Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Claiming a Biracial Identity: Resisting Social Constructions of Race and Culture

    Claiming a Biracial Identity: Resisting Social Constructions of Race and Culture

    Journal of Counseling & Development
    Volume 77, Number 1 (Winter 1999)
    pages 32-35
    ISSN-0748-9633

    Carmen Braun Williams, Assistant Vice President for Diversity
    University of Colorado System

    In a world where socially constructed categories of race are misconstrued as biological, the author, a light-skinned “Black,” found herself unacceptable to both sides. From exploring her own Blackness to owning both her Whiteness and her Blackness, her story explores the biracial experience that goes beyond racial identity models.

  • Biracial Japanese American identity: An evolving process.

    Biracial Japanese American identity: An evolving process.

    Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
    Volume 6, Number 2, (May 2000)
    pages 115-133
    DOI: 10.1037/1099-9809.6.2.115

    J. Fuji Collins, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Health & Wellness – Vice Chancellor
    University of California, Merced

    Explored the complexity of biracial identity development in Japanese Americans, focusing on how Japanese Americans perceive themselves in relation to individuals, groups, and their environment. 15 semistructured interviews with 8 men and 7 women (ages 20–40 yrs), each with 1 Japanese parent and 1 non-Asian parent were conducted. Identity development among participants varied. It was a long-term process involving changes in the individual–environment relationship, which differed in the way individual participants influenced or selected from environmental opportunities, even creating or recreating some aspects. Within a given setting, as youths, the potential for social experiences were relatively fixed and changed only gradually. As adults, there were opportunities for participants to select their own social and geographic settings, providing opportunity for change. In their new environments, participants were exposed to new contacts and role models, acquired new behavioral repertoire, and underwent role transitions. Depending on this, new and different aspects of biracial identity developed. Participants indicated it was an emotional and conflictual process to positive assertion of identity. Before reaching this, all of the participants experienced periods of confusion.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Thinking outside the (black) box: Measuring black and multiracial identification on surveys

    Thinking outside the (black) box: Measuring black and multiracial identification on surveys

    Social Science Research
    Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2007
    Pages 921-944
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2006.07.001 

    Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
    University of Iowa

    To better understand the diversity of the multiracial population, compare multiracial data to single-race data, and evaluate the rigidity of racial boundaries, we must understand the single-race identification choices of multiracial respondents. Many studies assume that this pattern will be straightforward for multiracial respondents who choose a part-black identification, with virtually all choosing a “black” single-race identification. I investigate whether this assumption is justified by available survey data. Using the May 1995 Current Population Survey’s Race and Ethnicity Supplement, I explore the single-race identifications of individuals who have chosen a part-black multiracial label on a survey. I find that single-race identification choices on forced-choice questions vary considerably across family heritage groups, with those who choose a “black-American Indian” identity extremely likely to select a black single-race identity, while other groups like “black-whites” have substantial variation in single-race identifications. Identification patterns vary significantly by age, family context and survey characteristics.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Books: Eight-Anna Girl

    Books: Eight-Anna Girl

    Time Magazine
    1954-03-29

    Bhowani Junction (394 pp.)—John Masters—Viking

    In days gone by, when the sun never set on the British Empire, old India hands toted the white man’s burden, and Rudyard Kipling wrote about it in some 35 volumes of prose and poetry. Now that the burden has been lifted, many an old India hand has little to tote but a stiff upper lip. Not so John Masters, exbrigadier of the Indian army. Bounced out of India by Indian independence, he has bounced right back again, figuratively, at least, with a self-imposed burden of Kiplingesque dimensions. The burden: to write 35 novels about the land of purdah and pukka sahibs, covering the rise and fall of British imperial rule. Bhowani Junction is 39-year-old Author Masters’ fourth, and a Book-of-the-Month-Club choice for April. It covers part of the fall.

    Three of Bhowani Junction’s, main characters take turns at telling the story, which hangs on the problems of a group Americans know little about. In India, there are many names for them—Anglo-Indians, Eurasians, half-castes, chee-chees, blacky-whites, eight-annas. Victoria Jones, an eight-anna girl, is “the color of dark ivory.” She is a lush beauty with come-hither eyes and a figure that would make an hourglass seem angular. But in 1946. with the British on their way out of India, Victoria’s problem is acute. (“We couldn’t become English, because we were half Indian. We couldn’t become Indian, because we were half English.”)

    Read the entire article here.

  • Dreaming of a colour-blind S’pore

    Dreaming of a colour-blind S’pore

    The Straits Sunday Times
    2010-08-08
    page 30

    Edwina Shaddick, 22
    British-Chinese

    Edwina Shaddick, final year politics and sociology major from SMU, has a father from Swindon, England and a mother who is Chinese Singaporean. She shares how her mixed heritage has shaped her identity.

    The politics and sociology major from Singapore Management University (SMU) has a father from Swindon, England, who is a Singapore permanent resident. Her mother is a Chinese Singaporean.

    The eldest of three children goes to England occasionally to visit relatives and friends.

    Her primary and secondary school years weres pent at Methodist Girls’ School.

    She is known as a Eurasian on her identity card. She had asked for Anglo-Chinese, but it was not allowed. Her two siblings are classified as Caucasians.

    Q: How has your mixed hetitage shaped your Identity?

    I think being mixed is but one facet of my identity. When I was younger I used to grapple with issues of race much more, like what it meant to not look like the majority of people in Singapore, what it meant to have an English father, which culture I liked more.

    But when I got older, I found other things that defined me, like my interest in sports or my sense of humour, so I placed less emphasis on something as trivial as race to define myself…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain

    Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain

    International Journal of Population Geography
    Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora
    Volume 9, Issue 4 (July/August 2003)
    pages 281–294
    DOI: 10.1002/ijpg.287

    Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
    Queen Mary, University of London

    This paper explores geographies of diaspora for Anglo-Indians (formerly known as ‘Eurasians’) through a focus on their ‘homing desire’ in two diaspora spaces: firstly, an imperial diaspora in British India, and secondly, a decolonised diaspora in Britain after independence in 1947. Before independence, although Anglo-Indians were ‘country-born’ and domiciled in India, many imagined Britain as home and identified with British life in India even though they were largely excluded from it. Britain was often imagined as the fatherland, embodied by the memory of a British paternal ancestor, as enacted by settlement at an independent homeland for Anglo-Indians established at McCluskieganj in Bihar in 1933. By 1947, there were about 300,000 Anglo-Indians in India, but a third had migrated by the 1970s. I explore the implications not only of independence but also the British Nationality Act of 1948, which required many Anglo-Indians to prove the British origins of a paternal ancestor. The difficulties of tracing British ancestry are explored with reference to the work of the Society of Genealogists in London on behalf of Anglo-Indians in the subcontinent. Drawing on these records, as well as material from the Anglo-Indian press and interviews with women from one school who migrated after independence, I argue that ideas of Britain as home were intimately bound up with ideas of whiteness. Ideas about an Anglo-Indian diaspora existed long before decolonisation, and the migration of Anglo-Indians under the British Nationality Act led in many ways to a recolonisation of identity. Unlike studies that concentrate on ‘feminising the diaspora’, I argue that the diasporic ‘homing desire’ of Anglo-Indians invoked ideas of imperial masculinity in both imaginative and material terms.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Fadeout for a Culture That’s Neither Indian Nor British

    Fadeout for a Culture That’s Neither Indian Nor British

    The New York Times
    2010-08-14

    Mian Ridge

    CALCUTTA — Entering the crumbling mansion of the Lawrence D’Souza Old Age Home here is a visit to a vanishing world.

    Breakfast tea from a cup and saucer, Agatha Christie murder mysteries and Mills & Boon romances, a weekly visit from the hairdresser, who sets a dowager’s delicate hair in a 1940s-style wave. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. Floral tea dresses, for example.

    “On Sundays, we listen to jive, although we don’t dance much anymore,” Sybil Martyr, a 96-year-old retired schoolteacher, said with a crisp English accent.

    “We’re museum pieces,” she said.

    The definition has varied over time, but under the Indian Constitution the term Anglo-Indian means an Indian citizen whose paternal line can be traced to Europe. Both of Mrs. Martyr’s grandfathers were Scots…

    …Before 1947, when the British left India, Anglo-Indians — also known at the time as half-castes, blacky-whites and eight annas (there were 16 annas in a rupee, the official currency of India) — formed a distinct community of 300,000 to 500,000 people. Most were employed in the railroads and other government services, and many lived in railroad towns built for them by the British, where their distinctive culture, neither Indian nor British, flourished…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Understanding Identity Differences among Biracial Siblings

    Understanding Identity Differences among Biracial Siblings

    American Sociological Association
    Annual Meeting 2010
    Regular Session: Multi-Racial Classification/Identity
    Atlanta Marriott Marquis
    Monday, 2010-08-16, 16:30-18:10 EDT (Local Time)

    Session Organizer: Rebecca C. King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer of Sociology, National University of Ireland-Maynooth 
    Presider: Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

    Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor, Sociology
    Dartmouth University

    This paper examines identity differences among a sample of 256 biracial siblings. We find that gender, age, and ancestry have modest relationships with identity, but that phenotype, racial context, language use, and social psychological factors have stronger relationships.

    For more information, click here.

  • Fluid or Fixed: Which is Better? Multiracial Identity Consistency and Emotional Well-Being in Adolescence

    Fluid or Fixed: Which is Better? Multiracial Identity Consistency and Emotional Well-Being in Adolescence

    American Sociological Association
    Annual Meeting 2010
    Regular Session: Multi-Racial Classification/Identity
    Atlanta Marriott Marquis
    Monday, 2010-08-16, 16:30-18:10 EDT (Local Time)

    Session Organizer: Rebecca C. King-O’Riain, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
    National University of Ireland-Maynooth 

    Presider: Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    University of Minnesota

    Ruth H. Burke
    University of Pennsylvania

    Rory Kramer
    University of Pennsylvania

    Camille Zubrinsky Charles, Professor of Sociology and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences; Director, The Center for Africana Studies
    University of Pennsylvania

    Traditional theories of multiracial identity propose that multiracial individuals go through a period of “crisis” in which their racial and ethnic identity is fluid and inconsistent. These theories argue that such fluidity leads to emotional stress. Recent research has shown that this fluidity is more related to socioeconomic status and background and that racial consistency is not a necessary or ideal goal for multiracial individuals. At the same time, others have shown how to measure consistency of identity in survey research such as Add Health but have not yet studied whether or not consistency is related to negative emotional outcomes. In this paper, we expand those measures to include Hispanic ethnic identity in our measure of consistency and test whether or not inconsistency of racial and/or ethnic identity is related to depression. We find that the older, more linear theories of multiraciality are not correct and that fluid identities are not significantly related to higher scores on a standard measure of depression. The paper concludes by discussing how these findings highlight the importance of producing new theories of racial identity that consider fluidity and multidimensionality of racial identity as a natural and neutral part of an individual’s identity.

    For more information, click here.

  • Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter

    Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter

    University of Georgia Press
    1995
    376 pages
    Illustrated
    Trim size: 6 x 9
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8203-1738-0

    Mary R. Bullard

    Society, politics, agriculture, and mixed-race unions in a coastal Georgia planter community

    Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island offers a rare glimpse into the life and times of a nineteenth-century planter on one of Georgia’s Sea Islands. Born poor, Robert Stafford (1790-1877) became the leading planter on his native Cumberland Island. Specializing in the highly valued long staple variety of cotton, he claimed among his assets more than 8,000 acres and 350 slaves.

    Mary R. Bullard recounts Stafford’s life in the context of how events from the Federalist period to the Civil War to Reconstruction affected Sea Island planters. As she discusses Stafford’s associations with other planters, his business dealings (which included banking and railroad investments), and the day-to-day operation of his plantation, Bullard also imparts a wealth of information about cotton farming methods, plantation life and material culture, and the geography and natural history of Cumberland Island.

    Stafford’s career was fairly typical for his time and place; his personal life was not. He never married, but fathered six children by Elizabeth Bernardey, a mulatto slave nurse. Bullard’s discussion of Stafford’s decision to move his family to Groton, Connecticut—and freedom—before the Civil War illuminates the complex interplay between southern notions of personal honor, the staunch independent-mindedness of Sea Island planters, and the practice and theory of racial separation.

    In her afterword to the Brown Thrasher edition, Bullard presents recently uncovered information about a second extralegal family of Robert Stafford as well as additional information about Elizabeth Bernardey’s children and the trust funds Stafford provided for them.