Mixed Race Studies

Race and Mixed Race

Temple University Press
October 1993
232 pages
6×9
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-265-5, ISBN: 1-56639-265-9
    
Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

In the first philosophical challenge to accepted racial classifications in the United States, Naomi Zack uses philosophical methods to criticize their logic. Tracing social and historical problems related to racial identity, she discusses why race is a matter of such importance in America and examines the treatment of mixed race in law, society, and literature.

Zack argues that black and white designations are themselves racist because the concept of race does not have an adequate scientific foundation.  The “one drop” rule, originally a rationalization for slavery, persists today even though there have never been “pure” races and most American blacks have “white” genes.

Exploring the existential problems of mixed race identity, she points out how the bi-racial system in this country generates a special racial alienation for many Americans. Ironically suggesting that we include “gray” in our racial vocabulary, Zack concludes that any racial identity is an expression of bad faith.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Existential Analysis
1. Introduction: Summary, Method, and Structure
2. The Ordinary Concept of Race
3. White Family Identity
4. Black Family Identity
5. Demography and the Identification of the Family
6. Mixed-Race Family Identity

Part II: The History of Mixed Race
7. Introduction to the History of Mixed Race
8. The Law on Black and White
9. Marooned!
10. The Harlem Renaissance: Cultural Suicide
11. Genocidal Images of Mixed Race
12. Mulattoes in Fiction
13. Alienation

Part III: The Philosophy of Anti-Race
14. Nobility versus Good Faith
15. Black, White, and Gray: Words, Words, Words

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Parental Communication and Its Influence on Biracial Identity

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 93rd Annual Convention, TBA
Chicago, IL
2007-11-15

27 pages
 
Carolyn Brooks

The Biracial identity development process has long been overlooked in society and in research. Few models exist and those models in existence are mostly descriptive. This paper focused on one of the major influential factors in a child’s identity development process – parental communication. The Parental Racial Socialization Communication Model (PRSC) is proposed. A parent’s view of the child’s Biracialness and view of the world impact two dimensions that construct a parent’s communication style. Those two dimensions are the approach technique and valence of racial socialization. Four parental racial socialization styles are created from those two dimensions and are examined as predictors of the child’s ethnic identity label (border, protean, transcendent, and traditional) and their racial-esteem (feelings associated with the label). This model is helpful for counseling practitioners working with this population and for the parents of Biracial children who want information on how best to communicate with their children. The Parental Racial Socialization Communication Model is a needed addition to the limited literature on Biracial identity development.

Introduction

A topic that has gained much interest over the past few decades is that of Biracial identity. The 2000 Census, which was the first Census providing individuals with the option of identifying with more than one racial group, made it clear that the number of Biracial individuals in the United States is increasing rapidly (Buckley & Carter, 2004). Before this, the historical One-Drop Rule, which stated that an individual with as little as one drop of Black blood would be considered Black, was prevalent (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2004). Therefore, some concluded that Black identity models were sufficient for Black/White Biracial individuals. In the 1980’s, researchers began to recognize that Biracial individuals experience racial issues differently than Blacks and have begun to delve into various investigations to see what factors influence Biracial identity development. (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2004).

The concept “Bi-racial identity,” however, is rarely defined or understood in any consistent manner in the existing literature. In many ways, Biracial identity appears to be a primitive term. However, various researchers examine Biracial identity in quite dissimilar ways, suggesting that the term Biracial identity is far from being understood. I define Biracial identity as an “emergent category of identification” (Rockquemore, 1998, p. 199) – singular, border, protean, or transcendent – for people with parents that are of “two different socially designated racial groups” (Root, 1996, p. ix). This identification, from which one attempts to gain a sense of self, is a choice based on a continuous process of interactions with one’s family, social network, and society, which are largely influenced by one’s appearance. The central question to be explored here is how parents of Biracial children communicatively influence their child’s Biracial identity development.

This question is not one that appears in most of the literature on this topic. The majority of the models proposed in this field are descriptive, based on qualitative data, and lack process. Thus, an understanding of what factors and how the factors influence Biracial identity has not yet been achieved. Although prior work has primarily been descriptive, they provide a substantial foundation upon which more predictive models can be built (Poston, 1990). The literature on racial identity suggests that parental influence is important in the identity development of their children, as parents are the “primary socializing agents” of their children (Hughes, 2003, p. 15). Hence, the scope of this paper is to examine one of those factors – parental influence and develop a model that has a process and predictive power. The following review of the Biracial identity literature will reveal just how integral parental influence seems to be in the racial identity process for Biracial children…

Read the entire paper here.

Narrating the Racial Self: Symbolic Boundaries and the Reference Group Identification Among Biracial Black Jews

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA
2005-08-12

45 pages

Bruce Haynes, Associate Professor
Sociology Depertment
University of California at Davis

Few studies of bi-racial or multiracial identity have considered the symbolic boundaries people use to establish their reference group identification to different social groups.  This analysis focuses on the ontological dimensions of social identification (Hart 1996) by considering the symbolic boundaries social actors use to emplot their life stories and claim membership in two distinct American ethno-racial groups, Blacks and Jews. The analysis seeks to answer two related questions: 1) How do self-identified Black and Jewish biracial individuals utilize symbolic boundaries in their personal narratives to claim membership in two publically recognized mutually exclusive groups? 2) To what degree traditional ethno/racial social boundaries have weakened as markers for social identification.  Although the content of any individual Black-Jewish identity is variable, many subjects report a “double-minority” status as both Black and Jewish, while others articulate identities as “Black Jews.”  The reproduction of Black and Jewish identity along traditional racial and ethnic group boundaries challenges both the presumed path towards the majority culture that is predicted by classic assimilation models, and romantic notions that the impact of race and the one drop rule has declined at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

The following analysis uses the intersection of Jewish and Black reference group identification as a way to explore the degree to which traditional ethno/racial social boundaries have weakened as markers for social identification among self-identified bi-racial Black and Jewish Americans. The data for this study is drawn from eleven in-depth life history interviews of self-identified Black and Jewish bi-racial people; five men and six women were selected who range from 22 to 46 years of age.

Self-identified bi-racial Black and Jewish Americans claim membership in two American ethno/racial groups that have historically been understood to be mutually exclusive. While holding a particular reference group identity is ultimately a matter of self-identifying with a specific group (Putnam 1993, 114), being both Black and Jewish requires making claims on both Black and Jewish collectives. Identity by definition carries consequences; otherwise it wouldn’t hold such salience to the orientations of social actors (Jenkins 1996)…

Read the entire paper here.

One Drop, No Rule: Identity Options among Multiracial Children in the U.S.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association
Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
Philadelphia, PA,
2005-08-12

Anthony Daniel Perez, Assistant Professor
Chapel Hill Department of Sociology
University of North Carolina

This paper examines the links between family background characteristics and patterns of identification among multiracial children in the U.S. I improve upon previous studies of multiracial classification by expanding the identity choice set to include a broader and more thorough range of classificatory options. In undertaking this analysis, I examine the large, nationally representative 5% Public Use Microdata from the Census 2000 long form. I find that children living in two-parent households with one white parent and one non-white parent are almost equally likely to identify (or be identified) as white, non-white, or multiracial. I further note that: 1.) Patterns of identification vary widely by mixed race subgroup and socioeconomic status. 2.) Racial differences in identification vary by socioeconomic status. 3.) The pathways to “white passing” are related but distinct from pathways to multiracial identification.

To read the entire paper, click here.

The Historical Legal Construction of Black Racial Identity of Mixed Black-White Race Individuals: The Role of State Legislatures

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association
Manchester Hyatt
San Diego, California
2008-03-20

Richard T. Middleton, IV, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Missouri, St. Louis

This research paper is an analysis of the historical legal construction of black racial identity of mixed black-white race individuals in America.  In particular, I investigate how state legislatures in the United States constructed black racial identity through the enactment of laws and constitutional provis ions. This research identifies the following two-part framework by which state legislatures historically used the language of the law to coerce mixed black-white race individuals to adopt a personal sense of collective identity with people of black African ancestry: (1) identification of mixed black-white race individuals and blacks/Negroes as constituting two separate racial groups yet speaking of them in the same blush and disadvantaging them the same, and (2) abandoning recognition of mixed black-white race individuals (mulattoes) as a distinct racial group from Negroes/blacks through the enactment of statutes that espoused the rule of hypodescent. To provide empirical support for this paper’s thesis, a survey of statutes across all fifty states ranging from the colonial period up to the mid-1900s is conducted.

Read the entire paper here.  Supporting documents: 1 and 2.

Essentialism and the Perception of Mixed-Race Individuals: Implications for the Sociopolitical Assimilation of Ethnic Minorities

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting
Trinity College
Dublin, Ireland
2009-07-14

Arnold Ho
Harvard University

James Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Previous work examining hypodescent, the process whereby persons of mixed-race descent are assigned to their socially subordinate racial status, showed that hypodescent may be applied to both Asian-White and Black-White targets (Ho & Sidanius, 2008).  However, no research has uncovered attitudinal covariates of hypodescent.  Thus, while hypodescent has been shown to occur, little is known about its antecedents.  Across two survey studies, we show that essentialism, or the tendency to see racial group boundaries and differences as being biological rather than socially constructed, can lead to hypodescent. Establishing essentialism as a precursor to hypodescent further establishes the role of essentialist thinking in intergroup relations, a topic of recent interest in social and political psychology (Prentice & Miller, 2007).  The relationship between essentialism and classical (“old fashioned”) racism, as well as the implications of hypodescent for the sociopolitical assimilation of African- and Asian-Americans, are discussed.

Read the entire paper here.

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

Octoroon means a person of fourth-generation black ancestry. Genealogically, it means one-eighth black. Typically an Octoroon has one great-grandparent who is of full African descent and seven great-grandparents who are not.

hexadecaroon (1/16th)
dotriacontaroon (1/32)
tetrahexacontaroon (1/64)
octaicosahectaroon (1/128)
hexapentacontadictaroon (1/256)
dodecapentactaroon (1/512)
tetraicosakiliaroon (1/1,024)
octatetracontadiliaroon (1/2,048)
hexanonacontatetraliaroon (1/4,096)
dinonacontahectaoctaliaroon (1/8,192)

See IUPAC numerical multipliers.

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used to describe proportion of African ancestry of mixed-race people in the slave societies of Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana…

…Quadroon usually referred to someone of one-quarter black ancestry; that is, with three white grandparents but also refers to a person of one-quarter caucasian ancestry and three-quarters black ancestry.  A quadroon has a biracial (mulatto) parent (black and white) and one white parent or black parent…

From Wikipedia.

The (Mono-) Racial Contract: Mixed-Race Implications

Canadian Political Science Association
79th Annual Conference
2007-05-30 through 2007-06-01

Paper Dated: 2007-05-17

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

Nearly a decade ago, Charles Mills brought ‘race’ into mainstream political theory through his theory of the Racial Contract; namely, that all social contracts are underwritten by the meta-political system of domination which privileges whites over nonwhites. Yet in Mills’ analysis – like most literature in the social sciences – the subjectivity of mixed-race identities is scarcely considered. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the Racial Contract for (s)he who is neither white nor nonwhite: the mixed-race subject. I contend applying the terms of the Racial Contract within the context of multiraciality in Canada will demonstrate both the unique racial positioning of the mixed-race subject and will further solidify Mills’ contention that the Racial Contract is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract.  Using The Racial Contract as a theoretical and methodological guide, this paper will follow three of Mills’ main arguments, incorporating mixed-race subjectivities and proving that: the Racial Contract has unique political, moral and epistemological implications for multiracials in Canada; the Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing not just personhood and subpersonhood, but also liminal personhood; and the ideological conditioning required by the Racial Contract involves a solidification of discrete racial categories, thus rendering the mixed-race subject as theoretically and vernacularly invisible. Using historical and contemporary examples from Canadian law and society, the scholarly contribution of this work is its merging of Canadian content and foci with the emerging, American-dominated literature known as critical mixed-race theory…

…Though a powerful legal paradigm in the U.S. dictated the racial identities of mixed-race children as ‘nonwhite’ from birth, the phenomenon of ‘passing’ erupted while miscegenation laws were still firmly in place. The lighter one’s skin happened to be, the finer his or her hair, the further away from a nonwhite racial identity (s)he could move, the less stigmatisation from dominant society (s)he faced. ‘Passing,’ therefore, always refers to passing as white. This phenomenon reinforces racial aesthetics as one of the means through which the biological construction of ‘race’ was able to negate the existence of multiraciality.  If a multiracial person could pass for white and gain access to social and economic opportunities denied to people of colour, self-identifying as such was never a solidification of mixed-race heritage. Rather, it was a forced denial borne from the necessity to identify as something – but the choice of categories were strictly divided in broad strokes of black, white, yellow and red, leaving no room for anything that was some (or even all) of the above. Further, this phenomenon elucidates another aspect of multiraciality deemed threatening by the dominant race: that of identifiability. Using ‘race’ to distinguish between persons and subpersons, the Racial Contract requires a means of identifying each from the other. Those who blur this distinction indeed pose a problem for the maintenance of the racial hierarchy itself. Subpersons must be kept firmly in place through proactive measures; being able to identify them was crucial to the Racial Contract’s continued existence. The alleged racial determinants of identity (and therefore destiny) were superficial morphological characteristics such as hair texture, eye, nose, and mouth shape and size, and, above all else, skin colour. Without these tell-tale signs of inferiority, the hierarchy itself would be in danger…

Read the entire paper here.

The one drop rule & the one hate rule

Dædalus, Winter 2005

David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
University of California at Berkeley

Two portentous practices within the public discussion of ‘race’ in the United States since the late 1960s are rarely analyzed together. One is the method by which we decide which individuals are ‘black.’ The other is our habit of conflating the mistreatment of blacks with that of nonblack minorities. Both practices compress a great range of phenomena into ostensibly manageable containers.  Both function to keep the concept of race current amid mounting pressures that threaten to render it anachronistic.  Both invite reassessment at the start of the twenty first century.  The prevailing criterion for deciding who is black is of course the principle of hypodescent. This ‘one drop rule’ has meant that anyone with a visually discernable trace of African, or what used to be called ‘Negro,’ ancestry is, simply, black.  Comparativists have long noted the peculiar ordinance this mixture denying principle has exercised over the history of the United States. Although it no longer has the legal status it held in many states during the Jim Crow era, this principle was reinforced in the civil rights era as a basis for antidiscrimination remedies.

Today it remains in place as a formidable convention in many settings and dominates debates about the categories appropriate for the federal census. The movement for recognition of ‘mixed race’ identity has made some headway, including for people with a fraction of African ancestry, but most governments, private agencies, educational institutions, and advocacy organizations that classify and count people by ethnoracial categories at all continue to perpetuate hypodescent racialization when they talk about African Americans.

This practice makes the most sense when antidiscrimination remedies are in view. If discrimination has proceeded on the basis of the one drop rule, so too should antidiscrimination remedies. But even when antidiscrimination remedies are not at issue, most Americans of all colors think about African American identity in either/or terms: you are black, or you are not. It is common for people to say, “I’m half Irish and half Jewish” without one’s listener translating the declaration into terms other than the speaker’s. One can even boast, “I’m one-eighth Cherokee” without causing the listener to quarrel with that fraction or to doubt that the speaker is basically a white person. But those who say things like “I’m half Irish and half black” are generally understood really to be black, and “I’m one-eighth African American” is not part of the genealogical boasting that infuses American popular culture.

The second portentous practice is the treating of all victims of white racism alike, regardless of how differently this racism has affected African Americans, Latinos, Indians, and Asian Americans, to say nothing of the subdivisions within each of these communities of descent.  When federal agencies developed affirmative action programs in the late 1960s, they identified Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Indians along with African Americans as eligible groups.  As John Skrentny has shown, entitlements for nonblack groups were predicated on the assumption that such groups were like blacks in their social experience.  Other disadvantaged groups, including women, impoverished Anglo whites, impoverished European ethnics, and gays and lesbians, were less successful in gaining entitlements during the socalled minority rights revolution because they were not perceived as victims of white racism. Yet the officials who designed entitlement programs for the purposes of remedying white racism often homogenized those descent groups colloquially coded as black, brown, red, and yellow. There was a good reason for this. White racism was real, had expressed itself against every one of these color-coded groups, and was a problem in American life that demanded correction…

Read the entire article here.