Mixed Race Studies

Marcia Dawkins Booksigning

Eso Won Books
4327 Degnan Blvd (Leimert Park Business Center)
Los Angeles, California 90008
Phone: 323-290-1048
2012-09-12, 19:00-21:00 PDT (Local Time)

Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity by Marcia Alesan Dawkins. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2012, 285 pages. Hardback ISBN: 9781602583122.

Passing (def): usually understood as an abbreviation for “racial passing.” Describes the fact of being accepted, or categorized successfully as, a member of people classifed as white.

Clearly Invisible journeys to sometimes uncomfortable but unfailingly learned places as Dawkins retells the contemporary expressions and past experiences of individuals who pass as white people. Along the way these former non-white people’s stories sound familiar but take subtle turns to reveal tensions lurking beneath the surface, non-white people who ultimately expose as much about white supremacy/racism as they conceal about themselves.

Bring your questions, put on your thinking cap and enjoy this controversial topic.

For more information, click here.

An Exploration of Factors Influencing Multiracial/Multiethnic Identity Development: A Qualitative Investigation

University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, Minnesota
2012-05-12

Anesh S. Patel

A Doctoral Project Presented to the Graduate School of Professional Psychology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Psychology

As of 2000, one in forty Americans identified themselves as multiracial/multiethnic (Lee & Bean, 2004), with 70% of the multiracial/multiethnic population younger than thirty-five years of age (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). Population trends predict that the multiracial population will continue to increase, possibly reaching 21% of the population by the year 2050 (Smith & Edmonston, 1997). With the burgeoning number of multiracial/multiethnic individuals in our society, it is important for counseling psychologists to understand the ways in which they identify with race/ethnicity, and how that identification is formed.
 
This qualitative study was designed to explore the lived experiences of a multiracial/multiethnic individual’s life to in order to better understand their process of racial identification/ethnic identification and thus identity for the express purpose of enhancing therapeutic interventions with this population. The way in which experiences were explored was through addressing the following questions: What are the influencing factors on identity development in multiracial/multiethnic individuals? What, if any, implications do these factors have for the practice of psychology when working with mixed race/ethnicity individuals?
 
This study revealed three themes that most strongly influenced identity development in the eight participants. The first theme that arose was influential people as participants highlighted social and family groups that made an impact on participants overall sense of belonging. Secondly, the theme of influential moments arose, which joined together experiences in participant’s lives that made them stop and think specifically about their different races/ethnicities. It could be defined for some as their “eureka moment” in their identity selection process. The final theme that emerged from the eight interviews was influential cultural experiences. This theme ranged from specific college courses taken by individuals to pressure around learning cultural rituals, either way, it was experiences in their lives directly linked to increasing knowledge and understanding of one’s specific culture/racial/ethnic group.

Read the entire project here.

Biracial and monoracial infant own-race face perception: an eye tracking study

Developmental Science
Published online: 2012-09-07
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01170.x

Sarah E. Gaither
Department of Psychology
Tufts University

Kristin Pauker, Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii

Scott P. Johnson, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

We know that early experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing, but we know little about how infants learn to distinguish faces from different races, especially for non-Caucasian populations. Moreover, it is unknown whether differential processing of different race faces observed in typically studied monoracial infants extends to biracial infants as well. Thus, we investigated 3-month-old Caucasian, Asian and biracial (Caucasian-Asian) infants’ ability to distinguish Caucasian and Asian faces. Infants completed two within-subject, infant-controlled habituation sequences and test trials as an eye tracker recorded looking times and scanning patterns. Examination of individual differences revealed significant positive correlations between own-race novelty preference and scanning frequency between eye and mouth regions of own-race habituation stimuli for Caucasian and Asian infants, suggesting that facility in own-race face discrimination stems from active inspection of internal facial features in these groups. Biracial infants, however, showed the opposite effect: An ‘own-race’ novelty preference was associated with reduced scanning between eye and mouth regions of ‘own-race’ habituation stimuli, suggesting that biracial infants use a distinct approach to processing frequently encountered faces. Future directions for investigating face processing development in biracial populations are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.

The black experience in postwar Germany

University of Connecticut
Honors Scholar Program
2012-05-06
36 pages

Jamie Christopher Morris

This paper endeavors to find the extent of anti-black racism in various sectors of German society following World War Two through an examination of primary sources and secondary scholarship. While some Germans, often women, tolerated and even loved African-American soldiers, many German men actively sought to keep black GIs out of their communities, encouraged by white GIs. Afro-German children were viewed as a huge and shameful problem to be dealt with en masse by the government. The development of German anti-black racism is interesting to track how the German people shifted from Nazi attitudes towards Americanized ones.

Introduction

In the late 1940s a young and frightened German girl believed that the African-American soldiers marching through her town had tails hidden in their trousers, a rumor that had been told to her by a passing white soldier. A decade later that girl was dating one of those same black GIs, and had in fact approached him first to get his attention. She may have been recalling the fact that it was the black soldiers who had treated her the best as a child, giving her gifts and making sure she was clean, or she may have simply desired an American boyfriend in the hopes that he would lavish her with his comparatively rich lifestyle. The girl’s attitude reflects that of many Germans towards blacks in the late 1940s and 1950s. Public opinion of black soldiers grew locally in the towns that hosted them, driven in no small part by their generosity and kindness compared to that of white GIs, but their exotic appearance and unique American outlook also attracted attention and praise.

Of course there was also some strong resistance to the stationing of black American soldiers in occupied Germany. Vestiges of the National Socialist ideology of racial purity remained in many Germans’ thoughts, if not always in their speech and actions, as well as the traditional prejudice against anything different from themselves that clung still to most Europeans. But because of the intense Nazi focus on race and cleansing, and the uncovering of the Nazi atrocities, Germany was forced into a unique position of having to prove its mended ways; as historian Heide Fehrenbach notes, “The postwar logic of race that emerged in Germany was beholden to an internationally enforced injunction that Germans differentiate their polity and policies from the Nazi predecessor.” Thus over the 1950s the language of “race” all but disappeared in Germany, although prejudices were often just as strong as previously. These hatreds, however, were turned towards the new and highly visible group of racial “others”: blacks.3 Germans maintained a unique outlook towards this new racial group, convincing themselves that they were not racist but proving hostile towards blacks and those who associated with them. An overwhelmingly conservative system of values warred with the Germans’ vehement denial of the feelings of the past to create a uniquely hostile yet also inviting environment for African-Americans…

Read the entire thesis here.

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