Mixed Race Studies

Me, Myself, and My Mixed Identity

The Bull & Bear: McGill’s Student-Run News Magazine
Montreal, Quebec
2019-10-17

Alia Shaukat

Photo courtesy of Regina Gonzalez

Content Warning: This article deals with sensitive topics such as racism, colorism, and sexual abuse.

I first encountered the world of racial fetishization during my brief stint on Tinder last June. That low-stakes, medium-reward dating app that we all know and love seemed like the perfect place for me to explore the dating scene. It was also, as I soon discovered, the perfect place for many men to explore their potential for racism.

Each morning, I would wake up to an aggressive amount of inquiring “What’s your race?” texts paired with a wealth of heart-eye emojis. This duality of violation and flattery was extremely confusing. Upon revealing my mixed ethnicity to my Tinder suitors, I would be praised for being “different” or “interesting,” and yet the only thing they knew about me was my mixed race identity. When I was younger, I would’ve found the comments gratifying, simply because they indicated that someone had taken an interest in me. However, now that I am older, I’ve seen that these compliments are the subtle forms in which racial fetishization manifests. It is a form of racism in which hurtful stereotypes camouflage as compliments and praise…

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New Evidence of Skin Color Bias and Health Outcomes Using Sibling Difference Models: A Research Note

Demography
Volume 56, Issue 2 (April 2019)
pages 753-762
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-018-0756-6

Thomas Laidley, Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Behavioral Science
University of Colorado

Benjamin Domingue, Assistant Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Sociology
Stanford University

Piyapat Sinsub
Princeton University

Kathleen Mullan Harris, James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina

Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology
Princeton University

In this research note, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to determine whether darker skin tone predicts hypertension among siblings using a family fixed-effects analytic strategy. We find that even after we account for common family background and home environment, body mass index, age, sex, and outdoor activity, darker skin color significantly predicts hypertension incidence among siblings. In a supplementary analysis using newly released genetic data from Add Health, we find no evidence that our results are biased by genetic pleiotropy, whereby differences in alleles among siblings relate to coloration and directly to cardiovascular health simultaneously. These results add to the extant evidence on color biases that are distinct from those based on race alone and that will likely only heighten in importance in an increasingly multiracial environment as categorization becomes more complex.

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Column: Lightskin privilege and its place in activism

The Daily Tar Heel
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2019-04-14

Devon Johnson, Chief Opinion Editor

After reading a letter to the editor this week questioning the place of biracial students in campus activism, I thought it was an important question that deserved to be expanded upon and hopefully answered to some degree. So I’ve reflected on my race, specifically how my race is perceived by others and how, if at all, it impacts the ways in which I form my racial identity.

The first time I distinctly remember my biracial identity being affirmed was, perhaps unsurprisingly, in Drake’s “You & The 6.” “I used to get teased for being Black, and now I’m here and I’m not Black enough.” This line summed up the in-betweenness I had felt for most of my life; the tugging from either side of the aisle by those trying to have me racialize and categorize myself…

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Coloring Racial Fluidity: How Skin Tone Shapes Multiracial Adolescents’ Racial Identity Changes

Race and Social Problems
First Online: 2019-09-30
9 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-019-09269-w

Robert L. Reece, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The University of Texas, Austin

Research on racial fluidity has become increasingly common as researchers seek to understand the ways and reasons people change their racial identifications and/or are perceived differently over time and across contexts. Concurrently, researchers have deepened their investigations of the attitudinal and identity aspects of “color,” that is the ways that people’s racial and political attitudes vary based on skin tone among members of the same racial group, particularly black Americans. This paper attempts to blend research on racial fluidity and color into an exploration of adolescent racial identity formation. I examine the effect skin tone on the likelihood and type of racial identity change among multiracial black adolescents as they transition into adulthood. My results reveal that lighter skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to a non-black single race, while darker skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to black only.

Read the entire article here.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who is the Fairest of Them All? Colourism and light skinned privilege

The Pin
2018-02-11

Elodie Silberstein, Artist & Scholar
Brooklyn, New York

Image Credit: Elodie Silberstein

Footscray station. Fifteen minutes by train from the city centre and here I am, in the multicultural melting pot of Melbourne. I feel thrilled. I want to sense the buzzing atmosphere of the market, and to replenish the stock of hair products that I use to enhance my natural curls. Some friends advised me to look for the requisite articles in the numerous shops of the East African community. Being new to Australia, I struggle to find products in mainstream stores that are suitable for my textured hair inherited from my Cameroonian father and French mother. The first beauty salon I encounter sets the scene. The flagship products in the window display immediately grab my attention: skin-lightening body lotions, whitening soaps… you name it, they have it. Smiley models display their charms all over the packaging promising to women of colour a lighter skin tone. A few applications, et voilà! Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Faced with this extravaganza of skin-whitening products I am suddenly brought back to my childhood in Cameroon, and I cannot help but feel my heart sinking.

Growing up mixed-race in Douala was a peculiar experience. Interracial unions were rare in the 1970s. My parents were a bit of a curiosity. I became used to being called chocolat au lait (milk chocolate) by my neighbours. It did not take me long to realise the obvious advantages that my lighter hue provided me over my dark chocolate counterparts in the white, but also in the black community…

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Biracial American Colorism: Passing for White

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume: 62 issue: 14 (The Implications of Colorism vis-à-vis Demographic Variation in a New Millennium)
DOI: 10.1177/0002764218810747
pages 2072-2086

Keshia L. Harris
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Biracial Americans constitute a larger portion of the U.S. population than is often acknowledged. According to the U.S. Census, 8.4 million people or 2.6% of the population identified with two or more racial origins in 2016. Arguably, these numbers are misleading considering extensive occurrences of interracial pairings between Whites and minority racial groups throughout U.S. history. Many theorists posit that the hypodescent principle of colorism, colloquially known as “the one drop rule,” has influenced American racial socialization in such a way that numerous individuals primarily identify with one racial group despite having parents from two different racial backgrounds. While much of social science literature examines the racial identification processes of biracial Americans who identify with their minority heritage, this article focuses on contextual factors such as family income, neighborhood, religion, and gender that influence the decision for otherwise African/Asian/Latino/Native Americans to identify as White.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Globalization of Light Skin Colorism: From Critical Race to Critical Skin Theory

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume: 62 issue: 14 (The Implications of Colorism vis-à-vis Demographic Variation in a New Millennium)
DOI: 10.1177/0002764218810755
pages 2133–2145

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

On the cusp of Western civilization, Caucasians aspired to a racial world order defining Caucasian as superior race status. Today, racial diversity is a societal theme facilitated by laws, which deems racial equality a right and racial discrimination illegal. Nevertheless, by globalization, a racial world order exists by locating light skin at the zenith of humanity. As pertains to the globalization of light skin, culture and social criteria are most significant considering the demands of a racist racial hierarchy. The existence of such a hierarchy by replacing racism with colorism then necessitates moving beyond race category. Critical race theory (CRT) per light skin as new world order must defer to critical skin theory (CST). Colorism per CST operates identical in manner to racism per CRT. CST must then be elevated to priority over CRT such that the future of humanity may be rescued from the tenacious transgressions of a racist societal past.

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Lil’ Kim’s Lighter, Whiter Skin Is a Sad Indictment of Racism

The Daily Beast
2016-04-26

Yaba Blay

Handout; Instagram

Why has Lil’ Kim seemingly lightened her skin? Because of the absurd, but very present, social advantage for black people that comes with having lighter skin.

There was a time when Lil’ Kim represented a brand of unapologetic self-love for black women. The kind that announced that we are sexual beings without shame or fear. She reflected what it might look like to be at once a woman, black, and sexually free. Visually, her body was a site for pleasure, most importantly her own.

Sonically, her lyrics offered us permission to explore our own bodies and our own pleasure. Lil’ Kim was our champion.

I’m not sure what she’s now championing. In a series of pictures she posted on Instagram, she is virtually unrecognizable.

While we have debated whether other celebrities like Beyoncé and Rihanna have actually lightened their skin or if the magazines that featured their images had photoshopped their complexions, with Kim, there surely can be little question.

It looks as though she has lightened her once black-girl-brown complexion to one that’s not so brown at all. Her hair is longer, straighter, blonder. Her once round nose now thin. Even her eyes sit differently on her face. She’s changed, in ways that words can’t even begin to capture. And it hurts…

Read the entire article here.

I’m Darker Than My Daughter. Here’s Why It Matters.

NYT Parenting
The New York Times
2019-05-21

Norma Newton

Norma Newton and her daughter at their home in Los Angeles. Carolina Adame

Breaching colorism with my little girl sent me reeling back into my childhood shame.

Our bedtime routine that night started off like so many others, harried but mostly sweet. After making our way through brushing teeth and getting into pajamas, my daughter and I lay down on her bedroom floor to sing songs, the final step before crawling into bed.

When I tried to curl up next to my 4-year-old, though, I sensed her hesitation. She wiggled her little body away from mine each time I inched closer. “Do you not want mommy close to you, sweetie?” I asked, assuming she was initiating a game to extend our nighttime ritual. Her light-brown eyes locked in on me as she brushed her honey-colored locks aside with her hand.

In a casual on-the-edge-of-sleep voice she cooed, “Your skin is dark. I don’t want you to touch me.”

My brown Indigenous Latina body stiffened; I labored to breathe, outraged and confused. She rendered me speechless…

Read the entire article here.

UMaine artist explores the many shades of colorism in exhibit

Bangor Daily News
2018-02-21

Emily Burnham

It wasn’t until she moved away from her home state of Maine, the whitest state in the country, that visual artist Eleanor Kipping realized it isn’t just her mixed race that affects the way she moves in the world — it’s also her lighter skin tone.

Discrimination toward people based on the shade of their skin, with favor given to fairer tones, is known as colorism — related to racism but often practiced within a specific community of people of color.

“I knew that I was a person of color, but it was in exploring that that I discovered colorism and my light skin in relation to that,” said Kipping, 29, a native of Old Town now back in Maine as a graduate student in the Intermedia MFA program at the University of Maine….

…The images are mounted on frames, on the backside of which is brown paper. The “brown paper bag test,” for which the installation is named, was a real “test” administered by among black people in the late 18th and 19th centuries, in which skin the same tone or lighter than a brown paper bag was deemed desirable for acceptance into black fraternities or social clubs, and darker was not…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.