Mixed Race Studies

How Understanding Interracial Families Contributes to Our Understanding of Race and Family

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-11

22 pages

Jessica Mills

In family sociology, racial differences have long been viewed as a defining feature of family life. Yet, the treatment of the family/race relationship in mainstream sociology has had major limitations. Many family scholars today are challenging the conventional wisdom about race and the family.  Their approaches to the matter of racial differences in family life have begun to refocus the family field.  This paper will provide a brief retrospective and prospective view of contemporary thought, analysis, and supporting research in the family field. It will also synthesize current sociological work on interracial families and assess its usefulness for advancing both family studies and the field of race.

Read the entire paper here.

Assimilating Blackness?: Multiple-Race Identification and African American Mate Selection

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel
San Francisco, CA
2004-08-14

23 pages

Jenifer L. Bratter, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research
Rice University

I investigate the influence of multiracial identification on assortative mating by race for the African American population. Using 2000 1 percent Public Use Microdata File of the U.S. Census, I compare mate selection patterns of the single race non-Hispanic Black population to the multiple race population whose selected “Black” at least once. I employ multinomial logistic regression models to explore how likely a respondent selects Black (single race) spouses compared to non-Hispanic Whites and Multiracial Blacks. The results show Black persons who selected at least one other race are more likely than their single race counterparts to have White spouses, they are far more likely to have multiracial spouses.  These analyses also show that neither of these tendencies are explained by other identity choices such as alternative races or ancestry responses, structural assimilation of the multiracial population, or regional location near other interracial couples. These results indicate that a “Black” identity is still salient in the mate selection of multiracial Blacks.  Although some marital assimilation is occurring , multiracial persons appear to engage in more marital homogamy with other multiracial persons.

Read the entire paper here.

Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America

Mercer University Press
2006
192 pages
ISBN (paperback): 9780881460742
ISBN (hardback): 9780881460131

Tim Hashaw

Some oppressed groups fought with guns, some fought in court, some exercised civil disobedience; the Melungeons, however, fought by telling folktales. Whites and blacks gave the name “children of perdition” to mixed Americans during the 300 years that marriage between whites and nonwhites was outlawed. Mixed communities ranked socially below communities of freed slaves although they had lighter skin. To escape persecution caused by the stigma of having African blood, these groups invented fantastic stories of their origins, known generally as “lost colony” legends. From the founding of America, through the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II, the author documents the histories of several related mixed communities that began in Virginia in 1619 and still exist today, and shows how they responded to racism over four centuries. Conflicts led to imprisonment, whippings, slavery, lynching, gun battles, forced sterilization, and exile—but they survived.  America’s view of mixing became increasingly intolerant and led to a twentieth-century scheme to forcibly exile U.S. citizens, with as little as “one drop” of black blood, to Africa even though their ancestors arrived before the Mayflower. Evidence documents the collaboration between American race purists and leading Nazi Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust. The author examines theories of ethnic purity and ethnic superiority, and reveals how mixed people responded to “pure race” myths with origin myths of their own as Nazi sympa-thizers in state and federal government segregated mixed Americans, citing the myth of Aryan supremacy. Finally, Children of Perdition explains why many Americans view mixing as unnatural and shows how mixed people continue to confront the Jim Crow “one drop” standard today.

MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons

Eclectica Magazine
July/August 2001

Tim Hashaw

Introduction

They settled in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the Engllish Crown and American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. They lived free in the South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.  Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the developing saga of America’s largest mixed community. Now finally, though stridently denied by some descendants and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia are beginning to emerge from the dim pages of the past to take their rightful places of honor in American history.

One misconception over Melungeon origins comes from confusion over the status of these African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to this mixed community.  Modern scholars mistakenly assume that the African heritage of Melungeons derives from the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves in the years 1780 to 1820.

Wrong on two counts. In fact:

1. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619.

2. Not one single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African ancestors of Melungia were freeborn for more than three hundred years.

This bears repeating.

Melungeons are not the offspring of white southern plantation owners and helpless black slaves. Most of the African ancestors of Melungeons were never chattel slaves. They were frequently black men freed from indentured servitude just like many white servants of the 17th century. Less often, African ancestors of the Melungeons either purchased their freedom from slavery or were freed upon the deaths of their masters.

The black patriarchs of the Melungeons were commonly free African-American men who married white women in Virginia and other southern colonies, often before 1700.  Paul Heinegg in his revealing book, Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, provides strong evidence that less than one percent of all free Africans were born of white slave-owners.

Understanding the status of the African-American ancestors of Melungeons and the era, in which they came to America, is critical to understanding their history and the origin of the name “Melungeon”….

Read the entire article here.

What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty? An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom

Television & New Media
Volume 10, Number 6 (November 2009)
pages 521-535
DOI: 10.1177/1527476409340906

Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Research, Measurement & Statistics
Georgia State University, Atlanta

This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse is the notion of a “color-blind society” (meaning that we no longer see color or that the color of one’s skin will not determine his or her life chances).  This idea has been has been recently redefined by the media as “postracial” (meaning that we have moved beyond race and that race no longer structures our thinking or our actions). Either discourse silences talk of racial privilege and disadvantage.  As a discursive racial project, the Ugly Betty text helps reify notions of race and difference.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, Multirace, and Racial Heterogeneity of Friends

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, TBA
New York, New York City
2007-08-11

27 pages

Bethany Hashiguchi

Are biracial youth more likely to be in racially heterogeneous friendship networks than single race youth, and do they act as catalysts for decreased social distance? Using a sample of youth in grades 7-12 in 1994-1995 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Youth, I study the effects of race and school context on racial diversity of friendship networks to answer these questions.  I find that biracial and Hispanic youth are more likely to report heterogeneous friendship groups than non-Hispanic single race youth. In addition, school racial composition is important in determining the relationship between race and friendship heterogeneity.  These results suggest that biracial and Hispanic youth bridge the social distance among different single race groups and help weaken social boundaries between racial groups by fostering interracial interactions.

Read the entire paper here.

Determinants of Multiracial Identification and Their Effects on Poverty Estimtates among US Children

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Hilton San Francisco & Renaissance Parc 55 Hotel
San Francisco, California
2004-08-14

21 pages

Anthony Daniel Perez, Assistant Professor
Chapel Hill Department of Sociology
University of North Carolina

This project examines the role of family background on the identification of multiracial children in the U.S. and considers the impact of various classificatory schemes on child poverty estimates. I seek to resolve several questions in this analysis. First, I consider the extent to which key family background characteristics such as income, education, and race influence patterns of child race reporting (monoracial vs. multiracial) by parents in interracial unions. I then consider whether child poverty tabulations are sensitive to how and where we include multiracial children in the estimates. In undertaking this analysis, I examine the large, nationally representative 5 percent Public Use Microdata from the Census 2000 long form.

Read the entire paper here.

The Multiple Race Population: Is it Increasing or Decreasing?

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Montreal Convention Center
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2006-08-11

15 pages

Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
Population Studies Center and Sociology Department
University of Michigan

A vibrant social movement developed in the 1990s, argued that many Americans had parents from differences races and that the federal statistical system should not classify persons into only one race. They succeeded in effecting the most dramatic change ever to occur in the measurement of race since Office of Management and Budget ruled in 1997 that the census and federal agencies must allow persons to identify with as many races as they wished.

Census 2000 found that one American in 40 identified with two or more races.  Because of increases in interracial marriage, a growth of the multiple race population was anticipated. The Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey asks the race question to a sample of 800,000 households.  The percent identifying with two or more races decreased from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 1.9 percent four years later.

Census Bureau surveys report a substantial change in the racial identity selected by those who identify themselves as Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.  The percent of Hispanics who used a Spanish term for their race increased from 29 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2004. Without doubt Hispanics are increasing using a Spanish term as their racial identity.

Read the entire paper here.

Multirace.com: The Promise and Pitfalls of Multiracial Cyberspace

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Atlanta Hilton Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia
2003-08-16
27  pages

Erica Childs, Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Hunter College at the City University of New York

Through the Internet, multiracial individuals and families, even those who have felt isolated in racially segregated communities, can transcend geographically defined communities just by clicking and typing.  Type “multiracial” in any search engine and hundreds of results will be given, identifying the varied websites that exist.  Surfing through these sites from individual webpages of interracial couples to larger sites, it becomes clear that these sites are not detached and separate but rather form an intricate web, connected by links. These websites are an instrumental part of the multiracial movement.

The promise and potential of multiracial cyberspace is that it does provide a multiracial community and network, an “imagined” community among the specific assemblage of linked sites and web browsers not bound by geographical boundaries where most of the members may never meet though “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Y et the Internet mirrors the larger society in that websites and web publications are often racialized, primarily geared towards one racial group or community thereby reinforcing the color line. Likewise multiracial websites exist on the color line, with a few challenging the racial status quo by bringing together all races, while most simply reproduce the racial hierarchy by further demarcating a separate multiracial community. This paper explores the significance of these “multiracial” websites, the ideologies they support, and their role in the multiracial movement. The images and ideas they project about multiracialism and racial politics is addressed. In particular the ways that these websites attempt to construct a multiracial community and promote a particular type of multiracial identity is highlighted.

Read the entire paper here.

Revisiting The Hollow Hope: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Repeal of Interracial Marriage Restrictions

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Atlanta Hilton Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia
2003-08-13

21 pages

Nancy Martin

This paper outlines a research proposal for the analysis of the state-by-state repeal of interracial marriage restrictions, and particularly the role of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in this process. Rosenberg (1991) argues that the Supreme Court actions are largely inconsequential to progress and social reform. This proposal develops the repeal of interracial marriage restrictions as an important test case for Rosenberg’s theory.  What happened at the state-level in the years leading up to and after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision declaring interracial marriage prohibitions unconstitutional?  Was this decision a key moment in ensuring the repeal of these laws in Southern states? Alternatively, was Loving v. Virginia (1967) nothing more than a punctuation mark in the already advancing progress of state-level reforms?  This project has the potential to make three important contributions: update our knowledge on the history of state-by-state repeal of interracial marriage laws; confirm, modify or extend Rosenberg’s thesis from The Hollow Hope; and provide valuable insights for contemporary activists who continue to work for social reforms.

Read the entire paper here.