Mixed Race Studies

The use of popular media in multicultural education: Stressing implications for the Black/non-Black biracial North American student

Syracuse University
1999
206 pages

Wendy Cecille Thompson

Instructor usage of popular media in the classroom has spawned studies on the impact of the visual image on minority populations. These studies range from examining the effects of films as role models on the self-concepts of Black elementary school children (Dimas, 1970), to Black college women’s persistence in viewing a popular television show in which none of the cast members were Black (Strother, 1994). This study is the first to examine the effects of classroom usage of popular media on populations that are racially “in the middle”—biracial individuals. Moreover, it is believed that popular media recommended for use with Blacks may be used with these individuals to reify the notion that the world’s population can be categorized into five socially-constructed groups called race. Lastly, a thorough examination of the relevant literature reveals that no models or paradigms of multicultural education specifically address the educational needs of biracial persons.

This study, through the use of unstructured and semi-structured qualitative interviews with 15 informants, seeks to discover how parental and cultural influences aid in the formation of a racial identity. The study is also concerned with the informants’ views on whether or how multicultural education served their educational needs. This study also attempts to discover how this marginalized population has responded to the use of popular media in multicultural education.

This study concludes that, although biracial persons have their own process of racial self-definition that is unique to them, society views them as Blacks. Parents and cultural influences greatly affect the biracial process of racial identification. Such influences minimize the effects of media on the biracial formation of a self-image. Media images, however, enable others to harbor perceptions of biracial persons based on essentialized notions of race and culture.

Such essentialized notions permeate educational structures, and thwart efforts at multicultural education. These efforts further marginalize biracial people by forcing them into rigid racial categories and by providing stereotypical images of those races when using popular media to further instructional goals.

This study should provide recommendations for popular media use in diverse fields, such as education, communication, and media studies.

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Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation by Malinda Maynor Lowery (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 126, Number 499, Winter 2013
pages 95-96
DOI: 10.1353/jaf.2013.0006

David Steven Cohen

This book from the University of North Carolina Press raises important questions about which groups are and are not recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as American Indian tribes. The book”€™s author, Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University, an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford, and a PhD in History from UNC-Chapel Hill. She also happens to be a Lumbee Indian.

Professor Lowery claims that the Lumbees, numbering about 50,000, are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. She acknowledges, however, they have no reservation, no treaties with the federal government, and no survivals of Indian language, customs, or beliefs. Her book purports to show how the Lumbee Indians “€œhave crafted an identity as a People, a race, a tribe, and a nation”€ (p. xii) in a dialogue between insiders and outsiders. Lowery”€™s argument is based on her extensive knowledge of the history of Native American relations with federal and state authorities and a sophisticated understanding of the concepts of the terms “€œrace,”€ “€œtribe,”€ and “€œnation.”€ She notes that these terms were imposed upon Native Americans by Europeans, and they must be viewed in the context of changing times. She frankly admits that both Lumbees and outsiders have used these terms to achieve certain goals in various contestations involving identity politics.

During the colonial period, the ancestors of the Lumbees were considered free Negroes or mulattoes. In the federal censuses from 1790 to 1830, Lumbee ancestors were listed as “€œfree persons of color,”€ a vague term that was used to describe people of racially mixed ancestry. Under the North Carolina Constitution of 1776, they were eligible to vote if they met the property qualification. The Lumbee ancestors were willing to accept free black identity, rather than be disqualified from voting as were American Indians, who were considered at that time to be members of foreign nations. During the Civil War, the Lumbees were assigned fortification duty, a job normally reserved for slaves and free blacks. In March 1865, Allen Lowery and his son William were murdered by the White Home Guard on suspicion that they deserted from fortification duty in Wilmington and aided escaped Union prisoners. Henry Berry Lowery, another son of Allen Lowery, led a band that took revenge on the murderers of his father and brother. From that day to the present, the Lowery Gang has been celebrated as legendary heroes.

North Carolina’s 1868 Constitution, passed under Republican rule during Reconstruction, allowed non-whites, including the Lumbees, the right to vote. When the Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1875, they instituted a system of segregated schools. The so-called “€œRedeemers”€ sought the support of the Lumbees, who had voted up until then as Republicans. In 1885, a state legislator from Robeson County named Hamilton Macmillan introduced a bill to recognize the Lumbees as the “€œCroatan”€ Indian tribe, based on a folk legend that they were descended from the Lost Colony of Roanoke whose only remnant was the name “€œCroatan”€ carved on a palisade. Two years after the recognition of the Croatan Indians, the legislature provided public funds for an Indian normal school, later renamed Pembroke College, which is today the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Lowery acknowledges that the Lumbees assumed the identity as Indians as part of a political deal to vote Republican so that they could establish their own segregated schools. Lowery rationalizes this deal as the Lumbees”€™s “€œadopting (and adapting to) racial segregation and creating political and social institutions that protected their distinct identity”€ (p. xii).

Federal recognition required descent from a known tribe, and there was some doubt whether the name “€œCroatan”€ referred to a place or a people. In 1913, the Lumbees petitioned the state of North Carolina to designate them as “€œthe Cherokee Indians of Robeson County.”€ The federal Office…

Understanding Who Reported Multiple Races in the U.S. Decennial Census: Results From Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies
Volume 62, Issue 1 (February 2013) (Special Issue on Multiethnic Families)
pages 5-16
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00759.x

Nicholas A. Jones, Chief, Racial Statistics Branch
Population Division
United States Census Bureau

Jungmiwha J. Bullock
United States Census Bureau

The United States’s collection of race data in Census 2000 and the 2010 Census provides a historical and landmark opportunity to compare results from two decennial censuses on the distributions of people reporting multiple races in response to the census. This research provides insights on the number of people who reported more than one race and details on various multiple-race combinations (e.g., White and Black or African American; White and Asian; White and American Indian and Alaska Native). This article presents analyses of the Two or More Races population and the largest multiple-race groups at the national and state level. The results inform data users and the public about an evolving portrait of the multiple-race population in the United States.

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Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880

The Journal of American History
Volume 85, Number 2 (September, 1998)
pages 466-501

Daniel R. Mandell, Professor of History
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri

In the century following the American Revolution, Indians in southern New England struggled to survive as communities, families, and individuals, in the face of prejudice and the region’s rapidly shifting social and economic landscape. Their struggle was shaped by intermarriage with “foreigners & strangers,” mostly African American men. The persistence, adaptation, and acculturation of particular ethnic groups, and the assimilation of members of those groups, are not unusual topics of study for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. But the story of New England Indians in the early republic is unusual because it took place on the side of America’s racial line where few studies of ethnicity have gone. Examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history, and it offers new insight into the complexity and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation…

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (review)

Journal of Social History
Volume 33, Number 3, Spring 2000
pages 753-755
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0037

Joshua D. Rothman, Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. xvi plus 542 pp.).

In his 1995 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, reprinted as the opening essay of this important collection, Gary Nash called the attention of his audience to the “hidden history of mestizo America.” Lost amidst America’s long and frequently tragic experience with racial and ethnic classification and separation is a past significantly shaped by sexual intermixture, cultural boundary crossing, and lives lived and identities forged in tension with dominant ideologies. Looking backward with a sensitivity to this “hybridity,” Nash proposed, might hold a key for moving beyond racialism in our future, and for finding a politics that transcends biological determinism without sacrificing the value of difference.

The twenty-three other essays assembled here by Martha Hodes (eight of which have been previously published in whole or in part) collectively explore the possibilities such a reconceptualization of the past holds. The subtitle of the volume is a bit misleading, since nearly all of the pieces deal principally with the European colonial territories that now comprise the continental United States rather than with Mexico or Canada. Still, the breadth of human experience and historical subfields traversed by the authors is astonishing. Working from discussions of the intersection of race and sex, the essays yield insight to historical issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and the family, class, religion, slavery, violence, national and personal identity, politics and political activism, diplomacy, culture, economics and commercial exchange, law, and crime, just to name those themes most prominent and recurring.

The collection is divided into five parts and arranged chronologically. Generally, the essays within each part are logically juxtaposed. Moreover, the separate parts are connected smartly to one another, producing a discernible, if subtle and fractured, narrative that describes important ebbs and flows in the history of sex across racial and ethnic lines in America since the 1690s. The essays in part one examine various regions of colonial North America, and cumulatively investigate European, Native American, and African American societies and cultures encountering each other, sexually and otherwise, for the first time. The authors here describe an era characterized by domination and distrust, but also by uncertainty, intercultural negotiation, and mutual accommodation. The early emergence of racial antipathy and the construction of racial hierarchy-both inseparable  from sex and sexuality-are never far from the surface in the stories told by Jennifer Spear about French Louisiana, Graham Hodges about German Lutherans in New York, Daniel Mandell about New England, and Richard Godbeer about the eighteenth-century Southern backcountry.

Part two moves on to the early national and antebellum periods. Here, slavery takes center stage. Most of the essays in this section focus on interracial sexual activity between whites and blacks-particularly in the South-which was commonplace despite being legally and culturally taboo. In the words of Sharon Block, who compares and contrasts the sexual vulnerability of white servant and black enslaved women, sex across the color line under slavery frequently yielded coercive situations where “economic mastery created sexual mastery.” As Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., and Josephine Boyd Bradley and Kent Anderson Leslie demonstrate in fascinating case studies, however, familial connections between whites and blacks under slavery also enabled some people of African descent to carve out personal identities and establish economic positions that transcended both their color and their ancestry.

In her essay on antebellum New York City, Leslie Harris demonstrates how fears of “amalgamation” were central to political discourse about abolitionism, urban poverty, and immigration. As a number of essays in part three make evident, interracial sex had even more volatile political implications in the Reconstruction-era South. In his…

Accordingly, the demand for statistical recognition of mixed-race persons—and acknowledgement of all aspects of an individual’s racial identity—is occurring within a sociopolitical context that values White ancestry and denigrates non-White ancestry. In such a racial caste system, it is impossible to acknowledge mixed-race persons officially without actually elevating the status of those who can claim to be other than “pure” Black, no matter how egalitarian the intent of the MCM [Multiracial Category Movement]. This same elevation of mixed-race classes is evident in various Latin American countries and in apartheid South Africa in ways that powerfully illuminate the implications of furthering multiracial discourse in the United States.

Tanya Katerí Hernández, “‘Multiracial’ Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-blind Jurisprudence,” Maryland Law Review, Volume 57, Issue 1 (1998): 121. http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol57/iss1/5/.

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity [review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013
Special Issue: Racialization and Religion: Race, culture and difference in the study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
pages 517-518
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.737929

Robin Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies
University of Oxford

Michael J. Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity. New York: Fordham University Press. 2011, ix + 247 pp. (paper).

This book is written by a philosopher who reworks the well-trodden ground of how we to understand race and racism. It is perhaps not too grand a claim to say that for many years US discussion about race and racism was directly or indirectly derived from Gunnar Myrdal’s formative study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It is an indication of how far scholarship in this field has moved on that Myrdal does not even make an appearance in Monahan’s list of references. Instead he draws on three newer wellsprings of arguments—cultural studies, whiteness studies and creolization.

One of the great luminaries of cultural studies was Raymond Williams at Cambridge, became so weary of being hailed as one of the progenitors of the field that he complained, ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I’d never heard the damned word (culture)’. This is because the idea of culture is often so vague and so tantalizingly out of reach. For Monahan. cultural studies is accessed not so much through reactions and interpretations of literature (the British tradition), but through phenomenology. Phenomenology, Monahan avers, is characterized ‘first and foremost by a commitment to placing human consciousness at the forefront of philosophical investigations’ (p. 106). This gives him ‘the subject’ in the principal title of his book.

Trained in a more prosaic sociological tradition. I would have supposed that accessing the subject’ might be easier if the dramatis personae in the research were alive and able to be surveyed or at least interviewed. Monahan does not make it easy for himself by choosing, as the central characters in his research, seventeenth-century Irish servants who were indentured to masters in Barbados. The so-called ‘Redlegs’ of the Caribbean (they went also to St Vincent and the Grenadines) have rightly attracted considerable scholarly attention by fascinated historians. There were a few who were stricto sensu slaves (though Monahan denies this); most were semi-free workers who could not be sold or endowed and had to be freed after their indentures expired. They were often impoverished to the point that their…

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Self-concept and parental values: influences on the ethnic identity development of biracial children

San Jose State University
August 1994
46 pages

Julie Mari Oka

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Psychology San Jose State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

In this thesis self-concept was measured across three ethnic groups (Japanese-American, Caucasian, and Japanese-American/Caucasian biracial). Forty-eight children divided by ethnicity and gender completed a self-concept measure and a perspective-taking measure. The perspective-taking measure was dropped from the study due to a ceiling effect. The self-concept measure yielded three scores for each child which included an overall self-concept score as well as scores for behavioral and physical self-concept.

Biracial boys and Caucasian girls scored highest when compared to other groups on overall self-concept. Furthermore, biracial boys scored highest on physical self-concept. Biracial girls scored lowest on both subscales. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on behavioral self-concept.

Parents completed a parental questionnaire designed to assess the extent to which parents would like their children to exhibit values and behaviors considered to be traditionally Japanese-American. Although not significant, mothers of biracial children tended to report more of a preference for their children to display traditional Japanese-American values.

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Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging [Kate Reed Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013
Special Issue: Racialization and Religion: Race, culture and difference in the study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
pages 517-518
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.734393

Kate Reed, Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology
University of Sheffield

Katharina Schramm,  David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg (eds.) Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012 (Volume 6 of Studies of the Biosocial Society), vi +221 pp. (hardback).

This is an interesting edited collection on race, ethnicity, identity and genetics. Focusing on exploring the intersections between genetic research and technology and the social and political construction of identities, the book offers a timely and original contribution to debates in the field. It explores the often uneasy relationship between new genetics and the politics of race, ethnicity and nation, highlighting the co-production of science and politics in the process. The text covers a range of issues related to race, ethnicity, identity and genetics at global, national, and local levels. It aims to unpack the concept of identity, further exploring the ways in which genetics affects local/global discussions of ethnicity and race. Overall, the book successfully highlights the complex and often contradictory nature of the relationship between politics and science.

After the editors’ introduction outlines the main themes and concerns of the collection, the volume begins with a contribution by Andrew Smart, Richard Tatton, Paul Martin and George Ellison. Their chapter offers a conceptual engagement with debates about social constructivism. They stress the importance of fluidity and flexibility in identity politics surrounding race and genetics on the one hand, without losing the focus on racialzation and racism as both historical and contemporary processes on the other. In chapter 2, David Skinner stays with the issue of race, categorization and genetics, this time focusing on the British criminal justice system. Skinner situates the emerging biopolitics of race, genetics and identity within the context of a varied and changing use of official systems of racial and ethnic categorization. Peter Wade’s chapter is also concerned with the changing dynamics of racial classification, particularly regarding the notion of “race-kinship congruity”. Drawing…

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“Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-blind Jurisprudence

Maryland Law Review
Volume 57, Issue 1 (1998)
pages 97-173

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION OF THE MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY MOVEMENT
• II. THE ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES OF MULTIRACIAL DISCOURSE
  • A. The Reaffirmation of the Value of Whiteness in Racial Hierarchy
  • B. The Dissociation of a Racially Subordinated Buffer Class from Equality Efforts
  • C. The Continuation of the Color-Blind Jurisprudence Trajectory
    • 1. The Historical Meaning of Race Expelled from Analysis of Racial Discrimination
    • 2. Societal Discrimination Expelled from Analysis of Racial Discrimination
    • 3. The Judicial View of Race-Conscious Equality Measures as Harmful Stereotyping
    • 4. The Judicial Excision of Race from Racial Discrimination Discourse
  • D. Measurement of Racial Progress Hindered
• III. A RACE-CONSCIOUS RACIAL CLASSIFICATION PROPOSAL
• CONCLUSION

Introduction

The debate, in short, is really not so much about a multiracial box as it is about what race means-and what it will come to mean as the society approaches the millennium.
—Ellis Close

For the past several years, there has been a Multiracial Category Movement (MCM) promoted by some biracial persons’ and their parents for the addition of a “multiracial” race category on the decennial census. The stated aim of such a new category is to obtain a more specific count of the number of mixed-race persons in the United States and to have that tallying of mixed-race persons act as a barometer and promoter of racial harmony. As proposed, a respondent could choose the “multiracial” box in lieu of the presently listed racial classifications of American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White, or Other. The census schedule also includes a separate Hispanic Origin ethnicity question. On October 29, 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) adopted a federal Interagency Committee recommendation to reject the multiracial category in favor of allowing individuals to check more than one racial category. Some MCM proponents are not satisfied with the OMB’s decision, because multiple box checking does not directly promote a distinct multiracial identity.  These MCM proponents are committed to continue lobbying for a multiracial category on the 2010 census. Further, an OMB official has indicated that the issue of a multiracial category might be reconsidered with an increase in mixed-race persons. Yet, the significance of the MCM extends beyond the actual decision of whether and how mixed-race persons should be counted.

The discourse surrounding the advocacy for a census count of mixed-race persons has social and legal ramifications apart from the limited context of revising a census form. The principle underlying this Article is that the law should be understood in terms of its social consequences. From a legal-realist perspective, it is important to scrutinize the neutral discourse characteristic among those proposing a legally mandated mixed-race census count. Such analysis exposes its moral and political significance and ramifications. “[L]anguage… can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people.” The power of discourse arises from its ability to construct a public narrative and
then obstruct counter-explanations for social reality.

Multiracial discourse contends that a mixed-race census count is necessary because race has become too fluid to monitor. The theory posits that the inability to identify psychologically with just one racial category is inherent to mixed-race persons alone and that the growing number of mixed-race persons demonstrates the futility of racial categorization as a practice. For instance, MCM proponents often refer to the growing numbers of persons who choose the “Other Race” category to support the premise that the racial categories are inadequate for mixed-race persons. The multiracial narrative of modern race being more fluid than in the past corresponds with and reinforces the color-blind jurisprudence presentation of race as devoid of meaning. Thus, “multiracial discourse” has an immediate meaning as the rhetoric deployed in the campaign for a specific count of mixed-race persons, and a more expansive meaning as the approach to race that views the increasing diversity of society as deconstructing and transcending race. Multiracial discourse misconstrues the meaning of race used in the group measurement of racial disparity, with an individual focused assessment of fluid cultural identity. Such a view of race negates its sociopolitical meaning26 and thereby undermines effective legal mechanisms to ameliorate racial discrimination. In fact, the MCM can be viewed as a metonym for the more general colorblind approach to race evident in recent Supreme Court cases.

Both the immediate and expansive meanings of “multiracial discourse” are interrelated and involve a highly politicized discourse. Accordingly, this Article shall question the assumptions that underlie both levels of meaning in order to assess the continuing significance of the racial classifications that multiracial discourse challenges. This analysis reveals that although multiracial discourse may seem benign and appealing on a humanitarian level, its implementation will produce counter-egalitarian results in the struggle for racial equality. The MCM’s campaign for color-blind treatment of racial hierarchy cloaks the racial significance of ostensibly race-neutral laws, as the Supreme Court’s recent movement toward color-blind anti-discrimination jurisprudence has done.

Because of the manner in which the census context highlights the dangers of multiracial discourse to racial justice efforts, this Article will focus upon the census as a well-known paradigm for the way racial classifications function. In particular, to demonstrate the folly of color-blind approaches to race issues, the author enlists the debate centered on the demand for a census count of mixed-race persons. Because the census is the cornerstone of the federal statistical system, the battle over the reform of the census racial classifications is significant and far-reaching.The census reflects in large measure the nation’s struggle over how human beings will be known politically in a racially stratified society.  The debate over a multiracial category reveals an intriguing aspect about how we conceptualize race. An examination of multiracial discourse reveals that multiracial-category proponents misperceive the meaning of race relevant to the census inquiry by conflating a cultural approach to race with a sociopolitical approach to race. Therefore, this Article analyzes the widespread legal ramifications of the MCM and assesses whether the MCM’s proposal effectively advances its stated goal of promoting racial equality. After analyzing the legal import of multiracial discourse, the Article determines that the MCM misperception of race and its fluidity inadvertently furthers the progression of color-blind jurisprudence in direct contravention of the MCM goal of promoting racial equality. Part I provides background and identifies the motivating forces behind the MCM as a color-blind movement. Part II critiques the MCM for its adverse effects upon racial justice efforts in furthering the manner in which color-blind jurisprudence disregards actual experiences of racial discrimination in the promotion of White supremacy. Part III proposes a race-conscious classification system, which reflects the sociopolitical nature of race, to monitor racial discrimination more effectively and to dislodge the force of multiracial discourse…

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