{"id":10892,"date":"2010-12-19T03:45:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-19T03:45:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10892"},"modified":"2014-10-09T19:26:41","modified_gmt":"2014-10-09T19:26:41","slug":"passing-as-black-how-biracial-americans-choose-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10892","title":{"rendered":"Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/healthland.time.com\/2010\/12\/16\/passing-as-black-how-biracial-americans-choose-identity\" target=\"_blank\">Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/healthland.time.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Time Magazine: Healthland<\/a><br \/>\nFriday, 2010-12-16<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/healthland.time.com\/author\/meredithmelnick\/\" target=\"_blank\">Meredith Melnick<\/a><\/strong>, Reporter and Producer<\/p>\n<p>The practice of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passing<\/a>\u2014identifying with and presenting oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another\u2014reached its peak during the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=4781\" target=\"_blank\">Jim Crow<\/a> era. Needless to say, the notion of having to \u201cpass\u201d as white is outdated and offensive, but as sociologists <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/sociology\/temp\/styled-5\/styled-59\/styled-43\/\" target=\"_blank\">Nikki Khanna<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sociology.emory.edu\/cjohnson\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cathryn Johnson<\/a> report in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=10786\" target=\"_blank\">new study<\/a>, passing is still alive and well today. It just happens in the other direction.<\/p>\n<p>For their study, Khanna and Johnson interviewed 40 biracial American adults about their racial identity, and were surprised by what they found: most people tended to suppress or reject their white ancestry altogether and claim to be entirely African American. It wasn&#8217;t simply about calling oneself black, but also aggressively changing one\u2019s behavior, looks and tastes to appear more \u201cblack.\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;The question is whether strongly identifying with a racial minority really qualifies as passing. The researchers argue that it does, because it involves a concerted effort to reveal one portion of ancestry while concealing and rejecting another. The volunteers in the study also behaved strategically to project their race\u2014something that sociologists call \u201cidentity work.\u201d The authors of the current study prefer to call it \u201cperforming race\u201d: they characterize the racial identities of their subjects as a strategically constructed, outwardly projected performance, and in this sense they liken it to the behavior of those who passed during the Jim Crow era&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/healthland.time.com\/2010\/12\/16\/passing-as-black-how-biracial-americans-choose-identity\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity Time Magazine: Healthland Friday, 2010-12-16 Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer The practice of passing\u2014identifying with and presenting oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another\u2014reached its peak during the Jim Crow era. Needless to say, the notion of having to \u201cpass\u201d as white is outdated and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,6462,394,20],"tags":[3529,4758,352,3045,3521],"class_list":["post-10892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-cathryn-johnson","tag-meredith-melnick","tag-nikki-khanna","tag-nikki-khanna-sherwin","tag-time-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}