Mixed Race Studies

Meaning of mixed race

Macalester College News
Saint Paul, Minnesota
2013-02-07

Americans are increasingly thinking about their racial identities, says American studies professor Jane Rhodes, with the whole question of mixed race identities getting more attention. “Academia is just starting to catch up with that conversation,” she says, which is one reason why her department is devoting its 15th annual conference to the topic February 27 and 28.

Macalester senior Hannah Johnson (Olympia, Wash.) is equally fascinated by the subject, which led her to write her sociology capstone paper about mixed race and multiracial identities. “We talk a lot at Mac about how we construct gender,” says Johnson, “but I wanted to explore how we construct race. Nobody really knows what mixed race is right now. It’s a great place to be in American history.”

Johnson interviewed 11 people in depth on the topic, and found that her fellow students and others “really want to talk about the issue—I’m still hearing from people excited to talk about mixed race,” she says.

She found that mixed race people have two distinct ways of thinking about their identity: as a combination of two or more racial groups (such as half Chinese, half African American) or as its own separate category. Many interviewees also reported that college was the first time they had really thought of themselves as mixed race…

Read the entire article here.

Black History Month celebrates both race and ethnicity

The Red & Black
University Georgia Student Newspaper
Athens, Georgia
2014-07-02

Mariya Lewter, Sphomore
Decatur, Georgia

As a person of “mixed” race, I’ve always found it difficult to truly racially identify myself. Not because I don’t know who I am, but because others refused to accept my definition of who I am.

Growing up, I attended predominantly black schools. There were few kids who looked like me, and I can probably count on one hand how many students were not African-American.

My peers had a hard time guessing my race because I have a light skin complexion, but black facial features and curly hair. So I often got asked the question, “What are you?”…

…I know how I look, but I also know how I feel and how I was raised. I was raised with black culture in a black community with a black family. My blood is only one-fourth Caucasian, but according to everyone around me, because I’m fair-skinned, there was no way I could be black.

This mindset needs to change…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Cornell University Press
2013-12-17
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8014-5251-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8014-7914-4

Edited by:

Andrew Garrod, Professor Emeritus of Education
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Christina Gómez, Professor of Sociology and Latino & Latin American Studies
Northeastern Illinois University

Robert Kilkenny, Executive Director; Clinical Associate
Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention
School of Social Work
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Mixed presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other times recalls a familiar world of racial and ethnic prejudice.

Exploring a wide range of concerns and anxieties, aspirations and ambitions, these young writers, who all attended Dartmouth College, come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike individuals who define themselves as having one racial identity, these students have lived the complexity of their identity from a very young age. In Mixed, a book that will benefit educators, students, and their families, they eloquently and often passionately reveal how they experience their multiracial identity, how their parents’ race or ethnicity shaped their childhoods, and how perceptions of their race have affected their relationships.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Who Am I?
  • 1. Good Hair / Ana Sofia De Brito
  • 2. So, What Are You? / Chris Collado
  • 3. In My World 1+1 = 3 / Yuki Kondo-Shah
  • 4. A Sort of Hybrid / Allison Bates
• Part II. In-Betweenness
  • 5. Seeking to Be Whole / Shannon Joyce Prince
  • 6. The Development of a Happa / Thomas Lane
  • 7. A Little Plot of No-Man’s-Land / Ki Mae Ponniah Heussner
  • 8. Finding Blackness / Samiir Bolsten
• Part III. A Different Perspective
  • 9. Chow Mein Kampf / Taica Hsu
  • 10. A Work in Progress / Anise Vance
  • 11. We Aren’t That Different / Dean O’Brien
  • 12. Finding Zion / Lola Shannon
• About the Editors

Skin color remains big barrier

The Korea Times
2014-01-27

Park Si-soo

Min Kyung-joon (alias) is a “good boy” in many aspects.

The freshman at a middle school in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, has been acknowledged by his teachers for his outstanding academic achievement and affable personality. Min is also very actively engaged in sports, which explains why he is one of the top players of an intramural soccer club.

Notwithstanding his good standing, he still has a hard time associating with his classmates, mainly because of his “exotic” appearance. The 15-year-old’s father is Pakistani and his mother a Korean native.

“That’s a huge disadvantage in making new friends among young children,” said Kim Young-im, a counselor who has interviewed numerous biracial children, including Min, in Ansan, home to one of the country’s largest population of low income immigrants.

“Children tend to get along with those who share similarity in looks and other visible characteristics. But he is different (from others) in many ways.”

For that reason, Kim added, it’s a common trend in the industrial town to see “exotic-looking” teenagers hanging out together, isolating themselves from their peers of Korean parentage.

“This is a problem that is very difficult to address,” the counselor said. “The government and school authorities have tried hard to solve this with various kinds of measures. But I think many of these programs turned out to be in vain.”

The number of biracial students like Min in Korea is estimated at 55,780 as of last year, representing 0.86 percent of the 6.53 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools nationwide. The figure is expected to steadily increase to reach five percent by 2020, according to the education ministry…

Read the entire article here.

“We Have Created Our Own Meaning for Hapa Identity”: The Mobilization of Self-Proclaimed Hapas within Institutions of Higher Education

Amerasia Journal
Volume 35, Number 2 (2009)
pages 191-213

Patricia E. Literte, Associate Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

This article examines Hapa student organizations on two university campuses—one public and one private. Drawing on qualitative data, this research interrogates the processes whereby young people who identify as Hapa come to: (1) recognize that race has importance in their lives, (2) rearticulate or reinterpret dominant racial thinking, and (3) translate their racial identities and experiences into organizations to negotiate the concrete and symbolic implications of race. This research also examines how institutions of higher education, in particular, student services that have a racial orientation (e.g., Asian Pacific American Student Services), are responding to Hapa organizations.

He’s [Keanu Reeves] the face of globalization. Born in Beirut to an English mother and a father of Hawaiian and Chinese descent, he’s a citizen of the world.

From Keanu Reeves, to Tiger Woods, to Barack Obama, multiracial people have increasingly received media attention, and as reflected in this description of Reeves, multiracial people are perceived as manifestations of the grand melting pot. Yet they can also be unsettling figures, symbolizing the breakdown of racial, cultural, and national boundaries which are central to the construction of identities.

While society often fixates on public figures who are mixed race, the creation of multiracial identities is the story not just of individuals, but of a post-Civil Rights generation. While racially mixed people have always existed, a concurrent rise in interracial marriages and racial tolerance in recent decades has resulted in a population that increasingly seeks to assert multiracial identities. As a group, multiracial people tend to be disproportionately young and concentrated on the West Coast, particularly in California and Hawaii. According to data from the 2000 Census, 26.3 percent of the two or more races population is between the ages of 18 to 34 versus 23.7 percent for the total population. These age based discrepancies are larger with younger persons. 15.5 percent of the two or more races population is between 10 and 17, compared to 11.5 percent of the general population, and 25.2 percent of the two or more races population is under age ten, in contrast to 14.1 percent of the total population. The median age for the two or more races population is 23.4…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial identity development of mixed race college students

Clemson University
2012
216 pages

Helen Diamond Steele

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that influence mixed race college students’ choice of racial identity. This study also explored whether or not there are any differences among each of the racial identity groups’ perceptions of institutional support for mixed race college students. The theoretical framework of this study was formed by Chickering’s Theory of Psychosocial Identity Development, Wijeyesinghe’s Factor Model of Multiracial Identity, and Renn’s Patterns of Multiracial Identity. The eight research questions that guided this study addressed hypothesized factors that may have a relationship with a mixed race student’s racial identity and students’ perceptions of institutional support for mixed race students. The sample included traditional age college students (18-24 at the time of the survey) who are mixed race (which is defined as having biological parents belonging to different racial groups) and enrolled as full-time students (registered for twelve or more credits) at an institution that was a member of the University System of Georgia. This study employed a survey instrument that included 63 multiple-choice and Likert scale questions and was divided into six sections: (a) racial ancestry, (b) racial identity, (c) physical appearance, (d) cultural attachment, (e) other social identities, and (f) institutional characteristics. The following quantitative methods were employed to analyze the collected data: (a) descriptive statistics, (b) Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test, (c) analysis of variance, (d) multinomial logistic regression, and (e) factor analysis. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are included. Keywords: mixed race, racial identity development.

Order the dissertation here.

American Sons & Daughters: Mixed Race, Identity in Southern California

KCET Television
Burbank, California
2013-12-04

Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside

This is how we began. I looked out at the 300 faces before me and said, “How many of you in this classroom are often asked, in a bar or a store or at a party, What are you?” Maybe a hundred young people raised their hands, and they couldn’t believe that’s what we would spend ten weeks talking about.

“People will guess, all the time, and they’re never right,” one young woman said.

“People think I’m black because of my hair. But I’m Ashkenazi Jewish,” a young man said.

“People think I’m Asian because of my eyes,” someone else said.

“My son is really light, because he’s Mexican-Irish,” said Arely, who is Mexican-American, standing in front of the class and showing her children from a cell phone photo onto the screens. “But my daughter is darker, since she’s Mexican-Colombian, and everyone talks about that. I already know how hard that’s going to be for her.”

The class is “The Mixed Race Novel and the American Experience.” But of course we didn’t talk only about books — we talked about who we are, how America sees us, how our families see us, and most importantly, how we see ourselves. We talked about America’s ongoing obsession with hair and melanin, about what it means to be undocumented, what it means to be a mother, what it means to witness a murder or to lose a dog. But all those discussions began with what it means to be of mixed racial and cultural heritage, and many students in this class at UC Riverside say this was their first time ever talking about these very personal things in an open forum…

Read the entire article here.

UCLA receiver Thomas Duarte proud of biracial heritage

Los Angeles Daily News
2013-11-25

Jack Wang, Staff Reporter

The smell hits him three or four blocks away.

Thomas Duarte is coming back from a run around his Orange County neighborhood, and the day is hot enough that the windows of his house have been cracked open.

What that smell actually was, though, depended on the day.

“We always had tamales around,” said the UCLA receiver. “That was probably my favorite. Coming around wintertime, that’s pretty much what I think about when it comes to food around the house.”

Ordinary by itself, but consider some of the other Duarte household favorites: teriyaki chicken, fried rice, sushi. The platter tends to be diverse when you’re the son of a Mexican-American father and a Japanese-American mother.

When Duarte was about five years old, his father Tim brought home a whole, freshly caught albacore that a friend had just fished from the pier. As he cut thin slices on the kitchen counter, Thomas approached eagerly. He ate a piece and loved it.

“If that’s not in the blood, I don’t know what is,” Tim said…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil in Black and White

Wide Angle
Public Broadcasting Service
2007-09-04

About the Issue

As one of the most racially diverse nations in the world, Brazil has long considered itself a colorblind “racial democracy.” But deep disparities in income, education and employment between lighter and darker-skinned Brazilians have prompted a civil rights movement advocating equal treatment of Afro-Brazilians. In Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, blacks today make up almost half of the total population — but nearly two-thirds of the nation’s poor. Institutions of higher education have typically been monopolized by Brazil’s wealthy and light-skinned elite, and illiteracy among black Brazilians is twice as high as among whites. Now, affirmative action programs are changing the rules of the game, with many colleges and universities reserving 20% of spots for Afro-Brazilians. But with national surveys identifying over 130 different categories of skin color, including “cinnamon,” “coffee with milk,” and “toasted,” who will be considered “black enough” to qualify for the new racial quotas?

About The Film

“Am I black or am I white?” Even before they ever set foot in a college classroom, many Brazilian university applicants must now confront a question with no easy answer. Brazil in Black and White follows the lives of five young college hopefuls from diverse backgrounds as they compete to win a coveted spot at the elite University of Brasilia, where 20 percent of the incoming freshmen must qualify as Afro-Brazilian. Outside the university, Wide Angle reports on the controversial racial debate roiling Brazil through profiles of civil right activists, opponents of affirmative action, and one of the country’s few black senators.

For more information, click here.

Living in Ambiguity: The Mixed Race Experience at Colorado State University

Colorado State University
Fall 2012
77 pages

Carl Izumi Olsen

In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University, Fort Collins

This study analyzes the experiences of mixed race students at Colorado State University by using semi-structured interviews of nineteen students. The interviews reveal that multiracial students exhibit different forms of racialization as compared to monoracial students. Despite some commonalities, the study also demonstrates that multiracial students are not monolithic group. In an effort to highlight the uniqueness embedded in the diversity of multiracial students, the study analytically identifies three main clusters based on how they are perceived. These include: Non-White Mixed Race, In-Between Mixed Race, and White-Identified Mixed Race. The interviews also show that the three dominant themes mediate their multiracial identity: perception, self-identification and connection to culture. Finally, the participants in this study all point to the inability of the existing cultural centers in meeting their specific needs and call for the establishment of multiracial center that would provide resources for education, outreach and retention issues for multiracial students.

Read the entire thesis here.