Mixed Race Studies

A critical ethnography of biracial elementary teachers: Biracial identity development and its effect on teaching practices and racism prevention

Alliant International University, San Diego
2010
480 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3428767
ISBN: 9781124269009

Jon E. Kingsbury

A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the Hufstedler School of Education Alliant International University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education

The purpose of this qualitative inquiry was to develop a critical ethnographic methodology to examine the experiences that led a select group of elementary teachers to self-identify as biracial. Additionally, through the use of critical systems analysis, this inquiry explored the perspectives of the informants with regard to racism at the classroom and the greater school or district levels. In order to collect data, in-depth phenomenological interviews were conducted with two self-identified biracial elementary teachers from the southern California area. These interviews were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. This inquiry sought to create an interview structure that would ensure a critical ethnographic approach to data generation that resulted in the development of the Figure Eight Interview Model, wherein the research process is dominated by two distinct research settings. The first is where the researcher and the informant are working collaboratively during the actual interviews. The second setting is where the researcher and the informant are working independently, using grounded theory to critically analyze the data transcribed from the previous interview. The analyses were then discussed at the next interview, where thematic categories were developed. These two settings were repeated three times, with each interview building on the previous and becoming more focused. Using system and social integration levels of critical systems analysis, themes were uncovered in order to develop theory for addressing, reducing, and ultimately preventing racism in classrooms and schools. These themes, along with the Figure Eight Interview Model, can be refined and expanded through further research done by professional development planners, multicultural educators, and qualitative researchers.

Table of Contents

• LIST OF FIGURES
• 1 . INTRODUCTION
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Significance of the Study
  • Assumptions of the Study
  • Delimitations of the Study
  • My View of Humanity and Racism
• 2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Racial Identity Development
    • Introduction
    • Monoracial Identity Models
    • Biracial Identity Models
    • Racial Identity Development and Teachers
    • Comments on Review of Racial Identity Models
  • Teachers’ Biographies
    • Perspectives on Teachers’ Biographies
    • Development of Teachers’ Biographies
    • Purpose and Value of Teachers’ Biographies
  • Multicultural Education
    • History and Development of Multicultural Education
    • Definitions and Goals
    • Teachers’ Role in Multicultural Education
  • Conclusions From the Review of the Literature
  • Research Questions in Light of the Literature Review
• 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
  • Research Paradigms
  • Critical Ethnography
    • Sociohistorical Development
    • Conceptual and Philosophical Framework
    • Feminist Methodology
    • Critical Theory
  • Research Design of the Study
    • In-Depth Phenomenological Interviewing
    • Sampling Strategy
    • Selection of Informants
    • Content and Conduct of the Interviews
    • Data Analysis
    • Carspecken’s Stages for Critical Research
    • Data Generation and Data Management
    • My Role as Researcher
    • Trustworthiness
• 4. ASSESSING THE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
  • Procedural Aspects of the Study
    • Number of Informants
    • Commitment of Time
    • Use of Instruments
    • Components of the Data Analysis
    • Summary of Procedural Aspects
  • Theoretical Concerns Within Critical Ethnography
    • Empowerment
    • Contextualization of Data
    • Romanticism
    • Validity/Trustworthiness
    • Summary of Theoretical Concerns
  • Criteria Within the Figure Eight Interview Model
    • The First Interview
    • The Second Interview
    • The Third Interview
    • Summary
• 5. MY ANALYSIS AND RESPONSES TO THE STUDY
  • The Research Questions
    • Research Question 1
    • Research Question 2
    • Research Question 3
    • Research Question 4
    • Research Question 5
  • My Summary of Our Study
    • Assessment of the Methodology
• 6. INFORMANTS’ RESPONSES TO OUR STUDY
  • Opening Comments/General Discussion
  • Time and Reflection Process I
  • Number of Participants
  • Length of Interviews
  • API Scores
  • Time and Reflection Process II
  • Role of Family
  • Self-identification Statements
  • Sociohistorical Context
  • Theoretical Elements
  • Empowerment of Informants
  • Time and Reflection Process III
  • Asian Pacific Islanders Educators Association
  • Their Mothers’ Influence
  • Weddings and Extended Families
  • Their Mothers as “Victims”
  • My Error in Identifying a Relationship
  • Regional Cultural Differences
  • Changes in Biracial Demographics
  • Their Physical Ambiguity
  • The Use of the Word “Threat”
  • School and Community Cultures
  • “Addressing” Versus “Reducing and Preventing”
  • Institutional Racism
  • San Diego’s Blueprint for Success
  • Changes in the American Culture
  • Truthfulness in My Re-Presentation
  • Stages of Biracial Identity Development
  • Closing Comments
  • Analysis of Informants’ Responses
    • Research Process
    • Critical REID Factors
    • Their Mothers’ Influence
    • Empowerment
    • Institutional Racism
    • Sociohistorical Contextualization
    • Hierarchy of Racism
  • Summary
• 7. SUMMARY CHAPTER
  • Research Findings
  • Research Questions
  • Possible Shortcomings
    • Focus of Study
    • Peer Debriefers
  • Figure Eight Interview Model
    • Theoretical Foundations
    • Figure Eight Interview Model’s Effectiveness
    • Summary: Figure Eight Interview Model
  • Critical Ethnography
    • Empowerment
    • Data Contextualization
    • Catalytic Validity
    • Validity/Trustworthiness
    • Summary
  • Ethical Implications of an Organic Inquiry
  • Developmental Biracial REID Model
  • Implications and Applications for Practice
    • Professional Educators
    • Qualitative Researchers
  • Personal Reflections
• REFERENCES CITED
• APPENDICES
  • A. SELF-IDENTIFICATION OF RACIAL IDENTITY STATEMENT
  • B. FAMILY HERITAGE WORKSHEET (FIGURE B1)
  • C. WRITTEN CONSENT FORM
  • D. SUGGESTIONS FOR REFLECTIVE JOURNAL WRITING
  • E. PERSONAL HISTORY OF IDENTITY WORKSHEET (FIGURE E1)
  • F. SUGGESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS OF TRANSCRIPTS
  • G. SUGGESTIONS FOR COMMENTS ON INTERVIEWER’S ANALYSIS
  • H. CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS HANDOUT
  • I. POEM: “I AM INVISIBLE”
  • J. INFORMANTS’ REFERENCE SHEET

List of Figures

1. Racial/ethnic identity development models
2. Moments of ethnography
3. Conceptual Figure Eight Interview Model
4. Procedural Figure Eight Interview Model
5. List of established interview questions
6. Five stages for critical qualitative research
7. Interpretation of Carspecken’s (1996) research design
8. Summary of responses to research questions
9. Biracial identity development continuum

Purchase the dissertation here.

My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay

The Guardian
Series: My Hero
2011-11-18

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

Refusal to be defined by single categories: Lorde in 1983. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

‘Lorde was openly lesbian before the gay movement existed. Her wise words often seem eerily prescient’

Audre Lorde dropped the y from Audrey when she was still a child so she could be Audre Lorde. She liked the symmetry of the es at the end. She was born in New York City in 1934 to immigrants from Grenada. She didn’t talk till she was four and was so short-sighted she was legally blind. She wrote her first poem in eighth grade. The Black Unicorn, her most unified collection of poems, partly describes a tricky relationship with her mother. “My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls … My mother had two faces / and a broken pot /where she hid out a perfect daughter /who was not me.”…

…I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn’t need to choose between being Scottish and being black. “You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot,” she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes…

Read the entire article here.

AAS 310: Mixed Race And The Media

University of Texas, Austin
Center for Asian American Studies
Spring 2012

Alexander Cho, Assistant Instructor

What is “race,” and what does it mean to be “mixed”? How is mass media responsible for channeling fears, desires, and anxieties about “mixed” bodies? Why are “mixed race” bodies suddenly desirable and chic? Can one exist in two or more categories at the same time? How do people think of “mixedness” in the U.S., and how is it different in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil? Why do people care so much? Why do categories matter? Isn’t everyone “mixed” somehow? Where do you fit in?
 
This course will give students the tools to critically respond to these questions via a comparative, historically situated study of the representation of “mixed-race” people in popular media. Major attention will be paid to special concerns for Asian American populations; it includes substantial attention to African American and Latino populations. Chiefly U.S.-centered, but with a large transnational comparative component analyzing “mixed” racial formation in: North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Brazil.

Pacific children of US servicemen for study

Otago Daily Times
University of Otago, New Zealand
2010-01-05

Allison Rudd

World War 2 brought two million United States servicemen to New Zealand and many Pacific Islands. Inevitably, many formed liaisons with local women and fathered possibly several thousand children. What happened to those babies, and, more than 60 years later, where are they now? Allison Rudd talks to University of Otago historian Prof Judith Bennett, who has won funding to try and trace the all-but forgotten offspring.

Judith Bennett was doing some research when she got sidetracked.

She was compiling information for a book on the environmental effect of the war on Pacific Island countries when she came across references to the mixed-race children of local women and United States servicemen.

Her interest was piqued.

“I was very curious because I could find very little on this topic.

“So it seemed to me there were questions that needed to be answered: How were these children accepted?

“Did their parentage affect their land rights?

“Did it affect their marriage prospects?

“How were their mothers characterised in their own societies?

“How did the US Government view marriage?

“How did the indigenous people view these relationships?

“Were they profitable, were they shameful, or were they a mixture?

“What have been the long-term effects of mixed parentage?

“These children would have looked different – their fathers were white or African American.

“What impact did that have on them as they were growing up and when they were adults?”

Now Prof Bennett hopes to satisfy her curiosity, having secured a $917,000 Marsden grant to embark on a three-year research project…

Read the entire article here.

Families on the color-line: patrolling borders and crossing boundaries

Race and Society
Volume 5, Issue 2, 2002
Pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1016/j.racsoc.2004.01.001

Erica Chito-Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Multiracial couples and families are becoming increasingly more common, yet opposition to these relationships still exists even if it is often hidden in color-blind language. In this lingering societal opposition to black-white unions, the strongest opposition often comes from the couples’ families. The social institution of the family plays an integral role in reproducing the dominant ideologies of race that exist in society, and more specifically a racialized discourse that actively discourages interracial unions. Families reproduce racial boundaries, by patrolling who their members can and cannot become involved with. In our society where group membership is all-important and identity is based primarily on one’s racial group, families object to individuals from different “racial” groups redefining themselves apart from their racial identities. Drawing from in-depth interviews with black-white couples, the responses of their white and black families will be explored to illustrate how families express opposition to black-white interracial relationships. In both white and black families, certain discourses are used when discussing black-white relationships that reproduce the image of these unions as different, deviant, even dangerous. Interracial relationships and marriage often bring forth certain racialized attitudes and beliefs about family and identity which otherwise are not expressed.

Article Outline

• 1. The role of family in societal opposition
• 2. Theorizing black–white couples and their families
• 3. Racialized discourses and color-blindness
• 4. Methods
• 5. Findings
• 6. Color-blind or blinded by color?
• 7. Family responses: from ambivalence to opposition
• 8. “But what about the children?”
• 9. Black–white differences in familial opposition
• 10. Black, white, and shades of grey
• References

Read or purchase the article here.