Mixed Race Studies

“The devil made the mulatto”: Race, religion and respectability in a Black Atlantic, 1931-2005

University of Toronto
2007
312 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR39517
ISBN: 9780494395172

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

According to The Historical Journal there has only been one scholarly study of mixed- race history. This text—New People: Mulattoes and Miscegenation in the United States—fails to address events after 1930 in any detail, and ends its historical analysis with a discussion of the mixed-race people who committed themselves to a “New Negro” group. In an attempt to cover this gap in the academic literature, my dissertation analyses the creative artistry of individuals who were born after 1930 and were told, by governmental agencies in the US, UK and Canada, that they had a Black father and a white mother. My first case study looks at Philippa Schuyler, the daughter of George Schuyler, the most prominent African American journalist of the early twentieth century. I acknowledge that George Schuyler’s journalistic peers marketed his daughter as a “Negro” child prodigy during the 1930s and 1940s, but I also document how she fashioned herself as a “mulatto” writer or a vaguely aristocratic “off-white” femme fatale during the 1950s and 1960s. My second case study looks at Lawrence Hill, a writer who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s and has achieved a degree of prominence in Canada by casting himself as a middle-class Black “race man” like his African American father, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Agency. Subsequent case studies investigate the legacy of the “Black is beautiful” movements of the 1960s on a wider variety of individuals—from working-class folks in Nova Scotia and Merseyside to American idols—and provide further evidence for my argument that a Black identity has been masculinized in opposition to the stigma attached to a “mulatto” identity associated with young “brown girls”. In doing so, I draw heavily on the work of Otto Rank, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. In particular, I link Rank’s ideas about creative artistry – that it was a masculine attempt to give birth to a new self, community or nation—to the theories of Du Bois and Fanon that defined “honest intellectuals” in a Black Atlantic against mixed-race women and children.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Constructing Whiteness: Regulating Aboriginal identity

University of Toronto
2009
93 pages
Publication Number: AAT MR59722
ISBN: 9780494597224

Rebecca Boock

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Graduate Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Curricula in classrooms facilitate a national amnesia of colonialism that renders inconceivable the possibility of Aboriginal heritage or mixed-blood presence in national subjects. This thesis examines my own family history alongside the Indian Act and discourses of multiculturalism. I provide a personal account for the ways in which Aboriginal identities are regulated in Canada. I examine how glorified white settler narratives—reproduced through both formal and informal schooling—work to displace Aboriginal peoples as the original inhabitants of the land. I argue that this facilitates ongoing Canadian colonialism that continues to circumvent the possibility of particular mixed-blood Aboriginal identities within the confines of national belonging. Citizenship education in the Toronto District School Board is situated as a mechanism of formal schooling that continues to negate the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people so that mixed-race Aboriginal students may continue to assume themselves as white subjects within the nation.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Rendering Whiteness: Making National Belonging White
• Chapter Two: National Benevolence and the Erasure of Canadian Colonialism
• Chapter Three” Citizenship Education: Reinscribing Whiteness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Re-imagining mixed race: Explorations of multiracial discourse in Canada

York University
December 2008
190 pages
ISBN: 9780494517864
Publication Number: AAT NR51786

Leanne Taylor

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation analyses discourses of racial mixture, with particular focus on the Canadian context. I suggest that mixed race has been largely under-theorized in current racial and multiracial research and argue that this deficiency, as well as the controversies that mixed race often inspires, is an effect of the limitations in discourses about race, racism and identity. Throughout, I address many of the challenges, questions and controversies surrounding racial mixture (including struggles over identity, classification and the recent multiracial movement), and engage stories depicting experiences of mixed race people in Canada. I focus most closely on Lawrence Hill’s Black Berry Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, Carol Camper’s anthology Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women, and Shanti Thakur’s documentary Domino. I use their stories as a means of commenting on broader struggles around racialization, racial identities, and racial discourse in our present multicultural context—one that is increasingly placing unbalanced focus on ideals of colour-blindness and neo-liberalism. My study is meant to inspire a re-thinking of some key concepts in contemporary theories of race and mixed race and the growing societal claims that we are moving toward a raceless state. The issues and questions I raise in this dissertation are intended to address the problems and concerns that many critical theories of race and mixed race fail to consider. I argue that creolization theory, particularly Edouard Glissant’s theory of “Relation”, his attention to rhizomatic identity, and his challenge to linearity and fixity, offer a critical challenge that might move complex discussions of mixed race and multiracial theory forward and away from the restrictions of binaries, racial biologism, and essentialist identity politics.

Order the dissertation here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus
DePaul University Student Center
2250 N. Sheffield
Chicago, Illinois USA 60614
2010-11-05 through 2010-11-06

Sponsored by DePaul University Asian American Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies and co-sponsored by the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and the MAVIN Foundation.

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 5-6, 2010.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Fanshen Cox, Tiffany Jones, and myself will participate in a Greg Carter (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) moderated round-table discussion titled “Exploring the Mixed Experience in New Media” on 2010-11-05 from 10:15 to 12:15 CDT at the conference.

View the finalized schedule here.

Organizers:

Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University, IPride Board
dariotis@sfsu.edu

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Neither Strange Nor Familiar: Contemporary Approaches to Hybridity

Location: TBD
Toronto, Canada
2010-10-22 through 2010-10-23

Kenote Speaker

Stephan Palmié, Professor of Anthroplogy
University of Chicago

We are pleased and excited to announce this interdisciplinary conference. The study of identity, whether from a sociological, ethnographic, anthropological or historical perspective, has been a widely debated topic. As real or imagined social constructs, identities are continuously contested. Involved in a relentless process of becoming, they negotiate between an array of connections—local, regional, national, global, and they cross racial, ethnic and gender lines. Hence, identities must not be construed as rigid phenomena but rather as being continuously reconstructed, revisioned and reinterpreted in a variety of ways. They are fluid and dynamic, and can fuse or coexist in multiple forms. As they move through a cultural matrix of meanings, they can mediate between the familiar and the strange, between the local and the global, between assimilation and differentiation, to assume new or modify old forms.

Contemporary approaches that explore this process of cultural production have revealed the multiplicity of identities and selves that can exist in a single space or context. Colonies and diasporas, borderlands and pluralistic societies—all offer insightful venues for the study of hybridity. In the contemporary era of migrations, cultural intermixture is quickly becoming an even more notable reality. But history abounds with examples of pluralistic societies where dual or partial identities flourished. Habsburg Empire, Transylvania or the Mexican-American borderlands, the Jewish or Iranian Diasporas in New York City, and the Canadian-Korean or American-African women can reveal much about the discourse of hybrid identities. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from across disciplines with a common interest in hybridity to stimulate discussion about how identity is constructed and reconstructed.

For more information, click here.

‘Half-breeds,’ racial opacity, and geographies of crime: law’s search for the ‘original’ Indian

Cultural Geographies
Volume 17, Number 4 (October 2010)
pages 487-506
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010376012

Renisa Mawani, Associate Professor of Sociology
The University of British Columbia, Canada

Discussions of hybridity have proliferated in cultural geography and in social and cultural theory. What has often been missing from these accounts are the ways in which mixed-race identities have been forged, contested, and embodied spatially. Inspired by recent calls in cultural geography to rematerialize race and drawing from the growing literature on law and geography, this article examines the material dimensions of hybridity, how it was legally produced, gained traction, and slipped in the quotidian spaces of everyday encounters. Focused on late-19th and early-20th-century British Columbia (Canada), I trace the emergence of the ‘half-breed’ as a new racial personage and juridical taxonomy that unsettled racial hierarchies and spatial distinctions between aboriginal and white settler populations. Unlike other colonial contexts, mixed-race peoples on Canada’s west coast did not threaten European superiority alone but were believed to endanger the protection and assimilation of aboriginal peoples. Proximities between ‘half-breeds’ and ‘Indians’ were politically charged for two reasons. First, racial differentiations between these populations were often imperceptible, and second, their putative distinctions were closely bound up with concerns over territory and with aboriginal well-being. The racial opacity of mixed-race peoples created some sites of mobility for those in-between. However, their unknowability shored up the uncertainties of colonial knowledge production and the limits of existing racial repertoires, creating persistent demands for new markers of racial otherness in the process. Crime and immorality became potent signifiers of racial inferiority aimed at differentiating half-breeds from Indians and providing authorities with additional optics through which to problematize and govern their affective and geographical encounters.

Read or purchase the article here.

“Being a Half-breed”: Discourses of Race and Cultural Syncreticity in the Works of Three Metis Women Writers

Canadian Literature
“Native, Individual, State”
Number 144, Spring, 1995
pages 82-96

Jodi Lundgren

In his introduction to All My Relations, Thomas King asserts that “being Native is a matter of race rather than something more transitory such as nationality”: “one is either born an Indian or one is not.” While King adds that there is no “racial denominator” among Natives and that it is important to “resist the temptation of trying to define a Native,” at least until the body of work by authors of Native ancestry reaches some sort of critical mass,” he contends that Indianness is an inborn genetic trait (x-xi). The danger of King’s position is elucidated by ethnohistorian James Clifton:

the uncritical use of Indian, White, and Black, and the associated ethnocentric assumptions about ancient differences in behaviour and potentialities, history, and culture effectively block analytic thinking. These historically derived, culturally patterned, institutionally reinforced convictions include such persistent ideas as being and becoming Indian is a matter largely of biological ancestry, that Indianness is fixed by blood. A related assumption is that the labels White and Indian mark sharply defined categories—culturally defined ways of sorting diverse people into a few classes. A further assumption is that these differences are primordial, inevitable, original, durable and natural. (23)

In other words, when race is considered anything more than an “accident of birth” (King xi), biological determinism soon follows and is inevitably used to justify and perpetuate the disempowerment of oppressed groups. Historically, as Noel Elizabeth Currie asserts, Europeans constructed the different “races’ they encountered in their colonialist and imperialist ventures as “inferior” and “savage’ in order to exploit them economically; contemporary Canadian society, internalized racism is a key element in Native people’s oppression. Beatrice Culleton’s novel April Raintree demonstrates the way in which a light-skinned Metis girl, for whom assimilation into white society appears a possibility, is convinced by her teachers, foster family, and social workers that Native people are responsible for their own disempowerment and that their social positioning is unalterable. Growing up isolated from any Metis community, April Raintree perceives her options as dichotomous: either become the drunken Indian Other or assimilate. In contrast, Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed illustrates the validating effects of having been raised in a family with a strong sense of Metis identity. Situating the Metis historically, Campbell characterizes their identity as a cultural construct; her emphasis is thus on ethnicity rather than race. In I Am Woman and Sojourner’s Truth, Lee Maracle too focusses not on race but on cultural heritage and political disempowerment as determinant of Metis experience. Hybrid by definition, Metis identity is predicated upon what is “an inescapable and characteristic feature of all post-colonial societies,” namely, cultural syncreticity (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 30). Thus, a positivist emphasis on race such as that put forth by Thomas King is peculiarly problematic for the Metis. That racial stereotyping has had a devastating impact on the Metis and other Native peoples is, however, undeniable. Its operation is thoroughly explored in April Raintree…

Read the entire article here.

The Influence of K-12 Schooling on the Identity Development of Multiethnic Students

University of British Columbia, Vancouver
April 2010

Erica Mohan

Thesis submitted in the partial fulfullment of the requirments for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies (Educational Studies)

This study examined the influence of K-12 schooling on the racial and ethnic identity development of 23 self-identified multiethnic students attending high schools across the San Francisco Bay Area. All of the students participated in a semi-structured interview, nine participated in one of two focus groups, and five completed a writing activity. I approached this study with a postpositivist realist conception of identity (Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000a/b) that takes seriously the fluidity and complexity of identities as well as their epistemic and real-world significance. In defining racial and ethnic identity formation, I borrowed Tatum’s (1997) understanding of it as “the process of defining for oneself the personal significance and social meaning of belonging to a particular racial [and/or ethnic] group” (p. 16).

The findings from this study indicate that the formal aspects of schooling (e.g., curriculum and diversity education initiatives) rarely directly influence the racial and ethnic identity development of multiethnic students. They do, however, shape all students’ racial and ethnic understandings and ideologies, which in turn shape the informal aspects of schooling (e.g., interactions with peers and racial and ethnic divisions within the student body) which exert direct influence over multiethnic students’ experiences and identities. Of course, schooling is not alone in shaping the racial and ethnic understandings and ideologies of the general student body; other influences such as family and neighborhood context cannot be discounted. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that schools are sites of negotiation, that these negotiations influence multiethnic students’ identities, and that these negotiations occur in the context of, and are shaped by, both formal and informal aspects of schooling, including, but not limited to, school demographics, curricula, race and ethnicity-based student organizations, and interactions between all members of the school community. Based on the findings, it is recommended that educators infuse the curriculum and classroom discussions with issues of race, ethnicity, multiethnicity, and difference; actively engage in the process of complicating, contesting, and deconstructing racial and ethnic categories and their classificatory power; and end the silence regarding multiethnicity in schools and ensure its authentic inclusion in the curriculum.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
  • Context
  • Problem Statement and Purpose
  • Research Questions and Methods
  • Definitions
    • Schooling vs. Education
    • Race, Ethnicity, and Multiethnicity
  • Limitations and Delimitations
  • Overview of the Dissertation
  • Significance of the Study
• CHAPTER TWO: CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMING OF IDENTITY
  • An Essentialist Approach to Identity
  • Postmodern and Poststructural Approaches to Identity
  • A Postpositivist Realist Approach to Identity
  • A Theory of Multiplicity
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER THREE: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Section I: Multiethnic Identity Development
  • Section II: Problem, Equivalent, and Variant Approaches to Multiethnic Identity
    • Problem Approaches to Multiethnic Identity
    • Equivalent and Variant Approaches to Multiethnic Identity
  • Section III: Schooling and Student Identity Construction
    • Overview of Multicultural and Antiracism Education
    • Critiques of Multicultural and Antiracism Education
  • Section IV: The K-12 Schooling Experiences of Multiethnic Students
  • Section V: Integrating the Literature
• CHAPTER FOUR: METHODOLOGY
  • Participant and Site Selection
  • Research Procedures
    • Semi-Structured Interviews
    • Focus Groups
    • Writing Activity
  • Data Analysis and Presentation
    • Starting Points
    • Generating Participant Profiles
    • Analysis of the Data Relating to K-12 Schooling Experiences
  • The Complexities of Researching Multiethnic Identities
  • Self as Research “Instrument”
    • Insider/Outsider Research
    • Self as Insider/Outsider
    • Additional Methodological Considerations
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER FIVE: PARTICIPANT PROFILES
  • Jill
  • Mialany
  • Dana
  • Andrea
  • Anthony
  • Frank
  • Jasmine
  • David
  • Cara
  • Amaya
  • Raya
  • Barry
  • Christina
  • Kendra
  • Renee
  • Jen
  • Hip Hapa
  • Kelley
  • Josh
  • Jordan
  • Anne
  • Hannah
  • Marie
  • Discussion
• CHAPTER SIX: PARTICIPANTS’ EXPERIENCES AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE FORMAL ASPECTS OF K-12 SCHOOLING
  • Documentation of Racial and Ethnic Identities
  • Race and Ethnicity-Based Student Organizations
  • Relationships and Interactions with Teachers and Administrators
  • Specific Lessons, Projects, and Classroom Activities
  • (Not) Learning about Multiethnicity
  • (Not) Learning about Race and Ethnicity
  • Diversity Education Initiatives
  • Integrating the Data
• CHAPTER SEVEN: PARTICIPANTS’ EXPERIENCES AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE INFORMAL ASPECTS OF K-12 SCHOOLING
  • School Diversity
  • Friendships
  • Diverse Friendship Networks and Boundary Crossing
  • Friends with Similar Identities and Heritages
  • Stereotypes
  • Challenged Identities
  • Racial Tension at School
  • Integrating the Data
• CHAPTER EIGHT: PARTICIPANTS’ BROADER REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLING AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATORS
  • Participant Perspectives
  • Integrating the Data
    • Correcting a “Blindness” Towards Multiethnic Students
    • Talking About Race (and Ethnicity and Multiethnicity)
    • Specifically Addressing Multiethnicity
    • Getting an Early Start
    • We All Have Similar “Needs”
    • A Desire for Awareness and Understanding
• CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION
  • Research Questions and Findings
  • Implications and Recommendations for Educators
  • Future Research Directions
  • Reflections on the Research Methodology
  • Reflections on a Postpositivist Realist Framing of Identity
  • Concluding Thoughts
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
  • Appendix I – Semi-Structured Interview Protocol
  • Appendix II – Writing Activity Prompt
  • Appendix III – Maria Root’s 50 Experiences of Racially Mixed People
  • Appendix IV – Behavioral Research Ethics Board Certificate of Approval

Read the entire thesis here.

CCIE presents Cedar & Bamboo – Film Première and Panel Discussion

University of British Columbia, Point Grey Campus
UBC First Nations Longhouse
Thursday, 2010-10-14, 12:00-14:30 (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE).

There are numerous First Nations in what is now British Columbia and Chinese people arrived on BC’s shores many generations ago. Since then, Indigenous and Chinese people have interacted and forged relationships. Set in Vancouver and other locations in BC, Cedar and Bamboo opens with a survey of the lives of early Chinese immigrants and concentrates on addressing the more recent history of highly complex and troubled issues of interracial relationships and marriages, multiracial identity and identification, alienation and belonging. Its central focus is on the lives of four people of mixed Indigenous and Chinese ancestry and their formation of strong and meaningful identity in spite of the difficulty of reconciling divergent identities, racist laws, the complexities of familial and ethnic acceptance and/or rejection and personal identification with and alienation from Canada and Canadianness, China and Chineseness and First Nations and Indigenous identity. Lil’wat elder Judy Joe reflects on being “abandoned” by her Indigenous mother, being sent to her father’s village in China at age five, being ill treated there as a foreigner and returning to Canada as a teenager to a Vancouver from which she felt completely alienated. Musqueam elder Howard Grant, whose Chinese father worked in the market gardens near his Musqueam mother’s family, reflects on his experiences with both cultures and his principal identification as aboriginal. Siblings Jordie and Hannah Yow, now in their 20s, reflect on growing up “Canadian” in Kamloops with knowledge of being quite multiracial and multiethnic but with virtually no information about either their Chinese grandfather or their Secwempec grandmother.

As a bonus- 1788: A History of Chinese and First Nations Relations in British Columbia, 10 minutes of academic commentary from Professors Henry Yu and Jean Barman of the University of British Columbia and Harley Wylie of Nuu-chah-nulth ancestry on the intersecting histories of First Nations and Chinese people in British Columbia.

For more information, click here.

The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 66, Issue 2 (January 2008)
pages 349-361
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.08.034

Linda M. Hunt, Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

Mary S. Megyesi, M.Sc.
Michigan State University

Many researchers are currently studying the distribution of genetic variations among diverse groups, with particular interest in explaining racial/ethnic health disparities. However, the use of racial/ethnic categories as variables in biological research is controversial. Just how racial/ethnic categories are conceptualized, operationalized, and interpreted is a key consideration in determining the legitimacy of their use, but has received little attention. We conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 30 human genetics scientists from the US and Canada who use racial/ethnic variables in their research. They discussed the types of classifications they use, the criteria upon which they are based, and their methods for classifying individual samples and subjects. We found definitions of racial/ethnic variables were often lacking or unclear, the specific categories they used were inconsistent and context specific, and classification practices were often implicit and unexamined. We conclude that such conceptual and practical problems are inherent to routinely used racial/ethnic categories themselves, and that they lack sufficient rigor to be used as key variables in biological research. It is our position that it is unacceptable to persist in the constructing of scientific arguments based on these highly ambiguous variables.

…A number of serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research have emerged in our analysis of our interviews with this group of genetic scientists. At the most basic level, the common racial/ethnic classifications they routinely use are of questionable value for delineating genetically related groups. The ubiquitous OMB categories in fact were designed for political and administrative purposes; they were not designed for use as scientific variables (Kertzer & Arel, 2002; Shields et al., 2005). These are notably ambiguous and arbitrary categories, based on strikingly diverse criteria such as skin color, language, or geographic location. They do not compose clear classifications, but instead are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. In the absence of clear principles for applying the labels, in practice, different aspects of an individual’s identity are arbitrarily prioritized, in order to fit individual cases into the schema.

A serious conceptual problem that reinforces the use of these questionable categories is that many of the researchers presume racial admixture is relatively rare and recent, and that specific geographically defined groups, such as Finnish or Japanese, can unproblematically be equated with broad socially designated racial/ethnic groups, such as white or Asian. However, this logic relies on several unsubstantiated assumptions: that historically there were pure racial types associated with particular geographic locations; that migrations were sporadic and relatively rare; and that racial/ethnic groups are primarily endogamous. (A recent study of the views of genetics journals editors reports similar findings: Outram & Ellison, 2006.) These assumptions are contrary to much of what is known about human population history. Genetic isolation among humans is in fact quite rare: human populations have always exchanged mates across broad geographic areas throughout time, producing clinal variation (gradual variation between places), rather than clearly distinct genetic stocks. Furthermore, racial admixture is not an exceptional event; indeed, there has been significant intermarriage between socially designated groups throughout history (Weiss, 1998; Harry & Marks, 1999; Race Ethnicity and Genetics Working Group, 2005). Compounding these conceptual problems is the practical fact that assigning these labels to individuals is often done in the absence of any specific knowledge of their actual familial migration histories.

Heavy reliance on self-identification, as reported by these researchers, further amplifies the imprecision to these variables. Despite its popularity, this method for classifying cases is extremely problematic. Racial/ethnic identities are inherently amorphous constructs; they are multiple and fluid, and may change as a person moves between social, economic and geographic contexts (Berry, 1993; Hunt, Schneider & Comer, 2004). There is no way to know what criteria an individual may apply when classifying their own racial/ethnic identity, and the criteria is likely to vary dramatically from person to person. Although some researchers collect additional information about parents and grandparents, this is only done for certain racial/ethnic groups, and never with others, and there appears to be no standard criteria for assigning group membership based on the additional information…

Read the entire article here.