Mixed Race Studies

Dr. Maria Root reads Bill of Rights for Mixed Heritage on Loving Day

Multiracial Americans
2021-07-03

For the first time ever, Dr. Maria Root reads her Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage on video. MASC presented an online Loving Day event June 2021. Loving Day celebrates the 1967 US Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage in all 50 states. Since then mixed marriages and the multiracial population has grown. In 1993 Dr. Maria Root created the Bill of Rights to affirm mixed race identity.

Watch the video here.

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.

Mixed Race Conference reflects on identity

The Daily Trojan
Los Angeles, California
2017-02-26

Erum Jaffrey

Julia Erickson | Daily Trojan Roundtable · Panelists spoke with Maria Root (second from left) to discuss her 25 years of experience in multiracial studies at the fourth annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference. The event was hosted by the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

When Rudy Guevarra Jr. filled out identification forms in elementary school, he remembers never checking the provided boxes for race. Instead, he drew his own box, and wrote “Mexican-Filipino,” unable to choose one parent’s culture over the other.

Guevarra delivered the keynote address for the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference on Sunday, a speech titled “Borderlands of Multiplicity: Reflections on Intimacies and Fluidity in Critical Mixed Race Studies”. The three-day conference held at USC featured a series of workshops, lectures, panels, movie-screenings and concerts on the topic of “Trans,” coinciding with the Hapa Japan Festival. It was hosted by USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

An associate professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University, Guevarra spoke about his mixed race heritage as a “Mexipino,” or Mexican-Filipino, growing up in the borderland city of San Diego and how that influenced his doctoral research in borderlands, labor history and multiethnic identities…

…The conference fell on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that declared anti-interracial marriage laws unconstitutional.

“It’s not just celebrating who we are, but also reflecting on how our multiplicity can enhance the greater good of the communities we work in,” said Chandra Crudup, co-coordinator of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference…

Read the entire article here.

All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?

Code Switch: Race And Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-08-25

Leah Donnella

In a country where the share of multiracial children has multiplied tenfold in the past 50 years, it’s a good time to take stock of our shared vocabulary when it comes to describing Americans like me. Jeannie Phan for NPR

It’s the summer of 1998 and I’m at the mall with my mom and my sister Anna, who has just turned 5. I’m 7. Anna and I are cranky from being too hot, then too cold, then too bored. We keep touching things we are not supposed to touch, and by the time Mom drags us to the register, the cashier seems a little on edge.

“They’re mixed, aren’t they?” she says. “I can tell by the hair.”

Mom doesn’t smile, and Mom always smiles. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” she says.

Later, in the kitchen, there is a conversation…

…‘Multiracial’ or ‘mixed’?

In light of Hall’s paper, “multiracial” was adopted by several advocacy groups springing up around the country, some of which felt the term neutralized the uncomfortable connotations of a competing term in use at that point: “mixed.”

In English, people have been using the word “mixed” to describe racial identity for at least 200 years, like this 1864 British study claiming that “no mixed races can subsist in humanity,” or this 1812 “Monthly Retrospect of Politics” that tallies the number of slaves — “either Africans or of a mixed race” — in a particular neighborhood.

Steven Riley, the curator of a multiracial research website, cites the year 1661 as the first “mixed-race milestone” in North America, when the Maryland colony forbade “racial admixture” between English women and Negro slaves.

But while “mixed” had an established pedigree by the mid-20th century, it wasn’t uncontroversial. To many, “mixed” invited associations like “mixed up,” “mixed company” and “mixed signals,” all of which reinforced existing stereotypes of “mixed” people as confused, untrustworthy or defective. It also had ties to animal breeding — “mixed” dogs and horses were the foil to pure-breeds and thoroughbreds.

Mixed “evokes identity crisis” to some, says Teresa Willams-León, author of The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans and a professor of Asian American Studies at California State University. “It becomes the antithesis to pure.”…

Read the entire article here.

From ‘blood quantum’ to multiracial bill of rights, Dolezal saga ignites talk of identity

The Seattle Times
2015-06-17

Nina Shapiro, Seattle Times staff reporter

The endless fascination with the Rachel Dolezal story reveals our hunger to talk about racial identity in all its complexity.

When Amanda Erekson was in her early 20s, a friend introduced her to a Japanese-American woman at a party. “Amanda is Japanese-American, too!” her friend enthused.

“The person was shocked,” Erekson recalls. “I know white people who look more Japanese than you,” the woman said.

The comment stung. Erekson, who is multiracial, identifies strongly with her Japanese-American heritage, although her appearance leads most people to assume she is simply white.

This kind of skeptical reaction is one reason the 33-year-old New Yorker, president of MAVIN, an organization devoted to the multiracial experience, bemoans the international media sensation that is Rachel Dolezal. Because of the former Spokane NAACP president, who resigned from her post Monday after her parents said she had been posing as black, Erekson says “it will be that much harder” for people like her…

…Race — or more specifically racial identity — has been Topic A in the national conversation over the past week. And it is one of the most nuanced and interesting conversations we’ve ever had.

People obviously have a deep need to talk about the subject, and to talk about it in complex ways, says New Jersey filmmaker Lacey Schwartz. She saw that same need in the outpouring of personal stories sparked by the making of her recent film “Little White Lie,” a documentary about growing up in a Jewish family and discovering in college that her biological father is African American…

To some extent, the current conversation involves picking apart details of the Dolezal saga, which seems to get stranger by the day.

Witness Dolezal’s assertion Tuesday, despite a birth certificate produced by Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, that there’s no proof that the couple are her biological parents. She evinced a similar squishiness on NBC’s “Today” show earlier in the day when she said that she “identified” as black.

Whatever story she has that prompts such a statement, she’s not “owning it’ by honestly talking about it, Schwartz says. The filmmaker also objects to Dolezal’s declaration on “Today” that she needed to present herself as black because otherwise it wouldn’t be “plausible” to assume guardianship, as she did, of one of her adopted African-American brothers.

“That is a real diss,” Schwartz says. “My mother is white. I know lots of white people raising children of color.”

Yet, Camille Gear Rich, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that parents who look different from their children often face incredulous questions. That intrusiveness might have pushed her into “going too far” by lying about her race, Rich says…

…Backlash

Yet this insistence on racial labeling faces a backlash.

MAVIN arose in 1998 in response to a growing desire by multiracial people to identify themselves in ways that might differ from how they are perceived. The group looks to a landmark “bill of rights for people of mixed heritage” produced by Seattle psychologist Maria P.P. Root.

Some key passages: “I have the right … To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify. To identify myself differently than how my parents identify me. To identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters. To identify myself differently in different situations.” Also: “I have the right … To change my identity over my lifetime — and more than once.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader

Wiley-Blackwell
June 1999
454 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-631-21021-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-631-21022-1

Edited by

Rodolfo D. Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy & Design and Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Louis F. Mirón
University of California, Irvine

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In recent years, race and ethnicity have been the focus of theoretical, political, and policy debates. This comprehensive and timely reader covers the range of topics that have been at the center of these debates including critical race theory, multiracial feminism, mixed race, whiteness, citizenship and globalization. Contributors include Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Richard Delgado, Robert Miles, Michael Eric Dyson, Saskia Sassen, Étienne Balibar, Patricia Hill Collins, Renato Rosaldo, Stanley Aronowitz, and Collette Guillaumin.

Table of Contents

• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments/Copyright Information
• Introduction
• Part I: Mapping The Languages of Racism
  • 1. Does “Race” Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after “Race Relations” Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres
  • 2. “I Know it’s Not Nice, But. . . ” The Changing Face of “Race” Colette Guillaumin
  • 3. The Contours of Racialization: Structures, Representations and Resistance in the United States Stephen Small
  • 4. Marxism, Racism, and Ethnicity John Solomos and Les Back
  • 5. Postmodernism and the Politics of Racialized Identities Louis F. Mirón
• Part II: Critical Multiracial Feminism
  • 6. Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill
  • 7. Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism Nira Yuval-Davis
  • 8. What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond Patricia Hill Collins
• Part III: Fashioning Mixed Race
  • 9. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered john a. powell
  • 10. Multiracial Asians: Models of Ethnic Identity Maria P. P. Root
  • 11. Cipherspace: Latino Identity Past and Present J. Jorge Klor de Alva
• Part IV: The Color(s) of Whiteness
  • 12. Establishing the Fact of Whiteness John Hartigan, Jr.
  • 13. Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism Alastair Bonnett
  • 14 The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewishing Michael Eric Dyson
  • 15. The Trickster’s Play: Whiteness in the Subordination and Liberation Process Aida Hurtado
• Part V: Cultural Citizenship, Multiculturalism, And The State
  • 16. Citizenship Richard Delgado
  • 17. Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism Renato Rosaldo
  • 18. Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States Aihwa Ong
• Part VI: Locating Class
  • 19. The Site of Class Edna Bonacich
  • 20. Between Nationality and Class Stanley Aronowitz
  • 21. Class Racism Étienne Balibar
• Part VII: Globalized Futures And Racialized Identities
  • 22. Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism Richard P. Appelbaum
  • 23. Analytic Borderlands: Race, Gender and Representation in the New City Saskia Sassen
  • 24. Globalization, the Racial Divide, and a New Citizenship Michael C. Dawson
• Part VIII: Critical Engagements
  • 25. Interview with Stuart Hall: Culture and Power Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal
  • 26. Angela Y. Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA Lisa Lowe
• Index

Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Realities

MAVIN Foundation
2003
288 pages
8 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0972963909

Edited by:

Maria P. P. Root

Matt Kelley

As America experiences a multiracial baby boom, parents, teachers and child welfare professionals must be equipped with resources to help raise happy and healthy mixed heritage youth. Published in 2003, this groundbreaking, 288-page volume edited by Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D. and Matt Kelley, offers 35 chapters to assist the people who work with children to serve multiracial youth with compassion and competence. Providing both a developmental and mixed heritage-specific approach, the Multiracial Child Resource Book provides a layered portrait of the mixed race experience from birth to adulthood, each chapter written by the nation’s experts and accompanied by first-person testimonials from mixed heritage young adults themselves.

The JCMRS inaugural issue will be released on Summer, 2013

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
c/o Department of Sociology
SSMS Room 3005
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California  93106-9430
E-Mail: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu
2012-10-10

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013 will include:

• “Editor’s Note”—G. Reginald Daniel
• “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”—Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, G. Reginald Daniel, and Camilla Fojas

Articles

1. “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”—Winthrop Jordan edited by Paul Spickard
2. “Retheorizing the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed Race Identity Models”—Jessie Turner
3. “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation,” Keynote Address presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, November 5, 2010, DePaul University—Andrew Jolivétte
4. “Only the News We Want to Print”—Rainier Spencer
5. “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”—Molly McKibbin
6. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods”—Daniel McNeil

Editorial Board

Founding Editors: G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P. P. Root, and Paul Spickard

Editor-in-Chief: G. Reginald Daniel

Managing Editors: Wei Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina

Editorial Review Board: Stanley R. Bailey, Mary C. Beltrán, David Brunsma, Greg Carter, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Peter Fry, Kip Fulbeck, Rudy Guevarra, Velina Hasu Houston, Kevin R. Johnson, Andrew Jolivette, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Laura A. Lewis, Kristen A. Renn, Maria P. P. Root, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Gary B. Nash, Kent A. Ono, Rita Simon, Miri Song, Rainier Spencer, Michael Thornton, Peter Wade, France Winddance Twine, Teresa Williams-León, and Naomi Zack

For more information, click here.

Woman of mixed racial heritage have historically been described as exotic, a term with simultaneously positive and negative connotations. Despite its  various meanings, it always had a sexual connotation to it. On one hand it was a coded term for objectifying and fantasizing what such woman sexually offered that might be different from other women.  On the other hand, it was term that suggested that such a woman was physically attractive in a way that set her apart from other women. This latter issue has made women, more than men of mixed race, the subject of suspicion and jealousy in heterosexually driven relationships in communities of color, because a woman’s social worth has historically been attached to her physical appearance.

Maria P. P. Root, “From Exotic to Dime a Dozen,” In Biracial Women In Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race, edited by Angela R. Gillem, Ph.D., Cathy A. Thompson, Ph.D., (New York, London, Oxford: The Hawford Press, 2004), 20.

Well, I’ve always joked that it was channeled to me. [Be]cause it was very easy. But it was after talking, just talking with people. That’s what people told me. So I wrote it down. You know, I organized, wrote it down. It was really given to me by the people. And that’s why I’ve always said it’s for anybody’s public use. It’s not mine. I don’t own that. So, there’s no great story behind it, other than this is what people were sharing with me, with their stories when I go to mixed family groups, or conferences, or just  talking with people individually. It all came out of that. I didn’t make a single piece of that up myself.

—Maria P. P. Root describing the creation of her “The Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage”.

“Episode 113 – Dr. Maria P. P. Root,” Mixed Chicks Chat, August 7, 2009, (00:22:31 – 00:23:22). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-237195.mp3.