Multiracial Identity

This article focuses on the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987). It is my goal to demonstrate how Freyre applied Nietzschean ideas to his interpretation of Brazilian society in an attempt to concretize the prophecy of the “new man” in the shape of the multiracial “mestiço.” By Nietzschean ideas I mean ideas indebted to Nietzsche directly or indirectly and reflected in the rhetorical, stylistic and argumentative strategies used by Freyre. It is not my intention to discuss whether Freyre interpreted Nietzsche’s ideas correctly; rather, I wish to highlight parallels to Nietzschean concepts and to indicate how the eclectic, even opportunistic, use of Nietzsche’s work allowed Freyre to move the discussion on Brazilian identity in a new direction.

Casa-grande & Senzala (1933), a obra secular de Gilberto Freyre, foi traditionalmente interpretado de um ponto de vista sociólogo e histórico. Esta interpretação deixou duas questões essenciais em aberto: 1) Como se pode explicar que Freyre interpretou a noção de miscegenação de uma forma (muito) mais positiva do que sociólogos anteriores e 2) Como se pode explicar as tendências elitistas e aristocráticas na sua obra? Este artigo explore estas duas perguntas analisando a influência em Freyre da filosofia de Friedrich Nietzsche através da interpretação de Henry L. Mencken. Argumenta que a influência de Mencken foi maior do que tradicionalmente tem sido admitido e que na obra de Mencken sobre Nietzsche se pode encontrar a mesma interpretação de miscigenação que Freyre mais tarde explorou em Casa-grande & Senzala. Argumenta também que Mencken profundamente influenciou Freyre com as suas ideias aristocráticas e elitistas."

From ancient times migrants to Japan have mixed with the local inhabitants and produced offspring. While much ethnic mixing has occurred in the distant past, many contemporary persons trace their immediate ancestry to more than one ethnic source.  I have been studying multiethnic individuals in Japan through interviews, psychological counseling, and ethnographic field work in Okinawa and Tokyo. In this paper I give five examples of these lives and explain how their identities are influenced by a wide range of political, legal, ideological social and psychological forces and constraints. Although some of the conditions are favorable, I will focus on problems that have become evident in my study.

This paper explores the following questions: a) What does it mean to self-identify as a biracial Mexicana? How does this self-identity impact me and others as an educator and leader in higher education? b) How are pain and privilege embodied and enacted in the choices I have made or circumstances I have confronted in higher educational settings? In what ways is whiteness ‘unbearable’? c) How, as teacher educators, can we integrate multiraciality into our pedagogy to prepare future teachers to work with minoritized monoracial and multiracial students?

A substantial literature has examined the nature of social categorization, a fundamental process having important implications for a wide variety of social phenomena. The great majority of this research has focused on the role of particular, clearly identified social categories (e.g. race, nationality, etc.) while ignoring or holding constant other identity dimensions. This approach has afforded considerable leverage for understanding how salient social identities influence perception, judgment, and behavior. However, it leaves unaddressed many questions about how particular social identities become salient and how (and whether) identities might be inferred when category membership is ambiguous or unknown. Everyday social perception often occurs under conditions of volatility (dynamic contexts), uncertainty (missing information), complexity (multiple bases for categorization), and ambiguity (unclear meaning of available cues). As a consequence, research must address how these factors might qualify basic processes of social categorization. Available evidence is reviewed, and directions for future research are discussed.

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Given the very large proportion of Hawaiians who are multiracial, our research examines Native Hawaiian identification in mixed-race Hawaiian families. We use the 1990 US Census, which affords a unique look at racial identification because multiracial people were required to choose one race over another. The results show support for our argument that place plays a central role in Pacific identity processes, illustrated in this case among Hawaiians. We find that strong ties to Hawai'i Á/ the spiritual and geographic home of the Hawaiian population Á/ are vital to the intergenerational transmission of Hawaiian identification in both continental and island multiracial families. We compare our results for multiracial Native Hawaiians to prior studies of American Indians and Asian Americans to identify any general patterns in correlates of racial identification choices. In each group, we find that familial and geographic relationships to the cultural and ancestral lands are strongly linked to racial identification.

The multiracial population increased by 32% between 2000 and 2010 and represents 9 million people in the United States. The author reflects on her lived experiences of being multiracial but with visibly White skin. She details the lessons she learned about her multiracial identity—from her early positioning as a young student to her role as a teacher of other multiracial students. The article presents the complexities experienced by students with multiracial identities and how their self-conceptions of identity may be complicated when they visually appear to be White.

Objective: This article analyzes how some multiracial people-the "products" of interracial relationships-conceptualize what counts as an interracial relationship and how they discuss the circumstances that influence these definitions. Background: Scholars have argued that the added complexity expanding multiracial populations contribute to dating and marriage market conditions requires additional study; this paper expands on limited research regarding how multiracial people perceive interraciality. Method: The paper utilizes in-depth interviews with self-identified multiracial women (N = 30) who used online dating platforms to facilitate their dating lives in three cities in Texas: Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Results: In framing their relationships through lenses centered around skin color, cultural difference, and "familiarity" in terms of seeing potential partners as similar to non-white male family members, multiracial women illustrate varied and overlapping means of describing their intimate relationships, providing additional nuance to sociological understandings of shifts in preferences and norms around partner choice across racial/ethnic lines and opening up opportunities to continue exploration of the impact of racial inequality on partner choice. Conclusion: Multiracial people internalize racial, gendered, and fetishistic framings about potential partners similarly to 2 monoracial people, demonstrating how racial boundaries and degrees of intimacy are (re)constructed for this growing demographic in the United States.

Multiracial individuals report the social pressure of having to “choose” one of their racial groups is one primary source of psychological conflict. Yet because of their ability to maneuver among their multiple identities, multiracials also adopt flexible cognitive strategies in dealing with their social environments—demonstrating a benefit to having multiple racial identities. The current paper reviews recent research including multiracial participants to examine the behavioral and cognitive outcomes linked to being multiracial and pinpoints possible moderators that may affect these outcomes for future research. Limitations in applying monoracial identity frameworks to multiracial populations are also discussed.

“Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology,” in The Anthem Companion to Robert Park, ed. Peter Kivisto (New York: Anthem Press, 2017), 159–180.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Laboratorium, 2012, vol. 4, no. 2: 199– 217.

Lesson Plan for Teaching Four Stories Featuring Multi/Mixed Identities:
• Charles Yu’s “Third Class Superhero”
• Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”
• Viet Nguyen's “The Americans”
• and Gish Jen's “Who’s Irish?”

Fiction as a genre is well known for its ability to discuss a wide range of topics in a way that is both entertaining and empathetic. But while fictional pieces, especially the short story, are famous for creating narratives that help readers understand experiences unlike their own and characters unlike themselves, I would argue that fiction can also serve as a medium of self-reflection. As someone who identifies as multi-ethnic and multi-racial, understanding my identity through literature has been both eye-opening and difficult. Multi authors and works of fiction do exist. But they are rarely discussed as widely or taught in a way that focuses purely on their multi and mixed themes. This lesson plan exists to suggest strategies that teachers and professors may use to help comprehensively teach multi and non-multi students about the complexities and tensions surrounding mixed identities.  Target audience:  high school and college/university teachers and their students.  —Lesson plan created by Sierra Sweeney '20 as part of a class assignment at Swarthmore College, 2018..

The importance of race as social category in the United States is evident in how the federal government over time has defined the racial categories on the census forms starting with the first census in 1790. Minority groups have always contested these official categorizations (Miller, 2007; Simon & Piche, 2012) because these categorizations are at variance with how these groups define themselves. These categorizations are even more problematic because there is usually no single racial definition within the various racial groups in the United States. Moreover, these racial definitions are influenced by the history of white racial privilege and discrimination against non-whites. Race has been a major feature of American society (Philogene, 2004a; Zinn, 2005). Therefore, studying the evolving categorizations of race on the census forms in the United States is a study of the history of the cultural representations of race which is the objective of this chapter.
The evolution and expansion of racial categories suggest that race as a social category is not fixed. The Jews and the Irish from Europe for example, were not considered white when the first major waves of Jewish and Irish immigrants came to the United States despite their White physicality. They were subsequently accepted as whites in the society (Brodkin, 1998; Ignatiev, 2008). The censuses of the United States since 1790 provide historical and contemporary evidence that race is a floating signifier (Hall, 1997b). This chapter explicates the content of these dynamic racial representations. The chapter starts with a discussion of how race has been represented in the United States followed by a discussion of social representation theory (SRT) which frames the study. Next, the method is outlined and the findings presented and discussed using SRT.

The philosophical novel Zuid-Zuid-West (South-Southwest, 1926) by the Dutch-Surinamese author Albert Helman (1903-1996) is famous for the sharp critique of Dutch colonial policy in its epilogue. The remaining part of this novel has traditionally received little attention. This is all the more surprising since Zuid-Zuid-West represents one of the first examples of the turn toward ‘mestizaje’ in Latin American literature. By comparing Helman’s Zuid-Zuid-West (1926) with José Vasconcelos’ prophecy of the ‘new man’ in La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925), this article intends to highlight how these Latin American intellectuals attempted to concretize Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophecy of the ‘new man’ in the shape of the multiracial ‘mestizo’.

Rigid thinking is associated with less creativity, suggesting that priming a flexible mindset should boost creative thought. In three studies, we investigate whether priming multiple social identities predicts more creativity in domains unrelated to social identity. Study 1 asked monoracial and multiracial participants to write about their racial identities before assessing creativity. Priming a multiracial person’s racial identity led to greater creativity compared to a no-prime control. Priming a monoracial person’s racial identity did not affect creativity. Study 2 showed that reminding monoracials that they, too, have multiple identities increased creativity. Study 3 replicated this effect, and demonstrated that priming a multiracial identity for monoracials did not affect creativity. These results are the first to investigate the association between flexible identities and flexible thinking, highlighting the potential for identity versatility to predict cognitive differences between individuals who have singular versus multifaceted views of their social selves.

Research on racial fluidity has become increasingly common as researchers seek to understand the ways and reasons people change their racial identifications and/or are perceived differently over time and across contexts. Concurrently, researchers have deepened their investigations of the attitudinal and identity aspects of "color," that is the ways that people's racial and political attitudes vary based on skin tone among members of the same racial group, particularly black Americans. This paper attempts to blend research on racial fluidity and color into an exploration of adolescent racial identity formation. I examine the effect skin tone on the likelihood and type of racial identity change among multiracial black adolescents as they transition into adulthood. My results reveal that lighter skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to a non-black single race, while darker skinned adolescents are more likely to change their identification to black only.

Pupils of White and Black Caribbean descent make up the largest category of mixed heritage pupils in the United Kingdom. As a group they are at risk of underachieving and are proportionally over-represented in school exclusions. Yet little is known to date about the barriers to their achievement. The common-sense explanation for their underachievement is often in relation to the perception that mixed-heritage people are more likely to have 'identity problems' and low selfesteem because of their mixed backgrounds. In some cases, this view is further compounded by low teacher expectations associated with the socio-economic background and household structure of some mixed heritage pupils. By drawing on qualitative data from recent research,¹ this article will explore the barriers to achievement faced by White/Black Caribbean pupils in English schools. We argue that although White/Black Caribbean pupils are likely to experience a similar set of barriers to achievement as Black Caribbean pupils, there are important distinctions to be made. The specific barriers to achievement identified for White/Black Caribbean pupils derive from socioeconomic disadvantage, low teacher expectation linked to misunderstandings of mixed heritage identities and backgrounds, and the behavioural issues and attitudes towards achievement linked to peer group pressures.

This study explores the ethnic identity development that occurs during adolescence and early adulthood for persons of Japanese and American ancestry. It focuses on the process of assertion and reflection by analyzing what kinds of ethnic identities are asserted by individuals and how others receive or reflect these identity assertions. The paper begins with an outline of how developments in the sociocultural environments in Japan and the United States have influenced identity assertions. It then describes the particular kinds of
ethnic identity choices that are made and the ways in which these identity assertions are responded to by others. The methodology utilized semistructured interviews with forty seven individuals with Japanese mothers and American fathers between the ages of 18 and 38 in Japan and the United States.

Larry: A guy at work told me “Mixed marriage offends me, it just offends me.” And I can accept that, it's not for everybody.  But it's his heart that's hurting, not mine.  Not everyone can do this.  Not everyone is that strong.
Debra:  Yes, everybody has to decide what they can live with and can't live with.
(From an interview with a black male-white female couple)

Robert: We’re just like any other couple….perfectly normal.
Linda: As far as things happening to us, we’re real boring.
(A black male spouse and a white female spouse in separate interviews)

As persons in intimate relationships can quickly confirm, individuals looking at the same picture, or living through the same event, often report completely different experiences. Attending to different aspects of situations, we tend to make sense of what we are sensing, feeling, and thinking in different ways.  The two couples quoted above report very different experiences, just as individual partners in interracial relationships may have differing takes or constructions of what is “real” or “true” for them.  While this can be a source of confusion or frustration, it is also a phenomenon that all couples must learn to effectively handle if their relationship is to be successful.  As partners in interracial relationships diverge from one another on multiple axes of power, such as gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, and social class, their basic beliefs and assumptions often differ markedly, and such differences shape the lenses through which they view their interpersonal worlds. Therefore, partners in interracial relationships, coming from different social locations, may exhibit very different understandings of everyday situations that they encounter.

This article uses the Hapa movement as a case study in order to provide a framework for understanding identity as a goal of social movements and to expand on a theoretical understanding of multiracial social movements. In contrast to current understandings of identity-based movements, this article argues that the Hapa movement seeks simultaneously to deconstruct traditional notions of (mono)racial identities and to secure recognition for a multiracial "Hapa" identity. Movements that have identity as a goal are motivated by activists' understandings of how categories are constituted and how those categories, codes, and ways of thinking serve as axes of regulation and domination. The Hapa movement simultaneously challenges (mono)racial categories at both the institutional level through targeting the state and at the micro level through challenging the quotidian enactment of race and promulgating a Hapa identity. Activism by mixed-race individuals and organizations constitutes an important challenge to power that has significant implications for racial categorization and classification in contemporary American society.

The term multiracial is complex. Recent research has adopted a multidimensional view initially proposed by Rockquemore and colleagues (2002, 2009) for examining racial identity among Black/White biracials. This approach has acknowledged the social construction of race and broadened the range of racial identity options beyond the two “traditional” options of being “Black” or “biracial.” This study was designed to further assess this framework by examining a more diverse multiracial sample from Canada and the U.S. (N = 122). Both the Black/White biracials (n = 38) and Asian/White biracials (n = 40) showed great variability in their selection of Rockquemore’s multiracial identity categories, but the pattern of responses differed across the two groups. In addition to revealing different patterns of identity selection between Asian/White and Black/White biracials, findings demonstrated the importance of identity validation by others and its relation to conceptions of the self. Having a multiracial identity that is validated by others (as opposed to invalidated or contextually-dependent identities) was associated with higher levels of identity integration and self-concept clarity. Theoretical implications for extending a multidimensional model to other biracial groups are discussed.

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland engage with geographies of loss, and how travel serves as an active process of mediation. My focus is on Indies (Indonesian-Dutch) migrants and their descendants living in the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic material I explore how migrants’ descendants associate colonial times and ancestral homelands with narrative strategies of exclusion and containment and tempo doeloe discourses (a nostalgic longing for the ‘good old days’) as generative of a collective victimhood. I seek to unravel how descendants explore agentic modalities of travel in order to reactivate, re-embody, and thus intervene in their families’ and collective histories. The article analyses how affective experiences of places of and far beyond the geographical locations of the Dutch East Indies have a potential to invigorate embodied Indies sensibilities. Thus, I write towards a theory of intergenerational transmission and felt dispositions in relation to old, multiracial diasporas such as Indies. I argue that searches for sensuous geographies of absence are a specific modality of genealogy work that serves as a vehicle through which to move across and among different times in order to destabilize postcolonial temporalities.

In this article, I use what Baszile terms critical autobiographical reflection to examine my experiences as a Black and Tamil American woman who engages in language and literacy research with Latinx adolescents. I describe my encounters with two types of research policing in which perceptions of my racial identity are used to challenge the “appropriateness” of my research. Then, I illustrate how my biographical journey as a multiracial woman has shaped how I envision the conception of community that is fundamental to my equity-focused work. Finally, I discuss that it was differences in racialized schooling experiences, not distinct ethnoracial identities, which had the potential to be the greatest barrier in my cross-racial dissertation research. Through this critical autobiographical reflection, I present a diverse representation of what it means to be a Woman of Color educational researcher and document how I enact what Paris conceptualizes as humanizing research.

This paper discusses how interracial couples both resist and comply with the prevailing ideology and racial logic of homogamy through their use of dominant and subordinate discourses around (1) hypersensitivity of the partner of color and (2) history’s insignificance. Qualitative interviews with interracial couples reveal their strategic responses to racism in the public context and to racial and ethnic differences in the relationship context. The narratives highlight marginalized ‘‘truths’’ crucial to effective clinical work with interracial couples. Implications for intervention with interracial and intercultural couples are discussed.

Conducted in collaboration with Single Parent Action Network, this report draws on case study findings of 10 lone mothers of mixed racial and ethnic children to look at their everyday experiences of raising their children, particularly the ways they seek to give their children a sense of identity and belonging and what support of challenges they face in doing so.

The norms for how multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American populations self-identify are less well established than for other population groups in the United States. There is considerable variation and fluidity in how these groups identify their race and ethnicity, as well as how they are classified by others. This presents challenges for estimating and analyzing these populations based on their self-identification alone. I argue that self-identification should be treated as a numerator, but the challenge is for researchers to establish the denominator – the population that could identify as members of the group based on their ancestry. Considering how many people who could identify with these groups choose to do so sheds light on assimilation and emerging racial classification processes. Analyses of the larger potential populations further avoid bias stemming from non-random patterns of self-identification with the groups.

The presence of fluid mixed-race racial identities within allegations of employment discrimination leads some legal commentators to conclude that civil rights laws are in urgent need of reform.  The article disputes that premise and concludes that the multiracial discrimination cases highlight the continued need for attention to white supremacy and for fortifying the focus of civil rights law on racial privilege and the lingering legacy of bias against non-whites.

This thesis examines print media news stories about Black/White interracial families from 1990-2003. Using the concept of dialogism, I conduct a textual analysis of selected newspaper and news magazine stories to examine the dialogic interaction between dominant and resistant discourses of racial identity. My findings suggest that a multiracial identity project can be seen emerging in print media stories about interracial families, but the degree to which this project is visible depends on each journalist's placement of individual voices and discourses within the narrative of each story. I find some evidence of a move from placing interracial families within narratives of conflict toward a more optimistic view of such families' position in society.

Building upon previous work, this research note reports results from a replication of Brunsma (2005) using a nationally-representative sample of 6 to 22-month old infants from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) to explore the structure and processes of racial identification of multiracial infants. The variation in parental racial identifications of mixed-race infants is described and the identifications in the three most common majority-minority interracial couplings – White/Asian, Black/White, and White/Multiracial – are predicted using logistic and multinomial logistic regression models. The results are compared to the original study (Brunsma, 2005) and briefly discussed.

This chapter presents preliminary findings from a study of the experiences and self-labeling of ten individuals who are biracial and whose parents identify themselves as monoracial members of minority groups. Implications for student affairs educators are shared.