Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Check All That Apply: The Psychological Costs and Benefits of Adopting a Multiracial Identity

    Check All That Apply: The Psychological Costs and Benefits of Adopting a Multiracial Identity

    SPSP 2010
    The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
    Royal Pavilion 6
    Friday, 2010-01-29, 09:45-11:00 PST (Local Time)

    Chair: Todd L. Pittinsky, Harvard University

    Multiracial people have always challenged the conventional notions of racial categorization, exemplified by the recent debate over President Obama’s racial identity—was he “Too Black” or “Not Black enough”? Despite his biological multiracial background, he consistently self-identifies as Black. This example illustrates the inherent flexibility in racial identification and raises questions about how this flexibility affects both the target and perceiver. This symposium assembles four diverse programs of research that explore race as a flexible construct. Our findings demonstrate how examining multiracial people can offer novel insight into the relationship between racial identification and discrimination, as well as their links to health and cognitive outcomes. Giamo and colleagues discuss how both perceptions of discrimination and parental ethnicity influence multiracial individuals’ conveyance of their racial identity. Sanchez and colleagues investigate how White ancestry reduces multiracial individuals’ credentials as an ethnic minority, affecting their worthiness as a candidate for affirmative action. Shih and La Plante explore the prevalence of health risk behaviors among monoracial and multiracial individuals. Finally, Pauker and Ambady examine whether multiracial individuals can flexibly adopt different racial identifications to guide preferential “own-race” memory and the involvement of discrimination narratives in such changes in racial identification. These studies introduce new advances in thinking about how perceived experiences with discrimination shape both self and other perceptions of racial identity. Additionally, they highlight that the adoption of a flexible, multiracial identity can engender a complex set of consequences and benefits, including both negative health outcomes and positive cognitive outcomes.

    Talk 1- The Influence of Perceptions of Discrimination and Parental Ethnicity on Multiracial Identity

    Lisa S. Giamo
    Simon Fraser University

    Michael T. Schmitt
    Simon Fraser University

    H. Robert Outten
    Simon Fraser University

    Talk 2 – Minority Status Perceptions of Black/White Biracial Individuals

    Diana T. Sanchez
    Rutgers University

    Jessica J. Good
    Rutgers University

    George Chavez
    Rutgers University

    Talk 3 – Health Risk Behaviors of Multiracial and Monoracial Young Adults

    Margaret J. Shih
    University of California, Los Angeles

    Debi A. LaPlante
    Harvard Medical School

    Talk 4 – Multiracial Individuals’ Flexible “Own-Race” Memory

    Kristin Pauker
    Stanford University

    Nalini Ambady
    Tufts University

    For complete information on the four talks, click here.

  • Identity & Issues for Multiracial Students and College Campuses (Pre-Conference Institute #111)

    Identity & Issues for Multiracial Students and College Campuses (Pre-Conference Institute #111)

    NCORE® 2010
    23 Annual National Conference on Race & Enthnicity in American Higher Education
    National Harbor, Maryland
    2010-06-01 through 2010-06-05

    A three‑part, highly interactive institute designed to provide participants a greater understanding of racial identity development for multiracial people and the issues surrounding them as they interface with different racial groups in their respective sociocultural environments. Using an assortment of educational approaches, the institute (1) presents historical and current models of racial identity development in multiracial people; (2) provides in‑depth reflection on personal perspectives and assumptions about multiracial identity; (3) discusses the implications of defining one’s self as multiracial, in campus and contemporary social settings; and (4) outlines some ways to promote inter‑group dialogue and coalition building between different racial groups and multiracial people on campuses and in community settings. The institute includes dialogue among participants who bring a wide range of perspectives about what it means to be multiracial on campus. In addition, the institute provides opportunities for participants to assess programs at their colleges and universities and develop action plans to further address the multiracial issues on their campuses. Presentations, experiential activities, and small- and large-group discussions allow participants to actively engage throughout the institute.

    Overall Objectives:

    1. Provide an overview of theoretical approaches to identity development of multiracial people.
    2. Provide a minimum of three creative and experiential tools for exploring and understanding multiracial identity.
    3. Provide roundtable discussions to address contemporary issues faced by Multiracial people on college campuses.
    4. Provide roundtable discussions to assist participants in evaluating and growing their own institution’s multiracial programs.

    Facilitated by: Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Meg Chang and Dennis Leoutsakas.

    For more information, click here.

  • ETHN 115 – Biracial+Multiracial Iden (3 Units)

    ETHN 115 – Biracial+Multiracial Iden (3 Units)

    Sacramento State University
    Spring 2010

    Examination of biracial/multiracial populations, their social histories, social experiences and social identities within various sociological and social psychological theoretical frameworks. An exploration of the relationship biracial/multiracial groups have had, and continue to have, with the larger white majority and monoracially identified minorities.

    Sect Class Nbr Ses Cmp Seats Tot/Avl Days Bldg/Room Times Faculty GE & Grad Req
    01 35182 1 Lecture 35/15 W TAH1026 530PM-820PM Leon,David J E

  • Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage

    Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage

    Temple University Press
    January 2001
    240 pages
    6×9
    3 tables 1 figure
    Paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-826-8; ISBN: 1-56639-826-6
    Cloth: EAN: 978-1-56639-825-1; ISBN: 1-56639-825-8

    Maria P. P. Root

    When the Baby Boom generation was in college, the last miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, but interracial romances retained an aura of taboo. Since 1960 the number of mixed race marriages has doubled every decade. Today, the trend toward intermarriage continues, and the growing presence of interracial couples in the media, on college campuses, in the shopping malls and other public places draws little notice.

    Love’s Revolution traces the social changes that account for the growth of intermarriage as well as the lingering prejudices and false beliefs that oppress racially mixed families. For this book author Maria P.P. Root, a clinical psychologist, interviewed some 200 people from a wide spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Speaking out about their views and experiences, these partners, family members, and children of mixed race marriages confirm that the barriers are gradually eroding; but they also testify to the heartache caused by family opposition and disapproving strangers.

    Root traces race prejudice to the various institutions that were structured to maintain white privilege, but the heart of the book is her analysis of what happens when people of different races decide to marry. Developing an analogy between families and types of businesses, she shows how both positive and negative reactions to such marriages are largely a matter of shared concepts of family rather than individual feelings about race. She probes into the identity issues that multiracial children confront and draws on her clinical experience to offer child-rearing recommendations for multiracial families. Root’s “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” is a document that at once empowers multiracial people and educates those who ominously ask, “What about the children?”

    Love’s Revolution paints an optimistic but not idealized picture of contemporary relationships. The “Ten Truths about Interracial Marriage” that close the book acknowledge that mixed race couples experience the same stresses as everyone else in addition to those arising from other people’s prejudice or curiosity. Their divorce rates are only slightly higher than those of single race couples, which suggests that their success or failure at marriage is not necessarily a racial issue. And that is a revolutionary idea!

    Read an exceprt from Chapter 1 here.

    Table of Contents

    Acknowledgments
    1. Love and Revolution
    2. Love and Fear
    3. Sex, Race, and Love
    4. The Business of Families
    5. Open and Closed Families
    6. The Life Cycle and Interracial Marriage
    7. Parents, Children, and Race
    8. Ten Truths of Interracial Marriage
    Appendix
    Notes
    References
    Index

  • AAST 398M – Multi-Racial Asian Americans

    AAST 398M – Multi-Racial Asian Americans

    University of Maryland
    Spring 2010

    The multiracial American population is increasing exponentially, as are available services and organizations to support it. With these shifts in mind, this class will examine multiracial America yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with an emphasis on multiracial Asian America in particular. Some questions of interest: what is the public consciousness of multiracial peoples? What is public policy regarding multiracial peoples? How do multiracial peoples view their struggles for identity, equity, and community? What “infrastructure” exists to support the multiracial population, and in what ways does it provide or fail to provide support? Having identified the crucial issues facing multiracial America, the class will culminate in collaborative projects to address them.

  • Sixth Annual Ray Warren Multicultural Symposium (2009): Mixed: The Politics of Hybrid Identities

    Sixth Annual Ray Warren Multicultural Symposium (2009): Mixed: The Politics of Hybrid Identities

    Lewis and Clark College
    Portland, Oregon
    2009-11-11 through 2009-11-13

    Events

    • “Obama and the Biracial Factor: Race, Sexuality, and the Battle for a New America” – Andrew Jolivétte (Introduced by Brenda Salas Neves, L&C student and symposium co-chair)
    • “Secrets of a Mixed Race Child” – Dmae Roberts (Introduced by Parasa Chanramy, L&C student and symposium co-chair)
    • Interracial Relationships, Adoption, and Identity – Moderator: Reiko Hillyer with Jiannbin Shiao, Astrid Dabbeni, Nicole Cullen, Hanako Conrad
    • Remix: Identities and Artistic Expression – Moderator: Franya Berkman with Dmae Roberts, Gerardo Calderón, Nelda Reyes, Christabel Escarez and Nico Jose
    • “The Future of Multiracial Politics” – Kim Williams (Introduced by Chris Wendt)
    • Indigeneity and Cultural Exchange – Moderator: Elliott Young with Se-ah-dom Edmo, Tana Atchley, Muki Hansteen Izora, L&C students Lu’u Nakanelua and Allison Perry
    • Nation-Building and Mixed Populations – Moderator: Rich Peck with Oren Kosansky, Cari Coe, Osaebea Amoako, Tim Moore
    • Race Monologues – Identity: According to Whom? (Introduced by Parasa Chanramy) with L&C students Christabel Escarez, Adrian Guerrero, Temesghen Habte, Christina Herring, Jessica Houston, Nico Jose, Yollie Keeton, Rhea Manley, Jasin Nazim,Goldann Salazar, Jared Schy, and Madelyn Troiano

  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

    Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

    State University of New York Press
    July 2007
    295 pages
    Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7099-7; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7099-2
    Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-7100-4; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7100-5

    Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
    University of Minnesota

    Explores contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities.

    When modern news media choose to focus attention on people of multiracial descent, how does this fit with broader contemporary and historical racial discourses? Do these news narratives complicate common understandings of race and race relations? Dispatches from the Color Line explores these issues by examining contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities. Catherine R. Squires looks at how journalists utilize information from many sources—including politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scholars, demographers, and marketers—to link multiracial identity to particular racial norms, policy preferences, and cultural trends. She considers individuals who were accused (rightly or wrongly) of misrepresenting their racial identity to the public for personal gain, and also compares the new racial categories of Census 2000 as reported in Black owned, Asian American owned, and mainstream newspapers. These comparisons reveal how a new racial group is framed in mass media, and how different media sources reinforce or challenge long-standing assumptions about racial identity and belonging in the United States.

  • Sci fi offers surprising insights on race

    Sci fi offers surprising insights on race

    The Brandeis Hoot
    Brandeis University
    2009-03-06

    Marissa Lainzi

    Months and months of wading through red ink, volleying e-mails, coordinating, coordinating, and coordinating came to fruition for the Mixed Heritage Club on Friday night, as their much-anticipated speaker, Eric Hamako, gave the talk, “Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else?” a discussion of mixed race issues in sci-fi movies.

    Hamako, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, intrigued the audience with his observations and theories regarding the portrayal of the “new” and “old” mixed race ideals in popular entertainment. Citing the movies Blade and Underworld, Hamako explained the portrayal of mixed-race people as “monsters” or “messiahs”—with vampires, humans, and werewolves becoming the racial metaphors.

    The “monster” depiction of mixed-race people, Hamako explained, comes from the “old” conception of mixed race, which presented mixed-race people as deformed, immoral, or somehow wrong or inhuman. The “new” conception of mixed race, on the other hand, presents opposite stereotypes—that mixed-race people are beautiful, genetically superior, and the easy way to quash racism. Hamako calls this the “messiah” depiction.

    Using clips from “Underworld,” Hamako showed the movie’s symbolic pitting of the new messiah version of mixed race against the old monster version. Hamako said that this is a way of injecting the new stereotypes about mixed race into the audience’s mind and attempting to justify forgetting that the old stereotypes existed by symbolically destroying them…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds

    Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds

    The MIT Press
    May 1996
    243 pages
    19 illus.
    Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-262-08247-1
    Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58172-1

    Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Professor of Anthropology & Psychology
    Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

    Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power.

    Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them.

    Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child’s notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood.

    After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children’s (and occasionally adults’) representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.

    Table of Contents

    Series Foreword
    Preface
    Acknowledgements
    Introduction
    1 Representing Race: Universal and Comparative Perspectives
    On the Notion of Human Kinds
    The Psychological Study of Race
    Psychology, Race, and Causality
    Psychology and the Reality of Racial Categories
    On the Historical Specificity of Race
    The Modernity of Race
    Race and Instrumentality
    Racial Thinking and Racial Theories
    2 Mining History for Psychological Wisdom: Rethinking Racial Thinking
    Common Sense and Race: A Proposal
    Racial Differences Are Embodied
    Racial Differences Are Natural
    Race Is Enduring
    Race Encompasses Nonobvious and Inner Qualities as Well as Outward Physical Ones
    Conclusions: Causality, History, and Psychology
    3 Domain Specificity and the Study of Race1
    Language and the Domain-Specificity Hypothesis
    Issues in Domain Specificity
    Constraints
    Theories
    The Acquisition of Domain-Specific Theories
    Evolution and Domain Specificity
    Domain Specificity and Problems of Cultural Variation
    Domain-Specific Competence: A Characterization
    Domain-Specific Competences as Guides to Partitioning the World
    Domain-Specific Competences as Explanatory Frames
    Domain-Specific Competences as Functional and Widely Distributed Devices
    Domain-Specific Competences as Dedicated Mechanisms
    Do Domain-Specific Competences Correspond to Domains of the External World?
    Conclusion: Toward a Domain-Specific Account of Racial Thinking
    4 Do Children Have a Theory of Race?1
    Cognition, Race, and “Mature” Representations
    Children’s Racial Thinking
    A Note on Methodology
    How Do We Know What the Young Child Thinks When Thinking Racially?
    Study 4.1: The Identity of Race
    Results
    Follow-up 1
    Follow-up 2
    Follow-up 3
    Follow-up 4
    Study 4.2: Switched at Birth: Race, Inheritability, and Essence
    Follow-up 1
    Follow-up 2
    Follow-up 3
    Conclusions: The Conceptual Origins of Folk Sociology
    5 Race, Language, and Collective Inference1
    Categories and Inference
    Language, Society, and Inductive Inference
    Children’s Understanding of Language Variation
    Study 5.1: Mapping Languages onto Social Categories
    Study 5.2: Are All Social Contrasts Informative of Language Differences?
    Language Differences and Social Contrast
    Race and Social Contrast
    Study 5.3: Intelligibility, Language Structure, and Race
    Conclusions
    6 The Appearance of Race: Perception in the Construction of Racial Categories1
    An Alternative Model
    Implications of the Alternative Model
    Testing the Model
    Study 6.1: Appearances and Memory for Narrative
    Results
    Study 6.2: Verbal Descriptions from Visual Narratives
    Labeling and Sorting Results
    Narrative Tasks
    Conclusion
    7 The Cultural Biology of Race1
    Race, Biology, and Society
    Children’s Understanding of the Inheritability of Race
    Social versus Biological Interpretation
    Essentialism in Children’s Reasoning about Race
    Study 7.1: Mixed Parentage, Category Membership, and Resemblance
    Results from Category-Identity Task
    Study 7.2: The Inheritance of Racial and Nonracial Features
    Results
    Study 7.3: Inheritance of Skin Color and Hair Color in Animals
    Results
    Study 7.4: Community, Race, and Beliefs about Inheritability
    Results
    Conclusions
    Children’s Biological and Racial Thinking
    Racial Identity and Essentialist Reasoning
    Conclusion
    Summary of Results
    Race and Other Intrinsic Kinds
    Race, Biology, and Perception
    Race and Culture
    Human Kinds in Culture and Cognition
    Appendix
    Experiment 7.1: Stimulus Story, Character Assignment 1
    French
    English
    References
    Index

  • Race Bending: “Mixed” Youth Practicing Strategic Racialization in California

    Race Bending: “Mixed” Youth Practicing Strategic Racialization in California

    Anthropology & Education Quarterly
    Volume 35 Issue 1 (March 2004)
    Pages 30-52
    DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2004.35.1.30

    Mica Pollock, Associate Professor of Education
    Harvard University

    As more U.S. youth claim “mixed” heritages, some adults are proposing to erase race words altogether from the nation’s inequality analysis. Yet such proposals, as detailed ethnography shows, ignore the complex realities of continuing racialized practice. At an urban California high school in the 1990s, “mixed” youth strategically employed simple “race” categories to describe themselves and inequality orders, even as they regularly challenged these very labels’ accuracy. In so “bending” race categories, these youth modeled a practical and theoretical strategy crucial for dealing thoughtfully with race in 21st century America.

    Read or purchase the article here.