{"id":11099,"date":"2010-12-30T17:36:48","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T17:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11099"},"modified":"2015-02-18T19:01:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T19:01:09","slug":"university-of-vermont-study-examines-biracial-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11099","title":{"rendered":"University of Vermont study examines biracial identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

University of Vermont study examines biracial identity<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Burlington Free Press
\n<\/a>2010-12-28<\/p>\n

Tim Johnson<\/a><\/strong>, Free Press Staff Writer<\/p>\n

Even though he was born of a white mother and an African father, Barack Obama<\/a> is commonly referred to as the first black president. That\u2019s a sign, sociologists say, that America’s \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>\u201d\u2014a vestige of the United States’ segregationist past\u2014is still with us.<\/p>\n

Under the one-drop rule, a person with even minimal African ancestry (one drop of black blood) was considered black. In the Jim Crow<\/a> South, such people were denied the rights and opportunities accorded to\u2014unless they had sufficiently light skin and Caucasian features to conceal their African ancestry and \u201cpass<\/a>\u201d themselves off as white.<\/p>\n

Racial \u201cpassing\u201d still takes place today, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna<\/a> reports in a new study<\/a>, but in different ways. Light-skinned people with African ancestry might pass themselves off as white or as black, depending on the situation. And biracial people with one white parent and one black parent are more likely for various reasons to identify themselves as black and even to conceal their white ancestry, Khanna said…<\/p>\n

A person’s racial identity is determined not just by society; it also can be self-defined. Even people who regard themselves as biracial often are inclined to pass themselves off as monoracial, Khanna reports in an article<\/a>, co-written with Cathryn Johnson<\/a> of Emory University, published recently in Social Psychology Quarterly<\/a><\/em>…<\/p>\n

..The fact that “biracial” and “multiracial” have entered common American parlance suggests that the “one-drop rule” might be weakening, Khanna said. The U.S. census, beginning in 2000, allowed respondents to choose more than one race.<\/p>\n

Still, the widespread perception that people with one black parent are black has its roots in a historically racist attitude that “one drop of black blood made one black, but one drop of white blood did not make one white,” as Khanna and Johnson put it.<\/p>\n

Khanna, daughter of an Indian father and a white mother, grew interested in interracial studies in graduate school. She said she noticed that research was lacking on the offspring of interracial couples…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

University of Vermont study examines biracial identity Burlington Free Press 2010-12-28 Tim Johnson, Free Press Staff Writer Even though he was born of a white mother and an African father, Barack Obama is commonly referred to as the first black president. That\u2019s a sign, sociologists say, that America’s \u201cone-drop rule\u201d\u2014a vestige of the United States’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,8,6462,394,20],"tags":[4915,3529,4732,352,3045,4916,4917],"class_list":["post-11099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-burlington-free-press","tag-cathryn-johnson","tag-emory-university","tag-nikki-khanna","tag-nikki-khanna-sherwin","tag-tim-johnson","tag-university-of-vermont"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099","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=11099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}