Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Identity in the Media

Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2008-05-22
18 Pages

Iliana Rucker
University of New Mexico

Many scholars have studied racial representations and have determined that images of racial groups we see on television shape the way we view these racial groups (Gorham, 1999; Tamborini & Mastro, 2000). This paper looks at how biracial/multiracial characters in film are represented and the language or lack of language used in the representation. In this paper, I examine the language in the films Imitation of Life and Get on the Bus, particularly regarding the biracial characters and how this racially mixed representation is either silenced or given a voice. The importance of this topic lies in the influential aspect of media.  There are very few biracial characters in the media. Their race plays into the message that they are sending, and I am curious in seeing who has the power to name their identity.

Read the entire paper here.

Political Discourse on Racial Mixture: American Newspapers, 1865 to 1970

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference
Palmer House Hotel
Hilton, Chicago, IL
2008-04-03

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

We trace American political discourse around multiracialism, race-mixing, and mixed-race people from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights era. We use two new sources of data: counts of keywords such as “mulatto” and “multiracial” in two black and four white newspapers over 150 years, and a content analysis of themes and assumptions in almost 2,100 articles from the same newspapers, also using keywords that indicate racial mixture.

These datasets provide evidence on two analytic and two substantive points: First, the press’s treatment of mixture permits us to analyze “racial meaning,” defined as the varied ways in which Americans construe, practice, and judge group-based identities and identifications. Second, the datasets enable us to trace the timing of changes in ideas about racial meaning, and to map these changes onto a new periodization of distinct institutional treatments of racial mixture. Substantively, the dataset show vividly how much Americans argued over what counted as a race, how people were to be allocated to and across races, and what implications racial groupings should have. The contemporary racial order, which looks inevitable and orderly in hindsight, was not at all clear while it was being created. Most importantly, the language of the newspaper articles shows vividly that Americans’ debates over racial mixture and racially mixed people were (and continue to be) a critical site for contestation over racial hierarchy, advance, and equality.

Read the entire paper here.

Policing the Borderlands: White- and Black-American Newspaper Perceptions of Multiracial Heritage and the Idea of Race, 1996–2006

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009)
pages 105-127
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01590.x

Michael C. Thornton
University of Wisconsin-Madison

By employing a new policy of “check all that apply,” the Census Bureau accommodated a mushrooming multiracial lobby demanding that its members be allowed a right to self-identification. With its implied shifting meaning of race, newspapers portrayed the reaction to this change as a firestorm of debate along racial fault lines, highlighted by Black-American inferences that this was a perilous decision. Using textual analysis, I examine from 1996 to 2006 how five Black-American and three White-American newspapers characterized multiracial people. White-American papers framed the discussion in two ways: (a) multiracial people epitomize a new era in which race has lost its bite, and (b) Black America stands in the way of their gaining their civil rights.  There were also two frames for the Black-American papers: (a) The lobby advocates individual identity and is undergirded by denial or distancing from Blackness, and (b) that focus undermines Black America’s future by playing into the misguided notion that race is socially insignificant.

Read or purchase the entire article here.