Racially Ambiguous Research Articles

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

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.

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#1plus1plus1is3

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.

The Cost of Racial Salience on Face Memory: How the Cross-Race Effect is Moderated by Racial Ambiguity and the Race of the Perceiver and the Perceived

This study tested how the cross-race effect (CRE) varies across Asian, Latino, and White participants within a racially diverse context. Furthermore, it assessed how disrupting the racial categorization process of the CRE externally (racial ambiguity) and internally (cultural priming) moderates the CRE. Participants studied racially unambiguous and ambiguous Asian, Black, Latino and White faces. After studying half of the faces, participants were primed for their racial/ethnic identity or American identity. Before the prime, in racially unambiguous faces, only White participants exhibited the CRE for all other-race faces. Latino participants exhibited a limited CRE, and Asian participants did not show the CRE at all. For racially ambiguous faces, while Latino and White participants showed no CRE, Asian participants did for Latino and White faces. In addition, cultural priming moderated the CRE variously for the participant groups, suggesting that directing attention to different cultural identities may have ramifications for face processing.

The neural basis of ideological differences in race categorization

Multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their 'socially subordinate' racial group-a form of social discrimination termed hypodescent-with political conservatives more likely than liberals to show this bias. Although hypodescent has been linked to racial hierarchy preservation motives, it remains unclear how political ideology influences categorization: Do conservatives and liberals see, feel or think about mixed-race faces differently? Do they differ in sensitivity to Black prototypicality (i.e. skin tone darkness and Afrocentric features) or racial ambiguity (i.e. categorization difficulty) of Black/White mixed-race faces? To help answer these questions, we collected a politically diverse sample of White participants and had them categorize mixed-race faces as Black or White during functional neuroimaging. We found that conservatism was related to greater anterior insula activity to racially ambiguous faces, and this pattern of brain activation mediated conservatives' use of hypodescent. This demonstrates that conservatives' greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity (rather than Black prototypicality) gives rise to greater categorization of mixed-race individuals into the socially subordinate group and tentatively suggests that conservatives may differ from liberals in their affective reactions to mixed-race faces. Implications for the study of race categorization and political psychology are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Broadening the stimulus set: Introducing the American Multiracial Faces Database.

Face-based perceptions form the basis for how people behave towards each other and, hence, are central to understanding human interaction. Studying face perception requires a large and diverse set of stimuli in order to make ecologically valid, generalizable conclusions. To date, there are no publicly available databases with a substantial number of Multiracial or racially ambiguous faces. Our systematic review of the literature on Multiracial person perception documented that published studies have relied on computer-generated faces (84% of stimuli), Black-White faces (74%), and male faces (63%). We sought to address these issues, and to broaden the diversity of available face stimuli, by creating the American Multiracial Faces Database (AMFD). The AMFD is a novel collection of 110 faces with mixed-race heritage and accompanying ratings of those faces by naive observers that are freely available to academic researchers. The faces (smiling and neutral expression poses) were rated on attractiveness, emotional expression, racial ambiguity, masculinity, racial group membership(s), gender group membership(s), warmth, competence, dominance, and trustworthiness. The large majority of the AMFD faces are racially ambiguous and can pass into at least two different racial categories. These faces will be useful to researchers seeking to study Multiracial person perception as well as those looking for racially ambiguous faces in order to study categorization processes in general. Consequently, the AMFD will be useful to a broad group of researchers who are studying face perception.

The Unambiguous Bias in Saying "Racially Ambiguous Babies".

The Unambiguous Bias in Saying "Racially Ambiguous Babies".

“What Are You?”: Addressing Racial Ambiguity

Abstract “What are you?” This question, whether explicitly raised by another or implied in his gaze, is one with which many persons perceived to be racially ambiguous struggle. This article centers on encounters with this question. Its aim is twofold: first, to describe the phenomenology of a particular type of racializing encounter, one in which one of the parties is perceived to be racially ambiguous; second, to investigate how these often alienating encounters can be better negotiated. In the course of this investigation, this article examines the addressee's point of view and consider possible responses to the other's question. In addition, it discusses the addresser's perspective, both to probe the curiosity underlying the “What are you?” question and to explore alternatives to it. By describing the phenomenology of these encounters, this article hopes to show that racial ambiguity, as distinct from mixed-race, is a category of lived experience that calls for deeper philosophical scrutiny.

Racially Ambiguous Babies and Racial Narratives in the United States: A Growing Contradiction for Health Disparities Research.

Researchers attempting to identify and track health disparities and inequities generally use five racial or ethnic (R/E) categories-four racial groups (white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian) and one ethnic group (Hispanic)-to analyze and predict variations in health outcomes in the overall U.S. population. These categories are used as if they were permanent, naturally occurring, internally homogeneous, and discrete. However, the United States is becoming increasingly racially ambiguous because of (1) the growth of the Latino population, nearly half of whom do not identify with one of the four racial groups; and (2) the growing population of racially ambiguous babies, whose mothers and fathers are of different R/E groups. In California, an average annual 52.6% of the babies born between 2011 and 2015 were racially ambiguous (i.e., their parents were from different R/E groups or at least one parent was something other than a single race).We describe the social-legal construction of hard-edged, binary racial categories in the United States from 1790 to the present (and the subsequent racial structuring of U.S. society along those categories). Researchers should shift the conceptualization of race from that of an innate, individual trait to that of a narrative, and should consider the impact that racial narratives can have on the life courses of individuals categorized as nonwhite. In light of the increasing racial ambiguity in the United States, the Latino fuzzy-edged, multivalent racial narrative that embraces racial mixing may be one alternative to the United States' hard-edged, binary one.

Resolving racial ambiguity in social interactions

People take longer to categorize racially ambiguous individuals, but does this perceptual complexity also affect social interactions? In Study 1, White participants interacted with a racially ambiguous confederate who was either labeled as biracial Black/White, monoracial Black, or given no racial label. White participants in the biracial condition were significantly less cognitively depleted, less essentialist in their thoughts about race, and exhibited more accurate face memory for their partners than when partner race remained unspecified or was labeled as monoracial Black. Confederate reports and nonverbal behavior in the biracial condition were also more positive. In Study 2, White participants perceived more similarity with a biracial Black/White labeled interaction partner compared to a Black-specified or race-unspecified partner, highlighting for the first time how racial ambiguity and racial labeling affect behavioral outcomes in social interactions.

STILL SEARCHING FOR A TRUE RACE? REPLY TO KRAMER ET AL. AND ALBA ET AL.

STILL SEARCHING FOR A TRUE RACE? REPLY TO KRAMER ET AL. AND ALBA ET AL.

Social Belonging Motivates Categorization of Racially Ambiguous Faces

Categorizing racially ambiguous individuals is multifaceted, and the current work proposes social-motivational factors also exert considerable influence on how racial ambiguity is perceived, directing the resolution of ambiguity in a manner that is functionally beneficial to the perceiver. Four studies tested two motivations related to social belonging: belonging needs and racial identification. Greater need to belong and racial identification (Study 1), and two types of social belonging threats—social exclusion (Studies 2a and 2b) and racial identity threat (Study 3)—predicted more categorizations of racially ambiguous Black/White faces as Black, with White participants more likely to categorize ambiguous faces as outgroup members (i.e., Black; Studies 1, 2a, 2b, and 3) and Black participants more likely to categorize ambiguous faces as ingroup members (Study 2b). Results also demonstrated that self-affirmation mitigated this motivated categorization for Whites (Study 3), illustrating the malleability of...

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture by Jennifer Ann Ho

Reviewed by: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture by Jennifer Ann Ho Elizabeth Fei (bio) Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, by Jennifer Ann Ho. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Xi + 215 pp. $31.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8135-7069-3. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Ho aims to explore the different modes of racial ambiguity embodied, encountered, and undertaken by Asian Americans. In doing so, Ho contributes to a body of work that attempts to de-essentialize the Asian American subject and to destabilize notions of race as a whole. By presenting five separate cases that oscillate between historical, cultural, and literary analysis, Ho’s work both articulates and embodies different manifestations of this ambiguity that marks (though, as she mentions, is not unique to) Asian American experiences (14). In doing so, Ho foregrounds the need for a nuanced understanding of race as we embark on actively antiracist work. Ho’s work is divided into five separate sections, each of which centers on a different subject and illuminates a different aspect of racial ambiguity. While each chapter might be read as its own separate essay, collectively the chapters provide a rounded perspective of Asian American identity. Chapter 1 discusses the unique case of Yoshiko deLeon, a Japanese woman who was able to resist internment during World War II through the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. Drawing on family interviews and military correspondence around the Mixed Marriage Policy, Ho simultaneously chronicles deLeon’s life as well as the historical events that surrounded her and illustrates the mutability of race and its implications on her life and on policy. Chapter 2 discusses how Asian adoptees have begun to utilize blogging communities in order to both explore and create their identities. By citing the blogs of a handful of adoptees, Ho characterizes their racial ambiguity both within their ability to navigate their ambiguous positions and within their ability to craft these identities in an ongoing fashion. Chapter 3 looks at Tiger Woods as a racially ambiguous subject. It construes him as the sum of a multitude of narratives that have fed his [End Page 263] identity. In particular, the chapter aims to recenter his multiraciality in relation to his Asian American mother Tida Woods and contrast this against his often more visible blackness. In doing so, Ho presents Tiger’s Asian American racial ambiguity as an attempt to resist monolithic racial definitions. Chapter 4 most clearly falls into Ho’s stated wheelhouse of literary analysis. In this chapter, Ho expands on notions of “passing” by detailing the ways that authors Paisley Redkal and Ruth Ozeki blur the lines between autobiography and fiction in their respective works. In addition to exploring each author’s literary technique of “passing” between genres, Ho discusses how the characters work and reclaim their racial ambiguity as a form of passing for an identity that they actually have. Ho construes this action, like Tiger Woods claiming his multiraciality, as a form of Asian American ambiguity as well as resistance against essentialized racial categories as a whole. Finally, chapter 5 continues the idea of overturning traditional racial ideas by asking the reader to consider what the canon of Asian American literature might look like if not tethered exclusively to the bodies of Asian Americans. Ho asserts that transgressive texts written by authors who are not Asian American may appropriately be added to the canon of Asian American literature. In doing so, Ho claims we may arrive at a deeper and more understanding of the racial ambiguity of Asian Americans. In addition to thematically visiting themes of racial ambiguity among different Asian American subjects, Ho seamlessly modulates between different analytical methods and different theories in order to craft her analysis. Ho weaves between historical recollection, literary analysis, current events, critical race theory, cultural studies, as well as her own personal experience in a way that mirrors the ambiguity of the subjects she discusses. Ho’s work is adept at exploring the various facets of racial ambiguity within Asian American culture. Her work inspires a several opportunities for continued analysis. Her chapter that discusses Tiger Woods, for example, touches upon the counterpoint of antiblackness as...

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs

Reviewed by: A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs Wilma King A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. By Allyson Hobbs. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. [xii], 382. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-36810-1.) An insightful introduction prepares readers for five deeply researched chapters and an epilogue constituting what Allyson Hobbs describes as a history of racial passing in American life. Two well-developed themes in the text add to its significance. First, Hobbs argues that the perceived need for racial passing changed over time. Before the Civil War, slaves passed to escape bondage, not blackness. Later, the promises of Reconstruction encouraged blacks to believe treatment equal to that enjoyed by whites was imminent. Instead, political disenfranchisement, social intimidation, and economic deprivation followed. Racial passing was a viable option to escape those circumstances. However, during the 1920s the Harlem Renaissance expanded conceptions of racial identity and offered alternatives to passing. The elimination of some racial barriers after World War II rendered racial passing passé. Second, the author calls attention to both the intended and unintended consequences of blacks passing as whites. On one hand, passing offered opportunities for economic gains, but on the other hand, there were social losses associated with leaving families and friends behind. “Once one circumvented the law, fooled coworkers, deceived neighbors, tricked friends, and sometimes even duped children and spouses,” writes Hobbs, “there were enormous costs to pay” (p. 5). The author contends “the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from” (p. 18). Passing, a performative, subversive, and tactical exercise, required constant vigilance to protect a newly crafted identity from exposure. Eventually, those who passed, temporarily or permanently, faced questions about gains and losses. A variety of historical and literary sources, supplemented by materials from popular and mixed media, make A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life come to life as readers are introduced to racially ambiguous women and men, including Ellen Craft, Henry Bibb, John H. Rapier, and descendants of Sally Hemings and Sarah Martha Sanders, all of whom were interested in acquiring equal opportunities, suffrage, and citizenship, more so than in actually becoming white. Hobbs is at her best when melding discussions about historical narratives, autobiographies, and biographies with popular literary productions. The deft treatment of works like Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930) and The Big Sea (1940) underscores the absence of a homogeneous identity among blacks. Toomer, described by others as a “Negro” writer, insisted that he was an American writer. Larsen appeared conflicted racially, while Hughes embraced blackness without equivocation. [End Page 465] A Chosen Exile, a highly recommended read, concludes with a discussion about the Albert Johnston family of Keene, New Hampshire, who lived as whites and enjoyed special privileges until their son, who was unaware of his racial identity, made disparaging remarks about a black friend. Those comments prompted the family to examine its rationale for passing, ultimately choosing to tell their children and the world the truth about their racial identity. Popular magazines highlighted their life experiences, which served as the basis for the film Lost Boundaries (1949). Finally, the epilogue reminds readers of the complexities involved in passing and highlights the fluidity of race making. Regardless of the era, old racial ideologies seem to reproduce themselves anew. Such an environment makes it possible for the agile to simultaneously embrace and transcend their race as needed. Demographic shifts result in more racial ambiguity and traction for “hybridity” (p. 274). Citizens may now mark more than one U.S. census identity category. Ultimately, the imagined color-blind and postracial society does not exist. Race continues to matter. Wilma King University of Missouri Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Exposure to Racial Ambiguity Influences Lay Theories of Race

Biological lay theories of race have proven to have pernicious consequences for interracial relations, yet few studies have examined how intergroup contact itself (particularly with those who naturalistically challenge these conceptions) affects beliefs about race. Three studies (a correlational study, an interaction study, and an experimental study) examine whether exposure to racially ambiguous individuals reduces Whites’ biological lay theories of race across time. Study 1 demonstrates that increased exposure to racial ambiguity across 2 weeks reduced White individuals’ biological lay theories. Study 2 shows that Whites who interacted in a laboratory setting with a racially ambiguous individual were less likely to endorse biological lay theories, an effect that sustained for 2 weeks. Study 3 finds that the reduction in biological lay theories after exposure to racial ambiguity is mediated by the tendency for Whites’ lay theories of race to conform to beliefs they presume racially ambiguous individuals hold.

“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity, Stigma, and the Racial Formation Project

Using interview data from individuals who were frequently asked some version of the question “What are you?” in regards to their race, we apply a deviance perspective to frame these encounters as micro level racial formation projects. Racial formation projects are problematized when one’s race is not readily classifiable. These data suggest that when race is perceptibly ambiguous, stigma is assigned and normativity is enforced through discursive constraint and other means. Racially ambiguous individuals use many forms of resistance to navigate these encounters and make identity claims that either affirm or endanger the normative racial formation order.

Multiraciality, Haunting, and “People Like Us”

Multiraciality, Haunting, and “People Like Us”

At the crossroads of race: Racial ambiguity and biracial identification influence psychological essentialist thinking.

Racial essentialism refers to the widely held belief that race is a biological, stable, and natural category. Although research finds very little evidence that race has biological underpinnings, racial essentialist beliefs persist and are linked to negative outgroup consequences. This study initially demonstrates that label and visual ambiguity concurrently inform racial categorization. It then tests whether exposure to racially ambiguous targets (a) challenges essentialism when ambiguous targets are labeled with biracial categories and (b) reinforces essentialism when ambiguous targets identify with monoracial categories. The results showed that White perceivers (N = 84) who were exposed to racially ambiguous, biracially labeled targets showed reductions in their essentialist thinking about race, whereas perceivers who were exposed to racially ambiguous, monoracially labeled targets showed increases in their essentialist beliefs.

On the ideology of hypodescent: Political conservatism predicts categorization of racially ambiguous faces as Black

According to the principle of hypodescent, multiracial individuals are categorized according to their most socially subordinate group membership. We investigated whether the tendency to apply this principle is related to political ideology. In three studies, participants categorized a series of morphed faces that varied in terms of racial ambiguity. In each study, self-reported conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize ambiguous faces as Black. Consistent with the notion that system justification motivation helps to explain ideological differences in racial categorization, the association between conservatism and hypodescent was mediated by individual differences in opposition to equality (Study 2) and was stronger when U.S. participants categorized American than Canadian faces (Study 3). We discuss ways in which the categorization of racially ambiguous individuals in terms of their most subordinate racial group may exacerbate inequality and vulnerability to discrimination.