Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • What Can We Learn about White Privilege and Racism from the Experiences of White Mothers Parenting Biracial Children?

    What Can We Learn about White Privilege and Racism from the Experiences of White Mothers Parenting Biracial Children?

    Wilfrid Laurier University
    2008
    175 pages

    Shannon Cushing

    A THESIS Submitted to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts Degree in Community Psychology

    Despite progress in the movement toward anti-racism, racism remains a problem in Canada. While the presence of racism and the problem of racism are recognized by Canadian society, there is still a long way to go before racism and white privilege are eliminated. In the present study, I apply Community Psychology values to the examination of an as-yet relatively unexamined minority population: white mothers of biracial children. Guided by epistemological views that place my research within the critical and social constructivist research paradigms, I explore my research question, “How can the experiences of white mothers parenting biracial children inform us about white privilege and racism?”, using a grounded theory analysis of self-reported experiences of six white mothers living in Greater Waterloo Region, in Ontario, Canada. My informants participated in semi-structured individual and small group interviews and completed a photographic journaling project. While all the mothers were united by their common experience of being white women parenting biracial children, they represented a diverse range of socioeconomic classes and family compositions, and were parenting children whose fathers came from several ethnic backgrounds. Through my analysis of my informants’ stories, I identified a new perspective of the “experience of racism” in society. In addition, my findings led to the development of a theoretical framework that merges white privilege and racism into inseparable entities and fosters critical understanding of how racism is perpetuated in Canadian society. Recommendations for additional contributions to the anti-racism movement are suggested.

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Learning to be different: A white mother of biracial children experiences racism

    Learning to be different: A white mother of biracial children experiences racism

    University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)
    December 2004
    194 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3154007
    ISBN: 9780496146376

    Jennifer Ann Greer Johnson

    A Dissertation Submitted to the Education Faculty of the University of St. Thomas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree Doctor of Education

    This qualitative autoethnographic study examines the experiences of an inner-city assistant principal in a multiracial high school who is also a Caucasian mother of biracial children of African American and Caucasian descent. The narratives throughout this study illustrate encounters with prejudice, discrimination, and racism in public and private places. The stories are analyzed through the lens of racial formation theory and Critical Race Theory. Results indicate that the identity of a mother of biracial children is complex as she straddles two cultures, that of the black and white community. An Ethnic Identity Development Model illustrates the struggles of rearing biracial children while working in an urban high school. This autoethnographic study illustrates the mother’s identity shift as she learns to be different in both worlds.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • ABSTRACT
    • LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.
    • PREFACE
    • CHAPTER 1: JUMPING THE BROOM
      • A journey into difference
      • Evolution of the study
      • Autoethnography
      • Data collection and analysis
      • Validity and ethics
      • Organization of the Dissertation
    • CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE
      • Interracial Relationships
      • Biracial Identity
      • Class Issues
      • Racial Formation Theory
      • Critical Race Theory
    • CHAPTER 3: AWAKENINGS
      • Is she adopted?
      • Their father is Black.
      • Children are not supposed to be out in the sun
      • Intraracial Discrimination
      • We can only choose one
      • Would you buy a warranty on a Cadillac?
      • Another Awakening
      • Is that your child?
      • I will never be with another white woman again!
      • His mouth fell open, and he stared at my children and then at me
    • CHAPTER 4: HAIR: POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RACE
      • What is this, the next Shirley Temple?
      • Do you use this on your hair?
      • I decided that you need to do something with Jacqueline’s hair
      • Everyone stopped and stared at me
      • Shampoo and conditioner for one colored girl
      • I have to get their hair “right” in the eyes of the Black community
    • CHAPTER 5: WILL MY CHILDREN HAVE A PLACE AT THE TABLE?
      • I was raised in a strict Catholic household
      • The Archbishop’s Letter
      • Racism is a sin
      • For my children’s sake, great changes need to be made
    • CHAPTER 6: WILL MY CHILDREN BE LEFT BEHIND?
      • Appointment as Assistant Principal
      • “Are those your children?”
      • I circled ‘White’ even though my son does not look White
      • “She does not like you”
      • “So you’re kickin it with a black man”
      • You’re just picking on me because I am Black
      • Does anyone speak another language?
      • Mama, will you still like us even though your skin is white and mine is brown?
      • Let’s not just give people the boots, let’s give them the straps
      • Most of the International Baccalaureate students are white
    • CHAPTER 7: A MOTHER’S STRUGGLE
      • “Second-Hand Racism”
      • Racism at school and the workplace
      • Rearing my children
      • Ethnic Identity Development Model
    • REFERENCES
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

    • TABLE 1 Changing Racial Combinations of Interracial Marriages in Minnesota.
    • TABLE 2 My Journey in a Racialized Society
    • FIGURE 1 2000 Census Self-Identification Questionnaire
    • FIGURE 2 Ethnic Identity Development Model (Fluid)

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Mixed Race Issues to be Examined at DePaul University Forum

    Mixed Race Issues to be Examined at DePaul University Forum

    DePaul University
    News Release
    2012-10-29

    As Americans of mixed racial ancestry continue to grow in number and diversity, the demographic, social, political and cultural implications for the country become more complex. These issues will be examined from a variety of perspectives at a groundbreaking conference that will bring scholars and artists from around the United States and the world to DePaul University Nov. 1 through 4.
     
    The conference will include 50 programs featuring research presentations, panel discussions and performances that explore various aspects of the emerging field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. More than 150 presenters from the U.S. and other countries, including the Philippines and the United Kingdom, are expected to attend.

    Individual programs will examine issues such as discrimination against mixed race persons, mixed race student organizations and mixed race gender and sexuality issues. Individual panel topics include: “Assessing Mixed Race Iconography: Barack Obama and Tiger Woods;” “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Mixed Race Identities;” and “Media, Celebrity and Beauty: The Visuals of Mixed Race.”
     
    All programs are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events, times and locations is online here.

    For more information, click here.

  • Race in a Bottle

    Race in a Bottle

    Scientific American
    Volume 297 (January 1, 2007)
    pages 40-45

    Jonathan D. Kahn, Professor of Law
    Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

    Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. This article focuses on the drug, BiDil – a drug that combats congestive heart failure by dilating the arteries and veins of African American patients. The author expounds that there is no solid evidence that the drug should targeted towards only one ethnic group. The author includes the history of BiDil including its inception and then its reappearance with a race-based focus.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

    Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

    The Aporetic
    2012-09-27

    Mike O’Malley

    The ques­tion posed above is extremely hard to answer. She doesn’t “look like an indian.” But what do Indians look like?

    Just to recap: Elizabeth Warren is run­ning for the Sen­ate in Massachusetts. She’s been widely mocked for claiming herself as “native Ameri­can” at var­i­ous points in her career. Warren grew up in what’s now Oklahoma, a vast region which the US government had originally reserved for Indian tribes relocated from the East…

    …The racial past of Americans is far more complicated and ambiguous than Americans generally realize. My favorite example is very personal. According to Virginia, the state in which I now reside, I am a black man. Had my family stayed in VA, my father could not have attended white schools and my parents would not have been allowed to marry. It’s absurd, and ridiculous: I’m as white as any white man you’d ever imagine, and no one in my family even knew of this history till about a decade ago. But there it is, a mat­ter of record.

    The man responsible, Walter Ashby Plecker, was convinced there were no “real” indians in VA. Instead, he argued, there lived a mongrel race of intermmarried people, the “WIN” tribe (White, Indian, Negro). If you listed yourself as “Indian” on official documents, Plecker would rewrite them, and change “indian” to “colored,” because there were no “real” indians. Had Warren grown up in VA, she would have been unable to prove any connec­tion to Indian ancestors, because Plecker destroyed the records. And yet, the descendants of Indians still live in Virginia today…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Obama struggles to balance African Americans’ hopes with country’s as a whole

    Obama struggles to balance African Americans’ hopes with country’s as a whole

    The Washington Post
    2012-10-28

    Peter Wallsten

    Barack Obama stood at the lectern, trying to figure out what to say — or at least how to say it. He started speaking, then stopped, then started again, each time searching for the right tone, the right cadence, the right words.

    The audience was a small group of advisers, including two African American scholars who were counseling him on how to get his message across most effectively with black voters. Obama, whose memoir years earlier had explored his mixed-race background and search for racial identity, wanted to connect with African Americans but remain true to his own style and voice.

    “I can’t sound like Martin,” Obama said at one point, according to the scholars. “I can’t sound like Jesse.”

    Obama was still more than a year away from becoming America’s first black president, but already he was parsing that identity in his mind…

    …Obama rarely discusses his innermost feelings about being the first African American to occupy the Oval Office, according to friends and associates, preferring to keep his thoughts closely held, shared with only a select few. He has shown himself to be drawn to the symbolic, or even aspirational, aspect of his presidency.

    One of the iconic images of his tenure is a 2009 photograph of Obama leaning down to let a 5-year-old black boy, Jacob Philadelphia, touch his hair. The boy wanted to see if his hair felt like the president’s. The image, captured by White House photographer Pete Souza, has been on display ever since, just outside the Oval Office in a hallway that Obama passes through regularly…

    …If the election of four years ago put to rest the notion that the United States was not ready to elect a black president, this year poses a new question: Can an African American president, after four years as a fixture in Americans’ lives, win reelection?…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “Incestuous Sheets” and “Adulterate Beasts”: Incest and Miscegenation in Early Modern Drama

    “Incestuous Sheets” and “Adulterate Beasts”: Incest and Miscegenation in Early Modern Drama

    University of Michigan
    2011
    199 pages

    Kentston D. Bauman

    A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature)

    This dissertation explores the centrality of incest and miscegenation in the early modern cultural imaginary. Incest, which occurs with surprising frequency in the drama of the period but with equally surprising scarcity in everyday social life, is frequently invoked in conjunction with miscegenation in all of its various forms (social, religious, ethnic/cultural/racial). As boundary phenomena – the two extreme ends of the spectrum of sexual alliance – incest and miscegenation served as powerful and surprisingly flexible dramatic tropes, providing a useful means of interrogating the social processes that create, instill, and redefine acceptable choices in sexual and social partners. I divide the project into two sections. In the first, I investigate the interplay among incest, social miscegenation, and social mobility. Looking at Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, I explore how these issues become filtered through the figure of the incestuous widow, whose treatment serves as both a critique of aristocratic hierarchies and a means of promoting sexual and social mobility. The second, which examines the relations between incest and ethnic miscegenation, centers on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Noting that Shakespeare takes the incestuous rape in Ovid’s tale of Philomel and replaces it with the miscegenistic rape of Lavinia, I investigate how this transposition interrogates the family’s relationship to itself and to the state. I situate my readings of these plays in a socio-political context that takes into account two different, yet intricately connected, cultural issues: the painful transition of a society still highly stratified along feudal lines to one suddenly faced with the possibilities for radical economic and political advancement; and the anxieties of a culture just as suddenly exposed, through exploration and trade, to other geographic and cultural realms. The attempt to navigate the new terrain opened up by changes in the social, political, and geographic climate, I argue, disrupts long-established institutions – the family, marriage, hierarchical stratification. Significantly, the tensions between incest and miscegenation so apparent in the period’s drama express, in part, cultural anxieties fostered by a new social openness combined with a newly heightened sense of an enticing yet threatening Other.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • DEDICATION
    • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    • CHAPTER
      • Introduction. Incest and Miscegenation on the Early Modern Stage
      • One. The Incestuous Widow and Social Mobility in Early Modern Drama
      • Two. Aristocratic Endogamy and Social Miscegenation in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
      • Three. “Unkind and Careless of Your Own”: Incest, Miscegenation, and Family in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
      • Epilogue. Looking Forward: A Pattern for Reading
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Research Matters June 27, 2012

    Research Matters June 27, 2012

    USC Dornsife Research Office Weekly Updates
    University of Southern California
    2012-06-27

    Stephan Haas, Vice Dean of Research

    Awards

    This information is based upon official award data from the Contracts and Grants office. It is provided to make you aware of the interesting research that is being conducted by our colleagues and that is supported through extramural sources…

    Read the entire update here.

  • Scholars fix gaze on changing racial landscape

    Scholars fix gaze on changing racial landscape

    Chicago Tribune
    2012-10-29

    Dawn Turner Trice

    Laura Kina, 39, is half Asian-American and half white. Her husband is Jewish, and her stepdaughter is half Hispanic. Her family, including her fair-skinned, blue-eyed biological daughter, lives near Devon Avenue in the heart of Chicago’s Indian and Pakistani community.

    Kina, who’s a DePaul University associate professor of art, media and design, views her life as a vibrant collage of culture, religion and race, pieced together by chance and choice.

    “I grew up in the ‘Sesame Street’ generation,” she said. “This is just my normal.”

    On Thursday, Kina and DePaul professor Camilla Fojas will begin a four-day conference on campus that explores the emerging academic field of critical mixed-race studies. Hundreds of scholars and artists from around the country and globe are expected to participate in research presentations, spoken-word performances and discussions.

    Kina and Fojas, who hosted a similar conference in 2010, hope to cover an array of topics on identity, discrimination and racial “passing.” Additionally, panels will tackle issues such as the role of the mixed-race person as exotic “everyman” in advertising and film, and the impact of President Barack Obama and Tiger Woods, among others, as biracial icons…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Price of a Black President

    The Price of a Black President

    The New York Times
    2012-10-27

    Frederick C. Harris, Professor of Political Science;  Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies; Director of the Center on African-American Politics and Society
    Columbia University

    WHEN African-Americans go to the polls next week, they are likely to support Barack Obama at a level approaching the 95 percent share of the black vote he received in 2008. As well they should, given the symbolic exceptionalism of his presidency and the modern Republican Party’s utter disregard for economic justice, civil rights and the social safety net.

    But for those who had seen in President Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realization of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “beloved community,” the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment. Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality. The tragedy is that black elites — from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members — have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.

    These are not easy words to write. Mr. Obama’s expansion of health insurance coverage was the most significant social legislation since the Great Society, his stimulus package blunted much of the devastation of the Great Recession, and the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul added major new protections for consumers. His politics would seem to vindicate the position of civil rights-era leaders like Malcolm X, who distrusted party politics and believed that blacks would be better positioned to advance their interests as an independent voting bloc, beholden to neither party…

    …But as president, Mr. Obama has had little to say on concerns specific to blacks. His State of the Union address in 2011 was the first by any president since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor. The political scientist Daniel Q. Gillion found that Mr. Obama, in his first two years in office, talked about race less than any Democratic president had since 1961. From racial profiling to mass incarceration to affirmative action, his comments have been sparse and halting.

    Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama weighed in after the prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The president said the police had “acted stupidly,” was criticized for rushing to judgment, and was mocked when he invited Dr. Gates and the arresting officer to chat over beers at the White House. It wasn’t until earlier this year that Mr. Obama spoke as forcefully on a civil rights matter — the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida — saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”…

    …Mr. Obama deserves the electoral support — but not the uncritical adulation — of African-Americans. If re-elected he might surprise us by explicitly emphasizing economic and racial justice and advocating “targeted universalism” — job-training and housing programs that are open to all, but are concentrated in low-income, minority communities. He would have to do this in the face of fiscal crisis and poisonous partisanship…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.