Mixed Race Studies

Interracial families face unique challenges because of the historical legacy of white supremacy, the long-standing social barriers against interracial marriage, and the cultural norm of racial homogeneity in marriage patterns.  For interracial families, racial socialization is complicated for important several reasons.  First, parents bring different racial identities, experiences, and ideologies to their relationship that may result in different ideas about how to racially socialize their children.  In addition, the politics of race in our society are such that their mixed-race children exist in a marginal and undefined space.  There is no clear community of mixed-race people or a comprehensive understanding of the mixed-race experience that can be used to guide racial socialization of mixed-race childrenin a positive, cohesive manner.  Unlike white or black children, most multiracial children do not have a parent with whom they can directly identify as a multiracial person.  Unless a parent is also mixed-race, the majority of mixed-race children learn about race from on or more adults who cannot completely understand their racial reality.  This means that most mixed-race children rarely have the luxury of being raised by a parent whose on racial identity and socialization process are relevant to their experience.

Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, Tracey Laszloffy, Julia Noveske. “It All Starts at Home: Racial Socialization in Multiracial Families”, In Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, edited by David L. Brunsma, 207.  Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006.

Multiple Realities: A Relational Narrative Approach in Therapy With Black–White Mixed-Race Clients

Family Relations
Volume 52, Issue 2 (April 2003)
pages 119–128
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2003.00119.x

Kerry Ann Rockquemore

Tracey A. Laszloffy

Notions of a racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent have assumed the existence of only a singular identity (first Black and later biracial). Emerging empirical research on racial identity formation among members of this group reveals that multiple identity options are possible. In terms of overall health, the level of social invalidation one encounters with respect to racial self-identification is more important than the specific racial identity selected. Here a relational narrative approach to therapy with Black–White mixed-race clients who experience systematic invalidation of their chosen racial identity is presented through a detailed case illustration.

Read or purchase the article here.

Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index

Mixing Blood: What Does “Biracialism” Do to the Notion of “Race”? [Book Review]

PINS (Psychology in Society)
Volume 31 (2005)
pages 99-105

Gerhard Maré, Professor of Sociology
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

Book review: Rockquemore, Kerry Ann & David L. Brunsma (2002) Beyond Black: Biracial identity in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN 0-7619-2322-5 pbk. Pages 256.

The term and notion of “biracial” confirms a perception of “races”, resting as it does on the acceptance of the existence, in some form, of two distinct “somethings” (races) that give rise to a combination. At the same time, paradoxically, it also adds confusion to the apparent certainty of race existence – what meaning can “race” have if it is so easily undermined through the creation of a totally new racial group or of a person who straddles “races”? Can we then have an infinite number of “races” through the infinitely various combinations of union that are possible?

In America, “biracial” challenges the “one drop of blood rule” that for so long turned the offspring of a dilution of the hegemonic notion “white” into “black”, and not into “biracial”, or into “Coloured” as was the case in South Africa. In the strange world of race thinking, and of racism and “race” or racist power, one drop could not, ever, turn “black” into “white”. This rule came to be accepted and then supported by black Americans as well, for a number of reasons.

In academic research and writing, the area of “race mixing” seems to be gaining in popularity. As Parker and Song note, “Of course racial mixture is nothing new – it has been the history of the world. What stands out as novel are the forms of political contestation gathering around the topic of ‘mixed race’” (2001:1). Paul Spickard (2001) refers to the “boom in biracial biography”. Charmaine Wijeyesinghe (2001:129) writes that “Multiracial identity is the newest chapter in the evolving field of racial identity development. The heightened interest in the experience of Multiracial people is fuelled by changing social demographics, an increasing number of Multiracial people who identify with their racial ancestries, and the emergence of groups advocating the rights of Multiracial people”. Interest in this aspect of social life was also illustrated by the appearance of a second edition, in 2002, of Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix’s Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, first published in 1993.In South Africa, too, several contributions in the field of “mixed race” identity include an edited collection by Zimitri Erasmus (2001) and an article by Jane Battersby (2003).

“Bi-racialism”, “hybridity”, “cross-racial”, “mulatto”, “coloured”, and so on, are terms that in different contexts signify an unnatural “mixing of blood” – in other words, moving beyond what is usually socially acceptable. The investigations that are reported on in books on this topic are of cases that need to be examined because of the disturbance it implies to the certainty of “race” categories, ripples on the smooth surface of the pond of race thinking. Of course, earlier, studies of the same social phenomenon set out to prove the horrors that arose from such mixing, the taint and the supposed mental and physical deficiencies that were to be the inevitable destiny of such people, the tragedies that befell them!

As Zimitri Erasmus comments on “mixture”: “There is no such thing as the Black ‘race’. Blackness, whiteness and colouredness exist, but they are cultural, historical and political identities. To talk about ‘race mixture’, ‘miscegenation’, ‘inter-racial’ sex, and ‘mixed descent’ is to use terms and habits of thought inherited from the very ‘race science’ that was used to justify oppression, brutality and the marginalisation of ‘bastard people’“ (Erasmus (ed) 2001: Editor’s note)…

Read the entire article here.

Opting for White: choice, fluidity and racial identity construction in post civil-rights America

Race & Society
Volume 5, Issue 1 (2002)
Symposium on The Latin Americanization of Race Relations in the United States edited by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Pages 49–64

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
Univerisity of Illinois, Chicago

Patricia Arend, Lecturer in Sociology
Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts

Historically, racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent assumed the development of a Black identity in accordance with the one-drop rule. However, empirical research on the multiracial population suggests that there exists wide variation in racial identification. We explore the interpretive power of [Eduardo] Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization model to explain racial identity construction among a sample of 259 mixed-race respondents.We highlight case studies of individuals who have constructed a White identity in order to illustrate how structural changes in race relations have increased the range of racial identities available to multiracial people. While we observe variation in racial identification among our respondents, their “choices” continue to be differentially available due to their physical appearance and social context.

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Identity: Beyond Black and White

The Boston College Chronicle
2003-02-13
Volume 11, Number 11

Sean Smith, Chronicle Editor

Sociologist’s expertise built on experience, not just scholarly inquiry

The man in the next seat had been eyeing her furtively for a while, so Asst. Prof. Kerry Ann Rockquemore (Sociology) figured it was only a matter of time before the question came.

What are you?”

There was neither malice nor menace in her fellow airplane passenger’s voice, but Rockquemore – recalling the event in a recent interview – knew what he was asking: He wanted to know her racial and ethnic background.

The daughter of a black father and white mother, Rockquemore was no stranger to questions and misperceptions about her appearance. That very day, one person had spoken Spanish to her, apparently thinking she was Latina, and a casual remark by the attendant at her flight check-in indicated that he took her for Italian.

“What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Socially Embedded Identities: Theories, Typologies, and Processes of Racial Identity among Black/White Biracials

Sociological Quarterly
Volume 43 Issue 3, (2002)
Pages 335 – 356
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2002.tb00052.x

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Current research on racial identity construction among biracial people derives primarily from small convenience samples and assumes that individuals with one black and one white parent have only two options for racial identity: “black” or “biracial.” Rockquemore’s (1999) taxonomy of racial identity options is used as a framework to synthesize existing research and to generate hypotheses that are explored using survey data from a sample of 177 biracial respondents. The findings support a multidimensional view of racial identity by illustrating that biracial people make various identity choices, albeit “choices” that are differentially available due to an individual’s structural iocation.

Read the entire article here.

What Does “Black” Mean? Exploring the Epistemological Stranglehold of Racial Categorization

Critical Sociology
Vol. 28, No. 1-2 (2002)
pages 101-121
DOI: 10.1177/08969205020280010801

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

The “check all that apply” approach to race on the 2000 census has ignited a conceptual debate over the meaning and usefulness of racial categories. This debate is most intense over the category “black” because of the historically unique way that blackness has been defined. Though the lived reality of many people of color has changed over the past three decades, we question whether the construct black has mirrored these changes and if “black” remains a valid analytic or discursive unit today. While black racial group membership has historically been defined using the one-drop rule, we test the contemporary salience of this classification norm by examining racial identity construction among multiracial people. We find that that the one-drop rule has lost the power to determine racial identity, while the meaning of black is becoming increasingly multidimensional, varied, and contextually specific. Ultimately, we argue that social, cultural and economic changes in post-Civil Rights America necessitate a re-evaluation of the validity of black as social construct and re-assessment of its’ continued use in social science research.

Read the entire article here.

Life on the Color Line: Exploring the Struggle to Conceptualize and Measure Racial Identity in the Mixed-Raced Population

Race & Ethnic Studies Institute
Texas A&M University
2010-01-29
14:30-16:00 CST (Local Time) 
ACAD 326

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Empirical research on the growing multiracial population in the U.S. has focused largely on documenting new forms of racial identification, analyzing psychological adjustment, and understanding the broader political consequences of mixed-race identification. Efforts toward conceptualizing multiracial identity, however, have been largely disconnected from empirical data, mired in disciplinary debates, and bound by historically specific assumptions about race and racial group membership. This talk will provide a critical overview of multiracial identity theories, examine the links between theory and research, explores the challenges in conceptualizing multiracial identity, and propose considerations for future directions in measuring the racial identity of the mixed-race population. Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s scholarship focuses on racial identity development among multiracial individuals, interracial family dynamics, and the politics of racial categorization. She is the author of Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America (2001, 2007), Raising Biracial Children (2005), and over two-dozen articles and book chapters on multiracial youth. Her research has been featured in numerous media outlets such as the New York Times and ABC’s 20/20. In addition to her research, Dr. Rockquemore provides mentoring workshops for faculty of color at colleges across the U.S. She facilitates the popular online discussion forums at www.BlackAcademic.com, and is co-author of The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure Without Losing Your Soul (2008).

The New Color Complex: Appearances and Biracial Identity

Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research
2001
Volume 3, Number 1
Pags 29-52

David L. Brunsma, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Missouri, Columbia

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Ethnic identity research has largely focused on the identity choices of White ethnics (Alba, 1990; Ignatiev, 1995; Waters, 1990). One key factor in these choices is bodily appearance. We extend this research to Black and White Biracial individuals and examine the role that physical appearance plays in their “choices” of racial identity.  We test Rockquemore’s (1999) taxonomy of Biracial identity using survey data from a sample of 177 Biracial respondents. The results indicate that Biracial individuals do make choices within circumscribed cultural contexts and these understandings are influenced not by skin color, but by an actor’s assumption of how others perceive his or her appearance.

Read the entire article here.