Mixed Race Studies

Mixed race, mixed racism and mental health (Sponsored by the National Mental Health Development Unit)

Thursday, 2009-10-29, The Kings Fund, Central London

People in Harmony is offering a rare opportunity to hear from a range of experts about the impact of mental health on young people and families of mixed race. The keynote speakers will be Professor Suman Fernando, London Metropolitan University, formerly a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS and now a highly respected international academic and advisor on mental health and race; and Melba Wilson, Director of Equalities at the National Mental Health Development Unit.

For more information, click here.

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.

Understanding the Educational Needs of Mixed Heritage Pupils

University of Bristol
June 2004
ISBN: 1844782646
121 pages

Leon Tikly, Professor in Education and Deputy Director of Research
University of Bristol

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Jo Haynes, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Bristol

John Hill
Birmingham LEA

in association with
Birmingham Local Education Authority

Introduction

In March 2003, a team from the University of Bristol working in association with Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) was commissioned by the DfES (Department for Education and Skills) to conduct research into the educational needs of mixed heritage pupils with specific reference to the barriers to achievement faced by White/Black Caribbean pupils. Qualitative research was carried out in fourteen schools in six LEAs (primary schools with more than 10% of mixed heritage pupils and secondary schools with more than 5% of mixed heritage pupils). Quantitative data from the DfES National Pupil Database are also reported.

Key findings

• The attainment of White/Black Caribbean pupils is below average, the attainment of White/Black African pupils is similar to average in primary schools and slightly below average in secondary schools and the attainment of White/Asian pupils is above average.
• The key barriers to achievement facing pupils of White/Black Caribbean origin are in many cases similar to those faced by pupils of Black Caribbean origin. They are more likely to come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds; are more likely to experience forms of institutionalised racism in the form of low teacher expectations; and, are more likely to be excluded from school.
• White/Black Caribbean pupils also face specific barriers to achievement. Low expectations of pupils by teachers often seem based on a stereotypical view of the fragmented home backgrounds and ‘confused’ identities of White/Black Caribbean pupils. These pupils often experience racism from teachers and from their White and Black peers targeted at their mixed heritage. This can lead to the adoption of what are perceived to be rebellious and challenging forms of behaviour.
• The barriers to achievement experienced by White/Black Caribbean pupils operate in a context where mixed heritage identities (including those of White/Black Caribbean, White/Black African and White/Asian pupils) are not recognised in the curriculum or in policies of schools and of LEAs. In the case of White/Black Caribbean pupils, their invisibility from policy makes it difficult for their underachievement to be challenged.
• In those schools where White/Black Caribbean pupils achieve relatively highly they often benefit from inclusion in policies targeted at Black Caribbean learners, with whom they share similar barriers to achievement and with whom they often identify.
• Even in these schools, however, the specific barriers to achievement faced by White/Black Caribbean learners are rarely explicitly addressed.

In our 2004 report from the DfES, our analysis indicated that 2.5% of the national school age population were identified as belonging to the overall ‘Mixed’ ethnic group, with large regional variations. The largest proportion of these pupils could be found in the Inner London area – they constituted 7.3% of school pupils. The smallest was in the North East – 0.7%.

Read the entire report here.

Specialist mixed-race training event

Mix-d: Professionals,

The Multiple Heritage Project is proud to present two specialist mixed-race training events for Black History Month 2009, in Manchester and London.

Are you a professional working with young people?
Want to really understand the complex issues around ‘mixed-race’?

If the answer is yes, then come and join us:

• Manchester: (on 2009-10-06 from 09:00Z to 12:00Z) – Lancashire Cricket Club
• London: (on 2009-10-21 from 09:00Z to 11:30Z) – North London Business Park

Who Should Attend?
Professionals working with young people, whether in education, criminal justice service, looking after care, youth work and foster care.

Aims of the day:

• Learn more about our work with young people across the country.
• What young people have to say on the subject.
• Six things to understand when developing positive racial literacy.
• Input from three leading specialists.
• Do’s and don’ts for developing student voice.
• Creating an action plan for your organisation.
• The ‘latest’ street terminology.
• Useful books and resources.
• Free DVD from our 1st National Youth Conference.

Key Speakers:
Bradley Lincoln, Dr. Chamion Caballero, Denise Williams

For more details visit: www.multipleheritage.co.uk

Relative/Outsider: The Art and Politics of Identity Among Mixed Heritage Students

Praeger Publishers
2001-05-30
200 pages
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-56750-551-1
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-56750-550-4
e-Book ISBN: 978-0-313-07598-8
DOI: 10.1336/1567505511

Kendra R. Wallace, Assistant Professor of Education
University of Maryland, Baltimore

The author explores the ethnic and racial identity formation among high school and college students of racially mixed heritage. The portraits in this book provide a thorough examination of the dynamic ethnic and racial lives of a multifaceted and growing segment of students. Unlike most recent projects on mixed heritage people which are narrow in scope and focus on one set of backgrounds (e.g., black and white or black and Japanese), the subjects in this study represent a vast array of heritages, including those of dual minority ancestry.

The students’ stories speak volumes about the uneven nature of racial and ethnic experience within and across traditional communities in contemporary U.S. society. Unlike studies analyzing broad intergroup processes, this work begins by examining the cultural dynamics of the home, contributing valuable insights into the otherwise invisible lives of mixed heritage families. Processes of enculturation and discourse acquisition are considered in the development of ethnic identity. The book also helps to frame how changes within the U.S. racial ecology lead many recently mixed heritage individuals to see themselves as occupying (un)common ground. Finally, this work offers recommendations for educators concerned with creating school contexts that are critically supportive of human diversity.
 
Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Surveying the U.S. Racial Ecology
Out of the Borderlands: Interethnic/Interracial Families
Lessons of Community: Origins of and Approaches to Ethnic Identity
Constructing Race
On Being Mixed: Issues and Interpretations
Conclusions and Educational Implications
Appendix A: Race-Ethnicity Survey
Appendix B: Recruitment Flyer
Appendix C: Expressive Autobioraphical Interview Probes
References
Index

Meeting the Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Schools

Merrill an imprint of Pearson
2003-10-23
256 pages
ISBN-10: 0205376088
ISBN-13:  9780205376087

Francis Wardle
Red Rocks Community College, Colorado

Maria I. Cruz-Janzen, Associate Professor of Multicultural Education
Florida Atlantic University

From one of the premiere experts on the subject comes this “crash course” for teachers on understanding the developmental needs of multiethnic, multicultural, and multiracial children.

This book educates teachers through the experiences of children culturally, ethnically, and racially mixed heritage. In doing so, the authors challenge even longtime multicultural experts to broaden how we think and approach multicultural education. Wardle and Cruz-Janzen push the envelope of typical awareness. They are the harbingers of questions and information in a changing climate of race and culture ripe for redress and new ways of thinking, talking, and educating.

Both of these authors bring to this topic a wealth of personal experience and academic scholarship and insight. They courageously embrace new ideas and concepts of race and culture, both nationally and globally, and provide new and exciting ways of thinking, talking, learning and educating.

Features

• Authors encourage the reader to critically think about diverse family constellations and individual racial and ethnic identity.
• Different models of multiracial identity development are reviewed.
• Focus Questions at the beginning of each chapter help give students direction.
• A variety of tools are provided to help students critically examine their own perceptions, and to evaluate materials, curricular approaches, and instructional methods.

Author Bios

Francis Wardle first became involved in issues regarding multiethnic and multiracial children when his four-year-old daughter came to him in tears, after a peer used race as a put down. Since then he has created the Center for the Study of Biracial Children, given presentations on multiethnic and multiracial issues throughout the US and Canada, written extensively on the topic, and been quoted in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and radio stations including NPR. Currently Dr. Wardle teaches at Red Rocks Community College and the University of Phoenix/Colorado Campus, consults for the National Head Start Migrant Program, and writes for a variety of national publications.

Marta I. Cruz-Janzen is Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at Florida Atlantic University. She received a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Denver, a Master of Arts and Master of Education in Human Development from Columbia University Teachers College, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University. Her dissertation, Curriculum and the Self-Concept of Biethnic and Biracial Persons received the University of Denver Phi Delta Kappa 1996-97 Dissertation of the Year Award. Marta has been a bilingual teacher and elementary school principal.

Table of Contents

1. Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
   • Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Our Schools.
   • Myths and Realities.
   • Chapter Feature: Eva.
   • Diversity in the Classroom.
   • Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.
   • Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
   • Development of Racial and Ethnic Identity.
   • Student Profile.
   • Supporting Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
2. Traditional Approaches.
   • Single Race-Ethnicity Approach.
   • Avoid Diversity by Celebration.
   • Student Profile.
   • Multicultural Education.
   • Group Membership.
   • Getting on the Same Page.
   • Approaches to Multicultural Education.
   • Banks’ Dimensions of Multicultural Education.
   • Banks’ Approaches to Multicultural Education.
   • Reforming Multicultural Education.
3. Historical Developments.
   • Student Profile.
   • Development of a Racial System.
   • Origins of U.S. Racism.
   • Rejection of Racial Mixing.
   • Latinos.
   • Student Profile.
   • Immigration.
   • Racism and Segregation.
   • Desegregation in Education.
4. Categorizing People.
   • Student Voices.
   • Understanding Race, Racism and Categorizing People.
   • Not Quite White: The Arab American Experience.
   • The Ethnic Category.
   • The Race Myth.
   • After the Civil War.
   • How Other Nations Categorize People.
   • The Legacy of Slaves and Slave Owners.
   • Maintaining the Color Line.
   • Today’s Multicultural and Multiethnic Children.
5. Identify Development of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
   • Identity Development.
   • Identity Development Models.
   • Chart Showing the Identity Models.
   • Developmental and Ecological Model of Identity Development.
   • Student Voices.
   • Diagram of the Ecological Components of the Multiethnic/Multiracial Identity Model.
6. Families and Communities.
   • The Multiethnic and Multiracial Family.
   • Myths and Realities.
   • Table of Age-Related Issues for Interracial and Interethnic Families.
   • Raising Healthy, Happy Interracial Children.
   • Different Family Structures.
7. Curricular Approaches.
   • Early Childhood.
   • Student Voices.
   • Late Elementary.
   • Student Voices.
   • How to Evaluate a Textbook/Reading Book for P-12 Programs.
   • Middle School.
   • Student Voices.
   • Multicultural School Activities.
   • High School.
   • Student Voices.
   • Comments About Interracial Marriage and Multiracial Identity by Frederick Douglass and Bob Marley.
   • Hidden Curriculum.
   • Multicultural Model.
   • Anti-Bias and Ecological Model of Multicultural Education.
   • Case Study of the Anti-Bias and Ecological Model.
8. Instructional Strategies.
   • The Impact of Standards on Instruction.
   • The Influence of the Teacher.
   • Student Voices.
   • Materials and Activities Checklist.
   • Biased Instructional Materials.
   • Culturally Authentic Bias.
   • Suggestions for Instructional Techniques.
   • Analysis of a Teaching Unit.
   • Multicultural Music and Dance.
9. Teaching Teachers.
   • The Nature of Public Education.
   • Preparing Future Teachers.
   • Teacher Preparation Programs.
   • Student Voices.
   • Sociopolitical Construction of Multiethnic and Multiracial Persons.
   • What Teachers Must Know and Be Able to Do.
   • Twenty-Five Recommendations for Teacher Education and Educational Leadership Faculty, Pre-Service Teacher Candidates, and Participate in Teacher In-Service.

Recasting Race: women of mixed heritage in further education

Trentham Books
January 2008
160 pages
234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781858564050
ISBN-13: 978 1 85856 405 0

Indra Angeli Dewan
Department of Sociology
University of East London

The mixed race population has shown an unprecedented increase in Britain in the last few years, and mixed race is currently heralded as the UK’s fastest growing ethnic group. Whilst this development has been reflected in the recent rapid growth in mixed race studies, this is the first book which specifically examines the relationship between mixed heritage women and the further education sector.

Drawing on mixed race women’s narratives on identity and further education, this book challenges some of the conceptualisations of race, culture and mixed race identity in contemporary sociological literature, and critically examines government discourses around personhood and equity identifiable in post-compulsory education policy. The data reveal that competing discourses of individualism, essentialism and postmodernism are at work, and that it is necessary to understand the interplay of these discourses in order to do justice to the complexity and multiplicity of ways in which the women in the study speak about their identities and experiences.

Recasting Race is important reading for those working in the fields of sociology, sociology of education, cultural studies, and gender and feminist studies, as well as for those developing and teaching on undergraduate and graduate courses in education, and PGCE and Cert Ed. courses. It discusses some of the implications the research has for feminist politics, and provides a source for future education policy and practice recommendations which take the experiences of mixed race people into account.

“What Are You?” Biracial Children in the Classroom

Childhood Education
Volume 84, Number 4
Summer 2008
pp.230-233
Association for Childhood Education International

Traci P. Baxley, Assistant Professor
College of Education
Florida Atlantic University

Over the last 30 years, biracial individuals have become one of the fastest growing populations in the United States. Despite this rapid growth, these citizens are only slowly beginning to be acknowledged among monoracial groups and in academia.  Because biracial identities “potentially disrupt the white/”of color” dichotomy, and thus call into question the assumptions on which racial inequality is based,” society has a difficult time acknowledging this section of the population.  Biracial heritage can mean mixed parentage of any kind.  This can include, but is not limited to, African American, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American.  “Biracial,” “interracial,” “multiracial,” and “mixed–race” are used interchangeably and are often self-prescribed by individuals and their families.  As this group increases in the general population, teachers are beginning to see more of these children in their classrooms. In this article, the author provides a historical glance at biracial children and offers classroom practices to support these children.  (Contains 35 print resources and 5 online resources.)

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Heritage in Young Adult Literature

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
March 2009
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-8108-5969-6; ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5969-2

Nancy Thalia Reynolds

Mixed-heritage people are one of the fastest-growing groups in the United States, yet culturally they have been largely invisible, especially in young adult literature. Mixed Heritage in Young Adult Literature is a critical exploration of how mixed-heritage characters (those of mixed race, ethnicity, religion, and/or adoption) and real-life people have been portrayed in young adult fiction and nonfiction.

This is the first in-depth, broad-scope critical exploration of this subgenre of multicultural literature. Following an introduction to the topic, author Nancy Thalia Reynolds examines the portrayal of mixed-heritage characters in literary classics by James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Zora Neale Hurston—staples of today’s high school English curriculum—along with other important authors. It opens up the discussion of young-adult racial and ethnic identity in literature to recognize—and focus on—those whose heritage straddles boundaries. In this book teachers will find new tools to approach race, ethnicity, and family heritage in literature and in the classroom.  This book also helps librarians find new criteria with which to evaluate young adult fiction and nonfiction with mixed-heritage characters.

Mixed Heritage Children and Young People: Issues and Ways Forward was a conference held in London, England on 2009-04-29 and hosted by the Ethnic Minority Achievement Service Cambridge Education @ Islington.

Featured speakers:

Leon Tikly, Professor
University of  Bristol

Bradley Lincoln
Multiple Heritage Project, Manchester

Featured Presentations:

Making Mixed Race Children Visible in the Education System

Jane Daffé, Senior EMA Consultant
Nottingham City, LA

Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing: A study of ‘Mixed Experiences’
…‘In junior school I remember feeling very popular. I had a large group of friends and we had all been brought up in the same area although our parents may have been from elsewhere. I went to the same high school as a lot of the girls in this group but they all spilt up and joined different groups that already existed within the school e.g. the Jewish girls joined a group of Jewish girls, the black girls joined a group of black girls etc. I wasn’t a ‘member’ of any of these groups and I didn’t want to be’
Dinah Morley

‘I had an attitude like I don’t know what to do I’ll just get on with things…I kind of changed my attitude like I was just saying well I can only be me …and it made things easier in a way’…

Improving the Educational Environment for Mixed Race Children
Professor Leon Tikly
University of Brsitol