Mixed Race Studies

The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba

University of Michigan
2008
555 pages

Tanya L. Saunders

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

This dissertation examines the post-1959 activism of Cuba’s socially critical artists and intellectuals, and the effects of the Cuban state’s institutionalization of culture. I analyze the Cuban underground hip-hop movement as a case study of the ways in which Black artists and intellectuals in Cuba have employed cultural aesthetics to challenge contemporary inequalities organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. I address the social context in which the Cuban underground hip-hop movement emerged by linking it to Cuba’s revolutionary project and to other counter-cultural social movements in Cuba’s history and from other post-colonial contexts. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic, historical, and interview-based research, the study engages with existing theories of the state, culture, civil society and the public sphere, but also reveals their limitations, particularly when applied to non-European contexts. As such, the dissertation offers significant insights into the relations between politics and culture, hegemony and resistance, history and the imagination of a better future, both in Cuba and beyond.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• Chapter I: Introduction
  • 1.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop
  • 1.2 The Organization of the Dissertation
  • 1.3 Contextual Considerations: Latin American Politics and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.4 Contextual Considerations: The Cuban Revolution and the Aesthetic Debates
• Chapter II: Methodology
  • 2.1 Background
  • 2.2 Developing a Research Agenda
  • 2.3 Phase One
  • 2.4 Phase Two
  • 2.5 Phase Three
  • 2.6 Data Collection
• Section I
  • Chapter III: Public Spaces, Cultural Spheres: Rethinking Theories of Political Participation, Civil Society and Social Change
    • 3.1: Subaltern Critiques of Cold War Politics
    • 3.2 Post-Socialist? Neocolonial? Republican Socialism? Reflections on Cuba‘s State Project
      • Republican Ideals within a Socialist State
    • 3.3 Citizenship, Democracy and Civil Society in the Anglo-American Metanarrative of Citizenship
      • Citizenship and Civic Participation
    • 3.4 Discussion: ‘Non-Western’ Challenges to Social Change, Political Participation and Civil Society
  • Chapter IV: Civil Society and Art Worlds: Rethinking Politics and Political Participation
    • 4.1 Making the Connections: Art and Social Change
    • 4.2 Rethinking Cultural Logics: Culture, Political Participation and Grassroots Activism
    • 4.3 The Base and Superstructure of Culture: The Institutional Structure of Cuban Culture
    • 4.4 The Ministry of Culture
    • 4.5 Discussion
• Section II
  • Chapter V: Art and Revolution: Cuba‟s Artistic Social Movements and Social Change
    • 5.1 The alternative music scene: hip-hop and Anti-Modernist Aesthetics
    • 5.2 The Marginal Existence of Cuban Rock within Cuban Culture
    • 5.3 Nueva Trova: The Cuban Protest Music Movement
    • 5.4 Reflections on My First Nueva Trova Show
  • Chapter VI: Race, Place and Colonial Legacies: Underground hip-hop and a Racialized Social Critique
    • 6.1 Race and Cuba: Historical Considerations
    • 6.2 American Occupation and the Creation of the Cuban Republic 1898-1912
    • 6.3 The Revolutionary State Attempts to Solve the Race Problem in Cuba
    • 6.4. Making the Linkages: Discussion and Some Additional Thoughts
    • 6.5. Ethnographic Notes: Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 6.6. “Everyone Knows That Whites Exist, But No One‘s Sure About The Blacks” Theoretical Perspectives on Art, hip-hop and Transnational Blackness
  • Chapter VII: Racial Identity and Revolution: The (Re-)Emergence of a Black Identity Among Havana‟s Underground Youth
    • 7.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop and Symbols of Blackness
    • 7.1a Raperos, Activistas, Revolutionaries: Underground Hip-Hop and Social Change
    • 7.2 Notes on Language
      • 7.2.1 Underground hip-hop/Comercialización/Institucionalización
    • 7.3 Transmitting Blackness: Graffiti, T-Shirts and the Black Experience
    • Figure 7q. Album cover, Jodido Protagonista, by Randeée Akozta (independently produced, circa 2004).
    • 7.4 Underground Graffiti: NoNo La Grafitera
    • 7.5 Section Summary/Concluding Remarks
• Section III
  • Chapter VIII: Cuba‟s Sexual Revolution? Women, Homosexuality and Cuban Revolutionary Policy
    • 8.1 All the Women Are Straight and All the Homosexuals are Men: Gender and Female (Homo-) Sexuality
    • 8.2. Silent Women, Invisible Lesbians: Researching the Experiences of Lesbians in Cuba
    • 8.3 Notes on Contemporary Lesbian, Gay Life in Cuba
  • Chapter IX: “Siempre Hay Lucha/There Is Always a Struggle”: Black Women, Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.1 (1). ―No Particular Racial Subjectivity‖
    • 9.2 (2). The Racially Conscious Race Rejecters
    • 9.3 (3). The Racially Awakened
    • 9.4 (4). Racially Conscious Actors
    • 9.5 ¿Y Que Paso Con OREMI?/ And What Happened with OREMI? Black Lesbian Subjectivity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.6 Conclusion
  • Chapter X: “No Soy Kruda”: Las Krudas, Cuban Black Feminism and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.1 Who Are Las Krudas?
    • 10.2 Las Krudas: Raperas Underground
    • 10.3 Krudas‘ Black Feminist Discourse
    • 10.4 Como Existe La Heterosexualidad, Existe Homosexualidad/Just As There Is Heterosexuality, There Is Homosexuality
    • 10.5 Krudas and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.6 Reaction to Krudas‘ Work
    • 10.7 Conclusion/Discussion
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
  • The Sociological Implications of My Research
• Appendix
• Discography, Interviews, IRB Forms & Supplementary Materials
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Writing Mixed Race Asian Americans into the Nation: Narratives of National Incorporation in the Bildungsroman and the Multiracial Movement

Wesleyan University
May 2013
80 pages

May Lee Watase

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in American Studies

Introduction

In spring 2011, during my sophomore year at Wesleyan, the student group I was a member of, MIX (an acronym for mixed heritage, interracial, cross-cultural), invited Ken Tanabe, a multiracial graphic designer and social activist to host a Loving Day celebration on Wesleyan’s campus. Tanabe is the founder of Loving Day, an event that celebrates interracial love, multiethnic identity, and marks the 1967 anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage. At our own event, Tanabe and a few other representatives of the Loving Day organization gave us Loving Day buttons, showed us a power point presentation, and chatted with us about our mixed race identities. At the end of the hour, Tanabe asked to take a picture of the group, snapping the exact moment the ten of us jumped in the air. About a month ago, two years following our celebration with Tanabe, I opened an email from the Loving Day listserv to find the following:

The Loving Day Project is pleased to announce the launch of Loving Day ON CAMPUS… a resource guide and forum to help students across the country connect, share, and inspire…Students have celebrated this important civil rights milestone in a variety of ways…We want every student and organization to have the best events possible, so we have created the Loving Day ON CAMPUS facebook page.

I clicked the link and found the picture of the Wesleyan MIX group on the Facebook page—there we all were, happy and smiling as the unofficial faces of Loving Day ON CAMPUS. I was slightly surprised to see myself there and began scrolling through the rest of the Loving Day website, becoming increasingly aware of the fact that Loving Day’s marketing strategy relied heavily on a celebratory “mixed-race” look…

In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the multiracial movement, the genre of the bildungsroman, or “coming of age novel,” and mixed race Asian American novels that are contextualized in the decade of the 1990s. The three novels I use in this study are Paper Bullets: a Fictional Autobiography, by Kip Fulbeck (2001); American Son: A Novel, by Brian Ascalon Roley (2001); and My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki (1998). I situate each novel within the rhetoric of the multiracial movement of the 1990s, which forwarded the institutionalization and legitimization of mixed race identity in American society both legally and socially, in the government, in education, and in popular culture. Each novel employs different functions of the bildungsroman, narrating the protagonists’ complex relationships with the boundaries of the nation, grappling with the notion of national belonging and validation. The bildungsroman structure and the multiracial movement both construct a progressive, teleological discourse, narrating a trajectory from exclusion and  marginality to an endpoint of inclusion within the nation as a celebratory affirmation of identity. By focusing on the ways in which these three mixed race Asian American texts subvert, manipulate, or are confined by the form of the bildungsroman and the rhetoric of the multiracial movement, I examine the pathways to inclusion in the American body politic and the positionality of the mixed race Asian American subject within and beyond the boundaries of the America. My studies of each text draw from contentious moments in the United States in the 1990s: the rhetoric of Ethnic Studies and cultural nationalism, the Rodney King beating and L.A. Riots, and the ascendancy of Asian economic power—all discourses that intervene in the narrative progress of the mixed race Asian American subject in American public discourse…

Read the entire thesis here.

From Medical Innovation to Sociopolitical Crisis: How Racialized Medicine Has Shifted the Scope of Racial Discourse and its Social Consequences

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut
May 2013
51 pages

Danielle Antonia Craig

An essay submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Sociology

Using a case study of a congestive heart failure, BiDil, patented in 2005 for use only in African Americans, I attempt to understand and analyze how the movement of racialized medicine has informed and effected American understandings of race, racial identity, and health.

Read the entire essay here.

Multiracial Identity Development and the Impact of Race-Oriented Student Services

Kansas State University
2013
46 pages

Margaret Roque

A REPORT submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF SCIENCE Department of Special Education, Counseling, and Student Affairs College of Education

Multiracial identity development has been a topic of study that has slowly begun to grow interest in academia. While it is important to acknowledge the process of multiracial identity development in and of itself, it is also essential to understand how this development is influenced by different ecological factors in higher education, such as when and where a multiracial student may encounter instances of marginalization, as well as instances of mattering. One of the more prominent facets of this ecology is race-oriented student services, which can provide either a space in which multiracial students feel marginalized, or one in which they feel that they matter. This report will examine multiracial identity development and why it is needed in order to better understand multiracial students’ needs, as well as how race-oriented student services affect development and expression of their identity.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Chapter 1 – Introduction
  • Concepts and Key Terms
  • Race as a Social Construct
  • Mattering and Marginalization
  • Summary
• Chapter 2 – Review of the Literature
  • Introduction
  • Monoracial Identity Development
    • Cross & Fhagen-Smith’s Life Span Model of Black Identity Development
  • Multiracial Identity Development
    • Poston’s Biracial Identity Development Model
    • Root’s Five Types of Identity
    • Renn’s Identity Patterns
    • Multiracial Identity Denial
      • External Identity Denial
      • Internal Identity Denial
    • The Effects of Marginalization
  • Race-Oriented Student Services
  • The Influence of Campus Ecology on Multiracial Identity
  • Monoracial Race-Oriented Student Services
    • External Denial
    • Marginalization
  • Multiracial Race-Oriented Student Services
    • Providing a Sense of Mattering
    • Making Meaning of Marginalizing Experiences
  • Summary
• Chapter 3 – Analysis through Personal Reflection
  • Personal Narrative
• Chapter 4 – Implications for Student Affairs Practitioners and Future Research
  • Implications for Student Affairs Practitioners
  • Need for Future Research
  • Conclusion
• References

Read the entire report here.

Race, Policy, and Culture: An Identity Crisis for Sickle Cell Disease in Brazil

Melissa S. Creary, MPH, Doctoral Candidate
Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts
Emory University

Professor Howard Kushner, Chair
Professor Jeffrey Lesser, Co-Chair

Abstract of Dissertation Prospectus

In 2001, Cândida and Altair, a married couple, started a national organization to increase the rights of sickle cell patients, and thereby gave birth to the sickle cell disease (SCD) movement in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Cândida, the wife, who carries sickle cell trait, now heads the municipal SCD unit for Salvador. She, with light skin and wavy brown hair, might be considered white in the United States, but when I asked her why she had created the organization she responded: “Eu sou negra!” (I am black). Her darker-skinned husband, who considers himself a black activist, coordinates the national SCD association and helped craft policy for SCD. As a family, Cândida and Altair shift between multiple roles: genetic carrier, parent, government official, and SCD advocate. Together these two activists have helped shape the racial discourse on SCD by associating the disease with “blackness” on the individual, organizational, and national level.

Sickle cell disease is the most common hereditary hematologic disorder in Brazil and throughout the world. In Brazil, the estimated prevalence is between 2% and 8% million people. My research explores how patients, non-governmental organizations, and the Brazilian government, at state and federal levels, have contributed to the discourse of SCD as a “black” disease, despite a prevailing cultural ideology of racial mixture. Specifically, this project analyzes how the Brazilian state, advocacy, and patient communities within the nation have, at times, branded SCD an Afro-Brazilian disease. At the state level, I’ll describe the reigning racial ideology and how the development of racialized health policy contests their own viewpoint. On the organizational level, I’ll investigate the alignment of the SCD movement with the black movement of Brazil and the decisions made by some of these organizations to influence health policy using anti-racist motives. Lastly, I will explore the actual embodiment of SCD in the patient population and the “identity crisis” many may experience upon being diagnosed with a “black” disease.

With this framework in mind, I aim to answer the question—How are different actors (re)defining race and health being through culture, biology, policy and politics in contemporary Brazil? This multi-level identity crisis is in constant contestation of competing racial frameworks at the micro, meso, and macro level. I will manage these complexities with a flexible notion of biological citizenship that considers frameworks of biology, social determinants, and policy in ways that is uniquely responsive to the cultural and historical specifics of how race, identity, health, and legitimacy operate in Brazil.

To do this, I will spend ten months in Brasília, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro investigating the construction of sickle cell disease on three different levels: advocacy organization around patient rights, individual patient and family experience, and governmental policy development and implementation. To assess the social, geographical, and political context of my subjects, I will use a series of historical and qualitative methodologies.

My work will deepen and re-think narratives of Brazil’s racial history through the lens of SCD. It also stands to generate a better understanding of the historical genealogy as it informs the current implementation of SCD policy. This analysis can provide lessons to both Brazil and the US on how future policy can be designed. Specifically, whether policy developed around populations (or sub-set of populations) can be measured against and be as effective as policy developed around disease.

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

University of Melbourne
November 2003
328 pages

Marguerita Stephens

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. It explores the way that particular, albeit contested, images of Aborigines ‘became legislative’. It surveys the declining influence of liberal and Evangelical ‘philanthropy’ at the end of the 1830s, the pragmatic moral slippages that transformed humanitarian gestures into colonial terror, and the part played by the Australians in the emergence of the concept of race as the chief vector of colonial power. The thesis contrasts the rhetoric of the British Evangelicals with governmental rationalisations in connection with Major Lettsom’s murderous raid on the Kulin on the outskirts of Melbourne. It then probes two mid century ‘scientific’ discourses – one concerning the purported infertility of Aboriginal women in connection with white men (a thesis that captivated Social Darwinists but was belied by the ubiquitous presence of children of mixed descent); the other concerning the purported propensity of the Australians to wantonly destroy their own offspring – to illustrate how self-serving misinterpretations of the effects of colonisation, and of Aboriginal cultural practices, presented the Kulin as less than human and underwrote the removal of their children into ‘protective’ incarceration. It explores how a policy originally intended to ‘domesticate’ and transform the children of the Kulin into model citizens turned into a project designed to eradicate the Aborigines of Victoria by ‘breeding them out’. It considers the contestations between humanitarians and racialists at the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines and how, in the 1870s, an arcane theory that the Aborigines were of Caucasian origins came to underwrite an intentionally genocidal ‘absorption’ policy that deployed the arithmetics of caste. Throughout the thesis, the determination of the Kulin survivors to adapt to the new circumstances, their efforts to farm the Coranderrk station lands as independent, free farmer-citizens, their resistance to the Board’s efforts to ‘board out’ their children and dispossess them of every acre of land in the colony, is juxtaposed against representations of the Aborigines as primitives, savages, as less than human and inherently bound for extinction on the one hand, and as a people passively awaiting the remedy of being made ‘white without soap’ on the other.

Read the entire dissertation here.

What’s Black and White and Black Or White?: The Effects of Category Assignment on the Evaluation of and Memory for Multi-raced Faces

University of Colorado
2007
85 pages
ISBN: 9780549508632

Eve C. Willadsen-Jensen

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Psychology

This paper examines the effect of social categorization, from the initial category assignment to perceiver evaluations and memory, on a racially ambiguous target. In a series of 3 studies, racial categorization at the initial stage of person perception was manipulated by providing a race cue prior to viewing racially-ambiguous faces. The studies demonstrated that categorization of an ambiguous target lead to differences in the initial processing of the face as well as evaluation and memory. Racially ambiguous faces were evaluated in a manner consistent with the race cue. In Studies 1 and 2, racially ambiguous faces cued with the word “Black” primed more biased responses than racially ambiguous faces cued with the word “White”. This difference was reflected in participants’ event-related potentials (Study 2) with larger initial attention to faces primed by “Black” followed by a shift in attention to faces primed by “White”. This pattern was for both ambiguous and unambiguous faces. The pattern continued into memory effects (Study 3) with better memory for “White” than “Black” cued faces. These results demonstrate how initial category assignment during early face processing affects the entire person perception process.

Purchase the dissertation here.

More than the Sum of My Parts: Multiracial Teen Identity Development and Experiences of Appeasement and Objection in a Mono-Racialized Context

University of Minnesota
2013
321 pages

Brynja Elisabeth Halldórsdóttir Gudjonsson

Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation examines multiracial student cultural awareness and how their experiences provided them insight into their current educational environment. The multiracial students in this study had significant self-awareness and cultural literacy due to their early identity formation and their continued navigation of disparate cultures. Because these students have received little attention in academic research, this dissertation explored multiracial identity in adolescents and the student experiences in a secondary educational context. This ethnographic study explores the students’ experiences through participant observations, in-depth interviews of students, teachers and school administrators, ethnographic reflections and field notes. The dissertation found that students encountered pressures in the school environment which affected their interactions in the school setting with teachers and peers. These encounters could be racially charged, although at times they could be so subtle that adults might not have recognized them as racially charged. In spite of these difficulties the students found supportive teachers and academic success. Based on the study’s findings the dissertation proposed a new lens through which to view multiracial student behavior. Since students were sensitive to others expectations, they mold their behavior to conform to these expectations. Through appeasement and objection the student actively chose how to react to others’ perceptions of them. Appeasement and objection in response to expectations could have stressful impacts on students as they sublimated portions of their identities in order to better fit into their environments.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• List of Tables
• Table of Figures
• Chapter 1
  • Categories of Self
  • Historical Understanding of Mixed Race Individuals
  • Racial Mixing and History
  • Definition of Modern Multiracial Identity
  • Schooling in Central City
  • Racism Entrenched in Schools
  • Research Questions
  • Methodology
  • Author Subjectivity
  • Data Discussion
  • Conclusions and Further Research
• Chapter 2 “My grandmother told me:” Race, History, School and Multiracial Identity Theory
  • In White and Black: Race and Dichotomy in U.S. Social Systems
  • Whiteness: Conception, History and Meaning
  • Black Identity: History and Context
  • Urban Education and Student Experience
  • Equal Education?
  • Multiracial Identity and Schooling
  • Multiracial History
  • Official Categorization of Multiracial and Multi-ethnic People
  • Identity Theory and the Multiracial Student
  • Contemporary Multiracial Identity Models and Theory
  • Conclusion and Research Questions
• Chapter 3: The Elusive Methodology of Critical Ethnography
  • Objective
  • The Ethnographic Frame
  • Embedding Ethnographers
  • Methods
  • Analysis
  • Cultural Politics in the Research
  • School Population
  • Sample Selection
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: This Examined Life An Exploration of Identity Creation and Projection for Multiracial Teens
  • Sorting the M&M’s: Seeing Multicultural and Multiracial Students at MWHS
  • Getting to Know You: Seeing Identity Changes
  • The Opportunity to Choose
  • Asking Permission: Finding Mixed Race Students
  • School Choice
  • “What are you?”
  • Friendship Groups
  • Foreclosure of Categorizing
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 “You think you’re special light-skind’ed bitch:”Student Interactions and School Curriculum
  • “You don’t just belong:” Finding Place in Social Groups in and out of School
  • Complex Problems with Simple Answers: Student Classroom Experiences
  • “Our history is still not their history too:” Student Connection to School Curriculum
• Chapter 6 “Ear-hustling” and Unsavory Experiences: Micro-aggressions are the Hidden Racial Interactions in School
  • Who is Listening? And What Do They Hear?
  • Micro-aggressions
  • Not Enough: Stepping Outside of the Expected Limits
  • Power and Control: Student Misbehavior and Punishment
  • Sit here not there: How negative attention affects students
  • Punishment: How Did it Affect Multiracial Students?
• Chapter 7 “To thine ownself be true:” Appeasement, Objection and Cultural Compliance
  • Additive Parts: Making up Identity
  • More than Code-switching: When Linguistic Analysis is not Enough
  • Act More White and Play School
  • Assimilation or Acculturation
  • Appeasement or Objection: How Mixed Students Reflect Expectations
  • Repercussions of objection and appeasement
• Chapter 8 Beyond All of the Pieces: What was Missing and Next Steps
  • Recommendations
  • The Matter of Power and Punishment
  • Directions for Future Research
  • The Last Pieces of the Puzzle
• References
• Appendix A: Research protocols
  • Observation protocol
  • Student questions:
  • Teacher questions:
• Appendix B
  • Male participant coding rubric
  • Female participant coding rubrique

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Politics of “Passing”: American Indians and Racial “Passing”

University of Arizona
2004
80 pages

Veronica R. Hirsch

Introduction

How is the racial “passing” behavioral concept applicable to American Indians, and what political forces created the socio-cultural circumstances that prompted this behavior? Beyond these immediate, sociologically-focused questions, what generational impacts does racial “passing” have upon tribal sovereignty and how does tribal sovereignty effect certain forms of racial “passing?” Until now, racial “passing” has been oversimplified as an exclusively Black/White social phenomenon, given the term “passing” was originally coined to describe an African-American’s attempts to identify him/herself, or to accept identification as a white person (Caughie 1999, p. 20). However, racial “passing” is neither historically nor contemporarily unique to the African-American community, since racial “passing” is facilitated by any social organization, such as the United States, that holds certain “subordinate” groups in disesteem (Sollors 1997, p. 248). Taking the United States’ “trust responsibility,” American Indian nations’ “domestic dependent” statuses, and documented history of Indian-specific, institutionalized racism together, one readily witnesses that the societal “disesteem” to which American Indians are and were subjected also positions and positioned them as both participants in and subjects of racial “passing.”…

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Authentic, Transformational Leadership: A Phenomenological Study of the Experiences of Black/White Biracial Leaders

University of Nebraska, Lincoln
May 2013
182 pages

Carmen R. Zafft

Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Major: Human Sciences (Leadership Studies)

This phenomenological study described the racial identity and leadership experiences of eight community, education, and business Black/White biracial leaders. Four central themes emerged relating to the participants’ racial identity choices: (a) family discourse, (b) social networks, (c) appearance, and (d) identity work. Three central themes emerged relating to the participants’ leadership experiences: (a) cultural agility: “Blessed to be flexible”, (b) perceived representation: “I look like them”, and (c) transformational leadership: “I lead so others can grow.” Because the participants were conscious of their identity development experience, all demonstrated a strong sense of self which influenced how they experienced leadership. As a result, the essence of experiencing leadership as a biracial leader was to be authentic and transformational.

Chapter One: Introduction

In an interview for CBS news in 2007, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked, “How important is race in defining yourself?” to which he responded, “I am rooted in the African-American community, but I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that’s not all I am” (Kroft, 2007). Historically, a presidential candidate’s racial identity has not to this degree been questioned. This question was due, in part, to his identification as a Black American yet his racial lineage consists of a White, Midwest-American mother and a Black, Kenyan father. Walters (2007) brought attention to the conflict surrounding President Obama’s racial and cultural heritage:

He appeared to be of African descent, but the cultural markers to which traditional American Blacks were exposed presented him as someone born of a White American mother and a Kenyan father and raised in Hawaii. Also, the fact that he had lived for a while in Indonesia complicated the matter further. In short, his identity omitted many of the cultural markers with which Blacks are more familiar to the extent that it has promoted a curiosity of ‘cultural fit’ that in turn has become an issue of political trust. (p. 13)

These “cultural markers” influence how Black Americans make sense of and fit in the world around them. Essentially, these markers have traditionally defined Blackness in America. Though Obama identified as a Black American, his racial heritage and social influences did not fit the cultural markers typical of a Black American male leader. This caused voters, Black and White, to question whose interests Barack Obama was committed to and if they could follow him. For these reasons, Obama’s racial lineage, his cultural influences, his racial identification, and his post-racial rhetoric communicated a welcomed, albeit “mixed message” to the American public.

Despite this mixed message, President Obama’s election signified substantial racial gains for African Americans. Of equal significance is the special attention his biracial parentage brings to this growing population. His election led me to consider how a biracial leaders’ racial identity influences their leadership experiences.

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to describe how biracial leaders identify racially and how they experience leadership. Biracial leaders are defined as an individual with a Black biological parent and a White biological parent who exercises leadership in an organization or group…

Read the entire dissertation here.