Mixed Race Studies

Pride, no prejudice: we’re young, Jewish and black

The Jewish Chronicle
London, United Kingdom
2019-01-31

Karen Glaser

Yasmin Bowen (left) and Vivien Sinclair (Photo: Benjamin Mole)

Drake, Sophie Okenado and Craig David: three big name examples of Jews who are black. So why do so many people assume all Jews are white? Karen Glaser met some teens who challenge that stereotype.

On Shabbat, frummers often stop Lia Grant on the streets of the Jewish neighbourhood where she lives and ask her to ring doorbells and switch on ovens for them. They preface their requests with a quick explanation of Shabbat and the type of work they are prohibited from doing on Judaism’s day of rest.

However, what they do not know is that far from being a potential Shabbos goy, Lia is a fellow Jew. So by asking her to work, her frum interlocutors are inadvertently committing a serious transgression: they are entreating someone who is obligated to keep Shabbat, to violate it.

“When I tell them I’m Jewish, very awkward shock washes over their faces,” says the JCoss sixth former whose mother is Jewish, Israeli and Nigerian, and whose father is Nigerian and Scottish.

It was a similar story when Lia first joined the Jewish secondary. “Are you Jewish?” her classmates would ask her. And six years later, her intersectional identity often elicits a similar response from non-Jews: “Wow! There’s such a thing as a black Jew?”…

Read the entire article here.

Seeking biracial women for an online research study!

Kiarra King
Department of Psychology
The University of Akron
290 East Buchtel Avenue
Akron, Ohio 44325-4301

2019-01-29

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into biracial women’s experiences with their racial identity, relationships, and other difficult experiences.

In order to participate in this survey, you must have parents of two different racial backgrounds, identify as a woman or transwoman, currently be in an adult intimate relationship or have been in one within the last twelve months, and be age 18 years or older.

Survey responses are confidential and you will not be asked to provide your name. The estimated completion time is 30 minutes. Participants will be compensated electronically!

To begin the survey, click here.

Duke Identity and Diversity Lab Seeking Participants for Online Study Relating to Their Experiences as a Multiracial Individual

Duke Identity and Diversity Lab
Duke University
Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
417 Chapel Drive, Box 90086
Durham, North Carolina 27708-0086
Telephone: (919) 660-5790

Dr. Sarah Gaither, Principal Investigator; Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

2019-01-28

As multiracials often have unique experiences related to their diverse heritages, this study aims to explore how factors such as physical appearance, gender, environment, and knowledge of heritage languages may inform multiracial identity development and experiences.

This is an online study for participants who identify as either mixed-race, biracial, having multiple ethnicities or multiple cultural heritages. Participants will be asked to complete a variety of multiple choice and short answer response questions relating to their experiences as a multiracial individual.

The study typically lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and participants will be entered to win a $50.00 Amazon gift card.

To begin the study, please follow the link here.

Q&A with Natasha Díaz, Author of Color Me In

Underlined
2018-12-21

We love hearing from new voices in YA!

In Color Me In, debut Author Natasha Díaz pulls from her personal experience to create a powerful, relatable, coming-of-age novel. We can’t wait for this beauty to hit shelves on 8/20/19. Get to know Natasha Díaz in the Q&A below!

Color Me In is based on your personal experiences. What inspired you to tell this story? Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

I’m the only person on my mom’s side of the family who looks the way that I do, and as a result, I have witnessed blatant racism since I was a child; it just was never directed at me. So often I find that narratives about biracial/multiracial, white-passing characters delve deeply into their internal struggle but rarely touch on the privileges and colorism that are inherently tied to those of us who are mixed and also pass as white. What has been directed at me is an unending amount of microaggression, which led to debilitating self-doubt that I don’t have the right to claim myself entirely. Color Me In was my chance to write the book I never had growing up: a story that acknowledges the privileges of being white-passing without in any way detracting from the right that we as mixed-race people have to own our identities…

Read the entire interview here.

Local Stories Show Realities of Biracial Identity for People and Families

WAER 88.3 FM
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York

2019-01-24

Chris Bolt, News Director

Elliott Lewis, Professor of Practice, Broadcast & Digital Journalism
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah is the featured speaker at Syracuse University’s Martin Luther King celebration this Sunday. Noah’s life story as the son of a South African mother and European father has struck a chord with many on campus. SU journalism professor Elliott Lewis explores the ways biracial Americans are answering questions of race and identity.

“I grew up in South Africa during Apartheid, which was awkward because I was raised in a mixed family …” wrote Trevor Noah in his book “Born a Crime”…

Read the story here. Listen to the story here.

Which box do second generation mixed race people fit into?

gal-dem
2018-01-03

Carinya Sharples

Britain has barely got its head around interracial relationships, and already we’re behind the times. The children of mixed couples from the 1960s and 70s are now adults, with their own kids – even grandkids.

But which box do they fit into? Black, white, Asian, mixed race? Is there a terminology that exists for second generation mixed race children that does not just shove them into the box labelled “other”?

Emma, who describes herself as half Mauritian and half Sri Lankan, resists the labels put on her: “I am classified as ‘Asian’ in the UK or ‘Asian – mixed’ or ‘mixed – other’ or ‘other’. I don’t resonate with any of these terms.”

Since having a son with her Nigerian partner, Emma is well aware that negotiating restrictive labels is about to get even more complex.

If her son was confused or asked for guidance, she says, she’d discuss it with him to find a term that he is comfortable with. But ultimately the choice would be his. “I think it’s important for us to identify ourselves as we feel as individuals,” she says.

This doesn’t mean, though, that other people aren’t already deciding for him – albeit in a positive, inclusive way. On the couple’s regular trips to Lagos, he’s embraced as a Nigerian and called “Yoruba boy”. And when the children at his London nursery had to make a flag of their country, he came home with a Nigerian flag…

…While there have been many studies of mixed-race relationships, there is precious little research on mixed-race families. This is something Miri Song, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, wants to change. Her new book, Multiracial Parents: Mixed Families, Generational Change and the Future of Race, explores some of these issues…

Read the entire article here.

Charla Huber: Every Indigenous person is Indigenous enough

The Times Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
2018-12-30

Charla Huber, Communications and Indigenous Relations
M’akola Group of Societies

Devan Cronshaw, left, Riley McKenzie and Alita Tocher are all urban Indigenous people in the capital region. Photograph By Charla Huber, Times Colonist

So often, we hear the words reconciliation and decolonization, and lately I have been wondering if people really understand their meanings. The more I read, learn and listen, the more important these words become to me.

I am a product of the Sixties Scoop and was adopted and raised by a non-Indigenous family. Being adopted and having no knowledge of or connection to my birth family growing up, I really held onto being Indigenous. It was the only thing that I ever knew about myself for sure.

Because I wasn’t raised in Indigenous culture, I have often wondered if I am Indigenous enough. This is especially heightened because I am half. I am very open about my heritage and my adoption, but I do struggle saying: “My family is from Fort Chipewyan and I have Inuit roots.” I’ve never set foot on my ancestors’ traditional territory…

Read the entire article here.

Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism

University of Nebraska Press
December 2018
348 pages, index
Hardcover: 978-0-8032-9681-7

Molly Littlewood McKibbin, Assistant Professor of Instruction
English and Creative Writing Department
Columbia College Chicago

In Shades of Gray Molly Littlewood McKibbin offers a social and literary history of multiracialism in the twentieth-century United States. She examines the African American and white racial binary in contemporary multiracial literature to reveal the tensions and struggles of multiracialism in American life through individual consciousness, social perceptions, societal expectations, and subjective struggles with multiracial identity.

McKibbin weaves a rich sociohistorical tapestry around the critically acclaimed works of Danzy Senna, Caucasia (1998); Rebecca Walker, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001); Emily Raboteau, The Professor’s Daughter (2005); Rachel M. Harper, Brass Ankle Blues (2006); and Heidi Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010). Taking into account the social history of racial classification and the literary history of depicting mixed race, she argues that these writers are producing new representations of multiracial identity.

Shades of Gray examines the current opportunity to define racial identity after the civil rights, black power, and multiracial movements of the late twentieth century changed the sociopolitical climate of the United States and helped revolutionize the racial consciousness of the nation. McKibbin makes the case that twenty-first-century literature is able to represent multiracial identities for the first time in ways that do not adhere to the dichotomous conceptions of race that have, until now, determined how racial identities could be expressed in the United States.

Socioemotional wellbeing of mixed race/ethnicity children in the UK and US: Patterns and mechanisms

SSM – Population Health
Volume 5, August 2018
Pages 147-159
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2018.06.010

James Nazroo, Honorary Professor of Sociology
Cathie Marsh Institute, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Afshin Zilanawala, Senior Research Associate
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Meichu Chen, Research Associate Social/Behavioral Sciences Intermediate
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Laia Bécares, Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Science (Social Work and Social Care)
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Pamela Davis-Kean, Professor of Psychology; Research Professor
Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

James S. Jackson, Daniel Katz Distinguished University Professor of Psychology; Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Yvonne Kelly, Professor of Lifecourse Epidemiology
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Lidia Panico, Researcher
Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques, Paris, France

Amanda Sacker, Professor of Lifecourse Studies
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Highlights

• Mixed race/ethnicity children are thought to have poorer socioemotional wellbeing
• We find no evidence that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing in a study covering children aged 5/6 in the US and UK
• We find that mixed race/ethnicity children do have socio-economic advantage
• This socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing

Existing literature suggests that mixed race/ethnicity children are more likely to experience poor socioemotional wellbeing in both the US and the UK, although the evidence is stronger in the US. It is suggested that this inequality may be a consequence of struggles with identity formation, more limited connections with racial/ethnic/cultural heritage, and increased risk of exposure to racism.

Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (n = 13,734) and the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n ~ 6250), we examine differences in the socioemotional wellbeing of mixed and non-mixed 5/6 year old children in the UK and US and explore heterogeneity in outcomes across different mixed groups in both locations. We estimate a series of linear regressions to examine the contribution of factors that may explain any observed differences, including socio-economic and cultural factors, and examine the extent to which these processes vary across the two nations.

We find no evidence of greater risk for poor socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in both national contexts. We find that mixed race/ethnicity children experience socio-economic advantage compared to their non-mixed minority counterparts and that socio-economic advantage is protective for socioemotional wellbeing. Cultural factors do not contribute to differences in socioemotional wellbeing across mixed and non-mixed groups.

Our evidence suggests then that at age 5/6 there is no evidence of poorer socioemotional wellbeing for mixed race/ethnicity children in either the UK or the US. The contrast between our findings and some previous literature, which reports that mixed race/ethnicity children have poorer socioemotional wellbeing, may reflect changes in the meaning of mixed identities across periods and/or the developmental stage of the children we studied.

Read the entire article in PDF or HTML format.

Mixed Up: ‘There are certain elements of English life that Iranian culture would deem totally disgusting’

Metro UK
2018-12-12

Natalie Morris, Senior Lifestyle Writer

Ariana Alexander-Sefre

Welcome to Mixed Up, a series looking at the highs, lows and unique experiences of being mixed-race.

Mixed-race is the fastest-growing ethnic group in the UK. It means your parents hail from two (or more) different ethnicities, leaving you somewhere in the middle.

In 2001, when the ‘mixed’ categories were first introduced to the national census, mixed-race people made up 1.3% of the population. Fast-forward 10 years, and that figure almost doubles to 2.3%.

It’s a trajectory that’s unlikely to slow down.

Alongside the unique pleasures and benefits of being exposed to multiple cultures, being mixed comes with complexities, conflicts and innate contradictions.

Ariana, founder of Sweat & Sound, is half Persian and half British. The Persians are an Iranian ethnic group that make up half of the population of Iran – they have their own language, Farsi.

Some schools of thinking class Persians as technically Caucasian, but recent census categorisation changes in the US have definied Iranian and Middle-Eastern heritage as different to white…

…Ariana identifies as mixed. She says her family is made up of a combination of intensely different cultural traditions.

But because of her appearance, her light skin and European features, she says she’s often assumed to be white by both English and Iranian people.

‘I actually find it really frustrating to be honest,’ Ariana tells Metro.co.uk…

Read the entire article here.