Racial Ambiguity Research Articles

“What Are You?” Racial Ambiguity, Belonging, and Well-being Among NonVeiled Arab American Women

“What Are You?” Racial Ambiguity, Belonging, and Well-being Among NonVeiled Arab American Women

Ambiguity, consciousness, and plantation afterlives in Brazil’s racial capitalism

ABSTRACT This paper studies racial ambiguity and consciousness to advance debates on labor and discourse in racial capitalism and the plantationocene. I examine how the historical co-constitution of race and class shapes ideology and discourse, and how non-white workers perceive racial discrimination in a context where race and class strongly overlap. Focusing on sugarcane in Northeast Brazil, my methods include interviews with workers and union officials, and ethnographic observations at plantations and sugarcane municipalities. I argue that structural racism and class exploitation were forged through colonial plantation systems and that respondents both uneasily follow and openly challenge ideologies of racial ambiguity.

Reflexive Activation of Monoracial Categories During Multiracial Categorization.

Previous research has examined the real-time cognitive processes underlying perceivers' ability to resolve racial ambiguity into monoracial categorizations, but such processes for multiracial categorizations are less clear. Using a novel, three-choice mouse-tracking paradigm, we found that when perceivers categorized faces as multiracial their hand movements revealed an initial attraction to a monoracial category (study 1). Moreover, exposure to multiracial individuals moderated these effects. When measured (Study 2) or manipulated (Study 3), multiracial exposure reduced monoracial category activation and activation occurred for both morphed and real multiracial faces (Study 4). Together, the findings suggest that multiracial categorizations emerge from dynamic competition between relatively more accessible monoracial categories and a less-accessible multiracial category, which is attenuated through greater exposure to multiracial targets. This research is the first to chart out the real-time dynamics underlying multiracial categorizations and offers a new theoretical account of this increasingly common form of social categorization.

Racial ambiguity impairs holistic face processing: Evidence from racially distinctive and racially ambiguous faces

ABSTRACT Humans possess a remarkable ability to efficiently process faces, a skill largely influenced by their experiences with individual faces. However, recent research has challenged the role of experience in holistic face processing. Our study examined the role of face-race experience in holistic face processing among Asian and White adults using Asian, White, and racially ambiguous faces. The findings showed that both Asians and Whites exhibited reliable holistic processing for their own-race faces but failed to exhibit this ability with racially ambiguous faces. Importantly, the failure was not solely due to the specific morphing procedure or response bias. These findings imply that face-race experience plays a crucial role in holistic processing. Notably, Asians maintained holistic processing for both own-race and other-race faces, whereas Whites only showed this for own-race faces, indicating differential impacts of face-race experience on holistic processing and highlight the need for further research across diverse cultural contexts. Highlights Asian adults showed equivalent holistic processing with Asian and Caucasian faces Caucasian adults showed holistic processing with Caucasian faces but not with Asian faces Both Asian and Caucasian adults did not show holistic processing with racially ambiguous faces

Racialization and claiming Whiteness among Iranian Americans in Kentucky

ABSTRACT In the light of Trump-era American racial politics, Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky have adeptly rearticulated their racial positionings by navigating the intricate interplay of discourses on race. Through this process, they have challenged dominant U.S. discourses on race generated by the political dynamics since the 1970s, casting doubt upon the Whiteness of Middle Easterners. Despite their racial ambiguity between the U.S. Census and post-9/11 lived realities, Iranians in rural Kentucky not only feel that they belong in the U.S. but also lay claim to the mantle of Whiteness through context-specific strategies of deracialization crafted in the temporal and spatial milieu of rural Kentucky. This article sheds light on the contextual strategies Iranian Americans have employed to articulate, contest, and reproduce the dominant discourses to secure their racial positioning, capitalizing not only on their class privileges but also on some of their White-associated phenotypes, remnants of their perceived ‘Indo-European’ lineage.

Is Psylocke Asian? The Racial Fantasy and Ambiguity of an Uncanny Oriental

ABSTRACT: The X-Man Psylocke is often dismissed as a hopelessly problematic character: a white Englishwoman in the body of a Japanese ninja with a convoluted backstory and a sexualized costume. This essay reinterprets her as a seminal character in comics history who serves as a visual index for Asianness by revealing both America’s volatile racial politics and the enduring legacy of Orientalism in the superhero genre. Drawing on theories of racial ambiguity, Orientalist stereotyping, and interethnic transformation, I argue that Betsy Braddock’s perpetually evolving face and outfits showcase mass media’s vexed relationship with the Asian diaspora, including its obsession with Asian females, fear of miscegenation, and fascination with the martial arts. Following her original Asianification in the 1980s to her eventual return to whiteness in the 2010s, this study employs Psylocke as an illuminating figure for exploring histories of racialization, yellowface, biological essentialism, and colorblindness in mainstream comics.

Mixed-race Pushkin: racial ambiguity and “The Lady Peasant”

ABSTRACT The concept of racial ambiguity, or the quality of challenging existing racial categories, helps us understand Aleksandr Pushkin, a Russian poet of partially African descent famously known as “protean.” According to memoirs about the poet, in his own lifetime Pushkin’s African heritage did not prevent him from being categorized as Russian, but it distinguished him from his peers. Moreover, as a light-skinned mixed-race individual, Pushkin challenged reigning notions of Africanness. Pushkin did not fit perfectly into the categories of either “Russian” or “African.” This ambiguity is reflected both in memoirs about the poet and in Pushkin’s story “The Lady Peasant” (1831), whose heroine adopts different identities over the course of the text. While she crosses class rather than racial boundaries, the story’s broader, intertextual context and Pushkin’s focus on her dark skin suggest that race informs her performance. This paper thus suggests that we can better understand the writer’s treatment of shifting identities when we think of Pushkin not just as racially marked (as African or Black) but as racially ambiguous.

(Under)cover and Uncovered: Muslim Women's Resistance to Islamophobic Violence

ABSTRACT After 9/11, research highlighted how Muslim communities endured discrimination, surveillance, and violence. In recent years, few studies have critically assessed how gender-based harassment of Muslim women is simultaneously linked to hypervisibility (veiling), while “invisible” (non-veiled) Muslim women remain susceptible to verbal harassment and physical violence in the public sphere. Drawing from qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with Muslim women (n = 27) across racial/ethnic and immigrant identity, this article examines the unique vulnerability of Muslim women during the Trump presidential administration, including covert and overt forms of violence. Findings indicate myriad forms of violence as veiled women navigate harassment at the axes of racialized Muslim identity and social categorization as immigrants (twice racialized intersectionality). Yet, Black Muslim women’s experiences are further complicated by anti-Black racism. Muslim women navigate gender-based anti-Muslim bias by disrupting notions of passive victimhood by leaning into invisible or hypervisible markers, revealing or concealing their ethnoreligious identity through racial ambiguity, and engaging in advocacy.

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Anthropocene and the Gothic: An Interview with Justin Edwards


 Justin Edwards is a professor in the Division of Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling. Previously Chair of English at the University of Surrey and professor and head of English at Bangor University, he was elected by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 2005. Between 1995 and 2005, he taught at the University of Montreal and the University of Copenhagen, where he was appointed as an associate professor in 2002. He holds an Affiliate Professorship in U.S. Literature at the University of Copenhagen and in 2016-2017 he was a Fulbright scholar at Elon University, North Carolina. He is also a member of the Peer Review College for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and a Trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). Justin’s contribution to the study of Gothic literature started with Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, which examines the development of U.S. Gothic literature alongside 19th-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. In Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature, he continued in the area by examining how collective stories about national identity and belonging tend to be haunted by artifice.

Shifting legibility: racial ambiguity in the US racial hierarchy

ABSTRACT Existing frameworks of assimilation and group boundaries are limited in making sense of experiences of racial ambiguity. What happens when racial groups are mistaken for other groups, and how does this phenomenon relate to the racial hierarchy? This paper investigates the on-the-ground mechanisms of racial ambiguity that formal institutions, like the Census, do not capture, yet are the lived realities for many immigrant groups. Through analysis of 120 interviews and supplemental observations, I find that the racialization of second-generation South Asians shifts between racial ambiguity and racial legibility in daily life. I present a theoretical concept – localized racialization – to reveal the transient, yet defining, racial experiences of groups residing in the racial middle. Localized racialization centres multiple factors of skin colour, intersectional status markers, and situational contexts that tether racial experiences to the local. This study’s South Asian participants reveal persistent racial dynamism at the micro-interactional level.

Performing Representational Labor: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Legibility in Global Latinx Media Cultures

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the representational work and institutional reception of two contemporary transnational icons, singer/actress Amara La Negra and actress Yalitza Aparicio. The author argues that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio disrupt the dominant trope of racial ambiguity circulating in transnational media representations of Latina womanhood. In doing so, these two public figures rupture hegemonic racial ideologies embedded in colonial regimes via their self-fashioning in media. This essay also documents how Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio are received by various media outlets in both English-and Spanish language markets in order to understand how their representations register within current racial formations in the Americas. The analysis reveals that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio perform both legible and illegible representational labor because while their presence and activism broadens the contours of how Latinidad is depicted globally, their messages are deemed illegible or threatening depending on the media context. In particular, within English-language media they are deemed as the exotic, foreign Other while in Spanish-language media their claims to Blackness and Indigeneity are either outright refused or ridiculed.

‘More of the diversity aspect and less of the desegregation aspect’: Asian Americans and desegregation in metropolitan Hartford

ABSTRACT Little research examines the experiences and perspectives of Asian American parents who participate in K–12 desegregation efforts, such as magnet schools. Conceptually framed by research on Asian American racialization, this qualitative case study investigates 10 Asian American parents in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut; and the motivations underpinning their decisions to choose magnet schools for their children. I find that most parents emphasized ‘diversity’ over ‘desegregation’ when explaining their decision to choose magnet schools. This pattern demonstrates parents’ limited engagement with racialized power structures and with how Asian Americans are situated within the American racial order. Findings reflect research on the invisibility and racial ambiguity of Asian Americans in policy and political discourses. Thus, findings point to the need for desegregation and other educational policies to center Asian American’ nuanced backgrounds and experiences.

“Fly on the wall” moments reveal whiteness-at-work for contested white graduate students

Contested white students often feel caught between two worlds, liminally situated, betwixt and between monoracial constructions of race. They are a subset of undergraduate and graduate students who are differentially located along the borders of whiteness, but who share common experiences of racial ambiguity, insecurity, and contestation. Contested whites report being under constant pressure to explain and justify their racial location along the borders of whiteness. Their narratives of racialization powerfully reveal the operations of whiteness-at-work in fleeting, everyday moments in U.S. universities and colleges. This manuscript tells the stories of Fly on the Wall moments for three contested white graduate students. I use critical discourse analysis and critical narrative analysis to explore how Fly on the Wall moments reveal iterative, paradoxical constructions of whiteness-at-work. Implications for postsecondary education are explored.

Memory for diverse faces in a racially attentive context

Two experiments assessed how racial ambiguity and racial salience moderates the cross-race effect (CRE). In experiment 1, White and Black participants studied and identified the race of Asian, Black, Latino, and White faces that varied in ethnic typicality (high or low ET). For White participants, the CRE was larger when comparing high-ET White faces to high-ET other-race faces than low-ET other-race faces. Black participants showed a similar CRE reduction by ethnic typicality, but also showed a less prevalent CRE than White participants. Experiment 2 replicated experiment 1 procedures, but without the race identification task and only with White participants. Experiment 2 findings were comparable to experiment 1. Furthermore, experiment 2 showed a noticeably smaller CRE on Black faces than experiment 1, eliciting questions about increased racial salience amplifying the CRE. Results’ general implications and the conceptual roots that indirectly link the CRE and racism will be discussed.

Perceived monoracism and psychological adjustment of multiracial adults: The roles of racially diverse contexts and creating third space.

Across two studies, we examined whether racially diverse contexts in combination with creating a third (multiracial) space played a protective role in the association between perceived monoracism and psychological adjustment for multiracial adults. Study 1 participants (N = 263; 77.8% female, Mage = 32.16 years) were recruited from national multiracial organizations and completed an online cross-sectional survey in 2009. Study 2 participants (N = 1478; 56.2% female, Mage = 48.89 years) were recruited by the Pew Research Center and completed a nationally representative survey in 2015. Results indicated significant three-way interaction effects on psychological adjustment, with differential effects depending on the types of perceived monoracism. Specifically, when subjective racial diversity was high, creating a third space buffered against the deleterious effects of multiracial discrimination on distress, negative affect, and life satisfaction; while it exacerbated the link between perceived racial ambiguity and negative affect. This study provides empirical evidence for the importance of using an ecological framework when examining multiracial identity and experiences. Results also highlight the need to move beyond conceptualizing and measuring multiracial experiences as dichotomous risks or resiliencies. Rather, we should aim to understand multiracial experiences as either promoting or inhibiting across contexts, time, and individual characteristics.

In/Visible POC: Narratives of a Brown Professor in Teacher Education

In this article, I reflect on experiences of Brown (or South Asian) in/visibility in teacher education. Using an autoethnographic approach, I share reflexive personal and professional counternarratives of my experiences as a Brown person and Brown teacher-educator committed to issues of justice in the diverse context of Toronto, Canada. I explore how Brown invisibility operates in desiring recognition, insider knowings, investments in ambiguity, and relational harm and liberation. I trouble the ways in which theoretical frames open and limit experiences and expressions of Brownness, locating myself in between postcolonial and anti-colonial theorizing and notions of racial ambiguity in DesiCrit. I conclude with the importance of making visible the experiences and constructions of Brownness in faculties of education and education more broadly, as a form of solidarity that both resists Brown invisibility and exposes Brown complicity in an aspirational whiteness that maintains racial hierarchies through its invisibility.

Gaining currency: confession, comedy, and the economics of racial ambiguity in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, and the narrator’s movement between racialized spaces, times, and identities in postapartheid South Africa. In spite of Noah’s self-identification as Black, social interactions interpellate him as white or Coloured, which frequently leads to conflict. As a means of survival, he mobilizes cultural knowledge – particularly language – to diffuse tension, influence interpretations of his body, and access socioeconomic advantages or escape disadvantages that accumulate in racialized spaces. I argue that the confessional form is an ideal genre to represent racial ambiguity because the genre itself, like the ambiguous narrator, operates upon a complex economy of revelation and concealment. The essay concludes by analyzing Noah’s comedy career and movement to the United States in order to explore transnational movements of the racially ambiguous body and the potential and pitfalls of representing racial ambiguity in twenty-first-century cultural production.

Crazy Rich Eurasians: white enough to be acceptable, Asian enough to be an asset

ABSTRACT This article explores Henry Golding’s transnational stardom as a site of racial ambiguity, with Golding and producers strategically utilising different aspects of his mixed-race identity in his filmography. I distinguish between two stages of Golding’s transnational stardom: the first in his early career as a regional television host, predicated on his ‘Eurasianness’ for a Southeast Asian audience, and the second in his Hollywood stardom, which emphasises his ‘Asianness’ for a global audience. I argue that mixed-race individuals in Southeast Asian media industries represent an ‘Asian Dream’ that Golding embodies. Golding is an asset precisely because he fulfils Western conventions of beauty in his British heritage and supplies an Asian heritage that is simultaneously authentic and exotic, made more valuable by the fact that he is indigenous. This article examines how producers from different regions use Golding’s Eurasian identity to market their films, and how Golding navigates his Eurasian identity in his different projects. Golding’s racial ambiguity allows him to be a uniquely versatile star, relying on his identity alternately as a British, Eurasian, Southeast Asian, Malaysian or Iban man. Golding thus simultaneously belongs to both, and neither, the Western and Eastern worlds, shifting between roles as required.

The Poetry of Suheir Hammad: Transnational Interventions in the Age of Islamophobia and Digital Media

Given the negative and limited representations of Muslims and Palestinians, and the central role that women play in this spectrum of dominant representations, this article takes interest in the possibilities of circulating dissent and alternative portrayals through digital media. Taking interest in the poetry of Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad, which vibrantly emerged in the digital public sphere in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, this analysis focuses on Hammad's digital interventions to challenge Islamophobia and other forms of discursive and material domination. Based on a textual analysis of Hammad's poetry, this article is also informed by a semi-structured interview conducted with the artist, as well as other information available in the public domain. This analysis reveals that digital media play an important role in increasing Hammad's ability to circulate her art to a wider audience. Building bridges across multiple communities and positions of marginality transnationally, Hammad's work attempts to challenge dominant Islamophobic and gendered discourses about identity. However, similarly to other “minority” artists, “talking back” (hooks 1989) to dominant discourses requires a performativity of identity, and is at the same time anchored to the motivation to unsettle essentialist understandings of identity. Through her writings and poetry performances archived online, Hammad highlights the complexity of identity and reveals both how racialization is socially constructed and the racial ambiguity of Islamophobia. While acknowledging the discursive formation of identity, Hammad's work also underscores the real, material consequences of discourses of fear and hate in order to regain some agency and symbolic power.