Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Students manage social lives amidst diversity

    Students manage social lives amidst diversity

    The Dartmouth
    Dartmouth College    , Hanover, New Hampshire
    2010-11-11

    Marina Villeneuve, The Dartmouth Staff

    Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series investigating race at the College. The experiences and opinions expressed are the views of individual students, and should not be considered representative of wider communities.

    When Marian Gutierrez ’13 stepped onto Dartmouth’s campus as a freshman, she said found she herself a member of a student population strikingly different than the one that existed in her hometown of Los Angeles.

    “It wasn’t as diverse as I thought it would be,” she said. “It was a bit of a culture shock.”

    The College’s efforts to widen the diversity of the student body have resulted in an undergraduate population increasingly reflective of national demographics — as of this fall, the undergraduate population is 8 percent African-American, 14 percent Asian-American, 7 percent Latino, 4 percent Native American, 7 percent international and 53 percent white, according to the Office of Institutional Research…

    …Students of mixed race said their backgrounds allowed them to mediate between different groups on campus.

    “Being half black and half Mexican has made my life more interesting here — I feel two ways at same time,” Chris Norman ’13 said. “There’s more than one group I can go to and relate with. For me, it’s easier to branch out to the mainstream community being mixed race.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

    Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

    Inside Fordham Online
    Fordham University
    In Focus: Faculty and Research
    2010-11-15

    Patrick Verel

    Already the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos will be an even bigger presence in the years to come, according to demographic studies. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is making sure their stories are told.

    Through 10 books, dozens of papers and consulting projects with Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, Rodriguez has developed a deep knowledge about a group that now accounts for 15 percent of the population.

    Her analyses of United States census data have resulted in papers such as “Contestations Over Classifications: Latinos, the Census and Race in the United States” (Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2009) and “Implications and Impact of Race on the Health of Latinos,” a chapter in Health Issues in Latino Males: A Social and Structural Approach (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

    As part of her study of census data, Rodriguez cast a critical eye on racial classifications in the decennial censuses. Examining how respondents who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino reported their race, she found that 40 percent chose “some other race,” and many of them wrote in what is known as a Latino identifier, such as Dominican, Panamanian or Chicano.

    This happened in the last three decennial censuses, despite the fact that the census allowed them to choose more than one racial category in the last census…

    …“People who could choose more than one race didn’t choose white and black; they still chose the category ‘some other race.’ This 40 percent has increased—I think this time it was 42 percent—even though the Census Bureau has really tried to discourage this response,” she said.

    “This raises the question, ‘What is race?’ Science was raising that question. Children of mixed-race families were raising that question. So are people from all over the world who came here with very different identities and are now being folded into one of our five major groups.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Trends in the Naming of Tri-Racial Mixed-Blood Groups in the Eastern United States

    Trends in the Naming of Tri-Racial Mixed-Blood Groups in the Eastern United States

    American Speech
    Volume 22, Number 2 (April, 1947)
    pages 81-87

    A. R. Dunlap
    University of Delaware

    C. A. Weslager
    University of Delaware

    In the eastern part of the United States, particularly in the southern and middle-Atlantic portions, are a number of populations groups, so-called ‘ethnic-island,’ whose members combine, in varying degrees, the characteristics of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Indian racial stocks. To quote W. H. Gilbert, Jr., who has written extensively of mixed-blood groups, these racial islands

    seem to develop especially where environmental circumstances such as forbidding swamps and inaccessible and barren mountain country favor their growth.  Many are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic coast where swamps or island and peninsulas have protected them… Others are farther inland in the Piedmont area and are found with their backs up against the wall of the Blue Ridge or Alleghenies.  A few… are to be found on the very top of the Blue Ridge and on the several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

    A sufficient number of these tri-racial groups has now been reported in various sociological and ethnological journals to make possible a study of the names employed to distinguish this type of mixed-bloods from mixed-bloods of bi-racial origin, such as mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, etc., or from ‘pure’ bloods of one of the three principal racial stocks, i.e., whites, Indians, and Negroes. From the alphabetical list which follows have been excluded names of ethnic groups which perpetuate Indian tribal names for example, the Nanticokes and Houmas mentioned in Gilbert’s ‘Memorandum’; or the surviving Powhatan tribes of Virginia, the Cherokee, and other Algonkian and Iroquoian descendants in the Eastern Woodlands area with tribal organizations.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

    Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

    University of Washington
    Department of Communications
    2010-11-15

    Amanda Weber

    LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

    Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.

  • Constructing Whiteness: Regulating Aboriginal identity

    Constructing Whiteness: Regulating Aboriginal identity

    University of Toronto
    2009
    93 pages
    Publication Number: AAT MR59722
    ISBN: 9780494597224

    Rebecca Boock

    A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Graduate Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

    Curricula in classrooms facilitate a national amnesia of colonialism that renders inconceivable the possibility of Aboriginal heritage or mixed-blood presence in national subjects. This thesis examines my own family history alongside the Indian Act and discourses of multiculturalism. I provide a personal account for the ways in which Aboriginal identities are regulated in Canada. I examine how glorified white settler narratives—reproduced through both formal and informal schooling—work to displace Aboriginal peoples as the original inhabitants of the land. I argue that this facilitates ongoing Canadian colonialism that continues to circumvent the possibility of particular mixed-blood Aboriginal identities within the confines of national belonging. Citizenship education in the Toronto District School Board is situated as a mechanism of formal schooling that continues to negate the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people so that mixed-race Aboriginal students may continue to assume themselves as white subjects within the nation.

    Table of Contents

    • Title Page
    • Abstract
    • Acknowledgements
    • Introduction
    • Chapter One: Rendering Whiteness: Making National Belonging White
    • Chapter Two: National Benevolence and the Erasure of Canadian Colonialism
    • Chapter Three” Citizenship Education: Reinscribing Whiteness
    • Conclusion
    • Bibliography

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Video from 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul now available on iTunes U

    Video from 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul now available on iTunes U

    If you missed the Nov 5-6, 2010 “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies” conference or any of the keynote talks or the welcoming address, you can now download the videos via Apple’s iTunes U.

    Here is a link to the following videos:

    • November 5th (00:19:48): Welcoming Remarks by DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and conference organizers Camilla Fojas, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Laura Kina.
    • November 5th (00:50:36): Keynote Address by Andrew Jolivette, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation”
    • November 6th(01:00:04): Keynote Address by Mary Beltrán, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”
    • November 6th (00:57:08): Keynote Address by Louie Gong, “Halfs and Have Nots”

    Please note that your computer must have Apple’s iTunes installed in order to view the video.  It can be download here.

  • Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

    Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

    Southern Spaces
    An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections
    2007-08-28

    Ed Piacentino, Professor of English
    High Point University, High Point, North Carolina

    This essay examines Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), a short story acknowledged as the first fictional work by an African American. Through its representation of physical and psychological effects, Séjour’s story, a narrative of slavery in Saint-Domingue, also inaugurated the literary delineation of slavery’s submission-rebellion binary. The enslaved raconteur in “The Mulatto” voices protest and appeals to social consciousness and sympathy, anticipating the embedded narrators in works of later writers throughout the Plantation Americas.

    Sections:

    • Introduction
    • Liberated Narrative Voice
    • Restricted Space
    • Clotel’s Rebellion
    • Local Color
    • Conclusion & Notes
    • Recommended Resources
    • “The Mulatto”

    Introduction

    A little-known story first translated into English in 1995 by Philip Barnard for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) by Victor Séjour (1817-1874), a New Orleans free man of color, was initially published in the March 1837 issue of Cyrille Bisette’s Parisian abolitionist journal La Revue des Colonies. La Revue was a monthly periodical of “Colonial Politics, Administration, Justice, Education and Customs” owned and sponsored by a “society of men of color.” A recent immigrant to Paris, Séjour was in an amenable environment among kindred spirits who shared his sentiments about slavery.

    …Although little known in its era, “The Mulatto” presents the binary of submission and rebellion that became a motif in U.S. based slave narratives and novelized autobiographies treating racialized sexual harassment and/or exploitation of mulattas such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, antislavery novels such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel or; The President’s Daughter and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and even late nineteenth-century southern local color stories with embedded former slave storytellers, such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius. In exposing the brutality of the slave system, such as the impact of miscegenation on persons of mixed race; the sexual violation of enslaved persons; and the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery—particularly the devastating effects on family life of whites as well as on blacks—“The Mulatto” deploys strategies for antislavery protest writing that will appear in antebellum slave narratives and anti-slavery novels and in postbellum fiction about slavery…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Bringing the Mix-d: Experience to Leicester College: A Good Practice Guide to Meeting the Needs of Mixed Heritage Students in Further Education

    Bringing the Mix-d: Experience to Leicester College: A Good Practice Guide to Meeting the Needs of Mixed Heritage Students in Further Education

    Multiple Heritage Project
    May 2010
    26 pages

    Leicester College was successful in gaining funding from the LSC [Learning Skills Council] for a specific action research project to work with a group of mixed heritage young people on their issues, and to produce this good practice guidance, other resources and staff training. The College advertised for a consultancy to undertake the work and subsequently commissioned the Multiple Heritage Project  (MHP) based in Manchester, as they had wide ranging national experience and a proven track record in this area. This is their report.

    …Mix-d: on the margins of FE

    Mix-d: [mixed heritage] students are the focus for this good practice guide because the data shows that they increasingly occupy stereotypical positions in society and institutions, are a growing group and are rarely, if ever, acknowledged in educational research. The small amount of research that exists suggests that mix-d: people are often expected to choose one racial identity at the exclusion of another, or are seen as occupying a ‘confused’ middle space.

    At the same time, mix-d: people are often heralded as the embodiments of a culturally diverse and post-racial society. As the numbers of mix-d: students entering FE increases, their absence from current race equality policies and invisibility within the curriculum are causing education practitioners to analyse more closely what is currently being offered to those who identify as mix-d:.

    Although race is a social construct, the “politics” of race—and the part racism plays—is a regular and unavoidable feature of life for many and should not be confused with ethnicity which simply means belonging to a human group ie White British people also have an ethnicity.

    Limited research in the area of mix-d: students suggests that there is a significant number of younger people in this group who are failing to have their needs met. Indications in this area of work are that socio-economic factors, family structure, stereotyping and lack of appropriate terminology can hinder any positive moves forward.

    There seems to be a dearth of policy in this area and low levels of awareness regarding this growing group. Some professionals appear reticent to address issues concerning race and ethnicity and still frequently struggle with appropriate terminology. It is time that targeted and focussed research addressed the presence of this growing population…

    Read the entire report here.

  • Multiracial and Adopted Asians

    Multiracial and Adopted Asians

    Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
    Volume 3, Number 2 (Fall 2001)
    Theme: Interracial and Mixed-racial Relationships and Families

    C. N. Le, Senior Lecturer Professor
    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    In the 1980s Asian Americans became the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the United States in terms of percentage growth.  As part of this growth, the number of those who are multiracial and adopted from Asia is increasing significantly.  These particular Asian Americans face unique political and cultural challenges from Asians and non-Asians alike.  While many struggle to fit into both cultures, many are creating their own identity that unites, rather than separates, their experiences. 

    Table of Contents

    • All Mixed Up?
    • All Asians Alone or with Other Races
    • Room to Grow
    • Much More Than the Sum of the Parts
    • References
    • Editor’s Note

    Read the eniter article here.

  • Ethnic, Multi-Ethnic, and Nationalist Identity in Belize: Voices of Belizean Children

    Ethnic, Multi-Ethnic, and Nationalist Identity in Belize: Voices of Belizean Children

    Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
    Volume 3, Number 1 (Spring 2001)
    Theme: International Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

    Sarah Woodbury Haug

    This paper discusses ethnicity and nationalism in children in the rural community of Punta Gorda, Belize. Ethnicity and nationalism are important aspects of identity in Belize because of a deliberate government policy to teach about these identities in the schools. My purpose in this paper is to contrast what is taught in schools about ethnicity and nationalism with how children describe their own identities.

    Table of Contents

    • The Government’s Plan
    • Methodology
    • Ethnicity in Punta Gorda
    • Working in the Schools
    • Voices of Ethnically Mixed Children
    • Conclusion
    • Endnotes
    • References

    Read the entire article here.