Mixed Race Studies

Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong

Zondervan (an imprint of HarperCollins Christian Publishing)
2011-09-13
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780310396192

Joan Steinau Lester

Book Summary

Nina never thought about being biracial until her parents divorced. Now it feels like everyone is forcing her to choose her identity, and in her hometown of Los Angeles, racial tensions flare. Conflicted and alone, Nina turns to the story of her ancestor who escaped slavery, hoping to find wisdom and direction while also learning who she truly is.

About the Book

Identity Crisis.

As a biracial teen, Nina is accustomed to a life of varied hues—mocha-colored skin, ringed brown hair streaked with red, a darker brother, a black father, a white mother. When her parents decide to divorce, the rainbow of Nina’s existence is reduced to a much starker reality. Shifting definitions and relationships are playing out all around her, and new boxes and lines seem to be getting drawn every day.

Between the fractures within her family and the racial tensions splintering her hometown, Nina feels caught in perpetual battle. Feeling stranded in the nowhere land between racial boundaries, and struggling for personal independence and identity, Nina turns to the story of her great-great-grandmother’s escape from slavery. Is there direction in the tale of her ancestor? Can Nina build her own compass when landmarks from her childhood stop guiding the way?

How Policies Can Address Multiracial Stigma

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
First published 2020-10-01
pages 115-122
DOI: 10.1177/2372732220943906

Diana T. Sanchez, Professor of Psychology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

Sarah E. Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke Identity and Diversity Lab
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Analia F. Albuja, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
Duke Identity and Diversity Lab
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Zoey Eddy, Research Assistant
Self and Social Identity Lab
University of California, Santa Barbara

Twenty years ago, Multiracial Americans completed the U.S Census with the option to indicate more than one race for the first time. As we embark on the second anniversary of this shift in Multiracial recognition, this article reviews the research related to known sources and systems that perpetuate Multiracial-specific stigma. Policy recommendations address the needs and the continued acknowledgment of this growing racial/ethnic minority population.

Key Points

• Multiracial individuals represent a growing majority in the racial/ethnic minority population
• Multiracial people encounter specific forms of stigma
• Multiracial-specific stigma uniquely impacts the psychological and physical health of Multiracial individuals
• Policies can address Multiracial-specific stigma (e.g., more detailed assessments of race/ethnicity, revisiting Multiracial language, Multiracial-specific health interventions)
• Recommended policy changes will make better use of human capital for everyone by increasing accuracy in population estimates used to distribute educational and health care resources, as well as improving health care delivery (e.g., transplant matching).

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Volunteers Needed for Research Study on Multiracial Individuals

2020-10-06

Jessica Harris, M.A., Clinical Psychology Psy.D. Graduate Student
California School of Professional Psychology
Alliant International University, Fresno, California

I am a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University-Fresno inviting you to participate in a research study to understand the experiences of multiracial individuals.

To participate in the study, you must:

• Be 18-years of age or older.
• Have biological parents from different racial/ethnic minority backgrounds (e.g., Black, Asian, Latinx, Native American). Or, at least one biological parent must belong to two different racial/ethnic minority groups.
• Currently live in the United States.

The entire online survey is anticipated to take 15-20 minutes to complete. Please note the survey does ask about multiracial experiences, participation is entirely voluntary, and that you are free to withdraw at any time. If you have any questions concerning the research study, please email me at jharris2@alliant.edu, or my dissertation chair, Dr. Jennifer Foster, at jfoster1@alliant.edu.

Upon completion of the survey, you will have the opportunity to enter a drawing to win 1 of 2 $50 (USD) Amazon gift cards. Providing your information for the drawing is completely voluntary.

The survey link is included here: https://tinyurl.com/mltiracial

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Jessica Harris, M.A.

Graduate Dissertation Recruitment – Biracial/Bicultural Individuals

Kimberly Foley, M.S., Clinical Psychology Doctoral Candidate
Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida

2020-09-26

I am a doctoral student of Florida Tech’s Clinical Psychology program in Melbourne, Florida. Under the supervision of my faculty chair, Dr. Felipa Chavez, a licensed clinical psychologist, and faculty of color, who is well-versed in socio-cultural issues, I am conducting a research study designed examining healthy biracial/bicultural and multiethnic identity formation in relation to one’s sense of belonging and psychological well-being and functioning. As a biracial graduate student, the daughter of an Irish-American father and a Mauritian mother, I am intimately aware of the unique experiences and socio-cultural skill sets that afford biracial/bicultural individuals the ability to successfully and seamlessly navigate multiple cultural contexts with a fluency in communication, also known as code switching. Such skill sets are often developed as a function of upbringing, in which biracial/bicultural individuals must learn to successfully straddle and integrate two divergent worlds of majority and minority culture.

Embedded in such Biracial/bicultural identity success is a greater understanding for one’s two divergent heritages of majority and minority culture, which must successfully learn to communicate, and be at peace with one another. As such, the goal of the current study is to validate the psychometric properties of a newly configured measure of bicultural identity development. In addition, it is hoped that focus on the adaptive strategies garnered from healthy biracial/bicultural and multiethnic identity formation, will shed light on ways to ameliorate the tensions precipitated by our nation’s racial divide; bringing forth psychological healing to a national epidemic of racial trauma, which compromises both the physical and psychological health of this nation’s citizens.

We are requesting that adult (18 years and older) biracial/bicultural individuals, with one parent who identifies as a Caucasian, please invest their time and commitment to filling out this online survey. The survey is estimated to take 45-60-minutes, because their stories greatly matter to us. With the survey being online, participants will be able to select the time and place that is most convenient for them within the next few weeks. Participants will be able to complete this survey by using their mobile phone or desktop computers through the link here. In exchange for their time, Participants who complete the survey can enter a drawing for three chances to win a $50 (USD) Amazon gift card.

This study has been approved by Florida Tech IRB: #20-069
IRB Contact Information: by Dr. Jigna Patel, IRB Chair (jpatel@fit.edu)

The future is mixed. Since its founding, Cornell [University] has served as a shining beacon in the fight for the inclusivity of women, POC, the LGBT+ community and people with disabilities in higher education. If Cornell truly believes in its motto, “Any Person, Any Study,” this new area of study and research into mixed-race individuals would fit like a glove into the ideals of this institution, and be a good step in developing future curricula as the United States’ demographic evolves.

Katherine Luong, “GUEST ROOM | Create a Mixed-Race Studies Department at Cornell,” The Cornell Daily Sun, September 18, 2020. https://cornellsun.com/2020/09/18/guest-room-create-a-mixed-race-studies-department-at-cornell/.

How The Vanishing Half fits into our cultural fixation with racial passing stories

Vox
2020-08-14

Constance Grady

Zac Freeland/Vox

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

“Passing for white never left.”

In Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, the character of Stella haunts the narrative like a ghost. Stella is the half who vanished: half of her family, half of her sister’s heart. And she vanished by excising half of her own identity.

Stella is a light-skinned Black woman, and when she is 16, she decides to start passing for white. Her identical twin sister Desiree, meanwhile, grows up to marry the darkest-skinned man she can find. Stella breaks away from her family, and we don’t get a chance to meet her on the pages of the novel until nearly halfway through the book when at last her niece, Desiree’s dark-skinned daughter, tracks her down. It’s only in that last section that we finally learn exactly what happened to Stella.

Stella’s fate haunts the novel, and so does the genre her story belongs to. There’s a long history of narratives of racial passing in the American novel, and The Vanishing Half plays with the genre in new and interesting ways. So as the Vox Book Club spends the month talking about The Vanishing Half, I wanted to put it in the context of the passing novel more broadly.

To get an expert view, I called up Alisha Gaines, an English professor at Florida State University and the author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. Together, we talked through the history of the African American passing novel, what passing looks like after Jim Crow (sorry, Ben Shapiro), and how passing novels can show us how race is produced and reproduced. Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

The first African American stories of racial passing are slave narratives

Constance Grady

Do we know when the first of these narratives emerged? How old are stories about racial passing?

Alisha Gaines

It’s an old story. In literature and in life, America has a fascination with impersonation, which includes blackface minstrelsy. And passing narratives, if you want to be technical about it, in African American literature, they start with the slave narrative…

Read the entire interview here.

Passing for White to Escape Slavery

JSTOR Daily: where news meets its scholarly match
2020-09-17

Matthew Wills

Ellen and William Craft via Flickr/ Flickr

Passing for white was an intentional strategy that enslaved people used to free themselves from bondage

Racial passing is in the news with the case of Jessica Krug, a white academic who claimed several Black identities throughout her professional career. The phenomenon of white people putting on different backgrounds is widespread—for example, as shown in well-documented cases of white people claiming Native American ancestry. But passing for Black seems, well, different.

One reason for that may be that the idea of passing has historically been linked to Black people passing for white. Scholar Martha J. Cutter, digging into “the early history of racial passing,” argues that it originated in advertisements offering rewards for captured runaway slaves starting in the mid-eighteenth century, decades before the American Revolution.

“The archive suggests that while laws from state to state and in different time periods varied, the idea of an enslaved individual from a black family heritage deliberately passing for white was frequently configured as duplicitous and even incendiary,” she writes…

Read the entire article here.

Dash Harris is doing the work to end anti-Blackness in LatinX culture

theGrio
2020-06-16

DeMicia Inman

Through her work in creating ‘NEGRO: A DOCU-SERIES ABOUT LATINX IDENTITY,’ Harris hopes to dismantle anti-Blackness in the LatinX community.

The African diaspora gave much of the world a very layered identity. For centuries, the slave trade resulted in African natives being sold or stolen as slaves and transported across the globe. Now, Black people reside in countries from the United States and Brazil to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Dash Harris, an Afro-LatinX woman, understands not only her multi-cultural heritage but also the implications and societal structure surrounding her identity. Through her work in creating NEGRO: A DOCU-SERIES ABOUT LATINX IDENTITY and more, she hopes to highlight LatinX existence and dismantle anti-Blackness in the LatinX community…

Read the entire interview here.

GUEST ROOM | Create a Mixed-Race Studies Department at Cornell

The Cornell Daily Sun
Ithaca, New York
2020-09-18

Katherine Luong, Junior
College of Human Ecology
Cornell University, Ithaca New York

We shouldn’t continue to exclude the fastest-growing population in the United States from higher education. Many mixed-race people grapple with defining their experiences and identities which can leak into their academic and professional lives.

The importance of ethnic and racial identity cannot be more relevant than it is now. The recent resurgence of racial tensions in the U.S. has highlighted the distinct experiences of historically oppressed racial minorities, especially those who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Black Lives Matter has gained incredible traction within mainstream political conversation, yet its issues (such as police brutality and system racism) do not affect only monoracial people. Understanding that the mixed experience includes many of the same racial prejudices as monoracial POC is crucial for the inclusivity of mixed people in spaces generally reserved for people of a singular race. Especially with the push Cornell is taking to create an anti-racist campus, this is the perfect time and place to create a mixed-race studies department that would give legitimacy to mixed people on campus and beyond.

There is a lack of ethnic-racial typicality associated with being mixed-race, but this does not negate the already-existing shared experiences of mixed people of all backgrounds. Such experiences include the feeling of being “in-between” and “not enough,” having to choose between displaying loyalty to one aspect of their identity instead of embracing both, language barriers between family members (especially between immigrant families residing in the U.S.) and other mix-specific experiences…

Read the entire article here.

(Un-)mixing in the Mandate: purity and persistence of ‘German-time’
in New Guinea

Chapter in: Norig Neveu, Philippe Bourmaud and Chantal Verdeil (Eds), Experts et expertise dans les mandats de la Société des Nations: figures, champs et outils, [The Expert in the Mandate], Inalco Presses, 2020

Christine Winter, Associate Professor and Matthew Flinders Fellow in History
Flinders University of South Australia
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
South Australia, Australia

“Unmixing” is a central term in the debates to bring stability and peace after WWI by ethnically homogenising regions and new nations: “… to unmix tlie (sic) populations of the Near East will tend to secure the true pacification of the Near East…” (Fritzhof Nansen, Lausanne Conference, Quoted by Sadia Abbas, Unmixing, Politicalconcepts, 2012.) So how did the nations with aspirations to ‘rule’ New Guinea deal with what could not be ‘un-mixed’: people of mixed descent, and what did this mean for German-New Guineans?

This chapter is an exploration of Weimar and Nazi German colonialism focusing on the Pacific Mandates. It focuses on leagies of German colonialism after the end of the formal German colonial empire. The crisis of the League of Nations destabilized the legitimacy of Mandate rule in the Pacific during the mid-1930s. Purity and persistence of Germanness became a theme for both the Mandate Administration and the Third Reich. In this chapter I explore the role and function of Germans of ambiguous racial belonging, namely mixed-race German Pacific Islanders, in a wider contest of expert advice and policy development. Racial scientists, German missionaries and ex-colonial officials all had a stake in the future of the Mandated Territories, and its mixed-race German population. Depending on the argument and on their place of residency – Germany or the Pacific – mixed-race German-Pacific Islanders were used as fellow Germans or as ‘natives’ to legitimize German claims.

Read the chapter draft here.