Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the metis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.

Jean Muteba Rahier, “Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities” in Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States, eds. Jean Muteba Rahier and Percey C. Hintzen, (London: Routledge, 2003): 86.

Counseling Interventions with Biracial Black/White Adolescents

Posted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive on 2010-05-28 04:27Z by Steven

Counseling Interventions with Biracial Black/White Adolescents

East Bay Therapist
California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists – East Bay Chapter
Jan/Feb 2005

Venita Antonia-Maria Lue, PhD, MFT

Adolescence is an especially vulnerable time for many biracial individuals because identity issues become racial problems when the interracial person starts dating. All dating is potentially interracial for these adolescents.

The important questions for these biracial teenagers seem to be “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit?” In adolescence the question of social acceptance is very important. Biracial adolescents report anxiety over social acceptance based on exclusion groups in which they were accepted as children. There is an abrupt recognition of the need to redefine and renegotiate their social relationships and status. The process of finding friends who will accept them as individuals and show them unconditional acceptance can be a painful one for some biracial adolescents of either gender…

Read the entire article here.

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Mixed Race Studies

Counseling Interventions with Biracial Black/White Adolescents

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