Construction Of Racial Identities Research Articles

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

Urban Latina/o Undergraduate Students' Negotiations of Identities and Participation in an Emerging Scholars Calculus I Workshop

In this article, the author presents a qualitative multiple case study that explored how two urban Latina/o undergraduate students' emerging mathematical and racial identity constructions influenced their participation in a culturally diverse, Emerging Scholars Program, Calculus I workshop at a predominately White urban university. Drawing on critical race theory and Latina/o critical theory, cross-case analysis illustrates that participants' emerging mathematical and racial identities--co-constructed with their other salient identities--contributed to positively shifting their participation by: (a) changing their perceptions of their and peers' mathematics abilities, (b) allowing them to challenge racialized mathematical experiences, and (c) strengthening their comfort levels in the workshop environment. The Latina/o participants' counter-stories support that the sociopolitical nature of identity development and participation in mathematical learning contexts should be embraced because it provides additional knowledge regarding how and why Latina/o students attain mathematical success.

RESEARCHING THE ROLE OF RACE IN YOUNG BIRACIAL ADULTS’ IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; EXPLORING IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANS-RACIAL ADOPTIONS

This article draws on the insights of research on nine Indian-White biracial young adults, and applies those insights to the transracial adoption debate. It thus does not report research on transracial adoption directly, but enters the debate on transracial adoption through using insights on the process of racial identity construction that challenge some assumptions prominent in the debate.

Constructing Scandinavian-American Identity through a Chaos of Darkness: Maj Lindman’s Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Gingerbread

Popular among young American readers since the early 1930s, Maj Lindman’s two series of children’s books—Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and Flicka, Ricka, Dicka—continue their long publishing histories in the U.S. These nostalgia-filled adventures about the Swedish triplet boys and girls construct positive values of childhood independence and cooperation. At the same time, they often associate these positive values with white racial features in ways that can be problematic for critical readers. This article examines Maj Lindman’s construction of racial identity by analyzing Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and the Gingerbread, the volume that gives the fullest commentary on whiteness in either series by offering dark images of its main characters. After falling into a vat of gingerbread batter and turning dark brown, Snipp, Snapp and Snurr spread chaos in their town, disturbing the peace, disrupting the market economy, and offending bourgeois propriety. Following Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and others who have critiqued similar representations of Africanized figures in American art, this article explores the extent to which Lindman was “playing in the dark” (Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1993) with this inaugural Snipp, Snapp, Snurr volume, engaging a white race ideology rooted in “Old-World” stereotypes but easily translatable to a “New-World” politics of race. Implications for critical parent-readers and Scandinavian-American identity will be considered.

Brave Old Spaniards and Indolent Mexicans: J. Ross Browne, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and the Social Construction of Off-Whiteness in the 1860s

The purpose of this article is to examine J. Ross Browne's construction of racial identity in the territories acquired by the United States after its war with Mexico in 1846–1848. The intent is to reveal the interaction between a journalist's social identity and his construction of the social reality of race relations by examining the most widely circulated works, personal trajectory, surrounding cultural influences, and private correspondence by Browne, one of the earliest Anglo journalists to chronicle American development of the Mexican Borderlands based on firsthand experience. The research method was cultural contrapuntal reading, which employs a combination of Marion Marzolf's content assessment and Edward Said's contrapuntal reading. Browne cast Spanish California elites as bringers of European progress and helpers to the Anglo American government and business leaders, Mexican peons as a cheap labor force for mining interests, and Spanish ladies and mixed-race temptresses as objects of desire.

Economic Development, Racialization, and Privilege: “Yes in My Backyard” Prison Politics and the Reinvention of Madras, Oregon

This article draws from geographic engagements with theories of racialization and NIMBYism to explore connections between economic development and the relational construction of racial identities. I investigate the discourses of local white leadership surrounding two interconnected economic agendas crafted with the goal of remaking the central Oregon town of Madras into an upscale, white community, including (1) entrepreneurial prison development, and (2) an urban renewal project emphasizing high-income residential construction and the removal of “blighted” housing. Community leaders framed these developments as essential to changing perceptions of Madras based on its racial makeup and entrenched poverty. White officials promoted prison recruitment and upscale housing development through a normative racial framework that reaffirmed the privileged status of whites, stigmatized Latinos and Native Americans, and (re)produced unequal spaces. Through this empirical focus, I call attention to the centrality of race in economic practices, emphasizing how racialized privilege and marginalization are reproduced through development agendas that give shape to geographies of opportunity and (dis)advantage.

Endogenous Race in Brazil: Affirmative Action and the Construction of Racial Identity among Young Adults

In this article, we study the construction of racial identity among students at a university that recently adopted racial quotas in admissions. Using data collected by the authors, we find that parents’ race, family socioeconomic status, gender, and racial quotas have a significant effect on self-reported race. The evidence indicates that students in mixed-race families are systematically more likely to identify with their mother’s race than with their father’s. Conditional on skin tone quintile, higher socioeconomic status is associated with lighter racial self-classification, and lower socioeconomic status with darker racial self-classification. Additionally, the results demonstrate that being male is associated with lighter racial self-classification, and being female with darker self-classification. Policy changes may also affect racial identity. After the adoption of racial quotas, students in the darkest two quintiles were less likely to self-identify as branco, those in the fourth quintile were more likely to self-identify as pardo, and those in the darkest quintile were more likely to self-identify as preto.

Performing the Self, Performing the Other: gender and racial identity construction in the Nanteuil Cycle

This article focuses on the Old French Nanteuil Cycle of chansons de geste, investigating the nature of medieval identity and its connection to gender, race and religion. The Nanteuil Cycle repeatedly uses disguise as a means of crossing gender boundaries, which allows the repositioning of identity and simultaneously reveals the arbitrariness of cultural categorisation. Although cross-dressing heroines abound in medieval literature, the fourteenth-century Tristan de Nanteuil contains instances where cross-dressing is both gendered and racialised, stretching the malleability of identity to the point that it seems physical form can be altered at will. The article discusses the distortion of genealogies in the Cycle effected by the challenges to the social matrix produced by disguise, with a new relational framework where wives may become fathers and mothers become husbands.

“Stop Acting Black!”: Black Conscious (Racial) Identities in Coconut

Whenever Ofilwe, a black character in the novel Coconut, and her family are told by white customers at restaurants, shopping malls, and other public spaces to stop acting black, Ofilwe in particular becomes perplexed by what it means to black. She will rhetorically ask: are not Concerning race, this kind of encounter is a reification of an existing difference in the conceptualization of between the interlocutors. Ofilwe's obvious puzzlement is based on the fact that she identifies herself within the apartheid frame of racial categorization which placed people into categories of white, Asian, colored, and African (black) on the bases of reputation and appearance (Marx 105). For Ofilwe, at least in this context, one belongs to the he/she appears to fit into. Racial identity is not determined by ways of behavior. Consequently, it is impossible for one to act race, to act black. To her white interlocutors however, in the milieu of apartheid South Africa, does not necessarily concern the phenotype of a person. It shows a political and/or economic relationship among groups of people where the binaries of the superior and the subordinate could be acted. What this means is that one could become white on the basis of an admissible reputation and a behavior considered typical of that status. To be precise, a black person who is accepted into a white status is required to exhibit a behavior fully purged of the inferiority of his/her black origin.In his assessment of racial performativity, Ian Hacking observes that human acts come into being hand in hand with our invention of the [racial] categories labeling them (Qtd in Appiah 78). This includes the construction of racial identities based on a way of behavior presumed to mark out one's race. It is for this reason that we expect people of a certain to behave a certain way not simply because they are confirming to the script for that identity, performing that role, but because they have certain antecedent properties that are consequences of the label's properly applying to them4 (Appiah 79). The antecedent property in Ofilwe's encounter is her black racial inferiority and subservience assessed in relation to white superiority and hegemony. Apart from explaining the underlying power relations based on which racial classifications are constructed, the narrative from Coconut providing the context for my introductory comments here problematizes racial identity in South Africa. For example, what exactly does the Ofilwe's brother, Tshepo, mean when he says: All I am saying is that my skin is black? (Matlwa 5). In other words, does having a black-colored skin make one also racially Also, how are to understand another black character like Fikile who declares her desire to be white? (Matlwa 135). Does her identity change from black to white on the basis of the disavowal of her black self?The task of this paper is to provide an analysis of racial identity formations in post apartheid South Africa through the medium of Coconut. Careful not to cause any undue mutilation of the work of fiction by insisting on it being both universal and race-free (Morrison 12), I propose to use the South African philosophy, Black Consciousness (hereafter BC), to offer a reading of racial identity which is specific to the setting of the novel. As a current literary expression on the issue of and racial relations in South Africa, I will be much concerned with looking at how BC offers a theoretical framework for understanding the idea of racial in the post-apartheid space fictionalized in the story. I will look at how BC's (re)classification of race into white, non-white, and blacks, offers an alternative method for rethinking in Coconut.Coconut is the debut novel of the black female South African writer Kapano Matlwa. Published in the year 2007, the story revolves around a middle-class black family living in a white suburb in post apartheid South Africa. …

Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity

Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity Peter Erickson (bio) David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010–11. Volume 3. From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition. Part 1. David Bindman, ed. Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque. 408 + xxi pages. $95.00. Part 2. By Jean Michel Massing. Europe and the World Beyond. 496 + xxvi pages. $95.00. Part 3. David Bindman, ed. The Eighteenth Century. 365 + xxvi pages. $95.00. Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, eds. The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem. London: The Warburg Institute; Savigliano: Nino Aragno Editore, 2012. 386 + x pages. £55.00. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, eds. Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 500 pages. $99.00. In her introductory statement, “Acknowledgments and Perspectives,” in the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, Dominique de Menil traces the moment of inception of this ambitious project with an admirable combination of humility and conviction: [End Page 151] The decision in 1960 to launch a systematic investigation of the iconography of blacks in Occidental art did not proceed from any clear plan. It was an impulse prompted by an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954. . . . The past is heavy. To face it, to assume it, facts must be brought candidly to light. The making of a more human world requires rigorous studies. (1: 291–92)1 In a similar spirit, John de Menil records his justification for supporting the purchase of Christian van Couwenberg’s The Rape of a Negress (1632) for the Museé des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg: “‘We are happy . . . to have been able to aid in the acquisition of an important painting which depicts us, whites, in a manner which we would prefer to ignore.’”2 Volumes 1, 2, and 4 of The Image of the Black in Western Art (consisting of five books) were completed in a thirteen-year period as follows: From Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (1976) on classical art; From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery” (1979), part 1, From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, and part 2, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World, on medieval art; and From the American Revolution to World War I (1989), part 1, Slaves and Liberators, and part 2, Black Models and White Myths, on nineteenth-century art. However, the series remained incomplete because of the glaring absence of the third volume intended to cover the early modern period. Not until fifty-one years after the initial commitment in 1960, and thirty-five years after the appearance of the first volume, has the gap at last been filled by the publication in 2010–11 of the three books—volume 3, parts 1–3—focusing on the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The arrival of this rich resource is a cause for scholarly celebration. The scope of the visual material is vast; its accumulation and coordination a massive achievement. So long awaited, it has been well worth the wait. The new addition provides a broad, solid base that begins to answer Dominique de Menil’s call for “rigorous studies.” Although the new volume 3 goes far toward definitively constituting and establishing a visual field for early modern race studies, it does not have the field to itself but rather shares this moment with the other volumes under review and hence is part of a much wider, ongoing process of growth and expansion. Nor did the field stand still during the prolonged delay in the emergence of the missing piece of The Image of the Black in the Western Art. The past two decades, beginning in the early 1990s, have witnessed concerted efforts and major critical developments in formulating the issue of race in early modern [End Page 152] culture. A pressing question has been whether, beyond its archival value, The Image of the Black in Western Art project would be fully capable of adjusting to, and engaging...

Gazing into the Mirror: Reflections of Racial Identity Transformation in Transnational and Transracial Adoptees

In order to understand the social construction of racial identity in adoptees, this paper utilizes the analysis of counter-narratives from Critical Race Theory to examine competing messages sent to adoptees by the adoptive family and society at large. By analyzing counter-narratives collected from both adoptees and adoptive parents, this study explores how the family and larger society influence racial identity development. The findings suggest a contrast in how the adoptee and adoptive parents define racism, which manifests in how they discuss race. Ulti mately, each adoptee was able to take the messages the adoptive parent sent along with messages society provided and transform them into a personally meaningful racial identity.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Role of Racial Identification, Social Acceptance/Rejection, Social Cognition, and Racial Socialization in Multiracial Youth’s Positive Development

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Role of Racial Identification, Social Acceptance/Rejection, Social Cognition, and Racial Socialization in Multiracial Youth’s Positive Development

Identities and inequalities: an examination of the role of racial identity in the formation of social capital inside a voluntary youth organization

This ethnographic study provides empirical illustrations of patterns of racial homophily and network ties within a voluntary youth association. The paper seeks to examine the role of racial identity and its relationship to the formation of social capital among a diverse group of youth participants. Drawing on narrative data, this article explores the kinds of organizational experiences that promote the development of interracial ties as well as how the construction of racial identity influences network formation and enhances social capital. The major findings are that racial homophily (staying within one's own group) are strongest among white participants while blacks are equally likely to form interracial ties with socially dissimilar peers as with socially similar peers. Some gendered and class differences also emerged. Institutional agents were also found to be important in helping youth participants bridge racial barriers.

“Until This Curse of Polygamy Is Wiped Out”: Black Methodists, White Mormons, and Constructions of Racial Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century

AbstractDuring the final quarter of the nineteenth century, black members of the Methodist Episcopal (ME) Church published a steady stream of anti-Mormonism in their weekly newspaper, the widely read and distributedSouthwestern Christian Advocate. This anti-Mormonism functioned as way for black ME Church members to articulate their denomination's distinctive racial ideology. Black ME Church members believed that their racially mixed denomination, imperfect though it was, offered the best model for advancing black citizens toward equality in both the Christian church and the American nation. Mormons, as a religious group who separated themselves in both identity and practice and as a community experiencing persecution, were a useful negative example of the dangers of abandoning the ME quest for inclusion. Black ME Church members emphasized their Christian faithfulness and American patriotism, in contrast to Mormon religious heterodoxy and political insubordination, as arguments for acceptance as equals in both religious and political institutions. At the same time, anti-Mormon rhetoric also proved a useful tool for reflecting on the challenges of African American life, regardless of denominational affiliation. For example, anti-polygamy opened space to comment on the precarious position of black women and families in the post-bellum South. In addition, cataloguing Mormon intellectual, moral, and social deficiencies became a form of instruction in the larger project of black uplift, by which African Americans sought to enter the ranks and privileges of the American middle class. In the end, however, black ME Church members found themselves increasingly segregated within their denomination and in society at large, even as Mormons, once considered both racially and religiously inferior, were welcomed into the nation as citizens and equals.

‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’ – The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States

In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the Dred Scott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the United States, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have ‘the right to enter every other State’. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggested that if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could not be considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerous Supreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States. Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with the construction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, the mobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive and inferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, African Americans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away from plantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Underground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced often deadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, ‘know their place’ and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore these contentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on the mobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States.

Rethinking space: an outsider’s view of the spatial turn

Geographical concerns with space and place have escaped the confines of the discipline of geography. Many humanities scholars now invoke such conceptions as a means to integrate diverse sources of information and to understand how broad social processes play out unevenly in different locations. The social production of spatiality thus offers a rich opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues between different schools of critical theory. Following a brief assessment of the spatial turn in history, history of science, and political philosophy, this paper explores its implications for literary and cultural studies. It invokes a detailed case study of late 18th century Lima, Peru to explicate the dynamics of colonialism, the construction of racial identities, and different power/knowledge configurations within a particular locale. Space in this example appears as both matter and meaning, i.e., as simultaneously tangible and intangible, as a set of social circumstances and physical landscapes and as a constellation of discourses that simultaneously reflected, constituted, and at times undermined, the hegemonic social order. The intent is to demonstrate how multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship can be facilitated by paying attention to the unique of circumstances that define places within given historical moments. As seen in this example from literary colonial studies, other disciplines, therefore, can both draw from and contribute to poststructuralist interpretations of space as a negotiated set of situated practices.

Tradition and the invention of racial selves: symbolic boundaries, collective authenticity, and contemporary struggles for racial equality1

This paper raises two important questions for understanding the influence of authenticity in the construction of racial identities: what motivates racial authenticity work? and how do racial groups do authenticity work? Relying on in-depth interviews we argue that Mexican Americans and Potawatomi Indians challenge contemporary institutional racism through elaborating symbolic boundaries and articulating moral discourses. By emphasizing authentic traditions – conceived of as values, roots, and cultural toolkits – these historically and currently subordinated racial groups distinguish themselves from the American mainstream. The moral and racial discourse of tradition and authenticity affords these racial minorities opportunities to re-evaluate their groups’ statuses and re-invest their communities with esteem.

Invisible colour: Landscapes of whiteness and racial identity in international development

Racialized identity in relation to international development is a surprisingly unanalyzed theme within anthropology, even though extensively explored in connection with contemporary western multi‐cultural societies and historical relations between different parts of the world. In the paper I explore race and whiteness in relation to international development, emphasizing the importance of analyzing how the historical construction of racial identity continues to inform actual lived relationships of people belonging to different geographical spaces. In order to capture the importance of development in visual and everyday lives of people in different parts of the world, I use the term “developscape”, adapting Arjun Appadurai's (1996) idea of globalization consisting of different “scapes”, furhtermore, as asking how this “developscape” is racialized.

Immigrants and modern racism: reproducing inequality

Learning Race: Becoming an American. The Racial Structure of US Security. Immigrants' Preconceptions of Race. Seeing, Hearing, and Acquiring New Notions of Race. Immigrants Express Modern Racism. Racial Identity Construction. Racial Reproduction Revisited.

Fitting in: the embodied politics of race in Seattle's desegregated schools

By considering the performative dimensions of racial identity construction, this paper joins recent calls to more fully incorporate the materiality of the body into geographical treatments of race (McKittrick 2000; Nash 2003; Saldanha 2006). Through an analysis of school desegregation in Seattle, Washington, this analysis investigates the ways in which students of different racial backgrounds negotiated the multiracial environments at their schools. Specifically, I examine how students' racial identities are worked through embodied practices as both conscious and unconscious attempts to fit into particular social realms. Drawing on performativity theory, I show how students actively mobilized their bodies to negotiate belongings that were ostensibly foreclosed by the primacy of phenotype. This paper suggests that by focusing on the active work that the body does in the social construction of race we can better theorize the ways in which racial categories are both reproduced and destabilized through everyday life.