Mixed Race Studies

The Social Negotiation of Ambiguous In-Between Stigmatized Identities: Investigating Identity Processes in Multiracial and Bisexual People

University of Massachusetts, Boston
December 2011
234 pages

Vali Dagmar Kahn

A Dissertation Presented by Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, in partial fulfillment of  the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Clinical Psychology

To date, most bisexual and multiracial identity models in psychology capture a largely internal developmental process (Collins, 2000; Kich, 1992; Weinberg, Williams & Pryor, 1994). However, individuals learn to manage their socially stigmatized identities in social interactions (Goffman, 1963). While the demands to socially negotiate stigmatized identity affect all minority peoples, individuals with inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identities, such as multiracial and bisexual people, must negotiate also being situated at the margins of their own reference groups (e.g. heterosexual and gay/lesbian). Using a comparative grounded theory approach, this study explored the question: How do experiences of socially negotiating an inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identity influence one’s identity development? And the sub-question: What are the similarities and differences in these processes for multiracial and bisexual people?

between the ages of 20 and 36 years participated in semi-structured interviews addressing the following areas of inquiry: (1) Contextualizing current identifications and establishing shared understandings, (2) Experiences of social negotiations, and (3) Effects of these experiences on identities. Issues regarding the rigor and credibility of the study (Morrow, 2005) were addressed through peer debriefing; inquiry auditing; and member check discussions. Analysis followed a constant comparative method (Creswell, 2007) and a multi-step process resulting in a theory describing three negotiation cycles and associated identity effects common to both kinds of identities (multiracial and bisexual), with additional identity specific (multiracial or bisexual) variations: the first cycle was Catalyzing Experiences, the second was Active Negotiations, and the third Emerging Sense of Agency through New Understandings, Perspectives, and Positive Experiences. Cycles were described by multiracial and bisexual participants as fluid, iterative, and interacting. The model developed in this study offers a way of understanding stigma management strategies and their relation to influencing identities and stigmatizing processes. This deeper understanding can help clinicians and community organizers create inclusive environments and develop interventions to assist multiracial and bisexual individuals develop skills to deal with social stigmatizing processes, resolve initial questions, and develop a greater sense of agency in identity choice and performance.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Census: Few among Az’s tribes claim to be multiracial

Tucson Sentinel
2012-01-26

Victoria Pelham
Cronkite News Service

WASHINGTON – The number of American Indians who claimed to be multiracial jumped sharply over the last decade, but not so much in Arizona, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

The bureau said the total number of American Indian or Alaska Natives grew from 4.1 million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2010, a 27 percent increase. Of those, 2.3 million people, or 44 percent of the total, claimed to be Indian and at least one other race, the report said.

But Arizona saw relatively higher numbers of people claiming to be Indian only.

“There’s a common trend in the state of Arizona that is different from other states,” said Mellor Willie, executive director of the National American Indian Housing Council.

“That will definitely have an effect when you’re working with raw federal policy that has to meet the needs of all Indian people,” Willie said. “Tribes have to take that into consideration, especially the tribes in Arizona.”

The Census Bureau said the Navajo Nation, which has a significant presence in Arizona, had the largest number of single-race members of any tribal group in the country, with 287,000 of the tribe’s 332,129 people claiming to be single-race. That means just 13 percent of Navajo claim to be multiracial…

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Race and Humanity

Science
Volume 113, Number 2932 (1951-03-09)
pages 264-266
DOI: 10.1126/science.113.2932.264

Th. Dobzhansky (1900-1975)

Probably no other scientific concept  has been so notorious for vagueness and ambiguity as that of race. Certainly none has been more unceremoniously exploited as a cloak for prejudice and malevolence. And this despite the fact that anthropologists and biologists have studied races in man and in other organisms for more than a century and a half. A very heartening break in this situation has, however, become apparent within the past decade or two. The rapid advances in population genetics have shed new light on race as a biological phenomenon and as a stage of the evolutionary development of sexually reproducing species. It was, then, only a question of time when the study of races of man would be revised and revived under the impact of modern population genetics. This reformation of the raciological thinking in anthropology is now at hand. The first and the second of the three books under review are the harbingers of a new era. The third is a useful anthology of raciological writings covering the late eighteenth century up to the modem era.

Professor Count’s anthology provides a historical perspective and a contrasting background against which the modern reform will stand out in bold relief. From its very inception, the race concept has suffered from an inner contradiction (not to speak of its perennial misuse for political propaganda purposes). Race has been a practical and convenient category of classification, with the aid of which the diversity of human types could be efficiently described and neatly pigeonholed. For this purpose it is useful to set up so-called racial “types.” The types are arrived at by estimation, or by calculation, of averages of various traits observed in the samples of individuals examined. No objection could be raised against this procedure if it were used solely as a technique of cataloguing. But a type once created has an insidious way of dominating its maker. It becomes “the race” a sort of noumenon of which the existing individuals are only imperfect representatives. Needless to say, such a race concept is basically antievolutionist, as well as incompatible with Mendelian genetics. And yet the idea of change and development has been a part of anthropological thinking since the times of Buffon, Kant, and Blumenbach. Darwin entitled his great work The Origin of Species; origin of races would have been no striking novelty either to anthropologists or to biologists.

An uneasy compromise was arranged between the contradictory concepts of race as an abstract but stable type and race the ineluctably changing biological reality. This compromise involved the assumption that there existed at some obscure time in the past so-called primary races, which were supposedly “pure” and conformed to their ideal types. The primary races engaged, however, in long-continued miscegenation; the miscegenation has not only resulted in numerous “mixed” or “secondary” races, but also engulfed and largely obliterated the pure primary ones. The latter can be discerned at present, in the words of an outstanding living anthropologist (Howells), only “by a process of personal estimation which is reminiscent of divination.” Another trouble with the pure primary races is that a pure race makes no sense at all from the standpoint of genetics, except in asexually reproducing organisms. In sexual and cross-fertilizing species such as man, no two individuals are likely to have the same genotype; parents and offspring, as well as brothers and sisters, are genetically different Nevertheless, the compromise has continued down to our day, long after it has lost every semblance of justification. Professor Count might have saved a not-inconsiderable number of pages of his anthology by deletion of some of the more recent lucubrations concerning this topic.

Professor Boyd’s book contains a detailed, in places caustic, and altogether devastating critique of the abuses of old-fashioned raciology. But Boyd in certainly not one of those who need to conceal their intellectual sterility by being severely critical of the work of others. His book is primarily constructive. The central idea is that every human being is a member of a biological community within which marriages are concluded. Such a community, termed Mendelian population or isolate, possesses a gene pool, from which the genes of the individuals are drawn, and to which some of them are returned unless the individual dies childless. Mankind, the human species, is the most inclusive Mendelian population. It is, however, a very complex system of isolates, kept apart by geography or by social forces. It happens that these subordinate populations often differ in relative frequencies of genes for various traits in their gene pools. Such different populations are races. Boyd defines (p. 207) “a human race as a population which differs significant…

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial People are Multiplying

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2011-03-31

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

The New York Times recently published a story highlighting the increase in numbers of multiracial children in the United States. The numbers of self identifying multiracial children has doubled in the United States to 2.9% of the entire population. With this data, coupled with a 2007 Pew Research Center report that interracial marriages represented 14% of all new marriages (up from 7% in 2000), we could begin to surmise an end to problematic racial distinctions and a truly new America, right?

Taken together these numbers indicate a movement towards greater acceptance of interracial/interethnic relationships as well as a greater freedom for multiracial children to claim this mixture as part of their identity. And perhaps this is the most significant aspect of these figures. While the idea of numbers doubling seems extraordinary, multiracial children still constitute only 2.9% of all children which means more often than not sexual desire and marriage is oriented towards similarity and homogeneity (it is also important to note how even mixed marriages follow patterns of desire away from African American women who marry outside of their race in the smallest numbers.)

In the midst of these numbers we must remember that multiracial identity is not confined to checking boxes. Interactions with friends, dating, interactions with co-workers do not begin with our self-assertions, but with a complicated set of markers and interpretations that the multiracial person is not entirely in control of.

The space to claim one’s “multi”ness is important, it is certainly important for myself and my children. At the same time, the existence of multiracial children does not diminish the realities of racial exclusion and economic oppression that are not only present, but becoming more vehement and stark in the wake of our first African American president. To put it a different way, we are not the future of America. Like all other people who are raised in a deeply racialized world, we are formed to resist certain notions of beauty, embrace or recoil from certain people…

…If we wish to celebrate the growth of multiracial children let us not pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but begin to rage against the systemic realities that prevent these numbers from growing: mass incarceration of African American men, tragic inequities between white and black in access to education, anti-immigration legislation, perpetual wars that limit our economic options, images of beauty and health that implicitly deride dark bodies and work against white bodies, the perpetual differentiation, bullying and teasing that plants these seeds of difference in elementary age children…

Read the entire article here.