Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Zebra – presented at National Association of Social Workers 2014 National Conference

Slideshare
2014-07-31

Carlos Hoyt

Read the presentation transcript here.

Smoking Trajectories Among Monoracial and Biracial Black Adolescents and Young Adults

Journal of Drug Issues
Volume 45, Number 1 (January 2015)
pages 22-37
DOI: 10.1177/0022042614542511

Trenette T. Clark, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Anh B. Nguyen, Cancer Prevention Fellow
Science of Research and Technology Branch (SRTB)
Behavioral Research Program (BRP)
National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland

Emanuel Coman
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Cigarette-smoking trajectories were assessed among monorace Blacks, Black–American Indians, Black–Asians, Black–Hispanics, and Black–Whites. We used a subsample of nationally representative data obtained from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The sample consisted of adolescents who were in Grades 7 to 12 in 1994, and followed across four waves of data collection into adulthood. Wave 4 data were collected in 2007-2008 when most respondents were between 24 and 32 years old. Respondents could report more than one race/ethnicity. Poisson’s regression was used to analyze the data. We found distinct smoking trajectories among monorace and biracial/ethnic Blacks, with all groups eventually equaling or surpassing trajectories of Whites. The age of cross-over varied by gender for some subgroups, with Black–American Indian males catching up earlier than Black–American Indian females. Black–White females smoked on more days than monorace Black females until age 26 and also smoked more than Black–White males between ages 11 and 29 years. Black–Hispanic males smoked on more days than Black–Hispanic females from ages 11 to 14. The results of the interaction tests also indicated different smoking trajectories across socioeconomic status (SES) levels among White, Black, and Black–White respondents. Significant heterogeneity was observed regarding smoking trajectories between monorace and biracial/ethnic Blacks. Knowledge of cigarette-smoking patterns among monorace and biracial/ethnic Black youth and young adults extends our understanding of the etiology of tobacco use and may inform interventions.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘The abuse we suffered due to our skin colour is being airbrushed from Irish history’

TheJournal.ie
Dublin, Ireland
2014-10-22

Nicky Ryan, Staff Reporter

Members of Mixed Race Irish before the committee today. Source: Oireachtas.ie

Mixed Race Irish is asking for the Government to recognise the abuse they suffered in State-run institutions.

IN A EMOTIONAL appearance before an Oireachtas committee, mixed race survivors of institutional abuse in Ireland have called on the Government to recognise the suffering they endured.

The group, Mixed Race Irish, believe the alleged racist abuse they experienced in these institutions is being “airbrushed from Irish history”. They say that few, if any, records exist of mixed race Irish in any State institutions.

“Our research suggests this racism was endemic throughout all the institutions attended by our community,” co-founder Rosemary Adaser told the Justice Committee.

“The nuns showed us films of missionaries going to tame the ‘savages’, and we were told, ‘look at that, they are savages, that’s what you are’,” she said.

Co-founder Carole Brennan said that parish priests “would single out mixed race children and abuse them.”

“We believe we were treated differently, resulting in inequality, in these systems due to one simple fact – the colour of our skin,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Couples, Intimacy, and Therapy: Crossing Racial Borders

Columbia University Press
October 2013
280 pages
6 B&W Photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-13294-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-13295-4

Kyle D. Killian, Couple and Family Therapist; Associate Professor and Research Associate
Centre for Refugee Studies
York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Grounded in the personal narratives of twenty interracial couples with multiracial children, this volume uniquely explores interracial couples’ encounters with racism and discrimination, partner difference, family identity, and counseling and therapy. It intimately portrays how race, class, and gender shape relationship dynamics and a partner’s sense of belonging. Assessment tools and intervention techniques help professionals and scholars work effectively with multiracial families as they negotiate difference, resist familial and societal disapproval, and strive for increased intimacy. The book concludes with a discussion of interracial couples in cinema and literature, the sensationalization of multiracial relations in mass media, and how to further liberalize partner selection across racial borders.

Mixed Race Irish group seek redress amid claims of racist abuse in industrial schools

The Irish Examiner
Dublin, Ireland
2014-10-22

Noel Baker, Senior Reporter

Mixed Race Irish group seek redress amid claims of racist abuse in industrial schools

Mixed-race Irish who spent time in industrial schools will today claim they faced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse there because of the colour of their skin.

The Mixed-Race Irish group has 71 members, many of whom now live outside Ireland. Representatives of the group will appear before the Oireachtas Justice Committee today as part of a campaign aimed at official recognition of their experiences and access to redress.

Founder members Evon Brennan, Rosemary C Adaser, and Carole Brennan are set to address the committee and are expected to outline how there has been a failure to acknowledge the historical and ongoing suffering of mixed-race Irish children placed in State institutions throughout Ireland between the 1940s and the 1980s.

They claim mixed-race children who spent time in the industrial school system have had their lives blighted as a result, from poor adoption and educational opportunities, reduced job opportunities due to institutional racism, and memories of neglect and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse because of their skin colour.

The group say records relating to their care are not readily available as the Irish Census did not begin to record ethnicity until 1996.

In all, the group believes as many as 150 mixed-race children were placed in State industrial schools between 1940 and 1980, including in St Patrick’s in Kilkenny, on the Navan Road in Dublin, and in Letterfrack in Galway…

Read the entire article here.

Poverty, environment helped set Toledo teens on path to murder

The Toledo Blade
Toledo, Ohio
2014-09-21

Roneisha Mullen, Staff Writer

Rose Russell, Staff Writer

First of two parts

By the time Shamus Groom was 11 years old, he was already drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. At 14, he saw a gun for the first time, and at 15, he was occasionally “packing.”

In 2000, Groom, who moved from Adrian to Toledo as a teen, was sentenced to 15 years to life for the 1998 shooting death of a 20-year-old North Toledo man. The victim was gunned down by Groom’s half brother over a drug deal that went bad; Groom was present during the shooting.

Shamus Groom, serving 15 years to life in the Belmont Correctional Institution in St. Clairsville, Ohio, says he and his younger brother were bounced around the homes of family members.
THE BLADE/AMY E. VOIGT

Printess Williams, a lifelong Toledoan, pleaded guilty in 2003 to killing four people — two in 1994 when he was 16, and two in 2002 when he was 24. He was sentenced to 151 years in state prison.

Groom and Williams are both black men. While violent crime isn’t limited to the black race, there appears to be something awry when significant numbers of young black males are landing in one of two places: graveyards or prisons.

Looking at their lives, it can be argued the environment Williams and Groom grew up in contributed as much to them becoming killers as their own decisions…

…The chain of events that led to the murder convictions of Groom and Williams began long before shots rang out claiming the lives of almost half a dozen Toledoans.

Born to a teenage mother and absentee father, Shamus Groom never fully knew what it meant to have a stable home. He and his younger brother, both of mixed race, bounced around the homes of family members while his mother worked odd jobs to take care of them. The boys were left with their “foster grandmother” when their mother moved out of the country to be with her new husband, who was in the military.

“They took care of us, but we felt like outcasts, like guests,” Groom said during an hourlong interview at Belmont Correctional Institution, a state prison in St. Clairsville, Ohio, near the Ohio–West Virginia line, where he’s serving his sentence. “We knew we didn’t belong there, and they reminded us all the time.”…

Read the entire article here.

Transracial Adoption – No Longer a Black and White Issue

Afropean: Adveures in Afro Europe
2014-09-03

Nat Illumine

N.b. This article is based on research conducted by the author for an undergraduate dissertation entitled ‘A Political Minefield: Transracial Adoption Policy and the Mixed Race Experience’ (2013) alongside a British Association of Adoption and Fostering conference entitled: ‘Transracial Placements: No longer a Black and White Issue’ (held on July 7th 2014). This articles focuses on transracial adoption but does not explicitly focus on the mixed race experience.

Introduction

There has been an on-going and controversial debate in the UK about transracial adoption – the practice of white families adopting children from ethnic minorities. The debate has a complex history, and British governments have historically flip-flopped on policies, on the one hand attempting to place ethnic minority children with loving parents as quickly as possible, and on the other hand trying to ensure racial, ethnic and religious matching between adoptive parents and adopted children, with varying degrees of success. Whether white parents are able to successfully raise ethnic minority children with a sound sense of racial identity, as well as effectively preparing them for the racism they may experience, is central to the debate.

The History of Transracial Adoption in the UK

Transracial adoption (TRA) began in the UK in the 1960s to allow white parents to adopt ethnic minority and mixed race children, because the number of white childless couples wanting to adopt far exceeded the number of white infants in care. The British Adoption Project was also set up in 1965 to address the increasing numbers of non-white children in care who were deemed ‘hard to place’ due to their ethnicity, thus establishing TRA in which white families were adopting non-white children…

…Racial Literacy and “Race Mixing” in the General Population

There has been markedly little research into the racial literacy of white parents and the potential strategies they may offer to transracially adopted ethnic minority children in combating racism and formulating positive identities. Racial literacy is defined as an understanding and appreciation of both racial and cultural differences, as well as the realities of racism and discrimination. White mothers have been specifically positioned within this discourse as failing to both inculcate a positive racial identity in their (transracially adopted or mixed race) children and effectively assist them in dealing with racism.

The academic and social commentator Jill Olumide (2002) posits TRA as a discourse about race mixing that is mediated by professional welfare organisations, citing adoption and fostering policy as ‘one of the few areas in which race mixing may still be prevented’. Olumide suggests that opposition to TRA problematises bonds in interracial families by suggesting that bonding between different races is unnatural. This view allows for social work professionals to ‘define the racial “needs” of poor children’, creating specific knowledge claims which are then perpetuated by the media as a discursive device against race mixing…

Read the entire article here.

Who cares about mixed race? Care experiences of young people in an inner city borough

Goldsmiths, University of London
April 2010
280 pages

Fiona Virginia Peters

A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London

This thesis is an engagement with the care experiences of mixed young people, to produce knowledge of how care processes, mediated though the private foster family, impact on their lives. It begins with an examination of the relationship between the mixed classification and care, and continues through a discussion of race, race mixing and the family. The study then examines methodologically how the mixed classification operates in social work through a discussion of racialisation and its impact on the care trajectory of young people. Further, it engages with long-standing debates over why young people with a mixed classification are more likely to be significantly represented in care. The empirical chapters are comprised of the narrative accounts and visual representations of the young people and their experiences in care.

A highly participatory research methodology paid critical attention to the narratives of mixed young people in care between the ages of 12-20 years, as research participants, in order to engage and elicit rich detail about their care experiences. An innovative mixedmethod approach emerged in part from their specific circumstances and led to new ways to research with and understand young people who live in circumstances of instability often characterised by crisis.

This thesis engages with the care experiences of the participants to reveal how the discursive repertoires of mixedness and their application through care processes impacts on lives. Each empirical chapter is presented as an individual case study that examines the experiences of a single participant in order to interrogate care practices in relation to mixedness. The themes to emerge centre around family, relationality, professional intervention, classification and identification, race and mixedness, sex, gender, class, culture and ethnicity, all within the crisis of the care system. This thesis argues that placing the care experiences of mixed young people in the centre of debates about how to conceptualise mixedness could influence care planning.

Read the entire thesis here.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”: Troubling the Visual Optics of Race

Flow
Volume 17, Issue 9 (2013-03-28)

Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies; Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies; Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

On February 26, 2013, the one year anniversary of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL by George Zimmerman, I stare at the beautiful face of Trayvon Martin on my television screen and online news feed. I study his cinnamon brown skin, big teddy bear brown eyes and long black lashes, trimmed tight curly black hair, well-sculpted nose and full lips. I hear the invisible and terrified cries for help, the shot, and the silence.

I am racially black and I am of Puerto Rican and Dominican ethnic descent. And I see my father, uncles, cousins. I silently remember President Barack Obama’s somber observation more than a year ago: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

The Problems with the Visual Optics of “Race”

I remember being frustrated by the news narratives that categorize Martin as black and George Zimmerman as white simply because of the color of their skin. After all, if Martin could be the son of our first mixed race president or be my son, his identity should be more complicated than the color of his skin. Martin’s gender, class, and ethnoracial complexities remain irrelevant – he was essentially, biologically, and categorically a black man. As a racial or ethnic identity, blackness remains static despite US Census reports that the black population is more racially and ethnically diverse that ever before with more than 25% of the growth among black Americans driven by immigration. Indeed Haitians are among Florida’s largest immigrant population.

Nevertheless, who is defined as black in the United States continues to be defined by the problematic rules of biological hypodescent – the one drop rule that defines anyone with one drop of “black blood” as black. How that “one drop” is often determined is by the visual resonances of blackness; and, Martin “looks” black.

Amidst civil rights protest calling for Martin’s murder to be classified as racial profiling and a hate crime, the story becomes more complicated and more troubling…

Read the entire article here.

Meeting the Needs of Ethnic Minority Children – Including Refugee, Black and Mixed Parentage Children: A Handbook for Professionals

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
2000
336 pages
234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-85302-959-2

Edited by:

Kedar N. Dwivedi, MBBS, MD, DPM, FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist
Northampton Child and Family Consultation Service

Experts from a variety of disciplines contribute to this substantially revised edition of this popular handbook – new chapters are included on identity work, refugee children, and the work of the Asian Project. The book also examines the central importance for professionals of the Lawrence Enquiry; the move to include more public services in the Race Relations Act; increased awareness of institutional racism; and the specific inclusion of ethnic minority children in health improvement programmes. Offering practical guidance based on sound research and practice, the book provides a focus on some of the most difficult and topical aspects of this field of work.

Contents

• Preface, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• Foreword, Professor Richard Williams, University of Glamorgan
• 1. Introduction, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• 2. Culture and Personality, Kedar Nath Dwivedi
• 3. Mental Health Needs of Ethnic Minority Children, Rajeev Banhatti, Northampton Child and Family Services, and Surya Bhate, The Tees and North East Yorkshire Trust
• 4. Family Therapy and Ethnic Minorities, Annie Lau, North East London Mental Health Trust
• 5. Children, Families and Therapists: Clinical considerations and ethnic minority cultures, Begum Maitra, Child and Family Consultation Centre, Hammersmith, and Ann Miller, Marlborough Family Service
• 6. Can talking about culture be therapeutic? Tasneen Fateh, Nurum Islam, Farra Khan, Cecilia Ko, Marigold Lee, Rubia Malik, Marlborough Family Service, and Inga-Britt Krause, Tavistock and Portman Mental Health Trust
• 7. What is a Positive Black Identity? Nick Banks, University of Nottingham
• 8. The Emergence of Ethnicity: A tale of three cultures, John Burnham, Birmingham Children’s Hospital (NHS) Trust, and Queenie Harris, Charles Burn Clinic, Birmingham
• 9. Anti-racist Strategies for Educational Performance: Facilitating successful learning for all children, Gerry German, Communities Empowerment Network
• 10. Mixed Race Children and Families, Nick Banks, University of Nottingham
• 11. Adoption of Children from Minority Groups, Professor Harry Zeitlin, North Essex Child and Family Consultation Service
• 12. Residential Care for Ethnic Minority Children, Harish Mehra, Birmingham Social Services
• 13. Practical Approaches to Work with Refugee Children, Jeremy Woodcock, University of Bristol
• 14. Community and Youth work with Asian Women and Girls, Radha Dwivedi, Northampton Child and Family Services
• 15. A Conceptual Framework of Identity Formation in a Society of Multiple Cultures: Applying theory to practice, James Rodriquez, Family Research Consortium, Ana Marie Cauce, Department of Psychology, Seattle, and Linda Wilson, Casey Family Programs, Seattle
• Bibliographic References
• Index