Mixed Race Studies

Protective factors promoting psychosocial resilience in biracial youths

University of Alaska, Fairbanks
2010
127 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3421517
ISBN: 9781124214290

Gail K. Kawakami-Schwarber

Presented to the Faculty of the University of Alaska ,Fairbanks in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Resilience in adolescents is the achievement of positive outcomes and the attainment of developmental tasks in the face of significant risk. This study identified protective factors promoting resilience in the development of positive self-identity in biracial youths. The rapidly rising biracial youth population is a vulnerable group facing potentially higher risks for mental health and behavioral issues compared to their monoracial counterparts. Identity development, a central psychosocial task of adolescence, is a complex task for biracial youths since they must integrate two ethnic identities. For biracial youths, mastery of the psychosocial identity developmental task can be daunting as they face stressors such as racial stigmas and negative stereotypes, which may lead to identity problems manifesting during adolescence. Sixteen biracial individuals ranging from age 18 to 29 years participated in this qualitative research project. Comparisons were made to identify patterns and themes for factors affecting self-esteem and ethnic identity level among the participants. Brought to light were culturally-based protective factors stemming from individual, family, and social domains promoting psychosocial resilience in fostering healthy biracial identity resolution. Risk factors unique for the biracial population were also identified. The findings underscore the importance in understanding how the environment shapes and influences the ways biracial youth negotiate their dual identity. The research results can be integrated into appropriate prevention and intervention techniques for application by professionals and families to further healthy identity resolution in biracial youths.

Table of Contents

• Signature Page
• Title Page
• Abstract
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
  • Statement of Problem
  • Statement of Purpose
  • Definition of Terms
• Chapter 2 Literature Review
  • Vulnerable Population
  • Issues Related to the Biracial Population
  • Adolescent Identity Development
  • Psychosocial Identity Process
  • Ecological Theory
  • Race, Culture, and Stereotypes
  • Racial Identity Studies
  • Ethnic Identity and Self-Esteem
  • Ethnic Identity Models
  • Biracial Identity Models
    • Posten’s biracial identity development model (BID)
    • Wardle’s biracial model
    • The Kerwin-Ponterotto model
    • Root’s biracial identity resolution theory
  • Resilience Concept
  • Models of Resilience
    • Challenge model
    • Cumulative effect model
    • Interaction model
  • Factors Influencing Resilience
    • Risk factors
    • Protective factors
      • Psychosocial protective factors
    • Self-Esteem
  • Developmental Outcomes of Resilience
• Chapter 3 Method
  • Participants
  • Apparatus
  • Procedures
  • Data Analysis
• Chapter 4 Results
  • Self-Esteem Ranking and Data Comparison
    • Heritage and parents’ heritage
    • First generation parents
    • Cultural knowledge
    • Self-identity and parental ethnic identification
    • Self-identity and identification with parents
    • Self-identity and role models
  • Ethnic Identity Levels and Data Comparison
    • Heritage and parents’ heritage
    • First generation parents
    • Culture knowledge
    • Self-identity and parental ethnic identification
    • Self-identity and identification with parents
    • Self-identity and role models
  • Comparison Between Self-Esteem Ranking and Ethnic Identity Levels
    • Self-esteem ranking
    • Ethnic identity levels
  • Identified Protective Factors
    • Personal Factors
    • Ethnic mixture
    • Ethnic heritage
  • Identity Factors
    • Positive and consistent labels from parents
    • Parental ethnic identity assignment
    • Identification with parents
  • Coping Skills
    • Ethnic identity discrepancy management
    • Identity fluctuation
  • Family Factors
    • First generation parent
    • Parents as role models
    • Extended family contact and acceptance
  • Social and Community Factors
    • Cultural knowledge
    • Peer acceptance
  • Potential Risk Factors
• Chapter 5 Discussion
  • Protective Factors for Biracial Identity Development
  • Additional Protective Factors
  • Risk Factors and Resilience
  • Implications
  • Practical Applications
  • Limitations
  • Future Directions
  • Conclusion
• References

List of Figures

• Figure 1: Potential risk factors identified for biracial identity development
• Figure 2: Protective factors identified for biracial identity development

List of Tables

• Table 1: Self-Esteem, Heritage, Parents’ Heritage and Generation to United States
• Table 2: Self-Esteem, Self-Identity, Parental’s Ethnic Identification and Cultural Knowledge
• Table 3: Self-Esteem, Self-Identity, Role Model and Identified with Parent
• Table 4: Ethnic Identity, Heritage, Parents’ Heritage and Generation to United States
• Table 5: Minority-White Ethnic Identity, Heritage and Parents’ Heritage
• Table 6: Minority-Minority Ethnic Identity, Heritage and Parents’ Heritage
• Table 7: Ethnic Identity, Self-Identity, Parental Ethnic Identification and Cultural Knowledge
• Table 8: Minority-White Ethnic Identity, Self-Identity, Parental Ethnic Identification and Cultural Knowledge
• Table 9: Minority-Minority Ethnic Identity, Self-Identity, Parental Ethnic Identification and Cultural Knowledge
• Table 10: Ethnic Identity, Self-Identity, Role Model and Identified with Parent
• Table 11: Self-Esteem Ranking with Ethnic Identity Score
• Table 12: Ethnic Identity Ranking with Self-Esteem Scores

List of Appendicies

• Appendix A: Informed Consent Form
• Appendix B: Demographic Questionnaire
• Appendix C: Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale
• Appendix D: Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure
• Appendix E: Interview Guide

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Race mixture

Eugenics Review
Volume 25, Number 3 (October 1933)
pages 161–166.

K. B. Aikman

Abridged from a paper read before the Eugenics Society on June 20th, 1933.

The immense advances in the last hundred years in the medical sciences and their application have greatly reduced death-rates, not only in civilized countries, but in savage countries as well. As a result there has occurred a general increase of population and thus of migration, which has had important effects-economic, social, moral, religious and biological—both on the peoples who have provided the emigrants and on those who have received them.

We must accept it as a fact that large numbers of different races cannot live side by side and compete for their daily bread without the production of racial mixture. There is one exception to this generalization: in proportion as there is intense antagonism, usually religious, the mixing of the races will be lessened. The practical drawbacks, however, to such a method of race-separation, are proved by the history of India. We need merely note that race-mixing will take place when opportunity occurs and ask ourselves how far is this process desirable. It is a question that cannot be answered in a word, because the nature of the races crossed is important.

THE PRIMARY RACES

Mankind may be divided into three Primary Races: (1) The Negro, blackskinned, with short woolly hair and, typically, African; (2) The Mongolian, yellowskinned, with long straight hair and, typically, Asiatic; (3) The Caucasian, whiteskinned, with abundant wavy hair and, typically, European. These groups may be subdivided, but I propose to do so only in the last case, classifying the Caucasians as the Fair Caucasians of the north and west of Europe and the Dark Caucasians of the south and east.

So great are the differences between these three Primary Races that they are comparable to the differences between the species of the zoologist rather than to those between the varieties. Therefore, the crosses between Primary Races will be described as hybrids, and the offspring of the more closely related varieties and of the half-breeds, as mongrels.

EFFECTS OF HYBRIDIZATION

It may be said that the bulk of medical opinion is against hybridization between the Primary Races and that the best eugenic opinion is definitely against it. Thus, Major Leonard Darwin wrote: “Theoretical reasons can be adduced for believing that inter-breeding between widely divergent races may result in the production of types inferior to both parent stocks: and that this would be the result of miscegenation is at all events a common belief.” Professor Ruggles Gates also supports this view. The biological objection is based upon the fact that, in these crosses, groups of inherited characteristics remain associated or “segregate,” with the result that the offspring has a “chaotic constitution.” Each variety of man or of animal, in the course of time, acquires a constitution adapted to its particular mode of life and to the diseases to which it is exposed. When such constitutions are mixed by inter-breeding, a new constitution is produced, which is not adapted to the mode of life of either parent and too often is not fitted for any actual environment whatever.

As examples of simple skeletal maladaptations, we find hybrids with skulls too large to permit of their birth; others with teeth too large for their jaws; and others with either the upper or the lower jaw a misfit with its neighbour. There are, however, many more complicated disabilities, such as altered resistance to disease and disharmonies of the internal secretions. It is found that the greater the difference between the races crossed, the less likely is the result to be beneficial: that the Caucasian is nearer to the Mongolian than either is to the Negro, and that the Dark Caucasian is nearer to the Mongolian than is the Fair Caucasian, and so the Dark Caucasian cross is the less harmful of the two.

These generalizations, to which there may be exceptions, are supported by the American, Professor N. S. Shaler:

“It is not only a general belief that hybrids of blacks and whites are less prolific and more liable to diseases than the pure bloods of either stock, but also that they seldom live so long. Statistics lacking on this point, I have questioned a large number of physicians well placed for judgment in this matter. All of them agreed that the offspring of a union between pure black and white parents is, on the average, much shorter lived and much less fertile than the race of either parent. My father, a physician of experience and a critical observer, who had spent more than half a century in Cuba and the slave-holding South, stated that, in his opinion, he had never seen mulattoes, that is a cross between white and pure black, who had attained the age of sixty years, and that they were often sterile. The judgment of medical men seems to be that when the blood of either race preponderates, and in proportion as it verges to one or the other, the longevity and fertility increase or decrease.”…

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Human hybrids in various parts of the world

Eugenics Review
Volume 21, Number 4 (January 1930)
pages 257–263

Rachel M. Fleming

Political issues involving the right of so-called ‘superior’ races to preserve privileges denied to other races on account of their so-called ‘inferiority’ are tending to darken counsel in the study of racial biology. Another form of political effort is a desire to demonstrate separateness of physical type, so that a subject race may claim autonomy. It is only with painful slowness that man is learning to study himself scientifically and dispassionately, and to apply biological and genetical laws) to his own case. Humanity to-day is the result of long racial crossing; it is difficult to apply the term “pure” to any physical type. All human races are capable of fertile crossing one with another, and man’s tendency to wander both over land and sea, frequently unaccompanied by the women of his own type, has led to marked heterogeneity of inheritance everywhere. The story of the “Sons of God” and the “daughters of men” is world wide and possibly as old as the oldest prehistoric find. And yet in a book published in 1928 we read, “Only a pure race is a strong race”; while the facile statement that the coloured half-caste inherits the worst of both sides, as if the laws of heredity bowed to our colour prejudice, is commonly quoted and believed…

SUPERIOR HALF-CASTES

E. Rodenwaldt has therefore rendered a great service to the study of human heredity by seizing the opportunity of examining the results of an experiment in human crossing which has been worked out in Kisar, an island in the East Indies 127°35’E. long., 8°5’S. lat. His results are published in Die Mestizen auf Kisar (in German) in two volumes, one of which gives detailed measurements and photographs of the Mestizos (half-castes) whom he observed. It contains a remarkable family tree showing the very complicated inter-marriages between the descendants of Mestizo families, and also, by an ingenious device, indicating their skin, eye, and hair colour heredity. No student of human heredity can afford to omit the study of these volumes. The Mestizos of Kisar are ideal material for such a study. The Dutch East Company had a station here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and soldiers of Dutch, French, German, and British nationality became the ancestors of the Mestizos. From 1819 onwards the island was no longer a station for troops, and the half-caste families formed a group which felt itself superior to the natives and tended to inter-marry. Thus we have available for research a sort of natural experiment in human breeding which has gone on for about two centuries…

…ANGLO-NEGRO AND ANGLO-CHINESE

Recently the writer visited Cape Town and had many conversations with workers among the ‘coloured’ (half-caste) colony there. One worker of long experience had observed the same rule of a higher cultural level and a general demand for better living conditions among those with a large admixture of white blood. He suggested that encouragement of intermixture between the best of the coloured people and the whites would tend to raise the standard of life in Cape Town. Some ‘coloured’ people with a large admixture of white blood showed such small traces of native inheritance that they had “passed over” into the white section and were making good there. Needless to say, this solution is most unpalatable to advocates of  ‘race purity,’ and there may be sound objections to it. On the other hand, it may ultimately be less harmful than the present cruel system of stigmatizing the half-caste socially, and so creating a moral and social environment for him which adds undesirables to the community. For some time past the writer has been in close contact with girls of Anglo-Chinese and Anglo-Negro origin who are unable to find employment because social stigma refuses to allow them to mix in our society in the ordinary way. They are British citizens, and they are the weakest of our citizens, and as such need protection. Whatever action may be taken to prevent such intermixture in the future, if it can be proved to be undesirable, it certainly seems a bad policy of citizenship to penalize half-castes for a fault of birth for which they are in no way responsible. Liverpool, always to the fore in attempts towards civic betterment, has formed an “Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children” (Hon. Sec., Mr. G. E. Haynes, B.Sc., University Settlement, Nile Street, Liverpool), and a wholetime research worker [Muriel E. Fletcher] has been appointed. We hope that other seaport towns may soon follow this example of scientific research into a serious problem…

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