Mixed Race Studies

It’s Not Easy Being Green: Stress and Invalidation in Identity Formation of Culturally-Complex or Mixed-Race Individuals

Texas A&M University
May 2008
159 pages

Samaria Dalia Roberts Perez

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Communications

This is an exploratory study to examine a population which has not been widely researched, mixed-race or “culturally-complex” individuals and identification. In the interest of this study, “culturally-complex” refers to individuals who report parents being from two or more different races/ethnicities; i.e. Black, White, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, etc. Current literature reveals through quantitative methods that mixed-race adolescents often report more stress and are at greater health risks than most mono-racial adolescents. However, past studies have not thoroughly investigated why and how this stress exists and at times is inconsistent, which points to the need for qualitative inquiry. Although most of the previous literature focuses on mixed-race adolescents, this study focused on an adult population. Study participants were recruited through snowball sampling for in-depth, open-ended interviews. The data was analyzed by searching for common themes that illustrate the possible causes for stress in culturally-complex individuals.

Though this study cannot be representational of all culturally-complex individuals it did provide for noteworthy findings. Race and ethnicity, and particularly being culturally-complex are topics that are often not spoken about in the family or between siblings. In general, culturally-complex individuals are not provided with space for dialogue and so thus, having a place to voice ideas, experiences, and opinions was appreciated by all participants. In all interviews, frustration and confusion was expressed towards box-checking. Though stress and invalidation was inconsistent in past literature surrounding mixed-race and culturally-complex individuals, only some participants in this study reported stress and invalidation, while other participants did not report having ever experienced stress or invalidation. While literature had posed that often culturally-complex individuals would identify with the ethnicity of the father, in this study most of those who identified as one culture over another had identified as the ethnicity of the mother. Participants additionally had―hierarchies of identities―where being culturally-complex was not always their most important role. Future research should examine populations from different socioeconomic groups and other demographics.

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Hybrids and History. The Role of Race and Ethnic Crossing in Individual and National Achievement

The Quarterly Review of Biology
Volume 26, Number 4 (December, 1951)
pages 331-347

George D. Snell (1903-1996)
Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine

It is curious to reflect that almost the requisite three or four hundred years have passed since the intercrossing began in America; and it is possible that the United States of America may be quite near to a brilliant efflorescence of genius in thought and art, and perhaps even nore in the scientific organization of natural resources for the good of its own life and for the life of mankind” (Murphy, 1941), This quotation from a British author is based on phenomenon often noted by anthropologists and historians. Sir Flinders Petrie (1911) and numerous writers after him have remarked that the rise of great civilizations, usually and perhaps invariably, is preceded by a mixing of races, and that an incubation period of several centuries follows the first invasion of alien groups before the civilization comes to full flower.

Toynbee (1935) has attached less significance to the crossing than most writers, and his discussion of the subject may be taken as conservative. He distinguishes twenty-one civilizations, and finds clear evidence of crossing in eleven of these. Moreover, most of the remaining ten can also be said to involve crossing if some additional permissible divisions are made in the races of man. The ten civilizations in which the evidence of crossing is least clear are the Babylonic, Syriac, Arabic, Hindu, Sinic (yellow), Far Eastern (yellow), Andean, Mayan, Yucatec, and Mexican. Nine of the great white civilizations including the Hellenic, Western and Egyptic are known beyond question to be the product of hybrid peoples with the Alpine race being one of the components of the mixture and the Nordic and/or Mediterranean the other. Toynbee concludes that “the number of civilizations created by the unaided endeavours of a single race in each case would present themselves as exceptions to a prevalent law—a law to the effect that the geneses of civilizations require creative contributions from more races than one.”

There has been little agreement among those who have discussed the subject as to reason for this relation between race crossing and the progress of civilizations. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the possibility that race crossing, even between subgroups of the white race, produces individuals of exceptional vitality and vigor (hybrid vigor), and that its role in the development of civilizations lies largely or in significant part in the unusual contributions which these individuals, both as leaders and as laborers, are able to make. Few writers seem to have considered this possibility. Hooton (1926) has recognized the probable occurrence of heterosis within the white race, and Hankins (1926) has proposed heterosis as an explanation of the role of race mixture in the genesis of civilizations. Other writers have looked elsewhere in seeking to explain the phenomenon…

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‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day

Visual Studies
Volume 21, Issue 2 (October 2006)
pages 106-132
DOI: 10.1080/14725860600944971

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

This article examines a collection of family photographs published in an unusual 1932 anthropological study of ‘Negro-White families’. In the 1920s Caroline Bond Day, a woman of mixed ancestry herself, gathered family histories and photographs of over 300 ‘Negro-White families’ for her graduate work at Harvard University under eugenicist Ernest Hooton. Day’s subjects, recruited from her circles of friends and acquaintances, shared her goals of African American equality and uplift but were often suspicious of her chosen field. Anthropology has often been referred to as the handmaiden of colonialism and racism, and physical anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not generally supportive of African American civil rights movements prior to World War II. Nevertheless, about 350 families submitted family histories and photographs and filled out surveys. Some also allowed themselves to be measured with calipers. The published study included over four hundred photographs, which collectively provide a visual mediation between Day’s political goals, her exclusive focus on mixed-race families and her use of physical anthropology and blood-quantum language. Day’s work remains controversial, but continues to be used by scholars, activists and artists in part because of its unique focus and methods.

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