Mixed Race Studies

Race Policy and [Multi]Racial Americans

David Marx: Book Reviews
2018-01-27

David Marx

Race Policy and [Multi]Racial Americans
Edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen
Policy Press – £18.39

[..] some argue that multiracial identity has the potential to undo race in the United States as long as it attends to social justice and does not present itself as a racially superior category, while other scholars contend that multiracial identity is supportive of White supremacy and is a throwback to earlier, simplistic, and racist conceptualizations of the American mulatto.

Rainier Spencer

I’m almost inclined to embark on this review with just one word: discuss.

The above is the nigh perfect examination question in relation to that of the book’s title, Race Policy and [Multi]Racial Americans, wherein it could be said that each of these twelve, exceedingly well-researched and seemingly provocative essays, act as differing answers.

Admittedly, some may home in more than others, simply due to having been written from a different perspective by an assortment of very fine scholars. But all twelve are undoubtedly designed to make one think, perhaps ponder and no doubt deliberate…

Read the entire review here.

In order to create a just society for Americans of every race—and multiple races—we need to officially acknowledge and protect the rights of multiracial people. Mono-racial policies leave growing numbers of Americans unprotected from racial discrimination. It is time for race policy in the U.S. to acknowledge the nation’s new demographics and work for a racially just society for all.

Kathleen Odell Korgen, “Why Race Policy must include Multiracial Americans,” Policy Press Blog at the University of Bristol, January 27, 2016. https://policypress.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/why-race-policy-must-include-multiracial-americans/.

Why Race Policy must include Multiracial Americans

Policy Press Blog at the University of Bristol
2016-01-27

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Today’s guest blog by Kathleen Odell Korgen, whose book Race policy and multi-racial Americans published this month, examines the much overlooked issue of including multiracial Americans in policy making and explains why this oversight must stop.

Americans who identify as multiracial comprise approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population. With a growth rate three times that the rest of the population, this percentage will rise quickly (U.S. Census Bureau 2012; Frey 2014; Pew Research Center 2015).

One would never know this, however, by viewing the nation’s race policies. A look at policies across a variety of areas, including public school curricula, health policy, and prison regulations, reveals little trace of the existence of growing numbers of Americans who identify as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans

Policy Press (Available in North America from University of Chicago Press)
2016-01-13
226 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781447316459
Paperback ISBN: 9781447316503

Edited by:

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans is the first book to look at the impact of multiracial people on race policies—where they lag behind the growing numbers of multiracial people in the U.S. and how they can be used to promote racial justice for multiracial Americans. Using a critical mixed race perspective, it covers such questions as: Which policies aimed at combating racial discrimination should cover multiracial Americans? Should all (or some) multiracial Americans benefit from affirmative action programmes? How can we better understand the education and health needs of multiracial Americans? This much-needed book is essential reading for sociology, political science and public policy students, policy makers, and anyone interested in race relations and social justice.

Contents

• Introduction ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen
• Multiracial Americans throughout the History of the U.S. ~ Tyrone Nagai
• National and Local Structures of Inequality: Multiracial Groups’ Profiles Across the United States ~ Mary E. Campbell and Jessica M. Barron
• Latinos and Multiracial America ~ Raúl Quiñones Rosado
• The Connections among Racial Identity, Social Class, and Public Policy? ~ Nikki Khanna
• Multiracial Americans and Racial Discrimination ~ Tina Fernandes Botts
• “Should All (or Some) Multiracial Americans Benefit from Affirmative Action Programs?”~ Daniel N. Lipson
• Multiracial Students and Educational Policy ~ Rhina Fernandes Williams and E. Namisi Chilungu
• Multiracial Americans in College ~ Marc P. Johnston and Kristen A. Renn
• Multiracial Americans, Health Patterns, and Health Policy: Assessment and Recommendations for Ways Forward ~ Jenifer L. Bratter and Chirsta Mason
• Racial Identity Among Multiracial Prisoners in the Color-Blind Era ~ Gennifer Furst and Kathleen Odell Korgen
• “Multiraciality and the Racial Order: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”~ Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl and David L. Brunsma
• Multiracial Identity and Monoracial Conflict: Toward a New Social Justice framework ~ Andrew Jolivette
• Conclusion: Policies for a Racially Just Society ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen

Mixed-Race Chic

The Chronicle Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2009-05-19

Rainier Spencer, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Popular wisdom suggests that we are in the midst of a transformation in the way race is constructed in the United States. Indeed, so strong and so inevitable is this shift said to be that longstanding racial dynamics are purportedly being dismantled and reconstructed even as you read these words.

According to this view, individuals of mixed race, particularly first-generation multiracial people, are confounding the American racial template with their ambiguous phenotypes and purported ability to serve as living bridges between races. This perspective is reflected in television and magazine advertising and coverage and in books both academic and nonacademic. As long as a decade ago, the sociologist Kathleen Odell Korgen wrote in From Black to Biracial: Transforming Racial Identity Among Americans (Praeger, 1998) that “today mixed-race Americans challenge the very foundation of our racial structure.”

From his well-received speech on race, in which he positioned himself as having a direct understanding of both black and white anger, to his reference to himself as a “mutt,” Barack Obama and his historic election have significantly boosted this view. Many Americans hail his background as portending our postracial future. We hear that self-styled multiracial young adults accept their mixed identity far more than did their pre-civil-rights-era predecessors; but precisely what they are actually assenting to and what it means may be little more than a fad.

People who see us accepting a new multiracial identity have long argued that it is destructive of race: that recognition and acceptance of multiracialism will bring about the demise of the American racial model. The American Multiracial Identity Movement thereby suggests that multiracial identity possesses an insurgent character, a militant stance against the idea of recognizing race in the United States.

Regardless of their contemporary popularity, such claims are without merit. Indeed, they are self-contradictory. If one holds that multiracial identity is a real and valid identity, then it can be sensible only as a biological racial identity. If words are to mean anything, and they should, it quite obviously cannot be that a multiracial identity is somehow not a biological racial identity. Rather, multiracial identity merely falls in place to join other, already existing racial categories…

…As Catherine R. Squires, a professor of journalism, writes in Dispatches From the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America (State University of New York Press, 2007), multiracialism is fundamentally ambiguous: “This ambiguity is about exoticism and intrigue, providing opportunities for consumers to fantasize and speculate about the Other with no expectations of critical consideration of power and racial categories.” Squires makes an important point, for it is crucial to be able to separate racial ambiguity that might be utilized to work consciously against racial hierarchies from racial ambiguity that is simply a form of self-interested celebration that ends up reinforcing those racial hierarchies…

Read the entire article here.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Minkah Makalani, “Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project,” in Race Struggles edited by Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen A. Neville Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 139-140.

Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project

Chapter in:

Race Struggles
University of Illinois Press
2009
352 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07648-0

Edited by:

Theodore Koditschek, Professor of History
University of Missouri, Columbia

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Helen A. Neville, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chapter Author:

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Since the early 1990s, there has emerged in the United States a push to racially reclassify persons with one black and one white parent as biracial. A central feature of what I am calling the biracial project is a cohort of scholars, themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for people of mixed parentage (PMP) than a black one. These scholars maintain that when PMP identify as biracial, they gain a more mentally healthy racial identity, have fewer experiences of alienation, and are able to express their racial and cultural distinction from African Americans. In addition to the presumed personal benefits of such an identity, these scholars suggest that a biracial identity is a positive step in moving society beyond race and toward a color-blind society. What remains troubling about this scholarship, though, is a tendency to conceptualize PMP as a distinct racial group, and the inattention to the potentially negative political impact such a reclassification would have on African Americans.

Historically and currently, white supremacy in the United States has hinged on the oppression of people of African descent. The position of African Americans in the political economy has served as the basis for developing a racialized social system, restructuring that system at different historical moments, and incorporating new social groups into the racial hierarchy as races. Asserting a new racial group premised on a claim to an inherent (biological) whiteness and a rejection of blackness taps into the intricacies, logics, and values of that very system. It is therefore important to remember that the push for a biracial racial category arose and made its greatest strides amid predictions that by the year 2050 whites will be a numerical minority. More than a question of self-identity, the push for a biracial identity concerns substantiating the existence of a new race to be positioned as an intermediary between blacks and whites in a reordered racialized social system. Indeed, in the United States there have always been multiple racial groups situated below whites in the racial hierarchy. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has recently argued that, increasingly, different groups are beginning to hold a position of “honorary whiteness” within that hierarchy. Taking into account the structures of race in Latin America and the Caribbean, I remain unconvinced that an honorary white racial status in the United States would include PMP, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, though I agree with his claim that various racialized groups that were previously denied the privileges of whiteness increasingly enjoy advantages, privileges, and access to centers of power that continue to be denied black people and those whom Bonilla-Silva calls the “collective black.” Far from helping to erase existing color lines or challenging the new racial formations described by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Bonilla-Silva, it would draw yet another color line. And unlike certain Asian and Latino groups, a new biracial race stakes its claim, quite literally, on possessing whiteness.

The biracial project approaches racial identity as racial identification, or the assertion of a racial category. Using identity as a synonym tor race has also entailed inadequate attention to the complexities of identity. Consequently, these works rarely engage the psychological scholarship on black identity formation, not to mention the historical, sociological, and cultural interrogations of blackness that have appeared in Black Studies over the past century. Most troubling is the inattention, if not utter aversion, to the history of PMP considering themselves black and struggling over the meanings of blackness.

It is hardly coincidental that these scholars presume certain antiracist attributes to inhere in a biracial identity. In asserting the subversive character of a biracial identity, Maria P. P. Root maintains that it “may force us to reexamine our construction of race and the hierarchical social order it supports.” Naomi Zack and G. Reginald Daniel more plainly argue that a biracial identity hastens the end of racial categories altogether by challenging popular notions of race. For Zack in particular, a biracial identity serves as the basis for “ultimately disabus(ing) Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race,” thus leading society away from racial classifications and hastening racisms demise. Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real, largely asserted with little research substantiating the claims of its proponents.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Situating the discussion of biracial identity in the context of race and racial oppression as structural relationships, I provide a detailed review of the theoretical and prescriptive literature advocating a biracial identity. Specifically, I am concerned with this racial projects theoretical basis for a biracial identity, how it conceptualizes race and racism, the place of the one-drop rule in this conceptualization, and the defense of biracial identity as an antiracist tool…

Read the chapter here.

Book Review: Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Editor, Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity. New York: Routledge, 2010. 230 pp. (paperback).

Teaching Sociology
Volume 39, Number 2 (2011-04-11)
pages 214-216
DOI: 10.1177/0092055X11403292

Beth Frankel Merenstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut

This collection of articles is organized into four sections, each focusing on the various issues and concerns of multiracial Americans, all with a particular emphasis on social class. Using a variety of methods, including statistical models as well as qualitative, in-depth interviews, the articles focus on issues of identity, demographical change, and culture, all through a lens of, as explained in the foreword, understanding how under a system of white supremacy, social class plays a pivotal role in the creation of a multiracial identity.

One immediate concern I had was with the organization of the book. While I found all the articles useful and informative in their own right, the division under the four different sections was unclear. In particular, I was unclear on why Section III had the three articles it did, focusing on multiracial Asian Americans, multiracial American Indians, and multiracial Hispanic youth, respectively. While none of these articles focused on biracial black-white Americans as the majority of the previous articles did, there seemed to be little other reason these three articles were joined together.

Nonetheless, correctly and jointly, these articles recognize that we live in a society dominated and dictated by white supremacy. To understand multiracial Americans, we must place individuals with this identity within this context. Additionally, this collection does what no other has: It includes in this recognition the role that class can and does play when it comes to understanding a multiracial identity and construction. Furthermore, numerous articles mention the way in which, in most conversations and research on multiracial Americans and racial identity, class is often conflated with culture. For example, Nikki Khanna…

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity

Routledge
2010-04-21
256 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-48397-1
Papeback ISBN: 978-0-415-48399-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-203-88373-0

Edited by

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market.

In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans in highly readable essays from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: What is the connection between class and race? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an ‘honorary white’? What is the connection between social class and culture? Do you need to ‘look’ White or just ‘act’ White in order to be treated as an ‘honorary white’? Can social class influence racial identity? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds?

Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of Sociology, Race and Ethnic Studies, Race Relations, and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Who are Multiracial Americans?

• 1. Multiracial Americans and Social Class, Kathleen Odell Korgen
• 2. In-Between Racial Status, Mobility and Promise of Assimilation: Irish, Italians Yesterday, Latinos and Asians Today, Charles Gallagher
• 3. ‘What’s Class Got to Do with It?’: Images and Discourses on Race and Class in Interracial Relationships, Erica Chito Childs
• 4. Social Class: Racial/Ethnic Identity, and the Psychology of Choice, Peony Fhagen-Smith
• 5. Stability and Change in Racial Identities of Multiracial Adolescents, Ruth Burke and Grace Kao

Part 2: Culture, Class, Racial Identity, and Blame

• 6. Country Clubs and Hip-Hop Thugs: Examining the Role of Social Class and Culture in Shaping Racial Identity, Nikki Khanna
• 7. Language, Power, and the Performance of Race and Class, Benjamin Bailey
• 8. Black and White Movies: Crash between Class and Biracial Identity Portrayals of Black/White Biracial Individuals in Movies, Alicia Edison and George Yancey
• 9. ‘Who is Really to Blame?’ Biracial Perspectives on Inequality in America, Monique E. Marsh

Part 3: Social Class, Demographic, and Cultural Characteristics

• 10. ‘Multiracial Asian Americans’, C. N. Le
• 11. A Group in Flux: Multiracial American Indians and the Social Construction of Race, Carolyn Liebler
• 12. Socioeconomic Status and Hispanic Identification in Part-Hispanic Multiracial Adolescents, Maria L. Castilla and Melissa R. Herman

Part 4: Social Class, Racial Identities, and Racial Hierarchies

• 13. Social Class and Multiracial Groups: What Can We Learn from Large Surveys? Mary E. Campbell
• 14. The One-Drop Rule through a Multiracial Lens: Examining the Roles of Race and Class in Racial Classification of Children of Partially Black Parents, Jenifer Bratter
• 15. It’s Not That Simple: Multiraciality, Models, and Social Hierarchy, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and Paul Spickard

Contributors

Benjamin Bailey is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research on the interactional negotiation of ethnic and racial identity in US contexts has appeared in Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and International Migration Review.

Jenifer L. Bratter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of racial intermarriage, marriage and multiracial populations, and has recently been published in Social Forces, Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Forum and Family Relations.

David L. Brunsma is Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the University of Missouri. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, and Identity.

Ruth H. Burke is a Graduate Student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on racial inequality in the United States and racial identification.

Mary E. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Science Quarterly and Social Science Research.

Maria Castilla earned her BA in 2009 from Dartmouth College, with high honors in sociology. She currently attends Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

Erica Chito Childs is an Associate Professor at Hunter College. Her research interests focus on issues of race, black/white couples, gender and sexuality in relationships, families, communities and media/popular culture. Her publications include Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (2005) and Fade to Black and White (2009).

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly is a historian and lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, whose forth-coming book, By the Least Bit of Blood, examines the uplift potential a vocal Black identity provided mixed-raced leaders during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her analysis extends beyond the U.S. to include the function of race in the process of Latin-American nation-making.

Alicia L. Edison is a Graduate Student at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, biracial identity formation, and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes within the media.

Peony Fhagen-Smith is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Her research centers on racial/ethnic identity development across the life-span and has published in Journal of Black Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, and The Counseling Psychologist.

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth, studies how identity affects developmental outcomes among multiracial adolescents. Her current research projects examine perceptions of multiracial people and interracial relationships. Her recent work appears in Child Development, Sociology of Education, and Social Psychology Quarterly.

Charles A. Gallagher is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at La Salle University in Philadelphia. In addition to numerous book chapters, his research on how the media, popular culture and political ideology shapes perceptions of racial and social inequality has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Forces and Race, Gender and Class.

Grace Kao is Professor of Sociology and Education at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race and immigrant differences in educational outcomes. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Social Science Research, Social Psychology Quarterly and Social Science Quarterly.

Nikki Khanna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. Her research on racial identity negotiation and gender in group processes has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Advances in Group Processes, and The Sociological Quarterly.

C. N. Le is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He focuses on racial/ethnic relations, immigration, institutional assimilation among Asian Americans, and public sociology through his Asian-Nation.org website.

Carolyn A. Liebler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research on indigenous populations, racial identity and the measurement of race has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, and Social Science Quarterly.

Monique E. Marsh is a Graduate Student of Sociology at Temple University. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Conference and at the National Science Foundation’s GLASS AGEP Research Conference.

Paul Spickard teaches history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. The author of fourteen books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. He is currently studying race in Hawaii and in Germany.

George A. Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His work has focused on interracial families and multiracial churches. His latest book is Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies.

I’m Color-blind But What Are You, Anyway?

Electronic Journal of Sociology (2007)
ISSN: 1198 3655

Kathleen Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

Eileen O’Brien, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Christopher Newport University

Using primary data from interviews conducted with 1) close black-white friends and 2) biracial Americans, we examine the relationship between the traditional fixation on racial categorizations and the current emphasis on color-blindness. In doing so, we reveal that, instead of indicating a decline in the importance of race, the color-blind ideology acts as both a cover for the obsession with race in U.S. society and a subtle but effective reinforcement for it.

Read the entire article here.