Mixed Race Studies

Assessing Shifting Racial Boundaries: Racial Classification of Biracial Asian Children in the 2000 Census

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
2009-12-07
77 pages

Sara Megan McDonough

Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Sociology.

This study examined the racial identification of biracial Asian children by their parents, in a sample (n=9,513) drawn from 2000 Public Use Microdata Series Census data (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series 2009). I used competing theories of Asian assimilation to examine how characteristics of the child, the Asian parent, the non-Asian parent, and the local Asian community influenced the likelihood of a child′s being identified as Asian, non-Asian, or biracial. Findings showed that child′s, both parents′, and community characteristics significantly influenced the child′s racial classification. While the effects of greater assimilation significantly increased the likelihood of an Asian classification for third-generation children, in contrast, it decreased the likelihood of an Asian identification for first- and second-generation children. Findings showed that children with a black parent were less likely than children with a white parent to be identified as Asian instead of non-Asian. However, inconsistent with past findings, children with a Hispanic parent were more likely than those with a white parent to be identified as Asian rather than non-Asian. Exploratory analyses concerning a biracial classification indicate significant relationships with factors previously found to increase the likelihood of an Asian identification, including the effects of greater Asian assimilation and size of the local Asian community. Moreover, the relationship between parent‟s and child′s gender on the child‟s racial classification may be more complicated than previously theorized, as I found evidence of “gender-matching” which meant that boys were more likely to be identified like their fathers, and girls more like their mothers.

Read the entire thesis here.

DEEP: A Photo-Essay by Clement Cooper

Clement Cooper

DEEP explores the contentious issue surrounding British Mixed-Race identity through image & oral testimony.

From 1992 to 1997, Clement Cooper journeyed to and lived in several port cities throughout the UK. Locations where: Toxteth, Liverpool, St Paul’s, Bristol; Butetown, Cardiff & Manchester.

Using available natural light and shooting for the first time on medium format, Clement Cooper explored the possibilities of portraiture to reveal a powerful and deeply moving monograph—the very first of it’s kind.  From a personal perspective, Clement Cooper was particularly keen to emphasize that behind all notions, concepts and constructs of racial stereotyping there lies one fact.  That there is no such thing as a “race”, there is only the human race.  DEEP celebrates this undeniable truth by revealing the common humanity of all those photographed explicitly.

A humanity that unites us all regardless.

View the photo-essay here.

Double Consciousness in the Work of Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans

Women: A Cultural Review
Volume 20, Issue 3 (December 2009)
pages 277-286
DOI: 10.1080/09574040903285735

Pilar Cuder-Domnguez, Associate Professor
University of Huelva, Spain

The first novels published by Helen Oyeyemi and Diana Evans feature twins of mixed-race parentage—a Nigerian mother and an English father—growing up in Britain. Eight-year-old Jessamy in Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl is unaware that she was born a twin, but on travelling to Nigeria she encounters TillyTilly, a troublesome girl she seems unable to shake off. Georgia and Bessi in Evans’s 26a are identical twins who share all their experiences until a visit to their mother’s homeland of Nigeria opens a breach in their perfect union. Both novels were published in 2005 and display certain commonalities of plot, characterisation, location and stylistic choice. Oyeyemi and Evans both explore Yoruba beliefs surrounding the special nature of twins—half way between the world of humans and gods. If one twin dies, parents commission a carving called ‘ibeji‘ to honour the deceased and to provide a location for their soul. The specialness attributed to twins by the Yoruba is compounded in both novels by the fact that they are mixed-race and by the diverging locations, cultures and languages of their parents. Thus, this article addresses how the two writers deploy Yoruba beliefs in order to raise questions about the cultural grounding of their characters’ identities, and how being twins becomes a metaphor for the ‘double consciousness’ of being black and British.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

Goldsmiths College, University of London
2006

Monica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

The thesis analyses the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mestizaje in Mexico. It focuses on the qualities of women’s experiences of racism and explores the significance of mestizaje in relation to Mexican discourses of race and nation. It provides a historical revision of the ways in which such discourses have developed in Mexico, emphasising the cultural conditions that make it possible to ‘think’ the nation, and relating them to the ways in which systems of differentiation amongst the population have operated. The thesis assesses the politics of difference in Mexico in relation to the ways in which notions of race and practices of racism have been detached from each other. For this, I analyse the historical development of the notion of mestizaje and the mestiza identity, and consider its impact and relevance in contemporary Mexico, calling into question official policies and public discourses that support the idea of the mestiza as the subject of national identity.

Through focus group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photographic albums, I explore how the women who participated in this study understand and experience their racialised, gendered and classed bodies and national identity, in a context where racism has been rendered invisible. The thesis then looks at the specificity of the participants’ social location and analyses how these women today in Mexico think through the notions of racism, mestizaje, and national identity. The focus on the qualities of their everyday experience of racism led me to explore the significance of the role of emotions in revealing the lived experience of racism. In this way, my analysis associates racial and class displacement with inadequacy; beauty, ugliness and ordinariness with shame; and the anxiety about family belonging with slightedness; and exposes the contradictory and ambivalent ways in which the experiences of racism are lived and understood. The experience of racism is explored from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically looking at the relationship between visual representations of identities and racist practices, and in this context the ways in which women see themselves and perceive how they are seen by others: the meanings and metaphors of their own image.

Read this thesis at the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library here.

Mutants, mudbloods, and futureheroes: Mixed race identity in contemporary narrative

The University of New Mexico
May 2008
327 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3318087
ISBN: 9780549676652

Felecia Rose Caton-Garcia

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is experiencing the expansion of a self-identified biracial, multiracial, and mixed race citizenry. This work examines the dominant tropes operative in the study of mixed race narrative cultural production, specifically film, fiction, and life-writing, in order to historicize and contextualize contemporary cultural production. In particular, this dissertation examines contemporary narratives with regard to the “tragic mulatto” trope in US culture throughout the 19th and 20th century and articulates the ways in which the abundance of contemporary work on mixed race both sustains and resists old archetypes and narratives. To this end, a survey of life-writing, fiction, and speculative film and fiction of the past fifteen years is conducted to determine new narrative tropes governing mixed race identity, particularly those identities that deviate from the historical black/white binary of biracial identity.

While some texts remain grounded in the idea of the mixed race person as deficient or problematic with regards to race and gender identity development, the dissertation identifies a general turn away from the “tragic mulatto” archetype, and a turn toward the mixed race identity as a holistic hybrid identity that is more than the sum of its parts. The study reveals that contemporary renderings of mixed race identity have become transnational, dynamic, unsettling, and synergistic. Further, the emergent tropes in mixed race narratives suggest hybridity as the inevitable future of humanity and some contemporary texts suggest that this hybridity is the mechanism through which humanity will progress toward racial equity and substantive democratic principles. These new narratives are explicated, analyzed, and critiqued with regard to their function in contemporary United States culture and politics.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One—Beguiling and Mysterious: Multiracialism Comes of Age
  • The Mulatto Millennium
  • A Note on Terms
  • Interracial Intimacy and Miscegenation in U.S. History and Law
  • Mixed Race in the Social Sciences
  • The Tragic Mulatto y Mas: the Need for a Hybrid Criticism
• Chapter Two—Like Mother Like Daughter?: The Poetics of Mixed Race Autobiography
  • “Likeness” and Culture
  • A Matter of Perspective: The Autobiographical Impulse
  • Hands Across the Ouija Board: The Process of Writing Autobiography
  • Who Are Your People?: Racial Identity and Family
  • “Don’t ask so many questions”: The Color of Family
  • “I find family there”: Choosing Blackness in Bulletproof Diva
  • Beyond Family: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Racial Formation
  • Blood and Water
• Chapter Three—Graceful Monsters: Mixed Race, Desire, Love, and Family in Contemporary Fiction
  • The Borders of the Tragic Mulatto
  • Hybrid Arts: The Use of Aesthetics to Narrate Mixed Race Identity
  • The Man in the Mirror: Double-Consciousness, Alternative Realities, and Mixed Race in Diaz, Alexie, Tenorio, and Davies
• Chapter Four—Vin Ordinaire: Hollywood Film and the Mixed Race Futurehero
  • Geek Nation: The Rise of Science Fiction in Hollywood Film
  • Beautiful Mutants: Transgressive Bodies and Futuresexuals
  • Saving Humanity, Sacrificing Self: Tragedy and Triumph for the New Mulatto
• Chapter Five—Mudbloods, Mutants, and Mulattos: New Speculative Fiction
  • Multiplicities: Histories, Futures, Realities, Races, Genders
  • Technologies of Hybridity: William Gibson and China Mieville
  • Half-Blood Magic: Harry Potter’s Muddy Dilemma
• Conclusion—Synergy and Symbiosis: What’s at Stake in the Stories We Tell
  • References Cited

Read or purchase the dissertation here.

“They Call It Marriage”: the Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

Book Manuscript In Progress

Diana Irene Williams, Assistant Professor of History, Law and Gender Studies
University of Southern California

Winner of the 2008 William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize in Legal History.

“They Call it Marriage” examines interracial marriage between black women and white men in nineteenth-century Louisiana. It explores how broad political and social struggles affected the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why mid-nineteenth-century Louisiana was such an important setting for national struggles over race, gender, legitimacy, and power.

After the Civil War, Louisiana authorities repealed the interracial marriage prohibition and permitted retroactive legitimation of “private religious” marriages. In doing so, they exposed an obscure past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing regional, religious, and civil jurisdictions. In highlighting the perspective of those outside the legal profession, I focus on law as a terrain of struggle rather than a fixed set of rules.

The use of interracial marriage laws to regulate the inheritance of both property and social status dated back to Louisiana’s earliest French colonial government. Mandating that mixed-race children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these regulations established the parameters of enslaved and racialized populations. Because legal kinship affected titles to household property in Louisiana, these laws encouraged distant kin and creditors to monitor interracial families’ internal affairs…

…The disputed illegitimate past of Louisiana interracial families had significance beyond the state’s borders. This manuscript traces the rhetoric of interracial genealogy and racial indeterminacy in antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson. Louisiana authorities’ persistence in invoking racial fluidity well into the 1890s complicates historians’ efforts to locate a transition point at which the region exchanged a fluid Latin racial system for a strictly binary American one. In this regard, “They Call it Marriage” explores the gendered history of private life in order to offer a means of reconsidering the nature of Jim Crow segregation.

Chapters

1. Licensing Marriage in Early Louisiana
2. “Religion Law” vs. Civil Law
3. Quadroon Balls, Plaçage, and Consensus Narratives
4. Concubinage and Legal Narratives
5. Forced Heirs and Family Drama
6. Interracial Marriage and the Law in Post-emancipation Louisiana
7. “Bastards Begat by their Masters”

Read the entire description here.