Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Utahns seeking identity

Deseret News
Salt Lake City, Utah
2005-03-12

Elaine Jarvik

They’re biracial — equally Polynesian and white. But most prefer to think of themselves as Polynesian, says University of Utah graduate student Kawika Allen, who recently studied 84 Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns.

Allen, who grew up with an Hawaiian mother and a Caucasian father, presented his findings Friday at the ninth annual Pacific Islander Awareness Week at the University of Utah…

…Growing up in Utah, Allen’s Polynesian friends sometimes thought he wasn’t Polynesian enough, and he wasn’t sure if he fit in his father’s white world either. That angst later led to a master’s thesis on biracial identity among Utah’s biracial Polynesians, who now number more than 3,000.

Although previous research of other biracial Americans found that children tend to identify more with the same-sex parent, regardless of ethnicity, Allen found that among Polynesian-Caucasian Utahns, children tended to identify more with the Polynesian parent, regardless of gender.

He also found that biracial Polynesians were more likely to receive negative messages about being biracial if their fathers, rather than mothers, were Polynesian…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-German Biracial Identity Development

Virginia Commonwealth University
May 2010
75 pages

Rebecca R. Hubbard

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at Virginia Commonwealth University

An increase in the biracial population has heightened our awareness of unique issues that pervade the experience of these individuals. The importance of environmental influences on biracial identity development has been established, but investigations concerning racial socialization of biracial individuals are scarce. This study, utilizing a qualitative design, explores racial identity development of biracial Afro-Germans living in Germany. The purpose of the study is to understand the strategies that biracial individuals use to negotiate their racial identity, factors that influence their development, cultural influences, and racial socialization processes. Interviews with biracial Afro-Germans were conducted using phenomenological interviewing techniques. Twelve themes emerged from the data that are best conceptualized in an ecological model. Inter-rater reliability was established in two phases. Implications of the findings include a need for continued research with Black-White biracial populations.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Problem Statement
• Review of the Literature
  • Developmental Models
  • Developmental Models of Biracial Identity Development
  • Ecological Models
  • Ecological Models of Biracial Identity Development
  • Racial Socialization
  • Racial Socialization of Biracial Individuals
  • Value of Cross-Cultural Comparisons
  • Historical Context of People of African Descent in Germany
  • Empirical Research with Afro-German Populations
  • Theoretical Conceptualization
  • Research Questions
• Method
  • Purpose
  • Design
  • Role of the Researcher
  • Sampling & Recruitment of Participants
  • Procedure
  • Data Analysis
  • Verification
  • Limitations
• Themes
  • Intersectional Identity
  • Black Identity
  • German/White Identity
  • Disconnect/Denial
  • Positive Internal Coping
  • Environmental Support
  • Injured Family
  • Person-Environment Discrepancy
  • Multi Kulti
  • American Familiarity
  • Racism, Marginalization, Conflict
  • Progress and Change
  • Ecological Conceptualization of Themes
• Discussion
  • The Essence of Biracial Afro-German Identity
  • Culture and Nationality
  • Lack of Appropriate Language
  • Future Directions
• List of References

List of Tables

1. Table 1 Mean Age and Parental Heritage by Gender
2. Table 2 Participant Demographics

List of Figures

1. Figure 1 Root’s Ecological Model of Biracial Identity
2. Figure 2 “Sarotti Mohr” Trademark of a German chocolate company
3. Figure 3 Hubbard’s Ecological Model of Afro-German Biracial Identity (HEMBAGI)

Read the entire thesis here.

Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 114, Number 3 (November 2008)
pages 577–614
DOI: 10.1086/592859

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries.  The Brazilian state traditionally embraced mixed-race classification, but is adopting racial quotas employing a black/white scheme.  To explore potential consequences of that turn for beneficiary identification and boundary formation, the author analyzes attitudinal survey data on race-targeted policy and racial classification in multiple formats, including classification in comparison to photographs. The results show that almost half of the mixed-race sample, when constrained to dichotomous classification, opts for whiteness, a majority rejects mixed-race individuals for quotas, and the mention of quotas for blacks in a split-ballot experiment nearly doubles the percentage choosing that racial category.  Theories of how states make race emphasize the use of official categories to legislate exclusion.  In contrast, analysis of the Brazilian case illuminates how states may also make race through policies of official inclusion.

At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).  Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

…The Brazilian census has used the categories branco (white), pardo (brown or mulatto), preto (black), and amarelo (yellow or Asian descent) since 1940 and added the indígena (indigenous) category in the 1991 census. According to its 2000 census, Brazil’s racial or color composition is 54% white, 39% mulatto, 6% black, 0.5% yellow, and 0.4% indigenous. The correspondence of Brazilian census terms with a color continuum is often contrasted with the U.S. use of ancestry for classifying its population (Nogueira 1985). In the United States, ancestry has been historically understood via the rule of hypodescent (Davis 1991). According to that rule’s logic, for any person of mixed ancestry that includes some ponderable African extraction, all other ancestries are generally obviated.

In Brazil, the mulatto and black census categories are considered by negro movement actors, as well as by many scholars, to comprise persons of some discernible degree of African ancestry, whom they view as members of a negro racial group (Guimara˜es 2001; Ribeiro 2007). Prominent negro politician, movement actor, and scholar Abdias do Nascimento clarifies this specific vision of ancestry, color, and race in Brazil:

Official Brazilian census data use two color categories for African descendants: preto (literally, “black”) for the dark-skinned and pardo (roughly, mulatto and mestizo) for others. It is now accepted convention to identify the black population as the sum of the preto and pardo categories, referred to as negro, afro-brasileira, or afro-descendente. In English, “black,” “African Brazilian,” and “people of African descent” refer to this same sum of the two groups. (Nascimento and Nascimento 2001, p. 108)

In contrast to the traditional color classification scheme, this new system approximates the U.S. understanding of racial group membership (Nobles 2000, p. 172; Guimarães 2001, p. 173). That is, the negro-versus-white dichotomous classification scheme in Brazil similarly joins together individuals with some discernible degree of African ancestry into one racial group for race-targeted policy administration, in essence representing an attempt to clarify ambiguous boundaries by “unmixing” the population.

Mulattos and blacks in Brazil, however, may not view themselves as common members of a negro racial group (Agier 1993; Marx 1998). Winant writes of nonwhites’ tendency in Brazil “not only to deny, but to avoid their own [black] racial identity” (Winant 2001, p. 246; emphasis in original). Hanchard, too, calls attention in his work to Brazilian nonwhites’ “negation of their [black] identity” (Hanchard 1994, p. 22). The term negro, then, may be more a classification attributed to nonwhites by movement actors than a real social group embraced by the general nonwhite population (Nobles 2000; Telles 2004)…

To read the entire article, click here.

Caucasia: A Novel

Riverhead an imprint of Penguin
1999-02-01
432 pages
5.31 x 7.99in
Paperback ISBN 9781573227162

Danzy Senna

Winner of:

• Alex Award
• BOMC Stephen Crane Award 1998
• Whiting Award 2002

Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970’s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can’t be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness.

Then their parents’ marriage falls apart. Their father’s new black girlfriend won’t even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.

One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire. Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find.

American novelist & memoirist Danzy Senna to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

University of Richmond
Richmond, Virginia
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall
Wednesday, 2011-03-16 19:00 EST (Local Time)

Danzy Senna is the author of two novels and a memoir that focus on issues of race, gender and cultural identity. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” the story of two biracial sisters growing up in racially charged Boston during the 1970s, became an instant national bestseller. It won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and an Alex Award from the American Library Association, was named Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Of mixed-race heritage, Senna writes extensively on the experience of being mistaken for white. Her latest work is a collection of short stories.

For more information, click here.

Werner Sollors to speak at University of Richmond English Department 2010-2011 Writers’ Series

University of Richmond
Westhampton Living Room, Westhampton Center
Richmond, Virginia
2010-09-30 16:30 EDT (Local Time)

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His major publications include “Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture;” “Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature;” and a book-length contribution on “Ethnic Modernism” in Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Cambridge History of American Literature.” With Greil Marcus he wrote “Ethnic Modernism and A New Literary History of America.”

Sollors is the recipient of a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Constance Rourke award for the best essay in American Quarterly in 1990. In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie. His talk is entitled “The Rise of Ethnic Modernism in the US, 1910-1950.”

For more information, click here.

The Race Construct and Public Opinion: Understanding Brazilian Beliefs about Racial Inequality and Their Determinants

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 108, Number 2 (September 2002)
pages 406–39

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Researchers hold that the racial democracy ideology fosters a rejection of discrimination-based explanations for racial inequality, thereby affecting antiracist mobilization. This study finds that Brazilians understand the discriminatory basis of inequality and that an attitudinal dimension associated with racial democracy strongly increases the likelihood of that understanding. Negative stereotyping produces a smaller opposite effect, and “race” is not a significant predictor. Finally, Brazilian and American racial attitudes differ considerably in explaining black disadvantage. These findings question perceptions of Brazilian racial attitudes and the efficacy of
dominant theories for their analysis, suggesting a context-driven approach to theorizing and for antidiscrimination strategizing.

…BRAZILIAN RACIAL ATTITUDES AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL DEMOCRACY
Historical Background

Gilberto Freyre (1946) is credited with popularizing the notion of racial democracy in Brazil in the 1930s. Confronted with scientific racism beliefs in the superiority of a white race and that “mixed” blood created degeneracy, Freyre proposed instead that “cross-breeding” produced hybrid vigor in humans, thereby enabling a bright future for the otherwise condemned “dark” Brazilian nation. He emphasized an uncommon flexibility on the part of Portuguese colonizers that made possible extensive miscegenation, and he claimed that “mixed” Brazilians (of three races: Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous) gave birth to a new metarace, constituting a new world in the tropics (Freyre 1959).

In this ideological construct, miscegenation became the motor behind Brazilian racial dynamics and racial democracy. Due to the extensive mixing, potential group boundaries blurred, rendering racism in the manner of U.S. segregation and polarization unintelligible. Unlike nations where ethnic and racial identities were stubbornly ascribed or asserted, in Brazil a universal national identity transcended particularist racial identification. What in other societies were considered incompatible social segments, and where group interests were national organizational principles, in Brazil they were united into Brazilianness. In sum, Brazilians viewed their society through “anti-racialism” lenses, as opposed to those of “racialism” in the United States (Guimarães 1999)…

Read the entire article here.

Looking in the Cultural Mirror: How understanding race and culture helps us answer the question: “Who am I?”

Psychology Today
2010-07-06

Jefferson M. Fish, Ph.D.

The Census and Race—Part I–Key Issues: What can science tell us about the census’s race questions? (2010-07-06)

The 2010 Census is well on its way to completion. Its controversial questions about race have raised many issues that deserve to be explored in depth. This is the first post in a multi-part series dealing with the census’s race questions and what we can learn from them about science, politics, and American culture…

The Census and Race—Part II—Slavery (1790-1860): How did the census deal with race during slavery? (2010-07-13)

…The term “color”–not “race”– first appeared in the 1850 census, with three options: white, black, or mulatto; and these options were repeated in 1860. Whatever folk beliefs about “race” Americans may have held prior to the Civil War, they were of secondary importance. Instead, the census questions were organized around the institution of slavery, and were aimed at getting the information needed to apportion taxes and allocate congressional representation.

The key to understanding these questions is political, not biological. The Three-Fifths Compromise, was the deal that made possible the formation of a national government consisting of both free states and slave states; and it did so by counting each slave as 3/5 of a person. (The constitution euphemistically avoided the words “slave” or “slavery” by referring to “other Persons.”) The interrelatedness of the three critical issues of congressional representation, the distribution of taxes, and the creation of the census is embodied in the way they are bound together in just two sentences. Here is the relevant part of Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:..

Read part II here.

The Census and Race—Part III— Reconstruction to the Great Depression (1870-1940): How did the census deal with race during segregation? (2010-07-20)

…The terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon reify the non-scientific American folk concept of blood. Blood is a biological entity, and many people inaccurately believe that it is the same as genes. The following explanation shows why they are wrong.

Suppose that there are eight genes for race, so that a mulatto has four black genes and four white genes, a quadroon has two black genes and six white genes, and an octoroon has one black gene and seven white genes. Now suppose that a mulatto man and a mulatto woman have a lot of children. Each child would get half its genes from the father and half from the mother. One child might get all four white genes from each parent and be 100% white, another might get all four black genes from each parent and be 100% black, and other children might wind up with all the other possible combinations of white and black genes. However, American culture views mulattos as black (e.g., President Obama); and believes that two blacks cannot have a 100% white baby. This is why the folk concept of blood does not act like genes…

• The Census and Race—Part IV— Civil Rights and the Cold War (1950-1980): What is special about the census categories White, Japanese, and Chinese? (2010-07-27)
• The Census and Race—Part V—(1990-2010): How do Samoans differ from Tahitians on the census? (2010-08-03)
• The Census and Race—Part VI—Summary of Trends/Lessons Learned: What have we learned from comparing all of the censuses since 1790? (2010-08-10)

President Obama checks the “Black” box Evidently it’s official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

Psychology Today
2010-04-04

Samantha Smithstein, Psy.D., Clinical and Forensic Psychologist and Co-Founder
Pathways Institute for Impulse Control, San Francisco

This week, the New York Times reported that “It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.” Evidently, President Obama chose to check the “African-American” box when defining his race for the 2010 census

…From the perspective of science and biological anthropology, race does not exist. In other words, there is not one gene, trait, or characteristic that distinguishes all members of one race from all members of another. In fact, eighty-five percent of all human variation can be found in any local population, and a full ninety-four percent can be found on any continent. In other words, there are no sub-species when it comes to humans; we are, in truth, one of the most genetically similar to each other species of all species on earth…

Read the entire article here.

When the Options Are Open: Racial Identification of Part-American Indian Children in Census 2000 

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

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

I will use data on part-American Indian children in the 2000 Census 1 percent- PUMS data (expected March 2003) to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. I use the case of American Indians because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by similar analyses using 1990 data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family. However, additional analyses using Census 2000 data are necessary because people of mixed heritage could mark multiple races (or a single race) in 2000. This freedom of choice in racial identification opens the door for new insights into patterns in and reasons behind racial identification among mixed-race people.

Read the entire paper here.