Mixed Race Studies

What Corn Island taught me about black identity

Girl Unfurled
2016-12-08

Georgina Lawton

“You’re not black here. The locals won’t call you black”.

These were some of the first words uttered to me by a (white, European, male) island inhabitant when I arrived on Big Corn Island.

“You’s a white gyal,” another friend who was born and raised on the island his whole life, told me on the bleach-white sands, one blisteringly hot day.

I remember looking at all the other people, similar in shade to me and I felt… un poco confuso (a little confused).

Why could I not be black here?!…

Read the entire article here.

How Biracial Identity Affects Behavior

The State of Things
WUNC 91.5, North Carolina Public Radio
2017-03-21

Charlie Shelton, Producer

Phoebe Judge, Host/Reporter

Sarah Gaither is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University Credit Duke University

Guest host Phoebe Judge talks with psychology and neuroscience professor Sarah Gaither about biracial identity and behavior.

Sarah Gaither is interested in how growing up with multiple racial identities shapes one’s social perceptions and behaviors.

Gaither is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and her work explores how racial and gender diversity can facilitate positive relationships within different social circles…

Listen to the interview (00:17:29) here.

Biracial and Jewish

The New York Times
2017-03-20

Helen Kiyong Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

Noah Samuel Leavitt, Associate Dean of Students
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington

To the Editor:

Re “What Biracial People Know” (Sunday Review, March 5):

Moises Velasquez-Manoff makes a number of vital points about the creative ways that biracial people navigate the world.

During 2011-14, we interviewed 39 young men and women who were the offspring of Jewish and Asian parents. Supporting Mr. Velasquez-

Manoff’s point that biracialism breaks down tribalism — and perhaps extending his assertions — our research found that these young people strongly identified both as multiracial as well as Jewish in a surprisingly traditional religious sense…

Read the entire letter here.

Stop Weaponzing Biracial Children

Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media
2017-03-16

Lara Witt
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Raising biracial or multiracial children isn’t a band-aid you can slap onto the festering wound that is racism.

Hi! It’s your local multiracial feminist here to remind you to stop weaponizing biracial and multiracial kids for the sake of making white supremacists angry. We have our own experiences, traumas and perceptions. We don’t simply exist to make people angry, so stop dehumanizing us as if we were grenades.

It’s been a common theme for a while now, and I remember hearing it countless times growing up: you have the best of both worlds and it’s people like you who will end racism! Cool. So, um, nope. It doesn’t work that way, in fact, it never has — and, very often, children with multiple ethnicities have identity issues and face a specific type of discrimination and racism.

I have always struggled with feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere: not white enough, not Kenyan enough, not Indian enough. I’m stuck at a crossroads where my understanding of blackness and whiteness is unique, and so it is rather alienating. I have dedicated my life to dismantling white supremacy, misogyny, colonialism and capitalism, but I don’t weaponize my racial identity to do so…

….It’s hard to ignore the underlying current of antiblackness when discussing bi-racial kids: when you want cute brown babies with European features and 3B curls, you’re talking about a dilution of blackness as a response to white supremacy, and frankly that doesn’t make sense. Frankly, I don’t want to be used as an example for your fetish of “exotic women.”…

Read the entire article here.

Two Halves Of A Whole: On Japan’s Habitual ‘Labeling’ Of Bicultural Kids

Savvy Tokyo
2017-03-15

Louise George Kittaka

Half Or Double, It’s About Time We Let Them Speak For Themselves

In Japan, Japanese are nihonjin and foreigners are gaikokujin and never the twain shall meet. But what does this mean for our bicultural offsprings?

The term hafu (literally, half) is commonly used in Japan for anyone who has one Japanese parent and one from another cultural background or nationality. The term grates on many foreign parents because it implies that the non-Japanese side of their background somehow renders them “incomplete.”

I certainly disliked the term when I became a mom for the first time following the birth of my son. I spent a lot of time and energy earnestly asking people, friends and strangers alike, to refer to my child as “daburu” or “double.” I even wrote an article for a bilingual magazine, entitled “Please Don’t Call My Baby a ‘Half’” and advocating for the use of the term “double” instead.

Looking back at the article now, I cringe inwardly. By the time the second of my two daughters arrived to complete my trio of kids, I was beginning to tire of the “what to call bicultural children” conversation. I began to think, “Why do we need to label them at all? They are kids who just happen to have parents from two different backgrounds. Get over it already!” Older and wiser, I now know that it isn’t that simple…

Read the entire article here.

Gender, race and prejudice

Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, New York
2017-03-20

Leigh Wilton

“As an experimental social psychologist, I’m interested in how people see each other and how that affects their interactions,” says Leigh Wilton, who joined Skidmore’s psychology faculty last year. Her work focuses on race and gender. “People have expectations about gender and race,” she says, “but what happens when they encounter challenges to those beliefs, such as people who have mixed-race or nontraditional gender identities? What are the consequences, in terms of interpersonal and group relations, of the assumptions we hold?”

The essentialist school of thought holds that these identities are mostly in-born and immutable, rather than socially constructed and learned. But as Wilton points out, there’s no support for a scientific concept of race, and she asks, “If people see racial traits as genetically hard-wired, what do they think when they meet people of mixed-race parentage?

For Wilton, it’s more than academic. With a Latina mother and white father, she grew up with a natural curiosity about what social identities really mean and also with a drive to test ways of improving social interactions across difference…

Read the entire article here.

Malcolm Gladwell Wants to Make the World Safe for Mediocrity

Conversations with Tyler
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
2017-03-15

Tyler Cowen, Host and Professor of Economics
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

Credit: Caren Louise Photographs

Journalist, author, and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell joins Tyler for a conversation on Joyce Gladwell, Caribbean identity, satire as a weapon, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, Harvard’s under-theorized endowment, why early childhood intervention is overrated, long-distance running, and Malcolm’s happy risk-averse career going from one “fur-lined rat hole to the next.”

Listen to the interview (01:32:11) here. Read the transcript here.

‘My mum always told me I was white, like her. Now I know the truth’

The Guardian
2017-03-18

Georgina Lawton

Georgina Lawton: ‘Even though I would look in the mirror and see a brown, dark-eyed girl, I couldn’t identify as black.’

As a child in a white Anglo-Irish family, Georgina Lawton’s curiosity about her dark skin colour was constantly brushed aside. Only when her father died did the truth surface

You might not think it to look at me, but my upbringing was a very Anglo-Irish affair. I grew up on the outskirts of London with my blue-eyed younger brother, British father and Irish mother. Many happy weeks of the school holidays were spent in Ireland and I was educated at a Catholic school in Surrey. We ate roast beef and yorkshire puddings on Sundays, and Thin Lizzy, Van Morrison and the Clash formed the soundtrack to our lazy weekends.

The only peculiar aspect to all this was the defining aspect of my identity. Because, although I look mixed-race, or black, my whole family is white. And until the man I called Dad died two years ago, I did not know the truth about my existence. Now, age 24, I’m starting to uncover where I come from…

Read the entire article here.

Obama on Our Minds: The Impact of Obama on the Psyche of America

Oxford University Press
2016-09-01
312 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199390618

Edited by:

Lori A. Barker, Professor
Department Psychology and Sociology Department
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

• Examines the true psychological impact of Obama’s presidency on the nation’s collective psyche
• Connects well-known psychological theories with contemporary issues, such as racism, ethnic identity, and stereotyping, and applies them to the historic election of President Obama
• Offers expert critical approaches to widely disseminated rhetoric from political pundits, i.e.

On the evening of November 4, 2008, as news of Barack Obama’s presidential victory spread, television footage depicted the emotional reactions of people across the country and the globe. As Obama gave his acceptance speech in Grant Park that night, the camera focused on those in the audience who were overjoyed, tears streaming down their faces. People cheered. Spontaneous and joyful celebrations broke out in the streets. Change had finally come.

Analysts describe Barack Obama’s success as “unheard of”–a meteoric rise–leaving many in the elite political circles astonished at what he had accomplished in his campaign. With his success, many questions arose: How was a junior senator from Chicago able to do this? Why does he evoke such strong reactions? What cultural shifts took place in American society for this to happen? Do we now live in a post-racial society, and what will this mean for the next generation?

In Obama on Our Minds, Lori A. Barker leads a team of expert multicultural theorists and researchers studying racism, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and immigration to answer these questions and analyze the enormous impact of this groundbreaking event in our nation’s history.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Section I: Obama and Key Concepts in Multicultural Psychology
  • Chapter 1: Presidents, Prototypes, and Stereotypes, Oh My! Understanding the Psychological Impact of Obama / Lori A. Barker
  • Chapter 2: The Struggle for Identity Congruence in an Obama White House / Thomas A. Parham
  • Chapter 3: Academic Success of Black Americans: Stereotype Threat in the Era of Obama / Brian E. Armenta and Carey S. Ryan
  • Chapter 4: Teaching for Change: Post-racial or a Different Kind of Racism? / Jeffrey Scott Mio
  • Chapter 5: Changing the Course of Race Relations in America: From Prevention of Discrimination to Promotion of Racial Equality / John F. Dovidio
  • Chapter 6: The Obama Effect on Racial Attitudes: A Review of the Research / Curtis A. Thompson and Lori A. Barker
• Section II: Obama’s Impact on Diverse Populations
  • Chapter 7: (Mixed) Race to the White House / Christine C. Iijima Hall
  • Chapter 8: Race, Masculinity, and Gendered Racism: President Obama’s Influence on Black Men / Christopher T.H. Liang, Carin Molenaar, and Shalena Heard
  • Chapter 9: Barack Obama and the LGBT Community: A Rocky Path to Real Progress and Ongoing Hopes for the Future / Laurie A. Roades
  • Chapter 10: New Hope for Immigrants in the Obama Era / Patricia Arredondo
  • Chapter 11: Has Change Come to America? College Student Attitudes Toward Obama’s Presidency / Andrea Aoun, Blake D. Daryaie, and Lori A. Barker
  • Chapter 12: The Obama Marriage: A Model for Moving Forward the ‘Stalled Revolution’ / Donna L. Franklin

Studying “Mixed Race”: Reflections on Methodological Practice

International Journal of Qualitative Methods
Volume 13, Issue: 1 (2014)
pages 347-361
DOI: 10.1177/160940691401300117

Jillian Paragg
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

In this article, I reflexively consider how three experiences from conducting an interview project with Canadian young adults of mixed race can lead to questions about methodological practice in “mixed race” research. These three experiences also have implications for theorizing mixed race identity. First, in the study, respondents complicated their hailing (Althusser, 2000) as mixed race through responding to a recruitment ad that used that term, but revealed in the interview that they did not actually self-identify as mixed race. Second, the space of the interview enabled me to ask respondents probing questions to “think through” the operation of race in their everyday lives. Third, the complex dynamic of “insider/outsider” between the respondents and myself (through my own identity as mixed race) was foregrounded throughout the research process, signaling complex commonalities between the researcher and research participants.

Read the entire article here.