Mixed Race Studies

“It is important to begin by talking about what race is not. Regardless of what our senses seem to tell us, race is not a biologically coherent story about human variation simply because the races we recognize and name are not biologically coherent populations. There is as much genetic variation within racial groups as there is between them. Now this does not mean that race is not real psychologically or sociologically. It is obvious that race is real in both these senses. People believe in races and they use this belief to organize important dimensions of social, economic, and political life. But this does not make race a real thing biologically.” —Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, University of Michigan Professor of Anthropology and Psychology

John Woodford, “A New Look at an Old Notion: Lawrence Hirchfeld Discusses Race in Society,” Michigan Today, (June 1996). http://www.ns.umich.edu/MT/96/Jun96/mta1j96.html.

Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds

The MIT Press
May 1996
243 pages
19 illus.
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-262-08247-1
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58172-1

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Professor of Anthropology & Psychology
Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power.

Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them.

Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child’s notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood.

After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children’s (and occasionally adults’) representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.

Table of Contents

The Inheritability of Identity: Children’s Understanding of the Cultural Biology of Race

Child Development
Volume 66 Issue 5 (October 1995)
Pages 1418 – 1437
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00943.x

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Professor, Anthropology & Psychology
Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

4 experiments explored adult and grade school children’s beliefs about inheritability of identity, particularly the “one-drop rule” that defines children of mixed-race parents as belonging to the racial category of the minority parent. In Study 1, 8- and 12-year-olds (N=32) and adults (N=43) were asked the category membership of mixed-race children and the degree to which they resembled each parent. Study 2 investigated whether the same-aged children (N=36) and adults (N=18) expected mixed-race children to have white, black, or intermediate features. Study 3 explored children’s (N=46) expectations about the inheritability of the same properties in animals. Older children, like adults, were found to believe that mixed-race children have black racial features. Adults additionally believe that such children inherit the categorical identity of the minority parent. Study 4 repeated the same tasks with black and white children (N=39) attending an integrated school. Unlike children attending a predominantly white school, children in the integrated school (regardless of race) expect mixed-race children to have intermediate racial features.

A New Look at an Old Notion: Lawrence Hirchfeld Discusses Race in Society

Michigan Today
University of Michigan
June 1996

John Woodford

Talk of race is everywhere and incessant in America, the din of discourse emanating from all ranks and stations, all age groups, all creeds, all parts of the political spectrum and all manner of news and cultural media.

Is race real or is it imagined? If it’s real, is it real in a biological sense, a social sense, or both? If imaginary, how did the idea arise?

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, U-M associate professor of anthropology and psychology, tackles all of these questions in a book published this spring by the MIT Press: Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. The book emerged from Hirschfeld’s studies in the United States and Europe of children’s thinking about race. It will interest not only anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, historians, political scientists and social workers, but parents and teachers as well. Professor Hirschfeld discussed some of his conclusions with Michigan Today’s John Woodford.

MT: What is race?

LH: It is important to begin by talking about what race is not. Regardless of what our senses seem to tell us, race is not a biologically coherent story about human variation simply because the races we recognize and name are not biologically coherent populations. There is as much genetic variation within racial groups as there is between them. Now this does not mean that race is not real psychologically or sociologically. It is obvious that race is real in both these senses. People believe in races and they use this belief to organize important dimensions of social, economic, and political life. But this does not make race a real thing biologically…

Read the entire article here.