Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Hollywood

New York University Press
2008
352 pages
20 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780814799895
Cloth ISBN: 9780814799888

Edited by

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

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

A Kansas City Star 2008 Notable Book

Since the early days of Hollywood film, portrayals of interracial romance and of individuals of mixed racial and ethnic heritage have served to highlight and challenge fault lines within Hollywood and the nation’s racial categories and borders. Mixed Race Hollywood is a pioneering compilation of essays on mixed-race romance, individuals, families, and stars in U.S. film and media culture.

Situated at the cutting-edge juncture of ethnic studies and media studies, this collection addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in children’s television programming, and the “outing” of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. The contributors explore this history and current trends from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to better understand the evolving conception of race and ethnicity in contemporary culture.

Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line

Stanford University Press
2007
280 pages
3 tables, 2 figures, 4 illustrations.
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804755450; ISBN-13: 9780804755450
Paper ISBN-10: 0804755469; ISBN-13: 9780804755467

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods described his racial identity on Oprah as “cablinasian,” it struck many as idiosyncratic. But by 2003, a New York Times article declared the arrival of “Generation E.A.”—the ethnically ambiguous. Multiracial had become a recognizable social category for a large group of Americans.

Making Multiracials tells the story of the social movement that emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s. Organizations for interracial families and mixed race people—groups once loosely organized and only partially aware of each other—proliferated. What was once ignored, treated as taboo, or just thought not to exist quickly became part of the cultural mainstream.

How did this category of people come together? Why did the movement develop when it did? What is it about “being mixed” that constitutes a compelling basis for activism? Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the author answers these questions to show how multiracials have been “made” through state policy, family organizations, and market forces.

Table of Contents

• Tables, Figures and Photos
• Acknowledgements
• The Making of a Category
• Becoming a Multiracial Entrepreneur: Four Stories
• Making Multiracial Families
• Creating Multiracial Identity and Community
• Consuming Multiracials
• Redrawing the Color Line?: The Problems and Possibilities of Multiracial Families and Group Making
• Appendix A: List of Respondents
• Appendix B: Methodology
• Appendix C: Situating Multiracial Group Making in the Literature on Social Movements, Race, and the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

For the press release, click here.
For an excerpt of chapter 2, click here.

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America

Harvard University Press
April 2003
382 pages
11 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-01033-8
ISBN 10: 0-674-01033-7

Renee C. Romano, Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies
Oberlin College

Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states, politicians argued for segregated facilities in order to prevent race mixing, and interracial couples risked public hostility, legal action, even violence. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America.

Although significant numbers of both blacks and whites still oppose interracial marriage, larger historical forces have greatly diminished overt racism and shaped a new consciousness about mixed-race families. The social revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s (with their emphasis on individualism and nonconformity), the legal sanctions of new civil rights laws, and a decline in the institutional stability of marriage have all contributed to the growing tolerance for interracial relationships. Telling the powerful stories of couples who married across the color line, Romano shows how cultural shifts are lived by individuals, and how they have enabled mixed couples to build supportive communities for themselves and their children.

However, Romano warns that the erosion of this taboo does not mean that racism no longer exists. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.

Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law

Oxford University Press
September 2000
560 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9780195128574
Paperback ISBN10: 0195128575
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195128567
Hardback ISBN10: 0195128567

Edited by:

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and African-American Studies
Harvard University

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided our nation since its earliest history. This collection explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in our racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies as well as for general readers interested in race relations. By bringing together a selection of historically significant documents and of the best essays and scholarship on the subject of “miscegenation,” interracialism demonstrates that notions of race can be fruitfully approached from the vantage point of the denial of interracialism that typically informs racial ideologies.

Friendship choices of multiracial adolescents: Racial homophily, blending, or amalgamation?

Social Science Research
2007
Number 36
pages 633-653

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we utilize the concepts of homophily, blending, and amalgamation to describe the possible friendship patterns of multiracials.  Homophily occurs when multiracials are most likely to choose other multiracials as friends. Blending occurs when friendship patterns of multiracials are somewhere in-between those of their monoracial counterparts. Amalgamation consists of friendship patterns that are similar to one of their monoracial counterparts. All groups exhibit signs of amalgamation such that non-white multiracials resemble Blacks, and White multiracials resemble whites except for Black-White multiracials. Black-Whites, Asian-Whites, and Asian-Blacks also exhibit signs of blending, while only Native American multiracials show signs of homophily. Multiracials have different experiences depending on their specific racial composition, and while they seem to bridge the distance between racial groups, their friendship patterns also fall along Black and White lines.

Introduction

In Robert E. Park’s seminal essay in 1928, he argues that a multiracial person lives in “two worlds, in both of which he [or she] is more or less a stranger,” (Park, 1928, p. 893).  This idea, often referred to as The Marginal Man Theory, has dominated sociological thinking about multiracials and their position in the racial structure of the United States and elsewhere. In the new millennium where multiracial identities are more prevalent and are officially recognized by the 2000 US Census, one emerging question is how multiracial people might self-identify in the modern racial landscape. Do they remain in the racial borderlands or act as a bridge between their two or more racial groups, as Park and Stonequist suggest, or do they simply assimilate into one of their monoracial counterparts?

To address this question, we investigate the extent to which self-identified multiracials are integrated into single-race groups by examining their best friend choices during adolescence. We know that racial groups are salient in part because peer groups tend to be racially homogeneous. Friendship choice offers a gauge of the social distance between groups; best friends, in particular, show with whom people feel the closest identification and greatest sense of acceptance.

Our paper proceeds as follows. We first delineate the specific contributions of previous research, focusing on the limited literature on multiracials and research on the determinants of peer selection. Then, drawing on key points from selected literature, we sketch our theoretical approach to this study and outline our hypotheses. We then describe our data, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The survey instrument not only allows individuals to check two or more races, but unlike other datasets, provides linkages to the respondent’s friendship network, making it possible to directly examine survey responses by the respondent’s friends. Race of both the respondent and his/her best friend is self-reported, reflecting the racial identity of the respondent as well as his/her best friend. Lastly, we estimate logistic models using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) to examine the actual friendship choices of multiracial youth, taking into account the opportunities for interaction…

Read the entire article here.

Are Racial Identities of Multiracials Stable? Changing Self-Identification Among Single and Multiple Race Individuals

Social Psychology Quarterly
Volume 70, Number 4 (December 2007)
Pages 405–423
DOI: 10.1177/019027250707000409

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we estimate the determinants and direction of change in individual racial identification among multiracial and monoracial adolescents as they transition to young adulthood. We find that while many multiracials subsequently identify as monoracials, sizable numbers of monoracials also subsequently become multiracials. Native American-whites appear to have the least stable identification. We find strong support that socioeconomic status, gender, and physical appearance shape the direction of change for multiracials, and that black biracials are especially compelled to identify as monoracial blacks.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Sociological Significance of President Barack Obama

The American Sociological Association
Mini-Symposium
San Francisco, California
2009-08-08 through 2009-08-09

The historic campaign and election of Barack Obama constitutes a compelling and timely context for examining the program theme. In response, the 2009 ASA Program Committee and ASA President Patricia Hill Collins have organized a mini-symposium, a meeting within the general meeting, which explores how the historic election of Barack Obama might signal a new politics of community in action. The mini-symposium consists of a cluster of sessions that are scheduled throughout the meetings that will examine how the 2008 presidential election engages the conference theme The New Politics of Community.

1. Plenary Session. Why Obama Won (and What that Says About Democracy and Change in America)
2. Presidential Panel. A Defining Moment? Youth, Power and the Obama Phenomenon
3. Presidential Panel. Through the Lens of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Class: The Obama Family and the American Dream
4. Thematic Session. Understanding Democratic Renewal: The Movement to Elect Barack Obama
5. Thematic Session. The Future of Community Organizing During an Obama Presidency
6. Thematic Session. Asian-American Movements, Identities, and Politics: A New Racial Project in the Obama Years?
7. Professional Workshop. The Next Generation of MFP Scholarship in Service to Social Justice
8. Open Forum. Does the Obama Administration Need a Social Science Scholars Council?: A Public Forum

Read the entire description here.

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

University of Notre Dame Press
2004
376 pages
Cloth ISBN 10: 0-268-04103-2
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04103-8
Paper ISBN 10: 0-268-04104-0
Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04104-5

Edited by:

Paul Spickard, Professor of 20th Century U.S. Social and Cultural History
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

The collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawai`i, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Chicana/o movement, the Asian American movement, Afrocentricity, and the White studies movement. Part four explores the multiracial movement which developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and assesses whether it constitutes a successful challenge to racial hierarchy and binary racial thinking.

Racial Thinking in the United States provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism. It will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American history.

Contributors: Paul Spickard, G. Reginald Daniel, Stephen A. Small, Hanna Wallinger, Lori Anne Pierce, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, William Wei, Michael C. Thornton, and Zipporah G. Glass.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy

Sociology Compass
Volume 3 Issue 5
Pages 847 – 852
2009-07-29
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00231.x

Katharine Tyler, Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity
University of Surrey

Over the last 20 years, there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects. These developments include a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This aspect of genetic research is of interest to sociologists and others working in the field of race and ethnicity studies. While the consensus among sociologists is that race is a social construction with no biological foundations, innovations in genetic research have pushed sociologists and other social scientists to reflect upon the ways in which ideas of biology mediate everyday understandings of race. Anthropologists, cultural geographers and sociologists have begun to study the complex and ambivalent ways in which laypeople think about the biological and genetic constitution of racial identities. Central to this area of inquiry has been analysis of laypeople’s engagements with the new reproductive technologies, such as IVF. In addition, social scientists have begun to study laypeople’s uses of genealogical technologies that claim to trace family ancestries, including racial descent and ethnic origins. Ultimately, such studies enable a deeper understanding of the social construction of ‘race’, and in the course of so doing provide an important research avenue to challenge racism.

Author recommends
…Wade, Peter (ed.) 2007. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics. Oxford: Berghahn, New York.

This book brings together a collection of essays written by scholars who worked collaboratively for 3 years exploring everyday articulations of race, ethnicity and genetics across Europe in the face of innovations in genetic science. The book draws upon a rich array of anthropological studies of ‘assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed-race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building’ to explore how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation and nature are lived and experienced by people within differing European social contexts….

Post-race: The end of race?

Lecture 10 – Interracial Identities

With a marked rise in the number of children of mixed parentage, there is a growing body of literature that explores the experiences and identities of the members of interracial families. This body of literature challenges simplistic understandings of ‘race’, nation and culture through an interrogation of what it means to be the parent of mixed-race children and/or to grow up and claim a ‘mixed’ identity.

Read more of this abstract here.
Purchase the entire article here.

Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture

Routledge
2000-08-24
320 pages
Trim Size: 234×156
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-19402-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-19403-7

Edited by

Avtar Brah, Professor in Sociology
Birbek University of London

Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture
Birkbeck University of London

Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of ‘hybridity’ – the mixing of peoples and cultures – in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and ‘race’, in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging.

The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial ‘contamination’, from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of ‘mixed parentage’, contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture?  The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and ‘race’.

The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.

Contributors

Avtar Brah, Annie Coombes, Donna Haraway, Sandra Klopper, John Kraniauskas, Jo Labanyi, Charlie Owen, Anne Phoenix, S. Sayyid, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Anne Stoler, Nicholas Thomas, Amal Treacher, Lola Young