Mixed Race Studies

AAST 398M – Multi-Racial Asian Americans

University of Maryland
Spring 2010

The multiracial American population is increasing exponentially, as are available services and organizations to support it. With these shifts in mind, this class will examine multiracial America yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with an emphasis on multiracial Asian America in particular. Some questions of interest: what is the public consciousness of multiracial peoples? What is public policy regarding multiracial peoples? How do multiracial peoples view their struggles for identity, equity, and community? What “infrastructure” exists to support the multiracial population, and in what ways does it provide or fail to provide support? Having identified the crucial issues facing multiracial America, the class will culminate in collaborative projects to address them.

Sixth Annual Ray Warren Multicultural Symposium (2009): Mixed: The Politics of Hybrid Identities

Lewis and Clark College
Portland, Oregon
2009-11-11 through 2009-11-13

Events

• “Obama and the Biracial Factor: Race, Sexuality, and the Battle for a New America” – Andrew Jolivétte (Introduced by Brenda Salas Neves, L&C student and symposium co-chair)
• “Secrets of a Mixed Race Child” – Dmae Roberts (Introduced by Parasa Chanramy, L&C student and symposium co-chair)
• Interracial Relationships, Adoption, and Identity – Moderator: Reiko Hillyer with Jiannbin Shiao, Astrid Dabbeni, Nicole Cullen, Hanako Conrad
• Remix: Identities and Artistic Expression – Moderator: Franya Berkman with Dmae Roberts, Gerardo Calderón, Nelda Reyes, Christabel Escarez and Nico Jose
• “The Future of Multiracial Politics” – Kim Williams (Introduced by Chris Wendt)
• Indigeneity and Cultural Exchange – Moderator: Elliott Young with Se-ah-dom Edmo, Tana Atchley, Muki Hansteen Izora, L&C students Lu’u Nakanelua and Allison Perry
• Nation-Building and Mixed Populations – Moderator: Rich Peck with Oren Kosansky, Cari Coe, Osaebea Amoako, Tim Moore
• Race Monologues – Identity: According to Whom? (Introduced by Parasa Chanramy) with L&C students Christabel Escarez, Adrian Guerrero, Temesghen Habte, Christina Herring, Jessica Houston, Nico Jose, Yollie Keeton, Rhea Manley, Jasin Nazim,Goldann Salazar, Jared Schy, and Madelyn Troiano

Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

State University of New York Press
July 2007
295 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7099-7; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7099-2
Paperback ISBN10: 0-7914-7100-4; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7100-5

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Explores contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities.

When modern news media choose to focus attention on people of multiracial descent, how does this fit with broader contemporary and historical racial discourses? Do these news narratives complicate common understandings of race and race relations? Dispatches from the Color Line explores these issues by examining contemporary news media coverage of multiracial people and identities. Catherine R. Squires looks at how journalists utilize information from many sources—including politicians, bureaucrats, activists, scholars, demographers, and marketers—to link multiracial identity to particular racial norms, policy preferences, and cultural trends. She considers individuals who were accused (rightly or wrongly) of misrepresenting their racial identity to the public for personal gain, and also compares the new racial categories of Census 2000 as reported in Black owned, Asian American owned, and mainstream newspapers. These comparisons reveal how a new racial group is framed in mass media, and how different media sources reinforce or challenge long-standing assumptions about racial identity and belonging in the United States.

Sci fi offers surprising insights on race

The Brandeis Hoot
Brandeis University
2009-03-06

Marissa Lainzi

Months and months of wading through red ink, volleying e-mails, coordinating, coordinating, and coordinating came to fruition for the Mixed Heritage Club on Friday night, as their much-anticipated speaker, Eric Hamako, gave the talk, “Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else?” a discussion of mixed race issues in sci-fi movies.

Hamako, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, intrigued the audience with his observations and theories regarding the portrayal of the “new” and “old” mixed race ideals in popular entertainment. Citing the movies Blade and Underworld, Hamako explained the portrayal of mixed-race people as “monsters” or “messiahs”—with vampires, humans, and werewolves becoming the racial metaphors.

The “monster” depiction of mixed-race people, Hamako explained, comes from the “old” conception of mixed race, which presented mixed-race people as deformed, immoral, or somehow wrong or inhuman. The “new” conception of mixed race, on the other hand, presents opposite stereotypes—that mixed-race people are beautiful, genetically superior, and the easy way to quash racism. Hamako calls this the “messiah” depiction.

Using clips from “Underworld,” Hamako showed the movie’s symbolic pitting of the new messiah version of mixed race against the old monster version. Hamako said that this is a way of injecting the new stereotypes about mixed race into the audience’s mind and attempting to justify forgetting that the old stereotypes existed by symbolically destroying them…

Read the entire article here.

Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds

The MIT Press
May 1996
243 pages
19 illus.
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-262-08247-1
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58172-1

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Professor of Anthropology & Psychology
Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power.

Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them.

Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child’s notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood.

After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children’s (and occasionally adults’) representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.

Table of Contents

Race Bending: “Mixed” Youth Practicing Strategic Racialization in California

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Volume 35 Issue 1 (March 2004)
Pages 30-52
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2004.35.1.30

Mica Pollock, Associate Professor of Education
Harvard University

As more U.S. youth claim “mixed” heritages, some adults are proposing to erase race words altogether from the nation’s inequality analysis. Yet such proposals, as detailed ethnography shows, ignore the complex realities of continuing racialized practice. At an urban California high school in the 1990s, “mixed” youth strategically employed simple “race” categories to describe themselves and inequality orders, even as they regularly challenged these very labels’ accuracy. In so “bending” race categories, these youth modeled a practical and theoretical strategy crucial for dealing thoughtfully with race in 21st century America.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Inheritability of Identity: Children’s Understanding of the Cultural Biology of Race

Child Development
Volume 66 Issue 5 (October 1995)
Pages 1418 – 1437
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00943.x

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Professor, Anthropology & Psychology
Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

4 experiments explored adult and grade school children’s beliefs about inheritability of identity, particularly the “one-drop rule” that defines children of mixed-race parents as belonging to the racial category of the minority parent. In Study 1, 8- and 12-year-olds (N=32) and adults (N=43) were asked the category membership of mixed-race children and the degree to which they resembled each parent. Study 2 investigated whether the same-aged children (N=36) and adults (N=18) expected mixed-race children to have white, black, or intermediate features. Study 3 explored children’s (N=46) expectations about the inheritability of the same properties in animals. Older children, like adults, were found to believe that mixed-race children have black racial features. Adults additionally believe that such children inherit the categorical identity of the minority parent. Study 4 repeated the same tasks with black and white children (N=39) attending an integrated school. Unlike children attending a predominantly white school, children in the integrated school (regardless of race) expect mixed-race children to have intermediate racial features.

A New Look at an Old Notion: Lawrence Hirchfeld Discusses Race in Society

Michigan Today
University of Michigan
June 1996

John Woodford

Talk of race is everywhere and incessant in America, the din of discourse emanating from all ranks and stations, all age groups, all creeds, all parts of the political spectrum and all manner of news and cultural media.

Is race real or is it imagined? If it’s real, is it real in a biological sense, a social sense, or both? If imaginary, how did the idea arise?

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, U-M associate professor of anthropology and psychology, tackles all of these questions in a book published this spring by the MIT Press: Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. The book emerged from Hirschfeld’s studies in the United States and Europe of children’s thinking about race. It will interest not only anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, historians, political scientists and social workers, but parents and teachers as well. Professor Hirschfeld discussed some of his conclusions with Michigan Today’s John Woodford.

MT: What is race?

LH: It is important to begin by talking about what race is not. Regardless of what our senses seem to tell us, race is not a biologically coherent story about human variation simply because the races we recognize and name are not biologically coherent populations. There is as much genetic variation within racial groups as there is between them. Now this does not mean that race is not real psychologically or sociologically. It is obvious that race is real in both these senses. People believe in races and they use this belief to organize important dimensions of social, economic, and political life. But this does not make race a real thing biologically…

Read the entire article here.

Continuous dynamics in the real-time perception of race

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 46, Issue 1 (January 2010)
pages 179–185
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.10.002

Jonathan B. Freemam,  Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Kristin Pauker, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii

Evan P. Apfelbaum
Kellog School of Management
Northwestern Univeristy

Nalini Ambady, Professor and Neubauer Faculty Fellow
Tufts University

Although the outcomes of race categorization have been studied in detail, the temporal dynamics of realtime processing of race remain elusive. We measured participants’ hand movements en route to one of two race-category alternatives by recording the streaming x, y coordinates of the computer mouse. Study 1 showed that, when categorizing White and Black computer-generated faces that featurally overlapped with the opposite race, mouse trajectories showed a continuous spatial attraction toward the opposite category. Moreover, these race-atypical White and Black targets induced spatial attraction effects that had different temporal signatures. Study 2 showed that, when categorizing real faces that varied along a continuum of racial ambiguity, graded increases in ambiguity led to corresponding increases in trajectories’ attraction to the opposite category and trajectories’ movement complexity. These studies provide evidence for temporally dynamic competition across perceptions of race, where simultaneously and partially-active race categories continuously evolve into single categorical outcomes over time. Moreover, the findings show how different social category cues may exert different dynamic patterns of influence over the real-time processing that culminates in categorizations of others.

…The second important difference between dimensions of sex and race is the inherently fuzzy nature of race relative to the substantially less fuzzy nature of sex. Whereas it is rare to encounter faces that are truly sex-ambiguous—an unlikely situation usually evoking anxiety, a few laughs, or both (e.g., Saturday Night Live’s androgynous ‘‘Pat” skits)—perceivers often encounter faces that do not fit squarely into any race category at all. Interactions with mixed-race individuals, for instance, involve the perception of faces that tend to  contain major physiognomic overlap between multiple traditionally-distinguished race categories. Prior research indicates that, even in instances of extreme racial ambiguity (e.g., mixed-race faces), perceivers readily resolve this ambiguity by slotting faces into traditionally-distinguished race categories (Pauker et al., 2009), particularly during rapid categorization (Peery & Bodenhausen, 2008). In the present work, we wanted to determine how this resolution of racial ambiguity is accomplished in realtime.  Because perceptions of race can be fuzzy and involve different levels of ambiguity, this gave us the opportunity to examine how graded increases in the ambiguity of a social category may have corresponding graded effects on the real-time evolution of social categorical responses…

Read the entire article here.

Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life

University of Arizona Press
1998
188 pages
5.0 x 8.0
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2270-5

Luis Alberto Urrea

Here’s a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the ‘hood, hoping for the American Dream.

…I’m not saying it’s our story. I’m not saying it isn’t. It might be yours. “How do you tell a story that cannot be told?” writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining. Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son’s ethnicity. “You are not a Mexican!” his mother once screamed at him. “Why can’t you be called Louis instead of Luis?” He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love. “I am nobody’s son. I am everybody’s brother,” writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody’s Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.

Read an excerpt here.