Mixed Race Studies

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.

Metisse Narratives

Soundings: A journal of politics and culture
Issue 5, Spring 1997

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

Jayne Ifekwunigwe discusses the testimonies of women of ‘mixed race’ parentage in the English-African diaspora.

Rather than representing a portrait of metisse (‘mixed race’) girls as unruly, at age six Sandra and Aneya have exposed the major problematic of ‘race’.  Their discussion highlights the cultural paradoxes of ‘race’ and colour which multiple generations of women, men and children in England silently negotiate in their everyday lives.  These individuals descend from lineages which cut across so-called different ‘black and white’ ‘races’, ethnicities, cultures, and classes. Their roots are both endogenous and exogenous.

In varied cultural and historical contexts, countless terms are employed to name such individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), metissage which more appropriately describe generations of individuals who by virtue of birth and lineage do not fit neatly into preordained sociological and anthropological categories.  In England, at the moment, there are a multitude of terms in circulation which describe individuals who straddle racial borders.  More often than not, received terminology either privileges presumed ‘racial’ differences (‘mixed race’) or obscures the complex ways in which being metis (se) involves both the negotiation of constructed ‘black’/’white’ racial categories and the celebration of converging cultures, continuities of generations and over-lapping historical traditions.  The lack of consensus as to which term to use, as well as the limitations of this discursive privileging of ‘race’ at the expense of generational, ethnic, and cultural concerns, led me to metis(se) and metissage…

…Gettin’ into me late teens, I didn’t think much about meself because of all these conflicts that were startin’ to come up from the past. Also new ones that were comin’ in from other communities – black communities – that were really shockin’ me. I mean there were times when I wouldn’t show me legs. I’d go through the summer wearing tights and socks. Cause I thought they were too light and too white-lookin’. There was a lot of pressure. I remember one day I was leanin’ up somewhere and this guy said to me, ‘Boy, aren’t your legs white.’ I just looked in horror, and felt really sick and wanted to just run away. I was thinkin’, God why didn’t you make me a bit darker? Why did you make me so light? It took me years to reconcile that…

Read the entire article here.

Nation and Miscegenation: Comparing Anti-Miscegenation Regulations in North America

Canadian Political Science Association
80th Annual Conference
2008-06-04 through 2008-06-06

Paper Dated: 2008-05

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

Nearly forty years after Loving v. Virginia, the historical prohibition of interracial relationships in the United States exemplifies the state’s regulation of intimate life.  Anti-miscegenation laws were not simply about the prevention interracial sexual relations; rather, the discourse also concerned the transgression of gendered/raced social boundaries, the exposure of raced/gendered sexualities, the threat of non-white access to white capital, and the potential of mixed-race progeny and the predicament of racial categorization.  While a number of legal and historical studies consider the emergence and existence of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States (Williamson, 1980; Davis, 1991;) comparative studies on this subject in political science are virtually non-existent.  However, the Canadian state also enacted antimiscegenation laws in the same era throughout various Indian Act regimes and informally regulated other white/non-white sexual relations.  This paper will explore the similarities and differences among discourses of anti-miscegenation in North America, seeking to demonstrate that: a) the decision to enact formal legislation can be partially attributed to a number of factors, including the demographic size of the non-white population and the threat posed by mixed-race progeny to the dominant group’s access to power, privilege and resources; b) contrary to the popular belief of the so-called ‘tolerance’ of Canadians, racist sentiments towards non-whites existed during the same era that anti-miscegenation laws were created and implemented in the United States; and c) the differences in anti-miscegenation regulation in Canada and the United States are strongly linked to discourses of white masculine nationalism.

Read the entire paper here.

The (Mono-) Racial Contract: Mixed-Race Implications

Canadian Political Science Association
79th Annual Conference
2007-05-30 through 2007-06-01

Paper Dated: 2007-05-17

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

Nearly a decade ago, Charles Mills brought ‘race’ into mainstream political theory through his theory of the Racial Contract; namely, that all social contracts are underwritten by the meta-political system of domination which privileges whites over nonwhites. Yet in Mills’ analysis – like most literature in the social sciences – the subjectivity of mixed-race identities is scarcely considered. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the Racial Contract for (s)he who is neither white nor nonwhite: the mixed-race subject. I contend applying the terms of the Racial Contract within the context of multiraciality in Canada will demonstrate both the unique racial positioning of the mixed-race subject and will further solidify Mills’ contention that the Racial Contract is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract.  Using The Racial Contract as a theoretical and methodological guide, this paper will follow three of Mills’ main arguments, incorporating mixed-race subjectivities and proving that: the Racial Contract has unique political, moral and epistemological implications for multiracials in Canada; the Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing not just personhood and subpersonhood, but also liminal personhood; and the ideological conditioning required by the Racial Contract involves a solidification of discrete racial categories, thus rendering the mixed-race subject as theoretically and vernacularly invisible. Using historical and contemporary examples from Canadian law and society, the scholarly contribution of this work is its merging of Canadian content and foci with the emerging, American-dominated literature known as critical mixed-race theory…

…Though a powerful legal paradigm in the U.S. dictated the racial identities of mixed-race children as ‘nonwhite’ from birth, the phenomenon of ‘passing’ erupted while miscegenation laws were still firmly in place. The lighter one’s skin happened to be, the finer his or her hair, the further away from a nonwhite racial identity (s)he could move, the less stigmatisation from dominant society (s)he faced. ‘Passing,’ therefore, always refers to passing as white. This phenomenon reinforces racial aesthetics as one of the means through which the biological construction of ‘race’ was able to negate the existence of multiraciality.  If a multiracial person could pass for white and gain access to social and economic opportunities denied to people of colour, self-identifying as such was never a solidification of mixed-race heritage. Rather, it was a forced denial borne from the necessity to identify as something – but the choice of categories were strictly divided in broad strokes of black, white, yellow and red, leaving no room for anything that was some (or even all) of the above. Further, this phenomenon elucidates another aspect of multiraciality deemed threatening by the dominant race: that of identifiability. Using ‘race’ to distinguish between persons and subpersons, the Racial Contract requires a means of identifying each from the other. Those who blur this distinction indeed pose a problem for the maintenance of the racial hierarchy itself. Subpersons must be kept firmly in place through proactive measures; being able to identify them was crucial to the Racial Contract’s continued existence. The alleged racial determinants of identity (and therefore destiny) were superficial morphological characteristics such as hair texture, eye, nose, and mouth shape and size, and, above all else, skin colour. Without these tell-tale signs of inferiority, the hierarchy itself would be in danger…

Read the entire paper here.