Mixed Race Studies

Beyond White Ethnicity: Developing a Sociological Understanding of Native American Identity Reclamation

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2006
262 pages
Cloth: 0-7391-1393-3 / 978-0-7391-1393-6
Paper: 0-7391-1394-1 / 978-0-7391-1394-3

Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, Professor of Sociology
University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana

Through qualitative analysis of individuals, Kathleen J. Fitzgerald studies the social construction of racial and ethnic identity in Beyond White Ethnicity. Fitzgerald focuses on Native Americans, who despite a previously unacknowledged and uncelebrated background, are embracing and reclaiming their heritage in their everyday lives. Focusing on the purpose, process, and problems of this reclamation, Fitzgerald’s research provides an understanding of these issues. She also exposes how institutional power relations are racialized and how race is a social and political construction, and she helps us understand larger cultural transformations. This insightful collection of research sparks the interest of those who study sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

1. Reclaimer Narratives: Exposing the Duality of Structure in Identity Formation
2. Challenging White Hegemony: Reclaimers and the Culture Wars
3. Reclaimer Practices: Religion, Spirituality, Language, Family, and Food
4. “If It Looks Like a Duck”: Physical Appearance and Reclaimer Identity
5. “Wanna-bes” and “Indian Police”: The Battle Over Authenticity

Book Review: Spencer, R. (1999). Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States: Boulder, CO: Westview. Spencer, R. (2006). Challenging Multiracial ldentity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 38, Number 4 (March 2008)
pages 679-683
DOI: 10.1177/0021934706296761

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

Rainier Spencer(1999). Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States.
Boulder, CO: Westview.

Rainier Spencer (2006). Challenging Multiracial ldentity.
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

These two books have achieved for Rainier Spencer an iconoclastic place in mixed-race studies, which is a wonderful development for a genuine specialist in critical mixedness studies. His argument, in a nutshell, is that mixedrace and multiracial studies suffer from a contradictory set of aims. On one hand, they challenge the tenability of race and its impact on American society. On the other, they present a case for their inclusion in the American racial order. Spencer argues that the projects are not compatible, but even if they were so, there are other contradictions at the heart of the multiracial formulations of mixture offered by many scholars in the field. He points out, as I too have pointed out in my book Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997), that discussions that examine Black-White mixture often fail to acknowledge the already mixed dimension of African American people. As Spencer correctly points out in Challenging Multiracial Identity, by posing mixture against Black Americans, such advocates are in fact posing multiraciality against multiraciality.  In effect, they would have to create a conception of “purity” that erases mixture within one group as the basis of determining mixture for a preferred group. There are also logical problems of descent, which make in effect an offspring genetically connected to a parent in which she or he is considered ontologically different from. Spencer offers historically informed theoretical challenges to the field by exemplifying consistency in his constructivism through his constantly reminding the reader that just as social identities come into being, they can also go out of being. What, in other words, will be the organization of human identities in the future will be a function of the kinds of critical questions and social and political conditions that come to bear on their meaning and being. In this sense, he is building upon what Frantz Fanon [other bio], in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) called sociogenesis; that is, about how the social world produces identities…

Read the entire review here.

Exploring the Pastoral Dynamics of Mixed-Race Persons

Pastoral Psychology
Volume 52, Number 4 (March 2004)
Pages 315-328
DOI: 10.1023/B:PASP.0000016936.79800.89

Peter Yuichi Clark, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care
American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley, California

The number of persons in the United States who identify with more than one racial group is a steadily growing segment of the larger population. Yet pastoral care literature has not focused much attention to date on the spiritual care of multiracial people in America. This article intends to begin that conversation by examining their intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, suggesting four directions of caring, and then exploring five implications for offering compassionate and relevant ministry.

Read or purchase the article here.

Rethinking inclusion and exclusion: the question of mixed-race presence in late colonial India

University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History
Issue Five
2002
pp. 1-22

Satoshi Mizutani

This article examines the ambivalent meanings of mixed-race presence in late colonial India (from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). In doing so it contributes insights for pursuing the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the historiography of imperialism and colonialism. Studies on the imperial politics of inclusion and exclusion have not fully explicated the complex intersections between colonial exclusion and the metropolitan bourgeois hierarchy. We still tend, rather habitually, to mould our analytic categories, according to the coloniser/colonised dichotomy. This is not at all to imply that the analytic and empirical weight of this dichotomy should be downplayed: rather, it means that the coloniser/colonised axis itself stands in need of being re-considered.

The post-Independent historiography of colonial India has attended to the internal ordering of the colonised society, so as to evaluate the correlation between colonialist exclusion and nationalist inclusion, and to research the multiplicities of racial, class, gender and caste subordination under imperialism. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the internal configuration of the coloniser’s society. As Ann Stoler has pointed out, studies of colonial societies have long tended to assume white communities and colonisers as an abstract force, comprising a seamless homogeneity of bureaucratic and commercial agents. But it is possible, as this paper will show, to challenge this conventional view in ways that address the important imbrications of ‘racial’, class and gender identities.

This paper assesses the imperial significance of mixed-race identity in order to show that the imperial formation of ‘whiteness’ was predicated on the metropolitan order of class as well as the bipolar conceptualisation of racial difference. It will seek to demonstrate how the heterogeneous subjects of British society (men, women, middle or working classes, children, as well as ‘mixed bloods’) were differentially included in, or excluded from, the imperial body politic. Pointing to this internal differentiation, however, should not be taken as an end in itself.  Rather, it should be done as a step to show how the internal hierarchies of British society had repercussions on external relations with the colonised. In other words, the analysis of the internal composition of the coloniser’s society in this paper will not be intended as a way of replacing the coloniser/colonised dichotomy, but, on the contrary, will be meant as a means precisely to re-consider it from another vantage point…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Families and the Racial Identification of Mixed-Race Children: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study

Social Forces
Volume 84, Number 2 (December 2005)
pages 1131-1157
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2006.0007

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

In this article, a nationally-representative sample of kindergarten-aged children is used from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to explore the structure of parental racial designation of mixed-race children. The variation in these parental designations of a variety of mixed-race children is described. Parental racial designations in the three most common majority-minority interracial couplings – White/Hispanic, Black/White and Asian/White – are predicted using multinomial logistic regression models. The results may indicate a movement by the parents of these multiracial children away from minority status through racial labeling and towards “multiracial” and “White” – movements that are predicated upon gender, class and context. Critical discussions of the implications of these results as well as directions for future research are offered.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiraciality Reigns Supreme? Mixed-Race Japanese Americans and the Cherry Blossom Queen Pagent

Amerasia Journal
1997
Volume 23, No. 1
pp. 113-128

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Lecturer in Sociology
National University of Ireland, Maynooth

The notes of the koto echo through the hall and I am mesmerized by the vision on stage.  Beautiful Japanese women dressed in kimono who seem to glide across the stage as if it were ice, their arms outstretched as if to begin a hug so that their ornate sleeves flap slightly in the breeze.  But then I squint to get a closer look, and I suddenly can hear the synthesized drum beat accompanying the plaintive sounds of the koto and can see that not all of the faces look completely Japanese.

Since 1968, a northern California pageant has chosen a queen to reign over the Cherry Blossom Festival held each April in San Francisco’s Japantown.  The queen has come to symbolize northern California’s Japanese American community in many ways.  However, in the past five years half of the candidates, and two of the queens, have not been racially 100 percent Japanese.  The increased participation of mixed-race Japanese Americans has an effect on both the mixed-race and the mono-racial participants in the Queen Pagent as well as the community at large.  This article examines how mixed-race Japanese American women define themselves in what has traditionally been a monoracial setting.  In the context of the pageant, what does it mean to be Japanese American?  How is that defined and how is that definition changing due to the increased participation of mixe-race Japanese Americans?…

Read the entire article here.

The Alchemy of Mixed Race – Review Essay

The Global Review of Ethnopolitics
Vol. 2, no. 3-4
March/June 2003
pages 100-106

Ayo Mansaray
University of Middlesex, UK

Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race
Jill Olumide
Pluto Press, 2001
pp. 224 (including: foreword, notes, bibliography, index, appendix)

Rethinking “Mixed Race”
Parker & Song (eds)
Pluto Press, 2001
pp. 208 (including: foreword, notes, bibliography, index, appendix)

We are, in Britain, witnessing high levels of co-habitation, marriages and romantic liaisons between different ethnic and racial groups (Alibhai-Brown 2001: 78).  According to the latest census statistics for England and Wales, 660,000 people described themselves as being of mixed ethnicity. The largest mixed group is white and black Caribbean – 237,000, of whom 137,000 (57.5%) are aged 15 and under (ONS 2003).  Extrapolating from this data, the number of Britons involved in mixed raced situations is much greater than this number, and growing. The mixed race/ethnicity population is now the third largest minority in the UK, 14.6% of the total ethnic minority population, second to the Indian and Pakistani communities and larger than the Caribbean and African populations (ONS 2003).  Findings from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities indicate that just over half of Caribbean men had white partners, and a third of Caribbean women had white partners. 39% of Caribbean children have one white parent, mostly a black father and a white mother (Modood, Berthoud et al. 1997: 30f.).  The statistics point to a significant phenomenon, which has gone unrecognised…

Read the entire review here.

50 Experiences of Racially Mixed People

Racial Experiences Questionnaire
1996

Maria P. P. Root

The 50 questions or comments and experiences evolved from a questionnaire I developed for a study on biracial siblings I conducted from 1996 to 1997. These questions and comments provide an introduction to the way in which race consciousness is brought up directly, sideways, and from all sides for people of mixed heritage. These comments and questions, though not an exhaustive list, provide a window into how this country internalizes assumption about race, belonging, and identity. They socialize the mixed race person to understand as well as question race American style. It is a monoracial system; one race per person. Not everyone experiences these questions or comments the similarly. One person might enjoy being asked, “What are you?” whereas their sibling might dread and resent the question. This list provides a launching point for sharing, discussing, laughing, debriefing, and educating….

Read the entire paper here.

‘Toubab La!’ Literary Representations of Mixed-Race Characters in the African Diaspora

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
July 2007
453 pages
ISBN13: 9781847182319
ISBN: 1-84718-231-3

Ginette Curry, Professor of English
Florida International University

The book is an examination of mixed-race characters from writers in the United States, The French and British Caribbean islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and Jamaica), Europe (France and England) and Africa (Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal). The objective of this study is to capture a realistic view of the literature of the African diaspora as it pertains to biracial and multiracial people. For example, the expression “Toubab La!” as used in the title, is from the Wolof ethnic group in Senegal, West Africa. It means “This is a white person” or “This is a black person who looks or acts white.” It is used as a metaphor to illustrate multiethnic people’s plight in many areas of the African diaspora and how it has evolved. The analysis addresses the different ways multiracial characters look at the world and how the world looks at them. These characters experience historical, economic, sociological and emotional realities in various environments from either white or black people. Their lineage as both white and black determines a new self, making them constantly search for their identity. Each section of the manuscript provides an in-depth analysis of specific authors’ novels that is a window into their true experiences.

The first section is a study of mixed race characters in three acclaimed contemporary novels from the United States. James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) and Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish (2001) reveal the conflicting dynamics of being biracial in today’s American society. The second section is an examination of mixed-race characters in the following French Caribbean novels: Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martinican Woman (1948), Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961) and Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993) by Raphaël Confiant. Section three is about their literary representations in Derek Walcott’s What the Twilight Says (1970), Another Life (1973), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995) from the British Caribbean islands. Section four is an in-depth analysis of their plight in novels written by contemporary mulatto writers from Europe such as Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997). Finally, the last section of the book is a study of novels from West African and South African writers. The analysis of Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de Peau (2001), Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990) and Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947) concludes this literary journey that takes the readers through several continents at different points in time.

Overall, this comprehensive study of mixed-race characters in the literature of the African diaspora reveals not only the old but also the new ways they decline, contest and refuse racial clichés. Likewise, the book unveils how these characters resist, create, reappropriate and revise fixed forms of identity in the African diaspora of the 20th and 21st century. Most importantly, it is also an examination of how the authors themselves deal with the complex reality of a multiracial identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. THE UNITED STATES
  • Chapter 1: James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996): A Journey Beyond Black and White
  • Chapter 2: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998): The Surviving Canary
  • Chapter 3: Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001): The Chameleon Experience
• PART II. THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 4: Mayotte Capécia’s I am a Martinican Woman (1948): “My father is Black, My Mother is Brown, and I, Am I White?” (Martinican Riddle)
  • Chapter 5: Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961): The Anti-Narcissus
  • Chapter 6: Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993): Ethnostereotypes in Martinique
• PART III. THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 7: The Racial Paradox of Derek Walcott in What the Twilight Says (1970), Derek Walcott: Another life (1973) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967)
  • Chapter 8: Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995): A Near-White Jamaican Woman’s Quest for Identity
• PART IV. EUROPE
  • Chapter 9: Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997): A Desperate Search for Caucasian Identity
  • Chapter 10: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000): The Concept of Englishness in the 21st Century
  • Chapter 11: Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997): Transculturality in England: Oyinbo, Whitey, Morena, Nig Nog, Nigra!
• PART V. AFRICA
  • Chapter 12: Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de peau (2001): Colonization and Forced Hybridity
  • Chapter 13: Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990): White-on-Black and Black-on-Black Racial Oppression in Southern Africa
  • Chapter 14: Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947): “Toubab La!”
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Primary Sources
• Critical Sources
• Index

Read a preview  here.