Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race

Routledge
2004-03-04
280 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780789021441; Hardback ISBN-10: 0789021447
Paperback ISBN: 9780789021458; Paperback ISBN-10: 0789021455

Editor: Cathy A. Thompson, Psychologist
Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)
University of California at San Diego

Editor: Angela R. Gillem, Professor & Clinical Psychologist
Arcadia University

Get a unique perspective on the female biracial experience!

Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race examines how physical appearance, cultural knowledge, and cultural stereotypes affect the experience of mixed-race women in belonging to, and being accepted within, their cultures. This unique book combines empirical research, theoretical papers, and first-person narrative to address issues relevant to providing therapy to biracial women and girls, helping therapists and counselors develop a treatment framework based on sociocultural factors. Researchers, practitioners, and academics provide insight into the biracial reality, taking multiple aspects of clients’ lives into account rather than looking for simple hierarchies of well-being based on race.

Biracial Women in Therapy is a building block for mental health practitioners in the construction of theory and practice in working with biracial females. The book examines how a biracial women’s racial/ethnic identity intersects with her gender and sexual identity to affect her sense of belonging and acceptance, addressing issues of appearance, social class, disability, power and guilt, and dating and marriage. Topics addressed in the book include:

• the complexities of multiple minority status
• how ethnic differences affect biracial adolescents
• issues encountered by biracial women from a sociohistorical context
• biracial women’s attitudes toward counseling
• stereotypes of marginalization and identity confusion
• a multicultural feminist approach to counseling
• and a first-person narrative of one author’s racial and sexual identity development

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard Place of Race
• From Exotic to a Dime a Dozen – Maria P. P. Root
• Utilizing the Strengths of Our Cultures: Therapy with Biracial Women and Girls
• Biracial (Black/White) Women: A Qualitative Study of Racial Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for Therapy
• Understanding and Assisting Black/White Biracial Women in Their Identity Development
• Negotiating Racial Identity: Biracial Women and Interactional Validation
• Dating Practices, Racial Identity, and Psychotherapeutic Needs of Biracial Women
• When Face and Soul Collide: Therapeutic Concerns with Racially Ambiguous and Nonvisible Minority Women
• Counseling Biracial Women: An Intersection of Multiculturalism and Feminism
• Depressive Symptoms and Attitudes Toward Counseling as Predictors of Biracial College Women’s Psychological Help-Seeking Behavior
• Biracial Lesbian and Bisexual Women: Understanding the Unique Aspects and Interactional Processes of Multiple Minority Identities
• Conversations, Not Categories: The Intersection of Biracial and Bisexual Identities
• Out of the Closet but Still in Hiding: Conflicts and Identity Issues for a Black-White Biracial Lesbian
• Therapeutic Considerations in Work with Biracial Girls
• Fitting In and Feeling Good: Patterns of Self-Evaluation and Psychological Stress Among Biracial Adolescent Girls
• Mixed Race Women: One More Mountain to Climb
• Index
• Reference Notes Included

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance

Rutgers University Press
2006
224 pages
b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3977-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3976-8

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Of all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes of black womanhood and a challenge to the color line. For others, they represented key aspects of modernity and race coding central to the New Negro Movement. Due to the mulatta’s frequent ability to pass for white, she represented a variety of contradictory meanings that often transcended racial, class, and gender boundaries.

Portraits of the New Negro Woman investigates the visual and literary images of black femininity that occurred between the two world wars. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson traces the origins and popularization of these new representations in the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance and how they became an ambiguous symbol of racial uplift constraining African American womanhood in the early twentieth century.

In this engaging narrative, the author uses the writings of Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as well as the work of artists like Archibald Motley and William H. Johnson to illuminate the centrality of the mulatta by examining a variety of competing arguments about race in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

Duke University Press
1997
232 pages
Cloth – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1975-7
Paperback – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1971-9

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Professor
Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa

How do adult children of interracial parents—where one parent is Jewish and one is Black—think about personal identity?  This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay’s Black, Jewish, and Interracial.  Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities.

Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, “passing,” intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness.  Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.

American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race”

1998-05-17

The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of “race.”  We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists.

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species….

Read the entire statement here.

‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader

Routledge
2004-06-17
352 pages
Trim Size: 246mm x 174mm
Binding(s): Hardback, Paperback
ISBN13: 9780415321631; ISBN-10: 0415321638

Editor:  Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

Mixed race studies is one of the fastest growing, as well as one of the most important and controversial areas in the field of race and ethnic relations. Bringing together pioneering and controversial scholarship from both the social and the biological sciences, as well as the humanities, this reader charts the evolution of debates on ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book is divided into three main sections:

• tracing the origins: miscegenation, moral degeneracy and genetics
• mapping contemporary and foundational discourses: ‘mixed race’, identities politics, and celebration
• debating definitions: multiraciality, census categories and critiques.

This collection adds a new dimension to the growing body of literature on the topic and provides a comprehensive history of the origins and directions of ‘mixed race’ research as an intellectual movement. For students of anthropology, race and ethnicity, it is an invaluable resource for examining the complexities and paradoxes of ‘racial’ thinking across space, time and disciplines.

Table of Contents

• Part 1:  Tracing the Origins: Miscegenation, Moral Degeneracy, and Genetics
• Part 2:  Mapping Contemporary and Foundational Discourses: ‘Mixed Race’, Identities Politics, and Celebration
• Part 3:  Debating Definitions: Multiraciality, Census Categories, and Critique.  Index.

Spurious Issues: Race And Multiracial Identity Politics In The United States

Westview Press
1999-08-12
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0813336775; ISBN-13: 978-0813336770

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Recent times have seen the rise of a movement lobbying for explicit recognition of multiracial identity as separate from any other racial category. Factions in this movement have petitioned the government for the addition of a federal multiracial category to the census and to other official forms. While these attempts have as yet been unsuccessful, the potential impact of such a change cannot be overstated. Rainier Spencer takes up the claims of multiracial activists, subjecting their arguments to a level of scholarly rigor they have heretofore not been required to meet. Demonstrating that the twin justifications for a federal multiracial category—accuracy and self-esteem—are inherently contradictory, Spencer presents an absorbing analysis of race, multirace, and categorization that shakes the very foundations of racial identity on all sides. Spurious Issues is a critical examination of multiracial identity politics in the United States, and of the specific issues surrounding federal racial classification. It is also a book about race generally, an extended argument that invites and challenges its readers to assume a skeptical position in regard to one of the most widely accepted but rarely analyzed components of life in the United States.

Shifting Whiteness: A Life History Approach to U.S. White Parents of “Biracial” or “Black” Children

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Joshua Carter Woodfork, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005

This research examines how the experiences of parenting “biracial” or “black” children have affected the beliefs of white parents who have published books and essays regarding their situations.  The participating parents claim that because of their relationship with their children of African descent their self-understandings, including their own sense of their racial identity, are altered.  They now speak of themselves as “not quite white,” “black by proxy,” or as a “bridge” (between the races).  My dissertation, “Shifting Whiteness: A Life History Approach to U.S. White Parents of ‘Biracial’ or ‘Black’ Children,” explores how such parents talk about and conceptualize their experiences, including the implications of these parents’ claims of racial identity transformation.

This dissertation posits that the white parents’ shift in attitudes and beliefs reflects their vivid engagement with the racism and racial experiences that their children endure.  The discord between the parents’ claim of racial transformation and their continued benefiting from white privilege is also examined. Consideration of the parents’ shifts provides a better understanding of racial beliefs and transformations at the individual, micro-level, which contributes to society’s general knowledge about the conception of race.

Understanding white parents’ decisions to write about their identity transformations as—to use Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1994) phrase—a “racial project,” I investigate its aims and limits, exploring which racial projects are presented by this group of U.S. white parents of biracial and black children. John L. Caughey’s (1994) approach to how individuals operate with “cultural traditions” and ideas of “border crossing” also provide theoretical frameworks.  Tools of analysis include ethnographic life history methods, textual analysis, critical race theory, and intersectional analysis.  My research method involves complementing a close reading of the writings of these authors that are white and parents with qualitative ethnographic life history interviews that gather detailed information from each of these individuals. I treat their publications together with my transcribed interviews as case studies through which I compare and contrast the similarities and differences in the belief changes and shifting that these informants have undergone, as well as their current constructions of race.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Beautiful beasts: Ambivalence and distinction in the gender identity negotiations of multiracialised women of Thai descent

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 30, Issue 5 (September-October 2007)
Pages 391-403
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2007.07.003

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

This qualitative analysis of interviews with women of Thai and non-Thai parentage throws into question the current celebration of Eur/asianness and multiraciality.  The study describes multiracialisation as an ambivalent and differential process of categorisation which mobilises essentialist ideas of ‘stock’ and ‘breeding’.  A far cry from historical notions of ‘mixed-race degeneracy’, interviewees emerged from this process the ‘best of both worlds’. However, beside the ‘good mix’ there ran the spectre of the ‘bad mix’, and some had more access to celebratory identities than others. Celebratory notions of Eur/asian femininity were further qualified by the competing discourse of the ‘Thai prostitute’.  The precariousness with which interviewees could access normative ideals of desirability was especially visible in narratives of masculinity, non-white parentage, gender variance and childhood.  The article ends by advocating, in the place of a power-evasive celebration, challenges to the multiple overlapping power relations which underlie all acts of evaluation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Beyond Racial Exceptionalism: Explaining the Convergence of Mixed-Race Census Categorizations in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain

Canadian Political Science Association
81th Annual Conference
2009-05-27 through 2009-05-29

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

By examining racial classifications in national censuses this paper will explore moments of policy convergence that defy domestic explanations of the state’s regulation of racial identities. During the same time period, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada all moved towards ‘counting’ mixed-race on their national censuses; given their previous divergences in other areas of racial regulation, even in terms of previous modes of racial classification, this recent convergence is puzzling. In the United States, this move is largely attributed to the existence of a mixed-race social movement that pushed Congress for the change – but parallel developments in Canada and the U.K. occurred without the presence of a politically active civil society devoted to making the change. This begs an interesting question: Why the convergence? When domestic explanations prove insufficient, what can comparisons tell us? This paper will demonstrate the political salience of global trends surrounding race and racialism – specifically, the transnational discourses of multiculturalism and recognition that have pervaded ethnopolitics since the 1990s. Ultimately, it seeks to challenge conventional domestic explanations for institutional racial categorization, rejecting ‘exceptionalism’ in the sphere of problematic race relations and demonstrating the ways in which race can be studied in comparative context.

Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 8, Number 1, 2002
pages 67-90

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor
Department of Geography & Planning
University Toronto

This paper examines the ways ‘mixed race’ women in Canada contemplate their relationship to national identity. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how some women of ‘mixed race’ contest ideas of the nation as constituted through the policy of multiculturalism in Canada. To challenge the tropes of the national narrative, some women of ‘mixed race’ develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation, they effectively produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identifed ‘mixed race’ bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own bodies as intrinsically ‘multicultural’.  The paper ends by addressing the paradoxes of multiculturalism, emphasising through narratives that the policy produces hierarchical spaces against which some ‘mixed race’ women imaginatively negotiate, contest and challenge perceptions of their racialised and gendered selves.

Read the entire article here.