Mixed Race Studies

Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons

Duke University Press
1996
198 pages
Cloth: ISBN: 978-0-8223-1826-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2044-9

Jane Lazarre

“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” She understands, she says—but he tells her, gently, that he doesn’t think so, that she can’t understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre’s memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.

Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one’s own experience—an overlapping of the stories of one’s own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre’s is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons’ and husband’s experience as Black Americans—an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor’s unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy—or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.

With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author’s delight at being accepted into her husband’s family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.

2011 Southern Arizona Asian American & Pacific Islander Conference

“Reach, Inspire, Connect”
 
Pima Community College – West Campus
2202 West Anklam Road
Tucson, Arizona 85709
Saturday, 2011-03-19 from 08:00 to 14:00 MDT (Local Time)

Conference Program…

09:00-09:50 –  Session “A”

Workshop 4:  Mixed Race – A popular 2009 workshop returning this year.  The presenter will talk about how she and others grew up as mixed race children, how the experiences shaped her adult professional life, how to grow positively with the lessons learned, and how they integrate into society.

Presenter:  M. Craig, Japan-America Society of Tucson

For information, click here.

Revisioning Black/White Multiracial Families: The Single-Parent Experience

American Sociological Association,
Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
2003-08-16
18 pages, 5,006 words

Rachel Sullivan

In the literature on Black/White multiracial families, there is a significant group of families missing from most research. These are households that are lead by a single parent of a biracial child. While data on the relative prevalence of single parenthood in multiracial populations is sparse, my research indicates that a significant percentage of multiracial families are headed by single parents. Nearly half of the Black/White biracial infants and toddlers in my study where born to a unmarried parent (National Maternal and Infant Health Survey 1988, 1991). This study also indicates that these families are much like other single parent families demographically. In most cases they fall somewhere between black and white single parent households; however, in areas where there are differences they tend to be closer to African American families.

…Since so much of the research is narrowly focused on identity and marriage,  single parents of biracial children, who are divorced, widowed, or never married, are rarely discussed. One reason this group is overlooked is because of the methodological  techniques used to analyzed multiracial families. Research on marriage uses often uses Census data to find intermarried couples; however, the level of analysis is generally the couple, so married couples are identified and then sorted into various racial combinations. Since so much of the research is narrowly focused on identity and marriage,  single parents of biracial children, who are divorced, widowed, or never married, are  rarely discussed. One reason this group is overlooked is because of the methodological  techniques used to analyzed multiracial families. Research on marriage uses often uses Census data to find intermarried couples; however, the level of analysis is generally the couple, so married couples are identified and then sorted into various racial combinations…

Read the entire paper here.

Parent and Child Influences on the Development of a Black-White Biracial Identity

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2009-10-07
286 pages

Dana J. Stone Harris

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human Development

In this qualitative study, the interactive process of exploring and developing shared, familial meanings about biracial identity development was investigated from the perspectives of both parents and children in Black-White multiracial families. Specifically, this study examined how monoracial parents and their biracial children describe the influence parents have on the biracial children’s identity development process from the biracial individuals’ youth into adulthood. Monoracial parents and their children were also invited to share how they negotiated the uniqueness of a biracial identity in both the parents’ and the children’s social arenas. Data were obtained through in-person, semi-structured interviews with 10 monoracial mothers and 11 of their adult (ages 18 to 40) biracial children. The data were analyzed using phenomenological methodology. The analysis of participants’ experiences of biracial identity development revealed four major themes: that family interactions and relationships contribute to the creation of identity for biracial individuals, that mothers intentionally worked to create an open family environment for their biracial children to grow up in, that parents and children affect and are affected by interactions with American culture and society throughout their development, and finally that growing up biracial is a unique experience within each of aforementioned contexts. While there were many shared experiences among the families, each family had its own exceptional story of strength and adjustment to the biracial identity development process. Across cases, the overarching theme was one of togetherness and resiliency for the mothers and their adult children. Data from this study has important implications for research and practice among a number of human service professionals.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE
  • JUSTIFICATION: BLACK-WHITE INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES
  • STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
  • PURPOSE STATEMENT
  • CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
  • DEFINITIONS OF KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
  • RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
  • IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • RACIAL IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • BIRACIAL IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • RACIAL SOCIALIZATION: THE ROLE OF FAMILIES
  • INTERRACIAL COUPLES: ATTITUDES AND EXPERIENCES
  • INTERRACIAL PARENTS AND RACIAL SOCIALIZATION
  • THE PRESENT STUDY
• CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
  • PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY
  • SAMPLE
  • PROCEDURES
  • MEASURES
  • ROLE OF THE RESEARCHER
  • DATA ANALYSIS
  • TRUSTWORTHINESS
• CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS
  • INTRODUCTION OF THE PARTICIPANT FAMILIES
    • Participant Demographics: Mothers
    • Participant Demographics: Biracial Adults
    • Descriptions of Participant Families
  • MULTIGENERATIONAL FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
    • Family Constellations and Parental Dating Practices
    • Supportive and Close Parent-Child Relationships
    • Supportive Siblings: Sharing the Biracial Experience
    • Grandparents and Great-Grandparents
  • FAMILIAL INFLUENCES ON THE BIRACIAL IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
    • Raising Biracial Children: An Intentionally Unique Responsibility
    • Racially Labeling Children
    • Acknowledging Potential Challenges for Biracial Children
    • Family pride: We are Comfortable and Proud to be an Interracial Family
  • NEGOTIATING OUR RACIAL IDENTITY WITH THE “OUTSIDE” WORLD
    • Friendships
    • Neighborhoods and Local Communities
    • Trying to Fit Me into a Box: Pressure to Choose Black or White
    • Fighting Discrimination and Racism as a Family
    • The Impact of Racially Historical Events
  • THE EXPERIENCE OF GROWING UP WITH A UNIQUE RACIAL HERITAGE
    • How I Describe My Racial Identity
    • The Color of My Skin Matters
    • “The Biggest Issue I’ve had is Hair”
    • Stuck in the Middle and “The Best of Both Worlds”
    • Resiliency: My Racial Identity Makes me a Stronger Person
  • SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
• CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
  • OVERVIEW
  • REFLEXIVITY AND PERSONAL PROCESS
  • DISCUSSION OF THE FINDINGS
    • Mother’s Perceptions of their Influence on Biracial Identity Development
    • Biracial Children Describe the Influence of their Parents and Families
    • Biracial Identity from Childhood into Adulthood
    • Negotiating Biracial Identity in the Social Arenas of Mothers and Children
  • LIMITATIONS
  • PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS
    • Mental Health Implications
    • Treatment Suggestions
    • Social and Political Implications
    • Community
    • Social Change
  • RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
  • FINAL CONCLUSIONS
• REFERENCES
  • APPENDIX A: ADVERTISEMENT FLYER
  • APPENDIX B: RECRUITMENT EMAIL/LETTER
  • APPENDIX C: IRB APPROVAL LETTER VIRGINIA TECH
  • APPENDIX D: IRB APPROVAL LETTER UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
  • APPENDIX E: INFORMED CONSENT
  • APPENDIX F: INTERVIEW GUIDES
  • APPENDIX G: DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTIONNAIRES
  • APPENDIX H: THEMES DRAFT 1
  • APPENDIX I: THEMES DRAFT 6
  • APPENDIX J: EMAIL LETTER FOR MEMBER CHECKS

LIST OF TABLES

• TABLE 1 SUMMARY OF THEMES
• TABLE 2 MOTHER DEMOGRAPHICS
• TABLE 3 BIRACIAL ADULT DEMOGRAPHICS

LIST OF FIGURES

• FIGURE 1 VINCENT FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 2 NELSON FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 3 SIMON FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 4 EDWARD FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 5 RULE FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 6 COLLINS FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 7 JACOBS FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 8 OLSON FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 9 MONROE FAMILY GENOGRAM
• FIGURE 10 BROOKS FAMILY GENOGRAM

Read the entire dissertation here.

A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Duke University Press
December 2010
328 Pages
57 b&w photos, 3 figures
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4876-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage. Filling a gap in the sociological literature on racism and antiracism, France Winddance Twine introduces new theoretical concepts in her description and analysis of white “transracial” mothers raising their children of African Caribbean ancestry in a racially diverse British city. Varying in age, income, education, and marital status, the transracial mothers at the center of Twine’s ethnography share moving stories about how they cope with racism and teach their children to identify and respond to racism. They also discuss how and why their thinking about race, racism, and whiteness changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over a decade, Twine discovered that the white women’s racial consciousness and their ability to recognize and negotiate racism was derived as much from their relationships with their black partner and his extended family as it was from their female friends. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, spouses, domestic partners, friends, and extended families members. Her book is best characterized as an ethnography of racial consciousness and a dialogue between black and white family members about the meaning of race, racism, and whiteness. It includes intimate photographs of the family members and their community.

Table of Conents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy
2. Disciplining Racial Dissidents
3. The Concept of Racial Literacy
4. Antiracism in Practice
5. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production
6. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs
7. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness
8. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy
Conclusion: Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions
Notes
References
Index

An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse)
Volume 1, Number 2 (2008)
pages 75-111
ISSN: 1718-9748

Temitope Oriola
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

This study utilizes in-depth interviews of five interracial heterosexual couples to explore how couples live, and re/de/construct their everyday lives within a multiethnic society. I examine how couples experience public spaces, negotiate their identities, raise biracial children and confront cultural differences. The study also investigates the process of acceptance of partners by couples’ respective families and the media representation of interracial relationships. This paper demonstrates that minority families are more likely to raise strong objections or resistance to their children marrying Whites. Another major finding of this study is that subjects experience gradual shifts in their identities and changes in their worldviews as a result of their relationships with their spouses regardless of whether they adopt a ‘colourblind’ or ‘colour-conscious’ approach. Subjects’ narratives are also laced with intermingling discourse of race and culture.

Introduction

More than most concepts, ‘race’ and its concomitant outcomes like racism, racialization and racial profiling have been subjects of intense debate by the academia and laity. Amid widespread issues of marginalization and inequality, it is easy to dismiss the ties that bind some members of the various groups—dominant or dominated—together. One of these is interracial intimacy like common-law heterosexual unions and marriages. Why do some individuals in spite of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule, widespread stereotypes, social (mis)construction of the Other, potential loss of privilege and historically entrenched and societally enforced boundaries cross the colour line when it comes to love and/or marriage? How do interracial couples negotiate their way in public spaces and raise biracial kids? What influence does their relationship have on their worldview and identities? How does society encompassing significant others like family, friends, neighbours, and the sea of unknown faces they encounter daily relate with them? How do interracial couples assess the representation of interracial unions on Canadian television? These are the questions this study attempted to explore through in-depth interviews conducted with five interracial couples in Canada between February and March, 2008.

Integration and Social Construction of Interracial Unions

Most studies done on interracial unions are American or British in origin, even though Canada, compared to the United States, has a higher proportion of interracial couples (Milan and Hamm, 2004). There are, however, some Canadian studies on the unease over mixed race offspring from heterosexual relations between First Nations’ women and White men in British Colombia by Mawani (2002) and the experiences of White women involved with Black men by Deliovsky (2002). From issues such as the media representations of interracial relationships as aberration, events and/or spectacles Perry and Sutton, 2006) to the contestedness of the identity of children of interracial ouples (Barn and Harman, 2006), to why young, upwardly mobile and career-driven lack men ostensibly prefer White women regardless of class (Craig-Henderson, 2006) to short (melo-dramatic) autobiographical accounts of interracially-involved young eople (Alderman, 2007) to the making of ‘multiracials’ and the problematic of the intersticial space of mixedness (DaCosta, 2007), to the ironic and paradoxical contradiction of ‘talking Black, sleeping White’ among some activists in post-bellum United States (Romano, 2003); interracial relationships have come to stay as evidenced in the ‘proliferation’ of those called a myriad of names like ‘coloured’, ‘mulattoes,’ ‘halfcaste’ and ‘mixed race’ (Barn and Harman, 2006: 1314) but are still largely seen as problematic. There is an urgent need to fill the intriguing lacuna in the Canadian literature on the experiences of interracial couples…

…Data Analysis—Interviews

In this section, findings from the interviews with all five couples are presented under thematic issues. These include reaction of subjects’ families to their choice of spouses, experiences in public spaces, shifts in identities and changes in the worldview of subjects, concerns about the identities of their biracial children, experiences in public spaces and media representation. The results show how divergent subjects’ experiences were when they introduced their partners to their families, how they began to learn, adopt and adapt to otherwise ‘alien’ cultures, and what impact these have had on their identities. The results indicate that except in one case, minority families are generally reluctant to accept their children’s White partners. Subjects also opine that the medium of television and movies seldom cast couples that look like them preferring to depict more ‘conventional’ couples…

Read the entire article here.

Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London

Cambridge University Press
January 1982
184 pages
216 x 140 mm, 0.24 kg
Paperback ISBN: 9780521297691

Susan Benson

In a society where race is a significant component of social identity and exerts an important influence on social relationships, the problems faced by couples who enter into ‘mixed’ marriages are especially difficult. The book is a study of the personal histories and everyday lives of a small number of interracial families living in and around Brixton, south London, in the early 1970s. Dr Benson sets the circumstances that confront these families within the context of wider British attitudes about race, colour and miscegenation as they developed over time. She argues that couples are obliged to make a continual series of choices between ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the course of their everyday lives. Through a discussion of these choices and of the factors which lead individuals to enter into a marriage which could be regarded with some disapproval, the book explores how people in London thought and felt about race, colour and social identity. It will be of interest to all teachers and students studying race relations, as well as to social and community workers, school teachers and administrators concerned with race relations and the inner city.

Table of Contents

• List of maps and diagrams
• Preface
• 1. Racial intermarriage in England
• 2. The pattern of interracial unions in England today
• 3. Introducing Brixton and the borough of Lambeth
• 4. The social world of Brixton
• 5. The dynamics of interracial marriage choice
• 6. Coping with opposition: the reactions of family and friends
• 7. The construction of a domestic world
• 8. The construction of a social universe
• 9. Living in a divided community
• 10. Parents and children
• 11. Concluding remarks
• Appendix 1. The research project: development and methodology
• Appendix 2. The calculation of births by parental ethnic origin
• References
• Index

Chinese America and the Multiracial Family

Chinese American Forum
Special Edition (June 2004)
pages 15-19

Amy Klazkin

This week my husband and I sold our second car. We live in the city, and we don’t need two, so we listed the car on an internet forum and got lots of responses. The first and most enthusiastic was from a young woman named Meilin Gee. She said she would come over at 2:00 on Sunday to see the car and give it a test drive. Without even thinking about it, we had constructed a mental picture of what someone named Meilin Gee would look like, when, at two sharp, the doorbell rang. We opened the door and saw a young, attractive, intelligent, and friendly African American woman: Meilin Gee. She doesn’t look it, but her dad’s Chinese.

This is the changing face of America. Where I live, we use the Hawaiian term hapa for mixed-race people. When I walk down the street with my Chinese daughter, who does not look even a tiny bit like me, people in San Francisco usually assume that my husband is Asian and she is hapa. She attends the Chinese American International School, where a third of the kids are hapa. Contrary to the stereotype that only Chinese American women marry whites, about half of the biracial kids at her school have white moms and Chinese dads. Some mixed-race kids look Caucasian, others look Asian, others look mixed. But what all the children learned way back in preschool is that kids and parents don’t have to match visually. And that’s been a wonderful thing for my daughter, because it normalizes multiracial families and creates an environment of acceptance for difference within a family as well as within a community…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race, mixed emotions

The Arizona Republic
2005-05-13

Janie Magruder

Multiracial children face challenges of identity, community

Aaron Foster was 3 years old the first time the question came.

“What are you?” asked the barber, out of earshot of his mother.

“I’m a boy,” Aaron replied, bewildered.

“No, what are you? Black? Chinese?”

“I do gymnastics.”

That exchange, in 1997, made Christina Cooper-Foster, the preschooler’s Taiwanian-born mom, realize that issues of race haven’t changed much. Cooper-Foster was raised by White adoptive parents in rural Florida in the 1970s, and the same hurtful queries and curious stares she got were now plaguing her son, who is mixed race…

…They also are more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, sleep problems and various illnesses, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Their 2003 study of 90,000 U.S. adolescents found students who called themselves biracial were more likely to have sex at younger ages, access to guns and poorer experiences at school.

“It did not matter what races the students identified with,” said J. Richard Udry, a professor of maternal and child health and lead researcher. “The risks were higher for all of them if they did not identify with a single race.”

Udry concluded that multiracial children live with stress that their single-race peers do not…

…Who are they?

They’re people like Nathalie Conte, a past president of SIMBA—Students Identifying Multiracial and Biracial at Arizona State University—who helped host a mixed-race event last month on campus. Tempe was among 15 cities on the Generation MIX tour, aimed at focusing attention on the challenges of multiracial people. It ended Tuesday in Seattle.

Conte, a 22-year-old ASU senior, has a Black mother and a Caucasian father.

“The biggest issue is we have to choose our race on application forms, and it’s kind of frustrating when you have to pick ‘other,’ because you don’t think of yourself as ‘other,’ ” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Raising Multiracial Awareness in Family Therapy Through Critical Conversations

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
Volume 31, Issue 4 (October 2005)
pages 399–411
DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2005.tb01579.x

Teresa McDowell, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Counseling Psychology
Lewis & Clark University, Portland Oregon

Lucrezia Ingoglia
Greater Lakes Mental Healthcare

Takiko Serizawa
Family Service Associates

Christina Holland
Behavioral Medicine Clinic

John Wayne Dashiell, Jr.
Tacoma, Washington

Christopher Stevens
Renton Area Youth and Family Services

Multiracial families are uniquely affected by racial dynamics in U.S. society. Family therapists must be prepared to meet the needs of this growing population and to support racial equity. This article includes an overview of literature related to being multiracial and offers a framework for working with multiracial identity development in therapy. A critical conversation approach to working with multiracial identity is shared along with case examples. The authors’ experiences developing the model via a practitioner inquiry group are highlighted.

Read or purchase the article here.