Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories

    The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories

    Wilfrid Laurier University Press
    May 2007
    370 pages
    ISBN13: 978-0-88920-523-9

    Editors:

    Ute Lischke, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
    Wilfrid Laurier University

    David T. McNab, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies
    York University, Toronto

    Known as “Canada’s forgotten people,” the Métis have long been here, but until 1982 they lacked the legal status of Native people. At that point, however, the Métis were recognized in the constitution as one of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. A significant addition to Métis historiography, The Long Journey of a Forgotten People includes Métis voices and personal narratives that address the thorny and complicated issue of Métis identity from historical and contemporary perspectives. Topics include eastern Canadian Métis communities; British military personnel and their mixed-blood descendants; life as a Métis woman; and the Métis peoples ongoing struggle for recognition of their rights, including discussion of recent Supreme Court rulings.

    Table of Contents

    Preface, The Years of Achievement Ute Lischke and David T.McNab
    Introduction: We Are Still Here Ute Lischke and David T.McNab

    Part I: Reflections on Métis Identities

      1. Out of the Bush: A Journey to a Dream Olive Patricia Dickason
      2. A Long Journey: Reflections on Spirit Memory and Métis Identities David T. McNab
      3. Reflections on Métis Connections in the Life and Writings of Louise Erdrich Ute Lischke
      4. The Winds of Change: Métis Rights after Powley, Taku and Haida Jean Teillet

    Part II: Historical Perspectives

      1. “I Shall Settle, Marry, and Trade Here”: British Military Personnel and Their Mixed-Blood Descendants Sandy Campbell
      2. Early Forefathers to the Athabasca Métis: Long-Term North West Company Employees Nicole St. Onge
      3. Manipulating Identity: The Sault Borderlands Métis and Colmiac Intervention Karl S. Hele
      4. New Light on the Plains Métis: The Buffalo Hunters of Pembinah, 1870- 71 Heather Devine
      5. The Drummond Island Voyageurs and the Search for Great Lakes Métis Identity Karen J. Travers

    Part III: Métis Families and Communities

    1. Searching for the Silver Fox: A fur-Trade Family History Virginia (Parker) Barter
    2. The Kokum Puzzle: Finding and Fitting the Pieces Donna G. Sutherland
    3. “Where the White Dove Flew Up”: The Saguingue Métis Community and the Fur Trade at Southampton on Lake Huron Patsy Lou Wilson McArthur
    4. My Story: Reflections on Growing Up in Lac la Biche Jaime Koebel

  • Ethical Considerations in Social Work Research with Multiracial Individuals

    Ethical Considerations in Social Work Research with Multiracial Individuals

    Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics
    Volume 7, Number 1 (2010)
    10 pages

    Kelly F. Jackson, MSW, PhD, Assistant Professor of Social Work
    Arizona State University

    Growing diversity in the U.S. has prioritized social work’s ethical obligation to develop specialized knowledge and understanding of culture and its function in human behavior and society. One ethnic minority group that is receiving growing attention in the social sciences is multiracial persons, or persons who identify with more than one race or ethnic group. This population represents one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in the United States.  The growing presence and visibility of multiracial persons in the US demands that social work researchers critically examine and understand the complexity of identity as it applies to people who identify with more than one race. This article will discuss both past and present conceptualizations of multiracial identity, and the methodological challenges specific to investigations with multiracial participants. This article will conclude with recommended strategies for ensuring ethically responsible and culturally sensitive research with multiracial persons.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging

    Mixed-Race Women and Epistemologies of Belonging

    Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
    Volume 31, Number 1, 2010
    Pages 142-165
    E-ISSN: 1536-0334
    Print ISSN: 0160-9009
    DOI: 10.5250/fronjwomestud.31.1.142

    Silvia Cristina Bettez, Associate Professor
    Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
    University of North Carolina, Greensboro

    How is it that people know when they belong and to what they belong? This question, about the epistemology of belonging, carries a particular complexity for mixed-race women. How is it that mixed-race women create a sense of identification with others? What are the unities and disjunctures? What can we understand about epistemologies of belonging through examining how mixed-race women create belonging? Through qualitative work based on the life stories of women of mixed heritage, in this paper I examine how the navigation of hybridity, as it is experienced in the lives of six “hybrid” mixed-race women, illuminates the complexities of identity construction and epistemologies of belonging. I use the term epistemology to signify the nature of knowledge, how we come to know things, in this case knowledge, or knowing, related to belonging. Belonging in human relations is connected to identity, both self-identification and identification with others…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Ethics of Racial Identity

    Ethics of Racial Identity

    Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
    108th Annual Conference
    2010-11-13 through 2010-11-14
    Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawaii

    Presiding Officer: Adebe DeRango-Adem, York University

    Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate. This special session envisions a mixed-race literature in the age of Obama that forwards not solely theorizations of what mixed race identities are, but an ethics for treating mixed race identification in literature. It is designed to re-situate mixedness/interraciality within the field of literary inquiry as a question of the ethical treatment of racialized figures.

  • Think Outside of The Box: Understanding Multiracial Students

    Think Outside of The Box: Understanding Multiracial Students

    Wisconsin Academic Advising Association Conference
    Appleton, Wisconsin
    2009-09-18
    18 pages
    Handout: 4 pages

    Angela Kellogg, Director of Academic Advising and Career Services
    University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point

    Overview
    Agenda

    • Introduction and interest in topic
    • Multiracial trivia quiz
    • Overview of session
    • General multiracial information
    • Study: methods and results
    • Discussion
    • Implications
    • Conclusion and questions

    Learning Outcomes
    As a result of this presentation, participants will:

    • Gain information about the findings of the study
    • Develop a greater understanding of multiracial identity in the college context
    • Increase awareness of critical incidents experienced by multiracial college students
    • Consider the implications for serving multiracial students on their respective campuses

    View the entire presentation here.  View the handout here.

  • Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey Toward Acceptance

    Ward Helps Biracial Youths on Journey Toward Acceptance

    The New York Times
    2009-11-09

    John Branch

    PITTSBURGH — Steelers receiver Hines Ward surrounded himself with old friends at the dinner table on a recent Saturday night. The bond was as obvious as the look on everyone’s faces — half Korean, half something else. The shared experience was far more than skin deep.

    There was a boy who was bullied into depression and tried to commit suicide. There was a girl ordered by a teacher to keep her hair pulled back tight, to straighten the natural curls she inherited from her black father. There was another too intimidated by her taunting classmates to board the bus, choosing instead the humiliating and lonely walk to school. There were the boys who were beaten regularly and teased mercilessly. There were college-age girls who broke into tears when telling their stories of growing up biracial in South Korea.

    But when they looked around the table, they saw familiarity. And a future…

    …“It was hard for me to find my identity,” Ward said. “The black kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I had a Korean mom. The white kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. The Korean kids didn’t want to hang out with me because I was black. It was hard to find friends growing up. And then once I got involved in sports, color didn’t matter.”

    But there is no such relief valve for most of the estimated 19,000 biracial children in South Korea. The fast-growing majority of them are Kosians, with a parent from a different Asian country.

    The number of Amerasians — those generally with white or black American fathers, often from the military — is slowly shrinking. But their mere appearance leads to harsher discrimination, officials said.

    “Korea is traditionally a single blood,” said Wondo Koh, a Korean who met up with the group in Pittsburgh while doing business. “We Koreans are not comfortable with this mixed-blood situation. We have become familiar now, but we did not know how to cope.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Identity and Self-Esteem: Problems Peculiar to Biracial Children

    Racial Identity and Self-Esteem: Problems Peculiar to Biracial Children

    Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry
    Volume 24, Issue 2, (March 1985)
    Pages 150-153
    DOI: 10.1016/S0002-7138(09)60440-4

    Michael R. Lyles, M.D.
    Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
    University of Kentucky College of Medicine

    Antronette Yancey, M.D.
    University of Kentucky College of Medicine

    Candis Grace, M.D.
    University of Kentucky College of Medicine

    James H. Carter, M.D.
    Professor of Psychiatry
    Duke University Medical Center

    This report illustrates several identity problems peculiar to a child of black and white parentage, who was reared by a white maternal grandmother in the South. The pervasive racial bigotry of the child’s family and community is contrasted with the child’s intrapsychic struggle for positive identity and self-esteem. The course of dynamic psychotherapy with this child is portrayed, with pertinent treatment issues dilineated and recommendations for therapy proposed.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • American demands, African treasures, Mixed possibilities

    American demands, African treasures, Mixed possibilities

    The African Diaspora Archaeology Network
    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
    December 2006 Newsletter
    ISSN: 1933-8651
    16 pages

    Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
    Newcastle University, United Kingdom

    In the 1990s, many Americans sought to cast themselves as heroic defenders of the liberal arts by condemning Afrocentricity. This paper reveals how many such profiteers and schemers were invested in Eurocentricity, but it also critiques Molefi Asante – the man who coined the phrase “Afrocentricity” – and points out his reliance on AfroAmericocentric norms.

    …Television history, employed by Gates in his PBS documentary, Wonders of the Ancient World, “while unquestionably powerful . . . is of necessity superficial . . . programmes have to be fast-moving if they are to retain their viewers” (Kershaw 16). Producers often assume that their history programs require a respected narrator and perhaps a charismatic interviewer, as “problems of interpretation tend to muddy the waters, and to leave the viewer confused, baffled or at least unable to decide which of variant interpretations is the most valid” (ibid.). According to cultural critic John Fiske, lumpers (broad synthesizers favoured by lay opinion) are preferred to splitters (narrow specialists favoured by professionals) because television history, like soap opera and sport, should be open and full of contradictions so that it invites “viewer engagement, disagreement, and thus popular productivity” (191). Perhaps ignoring the need to challenge the continuing deference to professors, such as Reisner, who considered Black Africa to be without history, Fiske also thought that televised history “must not preach or teach” (emphasis added; ibid. 196). Yet his comments remain important if curators and “public intellectuals” are to be encouraged to present themselves as possessors of technical competence whose function is to assist subordinate groups to use elite resources in order to make authored statements within the public sphere (Bennett 104). In this fashion, one can applaud Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s attempts to use his position as director of the Du Bois institute at Harvard to encourage to African Americans to enter Ivy League universities, even if one doesn’t support his desire to question Blacks of mixed parentage and/or Caribbean descent that “beat out” Black indigenous middle-class kids on the front page of The New York Times (Rimer and Anderson)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘Celtic Samurai’ Tells Story of Hapa Family Life

    ‘Celtic Samurai’ Tells Story of Hapa Family Life

    Hokubei.com – North America’s Japanese Newsource
    2010-06-18

    “Celtic Samurai,” a storytelling program by Dr. Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu on the family life of a Japanese mother and American-born Irish father, will be presented by the Japanese American National Library and the Nichi Bei Weekly on Saturday, June 19, [2010] at 1:30 p.m. in the Union Bank Hospitality Room, located in the Japan Center’s East Mall, Post and Buchanan streets in San Francisco.

    The subtitle, “A Boy’s Transcultural Journey Searching for Shamrocks in Zen Gardens,” expresses the playful nature of the stories that illuminate how political, legal and ideological forces influence the lives of families and individual identities

    Read the entire article here.

  • Developing a positive racial identity–challenges for psychotherapists working with black and mixed race adopted adults

    Developing a positive racial identity–challenges for psychotherapists working with black and mixed race adopted adults

    The Psychotherapist
    Spring 2010
    pages 10-12

    Esther Ina-Egbe, Psychotherapist, Counsellor and Trainer

    In this article, Esther Ina-Egbe argues that psychotherapists need to explore the repetitions and lack of mirroring that may be present in the therapeutic relationship

    There is a huge body of knowledge on the development of racial identity. This article has been influenced by notable writers and critics, such as Schwartz, and Armstrong and Slaytor, who have carried out extensive work on this topic. I have also consulted other writers and formed my own opinion and judgments based on my experience in private practice.

    What is racial identity?
    Before addressing how to develop a positive racial identity, we must first look at what racial identity is. Armstrong and Slaytor consider that children as young as two and a half years old are aware of racial differences, and that development of a positive racial identity does not just happen but must be cultivated. Bath and North-East Somerset Council has defined racial identity as ‘one’s self perception and sense of belonging to a particular group including not only how one describes and defines oneself, but also how one distinguishes oneself from other ethnic groups’. According to this definition, racial and ethnic group differences will certainly impact on children’s social development, although that impact may differ according to age and specific ethnicity. Hence, social context, immediate surroundings and historical heritage are underpinning factors in the development of a child’s race awareness and identity…

    …Mixed race heritage
    Having a mixed ethnic heritage has a different effect on a child’s development (Herring, 1992), and it is therefore very important to actively help mixed race children acquire a positive self-concept. They need exposure to models of all the ethnicities they embrace. They need to understand what it means to be mixed race and to acquire coping skills linked to their cultures, including ways to deal with racism and discrimination (Wardle, 1987).  Referring to the American experience, where there is dearth of fully integrated, stable and tension-free racially mixed communities, Miller and Rotheram-Borus (1994) advise that ‘families and schools must work hard to provide a supportive community that affirms multi-racialism’. A key factor in the lives of mixed race children and adults is how they are labelled by themselves, their families and society in general. Root (1996) views labels as a motivating factor, stating that ‘labels are important vehicles for self-empowerment as there has been an increase in the self-determination of interracial families’. Many have become active politically to ensure that they are accepted as a group with special concerns separate from other racial or ethnic populations. A recent example is the current president of the USA, Barack Obama.

    Mixed race children and adults need to work through internal conflicts and guilt about having to develop an identity that might not incorporate all aspects of their heritage and to resist internalising society’s negative attitudes, mixed racialism and minority status. Ultimately, successful identity formation, or a satisfying feeling of wholeness, requires that mixed race people appreciate and integrate all components of their heritage into their lives (Poston, 1990). Furthermore, while some families help their children develop a biracial identity based on the components of their particular background, it is important for children to take equal pride in all their heritages and to maintain equal connections with all members of their family. According to Pinderhughes (1995), some of these families recognise that their children’s appearance reflects their dual heritage and they want the family’s culture to embody that. However, other families foster their children’s identification with only one race. Single parents, especially, may want to emphasise the culture of their own race because that is what they know best and because their children resemble them (Mills, 1994). Some parents of children with African ancestry may assume that society will consider the children black, so they raise them as black to better prepare them for their treatment in later life (Morrison and Rodgers, 1996). In addition, society may encourage children only to identify with their minority group in an effort to maintain the ‘racial purity’ of whites. Conversely, some mixed race children may be urged to assume a white identity on the assumption that if they can ‘pass’ as white they can avoid experiencing racism (Miller and Rotheram-Borus, 1994)…

    Read the entire article here.