoffman’s racist study, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which in the context of social Darwinism had a dramatic impact on how mixed-race people were seen. Du Bois argued that African Americans should not divide on the basis of degrees of racial purity but unite around their common ideals and a hope for the future in the midst of continuing oppression.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • A New Take On A Old Idea: Do We Need Multiracial Studies?

    A New Take On A Old Idea: Do We Need Multiracial Studies?

    Du Bois Review: Social Science Review on Race
    Volume 3, Issue 2 (September 2006)
    pages 437-447
    DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X06060280

    Victor Thompson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersery

    Publications about multiracial identity and the multiracial population increased significantly prior to the 2000 U.S. Census. Most of these publications emerged after 1997—a significant year in the recent history of studies on the multiracial population, as this was the year the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established new guidelines for collecting data on race, allowing people to choose more than one race (Office of Management and Budget 1997). It quickly became evident that this change in how the federal government tallies race was a significant event that merited the attention of academics. This surge in research on multiracial identity and the multiracial movement reflected, on the one hand, a push by multiracial advocates for more attention to the complexities of “being multiracial” and, on the other hand, a group of scholars interested in understanding the unfolding of these events…

    …Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America, by Kim Williams (2006), treats issues characteristic of scholars interested in the set of events leading up to and following the adoption of the “mark one or more” (MOOM) option for the 2000 Census.  Challenging Multiracial Identity, by Rainier Spencer (2006), represents a growing interest in critically understanding and evaluating the motivations of “multiracial” politics.  And The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking (2004), edited by Heather Dalmage (2004), is a collection of essays by authors who contribute to what might be seen as the emerging field of multiracial studies.  I shall discuss these authors’ attempts to reflect on, and potentially give birth to, a sub-discipline of multiracial studies, after first offering a synopsis of each work…

    Read the entire review of all three books here.

  • ‘Canadian’ and ‘Being Indian’: Subject Positions and Discourses Used in South Asian-Canadian Women’s Talk about Ethnic Identity

    ‘Canadian’ and ‘Being Indian’: Subject Positions and Discourses Used in South Asian-Canadian Women’s Talk about Ethnic Identity

    Culture & Psychology
    Volume 15, Number 2 (2009)
    pages 255-283
    DOI: 10.1177/1354067X09102893

    Rebecca L. Malhi
    University of Calgary, Canada, rmalhi@ucalgary.ca

    Susan D. Boon
    University of Calgary, Canada, sdboon@ucalgary.ca

    Timothy B. Rogers
    University of Calgary, Canada

    Ethnic identity descriptions can be viewed as ‘subject positions’ (Davies and Harré, 1990) that are dynamically adopted and discarded for pragmatic purposes through the medium of socialinteraction.  Inthe present paper, we use positioning theory to explore the multiple ways our participants—South Asian-Canadian women—positioned themselves and others in conversations about their ethnic identity.  A discourse analysis of participants’ talk revealed a tendency to privilege a ‘hybrid’ Canadian/South Asian identity over a unicultural one.  Moreover, in the rare instances when participants positioned themselves with a unicultural identity, subtle social pressure from conversational partners seemed to induce them to reposition themselves (or others) with a hybrid identity. We conclude by giving possible reasons for such a preference and by discussing the ways in which the current study corroborates and expands on the extant literature.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice

    The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice

    Camera Obscura
    Volume 24, Number 1, 70 (2009)
    pages 37-65
    DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2008-014

    Jennifer González, Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture Contemporary Art, Race and Representation
    Harvard University

    Contemporary digital artists have been exploring the function of the face and its relation to public space for several decades. This essay offers a close reading of artworks by Keith Piper, Nancy Burson, Keith Obadike, and the collective Mongrel that address the relation between race discourse and the visual representation (or elision) of the face. As the most reproduced visual sign on the Internet, the face continues to operate as a threshold to public space. Facebook, the largest social networking site with more than 80 million registered members, has uploaded more than 4 billion images in the past four years alone. The writings of media theorist Mark Hansen offer a provocative starting point to explore how a desire for racial neutrality can lead to the unintentional repression of important forms of cultural difference. Two models of ethics, grounded in the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Emannuel Lévinas, respectively, are posed as alternatives in the quest for understanding the importance of “the face.” Finally, the essay asks what role secrecy might play in the production and subversion of the public sphere, as well as in the fantasy constructions of race and racial difference.

  • `Caucasian and Thai make a good mix’

    `Caucasian and Thai make a good mix’

    European Journal of Cultural Studies
    Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2009)
    pages 59-78
    DOI: 10.1177/1367549408098705

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

    This article examines the current celebration of Eur/Asianness in the media and popular culture. It traces representations of the `mixed race’ body, from colonial discourses of degeneracy and monstrosity to capitalist discourses of commercialized exoticism and `beauty’.  It then examines how people of Thai and non-Thai parentage interviewed in Britain and Germany in 2001 and 2002 negotiated gendered and racialized readings of their bodies. Narratives of multi-racialized embodiment brim with racism, as the `valuable’ or `pathological’, `good’ or `bad mixes’, of unlike body parts grafted onto each other. This necessitates a critical re-evaluation of `hybridity’ debates, which treat biological racism as a past phenomenon that can be metaphorized for cultural processes of identification.

    Read or purchase the article here.