Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Teens Talk About Their Identity Rip Tides

Women’s eNews
2015-10-27

Stephanie Geier, Teen Voices for Women’s eNews

The pressures and rejections come from within, from peers, from different sides of their families. “No matter how hard I tried I was always too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids,” says one girl. The second in a three-part series on multiracial teens.

WOODSIDE, N.Y. (WOMENSENEWS)–In middle school, Allyson Gonzalez thought befriending white girls would stop the other Brooklyn public school students from teasing her about her thick eyebrows and hairy arms.

However, her new friends acted outright, “horribly” racist to certain students. Gonzalez went along with them, but would be nice to the other students in private. After witnessing this behavior, she then decided “if anything was bad, it was being white.”

Now a college freshman at Hunter College, Gonzalez, who is German, Irish and Puerto Rican, identifies as a “multiracial white-Hispanic woman.” She blames “social pressure” for the delayed acceptance of her mixed background, she said in an email interview.

Young people who are multiracial are four times more likely to switch their racial identity than to consistently report one identity, sociologists Steven Hitlin, J.Scott Brown and Glen H. Elder found in their 2006 research, cited by sociologists Kerry Ann Rockquemore, David Brunsma and Daniel J. Delgado in their 2009 piece published in the Journal of Social Issues.

This is part of the multiracial “journey,” according to freelance writer Hannah Gomez, who also works with the advocacy organization We Need Diverse Books. In her 2013 paper “This, That, Both, Neither: The Badging Of Biracial Identity In Young Adult Realism,” she combined evidence from modern fiction and scientific research to identify a three-step process in multiracial identity development. First, individuals are confronted with a situation causing them to reject one side of their race. They then seek a community that does not pressure them to disconnect with one of their sides. Finally, they achieve a sense of empowerment that successfully leads to identifying with a mixed label.

“Structural, systemic racism says that people must be easily defined and sorted into groups, and race is an easy way to do that,” said Gomez in an email interview.

While she added that no one needs to embrace all of her background, individuals are often told to embrace just one, resulting in “a lot of undue stress.”…

Read the entire article here.

This, That, Both, Neither: The Badging Of Biracial Identity In Young Adult Realism

The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults
The official research journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association
2013-04-22

Sarah Hannah Gómez, Graduate Student
School of Library and Information Science
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Editor’s Note: “This, That, Both, Neither” was accepted for the peer reviewed paper session at YALSA’s third annual Young Adult Literature Symposium held November 2-4, 2012 in St. Louis. The theme of the conference was “Hit me with the next big thing.”

Only in the lifetime of the Millennial generation has it become legally acceptable to mark more than one race on a federal form. In the 2010 Census, 2.9 percent of respondents indicated that they were two or more races, with even more assigning themselves other designations that speak to the many types of multiracial identities common today. As this population grows in real life, it also flourishes in young adult literature, where ever more protagonists identify with more than one racial or ethnic group and must decide how to assert themselves and what to call themselves. This paper explores some of these novels and tracks each character’s progress towards creating a “badge” of identity.

Introduction

Every year when I was a student, my school district held awards ceremonies to honor distinguished students of color from all grade levels. There was an African American ceremony, a Hispanic ceremony, and presumably an Asian American and Native American one as well. High-achieving students were invited to their respective ceremonies as well as any students of color, although I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t even know the awards existed until seventh grade, when two girls in my homeroom asked me why I hadn’t been at the African American ceremony the evening before.

I hadn’t been invited.

“Oh.” It hit me. “The district has me down as white.”

If you’d been looking at me when I said that, you would be confused. I don’t exactly look like a character in a Nella Larsen novel. But it wasn’t a lie. I am white. I’m also black. And I’m adopted, so I also share a second mixed identity with my sister, one in which we are ethnically Jewish and Latina.

My mother knew that her children were mixed, and she wanted us to have the advantage of going to a diverse magnet elementary school, so when we started kindergarten, she checked the box marked “white.” This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when you were only allowed to be one race. And so, without having to lie, my mother helped me and my sister pass as white—at least on paper…

…I share this story not because I’m writing my autobiography, but because this is an experience shared by other mixed-race individuals, an increasingly larger part of the young American population. These teens, I believe, are the future of young adult (YA) literature. For fifteen years now, Americans have been able to officially identify as mixed. As people who identify as mixed-race begin to publish novels that tell their stories, it seems natural that their fictional worlds will represent the worlds they see around them. As Michele Elam notes, “the census box represents the new nonviolent resistance, a finger in the eye of the racial status quo,”  and we all know YA literature to be about testing boundaries and making bold statements…

Read the entire article here.

Hannah Gómez
2012-08-29

I am an MA and MS candidate at Simmons College in Boston preparing to present a paper on the formation and assertion of biracial identity in Young Adult literature. While I’ve amassed quite the list of novels, I’m sure I am missing some from smaller presses and urban and hi/lo imprints from major publishers. I am also looking for relevant critical and historical sources on mixed race identity, terminology used to describe various mixes, and biracial literature. I’m seeking suggestions and pointers from the Mixed Race Studies community (no self-published books, please)! If you have a title or resource to suggest, please e-mail Hannah Gómez. Thanks!