Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Socioemotional wellbeing of mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and mechanisms

    Socioemotional wellbeing of mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and mechanisms

    SSM – Population Health
    Volume 5, August 2018
    pages 147-159
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2018.06.010

    James Nazroo
    Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Afshin Zilanawala
    University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Meichu Chen
    University of Michigan

    Laia Bécares
    Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Pamela Davis-Kean
    University of Michigan

    James S. Jackson
    University of Michigan

    Yvonne Kelly
    University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Lidia Panico
    Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques, Paris, France

    Amanda Sacker
    University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Highlights

    • Mixed race/ethnicity children are thought to have poorer socioemotional wellbeing
    • We find no evidence that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing in a study covering children aged 5/6 in the US and UK
    • We find that mixed race/ethnicity children do have socio-economic advantage
    • This socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing

    Existing literature suggests that mixed race/ethnicity children are more likely to experience poor socioemotional wellbeing in both the US and the UK, although the evidence is stronger in the US. It is suggested that this inequality may be a consequence of struggles with identity formation, more limited connections with racial/ethnic/cultural heritage, and increased risk of exposure to racism.

    Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (n = 13,734) and the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n ~ 6250), we examine differences in the socioemotional wellbeing of mixed and non-mixed 5/6 year old children in the UK and US and explore heterogeneity in outcomes across different mixed groups in both locations. We estimate a series of linear regressions to examine the contribution of factors that may explain any observed differences, including socio-economic and cultural factors, and examine the extent to which these processes vary across the two nations.

    We find no evidence of greater risk for poor socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in both national contexts. We find that mixed race/ethnicity children experience socio-economic advantage compared to their non-mixed minority counterparts and that socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing. Cultural factors do not contribute to differences in socioemotional wellbeing across mixed and non-mixed groups.

    Our evidence suggests then that at age 5/6 there is no evidence of poorer socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in either the UK or the US. The contrast between our findings and some previous literature, which reports that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing, may reflect changes in the meaning of mixed identities across periods and/or the developmental stage of the children we studied.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Edward Telles: Afrodescendents and the Project on Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

    Edward Telles: Afrodescendents and the Project on Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

    BYU Kennedy Center
    2021-03-04

    Edward Telles, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Irvine

    For Latin America’s 170 million people of indigenous and African heritage, questions of race, ethnicity, and perceptions of skin color impact issues of equality. Dr. Telles will address his work with PERLA (Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America), which provides an empirical examination of numerous dimensions of race and ethnicity across Latin America.

    Dr. Edward Telles is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has reoriented the field of Sociology beyond the black-white paradigm prominent in the United States through his research and writings on color, race, and ethnicity globally, particularly in Latin America and for Latinos in the United States. He is the author or co-author of numerous articles and books, including Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America.

    Watch the presentation (00:57:03) here.

  • Who is black, white, or mixed race? How skin color, status, and nation shape racial classification in Latin America

    Who is black, white, or mixed race? How skin color, status, and nation shape racial classification in Latin America

    American Journal of Sociology
    Volume 120, Number 3 (November 2014)
    pages 864-907
    DOI: 10.1086/679252

    Edward Telles, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Irvine

    Tianna Paschel, Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies
    University of California, Berkeley

    Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America’s Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes (Brazil), mestizoizes (Colombia), darkens (Dominican Republic), or has no effect (Panama). The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Notes On ‘Passing’

    Notes On ‘Passing’

    Essence
    2021-10-27

    Rebecca Carroll

    Ruth Negga (left) and Tessa Thompson in “Passing” | Photo Credit: Netflix

    The upcoming drama, based on the 1929 novel, looks at the cultural self-alienation a black woman experiences when she attempts to gain the privileges that come with assuming a white identity.

    When my light-skinned Black and mixed-race teenage son was little, I worried aloud to my best girlfriend about whether people would recognize him as Black—or whether, God forbid, he himself would decide to identify as even partially white. My girlfriend, who is also Black, would counter with, “Why would he want to be on that team? Seriously, have you seen that team?” Yes, I would say, all too much, for far too long. And we’d laugh, because it was funny-ish.

    I was adopted by a white family and raised in a primarily white rural New England town. I then spent my life, well into adulthood, seeking out Blackness and trying to arrive at a place where I could feel unambiguous in my identity as a Black woman. My son opting to identify as white would have been the opposite of my journey. But as he grew older, I actually stopped worrying that he’d be taken as white—and became more worried that he’d be profiled by the police as Black. The irony…

    Read the entire review here.

  • For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

    For mixed-descent people on America’s frontier, acceptance and suspicion

    The Washington Post
    2022-03-11

    H.W. Brands

    Marguerite Waddens, pictured in the 1850s. Her father was a White fur trader, and her mother an Indigenous woman in Canada. Waddens herself married White men, including Alexander McKay, who worked for the North West Company. Often, unions between traders and native women were expected by both parties to be temporary. (National Park Service )

    In the late 19th century, Frederick Jackson Turner lit up the historical world with his frontier thesis of American history. He asserted that American democracy owed its distinctiveness to the existence of an advancing frontier, where American institutions reinvented themselves every generation. By no means did all historians accept Turner’s views, but his approach framed debate on the subject far into the 20th century.

    More recently the concept of frontier has given way to the idea of borders and borderlands, where peoples and cultures have intermingled and interacted. In “Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West,” Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

    Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

    Cornell University Press
    2022-03-15
    392 pages
    Hardcover ISBN13: 9781501761973

    Burton I. Kaufman, Dean Emeritus, School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor Emeritus, Department of History
    Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

    In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama’s was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy.

    Following his election, President Obama’s supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system.

    The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama’s greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States.

    In estimating the course and impact of Obama’s full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.

  • Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

    Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

    The Guardian
    2022-03-14

    Jamie Grierson, Reporter

    Lewis Hamilton with his mother, Carmen Lockhart (formerly Larbalestier), after receiving his knighthood in December 2021. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/AFP/Getty Images

    Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

    The British racing driver Lewis Hamilton is to change his name to incorporate his mother’s original surname – Larbalestier.

    The seven-time world champion says he intends to incorporate his mother Carmen’s surname, Larbalestier, alongside Hamilton.

    Hamilton’s father, Anthony, and his mother, Carmen, separated when Lewis was two; he lived with his mother until he was 12 before moving in with his father.

    Speaking before the new Formula One season, which starts in Bahrain on Sunday, Hamilton, 37, said: “I am really proud of my family’s name. My mum’s name is Larbalestier and I am just about to put that in my name…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Uncovering Family Secrets: Forming a New Identity

    Uncovering Family Secrets: Forming a New Identity

    Los Angeles Public Library Blog
    Los Angeles Public Library
    Los Angeles, California
    2022-03-07

    Janice Batzdorff, Librarian

    Imagine discovering that the man who raised you is not your biological father. That your mother’s race differs from how she presented herself. That the person you are attracted to is your sibling. That you are the descendent of a renowned individual. A monstrous one.

    Unknown details about blood relationships surface through DNA testing, genealogical research, an adoptee meeting a birth parent, or a confession made, perhaps after a loved one dies. Learning the truth triggers feelings ranging from betrayal to outrage over privileges denied, to joy at meeting new relatives, to a sense of peace in connecting to one’s heritage.

    Novelists have the latitude to develop a backstory for family secrets, whereas historians and memoir writers generally don’t have access to such information. Are the fictional narratives about lineage less plausible? To decide, consider the following true stories…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month

    ‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month

    KQED News
    San Fransisco, California
    2022-02-18

    Blanca Torres

    Novelist Aya de Leon (left), Nelson German, head chef and owner of alaMar, and Jacqueline Garcel, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation. All three are Afro Latinos who live in the Bay Area. (Blanca Torres/KQED)

    Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.

    “This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”

    Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.

    “We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there’s a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”

    “So, I always say Afro Latino,” he said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Heaviest Drop of Blood: Black Exceptionalism Among Multiracials

    The Heaviest Drop of Blood: Black Exceptionalism Among Multiracials

    Political Psychology
    First published 2022-03-04
    DOI: 10.1111/pops.12806

    Gregory John Leslie, Ph.D. Candidate
    University of California, Los Angeles

    David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Political Science
    University of California, Los Angeles

    We leverage the emerging multiracial population to reexamine prominent theories of the American color line. A Black exceptionalism hypothesis suggests that Black heritage will be more restrictive of biracials’ social and political assimilation prospects than Asian or Latino heritage. Black exceptionalism better explains biracials’ sorting into the racial hierarchy than does classic assimilation theory or a people-of-color hypothesis. In the American Community Survey, Black heritage dominates subjective racial self-identification among biracial adults and identity assignments to children of interracial marriages. In the 2015 Pew Survey of Multiracials, Black-White biracials’ social identity, social networks, perceptions and experiences of discrimination, and political attitudes relevant to race resemble those of monoracial Blacks, whereas Latino-Whites and Asian-Whites are more similar to monoracial Whites than to their minority-group counterparts. Results suggest that even in a more racially mixed future, Black Americans will continue to be uniquely situated behind a most impermeable color line.

    Read or purchase the article here.