Mixed Race Studies

Being Mixed and Black: The Socialization of Mixed-Race Identity

University of Chicago
2012-12-13
92 pages

Brett R. Coleman

Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2012

This study examined the relationship between parental racial-ethnic socialization and racial-ethnic identity development from the perspective of biracial young adults. Despite the recent advances in theory regarding mixed-race identity development, few studies have examined how parents’ attitudes about race and ethnicity influence the identities of mixed-race youth. Similarly, racial-ethnic socialization theory is largely based on the assumption that individuals identify with single racial-ethnic groups that are discrete and mutually exclusive. Participants were eight biracial young adults with one Black and one White parent. Through semi-structured, in-depth interviews, participants revealed that the socialization of their racial-ethnic identities involved balancing discrete and overlapping, mixed and Black identities. The relationship between socialization and identity development was subject to various ecological influences associated with living in a racialized society in which races are historically thought to be discrete groups with impermeable boundaries. Results are discussed in relation to ecological models of mixed-race identity development.

Read the entire thesis here.

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies: Call For Papers – March 1, 2013
 
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”

 
Papers that were presented at the November 1-4, 2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?” are invited for revision and submission for the second issue of JCMRS. We also welcome papers that speak to specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. JCMRS encourages both established and emerging scholars, including graduate students and faculty, to submit articles throughout the year. Articles will be considered for publication on the basis of their contributions to important and current discussions in mixed race studies, and their scholarly competence and originality.

The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the paper, not its connection to the 2012 conference theme. Papers might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Submission might also consider the following areas as related to Critical Mixed Race Studies:

Submission Deadline: Extended to March 1, 2013

Submission Guidelines: Article manuscripts should range between 15-30 double-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12-point font, including notes and works cited, must follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words).

Visit our website for complete submission guidelines and to submit an article: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucsb_soc_jcmrs
 
Please address all inquiries to: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the U.S.

University of North Texas
May 2012
165 pages

Starita Smith

Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation is a qualitative study of racially ambiguous people and their life experiences. Racially ambiguous people are individuals who are frequently misidentified racially by others because they do not resemble the phenotype associated with the racial group to which they belong or because they belong to racial/ethnic groups originating in different parts of the world that resemble each other. The racial/ethnic population of the United States is constantly changing because of variations in the birth rates among the racial/ethnic groups that comprise those populations and immigration from around the world. Although much research has been done that documents the existence of racial/ethnic mixing in the history of the United States and the world, this multiracial history is seldom acknowledged in the social, work, and other spheres of interaction among people in the U.S., instead a racialized system based on the perception of individuals as mono-racial thus easily identified through (skin tone, hair texture, facial features, etc.). This is research was done using life experience interviews with 24 racially ambiguous individuals to determine how race/ethnicity has affected their lives and how they negotiate the minefield of race.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
• CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
  • Research Questions
• CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Changing Definitions of Race
  • Race under European Domination
  • The One-Drop Rule or Hypo-Descent
  • Color Stratification among Blacks
  • Passing as White
  • Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
  • Biracial Identity
  • Racial Classifications have Porous Borders
  • Race as a Sorting Mechanism
  • Tri-Racial Isolate Groups
  • The Case of the Mississippi Choctaw Rejected
  • Racial Misclassification and Native Americans
  • Mixed Race Individuals and Kinship Networks
  • Racial Fusion and the Hispanics
  • The U.S. Census and the Social Construction of Race
• CHAPTER 3 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
  • Racial Formation Theory
  • Assimilation Theory
  • The Latin Americanization Thesis
  • Theoretical Perspectives: Discussion
• CHAPTER 4 METHODS
  • Recruitment
  • Data-Gathering Instruments
  • Interview Locations
  • The Interviewees
  • The Interview Script
  • Reflexivity
• CHAPTER 5 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE ENDURES IN A “COLORBLIND SOCIETY”
  • Race in Work and School
  • Family life
  • Romantic and Spousal Relationships
• CHAPTER 6 CONSTANT OBJECTIFICATION
  • Objectification of Native Americans
  • Being Constantly Doubted
• CHAPTER 7 STUBBORN STEREOTYPES
• CHAPTER 8 DEVELOPING AN ADULT CORE RACIAL IDENTITY
  • “We’re All the Same in God’s Eyes, Then How Come I Don’t Look Like You?”
  • Black is Bad
  • Making up Your own Racial Identity
• CHAPTER 9 NAVIGATING THE RACIAL LANDSCAPE: THE MULTIFOCAL RACIAL IDENTITY
  • Pride in Minority Identity
  • Learning to be Resilient
  • Being Flexible under Globalization
• CHAPTER 10 HURTFUL LIVES
• CHAPTER 11 THEORY REVISITED
• CHAPTER 12 CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A CONSENT FORM
• APPENDIX B INTERVIEWEE PHOTO INSTRUMENT
• REFERENCE LIST

LIST OF TABLES

1. Interviewee Demographic Data
2. Thematic Codingg
3. Sample of Thematic Coding for Indira

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Racialized society
2. Objectification of racially ambiguous people
3. Adult core racial identity

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (review)

Civil War History
Volume 52, Number 2, June 2006
pages 180-182
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2006.0034

Michael A. Morrison, Associate Professor of History
Purdue University

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. By Bruce Dain. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 321.)

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

Harvard University Press
February 2003
334 pages
6 x 9-15/16 inches
Hardcove ISBN: 9780674009462

Bruce Dain, Associate Professor of History
University of Utah

The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.

From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously “black” African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist “natural history” into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences.

In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion “race” caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. The Face of Nature
• 2. Culture and the Persistence of Race
• 3. The Horrors of St. Domingue
• 4. The Mutability of Human Affairs
• 5. Conceiving Universal Equality
• 6. Black Immediatism
• 7. The New Ethnology