Mixed Race Studies

Who Do Multiracials Consider Part of Their Racial In-Group?

Social Psychological and Personality Science
First Published 2019-10-24
11 pages
DOI: 10.1177/1948550619876639

A. Chyei Vinluan, Graduate Students
Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts

Jessica D. Remedios, Principal Investigator
Social Identity and Stigma Laboratory
Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts

We propose that Multiracials have flexible racial in-groups in that Multiracials can potentially consider members from three target racial groups as in-group members: same-race Multiracials, racial component Monoracials, and different-race Multiracials. Across three studies, we find that Black/Whites and Asian/Whites consider racial component Minorities (i.e., Blacks or Asians) and different-race Multiracials who share their Minority identity (i.e., Black/Asians) as in-group members in addition to, but to a lesser extent than, same-race Multiracials (i.e., Black/Whites or Asian/Whites). Moreover, participants who reported frequently encountering discrimination related to their Black or Asian backgrounds were more likely to consider individuals who share their Minority background as in-group members. Implications for Multiracials’ psychological well-being and the broader intergroup literature are discussed.

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Nor is he [Thomas Chatterton Williams] the first thinker to ponder how multiracial people navigate a world so obsessed with the minutiae of race. Self-Portrait in Black and White doesn’t meaningfully engage with centuries of work from black-identifying scholars who wrote accessibly about their backgrounds, especially those with mixed-race ancestry. Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing, was published nearly a century ago; the former NAACP leader Walter White published his memoir, A Man Called White, in 1948. Upon his death in 1955, The New York Times wrote that the fair-skinned White “could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color-line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country. But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people.” Absent from Williams’s memoir is any critical analysis of texts written by White or even by major figures such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Angela Davis, or Malcolm X.

Hannah Giorgis, “A Simplistic View of a Mixed-ish America,” The Atlantic, October 26, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/10/mixed-ish-thomas-chatterton-williams-race/600679/.

The National Geographic Twins and the Falsehood of Our Post-Racial FutureThe National Geographic Twins and the Falsehood of Our Post-Racial Future

The New Yorker
2018-03-14

Doreen St. Félix, Staff Writer

National Geographic has made a rare, and refreshing, admission of past racism. But its most recent cover story undermines this corrective. Photograph Courtesy National Geographic

On Monday, National Geographic opened its April issue with a sombre letter from the editor, Susan Goldberg, presented with the even more sombre headline “For Decades, Our Coverage was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.” “The Race Issue,” which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., inaugurates the magazine’s yearlong “Diversity in America” series. In the letter, Goldberg—who is the first woman and the first Jewish person in the top post since the magazine’s founding, in 1888—informs her readers that John Edwin Mason, a historian of photography and of the African continent, having studied the magazine’s archive, found that, through failures of omission, overwrought inclusions, a melodramatic tone, and other editorial choices, National Geographic had mismanaged its reportage on nonwhite cultures. As Goldberg summarized, “until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States . . . . Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.”

The magazine’s admission is rare, and vindicates readers who, like me, have always had a visceral reaction to National Geographic’s covers and ethos. A recent project at the Times was similarly refreshing—offering obituaries for the indefatigable journalist Ida B. Wells, the writer Sylvia Plath, and thirteen other women who hadn’t been memorialized in the paper at the time of their deaths. The Times, which calls its project “Overlooked,” uses oddly passive language in presenting its past missteps: its archives offer “a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers,” the copy reads. Mason uses more pointed language: “National Geographic comes into existence at the height of colonialism . . . . and National Geographic was reflecting that view of the world.”…

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Identity angst is a luxury of the privileged. And I was privileged. And I was/am angst. The fact that I have time space and a vocabulary to tease out my own relationship to race and represent Asian, and to lobby for more gender equity or fight for diversity in Western media and culture, means that I am already living my mother’s American dream. It wouldn’t look like that to her. Nope. She used to sigh and roll her eyes when I did shows like “Birth of a nASIAN” at the Smithsonian about Asian American identities. She was furious when I got into Juilliard because it meant I was not going to morph into a blonde doctor by sheer force of her will. And she would still be mad today that I am not pursuing her dream of passing as one of the Real Housewives of Assimilation Hills.

Kate Rigg, “My Asian Mom bought me a Blonde Wig.” Medium, October 25, 2019. https://medium.com/@katerigg/my-asian-mom-bought-me-a-blonde-wig-6158df9c7a3a.

Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer

Ewan’s Blog: Bioinformatician at Large
2019-10-24

Ewan Birney, Joint Director
European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

Jennifer Raff, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Kansas

Adam Rutherford, Professor of Genetics, Evolution & Environment
University College London

Aylwyn Scally, Professor of Genetics
University of Cambridge

Human genetics tells us about the similarities and differences between people – in our physical and psychological traits, and in our susceptibility to disorders and diseases – but our DNA can also reveal the broader story of our evolution, ancestry and history. Genetics is a new scientific field, relatively speaking, merely a century old. Over the last two decades, the pace of discovery has accelerated dramatically, with exciting new findings appearing daily. Even for scientists who study this field, it’s difficult to keep up.

Amidst this ongoing surge of new information, there are darker currents. A small number of researchers, mostly well outside of the scientific mainstream, have seized upon some of the new findings and methods in human genetics, and are part of a social-media cottage-industry that disseminates and amplifies low-quality or distorted science, sometimes in the form of scientific papers, sometimes as internet memes – under the guise of euphemisms such as ‘race realism’ or ‘human biodiversity’. Their arguments, which focus on racial groupings and often on the alleged genetically-based intelligence differences between them, have the semblance of science, with technical-seeming tables, graphs, and charts. But they’re misleading in several important ways. The aim of this article is to provide an accessible guide for scientists, journalists, and the general public for understanding, criticising and pushing back against these arguments…

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How ‘mixed-ish’ Failed To Tackle Biracial Identity and Chose To Rely On Tropes

Wear Your Voice
2019-10-02

Nylah Burton

Set in the 1980s, ABC’s mixed-ish, the newest black-ish spin-off, tells the story of Dr. Rainbow “Bow” Johnson’s (Arica Himmel) experience growing up biracial. The Johnson family — white father Paul (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), Black mother Alicia (Tika Sumpter), Bow and her siblings Johan (Ethan William Childress) and Santamonica (Mykal-Michelle Harris) — are also former members of a “hippy” commune, where presumably, neither race nor racism existed.

The show’s premise is that being forced into the “real world,” where race and racism do exist, is a major source of culture shock that the entire family must now navigate.

As a Black multiracial woman who doesn’t have a white parent, I’m tired of portrayals of mixedness that mock Blackness, portray multiraciality and interracial marriages as the more “righteous” path, and ignore experiences that don’t fit into POC/white binaries.

Unfortunately, mixed-ish embodies all this and more…

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