Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Improving Anti-Racist Education for Multiracial Students

    Improving Anti-Racist Education for Multiracial Students

    University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    May 2014
    479 pages

    Eric Hamako

    Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education

    This dissertation explores how anti‐racist education might be improved, so that it more effectively teaches Multiracial students about racism. A brief history of anti‐racist education and a theory of monoracism–the systematic oppression of Multiracial people–provide context for the study. Anti‐racist education in communities and colleges has supported U.S. social movements for racial justice. However, most anti‐racist education programs are not designed by or for students who identify with two or more races. Nor have such programs generally sought to address Multiraciality or monoracism. Since the 1980s, Multiraciality has become more salient in popular U.S. racial discourses. The number of people identifying as Multiracial, Mixed Race, or related terms has also increased, particularly among school‐age youth. Further, the size and number of Multiracial people’s organizations have also grown. Anti‐racist education may pose unintended challenges for Multiracial students and their organizations. This study asked twenty‐five educators involved in Multiracial organizations to discuss anti‐racist education: what it should teach Multiracial students; what is working; what is not working; and how it might be improved. Qualitative data were gathered via five focus group interviews in three West Coast cities. Participants proposed learning goals for Multiracial students. Goals included learning about privilege and oppression; social constructionism; historical and contemporary contexts of racism; and impacts of racism and monoracism on Multiracial people. Participants also called for education that develops interpersonal relationships, self‐reflection, and activism. Participants also discussed aspects of anti‐racist education that may help or hinder Multiracial students’ learning, as well as possible improvements. Participants problematized the exclusion of Multiraciality, the use of Black/White binary racial paradigms, linear racial identity development models, and the use of racial caucus groups or affinity spaces. Participants also challenged educators’ monoracist attitudes and behaviors, particularly the treatment of questions as pathological “resistance.” Suggestions included addressing Multiraciality and monoracism, accounting for intersectionality and the social construction of race, validating self‐identification, and teacher education about monoracism. The study then critically analyzes participants’ responses by drawing on literature about anti‐racist education, social justice education, multicultural education, transgender oppression (cissexism), and monoracism. Based on that synthesis, alternate recommendations for research and practice are provided.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    • ABSTRACT
    • 1. INTRODUCTION
      • Significance of the problem
      • Goals and intended audiences
      • Locating myself as a researcher
      • Research questions
      • Organization of the study
    • 2. FOUR CRITIQUES OF COMMUNITY‐BASED ANTI‐RACIST EDUCATION
      • A brief overview of CBARE
      • Two brief histories of CBARE
      • Anti‐intersectional praxes
      • Binary racial paradigms
      • Racial essentialism
      • Pathologizing “resistance”
      • Toward new anti‐racist praxes: Accounting for monoracism
    • 3. THEORIZING MONORACISM
      • Theorizing monoracism
      • Addressing challenges to a theory of monoracism
      • Benefits of theorizing monoracism
      • Summary
    • 4. METHODOLOGY
      • Focus group interview methodology
      • Participants
      • Focus groups: Number, size, and locations
      • Pre‐focus group data collection: Surveys, curricula sharing, and curricula analysis
      • Focus group data collection
      • Data analysis
    • 5. LEARNING GOALS FOR MULTIRACIAL STUDENTS
      • Representational knowledge: Learn about racism and monoracism
      • Representational knowledge: Hierarchies that trouble Multiracial organizing
      • Relational knowledge: Learn to connect with other people
      • Reflective knowledge: Learn about oneself
      • Summary
    • 6. DISCUSSION OF LEARNING GOALS FOR MULTIRACIAL STUDENTS
      • Representational knowledge: Learn about racism and monoracism
      • Representational knowledge: Hierarchies that trouble Multiracial organizing
      • Relational knowledge: Learn to connect with other people
      • Reflective knowledge: Learn about oneself
      • Summary
    • 7. ANTI‐RACIST EDUCATION: WHAT IS WORKING AND NOT WORKING FOR MULTIRACIAL STUDENTS
      • Monoracism in anti‐racist educational theories, curricula, and pedagogies
      • Monoracism in educators’ attitudes and behaviors
      • Summary
    • 8. DISCUSSION OF ANTI‐RACIST EDUCATION: WHAT IS WORKING AND NOT WORKING FOR MULTIRACIAL STUDENTS
      • Monoracism in anti‐racist educational theories, curricula, and pedagogies
      • Monoracism in educators’ attitudes and behaviors
      • Summary
    • 9. CONCLUSION
    • APPENDICES
      • A. RECRUITING SCRIPT
      • B. PARTICIPATION CONFIRMATION EMAIL
      • C. HUMAN SUBJECTS WRITTEN INFORMED CONSENT FORM
      • D. SURVEY 1: PARTICIPANT INTAKE SURVEY
      • E. PHONE/EMAIL REMINDER SCRIPT
      • F. SURVEY 2: CURRICULA EVALUATIONS
      • G. SURVEY 3: FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT WORKSHEET
      • H. FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEW PROTOCOL
      • I. MULTIRACIAL TIMELINE CURRICULUM
      • J. DESIGN A MONORACIST INSTITUTION CURRICULUM
      • K. RACIALBREAD COOKIE CURRICULUM
      • L. MULTIRACIAL POWER SHUFFLE CURRICULUM
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • I Was Racially Profiled in My Own Driveway

    I Was Racially Profiled in My Own Driveway

    The Atlantic
    2014-04-14

    Doug Glanville

    A retired Major League Baseball player explains how he’s trying to turn an upsetting encounter with the police into an opportunity for dialogue.

    It was an otherwise ordinary snow day in Hartford, Connecticut, and I was laughing as I headed outside to shovel my driveway. I’d spent the morning scrambling around, trying to stay ahead of my three children’s rising housebound energy, and once my shovel hit the snow, I thought about how my wife had been urging me to buy a snowblower. I hadn’t felt an urgent need. Whenever it got ridiculously blizzard-like, I hired a snow removal service. And on many occasions, I came outside to find that our next door neighbor had already cleared my driveway for me.

    Never mind that our neighbor was an empty-nester in his late 60s with a replaced hip, and I was a former professional ballplayer in his early 40s. I kept telling myself I had to permanently flip the script and clear his driveway. But not today. I had to focus on making sure we could get our car out for school the next morning. My wife was at a Black History Month event with our older two kids. The snow had finally stopped coming down and this was my mid-afternoon window of opportunity.

    Just as I was good-naturedly turning all this over in my mind, my smile disappeared.

    A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”

    All of my homeowner confidence suddenly seemed like an illusion…

    …As offended as I’d been, the worst part was trying to explain the incident to my kids. When I called my wife to tell her what had happened, she was on her way home from the Black History Month event, and my son heard her end of the conversation. Right away, he wanted to know whether I’d been arrested. My 4-year-old daughter couldn’t understand why a police officer would “hurt Daddy’s feelings.” I didn’t want to make my children fear the police. I also wasn’t ready to talk to them about stop-and-frisk policies, or the value judgments people put on race.

    Until that moment, skin colors had been little more than adjectives to my kids. Some members of our family have bronze or latte skin; others are caramel-colored or dark brown. Our eldest and “lightest-skinned” daughter had at times matter-of-factly described her brother and me as “brown” and herself as “white.” But that night, my wife made it painfully simple. “We are black,” she explained. “All of us.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Barack Obama’s Warning to People of Mixed Heritage

    Barack Obama’s Warning to People of Mixed Heritage

    Eighth Generation
    2014-01-22

    Louie Gong

    Back in April 2005, a group of mixed people sponsored by the nonprofit MAVIN had the golden opportunity to sit down with the then-Senator Obama. The conversation, filmed as part of the feature length documentary “Chasing Daybreak,” may be the only interview in which he has addressed the mixed race experience directly. I pulled the dusty DVD off my shelf last week and uploaded this clip with permission from MAVIN. (I’m a past President of MAVIN, and I currently sit on the Advisory Board for both MAVIN and Mixed in Canada)

    In my travels, I still hear people citing the increasing presence of America’s mixed race population (up 32% since Census 2000)—and high-profile individuals—as supposed movement towards a “post-racial” or colorblind society. In a cultural climate like this, I think hearing President Obama—the mixed race person most often touted as evidence of this post-race state—strongly caution mixed folks to stay connected to community and participate in larger movements by people of color is a priceless tool for sparking discussion…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Americans Say Obama’s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong

    Americans Say Obama’s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong

    The Root
    2014-04-14

    Jenée Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent

    Saying “Yes, Obama is mixed race” is not the same as saying “No, he’s not black.” Racial Identity 101: You can be both.

    Twenty-seven percent of Americans say President Barack Obama is black, while 52 percent say he’s mixed race.

    That’s part of a newly published Pew Research Center report that has inspired jarring headlines like these about perceptions of the man commonly (formerly?) known as the first African-American president:

    “Is Barack Obama ‘Black’? A Majority of Americans Say No”

    “Poll: Majority of Americans Say Obama Is Mixed-Race, Not Black”

    The Washington Post calls the data “fascinating.”

    But it’s actually not. The only thing fascinating (read: frustrating) is why Pew would force people to choose between these two options. By setting up “black” and “mixed race” as mutually exclusive, as it appears to have done in the “Obama: Black or Mixed Race” (emphasis mine) portion of its poll, it offered Americans a misleading choice that doesn’t reflect their social reality, and certainly doesn’t tell us anything new about how they see their president.

    If participants were, in fact, forced to choose between the two options, knowing that Obama self-identifies as black and knowing, too, that he has a white parent and a black parent, it makes sense to assume that many people simply picked the most specific option: “mixed race.”

    That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean they say “no” to his being black…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Forget Policy—Americans Can’t Even Agree on Whether Obama Is Black

    Forget Policy—Americans Can’t Even Agree on Whether Obama Is Black

    TakePart
    2014-04-15

    Liz Dwyer, Staff Writer

    A Pew Research Center study finds that whites and Latinos identify the commander-in-chief as ‘mixed race.’

    If you thought the United States had achieved the significant historic milestone of electing its first African American president, think again. According to Next America, a just-released Pew Research Center report, only a little over one-fourth of Americans believe Obama is black.

    Obama self-identifies as black—he checked the “black, negro, African American” box on the 2010 U.S. Census—and has jokingly identified himself as a mutt too. But when asked if Obama is black or mixed race, 27 percent of Americans say that he’s black, and 52 percent say he’s mixed race.

    When the data is broken out according to racial groups, whites and Hispanics respond similarly. Of whites, 24 percent say Obama is black, and 53 percent say he is mixed race. As for Hispanics, 23 percent say he’s black, and 61 percent say he’s mixed race. Asians weren’t asked what they thought. (What’s up with that, Pew?)

    The question—Is Obama black or mixed race?—is phrased oddly. A person can be both. And where is Pew’s “Is Obama black or mixed race or white” option? But this study is simply the latest example of America’s mass confusion over Obama’s identity…

    …Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, writer and star of One Drop of Love (Ben Affleck, Chay Carter, and Matt Damon are co-producers), a multimedia show that explores how a father and a daughter develop their racial identities, says she finds it “problematic to allow anyone other than self to identify people as a ‘race.’ ”

    Now we get boxes on the U.S. Census survey, but, says Cox DiGiovanni, “until 1970 the race question on the Census was answered through observation by the Census taker.” That means if you looked “black,” you were identified by the Census taker as black—or “negro,” as African Americans were called then…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Next America

    The Next America

    Pew Research Center
    2014-04-10

    Paul Taylor, Executive Vice President of Special Projects

    Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion. America is in the midst of two right now. Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era. The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion.

    The Pew Research Center tracks these transformations with public opinion surveys and demographic and economic analyses. Our new book, The Next America, draws on this research to paint a data-rich portrait of the many ways our nation is changing and the challenges we face in the decades ahead.

    Let’s start with what demographers call an “age pyramid.” Each bar represents a five year age cohort; with those ages 0-4 on the bottom and those ages 85 and older on the top. In every society since the start of history, whenever you broke down any population this way, you’d always get a pyramid.

    But from 1960 to 2060, our pyramid will turn into a rectangle. We’ll have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age 5. This is the result of longer life spans and lower birthrates. It’s uncharted territory, not just for us, but for all of humanity. And while it’s certainly good news over the long haul for the sustainability of the earth’s resources, it will create political and economic stress in the shorter term, as smaller cohorts of working age adults will be hard-pressed to finance the retirements of larger cohorts of older ones.

    America’s Racial Tapestry Is Changing

    At the same time our population is going gray, we’re also becoming multi-colored. In 1960, the population of the United States was 85% white; by 2060, it will be only 43% white. We were once a black and white country. Now, we’re a rainbow.

    Our intricate new racial tapestry is being woven by the more than 40 million immigrants who have arrived since 1965, about half of them Hispanics and nearly three-in-ten Asians.

    Because these tranformations happen tick by tock, without anyone announcing them with a drum roll or press conference, they are sometimes hard to perceive…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Book Release of Prof. Lundy Braun’s Breathing Race into the Machine

    Book Release of Prof. Lundy Braun’s Breathing Race into the Machine

    Brown University
    Providence, Rhode Island
    Program in Science and Technology Studies
    2014-03-26

    This February, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence, professor of medical science and Africana studies, and a member of the Science and Technology Studies Program, Lundy Braun released her new book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics.

    In her book, Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the ways medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, this book helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.

    In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixed or Not, Why Are We Still Taking Pictures of “Race”?

    Mixed or Not, Why Are We Still Taking Pictures of “Race”?

    Racism Review: scholarship and activism towards racial justice
    2014-04-13

    Sharon Chang

    Just days ago PolicyMic put up a piece entitled “National Geographic Concludes What Americans Will Look Like in 2050, and It’s Beautiful.” In it writer Zak Cheney-Rice attempts to address the so-called rise of multiracial peoples which has captured/enchanted the public eye and with which the media has become deeply enamored. He spotlights a retrospective and admiring look at National Geographic’s “The Changing Face of America” project of last year featuring a series of multiracial portraits by well-known German photographer Martin Schoeller, and also peripherally cites some statistics/graphs that demonstrate the explosion of the mixed-race population.

    “In a matter of years,” Cheney-Rice writes, “We’ll have Tindered, OKCupid-ed and otherwise sexed ourselves into one giant amalgamated mega-race.” Despite admitting racial inequity persists, he still flirts with the idea of an “end” approaching (presumably to race and by association racism), and suggests while we’re waiting for things to get better, we might “…applaud these growing rates of intermixing for what they are: An encouraging symbol of a rapidly changing America. 2050 remains decades away, but if these images are any preview, it’s definitely a year worth waiting for.” We are then perhaps left with this rather unfortunate centerpiece of his statement, “Here’s how the ‘average American’ will look by the year 2050”:…

    …What I think is incredibly important here (and doesn’t seem to have come up in the ensuing disputes) is why portraits designed to quantify/quality racialized appearance were taken with such intent in the first place? Photography which captures a person’s image for the sole and express purpose of measuring then discussing their supposed race is not new and frankly, like pretty much everything race-related, has a long and insidious history. It’s known as racial-type photography and it was popularized in the late 19th century by white pseudo-scientists to “prove” the superiority of some races, and the inferiority of others. Anthropologists used photography to make anatomical comparisons, then racially classify and rank human subjects on an evolutionary scale “seeming to confirm that some peoples were less evolved than others and would therefore benefit from imperial control” (Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1879-1940 by Anne Maxwell, p.21)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • National Geographic Concludes What Americans Will Look Like in 2050, and It’s Beautiful

    National Geographic Concludes What Americans Will Look Like in 2050, and It’s Beautiful

    PolicyMic
    2014-04-10

    Zak Cheney-Rice, Writer covering race, hip-hop, sports and pop culture

    It’s no secret that interracial relationships are trending upward, and in a matter of years we’ll have Tindered, OKCupid-ed and otherwise sexed ourselves into one giant amalgamated mega-race.

    But what will we look like? National Geographic built its 125th anniversary issue around this very question last October, commissioning Martin Schoeller, a renowned photographer and portrait artist, to capture the lovely faces of our nation’s multiracial future.

    Here’s how the “average American” will look by the year 2050:…

    …So is an end approaching? Will increased racial mixing finally and permanently redefine how we imagine our racial identities? The latest figures suggest we’re getting more comfortable with the idea, or perhaps that we simply give fewer shits than ever before. Either would be a step in the right direction…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Approaching race as a social rather than biological construct

    Approaching race as a social rather than biological construct

    The Daily Pennsylvanian
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    2014-04-08

    Laura Anthony

    The Program on Race, Science and Society will examine the role of race in scientific research at upcoming symposium

    In 1851, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine graduate Samuel Cartwright delivered a report to the Medical Association of Louisiana claiming that blacks’ health was improved by slavery.

    He theorized that forced physical labor improved blacks’ inferior lung capacity, so slavery was actually a necessity to bettering their health.

    Penn Law School professor Dorothy Roberts first heard this anecdote from a talk by Brown University professor Lundy Braun detailing the history of the spirometer, a medical device used to measure lung capacity.

    Some spirometers historically, and even in modern medicine, adjust the measurements according to the race of the patient. Cartwright used the device to justify the need for continued slavery to protect blacks’ health. Braun’s presentation included a picture of a modern spirometer with a button labeled “race,” and through numerous conversations with medical students, Roberts has found that some medical students are still trained to use spirometers based on patients’ race.

    For Roberts, this is a major problem. “My definition of race is that it is a political system to govern people based on invented biological demarcation, and it is not a natural division of human beings,” she said. “So it is much more plausible that inequities in health that fall along racial lines are caused by social determinants.”

    Braun’s talk sparked an idea for a future project in the new program she developed at Penn this year called the Program on Race, Science and Society…

    Read the entire article here.