Mixed Race Studies

A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy

Duke University Press
December 2010
328 Pages
57 b&w photos, 3 figures
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4876-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4900-6

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

A White Side of Black Britain explores the racial consciousness of white women in the United Kingdom who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage. Filling a gap in the sociological literature on racism and antiracism, France Winddance Twine introduces new theoretical concepts in her description and analysis of white “transracial” mothers raising their children of African Caribbean ancestry in a racially diverse British city. Varying in age, income, education, and marital status, the transracial mothers at the center of Twine’s ethnography share moving stories about how they cope with racism and teach their children to identify and respond to racism. They also discuss how and why their thinking about race, racism, and whiteness changed over time. Interviewing and observing more than forty multiracial families over a decade, Twine discovered that the white women’s racial consciousness and their ability to recognize and negotiate racism was derived as much from their relationships with their black partner and his extended family as it was from their female friends. In addition to the white birth mothers, Twine interviewed their children, spouses, domestic partners, friends, and extended families members. Her book is best characterized as an ethnography of racial consciousness and a dialogue between black and white family members about the meaning of race, racism, and whiteness. It includes intimate photographs of the family members and their community.

Table of Conents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Class Analysis of Interracial Intimacy
2. Disciplining Racial Dissidents
3. The Concept of Racial Literacy
4. Antiracism in Practice
5. Written on the Body: Ethnic Capital and Black Cultural Production
6. Archives of Interracial Intimacies: Race, Respectability, and Family Photographs
7. White Like Who? Status, Stigma, and the Social Meanings of Whiteness
8. Gender Gaps in the Experience of Interracial Intimacy
Conclusion: Constricted Eyes and Racial Visions
Notes
References
Index

Issues for Racially Diverse Families

A Research Project for the Capital Region Race Relations Association, Victoria [Canada]
2003
41 pages

Elias Cheboud (1959-2010), Adjunct Professor of Social Work
University of Victoria, Canada

Christine Downing, Project Coordinator
Multiracial Family Project

This report explores the experience of members of racially mixed families in Victoria, BC. Six themes were identified:(1. Identifying Self, 2. Being In Racially Mixed Family In Victoria, 3. The Challenges, 4. Access For Support, 5. Acceptance, 6. Gaps In Service And Resources). Then reference was made to the heuristic method, chosen to verify the process and to understand the meaning of these lived-experiences.

Most participants in this snapshot study have described encountering numerous barriers as part of a racially mixed family or as individuals living in Victoria. This could be due to everyday racism and discrimination that has closed their access to social services and resources. Interestingly, isolation, identity confusion and an impaired sense of belonging were common experiences reported by adults and children. As a result, for participants to seek resources and services, it has been difficult due to their uniqueness and inability to fit to the existing service and resource categories. The significance of this finding means participants are struggling to adapt their identity to fixed notions of identity (ie. “Chinese”, “Black”) in order to access services and/or seek resources.

What was fascinating in this study was that some individuals who chose to marry into different racial/ethnic backgrounds were rejected by their family of origin and as a result they became isolated from their community. Whereas some individual’s experiences regardless of racial/ethnic mix were positive, the family and community relationships remained solid. Based on this study, we conclude that racially mixed families in Victoria are lonely and the isolation experienced by their children is more serious due to the outright rejection of the community they live in.

The findings presented here are comparable to identity patterns explanations (individual, cultural, and social, as well as political issues) found in the literature. Furthermore, the extracted meanings have confirmed sources of identity as being congruent to the adopted theory of this research (explain briefly locational theory). This study is very important to all professionals as well as to human services agencies. Both human service agencies and professionals could refer to these participants’ patterns of experiences of reforming identities which serve as a guideline to help and provide services appropriately. We believe that we have exposed the need to facilitate this awareness and sensitivity to gain further knowledge about racially mixed people in Victoria. This research confirms commonly held assumptions about identity and associated stresses for racially mixed people. This research will serve to identify the various locations held by racially mixed people in the community as well as their unique needs which may ultimately help to bridge the gaps in knowledge about racially mixed families in Victoria.

The following recommendations are suggested to address these concerns:

1. Development of an educational, information and resource center in Victoria.
2. Development of support groups to address concerns brought up in the study
3. Province wide research (both qualitative and quantitative)
4. Extended training for professionals and service providers at all levels in community and government agencies.

Read the entire report here.

Patterns of Situational Identity Among Biracial and Multiracial College Students

The Review of Higher Education
Volume 23, Number 4 (Summer 2000)
pages 399–420
E-ISSN: 1090-7009, Print ISSN: 0162-5748
DOI: 10.1353/rhe.2000.0019

Kristen A. Renn, Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Using qualitative grounded theory framed by postmodern racial identity theory, the author explored the experience of 24 bi- and multiracial students at three postsecondary institutions. Five patterns of racial identification emerged, with peer culture and campus demographics as the major determinants of students’ identity. These findings, with insights into multiracial students’s experiences, can model how to explore other areas of socially constructed identity. It also introduces a conditional model for how students create new identity-based space on campus.

Despite significant and increasing numbers of biracial and multiracial students, almost nothing is known about their development and interactions in the college environment. This topic has special relevance to higher education at a time when multiraciality has become a matter of political and popular interest. A political movement of mixed-race people emerged in the last decade, demanding attention to mixed-race students in K-12 education and changes in data collection by racial group membership on the U.S. 2000 census (Schnaiberg, 1997; Yemma, 1997). For the first time, census respondents will be offered the option of selecting one or more racial categories (Baron, 1998; U.S. Office, 1997).

Prior to the October 1997 change in the census guidelines, studies showed that less than 2% of the population claimed to belong to more than one of the government’s existing racial categories (Schmidt, 1997). While this number is not very large compared to the general population, a change in how these individuals indicated their racial group categorization on the census could significantly influence racial group statistics used to enforce various civil rights laws (Baron, 1998). In the ongoing battle over access, equity, and affirmative action policy in higher education, racial statistics matter. At present there is no accurate count of multiracial students and no systems in place to deal with the new check-as-many-as-apply option.

This study does not attempt to develop such a system, but it begins to explore how multiracial students might see themselves in the context of higher education. While raising larger questions about the use of racial categories in higher education, this study focused on how campus peer culture influenced the ways in which multiracial students made meaning of their racial identity in college. Using qualitative grounded theory framed by postmodern racial identity theory, I explored how multiracial students’ interactions with peers, involvement in activities, and academic work influenced the kinds of identity-based spaces they chose to occupy and what caused them to create new, multiracial spaces on the monoracially defined campus landscape. Among 24 students at three institutions who identified themselves as biracial or multiracial, five patterns emerged in how students occupied existing identity-based spaces on campus or created new, multiracial spaces. The major determinants of students’ identity choices were campus racial demographics and peer culture. I developed a conditional model to explain the construction of public multiracial space on campus and ask how it might be applied in other situations.

The results of this study provide insight into the experience of multiracial students and can be used as a model to explore multiracial students’ lives at other institutions, as well as to explore other areas of socially constructed identity (gender, sexuality, class) on campus. The study builds on the multiracial identity development literature and fills a gap in college student development literature. It does not claim to represent the lives of all multiracial students, but it raises issues and questions that transcend institutional boundaries: How do students choose, create, and occupy public space on campus? How does peer culture mediate these choices? How might higher education address the needs of a growing population of multiracial people through programs, services, and policies?…

Read the entire article here.

The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.