Mixed Race Studies

From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Formation of Mexican American Identities in the U.S. Southwest

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020028
21 pages

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

The racialization of Mexican Americans in northern Mexico, that is, the U.S. Southwest, following the Anglo-Americanization during the second half of the nineteenth century, is an excellent case study of the historical formations of Anglo-American and Spanish American racial orders. Both racial orders were based on a hierarchy that privileged Whiteness and stigmatized Blackness. Yet Spanish America’s high levels of miscegenation resulted in ternary orders allowing for gradation in and fluidity within racial categories, in addition to the formation of multiracial identities, including those of individuals with African ancestry. Anglo-America was characterized by restrictions on miscegenation and more precise definitions of and restrictions on racial categories. This prohibited the formation of multiracial identities while buttressing a binary racial order that broadly necessitated single-race (monoracial) identification as either White or non-White, and more specifically, as White or Black, given their polar extremes in racial hierarchy. Within this order, hypodescent applies most stringently to those with African ancestry through the one-drop rule, which designates as Black all such individuals. This article examines monoracialization through historical processes of Mexican–American identity formations. Over the twentieth century, this shifted from White to Brown, but without any acknowledgment of African ancestry.

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Changing from Visibility to Invisibility—An Intersectional Perspective on Mixedness in Switzerland and Morocco

Genealogy
Volume 6, Issue 2 (2022) (Special Issue: Beyond the Frontiers of Mixedness: New Approaches to Intermarriage, Multiethnicity, and Multiracialism)
DOI: 10.3390/genealogy6020030
17 pages

Gwendolyn Gilliéron, Associate Research Fellow
University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, Grand Est, France

In the context of intermarriage, mixedness can take different forms. Most often, it refers to a mix of class, religion, nationality, ethnicity or race in a couple. In this article, I go beyond a separate analysis of categories, analyzing the interrelation of these factors. The article discusses how and under which circumstances mixed children become visible in Switzerland and Morocco using a comparative and intersectional approach to mixedness. Based on 23 biographical narrative interviews, I analyze three situations of stigmatization: racialization, language practices and othering due to religious affiliation. Stigmatization processes due to mixedness, it is argued, are a relational phenomenon depending not only on markers such as ‘race’, ethnicity and religion but also on their interplay with gender, class, language and biographical experiences. The results suggest that mixed individuals have found creative ways to navigate their visibility: they normalize their binational origin, look for alternative spaces of belonging, emphasize their ‘Swiss-ness’ or ‘Moroccan-ness’, use languages to influence their social positioning or acquire knowledge about their binational origin in order to confront stigmatizations. The study reveals further that processes of othering due to mixedness are not only an issue in ‘Western’ societies that look back on a long history of immigration and have pronounced migration discourses. Even in Morocco, a country where immigration has so far been a marginal phenomenon, the importance of social hierarchies for the positioning of people of binational origin is evident.

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Bleach in the Rainbow: Latin Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 13, Issue 2 (October 2005)
Pages 103-109
DOI: 10.1525/tran.2005.13.2.103

William A. Darity, Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Jason Dietrich, Section Chief, Compliance Analytics and Policy
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Washington, D.C.

Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy
Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment
The New School, New York, New York

The conventional wisdom is that race is constructed in vastly different ways in the United States and throughout Latin America. Race is ostensibly understood as genotypical in the United States, while race ostensibly is understood as phenotypical in Latin America. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom, represented by the rainbow people metaphor, characterizes racial identity as far less a source of stigma in Latin America than in the United States. In contrast, research reported in this article indicates strong similarities in the construction and the operation race the entire Americas. Genotype, or African ancestry, is shown to matter in Latin America; phenotype, or appearance, is shown to matter in the United States. Race is strongly associated with social exclusion and inequality throughout all of the Americas, with Latinos demonstrating a strong preference for Whiteness and an aversion toward a Black identity. African Americans’ tendency to be Black identified may be the result of the social selection effects the phenomenon “passing.”

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Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”
Published 2022-02-21

Guest Editors:

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia

Jennifer Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Alabama, Huntsville

Dear Colleagues,

Social scientific scholarship on Multiracial experiences and processes of identity development have been the subject of social scientific scholarship for over three decades. During this time, scholars from a wide variety disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, geography, history, political science, and the humanities, along with the critical interdisciplinary work of women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Black studies, and others, have contributed to the present state of knowledge.

We now know that multiracial identities are dynamic and intersectional. We also know that mixed-race experiences are embedded within social institutions, social structures, political movements, histories, and stories. Processes like racialization and microaggressions, family and peer dynamics, and other important social, cultural, economic, historical, collective, and political realities are known to manifest in unique ways for mixed-race populations. Far from heralding an end to race and racism, we know that multiraciality is woven within structures of white supremacy across a broad range of social, political, and national contexts…

Read all of the nine (9) papers here.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma: Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

New Books Network
2022-03-30

Hawai’i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma’s analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Listen to the interview (01:48:48) here.

“What are you?” Reactions to American Racial Rhetoric among Mixed and Multiracial Caribbeans

Charisse L’Pree, Ph.D.: Media Made Me Crazy
2014-08-19

Charisse L’Pree, Associate Professor of Communications
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

Historically, the United States has had tumultuous relationship with mixed and multiracial individuals within its borders; interracial marriage was illegal until 1967, and the one-drop rule continues affect racial discourse. Combined with the hegemonic power of American culture, the effect of this rhetoric is especially evident in neighboring cultures with different social constructions of race. This paper explores the experiences of young adults in the United States and the Caribbean who identify as mixed or multiracial, and their use of social media to publicly identify and affect this conversation.

To be “mixed” is to contain different qualities or elements. Although racial categorizations can differ from culture to culture, much of the literature regarding the identity of mixed individuals has emerged from the United States and Western Europe. In these communities, multiracial individuals are less than 3% of the population and considered to be between groups. Stereotypes like the “tragic mulatto” describe the psychological stress that multiracial individuals can experience as simultaneously ostracized and exoticized anomalies. They are the targets of curiosity, resulting in the common question: “What are you?”…

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A Dialectic of Race Discourses: The Presence/Absence of Mixed Race at the State, Institution, and Civil Society and Voluntary and Community Sector Levels in the United Kingdom

Chinelo L. Njaka, Independent Researcher
London, United Kingdom

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Number 2, Special Issue “Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy”
Published 2022-02-21
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11020086

For the twenty years that mixed race has been on the United Kingdom (UK) censuses, the main story of mixed race in the UK remains one notable for its nominal presence and widespread absence in national discourses on race and ethnicity, racialisation, and racisms. The article explores reasons for this through connecting the continued presence/absence of mixed race in public discursive spheres to the role that White supremacy continues to play at systemic, structural, and institutional levels within UK society. As technologies of White supremacy, the article argues that continued marginalisation of mixed race has a direct connection to systemic, structural, and institutional aspects of race, racialisation, and racisms. Using three case studies, the article will use race-critical analyses to examine the ways that mixed race is present and—more often—absent at three societal levels: the state, institution, and civil society and voluntary and community sector. The paper will conclude by exploring key broad consequences for the persistent and common presence/absence of mixed race within race and racisms discourses as a technology of political power. Working in tandem, the paper exposes that presence/absence continues to affect mixed race people—and all racialised people—living in and under White supremacy.

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Jennifer A. Jones: Afro-Mexicans, Migration, and the Permutations of Race

Dialogues in Afrolatinidad
Season 1, Episode 3
2021-05-31

Michele Reid-Vazquez, Host and Associate Professor
Department of Africana Studies
University of Pittsburgh

Dialogues in Afrolatinidad explores history, culture, and contemporary issues in Afro-Latin America and U.S.-Afro-Latinx communities. The podcast features interviews with scholars, writers, educators, artists, and community leaders who share their passion for Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies, the significance of their intellectual, creative, or community engagement, and resources for learning more.

This episode features Dr. Jennifer A. Jones, a native of Chicago and a sociologist specializing in contemporary transnational Afro-Mexican studies. She discusses the way race is made in Latin America through her experiences in both Cuba and Mexico, as well as the broader impact of space, politics, and mobility on racial constructions throughout the U.S. She also highlights her recent book, The Browning of the New South, which explores blackness and anti-blackness in Mexico, the current migration of Afro-Mexicans to North Carolina, and their reformulations of race in the U.S. South.

Listen to the episode (00:34:06) here. Download the episode here.

Understanding Race in Sweden: The Racialisation and Deracialisation of Multiethnic and Multiracial Swedes

Nordic Journal of Social Research
2022-02-23
pages 51-66
DOI: 10.18261/njsr.13.1.5

Sayaka Osanami Törngren, Associate Professor in International Migration and Ethnic Relations; Senior Researcher at Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare
Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

Mixed populations are becoming increasingly visible in Swedish society, although they are not always recognised as such. In a colour-blind Swedish society, mixed Swedes fall into the dichotomised binary of ‘Swedes’ and ‘immigrants’. The experiences of twenty-one interviewees with multiethnic and multiracial Swedes can be broadly categorised into three types: those who feel that they are not discriminated against or racialised, those who feel that they are not discriminated against but are racialised, and those who feel that they are both discriminated against and racialised. The analysis illustrates interviewed mixed Swedes’ unique position in the racial hierarchy in Sweden and how fluid their racial experiences are. Their different experiences also show how understandings of white and non-white racial groups are formed through the processes of racialisation and deracialisation in Sweden.

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Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Issue 3 (Published 2022-03-14)
14 pages
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11030124

Yasuko Takezawa, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, Kyoto

Stephen Small, Professor
Department of African Diaspora Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The most extensive theoretic and empirical studies of people of mixed racial descent extant today have addressed nations across the Atlantic. This article reveals how this literature on people of mixed racial descent is limited in its claims to represent a “global model”. In contrast, we argue that by juxtaposing institutional factors in the Atlantic region and Japan we can expand our understanding of people of mixed racial descent across a far wider range of social and political terrains. A consideration of Japan uncovers a fascinating combination of factors impactful in the emergence of populations of mixed origins in the Pacific region more generally. By identifying this range of variables, we believe this analysis can be instructive for scholars of race focusing on the Atlantic and can contribute to a more encompassing approach for theorizing people of mixed racial descent.

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