Mixed Race Studies

MIXED VOICES / VOCES MIXTAS

INMIX-UAB
2022-12-19

Synopsis: This topical short documentary features interviews with multiethnic and multiracial youth living in Catalonia, Spain, who talk about their mixed heritage and its meaning for them, their identity and sense of belonging, and their experiences of discrimination and agency. Through these narratives, MIXED VOICES reveals that the positive, empowering experiences of mixedness—a growing reality in Spain as well as across the globe—can coexist with negative stereotypes and prejudices and the continued stigmatization and discrimination of racialized groups, who are more constrained in their identity options. In this way, the documentary highlights the socially transformative aspects of mixedness while alerting us to persistent social divisions that hinder social inclusion and cohesion.

MIXED VOICES was produced as part of the MIXED-YOUTH Research Project (“Social Relations and Identity Processes of Children of Mixed Unions: Mixedness—Between Inclusion and Social Constraints,” CSO2015-63962-R), for which a total of 152 Spanish-born individuals from very diverse ancestries were interviewed. More information about the results of this project can be found in the following publications:

• Rodríguez-García, Dan. (2022) “The Persistence of Racial Constructs in Spain: Bringing Race and Colorblindness into the Debate on Interculturalism.” Social Sciences 11: 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11010013.
• Rodríguez-García, Dan, Miguel Solana, Anna Ortiz, and Beatriz Ballestín. (2021) “Blurring of Colour Lines? Ethnoracially Mixed Youth in Spain Navigating Identity.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(4): 838–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1654157.
• Rodríguez-García, Dan, and Cristina Rodríguez-Reche. (2022) “Daughters of Maghrebian Muslim and Native Non-Muslim Couples in Spain: Identity Choices and Constraints.” Social Compass 69(3): 423–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/00377686221091045.
• Rodríguez-García, Dan, Miguel Solana-Solana, Anna Ortiz-Guitart, and Joanna L. Freedman. (2018) “Linguistic Cultural Capital among Descendants of Mixed Couples in Catalonia, Spain.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 39(4): 429–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2018.1487388.
• Rodríguez-García, Dan. (2016) “Advances in the Study of Mixedness: Evaluating the Relationship Between Mixed Unions and Social Integration.” Revista UAB Divulga: Barcelona Investigación e Innovación, 11/04/2016. https://www.uab.cat/web/news-detail-1345680342044.html?noticiaid=1345700449240.

The material for this documentary was recorded in 2020 in Catalonia, Spain, in the midst of a full lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each participant self-recorded their video, which may have affected the sound and image quality in some cases. All participants have given their consent to use their recordings for the purposes of this documentary.

ORIGINAL IDEA, DIRECTION, AND PRODUCTION DESIGN:
Dan Rodríguez-García

EDITOR:
Victor Navarro-Izquierdo

PARTICIPANTS:
Carina Camacho-Semlani, Esteban Delgado-Arias, Jordi Strutt-Jaguin, Lukas Caggese-Ostergaard, Mireia Pereira-Molina, Nadya Jaziri-Arjona, Núria Ishii-Balagueró, Sonia Meynand-Giménez, Sora Ndiaye-Grau, Teresa Habimana-Jordana, Theo Bikoko-Pineda, Zeynabú Said-Xixons

PRODUCTION TEAM:
INMIX-UAB Research Group on Immigration, Mixedness, and Social Cohesion: Dan Rodríguez-García, Anna Ortiz-Guitart, Cristina Rodríguez-Reche, Teresa Habimana-Jordana, Miguel Solana-Solana, Beatriz Ballestín-González, Víctor Navarro-Izquierdo, Joanna Freedman

SUBTITLES:
Joanna Freedman & Dan Rodríguez-García

Do you identify as Biracial or Multiracial? Are you 18 years old or older? Do you currently live in the United States?

Yale BIS Research Team
Yale School of Public Health
Yale University
2022-08-24

Skyler Jackson, Associate Research Scientist
Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut

We are a team of researchers at Yale University who are interested in the experiences of individuals who identify as Biracial and Multiracial. Such individuals face unique challenges and the current research in this area is limited and needs greater representation.

We are currently conducting a two-part online study that addresses an important but little explored question: What are the unique experiences of Biracial and Multiracial individuals? If you choose to participate, your responses to this survey will contribute to knowledge about this underdeveloped area of research.

To participate in this study, you must (a) be 18 years of age or older, and (b) reside within the United States, and (c) identify as Biracial or Multiracial.

Participants are expected to complete two study phases.

• Phase 1 is a single online survey, which takes most people between 30-60 minutes to complete. At the end of this survey, you can choose to either (a) receive $10 for your participation or (b) enter a $100 (USD) raffle.
• Phase 2 involves completing a short 10-minute study every evening for one week. You will earn up to $15 for completing this weeklong study component ($1 per survey for surveys 1-5 and $5 per survey for surveys 6 and 7).
  Check out the attached flyer. To learn more and take an eligibility survey, use the following link and code (or “cut and paste” the link into your preferred Internet browser): https://bit.ly/31zSXor and code R22.

We appreciate you considering participating in this study. As you may imagine, Biracial and Multiracial individuals can be difficult to reach and recruit for research studies. By participating (and forwarding this email on to other groups and individuals), you will be helping to contribute to the body of accurate knowledge about the lives of Biracial and Multiracial individuals.

This study has been approved by the Yale University Institutional Review Board (HIC: 2000028402). If you have questions or concerns about participating, feel free to email our research team at yale.bis.study@gmail.com.

Psychological Lens Reveals Racial Repression at Heart of ‘Passing’

University of Kansas
2022-08-31

Rick Hellman
KU News Service

LAWRENCE – While many literary critics have found Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella “Passing” to be frustratingly opaque, and others have concentrated on its themes of same-sex attraction and class consciousness, an essay by a University of Kansas professor of English finds that racial repression is the focus of the novel by analyzing it from a Freudian perspective.

Doreen Fowler said she believed that the shift to a psychological reading explains why the two main characters — Irene, who lives as a Black woman, and Clare, who passes for white — are doubled.

In an article titled “Racial Repression and Doubling in Nella Larsen’s Passing” in the latest edition of The South Atlantic Review, Fowler wrote that the main character, Irene Redfield, “works to erase signs of her black identity — but those signs of blackness return to haunt her in the form of her double, Clare. While many scholars have recognized that Irene is ambivalent about her African American iden­tity and that Clare and Irene are doubled, my original contribution is to link the two. In my reading, Clare is Irene’s uncanny double because she figures the return of Irene’s rejected desire to fully integrate with the black race.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Racial Repression and Doubling in Nella Larsen’s Passing

South Atlantic Review
Volume 87, Number 1, Spring 2022

Doreen Fowler, Professor of English
University of Kansas

Critics of Passing have often observed that the novel seems to avoid engagement with the problem of racial inequality in the United States, and Claudia Tate goes so far as to write that “race … is merely a mechanism for setting the story in motion” (598). In the apparent absence of race as the novel’s subject, scholars have identified class or lesbian attraction as the novel’s central preoccupation. (1) While same sex attraction and class are certainly concerns of the novel, I would argue that critics have overlooked the centrality of race in the novel because the subject of Passing is racial repression; that is, a complete solidarity with an oppressed, racialized people is the repressed referent, and, for that reason, race scarcely appears. As a novel about passing, Larsen’s subject is a refusal to fully identify with African Americans, but Larsen’s critique is not only directed at members of the black community who pass for white; rather, Passing explores how race is repressed in the United States among both whites and some members of what Irene refers to as “Negro society” (157). Throughout the text, darkness is blanketed by whiteness. Even the word black or Negro seems to be nearly banished from the text. As I will show, the novel explores how an association with a black identity is repressed by many characters, including Brian, Jack Bellew, Gertrude, and other members of Harlem society, but Irene Redfield, the central consciousness of the novel, through whose mind events are perceived and filtered, is the primary exponent of racial repression. Jacquelyn McLendon astutely observes that Irene Redfield “lives in constant imitation of whites” (97). (2) Building on this observation, I argue that Irene, who desires safety above all, identifies safety with whiteness and represses a full identification with the black community out of a refusal of the abjection that whites project on black people. For this reason, Irene not only imitates whites in her upper-class bourgeois life, she, like a person passing for white, works to erase signs of her black identity–but those signs of blackness return to haunt her in the form of her double, Clare. While many scholars have recognized that Irene is ambivalent about her African American identity and that Clare and Irene are doubled, my original contribution is to link the two. In my reading, Clare is Irene’s uncanny double because she figures the return of Irene’s rejected desire to fully integrate with the black race.

In this essay, I propose that Larsen turns to Freudian theory to analyze the psychological dimension of racial repression. As Thadious Davis observes, Larsen was “very much aware of Freud, Jung, and their works” (329), and the cornerstone of Freud’s theory is repression. According to Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance from the conscious” (“Repression,” SE 14:147). Repression, then, is a form of self-censorship, which occurs, Freud explains, when an instinct is driven underground because the satisfaction of that desire…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed Race in Nordic Europe

Journal of Critical Mix Race Studies
Volume 1, Issue 2 (2022)
287 pages

Cover Image: Stein Egil Liland

Numerous scholarly works have been published on the topic of multiraciality and mixed-race experiences in the United States and Great Britain. There has historically been limited research on Nordic Europe. These analyses seek to help further research on Nordic Europe in terms of critical mixed race studies.

Read the entire issue here.

Research Study: Seeking Multiracial Interview Participants

Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, New York
2022-08-09

Stephanie von Numers, Doctoral Student in Social-Organizational Psychology

Do you identify as biracial, multiracial, or mixed-race? Has the topic of your ethnic heritage come up at work? Have you had any memorable encounters with coworkers, bosses, or clients who did not realize that you were mixed-race? Share your perspective on what it is like to be multiracial in the workplace!

The purpose of this study is to better understand how multiracial people experience their racial identities in the workplace. In particular, the study will explore what it is like to have one’s multiracial identity challenged, misrepresented, or denied by other people at work; how multiracial people respond to these instances of identity invalidation; and how these experiences may affect coworker relationships, job satisfaction, and other work outcomes. This study is being conducted as part of the primary researcher’s doctoral dissertation.

Who can participate?
To participate, you must meet the following criteria:

• Self-identify as biracial, multiracial, or mixed-race
• 18+ years old
• 2+ years of work experience in the U.S.
• Willing to discuss experiences of racial identity invalidation (e.g., being racially miscategorized or having your multiracial identity questioned or denied) in an interview

What will I be asked to do?
Participation involves two steps:

1. A brief online questionnaire (10-15 minutes)
2. A one-on-one interview with the primary researcher (60-90 minutes, virtually via Zoom)

Participation is confidential, and you can withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. There are no direct benefits and minimal risk.

If you are interested, complete this brief survey to get started!

Are you a mixed-race/Biracial/Multiracial man looking to participate in research?

Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts
2022-07-21

Athena Erickson, Ph.D. Student, Clinical Psychology
Men’s Well-Being Research Group

We are conducting a study to understand the ways in which biracial and multiracial (mixed-race) men think about and experience being a man compared to men of a single race. Participation includes responding to a short demographics questionnaire and answering interview questions relevant to your experiences as a man who has membership in your particular racial group(s). Interviews will either be held over Zoom or at Clark University, in a private office in the Department of Psychology (Jonas Clark Hall). All interviews will be audio-recorded and subsequently stored in secure electronic files. Audio recordings will not contain identifying information. You are free to not answer any questions that you do not want to, and all results of the study will be kept confidential. Participation in this study is completely voluntary and you may stop taking part at any point. The whole study is expected to take 1-2 hours.

WHO: We are recruiting men who identify as:

1. Mixed-race/biracial/multiracial (men whose biological parents belong to different socially defined racial groups)
2. 18+ years old

COMPENSATION: As a way of thanking participants for their time, participants will be compensated with a $15 (USD) Amazon gift card at the end of the study.

CONTACT: If interested, please email: Athena Erickson at: aterickson@clarku.edu.

Regimes beyond the One-Drop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2, (2022-06-20)
pages 57-80
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020057

Sarah Iverson, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
New York University

Ann Morning, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Aliya Saperstein, Associate Professor of Sociology; Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor in Human Biology
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Janet Xu, Postdoctoral Fellow
Inequality in America Initiative
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The racial classification of mixed-race people has often been presumed to follow hypo- or hyperdescent rules, where they were assigned to either their lower- or higher-status monoracial ancestor group. This simple framework, however, does not capture actual patterns of self-identification in contemporary societies with multiple racialized groups and numerous mixed-race combinations. Elaborating on previous concepts of multiracial classification regimes, we argue that two other theoretical models must be incorporated to describe and understand mixed-race identification today. One is “co-descent”, where multiracial individuals need not align with one single race or another, but rather be identified with or demonstrate characteristics that are a blend of their parental or ancestral races. The other is the “dominance” framework, a modern extension of the “one-drop” notion that posits that monoracial ancestries fall along a spectrum where some—the “supercessive”—are more likely to dominate mixed-race categorization, and others—the “recessive”—are likely to be dominated. Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s 2015 Survey of Multiracial Adults, we find declining evidence of hypo- and hyperdescent at work in the United States today, some support for a dominance structure that upends conventional expectations about a Black one-drop rule, and a rising regime of co-descent. In addition, we explore how regimes of mixed-race classification vary by racial ancestry combination, gender, generation of multiraciality, and the time period in which multiracial respondents or their mixed-race ancestors were born. These findings show that younger, first-generation multiracial Americans, especially those of partial Asian or Hispanic descent, have left hypo- and hyperdescent regimes behind—unlike other young people today whose mixed-race ancestry stems from further back in their family tree.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Back to race, not beyond race: multiraciality and racial identity in the United States and Brazil

Comparative Migration Studies
Volume 10, Article Number 22 (2022)
DOI: 10.1186/s40878-022-00294-0

Jasmine Mitchell, Associate Professor of American Studies and Media
State University of New York-Old Westbury, Old Westbury, New York

In contrast to discourses of multiraciality as leading to a future beyond race, this commentary looks at how multiracial discourses and symbols underline race. Taking an overview of multiracial discourses and identities in relation to Blackness in the United States and Brazil, this commentary examines the deployment of multiraciality to maintain white supremacy. Under global capitalism, United States multicultural discourses, and Latin American foundational narratives, multiracial peoples are often propped up as a solution to racism, the eradication of race, or reduced to racial binaries centering whiteness. The section ends with considerations of how fears of racial passing and fraud coincide with multiracial identities. Questions for further consideration on the nexus of political identities and racial identities are proposed in relation to multiraciality.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Looking for Participants: Understanding Mixed-Race, Ethnic Minority Young People’s Conceptualization of Belonging

Institute of Education
University College London, London, United Kingdom
2022-06-20

Corrina Salas

I am looking to interview mixed-race, ethnic minority young British people about their conceptualisation of belonging both now and in childhood. Interviews will last about one hour!

Eligibility Requirements:

• Ages 17-26
• Living in the United Kingdom
• Identifies as mixed- race and non-white (e.g. Black Caribbean and Asian, Black African and Latinx, etc.)
• Willing to be interviewed

For more information, or to sign up, please contact Corrina Salas at corrina.salas.21@ucl.ac.uk or stnvc97@ucl.ac.uk.