Mixed Race Studies

Do Conceptualisations of ‘Mixed Race’, ‘Interracial Unions’, and Race’s ‘Centrality to Understandings of Racism’ Challenge the UK’s Official Categorisation by Ethnic Group?

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022-06-13)
pages 52-74
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020052

A focus on ‘mixed race’ and mixedness in Britain has revived a debate around the central question of whether the decennial census and other official data collections should be capturing ‘race’ rather than ethnic group and producing ‘racial’ outputs. The British practice may seem out of step by some commentators, given that ‘mixed race’ is the term of choice amongst those it describes, and given scholarly interest in interracial unions. Moreover, the resurgence of interest in ‘race’ and racisms in the context of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and concern over the down-playing in a UK Government-commissioned report of the role of structural racism has enlivened the debate. However, this paper argues against a shift to ‘race’ in official data collection and for continued use of the conceptually preferable ‘ethnic group’ in the census question title, the section label ‘mixed/multiple ethnic groups’, and the ongoing provision of data on unions at the pan-ethnic and granular levels. A measure of socially constructed ‘race’ is already available in all but name in the pan-ethnic section labels (White, Asian, Black, Mixed, and Other) and the tick boxes under the ‘mixed/multiple’ heading. Ethnic group has been the conceptual basis of the question since the field trials for the 1991 Census, and its position has been strengthened by the increasing granularity of the categorisation (19 categories in the 2021 England and Wales Census) and by substantial distributed free-text provision that underpins the question’s context of self-identification. The wider understanding of ‘race’ identifications invokes ascription, imposition, and social categorisation rather than self-identification and subscription. There is also evidence of the unacceptability of ‘race’ in the context of the census amongst the wider society.

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Regimes beyond the One-Drop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2, (2022-06-20)
pages 57-80
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020057

Sarah Iverson, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
New York University

Ann Morning, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Aliya Saperstein, Associate Professor of Sociology; Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor in Human Biology
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Janet Xu, Postdoctoral Fellow
Inequality in America Initiative
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The racial classification of mixed-race people has often been presumed to follow hypo- or hyperdescent rules, where they were assigned to either their lower- or higher-status monoracial ancestor group. This simple framework, however, does not capture actual patterns of self-identification in contemporary societies with multiple racialized groups and numerous mixed-race combinations. Elaborating on previous concepts of multiracial classification regimes, we argue that two other theoretical models must be incorporated to describe and understand mixed-race identification today. One is “co-descent”, where multiracial individuals need not align with one single race or another, but rather be identified with or demonstrate characteristics that are a blend of their parental or ancestral races. The other is the “dominance” framework, a modern extension of the “one-drop” notion that posits that monoracial ancestries fall along a spectrum where some—the “supercessive”—are more likely to dominate mixed-race categorization, and others—the “recessive”—are likely to be dominated. Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s 2015 Survey of Multiracial Adults, we find declining evidence of hypo- and hyperdescent at work in the United States today, some support for a dominance structure that upends conventional expectations about a Black one-drop rule, and a rising regime of co-descent. In addition, we explore how regimes of mixed-race classification vary by racial ancestry combination, gender, generation of multiraciality, and the time period in which multiracial respondents or their mixed-race ancestors were born. These findings show that younger, first-generation multiracial Americans, especially those of partial Asian or Hispanic descent, have left hypo- and hyperdescent regimes behind—unlike other young people today whose mixed-race ancestry stems from further back in their family tree.

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Asian-White Mixed Identity after COVID-19: Racist Racial Projects and the Effects on Asian Multiraciality

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2, (2022-06-15)
pages 53-68
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020053

Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York

Erica Chito Childs, Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, New York

Stephanie Laudone, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, New York

With the onset of the Coronavirus and racist statements about the origins of COVID-19 in China there has been a surge in anti-Asian discrimination in the United States. The U.S. case is worthy of special focus because of former President Trump’s explicit racist rhetoric, referring to the Coronavirus as the “China virus” and “Kung-flu”. This rise in anti-Asian discrimination has led to a heightened awareness of racism against Asians and a corollary increase in AAPI activism. Based on survey and in-depth interview data with Asian-White multiracials, we examine how recent spikes in anti-Asian hate has shifted Asian-White multiracials to have a more heightened awareness of racism and a shift in their racial consciousness. We theorize how multiracials intermediary status on the racial hierarchy can be radically shifted at any moment in relation to emerging racist racial projects, which has broader implications for the status of mixed people globally.

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Clinical Sociology and Mixedness: Towards Applying Critical Mixed Race Theory in Everyday Life

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020032
21 pages

Zarine L. Rocha, Affiliated Researcher
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Research on mixed racial and ethnic identities has developed rapidly over the past decades, increasing in theoretical scope and depth, and exploring mixedness across a growing range of national and social contexts. Recent research has highlighted the huge variations and shifts in conceptions of mixedness around the world, and the different pathways to understanding what it means to be mixed through migration, development, postcolonialism and different forms of nation-building. This paper seeks to connect theory to practice, approaching mixedness through the lens of clinical sociology, applying sociological theory on the ground and exploring the utility of critical mixed race studies in everyday life. Clinical sociology as a practice is first outlined, juxtaposed against the development in theorizing around mixed racial and ethnic identities on an international level. The paper then looks at some possibilities for practical impact: by acknowledging the complexity of mixedness and everyday life, research on mixed identities can go beyond the development of theory and case description, with applied and clinical impacts ranging from the level of the individual to the level of the state. Research on mixedness worldwide illustrates the diversity inherent within ideas of mixing, and the micro, meso and macro applications and potential outcomes of such theories. This paper draws on new and shifting conceptions of mixedness, emphasizing that the sociology of mixedness can have considerable value in effecting positive social change: positioning the (mixed) individual within the (mixed) society and allowing sociology to become action. The development and use of theories around mixedness emphasize the importance of clinical sociology as a practice: a reason for theory, connecting the abstract to the everyday.

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From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Formation of Mexican American Identities in the U.S. Southwest

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020028
21 pages

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

The racialization of Mexican Americans in northern Mexico, that is, the U.S. Southwest, following the Anglo-Americanization during the second half of the nineteenth century, is an excellent case study of the historical formations of Anglo-American and Spanish American racial orders. Both racial orders were based on a hierarchy that privileged Whiteness and stigmatized Blackness. Yet Spanish America’s high levels of miscegenation resulted in ternary orders allowing for gradation in and fluidity within racial categories, in addition to the formation of multiracial identities, including those of individuals with African ancestry. Anglo-America was characterized by restrictions on miscegenation and more precise definitions of and restrictions on racial categories. This prohibited the formation of multiracial identities while buttressing a binary racial order that broadly necessitated single-race (monoracial) identification as either White or non-White, and more specifically, as White or Black, given their polar extremes in racial hierarchy. Within this order, hypodescent applies most stringently to those with African ancestry through the one-drop rule, which designates as Black all such individuals. This article examines monoracialization through historical processes of Mexican–American identity formations. Over the twentieth century, this shifted from White to Brown, but without any acknowledgment of African ancestry.

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Changing from Visibility to Invisibility—An Intersectional Perspective on Mixedness in Switzerland and Morocco

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020030
17 pages

Gwendolyn Gilliéron, Associate Research Fellow
University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Grand Est, France

In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or race in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzing the interrelation of these factors. The article discusses how and under which circumstances mixed children become visible in Switzerland and Morocco using a comparative and intersectional approach to mixedness. Based on 23 biographical narrative interviews, I analyze three situations of stigmatization: racialization, language practices and othering due to religious affiliation. Stigmatization processes due to mixedness, it is argued, are a relational phenomenon depending not only on markers such as ‘race’, ethnicity and religion but also on their interplay with gender, class, language and biographical experiences. The results suggest that mixed individuals have found creative ways to navigate their visibility: they normalize their binational origin, look for alternative spaces of belonging, emphasize their ‘Swiss-ness’ or ‘Moroccan-ness’, use languages to influence their social positioning or acquire knowledge about their binational origin in order to confront stigmatizations. The study reveals further that processes of othering due to mixedness are not only an issue in ‘Western’ societies that look back on a long history of immigration and have pronounced migration discourses. Even in Morocco, a country where immigration has so far been a marginal phenomenon, the importance of social hierarchies for the positioning of people of binational origin is evident.

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Racial Passing off the Record: A Journey in Reconnection and Navigating Shifting Identities

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 1 (March 2022)
Published online 2022-01-18
8 pages
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6010008

Gabby C. Womack, Reference/Access Services Associate, McQuade Library
Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts

Anyone of African descent or with African ancestry who engages in a genealogy project soon learns that the U.S. Census is a helpful yet frustrating tool. In 2016, equipped with my history degree and an online ancestry search engine, I searched for my great-grandfather Leroy in census records after I saw a picture of him as a young man at work in Philadelphia. This image would have been unremarkable had it not been for the fact that my African American ancestor was so light skinned that he seemed to blend in with his co-workers at Kramer’s Fruit and Vegetables. I thought there had to be a story behind this. Classified as, “Mu”, for mulatto in most of his records, Leroy became “Black” on the census in 1930. My first thought was to question whether this categorization changed for other folks like him. My research led me to my master’s thesis “From ‘Mulatto’ to ‘Negro’: How Fears of ‘Passing’ Changed the 1930 United States Census”. Through this research, I also became closer to my father’s family. This piece will take you through this journey of discovery and my frustrations along the way.

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Social Representations of Art in Public Places: A Study of Everyday Explanations of the Statue of ‘A Real Birmingham Family’

Genealogy
Volume 5, Issue 3
pages 59-74
First Published 2021-06-22
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy5030059

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

Figure 1. ‘A Real Birmingham Family’, 2014. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/2/27/Real_Birmingham_Family_statue_-_Library_of_Birmingham_(15119604114).jpg, accessed on 1 May 2021.

This article focuses on the social/cultural representations of the statue of A Real Birmingham Family cast in bronze and unveiled in Britain’s second city in October 2014. It reveals a family comprising two local mixed-race sisters, both single mothers, and their sons, unanimously chosen from 372 families. Three of the four families shortlisted for the statue were ‘mixed-race’ families. The artwork came about through a partnership between the sculptress, Gillian Wearing, and the city’s Ikon Gallery. A number of different lay representations of the artwork have been identified, notably, that it is a ‘normal family with no fathers’ and that it is not a ‘typical family’. These are at variance with a representation based on an interpretation of the artwork and materials associated with its creation: that a nuclear family is one reality amongst many and that what constitutes a family should not be fixed. This representation destabilizes our notion of the family and redefines it as empirical, experiential, and first-hand, families being brought into recognition by those in the wider society who choose to nominate themselves as such. The work of Ian Hacking, Richard Jenkins, and others is drawn upon to contest the concept of ‘normality’. Further, statistical data are presented that show that there is now a plurality of family types with no one type dominating or meriting the title of ‘normal’. Finally, Wearing’s statues of families in Trentino and Copenhagen comprise an evolving body of cross-national public art that provides further context and meaning for this representation.

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Special Issue “Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism”

Genealogy
2021-04-14
Abstract Deadline: 2021-05-31
Manuscript Submission Deadline: 2021-11-30

Professor Dr. Dan Rodriguez-Garcia, Guest Editor and Serra Húnter Associate Professor
Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Dear colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy invites essays on the topic of “Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism.”

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2021.

The field of mixed-race studies has experienced an incredible expansion since the pivotal work of Paul Spickard (1989) and Maria Root (1992, 1995). In the last three decades, we have witnessed numerous publications in this area of study, including edited collections and special issues, which have advanced our knowledge of “mixedness,” an encompassing concept that refers to mixed unions, families, and individuals across national, ethnocultural, racial, religious, and class boundaries as well as to the sociocultural processes involved (Rodríguez-García 2015). As the super-diversification of societies continues, the ever-growing research interest in mixedness can be attributed to scholars’ understanding that such an area of study both reveals existing social boundaries and shows how societies are being transformed. Mixedness can be understood to have a transformative potential in the sense that it disturbs, contests, and may reinvent social norms and established identity categories.

While intermarriage is on the rise and multiracial and multiethnic populations continue to grow worldwide, there are still many areas in which our knowledge of mixedness is limited or nascent. This Special Issue aims to expand our understanding of this complex phenomenon by exploring a variety of under-researched issues in the field, by seeking out research on untrodden topics and implications, and by employing innovative analytical approaches.

This Special Issue is intended to be broad in scope and welcomes innovative contributions across disciplines in the social sciences that may be theoretical or empirically based and that address—but are not limited to—one or more of the following topics:

• New conceptualizations of mixedness, intermarriage, and multiracialism;
• Mixedness beyond race: ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, class, micro-locations;
• Intersectional analyses of mixedness;
• New methods and mixed methods applied to the study of mixedness;
• Mixedness and statistics: the challenge of counting and categorizing intermarriage and mixed people;
• Comparative (inter-local/international/inter-continental) analyses of mixedness, including outside European and English-speaking settings;
• Decentering and decolonizing mixedness: multiracial and multiethnic identity formations outside of white-centric constructions;
• Mixedness in super-diverse contexts;
• New forms of cosmopolitanism and creolization;
• Mixedness and the reconceptualization of majority/minority meanings (reshaping the mainstream);
• Mixedness in highly segmented societies;
• Mixedness and religion: interfaith couples, families, and individuals;
• Mixedness, racialization, color blindness, and post-racialism;
• Mixedness and colorism: intraracial discrimination and horizontal hostility;
• Multiracial identifications for understanding racial formation;
• Ethnoracialism: multiracialism and multiethnicity as different or complementary processes;
• Mixedness, discrimination, and resilience/agency;
• Mixedness and whiteness (white privilege, white identities);
• Mixed-race privilege;
• Mixedness and (in)visibility;
• Contextual, multiform, translocational, malleable and shifting mixed identities: fixities and fluidities;
• Kinning in mixed families: raising and socializing multiracial and multiethnic children; inter-generational changes and continuities;
• Multiracial parents of multiracial children;
• Queer, LGBTQ+, same-sex, and transgender interracial and interethnic unions/families;
• Mixed-race masculinities;
• Mixedness and indigenous groups;
• Mixedness involving national ethnic minorities;
• Transracial adoption;
• Mixedness and the impact of COVID-19 (e.g., transnational reconfigurations, discrimination);
• Mixedness and cyberspace (i.e., online identity narratives, dating preferences, and relationships across race and ethnicity);
• Bridging the research-policy divide: working on mixedness with policymakers and third-sector practitioners.

This Special Issue is also interested in contributions that use novel analytical perspectives and methodologies, whether quantitative or qualitative or a combination of both.

For more information, click here.

Interraciality in Early Twentieth Century Britain: Challenging Traditional Conceptualisations through Accounts of ‘Ordinariness’

genealogy
Volume 3, Number 2
24 pages
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy3020021

Chamion Caballero, Visiting Senior Fellow
London School of Economics

Unknown Anglo-Chinese family, Liverpool, c.1930s. Image courtesy of Yvonne Foley. Foley has campaigned for greater recognition of the brutal repatriation of Chinese seaman by the British government in 1945–1946, many of whom were consequently forced to leave their white wives and children behind. See http://www.halfandhalf.org.uk/.

The popular conception of interraciality in Britain is one that frequently casts mixed racial relationships, people and families as being a modern phenomenon. Yet, as scholars are increasingly discussing, interraciality in Britain has much deeper and diverse roots, with racial mixing and mixedness now a substantively documented presence at least as far back as the Tudor era. While much of this history has been told through the perspectives of outsiders and frequently in the negative terms of the assumed ‘orthodoxy of the interracial experience’—marginality, conflict, rejection and confusion—first-hand accounts challenging these perceptions allow a contrasting picture to emerge. This article contributes to the foregrounding of this more complex history through focusing on accounts of interracial ‘ordinariness’—both presence and experiences—throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when official concern about racial mixing featured prominently in public debate. In doing so, a more multidimensional picture of interracial family life than has frequently been assumed is depicted, one which challenges mainstream attitudes about conceptualisations of racial mixing both then and now.

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