Mixed Race Studies

The identity development of mixed race individuals in Canada

University of Alberta
Spring 2010
131 pages

Monica Das

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Psychological Studies in Education

The purpose of this study was to explore the identity development of mixed race individuals in a Western Canadian context. The case study methodology was used to guide the overall procedure and participant selection. A thematic analysis was used to analyze patterns in the data. Four individuals of mixed race parentage were interviewed and five themes emerged: (a) the influence of family, (b) the influence of childhood experiences, (c) the influence of physical appearance, (d) the influence of racism, and (e) the influence of adult experiences. The detailed explorations of the participants’ experiences add to the Canadian literature on mixed race identity development, which provides several counselling implications and directions for future research.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

CHAPTER TWO
Literature Review
A Sociological Analysis of Race
A Historical Overview of Race Mixing
A Review of the Contemporary Mixed Race Experience
Identity Development
Racial Identity Development
Mixed Race Identity Development Model
Key Presenting Issues and Counselling Implications
Summary and Research Question

CHAPTER THREE
Methodology
Research Paradigm
Case Study Approach
Participants
Procedure
Data Analysis
Trustworthiness: An Evaluation of the Study
The Researcher
Ethical Considerations

CHAPTER FOUR
Findings from the Within-Case Analyses
Ko
Jessica
Alina
Steven

CHAPTER FIVE
Findings from the Cross-Case Analysis
The Influence of Family
The Influence of Childhood Experiences
The Influence of Physical Appearances
The Influence of Racism
The Influence of Adult Experiences

CHAPTER SIX
Discussion
Implications for Counselling and Education
Future Research Directions
Conclusions
References

Appendix A: Recruitment Handout
Appendix B: Information Letter to Participants and Informed Consent Form
Appendix C: Demographics Form
Appendix D: Interview Guide
Appendix E: Pre-Interview Activity Form

…My interest in this research topic stems from my personal experiences as a mixed race individual. My mother is from Czechoslovakia, my father is from India and I was born and raised in Canada. As a child, I was unaware of terms like interracial marriage or mixed race. Once I became aware of my mixed heritage as a young adult, I became curious as to why my racial and cultural identity were so different from either my Bengali or Czech relatives, or from most of the people around me. As I started to ask questions, I found deep commonalities with other mixed race individuals regardless of their particular racial mix. Additionally, I was amazed at the range and depth of opinions I encountered in casual conversations. It seemed that everyone had an opinion about mixed race individuals.

With this diversity in opinions, I was certain that I would find an overwhelming amount of academic data on the mixed race experience. I did find a significant volume of research on American Black-and-White mixed race people and the American history of anti-miscegenation. However, I was surprised at the minute amount of information available on non-Black-and-White mixed race individuals in general and the Canadian perspective in particular. When given the opportunity to conduct my own research as a Master’s student, I decided to explore the topic of non-Black-and-White mixed race individuals in a Canadian context. I hope that this information can be used to increase awareness of the unique issues that mixed race individuals face.

Consequently, the purpose of the present study is to explore the mixed race experience within its complex contemporary framework. The goal is to investigate the factors that influence the development of a mixed race identity. The information gathered from this study will provide a Canadian contribution to theories relating to racial identity development and a post-modern analysis of race as a socially constructed category. Moreover, this study explores the experiences of mixed race individuals that are not of Black and White parentage, which is a topic that is under-represented in the mixed race literature (Mahtani, 2001). A deeper understanding of the factors that influence the mixed race identity will add to the current literature by enhancing our knowledge of the Western Canadian, non-Black-and-White mixed race individual’s lived experience. Additionally, the results of the present study may help counsellors to increase their own awareness of mixed race issues by encouraging them to challenge any qualms they may consciously or unconsciously harbour about mixed race individuals. Considering the increasing mixed race population, it is important that researchers begin to focus on supportive measures to promote healthy mixed race identity development…

Read the entire thesis here.

Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 35, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
E-ISSN: 1946-3170 Print ISSN: 0163-755X
DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0078

David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English
University of St. Thomas

Passing narratives have long been a fixture of American literature. For African American authors, plots of racial mobility have been used to expose the permeability of racial boundaries and to reveal the irrationality of racial categorization, while for many white authors, passing narratives have expressed fears of racial contamination as well as voyeuristic fantasies of blackness. Our interest in stories of passing, whether fictional or autobiographical, has not waned, and the popularity of recent memoirs, novels, and films depicting passing and mixed raciality attests to this fact. Baz Dreisinger‘s study, Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (2008), capitalizes on the enduring curiosity surrounding the transgression of racial boundaries. While passing has mostly been thought of as a black-to-white affair, Dreisinger focuses on those crossing the color line in the direction of white-to-black. Her investigation of white-to-black passing provides a compelling perspective on past and current perceptions of race in American culture.

Dreisinger sets the parameters of her study by positing white-to-black passing as a commonality rather than an anomaly. She distinguishes between black and white passing, explaining that white passing is about neither deception nor survival. White passing is not even exactly about successfully becoming black. For Dreisinger, white-to-black passing is about those “moments of slippage in which whites perceive themselves, or are perceived by others as losing their whiteness and ‘acquiring’ blackness”…

Read or purchase the article here.

How Mixed-Race Politics Entered the United States: Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Appeal’

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 56, Number 1, 2010 (Nos. 218 O.S.)
pages 71-104
DOI: 10.1353/esq.0.0043

Robert Fanuzzi, Assistant Chair and Associate Professor of English
St. Johns University, Queens, New York

For scholars of the colonial and early national United States, it is difficult if not impossible to retell the story of social egalitarianism and political liberty without recounting the social, political, and legal codes governing the practice of miscegenation. Under both the colonial British regime and the post-Revolutionary political order of the United States, these laws and customs operated hand in hand with the equally determinate laws of slavery and citizenship, helping to decide who was a democratic subject and who was not.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, prohibitions against mixed-race marriages and extramarital unions along with their mixed-race offspring helped to create a new, putatively classless caste system, which equated the dignity of free labor and property holding with a pure British ancestry and the indignity of coercive labor with an African ancestry. In doing so, these laws paved the way for a historic argument for civic equality that rendered the American colonist the genetic bearer of English liberty.  In the new American republic, miscegenation laws functioned even more transparently as citizenship decrees, stipulating the whiteness of politically enfranchised subjects and, often capriciously, the blackness of the enslaved or disenfranchised. The logical outcome of these laws, the “one drop of blood” provision, was a testament to the determination of the privileged caste to maintain an artificially scarce supply of citizens by keeping their legal, economic, and political assets from their mixed-race descendants.

Miscegenation laws and regulations played an equally formative role in the civic culture of the antebellum era, when social prejudice against race mixing helped to police civil relations and to foreclose the scope of civic activism…

Read or purchase the article here.

Ambiguity and the Ethics of Reading Race and Lynching in James W. Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1912)

Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS)
Volume 10 (2009)
ISSN: 1861-6127

Carmen Dexl
University of Erlangen

James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) discusses the causes, conditions, and implications of passing in a segregated society. The essay argues that the novel’s aesthetics of ambiguity conveys and reflects an ambivalence towards the concept of race. Using theories of Geoffrey Galt Harpham and John Guillory, it elaborates an ethics of reading race and lynching in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

…Being of mixed-race heritage and blurring the black/white binary, the Ex-Colored Man as a passing figure personifies this “category crisis.” As the living proof of the instability—and hence unreliability—of the category race, the Ex-Colored Man is necessarily ambivalent towards the ontology of racial categories. Apart from his intention to remain anonymous, his and all the other characters’ namelessness throughout the novel further denote a “sense of rootlessness” (Andrews xix) in a constantly changing modern society that is paradoxically firmly rooted in exactly these unreliable conceptions of race. His moral dilemma and contradictory attitudes towards himself and society result from being at once an insider and beneficiary as well as an outsider and critical observer of that very social system…

Read the entire article here.

Breaking Barriers for Multiracial Students

National Forum of Multicultural Issues Journal
Sponsored by The Texas Chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education
Volume 7, Number 1 (2010)
Pages 1-6

Adriana Jones
Prairie View A&M University
Prairie View, Texas

Jeremy Jones
Prairie View A&M University
Prairie View, Texas

The number of multiracial college students has increased and will continue to increase rapidly over the years thus it is important for Student Affairs educators and administrators, and mental health providers to understand this population.  This essay will provide an overview of barriers often faced by multiracial students and will discuss strategies that can be used to help break these barriers for this population.

Read the entire article here.

MixedRaceStudies.org

A Paper Presented at
Who Counts & Who’s Counting? 38th Annual Conference National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference
Session: The race in “mixed” race? Reiterations of power and identity
Washington, DC
2010-04-10

Steven F. Riley

Abstract

In the paper I describe the origins of www.MixedRaceStudies.org a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary (sociology, psychology, history, law, etc.) English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism.  I discuss the inspiration, conception, development and future plans for the site.

Good Morning.

I would like to take a few moments of your time to describe an online resource I created a year ago called MixedRaceStudies.org.  Before I continue, I would like to thank Dr. Rainier Spencer and Dr. Sue-Je Gage for giving me this opportunity to speak to you.

The heightened visibility of self-described ‘mixed-race’ individuals in the entertainment industry and professional sports has of recent years has captured the attention and fascination of the American public.  This heightened awareness has even led to changes in the way our decennial census collects racial data.  Even more recently, the election of ‘mixed-race’ individuals across the country from mayors (such as this city) to the president of our country has led some to believe we have in fact entered a ‘post-racial’ society.

The skeptic in me has always questioned the validity of the American popular culture multiracial gaze.  To be honest, I too have occasionally succumbed to the gaze of increasing numbers of interracial relationships (like my own 24 year relationship with my loving wife Julia), and the offspring of such unions.  In the Silver Spring, Maryland area that my wife and I live in, interracial couples and mixed-race individuals seem to be everywhere.  And this, in a racialized society as ours is fascinating.  But, like many things, what is fascinating today may be irrelevant next week, despised next month, discarded next year… and rediscovered next century. 

I was drawn to the subject of mixed race because it is so complex.  I wanted to ask questions, and to share the answers and information I found along the way.  For me, current discourses about multiracialism in pop-culture today provide us with only a cursory understanding of the lives of ‘mixed-race’ people and the societal implications of their increasing presence.  The many shortcomings of pop-cultural discourses are too numerous to mention, but include.

1. An utter lack of historical perspective.  This ‘new’ thing has been occurring in the Americas for over five centuries.
2. An unwillingness to dismiss or even question the (scientifically proven) fallacious concept of ‘race’ despite the fact that mixed-race individuals—as Dr. Spencer says—embody its’ fallaciousness.
3. An unwillingness to question whether our ‘fascination’ with multiracialism may in fact be due to the persistence of racism.
4. A tendency to view the increased number of ‘mixed-race’ individuals of heralding in an era of a “post-racial” America.

To that end, I have turned my gaze away from television, away from rising and falling sports figures, towards the writings of individuals who have dedicated their life’s work to elucidating us about multiracialism.

Conception

 I began this journey, quite by accident in January 2008 when the son of a college friend of my wife Julia came to visit us for dinner at our home.  This young man—who we had not seen since he was a child—is the son of a black Haitian man and a white Jewish woman, mentioned to us that he was bringing along his girlfriend.  This caused me to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering about the girlfriend. I’m sure you have heard the phrase or question that “dare’th not speak its’ name”… “What are you?”  “What is she?”  I wondered was she “black” like his father or “white” like his mother?  Would he be in an interracial relationship like his parents?  Would his parents approve of the relationship? Was I asking myself a lot of stupid questions and what did it matter anyway?

As it turned out, our young guest’s girlfriend (now fiance) was in fact the daughter of a black father and a white mother also.  Were they an interracial couple?  Would their children be ‘mixed-race’?…. or not.

As the evening progressed, our conversation turned to politics and our preferred candidates for Democratic presidential nomination.  Julia and I supported then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, because… we thought she could win.  Our two young guests disagreed and were convinced—and convinced us—that this “black man of mixed heritage” named Barack Obama could indeed be elected to the presidency.

My journey continued after the election of President Obama and before his inauguration.  It seemed that everywhere I looked there were articles about interracial families on television programs, in newspapers, magazines and websites… again.  Were “mixed race” people in hiding since a previous victory, not in the electoral politics, but on the golf course in 1997?  Was America on the verge of a becoming post-post racial society?  What I yearned for was not another 15 second sound bite about the “changing face of America”, but an honest appraisal of what the apparent heightened visibility of mixed-race people really meant for America.

In February of 2009, I discovered the online podcast Mixed Chicks Chat.  Started in May of 2007 by educator Fanshen Cox and author Heidi W. Durrow, this wonderful podcast promotes itself as “the only weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.”  Available live or recorded via TalkShoe or recorded via Apple’s iTunes, the 150 episodes—I appeared as a featured guest on the 150^thepisode this last Wednesday—provide listeners with insightful and thought provoking discussion surrounding ‘mixed-race’ issues.  After listening to several live podcasts, I found the hosts Ms. Cox and Ms. Durrow quite knowledgeable about all aspects of the ‘mixed-race’ experience.  Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the some of the listeners.  On many occasions, I would post links in the “chat room” to books and articles for fellow participants unfamiliar with terms such as “one-drop rule”, “Jim Crow”,  etc.  It was after a few weeks of this exercise, I decided to create an online resource to answer these many questions.

To obtain the knowledge to begin the process of building this resource, I purchased and read Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe’s ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader.  Considered by some the definitive anthology on the subject, ‘Mixed Race’ Studies takes the reader on a 150 year interdisciplinary trek encompassing the origins of “miscegenation theory” and false notions of moral and hybrid degeneracy, to contemporary discourses on identity politics and celebration, and finally to the critiques of these political movements.  Great anthologies like ‘Mixed Race’ Studies encourage the reader to further their scholarship by reading additional discourses by the various authors.  That was and remains the goal for my site, which I named MixedRaceStudies.org in April of 2009.

www.MixedRaceStudies.org  is a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary (sociology, psychology, history, law, etc.) English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism.

The site contains over 1,000 posts that include over 400 articles, 300 books, and over 100 papers, reports and dissertations.

The site is by no means an exhaustive listing of discourses on ‘mixed race’ scholarship.  Some examples of the scholarship that is not available on the site are as follows:

• Non-English language resources.
• Out-of-print resources.  This includes important texts such as Everett V. Stonequist’s The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (1937) and other works.
• Non-web-based resources.

I created this site:

• For all of those who think that race is a biological construction.
• For Daphne who thought interracial marriage was not legal in the US until 1967.
• For those who have always wondered why people who have complexions that range from white to dark-brown are classified as ‘black’.
• For the young student of my 40-something pal Bradley in Manchester, England who was asked if there were any ‘mixed-race’ people older than him in Britain.
• For Mike who told me there “weren’t many scholarly resource available on mixed-race identity.”

The goals of the site are to:

• Provide visitors with links to books, articles, dissertations, multimedia and any other resources to enable them to further their (and my) knowledge on the topic.
• Remind visitors that so-called “racial mixing” has been occurring in the Americas for over five centuries and in fact, all of the founding nations of the Americas were mixed-race societies at their inception.
• Ultimately support a vision of the irrelevance of race.

In supporting the vision of the irrelevance of race, I’ve been forced to ask myself the following questions.

• Is the ideal of no racial distinction a possibility?
• Does mixed race identity continue the racial hierarchy/paradigm or does it change it?
• Will the acknowledgement and study of multiraciality help or hinder a goal of a post-racial future?
• Will the sheer volume of mixed race people provoke change?
• …But if everybody has been mixed already and our racial paradigm hasn’t changed in the last 400 years, what do we make of the changes in these last 40 years?
• And what changes can we expect in the next 40?

Future plans for the site

After creating the site, I firmly believed that the audience would be individuals like myself—non-scholars—with a casual to moderate interest in multiracial identity issues.  At best, I hoped that parents or caregivers of mixed race children would find some interest in the site.  To my surprise, I have discovered that the overwhelming audience—at least by those who have contacted me—have been individuals in academia!  Many scholars in fact, are regular subscribers to the site.  A professor at the University of California has told me that his institution has been trying to set up a website similar to mine, but for now there are no funds to proceed.

As for now, MixedRaceStudies.org remains a labor of love, requiring minimal financial resources to host ($10.00 per/month).  Future plans involve utilizing my programming and database skills to produce a scholar bibliographic search engine and other features.

The Census and the Social Construction of Race

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2010-03-29

Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Occidental College

Social and biological scientists agree that race and ethicity are social constructions, not biological categories.  The U.S. government, nonetheless, has an official position on what categories are “real.”  You can find them on the U.S. Census…

…Alvaro V. asked us to talk a little bit about the Census.  So, here are some highlights from the hour-long lecture I give in my Race and Ethnicity course…

Read the entire article here.

Does the British State’s Categorisation of ‘Mixed Race’ Meet Public Policy Needs?

Social Policy & Society
Volume 9, Number 1 (January 2010)
pages 55-69
DOI:10.1017/S1474746409990194

Peter J. Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

The England and Wales 2001 Census was the first to include ‘Mixed’ categories which have now been adopted across government. The four ‘cultural background’ options were highly prescriptive, specifying combinations of groups. This paper assesses how satisfactorily these analytical categories captured self-ascribed cultural affiliation based on the criteria of validity, reliability and utility of the data for public services. Finally, the paper asks whether we now need a census question on ethnic origin/ancestry in addition to—or instead of—ethnic group or whether multi-ticking or a focus on family origins might give more useful public policy data and better measure the population’s ethnic diversity.

Read the entire article here.

‘Passing’ Across The Color Line In The Jazz Age

National Public Radio
All Things Considered: You Must Read This
2010-04-07

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. Her debut novel is “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky.”

There are novels that are enjoyable to read and others that say something about the world.  And sometimes there are novels that are both.  Passing by Nella Larsen is one of those books…

Read the entire essay here.
Listen to the essay here.

Racially Mixed People, DDC Table 5 Ethnic and National Groups, and MARC 21 Bibliographic Format Field 083 

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 7 (October 2009)
pages 657 – 670
DOI: 10.1080/01639370903112005

Julianne Beall
Library of Congress, Washington, DC

This article explores ways that notation in Table 5 Ethnic and National Groups of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system can be used to extend subject access to works about racially mixed people beyond that provided by the rules for constructing standard DDC numbers. The proposed approach makes use of the new 083 field (Additional Dewey Decimal Classification Number) in the MARC Bibliographic Format and techniques developed for DeweyBrowser beta v2.0 by OCLC Research, especially tag clouds.

Read or purchase the article here.