Mixed Race Studies

Multiracialism and Civil Rights

Fordham Law News
Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York
2016-11-21

Shane Danaher

Tanya K. Hernández

Fordham Law Professor Tanya Hernandez shared excerpts from her upcoming book on multiracialism and civil rights in talk sponsored by the Center on Race, Law & Justice’s Colloquium on Race and Ethnicity on November 17, not quite seven months shy of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage and the legal stigma against mixed-race children.

Hernandez outlined the argument presented in her work-in-progress study of multiracial identity in discrimination lawsuits, tentatively titled Multiracials and Civil Rights. In the book, Hernandez challenges conventional wisdom about multiracial discrimination.

“The growing view that discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people poses a distinctive challenge to racial equality law is incorrect,” she said. “This misperception is based on the false presumption that multiracials experience racial discrimination in a unique manner that makes it necessary to reconsider civil rights law.”…

Read the entire article here.

Professor Silvana Patriarca’s Research on Race and Nation in Post World War II Italy

History at Fordham University
Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York
2016-03-31

Aurora Pfefferkorn

Dr. Silvana Patriarca

Professor Silvana Patriarca is a faculty member in the Fordham University History department and specializes in modern Italian history. She is currently exploring the interaction between ideas of nation and “race” and working on a book about the history of racism in post-World War II Italy. Her new book will focus on “mixed-race” children born in Italy during the Allied occupation. These children were born to Italian mothers and non-white Allied soldiers, and were highly racialized in the post-war period.

Dr. Patriarca had initially started her research with a different topic in mind, but became interested in the post-war period when she discovered a lack of scholarship about race and racism in Italy after 1945. She began to focus on the experiences of mix-raced Italian children when she came across a 1961 Italian anthropometric study of a group of mixed-race children born during and right after WWII. The children had been measured in all sorts of invasive way to determine the physical, intellectual, and psychological traits that distinguished them, as if they were a group apart from a racial standpoint. “I found the book offensive and asked myself what do we know about the experiences of these children? I wondered what happened to them at that time and after [these studies were finished]?” Dr. Patriarca said. She saw these racial studies as linked to the large issue of Italian identity, the war experience, and the trauma of defeat. Fascist and racist ideas still circulated throughout Italy after World War II and permeated the scientific community especially. “Of course mentalities are slow to change,” Dr. Patriarca explained “It was troubling that many historians could still not see the intersection of nation and race in the postwar period and the lingering effects of fascism and racism on national identity.”…

Read the entire article here.

The racial identity of the offspring of Latino intermarriage: A case of racial identity and census categories

Fordham University, Bronx, New York
May 2013
241 pages

Michael Hajime Miyawaki

Since 1970, rates of Latino intermarriage and the number of “part-Latinos” have been on the rise in the United States. Among newlyweds, Latino/non-Latino couples account for over 40 percent of all mixed marriages. In places like California, part-Latinos already make up more than two thirds of mixed heritage births. Despite these demographic trends, part-Latinos remain an understudied population. In my dissertation, I examine the racial identity of the offspring of Latino/non-Latino white, black, and Asian intermarriages. To investigate part-Latino racial identity, I rely on multiple measures of race using quantitative and qualitative research methods. First, I look at how Latino/non-Latino couples racially classify their children using data from the 2008-2010 American Community Survey (ACS). Second, I use the same dataset to analyze how part-Latino adults racially report themselves. Third, for an in-depth analysis of racial identity, I interview 50 part-Latinos from the New York metropolitan area, focusing on the meanings that they attribute to their racial responses in the 2010 Census and their “lived racial identity” experience. Findings from the ACS indicate that the majority of Latino/non-Latino white and black children are classified by their parents as “white” and “black,” respectively, whereas most Latino/non-Latino Asian children are given a “multiracial” classification. Similar patterns in racial reporting in the ACS are found among part-Latino adults. While these findings suggest that part-Latinos racially identify as white, black, and even multiracial, interviews with part-Latinos reveal that their racial responses in the Census do not always correspond with their racial identity. Many feel constrained by question format because Hispanic origins are not included in the race question. If given a “Latino” option, the majority of my respondents would report being Latino and white, black, or Asian. Overall, most part-Latino respondents racially identify as “mixed,” particularly among Latino/non-Latino blacks and Asians. For some, their racial identity has changed over time and across situations. Lastly, their experience being classified by others are influenced by not only by their physical appearance and ethnic markers (e.g., name), but also vary by region (e.g., California vs. New York). These findings point to the complexity of part-Latino racial identity.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

Inside Fordham Online
Fordham University
In Focus: Faculty and Research
2010-11-15

Patrick Verel

Already the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos will be an even bigger presence in the years to come, according to demographic studies. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is making sure their stories are told.

Through 10 books, dozens of papers and consulting projects with Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, Rodriguez has developed a deep knowledge about a group that now accounts for 15 percent of the population.

Her analyses of United States census data have resulted in papers such as “Contestations Over Classifications: Latinos, the Census and Race in the United States” (Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2009) and “Implications and Impact of Race on the Health of Latinos,” a chapter in Health Issues in Latino Males: A Social and Structural Approach (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

As part of her study of census data, Rodriguez cast a critical eye on racial classifications in the decennial censuses. Examining how respondents who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino reported their race, she found that 40 percent chose “some other race,” and many of them wrote in what is known as a Latino identifier, such as Dominican, Panamanian or Chicano.

This happened in the last three decennial censuses, despite the fact that the census allowed them to choose more than one racial category in the last census…

…“People who could choose more than one race didn’t choose white and black; they still chose the category ‘some other race.’ This 40 percent has increased—I think this time it was 42 percent—even though the Census Bureau has really tried to discourage this response,” she said.

“This raises the question, ‘What is race?’ Science was raising that question. Children of mixed-race families were raising that question. So are people from all over the world who came here with very different identities and are now being folded into one of our five major groups.”…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial-heritage awareness and personal affiliation: Development and validation of a new measure to assess identity in people of mixed race descent

Fordham University
2003-03-05
222 pages
Publication ID: AAT 3098135

SooJean Choi-Misailidis

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Psychology at Fordham University

The Multiracial-Heritage Awareness and Personal Affiliation (M-HAPA) Theory was proposed to account for mixed race identity. M-HAPA Theory suggests that mixed race identity could be conceptualized by three identity types: Marginal Identity Status, in which the individual does not affiliate with any of the racial groups in their heritage; Singular Identity Status, in which an individual affiliates solely with one racial group in their heritage; and Integrated Identity Status, in which the mixed race individual integrates many racial groups into their identity.

A self-report measure (M-HAPAs), based on the M-HAPA Theory, was devised and administered to a diverse group of 364 multiracial individuals. Participants were recruited through three major universities in Hawaii. Psychometric properties of the measure were evaluated; the new instrument demonstrated good internal consistency reliability. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that though both 3- and 4-factor models were interpretable, the extraction of the 4-factor model was indicated. Further examination of the results of the exploratory factor analysis revealed that Integrated Identity Status was composed of two sub-types: the Combinatory Factor, in which the mixed race individual integrates their affiliations with all of the racial groups in their heritage into their identity; and the Universality Factor, in which the individual identifies with the commonalities among all racial groups.

Construct validity was evaluated by comparing the participants’ responses on the M-HAPAs to measures of ethnic identity, ego identity, self-esteem and social desirability. The findings were, in general, consistent with hypotheses drawn from the preponderance of literature that suggested relationships between these variables. The results of the current study lend support to the validity of the proposed Multiracial-Heritage Awareness and Personal Affiliation Theory.

Purchase the dissertation here.