Mixed Race Studies

Making the invisible visible: Experiences of multiracial late adolescents/young adults with three or more racial backgrounds

The Wright Institute
May 2011
182 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3459694
ISBN: 9781124715537

Frandelia Sharmila Moore

A dissertation submitted to the Wright Institute School of Psychology, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Psychology

Research regarding the experiences of multiracial late adolescents/young adults with three or more racial backgrounds has a rare presence in psychological literature. The present study was the first overall exploration of the experiences of this population. A qualitative approach, specifically Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), was used to investigate the experiences of multiracial late adolescents/young adults. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 participants between the ages of 19 and 25 to examine their experiences in different areas of their lives such as general experiences as a multiracial person, personal identification and identification by others. It also explored the influence of racial identity development, the experience of being multiracial in relation to attitudes/practices, the likes and challenges of being multiracial and advice from the multiracial perspective. IPA was used to extract 20 major themes which were placed in 3 domains: the effects of oppression on the community, the intersection of systemic perceptions of multiracial late adolescents/young adults, and experiences of multiracial identity. The domains and themes are discussed in connection with the current literature as well as clinical implications and future research for this population.

The outcome of this study emphasizes the effects of oppression on the community, family and the multiracial individual. Participants report how the long lasting effects of colonization and slavery have left them in position where they are judged because of their phenotype, their mixed racial background, and their behavior if different from the stereotype of a specific monoracial group. They are often classified as monoracial by others due to phenotype or because others must place them into a category regardless of their mixed heritage. However, the majority of participants claimed a private and public multiracial identity. Overall, multiracial identity has allowed participants to be more open and tolerant of others’ realities and it has influenced their course of education and/or future career goals in a positive way. Finally, participants advise parents of multiracial children to educate and expose their children to all of the races/cultures in their background in order to help them develop a healthy identity. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• CHAPTER ONE
  • Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO
  • Literature Review
  • Definition of key terms
  • A historical context of Blacks in the United States
    • The slave trade
    • Race relations during the Colonial era
    • The American Revolution
    • The fight for freedom
    • The Civil Rights era
  • A historical context of people of color in the United States
  • A historical context of mixed people in the United States
    • The multiracial Civil Rights Movement: Where we are now
  • Racial Identity Development
    • Ethnic identity development
    • Monoracial identity development
    • Biracial identity development
    • Multiracial identity development
  • Research on mixed race people
  • Adolescent Identity Development
  • Mixed race adolescents
  • Present study
• CHAPTER THREE
  • Methodology
    • Participants
    • Procedure
    • Instrument
    • Data Analysis
• CHAPTER FOUR
  • Results
    • The Participants
    • Themes
    • Data Analysis
• CHAPTER FIVE
  • Discussion
    • Clinical Implications
    • Strengths and Limitations
    • Suggestions for Future Research
    • Conclusion
• REFRENCES
• APPENDICES
  • Appendix A: Informed Consent
  • Appendix B: Participant Consent Form
  • Appendix C: Demographic Questionnaire
  • Appendix D: Interview Questions
  • Appendix E: Full Review CPHS Protocol
  • Appendix F: Flyer

Purchase the dissertation here.

20 years after riots, Crown Heights is now a mixed racial haven

New York Daily News
2011-08-14

Simone Weichselbaum, Staff Writer

Crown Heights has become a mixed race mecca.

The Brooklyn neighborhood infamous for the 1991 riot between blacks and Jews has the second-most residents who identify as being both black and white, the latest Census figures show.

Crown Heights had 635 people in 2010 who said they were born to one black parent and one white. Harlem led the city with 776.

The neighborhood’s new population includes mixed race hipsters and young biracial families moving from pricier neighborhoods. Others identify as Jewish with a black parent who want a multi-cultural area to call home…

Read the entire article here.

Scouting the City for Her Characters

The New York Times
2011-08-19

John Leland

A Summer afternoon in Chelsea, and Sarah Jones was on a recon mission, searching for… she did not know what, exactly. An accent, for starters. An ethnic wild card. “Hybridity,” she said, using a word she uses often to describe her field of urban study.

She noted a young man with a do-rag under his baseball cap and a belt buckle in the shape of a handgun; a Caribbean woman pushing a white baby in a designer stroller; a heavy woman smoking a long, exaggeratedly slim cigarette. “The slim cigarette trumps the fact that she wasn’t talking to anyone,” Ms. Jones said, turning to follow the woman. “Nobody smokes those anymore.”

Ms. Jones asked the woman for a cigarette, but got nothing useful in return. “She didn’t say, ‘Yeah, honey, you can have one,’ ” Ms. Jones said, shifting her voice to sound like a Bensonhurst ashtray, circa 1938. “I’m looking for something else.”

Ms. Jones, 37, might be described as an unlicensed anthropologist, an explorer of the cultural fault lines that unite and divide the city. More plainly, she is a playwright and performer whose one-woman shows carry her through rapid successions of ethnically diverse male and female roles: a Russian immigrant or an elderly Jewish woman; an Italian cop or a Brooklyn rapper seeking treatment for rhyme addiction; an American Indian comedian or a Chinese-American woman whose daughter, to her disappointment, is lesbian…

…Ms. Jones, the daughter of a white mother and a black father, both doctors, came by her cultural inquisitiveness early, as a child in Baltimore trying to figure out who she was. When she brought home forms from school asking her to designate her race, her mother would cross out the line and write “human,” she said.

“My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean,” Ms. Jones said. “My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn’t want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment. I don’t think of it as having a fractured self, but as having many interconnecting selves, concentric identities.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Place of Miscegenation Laws within Historical Scholarship about Slavery

The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities
2011-05-17

Allen Porter Mendenhall

The following post appeared at The Literary Table.

Miscegenation laws, also known as anti-miscegenation laws, increasingly have attracted the attention of scholars of slavery over the last half-century. Scholarship on slavery first achieved eminence with the publication of such texts as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), and Leon F. Litwack’s North of Slavery (1961). When Winthrop D. Jordan published his landmark study White Over Black in 1968, miscegenation statutes during the era of American slavery were just beginning to fall within historians’ critical purview. The Loving v. Virginia case, initiated in 1959 and resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, no doubt played an important role in activating scholarship on this issue, especially in light of the Civil Rights movement that called attention to various areas of understudied black history.

In Loving, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statutes forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites and ruled that the racial classifications of the statutes restricted the freedom to marry and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the wake of Loving, scholarship on miscegenation laws gained traction, although miscegenation laws during the era of American slavery have yet to receive extensive critical treatment. Several articles and essays have considered miscegenation laws and interracial sex during the era of American slavery, but only a few book-length analyses are devoted to these issues, and of these analyses, most deal with interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, or from the period of Reconstruction up through the twentieth-century. This historiographical essay explores interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the corpus of historical writing about slavery. It does so by contextualizing interracial sex and miscegenation laws within broader trends in the study of slavery. Placing various historical texts in conversation with one another, this essay speculates about how and why, over time, historians treated interracial sex and miscegenation laws differently and with varying degrees of detail. By no means exhaustive, this essay merely seeks to point out one area of slavery studies that stands for notice, interrogation, and reconsideration. The colonies did not always have miscegenation laws; indeed, miscegenation laws did not spring up in America until the late seventeenth-century, and they remained in effect in various times and regions until just forty-four years ago. The longevity and severity of these laws make them worthy our continued attention, for to understand miscegenation laws is to understand more fully the logic and formal expression of racism…

Read the entire article here.

Blood relations: The cultural work of miscegenation in nineteenth-century American literature

University of Pennsylvania
1999, 282 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9937719
ISBN: 9780599389762

Leigh Holladay Edwards, Associate Professor of English
Florida State University

A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

“Blood Relations” analyzes the way nineteenth-century literary texts use racial mixture to explore cultural anxieties about subjectivity and national identity. As many scholars have detailed, nineteenth century Anglo-America overwhelmingly rejected actual, literal interracial sex and reproduction between white and non-white races. Yet I show that on a symbolic level, the dominant white culture actively invoked metaphors of mixing in order to define itself. While it would be more conventional to argue that nineteenth-century culture ignored or suppressed miscegenation because it wanted to believe in racial purity, I illustrate that the culture shaped notions of race not by repressing mixture but rather by obsessively focusing on it. Intermixture emerges as a popular literary trope in the nineteenth century at the same time that amalgamation was becoming more socially and legally taboo. The literary focus on mixing is a way of micro-managing it, encouraging people to think about the interracial in certain ways, not in others. This process of cultural management through endless discussion is similar to nineteenth-century discourses about sexuality; as Foucault has shown us, the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not ignore sex, they endlessly talked about it, and their routinized ways of talking about sex worked to narrow and restrict sexual identities. Similarly, American race consciousness requires a discussion of the interracial in order to sustain itself. If Americans had not had interracial sex, their writers would have had to invent it.

I analyze works by writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Chopin, Twain, and Helen Hunt Jackson, as well as popular Pocahontas narratives and the 1863 miscegenation pamphlet in which the term was coined. These representations titillated readers with America’s “open secret” of mixture, speaking to its paradoxical status as both social taboo and defining factor of self and nation. While distancing themselves from literal mixing, these writers simultaneously deploy symbolic intermixing, using mixture metaphorically to stage notions of the identity and the relationship between ideas of nation, gender, and race. I argue that we should place representations of mixture not at the periphery, but at the center of accounts of nineteenth-century culture.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Amalgamation and the National Imaginary in Hawthorne and Melville
• Chapter Two: Tricky Business: Racial Mixture as Hoax in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Section Introduction: Gendering Interracial Mixture
• Chapter Three: Women as the Source of Mixture in “Desiree’s Baby“
• Chapter Four: Women and Assimilation in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona
• Chapter Five: The United Colors of Pocahontas: America’s Obsession with Race Mixing
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

Somebody Always Singing You

University Press of Mississippi
1997
160 pages
ISBN: 0878059814 (9780878059812)

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

The story of a multi-racial woman coming to understand her identity

As the child of African-American and Native American parents, Kaylynn TwoTrees grew up hearing herself called “half breed” and “mixed blood,” terms which now, after many transforming experiences, have positive and powerful meanings for her. This book spanning the first fifty years of her life is the account of her extraordinary journey into an understanding of her rich and complex heritage.
 
TwoTrees’s poignant, honest memoir tells of her birth to a Lakota father from a South Dakota reservation and a black mother from an urban neighborhood in Des Moines. She spent summers during her early childhood visiting the Pine Ridge reservation. Her grandmother’s teachings from those days sustained her throughout the subsequent years. She always has remembered her grandmother’s saying “You going/coming back being. Grandmothers always singing you going. Grandchildren always singing you coming back. Somebody always singing you.”
 
After the murder of her mother, she was adopted by her black grandparents, who had worked hard to achieve a middle-class life. TwoTrees was later sent to a Catholic boarding school where she was the only person of color. After she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she released to the care of relatives, she set out on her own. The ensuing journey took her from Chicago to a life in Europe, where she lived for some years as a dancer and a manager of dance companies. Returning to the United States, she lived first in New York, and then in the Southwest, where she spent recent years learning about the landscape and the indigenous cultures and giving workshops and performances.
 
TwoTrees, whose fascinating life journey has been filled with exhilarating as well as painful moments, writes movingly of her efforts to incorporate the diverse strands of her identity. Always carrying with her the love and lessons from her Indian grandmother and many others, she has come to understand the value of her multiple heritages.

Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America

University of Chicago Press
2010
208 pages
37 line drawings, 7 tables
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226793825; Paperback ISBN: 9780226793832; E-Book ISBN: 9780226793849

Michael Tesler, Doctoral Student in Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

Barack Obama’s presidential victory naturally led people to believe that the United States might finally be moving into a post-racial era. Obama’s Race—and its eye-opening account of the role played by race in the election—paints a dramatically different picture.

The authors argue that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record—and perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. As Obama’s campaign was given a boost in the primaries from racial liberals that extended well beyond that usually offered to ideologically similar white candidates, Hillary Clinton lost much of her longstanding support and instead became the preferred candidate of Democratic racial conservatives. Time and again, voters’ racial predispositions trumped their ideological preferences as John McCain—seldom described as conservative in matters of race—became the darling of racial conservatives from both parties. Hard-hitting and sure to be controversial, Obama’s Race will be both praised and criticized—but certainly not ignored.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Obama as Post-Racial?
• Chapter 1: Background: Race in Presidential Elections
• Chapter 2: Racialized Momentum: The Two Sides of Racialization in the Primaries
• Chapter 3: The General Election: The Two Sides of Racialization and Short-Term Political Dynamics
• Chapter 4: The Spillover of Racialization
• Chapter 5: The Racialized Voting Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
• Chapter 6: The Paradox of Gender Traditionalists’ Support for Hillary Clinton
• Chapter 7: Beyond Black and White: Obama as “Other”
• Chapter 8: Is the Obama Presidency Post-Racial? Evidence from His First Year in Office
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index