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5 Internalizing Racial Identities

Some people with racially mixed parentage or heritage experience great difficulty asserting their preferred racial identities, especially when others continue to police these preferences and choices. How is it that, at a time of increased freedom of choice, individuals with mixed race parentage and heritage sometimes reject this opportunity to choose all races that apply? Why do some invest in the racial hierarchy that divides yet feel forced to choose “one and only one” race rather than claim the sum of their parts? Why do some multiracial people buy into the false notions of racial realness, thereby effectively disqualifying themselves or believing that they are not “really” the races that they claim? Why do some multiracial people internalize the racial identities affirmed by others rather than the ones that they themselves prefer (if and when differences exist between the two)? When will be the time for multiracial people to freely choose their preferred racial identities without contestation? Why do multiracial people border patrol themselves?

That multiracial individuals support and uphold racial hierarchies and categories based in part on their own racial ideologies and actions means they are not immune from developing problematic, prejudicial ways of thinking and participating in discriminatory action. It may seem counterintuitive that many multiracial people police racial borders, including their own. Their borders stand in contrast to the border blending suggested by statements about multiracial people having “the best of both worlds.”

One need only look at the ways that multiracial people encounter borderism from strangers, family members, and/or friends to understand auto-borderism, or a self-policing, border patrolling. Direct and indirect lines can be drawn socially between the border patrolling people encounter in society and their own perpetuation of that practice as directed toward themselves and others.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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162 The Borders of Race

An observable pattern begins to emerge in which multiracial people experience resistance or opposition to claiming their preferred identities, thereby limiting their own choices (and those of others). In this chapter, I discuss the process expressed by some of my respondents who policed their own racial identities. I provide some explanations for multiracial people choosing to patrol, rather than blend, racial borders.

When Multiracial People Border Patrol Their Own Identities

In 1967, the Loving v. Virginia decision removed the ban on interracial marriages in the U.S. (see Alonso 2000; Noble Maillard and Cuison Villazor 2012). Ostensibly, the increase in interracial marriages and in the multiracial population can be attributed directly to this decision, as well as shifting social norms that accommodates interracial intimacy and families. What these effects of the Loving decision have revealed, and concealed at the same time, are the complexity and varied levels of mixture in interracial marriages and in individuals. That is, that historic moment, coupled with another (the Multiracial Movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s), amplified attention to the existence of racial mixture at individual and familial levels (see Dalmage 2004a). This legislation and the subsequent collective social action of the 90s made much of the previously “hidden” racial mixtures appear. This appearance seemed sudden, rather than a historical residue or a pattern that had been centuries in the making.

While multiracial identities are more easily accommodated in general, some of the research respondents noted the difficulty in expressing and having their preferred identities validated. Instead of being “racial border blenders,” many respondents primarily opted for the ostensibly easier option: singular racial identities. Based on their accounts of borders, they felt unable to assert their preferred racial identities. Instead, they often chose to dissolve their complex, racial realities into tidy, racial categories. As the earlier chapters (3 and 4) reveal, asserting a singular racial identity publicly did not always prove a simple matter. Sometimes, it actually intensified the border patrolling these multiracial individuals faced.

Due to a lack of information about familial histories and racial genealogies; encountering invalidation or opposition from others; or, wanting to evade racial surveillance from others, respondents who border patrolled themselves seemed to internalize and perpetuate the policing of strangers and significant others. I acknowledge these connections between border patrolling from the outside-in, outsiders-

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 163

within, and inside-out, focusing here on the last method of border patrolling—inside-out.

As discussed in previous chapters, I found that individuals managed their multiracial identities in many ways. Sometimes they internalized racial borders, imposing the rules of race and racial identity options on themselves. The ongoing process of racial socialization and the persistence of structural racism combined to inform multiracial identity choices and constraints; many multiracial people described how they policed their own racial identities. Rather than resist these racial rules and the racial hierarchy, they sorted themselves into socially appropriate and positively sanctioned categories. Many chose singular racial identities in response to these social pressures instead of enjoying “the best of both worlds.” That is, many multiracial people managed social pressures surrounding their racial multiplicity by choosing singular racial identities. In this chapter, I discuss the way that multiracial people engage in benevolent, beneficiary, and malevolent border patrolling of their own. I begin with benevolent border patrolling.

Benevolent Border Patrolling: “All of My Life, I Was Socialized as an African American”

“Black” is the umbrella term for minorities to kind of come together under because “black,” as it has evolved, does not necessarily just refer to African Americans. On the other side, when you’re saying that you’re black, you’re still keeping the dichotomy of black and white, which aside from not being fair to other groups, I think it’s just not realistic as well. And it also causes some limiting there as well, because even though black is an umbrella term for minorities, it’s still kind of rooted in some notion of an African American identity as well. (James, a black-identified Black and Native American man)

Throughout the interview, James complicated the concept and question of “blackness,” interrogating the term, exploring its many meanings, and noting its expansive reach and inclusive quality. He also shared how specifically it applied to particular people, both including and excluding him at once.

I begin with the above quote from James because he grapples with the multiple meanings of blackness; his narrative attempts to answer the question posed in Brunsma and Rockquemore’s (2002) article, “What Does ‘Black’ Mean?” In offering up his experiential knowledge of blackness, James shared ideas that echo the authors’ discussion of what they call the “epistemological stranglehold of racial categorization.”

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164 The Borders of Race

These authors explore in their investigation of the meanings of blackness. Interestingly, as the category “black” continues to expand today to un/easily accommodate mixture, the category (to James’s point) may reinforce a white/black binary. However, in ways that parallel the “expanding boundaries of whiteness” (see Gallagher 2004), a similar expansion of blackness continues. This draws attention to the mixture embedded in both whiteness and blackness. While this seemingly upholds these two racial categories as two-and-only-two singular and cohesive racial groups, I refer to them to simultaneously undermine the implicit and taken-for-granted singularity and cohesion within their categorical connotations. That is, this multiplicity and variability exists across all racial categories.

Racial multiplicity exists, and hides in plain sight, as “invisible mixture.” Linguistically and socially, the terms “white” and “black” reinforce singularity, not mixture. The terms then make mixture situationally il/legible. Mixture largely becomes legible or visible through usage of the very term, “mixture,” even as it exists in “single” race categories, such as “white” and “black.” While these singular race terms suggest specificity, they also implicitly capture a multiplicity. That is, single race categories suggest just that, singularity, which reinforces the idea of “one-and-only-one” race. The myth of such a racially pure, cohesive, and coherent racial category convinces people that racial multiplicity only exists in people who claim more than one race. Thus, for most of the national population, this multiplicity often remains unnamed and resides under the veil of singularity. Mixture also disappears through the stories that families tell about themselves and their heritage. I discuss these “sins of omission” in the socialization that family storytelling makes possible in racially mixed families.

Mysteries of Histories

In attempting to sort out what I call the “mysteries of histories” in families, James asks “a lot of questions” to disentangle his heritage. He explores his family biography in an attempt to answer his many questions; to curb the curiosities about his identity and to solve some of those “mysteries of histories.” He wants to more fully understand his Nigerian and Native American ancestry, especially in relation to his blackness. Recognizing both his African American and Native American ancestry is a practice that allows him (and other black and Native American respondents) to acknowledge “intermarriage further back in their family history” (Campbell 2007:926). This point follows Jessie Turner’s (2013) work on historical and contemporary mixture and

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Internalizing Racial Identities 165

invites us to consider what constitutes the old and the new, with respect to racial mixture. To Jenifer Bratter’s (2007) point, “multiracial” identity does not always survive the next generation. But when it does, it may take on new names with old faces, or maintain old names among new faces (see Dawkins 2012; Winters and DeBose 2003).

Despite considering the complexity of his rich heritage, James asserted what I understood as a singular black identity. However, he engaged in “problematizing blackness” by assigning expansive and inclusive meanings to the term, in its chosen (not forced) form (see Hintzen and Rahier 2003). Chosen blackness departs from the forced blackness historically mandated through the “one drop” rule of hypodescent; chosen blackness enriches and expands the meaning of blackness and recognizes more of its liberatory potential, a freedom to choose not fully afforded people with any known black African ancestry.

Other black multiracial respondents who identify as black engaged in this practice. That is, the term, “black,” weaved together a multiplicity of races and ethnicities, as evidenced in other respondents like Jessica, a black and Asian Indian woman, opting for black as James did. In doing so, people can acknowledge historical and contemporary mixtures of blackness (see Khanna 2010; Turner 2013). In thinking about these complexities and contradictions of racial singularity and multiplicity, I draw from the experiences shared by another respondent. Abigail, an African American-identified woman (also of Native American [Cherokee] heritage), shared that she asserts a singular black identity in part because of her illegible identities or racially mixed heritage.

As one of the older respondents in my research sample, Abigail grew up in a time and place that more closely abided by the rule of hypodescent and, therefore, endorsed this “one drop” rule of blackness. That rule canceled out, or denied, her racial mixture, and informed her way of thinking about racial categories. Growing up in a white/black binary supported by society meant that her mixture remained relatively out of reach to her. She explained, “I’m not mixed race. I appear to be more African American than anything else, you know?” Because she believes others see her as black, or that others do not see or acknowledge her mixed race heritage, she claims a black identity. She minimized this mixture to adopt a black identity because she believes that it is her blackness that is legible to others. Abigail “thinks mixture” in traditional ways with history and family shaping her perspective; indeed, she has internalized the “one drop” rule. Abigail’s narrative supports a “seeing is believing,” or “believing is seeing” (Lorber 1993) approach to racial classification in the sense that she relied heavily on

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166 The Borders of Race

the visibility or legibility of race. Doing so invalidates her illegible identities, instead of challenging our collective reliance on (racialized) appearances to categorize ourselves and others by race.

Much like other respondents, Abigail offered contradictions on her own racial location, illustrating how she benevolently border patrols herself:

I racially identify as African American basically but I remember that my mother told me when I was very young, she said, “Don’t ever forget that you are part Cherokee, part Cherokee Indian, Native American.” But all of my life, I socialized, was socialized as an African American or black child, you know, listening to R and B, and you know, dancing and everything was geared towards African American culture…. At the time, I didn’t question it. It meant, as I got older, that there’s something other than African American about me, something different about me…. That I just wasn’t all African. That, you know, there’s a part of me that was the “Other” if you wanna call it that. That wasn’t defined. It made me intercept my thinking I was all black. Well, not all black, your DNA might come back saying you’re all black. My appearance is black. Her words made me question that.

Despite questioning those “mysteries of histories” and her partial knowledge of racial mixture in her own family, Abigail continues to assert a black identity.

Similar to other black multiracial respondents, Abigail learned racial lessons, including that she should default to a black identity despite any “body as evidence” to the contrary (see Hobson 2012). Her story reveals what so many families work to conceal: racial mixture, then and now, and the stories that people speak or silence (see Nash and Viray 2014, 2013; Walters et al. 2011). These stories, and the silences that sometimes surround them, become part of the racial inheritance within all families, not exclusively racially mixed ones.

As Abigail illustrated, and in contrast to people with known Asian, Latino, and Native American ancestry who claim a white identity, people with known African ancestry may feel like they cannot claim a nonblack identity (Bratter 2007; Khanna 2010); otherwise, they opt for blackness as an assertion of their right to choose. In the latter case, the act of choosing is an expression of self-definition or an act of resistance to borderism. In the former case, multiracial people may sense some social constraints to available choices, such that the particularities of the geographies of race expand or limit their options; they may feel like they are “forced to choose” or effectively “passing as black” (see Khanna

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Internalizing Racial Identities 167

2010), or they may actively choose a preferred black identity, experienced not as limitation but in terms of liberation.

The challenge in this choosing involves consideration of the history of individual and collective mixture; current and historical mixture; and, consensual and forced mixture. These considerations thus include acknowledgment of the variations of racial identity and claims to mixture made increasingly broader during the Multiracial Movement of the late 20th Century; they invite people to “think mixture” and reflect on how the concept of racial mixture and who is mixed changes across time and space.

In Abigail’s example above, she thinks mixture through the lens of the one-drop rule. Although she acknowledges the familial mixture of black and Native American ancestry, she does not claim a black and Native American multiracial identity; her “opting for black” typifies the tensions between agency and the legacy of racial rules and paradigms that foreclose choice for people with certain racial combinations (see Campbell 2007). As Campbell notes, many African Americans in contemporary society remain reluctant to publicly make claims to their Native American ancestry, fearing racial invalidations and accusations similar to the ones described by respondents like Abigail. They worked to avoid the charge that they were falsely attempting to diversify or dilute their blackness with indigeneity. Respondents like Abigail opted for blackness but the kind of blackness that incorporates these charges with a positive spin. That is, if the common charge was that African Americans always try to claim Native American ancestry, then “blackness” in this context is always already mixed with Native American ancestry. Rather than risk naming both her African American and Native American ancestry, Abigail effectively wove those ancestries into blackness. This exemplifies my earlier point about the illusion of singular racial categories being cohesive. The narrative of Abigail and others provides evidence of racial multiplicity taking up residence in single race categories.

Another respondent shared the process of her racial identity formation and her experiences with benevolent border patrolling. Wendy, a light-skinned, black Hispanic, described moving from a northern city to a southern one, and navigating impediments to connecting with other Latinos. In that northern city, she felt her skin color and lack of fluency in Spanish disconnected her from other Latinas. During our interview, Wendy further suggested that her limited Spanish-speaking ability prohibited her from getting “that deep” with “the Spanish group” in high school because “every now and then, I wouldn’t know what they were talking about” (when they spoke in

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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168 The Borders of Race

Spanish). She contrasted her lack of fluency in Spanish with otherwise being an “articulate person.”

Unlike David (discussed later in this chapter and again in Chapter 6), Wendy does not experience, or admit to, this lack of Spanish language literacy and fluency as a source of tension that generates “imposter syndrome” (see Moore 2015). In contrast to him, she expresses much less awareness of the way the social construction of race and ethnicity are shaping these social dynamics, even as she discusses these and related issues. Instead, Wendy offered up a narrative framed by colorblindness, which minimized the significance of race and racism:

You know, when you’re asking me [about race], it’s weird. I’m trying to think back and I don’t really ever remember race being an issue, whether it was both of the races or either one of them. I mean, I guess I would more relate to being black because I don’t speak Spanish fluently and a lot of the things that I was put into as far as a child were mostly minority-oriented or black-oriented rather than Latino [said with an emphasized Spanish accent]. So I guess I would relate more to black but I mean there wasn’t really any like you know, “You’re black and Puerto Rican,” and I mean “You’re biracial.” I don’t remember ever asking, I don’t think I had an identity crisis or a race crisis about who I was. I remember I said to my mom one time, I um, I said, “Mom, I’m not black; I’m peach.” But that was, you know, like…the extent of it. I didn’t really think about it like that, I think.

Arguably, if race and ethnicity did not matter, it would not matter if Wendy knew Spanish, as people of all racial and ethnic groups have varying language literacies and skills. Ostensibly, she would be able to make connections to even a few other Latinos or to any and everybody based on her logic. However, if the expectation is that Wendy—as a multiracial Latina—know Spanish well (which she admits she does not), she may feel or be disqualified on some level; any markers of blackness may serve as further disqualification to some, or conversely, qualification and authentication to others. That she is read as black, but not necessarily Latina, offers partial explanation for the disconnection she experiences. She conveys a narrative that suggests that she is not allowed to be both and, therefore, border patrols herself.

What Wendy’s experience highlights is the lacuna, or the silence surrounding the racial and ethnic socialization she received in her family. She points to this silence as an absence; in that void, the term “biracial” does not exist. Hearing such a term might have affirmed to her, or signaled, that “black” and “Latina” are not mutually exclusive terms. Despite not learning the language to refer to her black and Latina

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Internalizing Racial Identities 169

identity, Wendy does show how she is able to intercept—and correct— the language others use to describe her: “I’m not black, I’m peach.” Despite noting that she does not think about race and ethnicity, she obviously does. She offers an awareness of her embodied reality, as she experiences the “multiracial” as “multicultural.” Wendy’s innocent and simple description of her color, as it contrasts with the language that speaks only to her “legible” blackness, allows her the agency to contest this and to recognize her reality as a multiracial and multicultural one.

The shift between “black” and “peach,” therefore, is not only a nominal and discursive one but also an important agentic one to the “names we call home” (Thompson and Tyagi 1996). These names are a colorful expression of embodied hybridity and multiplicity of life in the borderlands (see Anzaldua 1987; Canclini 2005). Wendy makes space in her family that the ampersand between being black and Latina creates. The ampersand acknowledges and accommodates her mixture, making space for complexity in her racial identity, and what some see as a contradiction, instead of the identity composition or sum of Wendy’s parts. While she may claim to not think about her life in racialized ways, she is clearly impacted by these dynamics in her family and in society, as they shape her sense of self and the social interactions she has with others.

Other respondents negotiate the ampersand differently. In contrast to Wendy, whose peach-colored skin could locate her in “white,” “honorary white,” and “collective black” categories, darker-skinned black Latinos reported different experiences as individuals more definitely located within the racial category of “collective blacks.” For example, Sanchez, a black and Latino Puerto Rican man, confronted the realities of borderism as a darker-skinned man. This reality includes recognizing the racial hierarchy and classification system that inform people’s perceptions of others and themselves He explained how he embraced the categorization to arrive at a singular racial identity. Growing up in “basically black or white” spaces (schools, neighborhoods, etc.), Sanchez noted how the absence of Asians or “any other race” created a white/black binary that meant he was defined as a black person. “I was like, ‘Okay, I know that I’m a black person. I mean my skin color is dark, so therefore I’m a black person.’ And I never really, to tell you the truth, when I was younger, I never really thought about race as much as I do today.” Sanchez’s understanding of his social location within the U.S. racial hierarchy supports Bonilla-Silva’s (2003) contention that darker-skinned people are sorted into a collective black category.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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170 The Borders of Race

Similar to Sanchez, Frank, a 21-year-old man describes how he arrived at a singular black identity and what I interpreted as benevolent borderism:

I identify racially as African American or Black. Now ethnically, I consider myself a mix and I’m a mix of different races—I mean different groups of people. Ah, Native American; as well as Spanish and oh no, not Spanish. Sorry, Um, German and French. My African American identity is dominant. It’s almost like chromosomes. You have dominant and you have recessive. So the Native American history, the Native American heritage or ethnicity, they’re all the same; they’re all related. The ethnicity is sort of recessive…. I experience being African American. In all honesty, I don’t think it has much to do with how I identify because even if I didn’t identify as African American, I would still be treated like an African American…. Because that’s how I look. I look African American. I guess I’m not light enough or um, of the consistency or what not, or whatever the case may be, to be considered mixed, so when they, for example, see me, the first thing they think of is black. The first thing that comes out of their mouth is “black.”

In borrowing from the language of natural sciences, Frank refers to the “dominant” and “recessive” genomic matter (“chromosomes”) which becomes a metonym of race, though in reverse (see also Bliss 2012; Dawkins 2012; Hochshild 2014). Frank observes that his “African American identity is dominant” in this society which means that he sees his African American parentage and heritage as phenotypically dominant, a point that inadvertently reinforces the one-drop rule to some degree. It suggests that because it is most visible (among his racial mixture), blackness trumps any other race, and that said racial mixture must be visible in order for it to be claimed.

In contrast to this dominance based on physical features or appearances, and based on the racial hierarchy in the U.S., the opposite proves true about social and structural dominance. In terms of power and privilege, whiteness, as a group position and ideological framework, dominates (see Blumer 1958; Feagin 2009). The taint of “contaminating” black blood (see Douglas 2002), borrowing from the biology of race discourse and racist ideologies about the polluting qualities of this blood, has historically been used as evidence of black inferiority; this discourse also supports false notions of race as biological, effectively essentializing and naturalizing it (see Spencer 2010; Bridges 2011).

Frank contrasted his self-image with others’ perceptions of his race, pointing to the pattern in which others see him as black. Because of his

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 171

(dark skin) appearance, Frank (like Abigail) believed that asserting a mixed identity would prove arduous, a point echoed in the work of Khanna (2011) and others. The absence of discernible markers of mixture dissuaded Frank from incorporating mixture immediately into his identity.1 He regarded visible mixture a requisite criteria for claiming a mixed identity, despite discursively recognizing a “multiethnic,” if not multiracial, heritage. He explained his rejection of the label “mixed,” citing these reasons:

The diversity is not allowed to exist. That’s why it’s recessive. The resistance is everywhere. It’s in institutions, with your peers…Institutionally, for instance, you, until recently, weren’t allowed to identify as anything more than, either, you’re African American, you’re white, you’re not European American, or you’re Asian American and so forth. Even if I put on (forms), considering that I have Spanish and German, Native American, African American, I could put on there “white” but if I get stopped by a police officer, shoot, no matter what, pick one, no matter what happens if, they’ll look at you, and you say white, they’ll say, “Yeah, right. Yeah, stop lying.” You know. You could have a black person immigrate from Germany to America and they say, “Okay, you’re German. You’re black. You’re African American.” Which they don’t know how far back you have to go to get to Africa in this heritage but it’s got to be back there somewhere because you’re black. And “African American” to my peers is devalued. It is considered an insult, like you’re denying yourself or you’re insulting your race or your heritage to say, “Okay,” that you’re not just black because you have the oppressor and you have the oppressed and the oppressor.

Frank’s comments illustrate what Audre Lorde (1984) discusses in Sister Outsider, that we are all the oppressed and oppressor together, at once. Because he has encountered borderism from others, Frank opts for black:

I mean, I like the African American ethnicity. I think I identify with it. I think I would also, however, at least identify with my Native American heritage, I’m not so partial to my German and French heritage in that, it’s basis is on people being forced to come. It’s not like they had a choice in the matter. If you get over here and you don’t like it, there’s a chain and you get whipped up. I mean, so, granted I am very much an admirer of Germany’s brilliance and France’s, you know, medical and scientific advancements, as well, you know, in that I have great respect for them.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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172 The Borders of Race

Frank recognizes his Native American ancestry, respects his German and French ancestry, and connects to his African American ethnic heritage. He also decidedly interprets race and arrives at his own racial identity on the basis of hypodescent (Khanna 2010; Brunsma 2006a). During our interview, Frank rejected the possibility of a person’s mixture being “clearly invisible” (Dawkins 2012; see also Buchanan and Acevedo 2004), which ignores the number of multiracial people “hiding in plain sight” because they do not appear to be what I call, “clearly mixed.” In a way, this logic upholds the racial hierarchy and system of racial stratification. By doing so, he border patrols his racial identity choices. This creates a chain of events, reflecting others limiting his racial identity options and illustrating his own imposition of that limitation; this potentially extends to how he supports or denies others in their preferred racial identities. That is, as he is denied choice, he likely internalizes that constraint and, in effect, denies others with invisible mixture their own freedom to choose. Frank also overlooked how many visibly multiracial people face similar kinds of identity invalidation, if they too, like him, do not look sufficiently mixed or are not clearly ambiguous.

Like Frank, Kelly (a black-identified woman with French Guyanese, French, Asian Indian, Blackfoot Indian, Black American, German, and a “splash of Irish” ancestry) racially identified as black or “Black American because…that’s how the general public perceives me.” Both felt that they would be treated as black by the public and in public; this implies that 1) they anticipate or fear facing antiblack racial discrimination and devaluation (see also Yancey 2003), alienation, or differential treatment because of their perceived blackness, and/or 2) they would benefit from collective conscience and experience black solidarity and racial kinship if and when perceived by other black people as sharing a similar black identity.

Though Kelly thought she “would claim a multiracial identity if society allowed,” she made clear her satisfaction and “comfort with being black.” Rather than adopt an “anything but black” position (Bonilla-Silva 2003b), Kelly and others actively challenged such antiblack ideologies by purposefully opting for black. Despite persistent antiblack racism, that includes maneuvers away from blackness in this society, Kelly, Frank, and others moved towards blackness by embracing African American racial and ethnic identities.

With racial mixture in her family that was “more distant…not direct (since) it’s not like my mom’s one mono-race and my father’s one mono-race,” Kelly described the intergenerational negotiations of race. This accounts for both mixture shifting as well as a change in racial

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 173

categories and the meanings attached to them across generations. In socially constructing her parents as having singular races, while recognizing their racial mixture as “distant,” Kelly conveyed the way that distance made claiming a multiracial identity feel inaccessible to her. This distance, however real or imagined, made multiraciality that much more off-limits given the absence of immediate, visual markers of racial mixture. Although Kelly’s mixture is both contemporary and historical (Turner 2013), she remained ambivalent about claiming a multiracial identity.

Kelly’s reluctance, much like Frank’s, rested on her perception and understanding of what counts as mixed; it also illustrates Bratter’s (2007) concern about the survival of multiracial identification to “the next generation.” It may also relate to the construction of a black family. To some, the maintenance of a “black” family may be predicated on all its members asserting black identities versus departing from that expectation. The implicit concern is that a single departure would signal a departure from blackness (or be read as antiblackness) as opposed to a problematizing of blackness, in recognition of its richness and categorical complexity, across the diaspora.

Having grown up in and been socialized as part of a family that collectively asserted blackness (or whose members individually and/or collectively asserted black identities), Kelly did not exactly view herself as a “first-generation” multiracial (Daniel 2002) and felt she would not be able to claim a validated border (mixed) identity (see Campbell 2007). In fact, one-quarter of the respondents (with black heritage or parentage) asserted a singular black identity, evidence that supports existing literature indicating that a very small portion of blacks claims a multiracial identity (Lee and Bean 2004).

Notably, Kelly mentioned others’ interpolating or hailing her (Althusser 1971) as “more than black” (Daniel 2002). “I mean I’ve had people ask me, ‘So, what are you?’ And…for simplicity sake, you know, I say, ‘I’m black.’ ‘No, but really, what are you?’” That some people see her in this way suggests that, should she choose, she could assert a multiracial identity that others might validate in those moments (rather than fear imminent invalidation and contestation). Nevertheless, Kelly seemed to resent and reject the intended “compliments” others provided in presuming her to be Brazilian (mixed, not black); or, when saying, “‘Oh, you don’t look fully black.’ Or ‘You know you have…a little bit of oh, something else in you.’” She suspected that others may have intended their comments as compliments but she failed to see them as such. Instead, she implied that she saw them as sociologist Heather Dalmage (2000) describes: “racist compliments.”

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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174 The Borders of Race

Had her parents’ looks contrasted each other more, such that they were more “obviously interracial” or visibly mixed, and/or had they chosen multiracial or black identities, Kelly might have felt more compelled to choose such an identity for herself. I suspect this might be the case for other black multiracial people. Without these verbal or visible markers of mixture in significant others, those who get to claim such a validated multiracial identity remain on exclusive and contested terrain (Morning 2000), a point Khanna (2011) also makes in her book, Biracial in America.

For Kelly and others, choosing blackness also serves as an expression of racial solidarity and/or an explicit rejection of “multiracial” privilege. As some black multiracial people move towards, not away from, blackness, they challenge the antiblackness that prevails in the U.S. Many black multiracial respondents expressed views similar to Kelly. They found that the “absence of a presence” (Fine 2002), in this case a racial presence, or a “clearly mixed” phenotype or physical appearance, denied them the chance to choose a “mixed” identity. The absence of racial mixture in the form of a visibly recognizable or legible interracial family (nuclear or extended) remained present in their lives. They negotiated this absence by expressing their desire to explore more of their family heritage and racially mixed ancestry. Their choosing blackness then can be understood as both constrained and concerted: their “too dark to not be black” skin color marked them as black, because of the one-drop rule (Khanna 2010), but also allowed them to actively, positively embrace blackness.

In the next section, I consider the ways in which multiracial individuals make strategic identity moves to increase their mobility and facility in the world. I illustrate the ways that some multiracial people curiously produce colorblind narratives or deny the reality of race, yet appear to be managing their multiracial identity in ways that ensure their access to some racial privilege.

Beneficiary Border Patrolling: A Matter of Choice, Convenience, or Privilege?

For some of my respondents, acknowledging a racially mixed heritage proved easier than asserting their own mixed race identity. Naming a multiracial heritage enabled them to preserve the privileges associated with the identities they chose. Unlike benevolent border patrolling of identity, beneficiary border patrolling involved respondents generally claiming a singular race that ensured greater social status than the races not embraced or acknowledged. Most examples of beneficiary border

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 175

patrolling came from white-identified individuals (including White and Asian and White and Latino respondents, and one White/Native American respondent). In these cases, I saw these respondents as avoiding a multiracial identity (based on the perception of its lower social status and value in the racial hierarchy), and opting for white (based on the perception of the benefits that accrue from whiteness).

Sociologists such as Mary Waters (1999) found that white people reveal and conceal their ethnicity as they so desire. They may claim one ethnicity based on its popularity in a particular historical moment, social setting, or context; or, they may reject or deny parts of their ethnic heritage. They claim or reject contingent on a set of variables including the popularity of an ethnicity, or any animosity directed at certain ethnic groups in particular social settings or historical moments. In my research, I discovered that some multiracial people engage in practices parallel to exercising their “ethnic options” by making a series of racial options. This ongoing process of negotiating identity involves revealing and concealing the composite parts of their (multi)racial heritage.

Consistent with the ways a white person interprets their “ethnic options” (Waters 1990), Dakota, a white-identified white Asian multiracial woman, treats her racial identity similarly. She explained: “I do identify as Korean when it is convenient,2 I guess…I always say that I am White on the standardized tests and things like that but, in social situations when I am talking to people, I always say that I am half Korean. I guess it makes things more interesting and I don’t feel that I am a boring White girl.” This last observation suggests that Dakota was “thinking the border” strategically—opting for white and/or Asian, depending on which identity benefits her. As she suggests, she benefits from being “half Korean.” Being able to brighten the borders of race, she highlights her Korean identity to spice up what she might see as “vanilla” whiteness.

Formally identifying as white on applications can prove materially beneficial for white multiracials, as evidence suggests “opting for white” (Rockquemore and Arend 2002) is a currency in today’s racial hierarchy (Bonilla-Silva 2003a,b; Hunter 2005). These and other sources show the material benefits of and the possessive investment in whiteness (see also Lipsitz 2006; Harris 1993; Roediger 2003). Consistent with discussions of the emergent multiracial “identity grab bag” (Rockquemore, Brunsma, and Delgado, 2009), Dakota defaulted to whiteness because her physical appearance does not deny her that option. Alternately, one could interpret that she formally opted for whiteness, while having her (“half Korean”) mixture operate as an added “flavor.” However, some people read her as ambiguous, which places her in white and honorary

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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176 The Borders of Race

white categories (and accounts for the different groups to which others perceive her as belonging to). The identities she chooses remain contingent on the situations she finds herself in and the perceptions of others.

As a general observation, I noticed that this and other white Asian multiracial individuals situationally employ their racial literacy to strategically shift their mixture to acquire the most privileges—the social and material benefits—attached to whiteness and increasingly to multiraciality. This ability to shift mixture operates as a material benefit not only of whiteness then, but also of white- or light-skinned multiraciality. That is, visible mixture affords some multiracial individuals material benefits comparable to white privilege in white- looking multiracials (see Bonilla-Silva 2004; Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003a,b; Gans 1999).

Finally, Dakota’s convenient deployment of her Korean parentage and identity allowed her to spice up her vanilla existence and reaffirm her whiteness. This speaks to the point that cultural theorist and literary critic, bell hooks, makes in her work; this “illustrates a commodification of the racial otherness as ‘a spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.’ The white woman does not seem to seek a broader cultural appreciation, but rather a brief cultural appropriation…She can perhaps have the fun of pretending to be black for one night, but can soon return to her privileged white appearance and style” (hooks 1992:21). Specifically among white Asian multiracials, many of them “spice” themselves up with their Asian “Otherness,” which reaffirms their predominantly white racial identity and white privilege. They normalize their choice for whiteness through these “Othering” discourses (Frankenberg 1993) and Orientalizing moves (see Said 1978), which fetishize rather than respect and celebrate difference. This fetishism of difference can also be a self-Orientalism when the “Other” is the self. This became evident in Dakota’s interview, when she said the following:

I see really cute Asian girls and sometimes I do wish that I looked Korean because, I don’t know why, but I just think they are so cute. But there is nothing I can do….I look at myself and I don’t feel like really Korean a lot, other than my hair color and a little bit my eyes. You know, like typical Korean girls have really small bodies, too thin.

By using language that supports the fetishism of Asian women, apparent in her reference to “really cute Asian girls,” Dakota could be viewed as admiring and/or creating a racialized spectacle of them.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 177

Though not mutually exclusive categories, these ways of seeing Asian women dislocates Dakota from sharing that identity. In my interpretation, it not only dislocates but distances Dakota from the category, “Asian American woman.” Perhaps as Dakota continues her education, she will consider ways of seeing herself as a part of the group of women she finds cute. How she constructs or imagines racial boundaries, specific to Asians, will reveal where she positions herself over time accordingly, be it at the margins or the center.

Some respondents, reluctant to embrace a mixed identity, also illustrated that they were transitioning into an incipient multiracial identity, much like Dakota. By learning more about their family’s racial diversity and starting to solve their family’s “mysteries of histories,” some of my participants began to more readily recognize their own multiraciality. They cultivated these nascent identities, growing their dimensions as they acquired knowledge of their family’s racial mixtures.

During our interview, Dakota stated, “I always feel White.” She experienced the feeling of being disqualified for not looking “Asian enough,” and described a disconnection to Korean culture, language, and people (resulting from being border patrolled by significant others, as previously discussed). These feelings of disconnection and encounters with borderism partially explain her racial identity options. Rather than reject Korean culture altogether, she seems ambivalent towards it: “I mean, it’s not like I am trying not to engage my Korean culture or anything like that. But I just think it’s that my mom didn’t really force Korean culture onto me…I mean I feel strange going to the Korean market.” Because she looks more white than Asian (and Korean specifically), Dakota feels out of place in predominantly Korean settings. Were she to be both darker and smaller, Dakota noted, she might feel more entitled to actively and publicly claim a Korean identity. This is so largely because people essentialize ethnicity and race, proscribing what counts as Korean or not. Believing that she fails a variety of authenticity tests, Dakota instead opts for white.

In ways that echo traces of Dakota’s narrative, Rose offered some of her experiences as a white-identified white and Native American multiracial woman. Rose readily acknowledged some Native American heritage and partially did so by recognizing the racial differences between her grandfather (who she described as having dark skin and being part Cherokee) and other relatives (who she described as white). Registering this racial difference discursively distances and disconnects Rose racially from the physically or phenotypically different relatives, thereby keeping her “whiteness” intact. Such discursive practices stabilize the category of whiteness without compromising its mythical

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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178 The Borders of Race

purity, despite the acknowledgment of racial mixture. That is, Rose asserts and maintains a singular white identity comfortably, though she “spices up” her vanilla whiteness with the difference of “Otherness,” in this case, her Native American ancestry3 (see hooks 1992; Rubin 1984). She offers different details than other respondents who see their multiracial heritage as a flavorful addition to their chosen whiteness, although Rose effectively does the same. Rose offers, “My mom’s dad, he was a quarter Cherokee. They didn’t have a good relationship. I never knew him. I think he’s dead. I really couldn’t say. There’s no documentation [proving his Indian identity], it’s just what they’re telling me.” At once, Rose remains skeptical of her family’s “mysteries of histories,” and diminishes any connection she feels toward her maternal grandfather. Her discourses work to do what I call “disappear difference.” She disappears difference in herself by erasing mixture through the speculation (instead of certainty) of her grandfather’s death, and then by questioning his racial identity in life.

Because her family socialized her as white (rather than multiracial), Rose learned to identify as white. At some point, her mother “just kind of brought up that there was Indian blood in us,” and said, “‘Oh yeah, we have some Indian in us….I think it’s Cherokee. Yeah, it’s Cherokee.’ And I’ve always been interested in Indian heritage. I think it’s neat. I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t know the ‘P.C.’ way to put it.” Like Dakota, Rose employs language that infantilizes and fetishizes difference not in whites, but in Indians or Native Americans. In fairness to Rose, she acknowledges her limited racial literacy when she admits to not knowing the socially appropriate expression.

Following Bonilla-Silva (2003a,b), I wonder if Rose would regard her whiteness as “neat” as well. Her ways of describing “difference” in relation to whiteness reinforces the spectacle that so often surrounds Native Americans and other racial groups of color, and normalizes the centrality and invisibility of whiteness as well (see DeLoria 1999; Dyer 1992). Concerns about people “playing Indian” surface in instances where Native American people and culture are regarded as more interesting than white people and culture (DeLoria 1999). This is another way of understanding hooks’ concerns of “spicing up” whiteness with “Otherness.” This is especially notable in instances where multiracial people who choose whiteness regard their “Other” racial identity as something of an accessory; this Otherness can be put on when desired and disregarded when not. This fashioning of race speaks to the “optional” quality it takes on, as I discussed earlier (see also Goldberg 1997; Waters 1999).

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 179

Amidst her curiosity about her “one-sixteenth” Cherokee “blood,” Rose indicated, “I think I would still identify as white, depending on the situation.” Because of this, and the fact that she knew precisely what “fraction” Native American she was, she appeared to me to be a beneficiary border patroller. The border patrolling that she experienced from outsider within (significant others) partially related to her own border patrolling of identity. This is not indicative of the racial treason that scholars have described (see Segrest 1994; Wise 2008). Instead of having traitorous identities that reject “whitely scripts4,” Rose and her family embraced white privilege and engaged in racial redistricting to remain race evasive and privileged (Fischer 2006; Frankenberg 1993; Thompson 2001; Warren and Twine 1997). Her uncertainty concerning her grandfather’s mortality and identity exposed racial ideologies that partially explained his peripheral position in her family and memory.

I can’t exactly remember…I was just looking at pictures, and I saw a picture and apparently it was my grandfather but he didn’t look related to me at all, like he was very dark skinned, with dark hair. His nose was a little bit bigger, I guess. And just looked mean to me. He just looked angry, but my grandfather and grandmother weren’t together for very long so it could have been likely that he was really mean….You know, he drank too much; he was not necessarily physically abusive but definitely verbally abusive, and um, kind of a slacker. Wasn’t around, didn’t want to work.

One can speculate that the rocky relationship between Rose’s maternal grandparents colored and contaminated her perception of her grandfather. The negligible relationship that Rose had with him seemed soured by others’ unfavorable accounts of his personality. This illustrates the importance of the stories people circulate within families, that “our stories matter” (Nash and Viray 2013), in terms of how they shape and support our identities.

Additional interpretations of Rose’s narrative and experiences exist. One possible interpretation of Rose’s attitude towards her multiracial heritage draws attention to her inability (or reasonable unwillingness) to recognize herself in her grandfather. While it is difficult to say whether or not her perception of differences in terms of gender, color, physical features, and other characteristics largely stems from the disparaging remarks of others, I do think Rose’s discussion of these differences dances around the idea of “real” racial differences, as evidenced through her description of her grandfather as “only” one-quarter Cherokee. That Rose indicated that it would be easier to opt for white in any (casual or professional)5 situation, suggests her desire to possessively invest in

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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180 The Borders of Race

whiteness (Lipsitz 2006). Her narrative reveals both the relative ease with which multiracial people with whiter or lighter skin can assert their whiteness, and some of their reasons or motivations for doing so.

Rose implied that others might not take much of an interest in the details of her mixture and, that in those inquiring moments, she would not “want to overstep my boundary of information.” She suggested that sharing information with strangers would be contextual, restrained, and relevant to the social situation or particular interaction (Waters 1999). However, it is more instructive to consider what information Rose is willing to share about herself racially, namely that she is white. Interestingly, when she mentioned lacking evidence of her racial mixture, she did not feel this dearth in relation to proving her whiteness. That is, she did not speak of the need to prove whiteness in ways that contrast with her need to prove her Native American ancestry. It is as if she has internalized government requirements to “document” or legitimize her identity, not only to herself but to others as well. Rose shared:

I think, you know, if I found out undeniable proof then I would probably say White and Native American, just that I would give an explanation. But if I couldn’t prove it, then I wouldn’t want to give false information. I’d just say White. I wouldn’t want people to be like, “Oh, well, tell me about your history.” Like, “Gasp.”… I think it’s also, I don’t know, I would sort of be proud if I was a part of that history that’s been pretty much demolished. I’d be proud to have the opportunity to carry on some part of that because I know that there isn’t a whole lot of it being passed on. Um, I don’t know.

Rose’s example suggests that when people lack racial literacy in a general sense, they often still possess enough working knowledge of the racial hierarchy to understand the wages of whiteness (Roediger 2003). They experientially know the material and social benefits of whiteness which require little proof of light- and white-skinned multiracial people. White (looking) skin becomes proof enough, with the body as evidence, but how does one prove something one ostensibly cannot see? Rose’s comments expose the differences in racial group membership status and socialization. What seems apparent is that she was likely socialized, through colorblindness and colormuteness, to maintain the “invisibility of whiteness” while recognizing her indigeneity as the “Other.” Consistent with white racial socialization, she claims whiteness, while remaining ambivalent about her “authority” to claim any indigeneity. As a result, she reinforces both the idea of whiteness as property and her invisible mixture.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 181

Another interpretation of Rose’s identity articulation relates to any fear she has of facing further invalidation as a white-looking person trying to acknowledge a racially mixed heritage. As a multiracial woman with white skin color, Rose knows that asserting a mixed race identity marks a risky proposition; doing so jeopardizes any white privilege that Rose accesses and enjoys, which also runs the risk of inauthenticating her mixture. As with other respondents, Rose reported that her phenotypical whiteness motivated her singular white identity. Negating her mixture and affirming her whiteness could be her way of border patrolling herself for her own benefit and, as I discuss shortly, for self- protection.

Unlike those White and Asian multiracial respondents who opted for white or tentatively claimed more of an incipient multiracial identity while enjoying their honorary whiteness, Peg rejected her honorary whiteness by increasingly attempting to assert a validated Korean identity. As a white Asian multiracial woman who was adopted into an interracial family of the same racial mixture (white and Asian), Peg increasingly embraced her Asian identity, even as she wrestled with not knowing much about her birth family.

In the South, she found relative ease in emphasizing her Korean heritage. She had no “concept of, like, being identified as white.” However, her move away from her adoptive family and from one part of the country to another facilitated some of these changes in her racial self-perception. She noted that her racial sense of self shifted, such that she no longer saw herself as primarily Korean. Peg tired of others’ inability to not see her as Korean. As she moved away from and became increasingly ashamed of being Korean, she remained bothered by this misrecognition.

This moving away from being Korean did not translate into intentionally moving towards whiteness. As Peg explained, she was essentially becoming white; the white culture, and mostly white friends in their “completely white world,” made being Korean “different” but also “honorary white.” Even though she “blended in very well” into these whitespaces (Horton 2006), Peg described feelings of racial alienation. Though “it was understood that I was Asian because I was different,” many of the white people in Peg’s life treated her as white. This behavior included making disparaging comments about other (than white) races. This exposure to how her white friends felt about her as an Asian solidified her honorary white status but also caused her to feel alienated from these friends. The ease with which they revealed ugly truths concealed in their race talk (Houts Picca and Feagin 2007) drew a wedge between them and Peg. She felt increasing dissonance over her

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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182 The Borders of Race

friendships with whites, who accounted for and then effectively denied, her preferred racial and ethnic sense of self. By not expressing criticism of their racism, Peg maintained her honorary white status with them, using it to her advantage.

Following the rules of racial etiquette, or the “polite silences” of colorblind racism, none of the multiracial individuals admitted to wanting to access white privilege. This, however, does not mean that they do not want to enjoy the privileges of whiteness. Denying white privilege allows the beneficiaries of this “invisible knapsack of privilege” to continue enjoying earned advantages while maintaining the view of deserving them (McIntosh 1998). The literature on white privilege echoes this point by illustrating how whiteness and its invisible knapsack of privilege remain sights left unseen.

Many respondents who claimed a white identity also spoke of the nonwhite (or part-white) parent as highly assimilated. Also, they espoused a rather colorblind view of society and centered whiteness throughout the interviews. In that way, many of the part-white respondents engaged in beneficiary border patrolling of their identities because they knew they could access or had already accessed, the unearned privileges of claiming a white, honorary white, or multiracial identity versus a singular or collective black identity. This strategy reaffirmed the new racial hierarchy (Gans 1999) in which most multiracial individuals enjoy honorary white or white status in society. That is, respondents with part-white parentage or ancestry could and would more easily acknowledge their partial whiteness and its attendant privileges, while those with part black parentage or ancestry were more likely to claim a biracial or black identity than a singular white, Asian, or Hispanic one.

Protective Border Patrolling: Choosing “Black” When Others Don’t Understand “Biracial”

Prevailing racial hierarchies and ideologies shape the choices people make regarding their racial identities and romantic partners. These forces inform many differences between the public and private presentation of their racialized selves. When people encounter opposition to the racial identities they choose, they may become increasingly self-protective. They opt for public identities that differ from their preferred (and private) identities to minimize this invalidation. They also do so anticipating that it will make more facile the social interactions with others (including strangers, family members, and friends). This does not always prove true.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 183

In order to buffer themselves from reactions, including surprise, amusement, rejection, and so on, many respondents reported expressing public identities that they could convincingly “get away with” (see below). This observation underscores the performative aspect and expectation of social interactions (see Goffman 1963, 1967). It also highlights how much those interactions are racialized (see Khanna and Harris 2014). Not all multiracials felt they could give a convincing performance of their preferred identities. Consequently, they opted for simpler, often singular options, in an effort to achieve this legitimacy (in their own eyes and that of others).

As Gloria, one black and white biracial respondent recognized, whiteness was out of bounds or out of reach for her, despite her golden skin and curly blondish hair (as affirmed in people’s comments about her appearance). Her experience illustrates that the boundaries of whiteness seldom expand to include black/white multiracials, a point made by Gallagher (2004a); Lee and Bean (2004); and others. This explains why she asserted a protean identity (black and white, biracial, “Other” [her term]), but never a singular white identity.

The identity grab bag that Rockquemore, Brunsma, and Delgado (2009) discuss does not afford all multiracial individuals the same number of racial identity options. In part, the racial hierarchy privileges whiteness and, thusly, allows multiracial individuals with white parentage an arguably more diverse range of options. Ironically, as my research illustrates, multiracial individuals often reinforce the racial hierarchy and the current racial classification system by border patrolling their own identities. While many multiracial individuals expressed a preference for shifting mixture, others preferred to collapse their complexity into singular categories. However, multiracial individuals with white and black heritage/parentage, for example, did not feel that they could choose whiteness, in the same ways that some white and Asian multiracial participants did. Despite the relative ease with which the latter may claim a white and/or Asian identity, most respondents of this combination chose to assert a mixed race or white racial identity, not a singular Asian identity. No respondents claimed a singular Asian identity.

This contrasts with Gloria’s observation about the limitations to racial identity choice. She felt the option of whiteness was socially denied her, as exemplified by her response when asked about it (if she ever opted for whiteness): “I don’t think I could get away with it (whiteness).” “Getting away” with whiteness involved looking white, not simply having a white parent, or claiming a white identity and having others affirm and validate such a choice rather than regard it

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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184 The Borders of Race

suspiciously or dubiously. That Gloria has “never thought about that, honestly” shows the extent to which whiteness expands selectively, careful to exclude part-black multiracials in the process. Her reportedly having never thought about this issue could also be read as “not having to think about that.” That suggests that Gloria either enjoys enough white privilege to not have to think about race and racism deeply or meaningfully, or the option to claim to not notice race through the twin discourses of colorblindness and colormuteness. This colorblind and colormute kinds of explanations exemplify the dominant patterns of people seeking to avoid conversations about race and any acknowledgment of racial difference.

Deploying colorblind explanations deflects attention away from any unearned privileges she enjoys as she approximates whiteness. Her comments that directly engaged racial matters in the interview contrast with some of her colorblind narratives. For example, she communicated that she claims a protean multiracial identity and has thought about that enough to equate whiteness and blackness combined with mixture. A more likely explanation again rests in the racial hierarchy that places Gloria more centrally in the collective black category, and more decidedly outside of categorical whiteness.

Chloe, an African American and Native American-identified woman (with Irish and Italian ancestry), also discussed how she defended her racial identity to family members. When some of her black relatives made disparaging comments about whites, Chloe, “out of defense,” reminded them of her Irish and Italian parentage (mother). Chloe recognized her behavior as a “defense mechanism” when she took those comments personally because of her white mother. She observed, “If you [relatives] think this about white people, well then, what do you think about me, or my mother, or her side of the family?” Despite her understandable agitation, Chloe acknowledged that she mostly asserts a black or Native American identity. Doing so replicated others’ invalidation of her racial mixture, making her identity align with how she appears to others: “more black” than any other race(s). Chloe’s choice captures the reverberation of invalidation.

Even as she recognizes her multiplicity, she asserts a simpler or singular identity. This illustrates how many multiracial people may choose racial identities that reflect borderists’ logic, or may become border patrollers themselves, in these cases, of their own identity options. This also illustrates the impact that border patrolling from strangers and familial others has on multiracial individuals and the identities they choose (or do not choose). When multiracial individuals internalize this borderism, they begin to perpetuate it themselves.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 185

Though not her intention, Chloe (in opting for a black identity) also alienated some white relatives who saw her as multiracial and not black. She chose blackness to “uncomplicate things” and challenge the societal devaluation of blackness. However, doing so confused others’ ways of seeing her, even as these other family members worked to affirm her multiraciality.

The above example underscores the predicament that places a burden on multiracial people who have to manage both the luxury and the liability of racial identity options (in contrast to people who feel altogether denied this choice) (see Rockquemore and Lazloffy 2005). Despite having more luxuries, in terms of choices or racial identity options, Chloe highlighted one limitation of that choice: opting for white. She offered:

I definitely don’t think I can get away with saying I’m white. “What? Did you just come back from vacation?” But yeah, I mean it’s not something that I’d do. But you know, I’d love to say, I’m Italian, too, but what Italian community is really going to accept me? And the rest of the world, you know, maybe one community might accept me, but the rest of the world, when I step outside, they’ll be like, “Italian?” Yeah. “She’s Irish, you know?”

Chloe also linked how she arrived at her racial identity in relation to the racial socialization she received primarily from her father who “definitely wants us to identify as black” because of “decades of conditioning.” Chloe’s father prepared his children for the possibility of facing racial discrimination resulting from others’ misperceptions of them (as black and stereotypically so):

He definitely wants [us] to know that…when we step outside, nobody really cares that our mother’s white…. He’s done it subtly you know? He hasn’t actually sat us down, and said, “Well, you do know that you’re black.” Or “There’s some things that comes along with being black.”…. He’s subtly reminded us countless times that we can’t expect the rest of the world to, like, buy into this biracial wonderland that we have at home, maybe.

In her “biracial wonderland,” Chloe expressed a dichotomy between the public and private selves (Goffman 1967) or what others have called “public identity” and “internalized identity” (Khanna 2010). In Chloe’s public presentation of self (Goffman 1963, 1967), she performs blackness yet, while in the comfort of her wonderland, she can more

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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186 The Borders of Race

easily claim her racial mixture (though not without occasional contestation from some relatives) (see Brunsma 2006b).

Chloe’s description of the backstage into which she retreats, or perhaps luxuriates, connotes the comfort she experiences there. This comfort eludes her in public in instances where others question or even challenge her identities. Like many other multiracial women with black parentage or heritage, Chloe draws this distinction to show the racework that many multiracial individuals engage in, during these public interactions with strangers; Steinbugler (2012) discusses this in her work with lesbian, gay, and straight, interracial relationships. These circumstances and social conditions reveal this racework and also make more visible the extent to which multiracial people manage their racial identities. The management of these identities involves auto-borderism, a self-policing of one’s racial presentation of self in public and, sometimes, in private settings as well.

Opting for black for simplicity’s sake did not, in fact, always simplify social interactions. Instead, they sometimes created productive tensions or intensified conflict between multiracial individuals and others, including strangers, significant others, other family members, and friends. Vanessa, a black-identified woman, explained why she too asserted a singular black identity as a protective mechanism: “I say I’m black because it’s easier. I don’t get a lot of questions that way.” Opting for black enabled her attempts to evade borderists’ racialized attention or the racial panopticon (Foucault 1977; Mirzoeff 2011) on the visuality and spectacle of bodies (see also Markovitz 2011). In a way, her choice to collapse her multiracial parentage into blackness can be interpreted as a kind of self-border patrolling. Her choice also shows how “multiracial” does not always survive to the next generation (Bratter 2007).

My father is Cherokee Indian and African American. He identifies himself as African American. My mother is Caucasian and African American, and she identifies as African American….My family also identified us as African American because that’s how we are seen by society and that’s how they see themselves. They feel like they’d be able to relate to, they can deal with issues they are given by identifying as African American instead of something else.

Similar to other black multiracials, Vanessa gets asked if she is “anything besides black.” People often say that they think she looks “different” and “exotic,” as if there is “something there that I don’t see.” I suspect that they see signs of racial mixture (Cherokee Indian, African

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 187

American, and Caucasian) that Vanessa only partially acknowledges but does not incorporate into her identity. Her mixture is her habitus and thus it remains, relatively speaking, “clearly invisible” to her. To others, her mixture appears always already visible.

Her desire for privacy and simplicity does not always dissuade others who continue to wonder about Vanessa’s racial identity. Identifying as black then backfires to the degree that it does little to deflect these inquiring and curious gazes. What Vanessa draws attention to here contrasts with her desire to not draw attention to herself. The legibility of race—the in/visible mixture—relates here to racial literacy and betrays the way people ignore, deny, or minimize the continuing significance of race (Feagin 1991).

Another black-identified multiracial woman respondent, Juanita, explained her own complicated racial parentage and reasons for choosing her preferred racial identity:

I say that I’m black but I’m not really sure how to say it, like when people ask me that question because I don’t know how to include everything and so I just leave it (she laughs). “Everything” is of course African American, Native American, Creole, Puerto Rican, I think that’s it. There’s maybe something else…Some Caucasian but it’s just further out (generations back).

Like Vanessa, Juanita opted for black, to elude attention and evade others’ (un)spoken expectations of her to elaborate on her racial identity. She strategically employed this tactic to manage public interactions with strangers but effectively erased her racial multiplicity, or at least attempted to, when she is in public. She suggested that opting for black proved easier than elaborating on her racial mixture to strangers, “because I get less questions that way.” Eliding inquiries and evading racial interrogations is possible by collapsing her multiracial identity into blackness. That way, Juanita avoids comments claiming that she is “confused” or a modern day “tragic mulatto” who struggles with what she called “the Tiger Woods problem.” This persistence of a problematic narrative, the troubled, confused “tragic mulatto,” must be managed by many multiracial people even those who claim a singular racial identity and even if they are not the ones experiencing confusion over their racial identities.

Juanita collapsing her racial complexity into a single category is a variation of Rose’s practice of “disappearing difference,” as I discussed earlier. In my estimation, Juanita does not work to deny or avoid her mixture but rather simplifies it. She displays knowledge of the social

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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188 The Borders of Race

interactional rules; the ones that nudge her to abbreviate her responses to strangers’ questions (see Goffman 1967, 1963). This contrasts with Rose, who appears to intentionally “opt for white” to avoid any penalties she might otherwise incur for naming her Native American heritage (despite her discussion of how interesting this detail of her heritage makes her).

Like other black multiracial respondents, Jessica, a black-identified young woman of black and Asian Indian parentage, discussed having a black habitus6 which largely influenced and explained her singular black identity. She shared her negotiation of the space in between (feeling and “acting black”) and the way she patrolled her own identity:

I’ve always felt black but I’ve always identified myself as biracial so it’s kind of weird, you know what I mean? Like I—I know it’s not proper to say this: I act black, you know, because that’s how I grew up…. That’s kind of what I identify with, you know, but if like, I’m filling out a form or something, you know, I’ll put multiracial. Whereas when I was younger, I’d used to always put black.

Jessica’s response captures the conflict of racial identities in tension with one another and in flux over the life course (Doyle and Kao 2007, 2004). Though Jessica wanted to “recognize both parents,” she opted for black. Jessica’s border patrolling worked to both affirm and problematize blackness (Hintzen and Rahier 2003). In celebrating her pride in being black and her love of black people, Jessica overshadowed her Asian Indian identity while deferring to it in order to nuance her black experience. As with other respondents, Jessica had not thought about or noticed any unearned privileges she enjoyed because of her multiraciality and racial ambiguity. In not noticing, Jessica enjoyed her singular black identity in ways that preserved her occasional colorblindness. This colorblindness and colormuteness prevented her from registering how her skin color and beauty operates as a currency in this pigmentocracy (Bonilla-Silva 2003a,b).

Like Jessica, Jamie also asserted a black identity even though her light skin tone piques others’ curiosity about her heritage. Based on Jamie’s accounts, people interested in her racial identity and ambiguity often confrontationally commented, “No, you’re not black. You’re black and something else.” These comments troubled Jamie because she grew up in a small Southern town and in a community and a family where people abided by the racial binary: a person is either black or white. She dogmatically denied the racial mixture that was the result of a white man’s sexual exploitation of a black female relative that occurred

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 189

generations ago. Here, her denial of mixture is actually a refusal to acknowledge mixture; a strategy or stance mimicked in her family, who worked consciously to preserve blackness by negating and erasing the trauma of rape (and the forced inclusion of whiteness into families) (see Gray-Rosendale 2013; Spickard 1989; Walters, Mohammed, Evans- Campbell, Beltran, Chae, and Duran 2011).

When I asked her to elaborate on her reasons for choosing “black” over other options (i.e., “white,” “mixed,” “biracial,” etc.), Jamie replied: “Because it wasn’t a choice that they (black female relatives) slept with them, slept with the white people. It was rape. It wasn’t by choice…. To be honest, if I could pass for white, I probably would say that I’m white but I couldn’t pass for it, so I wouldn’t say it.” Since Jamie felt too dark to be white, she resented relatives who passed as white and enjoyed “the advantages you get just by being white,” or what Peggy McIntosh (1998) refers to as “white privilege.” She recalled having heard stories of white-looking black relatives trying to assert black identities and encountering resistance and invalidation: “They told her (a relative), ‘No.’ That she wasn’t, they told her that she wasn’t black. That she was white…. Oh, I have some pictures—they look exactly like white people but they’re not white. They’re black.”

While Jamie acknowledges why her family actively preserves blackness by denying and eliding the painful racial reality of how whiteness was incorporated into the family, she remains conflicted over racial identity choice. Her narrative captures the ways that the meanings people attach to racial categories often encapsulate or get informed by the messiness of historical traumas. Claiming anything other than blackness could be a trigger, resuscitating past individual, familial, and collective traumas. Sensitivity to these matters involves attending to the historical residue of trauma, and the traumatic residue of history, as Jamie acknowledges and alludes to in her narrative (see Walters, Mohammed, Evans-Campbell, Beltran, Chae, and Duran 2011).

Curious about her conviction to reinforce the black-white binary, I asked Jamie to reflect on the term “biracial.” We shared this exchange in discussing her views on the term:

Jamie: I don’t like it. I don’t think there’s such a thing (as biracial). It’s either one or the other. Because you can’t be both. You just can’t; I just don’t see how you can be both. You’re either black or you’re white, whichever is more prominent, that’s the one you are, to me.

Author: If one is more prominent than the other, then that means that the other still exists?

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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190 The Borders of Race

Jamie: It exists, but you don’t have to acknowledge it. You can’t identify with both. When somebody asks you what race you are, you can’t say, “Oh, I’m multiracial,” or “I’m mixed.”

Author: Why not?

Jamie: You’re just not. I just don’t see it. I don’t understand how you could say that. Like I have a cousin and my uncle, he’s very light skinned, green eyes, and he’s black but identifies either way though. But he had 2 kids by a white lady and they look white. Like you couldn’t tell they have any black blood and they don’t say that they’re black or mixed. They don’t say that they’re black or mixed. They say that they’re white. Because if they say, “Oh, I’m mixed,” or “I’m black,” people gonna look at them like they’re crazy.

Jamie regarded racial mixture as impossible, relegating it to the body (but not something that should be socially claimed in reality, as a possible identity). She found multiraciality largely incomprehensible. She lacked an awareness of the social construction of race, failing (or refusing) to see how her community and family reinforced a black/white racial divide in her life and mind. “Where I grew up at, you’re either black or you’re white. No in-between. And those are the only two races: black or white.” Although some scholars argue that members of the same family are of different races because of the ways we socially construct race in this country (Ferrante and Brown 2001), Jamie rejected that reality. Instead, she insisted on her black identity.

This insistence was compromised by some of her classmates (“white girls”) who considered her white. Once on a class trip, one classmate commented, “I wanna get a tan like [Jamie].” Stumped by this white girl’s perception of her, Jamie thought to herself, “White with a tan?” She explained her conflicted feelings about racial passing and the politics of skin color:

Skin tone is a big thing for me; I’m just getting over it…. I don’t want to be dark, like this is too dark for me. I don’t know, I don’t think that dark skin’s pretty. [I got that idea from] my grandmother….She always used to tell us not to be out in the sun, and you know, that’s not pretty. You don’t wanna get black. There was some saying she used to say, I don’t even remember it.” (Emphasis hers).

Even though her maternal grandmother was light-skinned enough to pass as white, she chose not to do so. Despite her choice, the grandmother conveyed the importance of lighter skin to Jamie, who observed that “they were seen to be a little bit better than the other black

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 191

people…and it was mainly because of their skin tone.” Jamie’s mother also emphasized the importance of light skin and discouraged her daughter from darkening by similarly admonishing her and advising her to stay inside (see Golden 2005; Rondilla and Spickard 2007). While Jamie’s mother cleverly couched her advice in gendered terms, “Don’t go outside, or you’ll get dirty,” and initially deflected attention away from a racial hierarchy, Jamie’s reflection on her mother’s (and grandmother’s) comments suggests that despite these attempts at racial displacement, she knew better than to ignore the significance of race in these narratives.

In order to avoid or minimize this border patrolling from strangers, black multiracial respondents asserted a singular black identity. In part, they hoped to elide this attention (Frankenberg 1993) and avoid being a racial spectacle (DeBord 1995), however benign the racialized gaze (Foucault 1977). Choosing blackness as a means of circumventing interrogations and the usual inspection, or what Gloria Wade-Gayles (1997) calls “eye questions,” then could be interpreted as protective border patrolling.

A few “honorary white” respondents had similar experiences. David, another respondent (white Hispanic) discussed his blended experience in terms of a “two-ness.” In borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois (1903), David described himself “racially as white and culturally as bicultural.” In his elaboration, he explained how being both white and Hispanic meant enduring authenticity testing from various sources. In feeling these pressures, David works to protect his multiracial, bicultural identity.

Because I grew up identifying as biracial but as I came to explore what race means, it became more and more evident to me that um, it’s, it’s much more of an identity that’s assigned by the outside rather than a sense of self and it’s, it’s linked to um, how I’ve experienced the world because of privilege and things like that, and so, of my siblings, I’m the whitest one and, and I, you know, came to realize at some point that perhaps this was not just, “Oh, I worked really hard.” That I’m the only one with a Ph.D. and the other two, one just has H.S. and she’s the darkest of us, the one that’s most immediately recognized as Spanish or “spic” (he says with a Southern accent; imitating a Southern accent) or Latina, however she’s clearly recognized as something other than white and my youngest sister is kind of in the middle. And so I identify racially just sort of out of my awareness of um sort of oppression dynamics, power, privilege issues and my lens, my outward-looking lens, that’s pretty impossible for me to define. I, I realize that, I know that I do not see the world as, um, people that I know that are white from both parents, um. It’s very clear to me that,

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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192 The Borders of Race

that I see the world very differently than they see the world. Even those who have had more awareness around racial constructs and things like that. And so it’s a cognitive distinction that I’m easily able to make and in terms of Latino people, I, I don’t experience a sense of belonging from the inside but as a legitimacy I guess is a better word. And so I clearly don’t see the world from the perspective of people who are completely Latino because, or even Panamanian specifically, because my whole life, I’ve, I’ve sort of been given that, that sort of, you know, reminders that I’m the gringo, that I’m the white one. So I have no idea how I would, you know, describe…. my racial identity from the inside, because I can’t, I can’t—to me I can only say there’s something about this blended perspective.

For this and other white Hispanic/Latino/a respondents, being blended offers a unique vantage point for experiencing the world. While they situationally enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, they also experienced social life as “optional people of color” (Gonzalez 2016) or “white people of color” (Alvarez 1998). As such, they may be read as “a different kind of white” due to their Spanish language ability, but they are also often read as “not quite Hispanic enough” and disqualified accordingly. Having many of his white American father’s physical features and appearance, David endured authenticity testing throughout adolescence and young adulthood as others evaluated his legitimacy as a “real” Panamanian. He even appeared to internalize some of this disqualification. He said:

It was a strange reverse because the power dynamics of our, the racial dynamics of our society were reversed in my family. My mother, the Latina person, was the dominating figure and I grew up in a household that devalued white people. Everything from “Their food has no rhythm” to “They’re imperialist bastards.” You know? And so, I grew up in a world where white was the bad guy, and um, for me, you know, I was never, you know, I was adored but it, it and so the bad guy didn’t apply to me, um, in any of those ways. It applied to me in, “[He] doesn’t like mangoes.” I don’t like mangoes. (Here he enunciates, mimicking/mocking whiteness through “hyperarticula- tion”). “Mango,” (pronounced with noticeable or emphasized Spanish accent, presumably the “proper” pronunciation), whatever you wanna call it. And you know dancing, I can’t do salsa…. I dance like a white guy. Yeah basically, that kind of stuff. And um, my older sister, has the, in addition to her physical features, she also had this notion, she was actually born in Panama, and so she is a “real” Panamanian and I am not. And so since my mother was the idolized figure in the family, I have her personality traits, but I, I was raised with the notion that I got stuck with my father’s physical traits.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 193

As a point of clarification, and in my estimation, the comment, “There food has no rhythm,” loops back to my discussion of vanilla whiteness, and (stereotypically) speaks to this point by casting whiteness as boring or bland. It endorses a different stereotype, that of “spicy” or exciting Latino culture. As Dalmage (2000), people reinforce race and police racial borders through the use of stereotypes. The narratives that circulated in the interviews, and in the daily lives of my respondents, make this clear.

The extent to which David participated in performing his racial and ethnic identity intentionally at some points and unintentionally at others is interesting, particularly given his geographical location: the South. Khanna (2010, 2011) discusses the ways in which multiracials form and perform their racial identities in the South. As someone living in the South (at the time of our interview), David was not only reflecting on his experiences forming and performing race from his blended perspective but also within the particular geographical context of the South. The bifurcated system of race that prevails there does not easily accommodate his “two-ness” and keeps his mixture relatively invisible to others.

Throughout the discussion of disqualification and authenticity testing, he deploys his cultural knowledge and capital in a way that authenticates the very identity that others have disqualified. When he pronounced certain words such as “salsa,” and “mangoes” he used a decidedly Spanish accent as if to stamp these words with his identity, to inflect them in ways that native Spanish speakers would, to solidify his position as a “real” Panamanian who speaks Spanish well. His hyperarticulation, the deliberate enunciation of both syllables, offered up whiteness as hyperbolic and hegemonic, as well as a reference with which to contrast his Panamanian identity. When he said, “I don’t like mangoes,” he was almost mocking whiteness, and himself, as he recognized that he is white and not white; his tone of voice also inferred that he is not the kind of white that others suggest he is. He tentatively embraces whiteness or reluctantly identifies with what whiteness connotes to the people who see him as only white. Another possible interpretation of this enunciation and interaction is that he may disidentify (see Muñoz 1999) with this kind of hyperbolic whiteness.

To make his whiteness visible, David makes his performance of whiteness intentional and recognizable in its clichéd form (starchy, “proper English” speaking). Doing so comfortably centers him in the interstices or the borderlands and affirms that he is both white and Spanish (see Anzaldua 1983). This affirmation results from his ability to “do” race and ethnicity well (see Khanna 2011 for more on forming and

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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194 The Borders of Race

performing race). He can “sound” both white and Spanish in its most recognizable essentialized, even hyperbolic, forms. This racial (and cultural) performance not only validates his knowledge of both but cements his position in-between. This performance also begins to explain the blended perspective of which he spoke in the interview.

It wasn’t so much liked or did, because I liked and did. It was more of just the way I was; the most vivid example that comes to mind, I haven’t thought about this, and I’m realizing there’s some emotion in all of this as I am talking about this. I haven’t talked about this in a while. Um, ah, I, I did not drink when I was a teenager, you know; I wasn’t getting laid with as many women as possible. I wasn’t you know, I wasn’t a tough macho guy. I played the piano and so… I still, I remember my cousins, because I lived in Panama when I was in high school, and I remember my cousins you know, on the balcony of their, of their porch in Panama City, you know, and they each have a glass of scotch and soda and they say, “C’mon, you have to drink. You cannot be a Gonzalez unless you drink.” I remember distinctly thinking, “Shit.” You know. “Now I’m even more white because I don’t like the taste of scotch and soda.” And um, it wasn’t until later in life that I looked back on that memory, which is a vivid memory, but it wasn’t until later that I realized, you know, they were linking being Panamanian, um, with drinking, and toughness, and things like that. My cousins, every once in a while, would could home, like with a black eye, because they got into a fight. And I could hear my mother— “Over a girl!” and yeah probably, you know, or because they stood up for themselves, talking trash to some larger guy; and you know, I remember my mom contrasting, “[David] would never do that; he’s smart; he’s going to college” and all of that stuff. And so the very traits that were different were also somehow linked to the fact that I was going to achieve. And the only positive things my mother ever said about my father, um, there was a lot of playful, um, insulting as I was growing up, at him, she was, the most repeated thing was, “I only married him because he had blue eyes and fair skin.” And that was a big accomplishment for a Panamanian woman in the 1960s.

As the lightest sibling in his family, David stood out as different. His skin color made him a target of ridicule and teasing, but also made him a symbol of “potential,” a sign of inevitable success. For him and other respondents, protecting one’s preferred racial identity proved important. While most were recognized as mixed, they were not always validated as such. In maneuvering around and manipulating mixture, they opted to protect this mixture. For many of the black multiracial respondents, especially those with darker skin color, they attempted to

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Internalizing Racial Identities 195

protect themselves from racial interrogations and identity invalidations by choosing blackness.

Some portions of David’s narrative suggest a more insidious or condemning tone than he registers. In some of his examples, he notes the way people use humor to defuse the charge of some racialized comments and observations. If one could understand this practice as a kind of “racetalk” (Myers 2005), one might consider how this discourse impacts others. What is the impact of these discourses on multiracial people like David? Does the existence and circulation of these discourses link to the kinds of border patrolling behavior of multiracials themselves? In the next section, I discuss malevolent border patrolling, drawing particular attention to the patterns that emerge in terms of people policing their own identity choices.

Malevolent Border Patrolling: Black, but Not That Kind of Black

Many people, including multiracial people themselves, believe that multiracial people cannot express individual racism. This section challenges that view, offering up many examples of multiracial individuals negotiating their participation in racism and precarious positions of privilege in the racial hierarchy. As multiracial people internalize racism, they participate in malevolent border patrolling when they express any variety of problematic stereotypes that situate them as “better than” other groups of people. In addition, malevolent border patrolling insists on a singularity. It reifies racial categories and generally denies mixture and, thus, racially mixed identities.

Some respondents who confidently asserted a multiracial identity deployed somewhat stereotypical thinking in affirming multiraciality. Take Sanchez, a black Puerto Rican man:

I’m not one-sided on my race in any degree. I’m basically like in the middle. I like Spanish food, like paella. Stuff like that. Platanos are really good. Reggaeton. Merengue. And stuff like that. I love that music. And of course, I’m black. I love hip-hop and all that other stuff, like hip hop, rap, R and B, and of course fried chicken. And all those stereotypes.

Here, Sanchez presented himself as a divided (versus composite) self, enumerating his mixture as one part Hispanic, the other black. Each part obediently follows what hegemonic culture dictates. These discursive practices cement the idea that to be black is to like rap and hip-hop or that to be Hispanic is to eat paella. Interestingly, Sanchez

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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196 The Borders of Race

acknowledges how his friends were affected by the policing racial discourses of their parents, who held stereotypical views of blacks as violent, criminal, “shacking up,” uneducated, incarcerated sex fiends (see Davis 1981; Collins 2005).

Jessica, who engaged in both protective and malevolent border patrolling, explained that growing up around black people both prompted and pressured her to identify as black because “that was really all I was exposed to.” She continued,

I identify with black culture. I listen to, you know, traditional black culture, stereotypical music, you know, hip hop, R and B, all types of music like that, and I mean, I guess just being around all black people helped me identify more with that side of me.

Jessica also described not knowing “a lot about Indian culture,” since her mother, who “you can’t tell is Indian just by talking to her” and is “pretty much fully Americanized,” has “assimilated toward it, regular culture.” In addition, “She cooks American food. She doesn’t cook Indian food.” With both sides of her extended family in the Midwest, Jessica noted that she has little contact with her parent’s relatives and other extended kinship networks.

Jessica’s reference to “regular culture” speaks to the way that “American culture” becomes the dominant reference point, despite her growing up in a multicultural family (see Takaki 1993). Her logic extends to matters of race as she relied on troublesome tropes of race to situate herself in society (see Gates 1986). Jessica deployed similar stereotypes in explaining how she arrived at a black identity. Her contradictory comments above suggest that blackness was imposed on her (the racial identity to which she should default), even though she was aware that “when people see me, they don’t see a black person because I don’t look black. I look like I’m mixed.” She actively chose and embraced blackness “because I love black people.” She did so amidst being teased by other black people:

If I say…an urban comment, you know…“What’s up??” or something that’s really urban, people will make fun of me and they’ll be like, “You ain’t black. Stop acting black.”…. Like my boyfriend. He’s black. Um, he grew up a certain way. Of course, he grew up with the mom who used to punish him, and beat him whenever he did something wrong. And he knows that the way I grew up, it wasn’t like that because I didn’t have a black mother, so you know I didn’t get punishment all the time.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 197

Here, Jessica participates in racetalk. Following Toni Morrison, Myers (2005) describes racetalk as permeated everyday life with “racial signs and symbols” designed to oppress black people. In earlier work, Myers (2003) contends that racism is always already present in social interactions, whether or not black people are present; racetalk is “symptomatic of a racial structure in which some racial/ethnic groups enjoy more privileges than others.”

In some ways then, racetalk allows Jessica to deploy racial stereotypes of black people, despite her own blackness and her admission, “I love black people!” The deployment of these stereotypes (that black mothers physically punish their children as discipline; or that “real” black people “have it rough” growing up) is a curiosity in that Jessica used it to both mark blackness and differentiate her blackness from the recognizably stereotypical form. Much like Sanchez deployed racial code words, tropes and stereotypes, so too did Jessica. To Jessica, to be “urban” is to be black; it is to grow up a “certain way” (which included examples associating verbal and physical punishment and discipline with black people). This racetalk reflected the troublesome tropes that persist which can be used to perpetuate racial stereotypes and to authenticate race.

Others seemed less aware or equipped to deal with their own stereotypical thinking about race and racial identity. For example, Toni, a young African American-identified woman with Black, White, and Native American ancestry, also faced invalidation of her racially mixed heritage. “When I say I had a white great-grandfather,” some refute her assertion by saying, “Everybody did. Who doesn’t?” Toni explained, “I acknowledge that (mixture) because that’s just my history.” Ironically, while confronting the racial ideologies of others and elaborating on others accusing her of “acting white,” Toni reified many stereotypes about blacks:7 that they “go around with nails and hair” [presumably long and loud]; and look “ghetto” and expressed some problematic ideologies of her own.8 When I asked her to clarify what “acting white” meant to her, she offered the following:

People think I “act white” because I don’t act like that. (Emphasis hers). You know what I’m saying?.... Well, I know I’m very reserved. I guess by the way I speak, that I don’t speak slang, I guess. The way I carry myself…. The way I dress; the things that I wear…. And also because I, I’ve never, I don’t hang around just black people. I’ve never gone to an all-black institution, like schools. I’ve always been around whites (attended racially diverse schools)…. Except for one. I started off at an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), and it was a culture shock for me…. Because they were African American

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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198 The Borders of Race

through and through. They weren’t like me…. They were a little bit wild, more outspoken.

By “wild,” Toni meant “just flying off the handle about everything; cursing.” Her comments about being “African American through and through” suggest an authenticity or “realness” about blackness. She knows these authenticity tests from experience yet supports them in her observations of “real” black people. She also suggested that many had “strong personalities, not saying that that’s a black thing. But it was just different than what I’m used to.” After a year, Toni transferred to a predominantly white university. Her experience “wasn’t as bad as at the HBCU [because] everyone acted like they were supposed to.” Toni’s comments illustrated that not only do some whites subscribe to racist ideologies but often blacks do as well. The comments also contrasted blackness by differentiating between “good” and “bad” blacks. Toni was not alone in her deployment of these discursive practices.

The racetalk that Toni engages in supports the point that Bonilla- Silva (2003a) makes in his work, Racism without Racists. He argues that blacks increasingly adopt the style of colorblind racism many white people rely on in this society. Bonilla-Silva (2002) also addresses this covert operation in his article, “The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism.” This article details the new face of racism—the softer, subtler kind. While some people continue to keep racial epithets in circulation, they have recently introduced a gentler style of racism into their repertoire. The stylistics of this new racism have begun to seduce not only whites, many of whom feel “outnumbered” or otherwise crowded out by immigrants and/or people of color, but also by some of those very immigrants and/or people of color. In an ironic but perhaps not altogether surprising pattern, members of the honorary white and collective black groups have coopted whites’ styles of racial discourses, which replicate and reproduce dominant racial discourses and racial hegemony.

Toni’s comments suggest some internalized racism which provides a partial explanation for her perception and description of some black people as “wild.” The result of this internalization of racism could also offer explanation as to some of the contradictions that emerge in her narrative, relating her contradictory admiring and disparaging comments about black people (see Bailey, Chung, Williams, Singh, and Terrell 2011).

In contrasting shades of blackness, these respondents promoted themselves as having ostensibly “better” kinds of black versus “not that kind of black” identities by juxtaposing themselves with the more

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 199

mythical, hyperbolic blackness. Alternately, black-identified respondents with multiracial parentage may experience border patrolling as an attempt (by others) to dis/qualify their blackness. Invoking stereotypical images of blackness can position one as an insider because it suggests an intimate familiarity with such mythologies. Conversely, circulating these stereotypes discursively could position one as an outsider, thereby compromising their blackness even further. Perhaps one could argue that a little bit of both are at play here. Toni, Jessica, and others show how racial ideologies in a post–Civil Rights Era remain contradictory at best.

That Jessica performs her blackness by getting “a little ghetto” or “putting a little accent with my speech” suggests that she is both a racial insider and an outsider to blackness. Her racial performance remains problematic in her evocation of or reliance on stereotypes to express her blackness publicly. Feeling pressured to prove her blackness (versus both her black and Asian Indian identity), Jessica border patrols herself. To alleviate some of the pressure of this border patrolling, she notes that increasingly she acknowledges that she is mixed, with plans to travel to India “to try to learn a little bit about that side of me.”

Jessica’s narrative deviated slightly from that of Sa, who pointedly felt a sense of entitlement to freely explore a number of experiences and cultures that her Black, Brazilian, and British relatives introduced and exposed her to throughout her life course: “That’s why I’m kinda like dipping into every little thing because it’s just like from one side I have my (white British) grandmother showing me this (etiquette; tea parties; ‘ballet, opera, classical music…and museums’) from the other (black American) aunts and cousins introducing me to rap music and stuff like that (‘jazz’ and ‘Luther Vandross’).”

In describing this freedom to choose, Sa not only contrasted (and racialized) the interests of family, she classed them as well, at least implicitly, with references to the “ballet” and “opera” signifying high culture and “rap” signifying low culture, in the dominant imagination. The class connotations intersect with race to suggest that ballet, opera and the like are “white” pastimes while rap music and jazz are “black” pastimes. On a related note, respondents like Sa expressed an appreciation for being able to blend racial borders by exploring their interests cross-racially (“dipping into every little thing”). Ironically, as they did so, they described different activities in bounded and race- specific ways. This reified the racial connotations (and their attendant limitations) of various social and cultural activities such that they equated ballet with whiteness or jazz with blackness (see Steele 2011). These dichotomies are false but, paradoxically, when mixed, they can

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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200 The Borders of Race

signal blending, border crossing, and affirm multiracial mixture. Indeed, they signal mixture.

Respondents who were border patrolled by significant others did not seem to be as easygoing about border blending. In general, they appeared more tentative and policing of their own interests as a result. Respondents whose families encouraged border blending, then, more easily seemed to embrace their racial composition. Unlike respondents who felt regulated and disciplined by others’ borderism, Sa, for example, felt unrestricted. Since she had not internalized others’ borderism, she felt free to explore her interests without being a docile body pressured to follow racial scripts (Foucault 1977).

Another expression of borderism involved respondents articulating antagonism about or frustration with being misread or misrecognized racially and ethnically (see Harper 2005 and Harris-Perry 2011 on misrecognition). While some respondents regarded such misreading as complimentary because it facilitated their ability to blend into different racial groups, other respondents responded less favorably to this misreading that they felt was pejorative. This ambiguity sometimes increased their social access to more groups of people.

Zach, a white Asian multiracial man, revealed more interesting, almost incitable ideas about his reactions to being misread as Hispanic. Because he jokingly referred to himself as a “flip,” which some Filipinos do (see Francia and Gamalinda 1996), I considered his experience in transitioning from “‘flip’ to ‘spic’” a provocative way to draw attention to his ostensibly internalized racism and the white privilege he enjoys as an “honorary white” or “not fully Asian” person. Bailey, Chung, Williams, Singh, and Terrell (2011) discuss internalized racism or racial oppression as it relates to black individuals, but one could argue similar patterns may be observed in multiracial individuals of various racial combinations. The aforementioned transition from one racial location and consciousness to another occurs when his friends fail to grant him honorary whiteness by problematically pointing out Zach’s difference through “jokes.” They do not make fun of his Filipino identity, notably, but rather the racialized ethnicity for which he is often mistaken. Speculatively, Zach’s friends tease him about this, knowing of his displeasure in being mistaken for a Latino. He expressed this displeasure in misrecognition to me at various points in our interview conversation. He provided this explanation and observation of the humor his friends deploy to deal with the differences between them. Note their use of the dimunitive, “little,” to describe a Mexican person; this is indicative of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003a) argues is one of the primary styles of colorblind racism:

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 201

It seems like it’s just a big joke, like my friends that are white, they’re like, “Ah, you little Mexican, come here.” I mean, they don’t mean any harm by it. I know they’re just kidding; they’re just messing with me. Like I have one friend who’s, he’s a white guy, and I call him fatty, because he’s a big guy. And he’s like, “Come here, you little wetback. Will you come cut my grass?” That kind of stuff, and it’s all fun and games so I don’t take any offense to it. Like the thing that really irritates me though is when I go to a Mexican restaurant or someplace and like a Mexican, or a Latino generally, will come up to me or my girlfriend and just assume, right off the bat, that we speak Spanish. And I’m like, “Dude, I don’t speak Spanish” and they have this look like, “Why not?” and I’m like, “Because I’m not Latino. I don’t have to know Spanish.”

His racial attitudes about Latinos are insensitive, if not abrasive. They are not, however, altogether uncommon, particularly in the national and local context of intensified public debates and discussions regarding the (legal and/or illegal) presence of immigrants, especially Mexicans in the South (see also Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997). His vehemence becomes more visible and striking in opposition to the racist jocularity he exchanges among friends, most of whom identify as white.

Rather than enjoy the multiple honorary memberships he is granted because of his ambiguity (that some mistake him as Hispanic), Zach reacts with frustration. Ironically, he remains tolerant, if not accomodating, of the racist jokes and race talk his friends casually deploy in his presence (see Houts Picca and Feagin 2007; Myers 2005). Arguably, when he joins in the joking, he might even be viewed as encouraging their behavior. Whether he forgives them for joking or actually does not even seem to find any offense in this type of humor, he takes obvious offense to strangers misperceiving him as Hispanic or presuming that he knows Spanish. He appears insistent on distancing himself from Latinos or Hispanics, so much so that he disregards that others may see him as multilingual (a speaker of Spanish and English), rather than Spanish-speaking only. So palpable is his aversion to this perception that he rejects this possibility and firmly celebrates that he primarily knows and speaks only one language.

This, in some ways, exposes not only how his white friends view him as “honorary white” or “not really Asian” (except for the “good food” his Asian mother is able to prepare), but also suggests that he 1) may see himself similarly, as “honorary white,” and 2) may harbor potentially prejudicial views of different racial/ethnic groups (except whites and Asians).

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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202 The Borders of Race

What is ironic about Zach’s opposition to honorary Hispanic membership, or more generally to being perceived as of a group to which one does not claim membership, involves the lack of information that people have about the very groups to which they do or could claim membership. For example, because one could understand Filipino as a mix of Chinese and Spanish (Root 1997; Espiritu 2001, 2003, 2004), one could read Zach’s frustration with or rejection of being misperceived as Spanish as a form of internalized racism—or a lack of literacy or knowledge about the complexity of multiraciality among Filipinos. One might suggest he is border patrolling himself, except that he appears unaware of what Filipino mixture includes (historically and in contemporary society) (see Ocampo 2016).

To not know the composite parts of his identity prohibits him from seeing that disliking or distancing himself from Hispanics/Latinos could be interpreted as disliking or distancing from himself. While I cannot draw this conclusion, I share part of his narrative as an example of how easily some multiracial people can access white privilege, revise their own family histories to maintain this privilege or enjoy “honorary white” status, and reinforce socially constructed differences between racial and ethnic groups. His example also reveals a certain fragility or precarity in that honorary position.

Zach’s experience echoes that of Tracy whose friends reportedly directed a lot of racetalk at her as well. As I discussed in the last chapter, Tracy also enjoyed an honorary white status in her mostly white friendship group. However, because she reportedly ate rice and “Chinese food, or Asian food, everyday just about,” she faced a similar set of insensitive and racist remarks or “jokes” from her friends. In both examples, Zach and Tracy espouse colorblind narratives throughout the course of our interviews yet these moments they offer punctuate, if not rupture, their colorblindness. Their narratives reveal a far messier negotiation that they must make, as they may want to preserve their honorary white membership in the friendship circles and their integrity. Reacting “too strongly” could easily jeopardize their status and reinforce racial divisions that otherwise get ignored or minimized. Their experiences suggest that these negotiations can much more easily be framed through humor because that interpretation is more forgiving. To interpret the jokes as more malicious, or racist, would require emotional work and communication that multiracial individuals and their mostly white peers may not be prepared to handle effectively. This sobering reality suggests that more work must be done to equip people with the tools to talk more openly and honestly about race, racial difference, and racial discrimination on individual and institutional levels.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Internalizing Racial Identities 203

Just think about the impact and injury that these “jokes” have on young people crystallizing their racial identities (see Collins 1998b; Myers 2005). Is it any wonder that multiracial individuals engage in racial border patrolling, denying parts of their parentage to blend in, instead of blending borders?

Conclusions

What many of the narratives of multiracial respondents revealed is the sobering reality of racism. That is, as some multiracial individuals acknowledge the way that they are targets of racial discrimination and differential treatment and that they are positioned at a disadvantage in the dating and mate selection process, others participate in and produce what Kristen Myers (2005) calls “racetalk.” Sometimes, the same individuals may be targets of discrimination and also participants in perpetuating it individually. This participation upholds and circulates the problematic racial ideologies of members of various racial groups. As multiracial individuals negotiate their potentially shifting mixture, they may manage their multiplicity by border patrolling themselves.

Policing or constraining their own choices, instead of enjoying and exploring these choices, reflects a trend that reinforces Bonilla-Silva’s (2004) contention that anyone living in a racial pigmentocracy and hierarchy will learn to participate in the process. Multiracial people may choose to present themselves in ways that bring them better access to racial privilege, positioning themselves in closer proximity to some color lines and further from others. Doing so also upholds the antiblack racism that persists in this country and the dis-privileges that collective black members experience.

In Chapter Six, I build on my discussion of borderism to show how people who are policed, in terms of their racial identities, produce new ways of seeing race. Through their own literal and figurative journeys, many multiracial people cross racial borders as well as geographical ones. What does this multiracial movement do to our collective conceptualizations of race when we are encouraged to take into account different racial paradigms? How do these migrations facilitate racial transformations and reconfigurations in the racial classification system and the way people locate, dislocate, and/or relocate themselves within this system, in this society, and others?

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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204 The Borders of Race

Notes 1 He held this belief despite saying, “Almost everybody’s a mixture of the

oppressed and the oppressor because when you look at how many children were the children of sexual, I mean, I hate to say it but, sexual molestation of the white master on the black slave. A lot of kids came from that. And so you are a mixture of the oppressor and the oppressed.”

2 Dakota revisits this term and provides the following elaboration: “My mom’s best friend is also Korean and married to a White man. They have two daughters which are half Korean and so when we are out, we are like whatever, but when they are at home with us and mom, and they are speaking Korean, we can start to be like little Korean girls or whatever, but only when it’s convenient like that. That’s what I meant when I said ‘convenient.’”

3 More evidence of this “spicing up” of whiteness occurred with Rose’s discussion of exploring more of her Native American ancestry: “I think it would be fun, something to learn, about my culture…. Um, I think I would try to promote the heritage more, if I could, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t promote it, I think it’s great to promote other cultures but I think if I knew I was definitely a part of it, then I would try to participate in more things that were culturally from that sect of Indian culture.”

4 Rosalind Fischer (2006) described these as “rules and roles that support and maintain the domination of people of color.”

5 “I think if it was like in a class, where people were asking about it, I’d want to share more about it, but maybe professional situations where they don’t want to know details, just they want to know, ‘What are you?’ Okay, move on. I would probably just say white.”

6 By this, I mean that she mostly grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods and “black settings”; and established black friendship networks.

7 Toni also reified stereotypes about whites, noting their reserved demeanor, proper speech, and polished appearance and dress. These examples illustrate racetalk (2005).

8 Bonilla-Silva (2003a,b) discussed how some nonwhite groups possess more prowhite attitudes than whites themselves. The converse, then, involves blacks having anti-black attitudes that match or exceed that of whites.

Mills, Melinda. <i>The Borders of Race : Patrolling "Multiracial" Identities</i>, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360. Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.

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Assignment 3: Assault, Battery, and Crimes against Persons Review the following scenario in order to complete this assignment: (A) is walking to towards her car in the shopping mall parking lot when a man suddenly jumps in front of her, points a knife in her face, and demands her purse. The attacker strikes (A) and rips the handle of her purse. Fortunately, (A) took self-defense class and hits the attacker with her knee and fists, keeps her purse, and runs to safety. Use the Internet or Strayer databases to research assault, battery, and crimes against persons.

Write a four to six (4-6) page paper in which you:

1. Compare and contrast the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Provide one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

2. Determine whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Next, determine whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Justify your response.

3. Suggest one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Support the validity of your response.

Consider the following change to the scenario. (A) is forced at knifepoint into her car and made to drive the suspect away from the mall, where they encounter a police roadblock. (A) is not allowed to leave the car, despite the police negotiator’s demand that she be allowed to exit the car.

1. Discuss the crime of kidnapping. Next, debate whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Provide a rationale to support your response.

2. Differentiate between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Support or critique the notion that one of the two crimes is more serious than the other. Justify your response.

Consider the following change to the scenario. (A) and the attacker are romantically linked and are having an argument in the shopping mall parking lot. (A) pulls a knife from her purse and swings it at the attacker.

1. Debate whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Provide a rationale to support your response.

2. Use at least three (3) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar types of websites do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements: 

· This course requires use of new  Strayer Writing Standards (SWS ). The format is different than other Strayer University courses. Please take a moment to review the SWS documentation for details. 

· Be typed, double-spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow SWS or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions. 

· Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are: 

· Explain the role of individuals and federal, state, and local government agencies in crime fighting and the prosecution of criminal offenses. 

· Analyze the essential legal elements of criminal conduct. 

· Explain the concept of criminal liability. 

· Apply the concept of criminal responsibility and give examples of justifications, excuses, and incapacity for criminal acts. 

· Contrast crimes against persons, crimes against property, and other types of criminal conduct. 

· Use technology and information resources to research issues in criminal law. 

· Write clearly and concisely about criminal law using proper writing mechanics. 

Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic/organization of the paper, and language and writing skills, using the following  rubric

Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic / organization of the paper, and language and writing skills, using the following rubric.

Points: 190

Assignment 3: Assault, Battery, and Crimes against Persons

Criteria

 

Unacceptable

Below 60% F

Meets Minimum Expectations

60-69% D

 

Fair

70-79% C

 

Proficient

80-89% B

 

Exemplary

90-100% A

1. Compare and contrast the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Provide one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

Weight: 15%

Did not submit or incompletely compared and contrasted the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Did not submit or incompletely provided one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

Insufficiently compared and contrasted the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Insufficiently provided one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

Partially compared and contrasted the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Partially provided one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

Satisfactorily compared and contrasted the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Satisfactorily provided one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

Thoroughly compared and contrasted the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Thoroughly provided one (1) example of each crime to support your response.

2. Determine whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Next, determine whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Justify your response. Weight: 15%

Did not submit or incompletely determined whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Did not submit or incompletely determined whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Did not submit or incompletely justified your response.

Insufficiently determined whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Insufficiently determined whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Insufficiently justified your response.

Partially determined whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Partially determined whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Partially justified your response.

Satisfactorily determined whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Satisfactorily determined whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Satisfactorily justified your response.

Thoroughly determined whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions as assault. Thoroughly determined whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Thoroughly justified your response.

3. Suggest one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Support the validity of your response.

Weight: 15%

Did not submit or incompletely suggested one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Did not submit or incompletely supported the validity of your response.

Insufficiently suggested one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Insufficiently supported the validity of your response.

Partially suggested one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Partially supported the validity of your response.

Satisfactorily suggested one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Satisfactorily supported the validity of your response.

Thoroughly suggested one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault and / or battery to simple assault. Thoroughly supported the validity of your response.

4. Discuss the crime of kidnapping. Next, debate whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Provide a rationale to support your response.

Weight: 15%

Did not submit or incompletely discussed the crime of kidnapping. Did not submit or incompletely debated whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Did not submit or incompletely provided a rationale to support your response.

Insufficiently discussed the crime of kidnapping. Insufficiently debated whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Insufficiently provided a rationale to support your response.

Partially discussed the crime of kidnapping. Partially debated whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Partially provided a rationale to support your response.

Satisfactorily discussed the crime of kidnapping. Satisfactorily debated whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Satisfactorily provided a rationale to support your response.

Thoroughly discussed the crime of kidnapping. Thoroughly debated whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Thoroughly provided a rationale to support your response.

5. Differentiate between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Support or critique the notion that one of the two crimes is more serious than the other. Justify your response. Justify your response.

Weight: 15%

Did not submit or incompletely differentiated between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Did not submit or incompletely supported or critiqued the notion that one of the two crimes is more heinous than the other. Did not submit or incompletely justified your response.

Insufficiently differentiated between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Insufficiently supported or critiqued the notion that one of the two crimes is more heinous than the other. Insufficiently justified your response.

Partially differentiated between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Partially supported or critiqued the notion that one of the two crimes is more heinous than the other. Partially justified your response.

Satisfactorily differentiated between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Satisfactorily supported or critiqued the notion that one of the two crimes is more heinous than the other. Satisfactorily justified your response.

Thoroughly differentiated between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Thoroughly supported or critiqued the notion that one of the two crimes is more heinous than the other. Thoroughly justified your response.

6. Debate whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Provide a rationale to support your response.

Weight: 10%

Did not submit or incompletely debated whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Did not submit or incompletely provided a rationale to support your response.

Insufficiently debated whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Insufficiently provided a rationale to support your response.

Partially debated whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Partially provided a rationale to support your response.

Satisfactorily debated whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Satisfactorily provided a rationale to support your response.

Thoroughly debated whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Thoroughly provided a rationale to support your response.

7. Cite 3 references.

Weight: 5%

No references provided.

Does not meet the required number of references; all references poor quality choices.

Does not meet the required number of references; some references poor quality choices.

Meets number of required references; all references high quality choices.

Exceeds number of required references; all references high quality choices.

8. Clarity, writing mechanics, and formatting requirements

Weight: 10%

More than 8 errors present.

7-8 errors present.

5-6 errors present.

3-4 errors present.

0-2 errors present.

Assignment

3:

Assault,

Battery,

and

Crimes

against

Persons

Review the following scenario in order to complete this assignment:

(A) is walking to towards her car in the shopping mall parking lot when a man suddenly

jumps in front of her, points a knife in her face, and demands her purse. The attacker

strikes (A) and rips the handle of her purse. Fortunately, (A) took self

-

defense

class and

hits the attacker with her knee and fists, keeps her purse, and runs to safety.

Use the Internet or Strayer databases to research assault, battery, and crimes against

persons.

Write a four to six (4

-

6) page paper in which you:

1.

Compare and contrast the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon

and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Provide one (1) example of each crime to support your

response.

2.

Determine whether or not the juri

sdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions

as assault. Next, determine whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Justify

your response.

3.

Suggest one (1) different fact pattern that would chan

ge the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault

and / or battery to simple assault. Support the validity of your response.

Consider the following change to the scenario. (A) is forced at knifepoint into her car

and made to drive the suspect away from

the mall, where they encounter a police

roadblock. (A) is not allowed to leave the car, despite the police negotiator’s demand

that she be allowed to exit the car.

1.

Discuss the crime of kidnapping. Next, debate whether or not the suggested change in Questi

on 3 would allow

the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Provide a rationale to support your response.

2.

Differentiate between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Support or critique the notion that one of

the two crimes is mo

re serious than the other. Justify your response.

Consider the following change to the scenario. (A) and the attacker are romantically

linked and are having an argument in the shopping mall parking lot. (A) pulls a knife

from her purse and swings it at the

attacker.

1.

Debate whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Provide a rationale to

support your response.

2.

Use at least three (3) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar types of

websites do

not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

·

This course requires use of new

Strayer

Writing

Standards

(SWS

). The format is different than other Strayer

University courses. Please take a moment to review the SWS documentation for details.

·

Be typed, double

-

spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one

-

inch margins on all sides; citations

and references must follow SWS or school

-

specific format. Check with your professor for any additional

instructions.

·

Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name

, the

course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment

page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

Assignment 3: Assault, Battery, and Crimes against Persons

Review the following scenario in order to complete this assignment:

(A) is walking to towards her car in the shopping mall parking lot when a man suddenly

jumps in front of her, points a knife in her face, and demands her purse. The attacker

strikes (A) and rips the handle of her purse. Fortunately, (A) took self-defense class and

hits the attacker with her knee and fists, keeps her purse, and runs to safety.

Use the Internet or Strayer databases to research assault, battery, and crimes against

persons.

Write a four to six (4-6) page paper in which you:

1. Compare and contrast the key similarities and differences between the crime of assault with a deadly weapon

and the crime of felonious and aggravated battery. Provide one (1) example of each crime to support your

response.

2. Determine whether or not the jurisdiction in which the crime has occurred should consider the man’s actions

as assault. Next, determine whether or not the jurisdiction should punish the man’s actions as battery. Justify

your response.

3. Suggest one (1) different fact pattern that would change the scenario from felonious and aggravated assault

and / or battery to simple assault. Support the validity of your response.

Consider the following change to the scenario. (A) is forced at knifepoint into her car

and made to drive the suspect away from the mall, where they encounter a police

roadblock. (A) is not allowed to leave the car, despite the police negotiator’s demand

that she be allowed to exit the car.

1. Discuss the crime of kidnapping. Next, debate whether or not the suggested change in Question 3 would allow

the court to convict the attacker for the crime of kidnapping. Provide a rationale to support your response.

2. Differentiate between the crimes of hostage taking and kidnapping. Support or critique the notion that one of

the two crimes is more serious than the other. Justify your response.

Consider the following change to the scenario. (A) and the attacker are romantically

linked and are having an argument in the shopping mall parking lot. (A) pulls a knife

from her purse and swings it at the attacker.

1. Debate whether or not (A)’s action would require the attacker to defend himself. Provide a rationale to

support your response.

2. Use at least three (3) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar types of

websites do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

 This course requires use of new Strayer Writing Standards (SWS). The format is different than other Strayer

University courses. Please take a moment to review the SWS documentation for details.

 Be typed, double-spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations

and references must follow SWS or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional

instructions.

 Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the

course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment

page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

Communicating professionally and ethically is one of the essential skill sets we can teach you at Strayer. The following guidelines will ensure:

· Your writing is professional · You avoid plagiarizing others, which is essential to writing ethically · You give credit to others in your work

Visit Strayer’s Academic Integrity Center for more information.

Winter 2019

Strayer University Writing Standards 2

… Include page numbers.

… Use 1-inch margins.

… Use Arial, Courier, Times New Roman, or Calibri font style.

… Use 10-, 11-, or 12-point font size for the body of your text.

… Use numerals (1, 2, 3, and so on) or spell out numbers (one, two, three, and so on). Be consistent with your choice throughout the assignment.

… Use either single or double spacing, according to assignment guidelines.

… If assignment requires a title page: · Include the assignment title, your name, course title, your professor’s name, and the

date of submission on a separate page.

… If assignment does not require a title page (stated in the assignment details): a. Include all required content in a header at the top of your document.

or b. Include all required content where appropriate for assignment format. Examples of appropriate places per assignment: letterhead of a business letter assignment or a title slide for a PowerPoint presentation.

… Use appropriate language and be concise.

… Write in active voice when possible. Find tips here.

… Use the point of view (first, second, or third person) required by the assignment guidelines.

… Use spelling and grammar check and proofread to help ensure your work is error free.

… Use credible sources to support your ideas/work. Find tips here.

… Cite your sources throughout your work when you borrow someone else’s words or ideas. Give credit to the authors.

… Look for a permalink tool for a webpage when possible (especially when an electronic source requires logging in like the Strayer Library). Find tips here.

… Add each cited source to the Source List at the end of your assignment. (See the Giving Credit to Authors and Sources section for more details.)

… Don’t forget to cite and add your textbook to the Source List if you use it as a source.

… Include a Source List when the assignment requires research or if you cite the textbook.

… Type “Sources” centered on the first line of the page.

… List the sources that you used in your assignment.

… Organize sources in a numbered list and in order of use throughout the paper. Use the original number when citing a source multiple times.

… For more information, see the Source List section.

General Standards

Use Appropriate Formatting

Title Your Work

Write Clearly

Cite Credible Sources

Build a Source List

Strayer University Writing Standards 3

Writing Assignments Strayer University uses several different types of writing assignments. The Strayer University Student Writing Standards are designed to allow flexibility in formatting your assignment and giving credit to your sources. This section covers specific areas to help you properly format and develop your assignments. Note: The specific format guidelines override guidelines in the General Standards section.

Paper and Essay Specific Format Guidelines

PowerPoint or Slideshow Specific Format Guidelines

… Use double spacing throughout the body of your assignment.

… Use a consistent 12-point font throughout your assignment submission. (For acceptable fonts, see General Standards section.)

… Use the point of view (first or third person) required by the assignment guidelines.

… Section headings can be used to divide different content areas. Align section headings (centered) on the page, be consistent, and include at least two section headings in the assignment.

… Follow all other General Standards section guidelines.

… Title slides should include the project name (title your work to capture attention if possible), a subtitle (if needed), the course title, and your name.

… Use spacing that improves professional style (mixing single and double spacing as needed).

… Use a background color or image on slides.

… Use Calibri, Lucida Console, Helvetica, Futura, Myriad Pro, or Gill Sans font styles.

… Use 28-32 point font size for the body of your slides (based on your chosen font style). Avoid font sizes below 24-point.

… Use 36-44 point font size for the titles of your slides (based on chosen font style).

… Limit content per slide (no more than 7 lines on any slide and no more than 7 words per line).

… Include slide numbers when your slide show has 3+ slides. You may place the numbers wherever you like (but be consistent).

… Include appropriate images that connect directly to slide content or presentation content.

… Follow additional guidelines from the PowerPoint or Slideshow Specific Format Guidelines section and assignment guidelines.

Strayer University Writing Standards 4

Giving Credit to Authors and Sources When quoting or paraphrasing another source, you need to give credit by using an in-text citation. An in-text citation includes the author’s last name and the number of the source from the Source List. A well-researched assignment has at least as many sources as pages (see Writing Assignments for the required number of sources). Find tips here.

Option #1: Paraphrasing Rewording Source Information in Your Own Words · Rephrase the source information in your words.

Be sure not to repeat the same words of the author.

· Add a number to the end of your source (which will tie to your Source List).

· Remember, you cannot just replace words of the original sentence.

 Examples ORIGINAL SOURCE

“Writing at a college level requires informed research.”

PARAPHRASING

As Harvey wrote, when writing a paper for higher education, it is critical to research and cite sources (1).

When writing a paper for higher education, it is imperative to research and cite sources (Harvey, 1).

Option #2: Quoting Citing Another Person’s Work Word-For-Word · Place quotation marks at the beginning and the end of

the quoted information.

· Add a number to the end of your source (which will tie to your Source List).

· Do not quote more than one to two sentences (approximately 25 words) at a time.

· Do not start a sentence with a quotation. · Introduce and explain quotes within the context of

your paper.

 Examples ORIGINAL SOURCE

“Writing at a college level requires informed research.”

QUOTING

Harvey wrote in his book, “Writing at a college level requires informed research” (1).

Many authors agree, “Writing at a college level requires informed research” (Harvey, 1).

Strayer University Writing Standards 5

Page Numbers When referencing multiple pages in a text book or other large book, consider adding page numbers to help the reader understand where the information you referenced can be found. You can do this in three ways:

a. In the body of your paper;

or b. In the citation;

or c. By listing page numbers in the order they were used in your paper on the Source List.

Check with your instructor or the assignment guidelines to see if there is a preference based on your course.

 Example IN-TEXT CITATION

(Harvey, 1, p. 16)

In the example, the author is Harvey, the source list number is 1, and the page number that this information can be found on is page 16.

Multiple Sources (Synthesizing) Synthesizing means using multiple sources in one sentence or paragraph (typically paraphrased) to make a strong point. This is normally done with more advanced writing, but could happen in any writing where you use more than one source.

The key here is clarity. If you paraphrase multiple sources in the same sentence (of paragraph if the majority of the information contained in the paragraph is paraphrased), you should include each source in the citation. Separate sources using semi-colons (;) and create the citation in the normal style that you would for using only one source (Name, Source Number).

 Example SYNTHESIZED IN-TEXT CITATION

(Harvey, 1; Buchanan, 2)

In the example, the authors Harvey and Buchanan were paraphrased to help the student make a strong point. Harvey is the first source on the source list, and Buchanan is the second source on the source list.

Traditional Sources

Strayer University Writing Standards 6

Discussion Posts When quoting or paraphrasing a source for discussion threads, include the source number in parenthesis after the body text where you quote or paraphrase. At the end of your post, type the word “Sources” and below that include a list of any sources that you cited.

If you pulled information from more than one source, continue to number the additional sources in the order that they appear in your post.

For more information on building a Source List Entry, see Source List section.

 Examples SAMPLE POST

The work is the important part of any writing assignment. According to Smith, “writing things down is the biggest challenge” (1). This is significant because…

The other side of this is also important. It is noted that “actually writing isn’t important as much as putting ideas somewhere useful” (2).

SOURCES

1. William Smith. 2018. The Way Things Are. http://www.samplesite.com/writing

2. Patricia Smith. 2018. The Way Things Really Are. http://www.betterthansample.com/tiger

A web source is any source accessed through an internet browser. Before using any source, first determine its credibility. Then decide if the source is appropriate and relevant for your project. Find tips here.

Home Pages A home page is the main page that loads when you type a standard web address. For instance, if you type Google. com into the web browser, you will be taken to Google’s home page.

If you do need to cite a home page, use the webpage’s title from the browser. This found by moving your mouse cursor over the webpage name at the top of the browser. When citing a homepage, it is likely because there is a news thread, image, or basic piece of information on a company that you wish to include in your assignment.

Specific Web Pages If you are using any web page other than the home page, include the specific title of the page and the direct link (when possible) for that specific page in your Source List Entry.

If your assignment used multiple pages from the same author/ source, create separate Source List Entries for each page when possible (if the title and/or web address is different).

Web Sources

Strayer University Writing Standards 7

Effective Internet Links When sharing a link to an article with your instructor and classmates, start with a brief summary and why you chose to share it.

Be sure to check the link you’re posting to be sure it will work for your classmates. They should be able to just click on the link and go directly to your shared site.

Share vs. URL Options

Cutting and pasting the URL (web address) from your browser may not allow others to view your source. This makes it hard for people to engage with the content you used.

To avoid this problem, look for a “share” option and choose that when possible so your classmates and professor get the full, direct link. Always test your link(s) before submitting to make sure they work.

If you cannot properly share the link, include the article as an attachment. Interested classmates and your professor can reference the article shared as an attachment. Find tips here.

 Examples POOR EXAMPLE

Hey check out this article: http://www. Jobs4You.FED/Jobs_u_can_get

BETTER EXAMPLE

After reading the textbook this week, I researched job sites. I found an article on how to find the best job site depending on the job you’re looking for. The author shared some interesting tools such as job sites that collect job postings from other sites and ranks them from newest to oldest, depending on category. Check out the article at this link: http://www.Jobs4You. FED/Jobs_u_can_get

Charts, images, and tables should be centered and followed by an in-text citation. Design your page and place a citation below the chart, image, or table. When referring to the chart, image, or table in the body of the assignment, use the citation.

On your Source List, provide the following details of the visual:

· Author’s name (if created by you, provide your name) · Date (if created by you, provide the year) · Type (Chart, Image, or Table) · How to find it (link or other information – See Source List section for additional details).

Charts, Images, and Tables

Strayer University Writing Standards 8

Source List The Source List (which includes the sources that you used in your assignment) is a new page you add at the end of your paper. The list has two purposes: it gives credit to the authors that you use and gives your readers enough information to find the source without your help. Build your Source List as you write.

· Type “Sources” at the top of a new page. · Include a numbered list of the sources you used in your paper (the numbers

indicate the order in which you used them).

1. Use the number one (1) for the first source used in the paper, the number two (2) for the second source, and so on.

2. Use the same number for a source if you use it multiple times.

· Ensure each source includes five parts: author or organization, publication date, title, page number (if needed), and how to find it. If you have trouble finding these details, then re-evaluate the credibility of your source.

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or a permalink.

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AUTHOR PUBLICATION DATE TITLE PAGE NO. HOW TO FIND

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The date the source was published. If the source has no publication date, use “No date” where you would list the date.

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Instruct readers how to find all sources. Keep explanations simple and concise, but provide enough information so the source can be located. Note: It is your responsibility to make sure the source can be found.

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Michael Harvey

In the case of multiple authors, only list the first.

2013

This is not the same as copyright date, which is denoted by ©

The Nuts & Bolts of College Writing

p. 1

Include p. and the page(s) used.

http://libdatab.strayer.edu/ login?url=http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx

Setting Up the Source List Page

Creating a Source List Entry

Source List Elements

Strayer University Writing Standards 9

 How It Will Look in Your Source List

1. Michael Harvey. 2013. The Nuts & Bolts of College Writing. p. 1. http://libdatab.strayer.edu/ login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx

 Sample Source List

1. Michael Harvey. 2013. The Nuts & Bolts of College Writing. p. 1. http://libdatab.strayer.edu/login?url=http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx

2. William R. Stanek. 2010. Storyboarding Techniques chapter in Effective Writing for Business, College and Life. http:// libdatab.strayer.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=359141&site=e ds-live&scope=site&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_23

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4. Anya Kamenetz. July 10, 2015. The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives. https://www.npr.org/sections/ ed/2015/07/10/419202925/the-writing-assignment-that-changes-lives

5. Brad Thor. June 14, 2016. The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got. http://time.com/4363050/brad-thor-best-writing-advice/

6. Karen Hertzberg. June 15, 2017. How to Improve Writing Skills in 15 Easy Steps. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/ how-to-improve-writing-skills/

7. Roy Peter Clark. 2008. Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. p.55-67. Book on Amazon.com.

8. C.M. Gill. 2014. The Psychology of Grading and Scoring chapter in Essential Writing Skills for College & Beyond. Textbook.

9. ABC Company’s Policy & Procedures Committee. No Date. Employee Dress and Attendance Policy. Policy in my office.

10. Henry M. Sayre. 2014. The Humanities: Culture, Continuity and Change, Vol. 1. This is the HUM111 textbook.

11. Savannah Student. 2018. Image. http://www.studentsite.com

12. Don Dollarsign. 2018. Chart. http://www.allaboutthemoney.com

13. Company Newsletter Name. 2018. Table. Company Newsletter Printed Copy (provided upon request).

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Title Multiculturalism in the United States : current issues, contemporary voices

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Section to Scan The politics of ethnic authenticity: building native American identities and communities / Joane Nagel

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• httDs://roaer.ucsd.edu/search~S9?/i0761986480 (alk. paper)

R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S O F R A C E A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F I D E N T I T Y

9

The Politics of Ethnic Authenticity: Building Native American Identities

and Communities Joane Nagel

No one knows for sure how many indigenous North Americans were present when Colum­ bus landed in 1492, although estimates sug­ gest that numbers were in the several mil­ lions. Over the next 400 years, there was a dramatic decline in the native population; by the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Census Bureau counted fewer than 250,000 Native Americans in the United States.1 The decrease in the number of native people was accompanied by a marked reduction in the number of native societies or "tribes." Dis­ tinct language and dialect communities at the time of contact were estimated at more than 1,000 (Swanton 1952).2 This number has dwindled to around 320 Indian groups or "entities" in the lower 48 states that are offi­ cially recognized by the U.S. Department of the Interior in the 1990s.3

In spite of these declines, the twentieth century has seen a remarkable increase in the American Indian population, from its nadir of 237,196 in 1900 to 1,874,536 in the 1990 census (Snipp 1989; U.S. Census Bureau 1991). This growth is summarized in Table 9.1. As we can see, native population figures

for the past 90 years represent a reversal of 4 centuries of decline in the North American Indian population: beginning with fewer than one half million at the turn of the cen­ tury, climbing back up to nearly 2 million in 1990. Although these trends reflect a tragic pattern of death and decline, they also reveal an extraordinary trend toward recovery and renewal. The twentieth century resurgence of the American Indian population is a truly re­ markable story of ethnic survival and re­ birth.

Population projections undertaken by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1986 suggest that Native American demo­ graphic recovery is far from over. The OTA projected the American Indian population for the next century using as a base popula­ tion the number of Indians in 1980 living in 32 states with federal reservations according to various degrees of native ancestry (so-called blood quantum). Table 9.2 shows these projections.

As we can see from Table 9.2, the total in­ crease in the Indian population during the next century is expected to be twelvefold,

Representations of Race and the Politics of Identity 113

Table 9.1 American Indian Population—1890-1990

Year Number % Change

1890 248,253 1900 237,196 -5

1910 276,927 17

1920 244,437 -13

1930 343,352 40

1940 345,252 1 1950 357,499 4 1960 523,591 46 1970 792,730 51 1980 1,364,033 72 1990 1,873,536 38 Sources: 1890-1970: Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), p. 160; figures for 1980 and 1990 are from U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of the Census Releases 1990 Census Counts on Specific Racial Croups (Census Bureau Press Release CB91 -215, Wednesday, June 12, 1991), Table 1.

growing from 1.3 million in 1980 to 15.8 mil­ lion in 2080. What is especially interesting about these projections is the changing inter­ nal composition of Native America. Snipp (1989) reported on the projections made by the OTA using Bureau of Indian Affairs blood quantum data and taking "into account the prevalence of racial intermarriage among In­ dians based on data from the 1980 census" (p. 166).

The OTA projection begins in 1980 with 1.1 million individuals with 50 percent or

more Indian ancestry (blood quantum), 120,068 with 25 percent to 49 percent native blood quantum, and 46,636 with less than 25 percent native ancestry. A century later, the demographic picture would look very differ­ ent. By 2080, the OTA projects a stable num­ ber of Indians with blood quanta of 50 per­ cent or more (1.3 million in 2080). However, the OTA predicts a tremendous growth in the other two categories, with 5.2 million indi­ viduals with blood quanta ranging from 25 percent to 49 percent and 9.3 million native people with less than one quarter Indian an­ cestry. This population explosion of Indians of mixed ancestry reduces the percentage of the native population with 50 percent or more Indian ancestry from 86.9 percent of the native population in 1980 to only 8.2 per­ cent of the native population in 2080. Con­ comitantly, the percentage of the Indian pop ulation with 25 percent to 49 percent blood quantum rises from 9.5 percent in 1980 to 32.9 percent in 2080, and the percentage of the Indian population with less than 25 per­ cent blood quantum increases the most, ris­ ing from 3.6 percent of the population in 1980 to 58.9 percent in 2080.

What do these predicted changes in the ancestry of American Indians mean? This fu­ ture portrait of Native America painted by the OTA is one of increased racial diversity, with more and more Native Americans of mixed Indian/non-Indian ancestry. The im­ plications of this mixing are important for understanding what it will mean to be an

Table 9.2 Office of Technology Assessment: Indian Population Projections (1980-2080)

Percent Indian Ance

Year 50% and above 2596-4996

1980 1,125,746(86.9%) 123,068(9.5%) 46,636(3.6%) 1,295,450(100.0%) 2080 1,292,911 (8.2%) 5,187,411 (32.9%) 5,187,411 (58,9%) 15,767,206(100.0%) Source: C. Matthew Snipp, American Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), p. 167.

1 1 4 Multiculturalism in the United States

American Indian in the next century, in par­ ticular in light of contemporary controver­ sies about Indian authenticity and debates over what constitutes legitimate claims to In­ dian ancestry and group membership.

The puzzle of why the American Indian population increased so dramatically in the last decades of the twentieth century and the implications of the racial diversity of future generations of Native Americans are two of the main reasons for my interest in American Indian history and contemporary political and social life. For a sociologist, both puzzles and change pose a challenge. Puzzles are to be solved, and change is to be understood. My solution to the rising numbers of American Indians in the post-Second World War era can be summarized as a combination of fac­ tors involving the urbanization, education, and political activism of American Indians, all of which led to an increased sense of ethnic pride and thus an increased likelihood of identifying oneself as "American Indian" (for a full explanation, see Nagel 1996). My analy­ sis of the implications of past and future ra­ cial diversity among Native Americans is that Indian ethnicity will be a subject of debate and controversy for the foreseeable future. Questions about native ethnic group mem­ bership and who has a right to American In­ dian identity and resources are the focus of the remainder of this chapter.

American Indian Ethnic Diversity

Since the 1970s, more than half of all Ameri­ can Indians have lived in cities (Sorkin 1978; U.S. Census Bureau 1992a, table 44). Al­ though tribal origin and affiliation continue to have enormous currency among these of­ ten first-generation native urban immi­ grants, demographic differences inevitably have emerged between urban and reservation Indians in education, health, income, life­ style, interests, and perspective. These differ­

ences reflect the worldwide impact of ur­ banization on formerly rural populations: increased income and employment, higher levels of education, lower rates of fertility, more intermarriage, and native language loss.4

Despite a great deal of reservation-urban circular migration, differences between ur­ ban Indians and those residing on reserva­ tions represents an important ethnic bound­ ary between the two groups, one characterized by some strain and suspicion. One source of this tension is the concern of reservation In­ dians that their urban coethnics have lost touch with reservation needs and concerns while having disporportionate access to power and influence in national arenas gov­ erning Indian affairs. In an article tided "So Who Really Represents Indian Tribes?" one commentator criticized the prominent role played by "urban Indians" in federal Indian policy, arguing that, although educated, ur­ ban Indians are "thoroughly grounded... in municipal bonds, capital formation, and other esoteric topics They do not under­ stand the perspective of tribal leaders, or of Indian people" who must contend with such reservation problems as health, education, housing, cultural preservation, environmen­ tal protection, or language preservation (Chavers 1993:A5).

Urban-reservation differences, although obviously important, represent but one source of diversity among a socially, econom­ ically, politically, linguistically, and culturally plural Native American population. Tribal distinctions represent an even greater source of variability. More than 350 Indian tribes and communities in the lower 48 states are separately recognized by federal and state au­ thorities.5 Each has its own government, legal system, justice system, educational system, and economic, social, and cultural organiza­ tion (for an overview of many tribal political differences, see O'Brien 1989). These differ­ ences are reinforced by geographic distances among tribes and the isolation of many res-

Representations of Race and the Politics of Identity 115

ervations. Historical patterns of conflict, competition, or cooperation also remain a legacy that shades contemporary intertribal relations, as does the fact that Indian com­ munities often see one another as competi­ tors for scarce federal funding or federally regulated resources. Competition can be­ come especially bitter when federally nonrecognized groups seek access to Indian resources. Challenges to tribal authenticity can result.

For instance, in 1979, the Samish and Snohomish tribes of Puget Sound in Wash­ ington State were judged by the federal gov­ ernment to be "legally extinct" and were ex­ cluded from native access to the region's fishing economy. Recognized tribes who had won rights to half the annual salmon catch in the landmark federal district court "Boldt" decision in 1974 opposed the Samish and Snohomish efforts. "It boils down to trying to protect tribal fisheries from groups which the Tulalips [a recognized tribe] view as not gen­ uine Indians" (Egan 1992:8).6 The impor­ tance of resource competition in intertribal relations can be seen in the situation of the Lumbees of North Carolina. One of the larg­ est tribes in the 1980 census, numbering 26,631 (U.S. Census Bureau 1989, table 1:26), the Lumbees have long sought federal recog­ nition, only to receive limited acknowledg­ ment with the proviso that the tribe would re­ ceive no federal services (Blu 1980). There are many such tribes seeking social and federal acceptance as legitimate Indian communi­ ties. Their presence represents another level of complexity in Indian ethnicity.

Debates over Indian Ethnic Authenticity

Challenges to authenticity can be leveled against individuals and their claims to ethnic group membership. For instance, in 1982 I visited an American Indian7 community cen­ ter in an eastern city. I was greeted by the di­

116 Multiculturalism in the United States

rector, a man wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, whose dark hair was woven into braids bound by beaded ties. He told me about the Indian center's history and about its current activities, which were designed to provide a sense of community for the city's several thousand American Indian residents. The most successful undertaking, he reported, was a summer camp program, where local In­ dian children from diverse tribal back­ grounds, most of whom had been born and lived their lives in the city, were sent to spend 2 weeks on his home reservation more than a thousand miles away to learn about reserva­ tion life and their native heritage. I found the conversation interesting and informative. Several months later, while I was visiting a Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Washing­ ton, DC, the Indian center director's name came up in conversation. To my surprise, I was told matter-of-factly by a person working there (who identified himself as a member of a recognized Indian tribe) that the director, Sam Smith (not his name), was "not really an Indian." When I inquired into this statement, the official said, "Well, maybe his grand­ mother had some Indian blood," but, he reit­ erated, "Sam Smith is not really an Indian."

Reading the Indian affairs literature and listening to native people, the question of who is really an Indian comes up again and again. The query is often made in an atmo­ sphere of skepticism and sometimes bitter contention.8 The question is posed to tribes as well as to individuals. For instance, in an "open letter" to the Governor of Georgia, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller denounced the state's decision to officially recognize two groups claiming Cherokee ancestry, expressing con­ cern these groups were "using the Cherokee Nation's name, history, culture, and reputa­ tion . . . and posing as Indian tribes" (Mankiller 1993:A4).9 Such concerns often arise because of the potential loss of scarce tribal resources to an ever-increasing pool of collective and individual recipients.

Individual Indian ethnicity is at least as problematic as that of groups, due to wide variability in the criteria and standards of proof of Indian ancestry and Indianness. Again, the doubts and suspicions seem great­ est when ethnically tied resources are at stake and when benefits are seen to accrue to indi­ viduals who claim Indian ancestry or special Indian knowledge. This challenge to authen­ ticity is extended to a wide variety of authors, artists, scholars, and activists, and individu­ als claiming Indian identity or interests.10 Again, although the debate here focuses on American Indian ethnic boundaries and is­ sues of authenticity, similar debates can be found in other ethnic communities (African Americans, Asians, Latinos, to name a few) and among other bounded social groups (age, gender, disabled, veterans). In some of these cases, the issues do not center so much on lineage or biology—who is really black or who is really female; rather, the focus is on what kind of upbringing, class position, or life experience qualifies an individual to speak for or represent the interests of the group. In other cases, the issues center more on actual personal characteristics (ability to speak Spanish or not; having been in combat or not; degree of disability)." In the case of American Indians, the authenticity de­ bate often centers on ancestry (see Gates 1991),12 namely, just how much and what kind of Indian background qualifies individ­ uals or groups to have the rights of American Indians.

Another source of controversy concerns how an individual acquires authentic Indian ethnicity—through self-definition or by the acknowledgment of others. Again, resources seem to be a key issue. For instance, at its an­ nual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1993, the Association of American Indian and Alaskan Native Professors (AAIANP) issued a statement on "ethnic fraud," stressing the importance of official tribal recognition of individuals' Indianness in classifying univer­ sity students and faculty. The statement was

intended to register the organization's con­ cern about

ethnic fraud and offer recommendations to en­ sure the accuracy of American Indian/Alaska Na­ tive identification in American colleges and universities... and to affirm and ensure Ameri­ can Indian/Alaska Native identity in the hiring process. We are asking that colleges and universi­ ties: Require documentation of enrollment in a state or federally recognized nation/tribe with preference given to those who meet this criterion (AAIANP 1993).13

David Cornsilk, assistant director of admis­ sions at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, provided this rationale for such a policy:

I believe in membership as the foundation of sov­ ereignty. ... I believe the authority of the tribe, the right of the tribe, stems from the group, the community. ... I don't believe in the right of self-identification. I believe that's an assault on the right of the group. (Reynolds 1993:A3)M

Tim Giago, editor of Indian Country Today and The Lakota Times, affirmed the tribal membership approach to establishing Indian authenticity and underlined the issue of re­ sources in making distinctions between "real" Indians and others who claim Indian ancestry.

It was in the 1970s that people claiming to be In­ dian began to take jobs intended for Indians and to write books claiming to be authorities on Indi­ ans. These instant "wannabes" did us far more harm than good. Not only did they often give out misleading information about Indians, they also took jobs that left many qualified genuine Native Americans out in the cold. .. . Before you can truly be considered an Indian you must become an enrolled member of a tribe. I think most Indi­ ans would agree that this is the only way you can truly be accepted as Indian. (Giago 1991:3)

Representations of Race and the Politics of Identity 117

Alphonse Ortiz echoed these concerns about scarce resources allocated to self-identified recipients:

These are people who have no business soaking up jobs and grants, people who have made no claim to being Indian up to their early adult­ hood, and then when there's something to be gained they're opportunists of the rankest stripe, of the worst order. ... We resent these people who just come in and when the going's good skim the riches off the surface. (Reynolds 1993:A1)

Although convincingly argued, this em­ phasis on official enrollment (membership) in recognized tribes in determining Indian ethnicity is at odds with the way in which most Americans (and perhaps most Ameri­ can Indians) acquire their ethnicity. Though estimates vary, somewhere between two thirds and one half of American Indians counted in the 1980 and 1990 census were en­ rolled members of recognized tribes.15 Thus, the official enrollment rule would throw into question the ethnicity of a significant propor­ tion of Americans who designated their "race" as Indian in the U.S. census, not to mention the millions more who identified an Indian ethnic ancestry on census forms. This restrictive approach to constructing Native American ethnic boundaries is not typical of strategies used by most ethnic groups in con­ temporary America, who often seek to widen ethnic self-definitions to compete more ef­ fectively in local, state, and national political arenas. Indeed, the AAIANP's reliance on ex­ ternal (tribal) ascription represents a chal­ lenge to the widely held notion in American society that ethnicity is, at least in part, a pri­ vate, individual choice (a notion that is shared by the U.S. Census Bureau).

These debates can be trying to the targets of authenticity inquiries, as critical author and activist Ward Churchill's comments re­ veal:

118 Multiculturalism in the United States

I'm forever being asked not only my "tribe," but my "percentage of Indian blood." I've given the matter a lot of thought, and find that I prefer to make the computation based on all of me rather than just the fluid coursing through my veins. Calculated this way, I can report that I am pre­ cisely 52.5 pounds Indian—about 35 pounds Creek and the remainder Cherokee—88 pounds Teutonic, 43.5 pounds some sort of English, and all the rest "undetermined." Maybe that last part should just be described as "human." It all seems rather silly as a means of assessing who I am, don't you think? (Jaimes 1992:123)16

Although many methods of calculating in­ dividual Indian or tribal authenticity are of­ ten ludicrous and sometimes offensive (anal­ yses of urine and earwax, chemical tasting abilities; Snipp 1989:30-31), unfortunately, the enterprise is by no means capricious. It turns out to be deadly serious in the many cases in which individual and community life-sustaining resources hang in the balance as judgments of "real" Indian authenticity are decided. These cases routinely involve such important matters as child custody rights, health benefits, scholarships, legitimate means of livelihood, land claims, mineral and resource rights and royalty payments, politi­ cal and criminal jurisdiction, taxation, and myriad other personal and financial matters. The truth is embedded in the common socio­ logical fact: Although ethnicity is socially and politically constructed and is thus arbitrary, variable, and constantly negotiated, it is no less real in its consequences.

Changing Definitions of Indianness

Embedded in many discussions of Indian au­ thenticity and membership regulations is a question about whether the rules defining Indianness and tribal membership should be relaxed or tightened, that is, made more inclusionary or more exclusionary. For in-

stance, Trosper (1976) described the adop­ tion of tighter, more exclusionary enrollment rules by the Flathead Tribe of Montana in re­ sponse to pressures to "terminate" the tribe (i.e., dissolve the federal trust relationship) in the 1950s. Federal officials charged that Flat­ head's Salish and Kootenai tribal members were acculturated and no longer needed fed­ eral services or protection. This prompted a move by tribal leaders to pursue a kind of eth­ nic purification strategy by adopting a stricter set of blood quantum rules to designate membership. Thornton (1987) reported an opposite, loosening or inclusionary strategy on the part of some nonreservation-based groups, mainly in Oklahoma, where groups such as the Cherokees or Choctaws face less competition among members for shares of tribally held or land-based resources (Thorn­ ton 1987). In these instances, inclusion can have positive political consequences in an electoral system, because a relatively large percentage of the Oklahoma population is American Indian.17

Some critics call for the entire abolish­ ment of ancestry or blood quantum regula­ tion of tribal membership, arguing that such rules, particularly when applied by the fed­ eral government, tend to heighten tension among Native Americans, creating disunity and suspicion. For instance, activist Russell Means raised questions about the meaning and legitimacy of ancestry tests of Indianness:

Our treaties say nothing about your having to be such-and-such a degree of blood in order to be covered When the federal government made its guarantees to our nations in exchange for our land, it committed to provide certain services to us as we defined ourselves. As nations, and as a people. This seems to have been forgotten. Now we have Indian people who spend most of their time trying to prevent other Indian people from being recognized as such, just so that a few more crumbs—crumbs from the federal table—may be available to them, personally. I don't have to

tell you that this isn't the Indian way of doing things. The Indian way would be to get together and demand what is coming to each and every one of us, instead of trying to cancel each other out. We are acting like colonized peoples, like subject peoples. (U.S. Census Bureau 1991:139)

Like Means, StifFarm and Lane (1992) challenged the assumptions underlying an­ cestry and blood quantum tests of Indianness and tribal membership, asking whether American Indians

will continue to allow themselves to be defined mainly by their colonizers, in exclusively ra­ cial/familial terms (as "tribes"), or whether they will (re)assume responsibility for advancing the more general and coherently political definition of themselves they once held, as nations defining membership/citizenship in terms of culture, so­ cialization, and commitment to the good of the group. (P. 45)

They wonder whether American Indian tribes cannot take seriously their semisovereign sta­ tus with regard to citizenship, bringing "'out­ siders' . .. into their membership by way of marriage, birth, adoption, and naturaliza­ tion" (Stiffarm and Lane 1992:45).

Such a strategy certainly would open the door to an expansion of Indian ethnic mem­ bership, as well as tribal citizenship, which might be resisted by Indian communities faced with distributing already scarce re­ sources and by a federal bureaucracy at­ tempting to keep the lid on or reduce Indian expenditures.18 However, many tribes may be forced to come to terms with their own blood quantum rules in the very near future. The rate of racial intermarriage for American In­ dians is the highest of all American racial cat­ egories, with fewer than half of American In­ dians marrying other Indians, compared with racial endogamy rates of 95 percent and higher for whites, blacks, and Asians (Snipp 1989:157; see also Sandefiir and McKinnell 1986; Thornton, Sandefur, and Snipp 1991).

Representations of Race and the Politics of Identity 119

The consequence of this intermarriage is an increase in the number of Indian/non-Indian offspring with ever-diminishing degrees of Indian ancestry. One result of tribal blood quantum restrictions, even as low as one quarter, is that an increasing proportion of these children will not qualify for tribal membership even though one or both of their parents are tribal members, and despite their having lived on the reservation since birth.19

Conclusion

As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the Native American population is expected to continue to grow during the next century, and that growth will produce an increasingly racially mixed, urban Indian population. Contemporary tensions between reservation and urban native communities and current debates about the rules for determining au­ thentic Indian identity, rights, and tribal membership have enormous implications for the descendants of today's native people. A case from history might be useful in explor­ ing these implications.

The Yamasees were an indigenous group living in the southeastern United States at the time of European contact with North Amer­ ica. They no longer exist as an identifiable tribe, and few individuals report Yamasee tribal affiliation.20 The Cherokees, in con­ trast, have several federally recognized, state-recognized, and nonrecognized com­ munities, and, in the 1980 census, they sur­ passed the historically numerically dominant Navajo Nation as the most populous tribe in the United States. Young (1987) noted that the Cherokees have been described as accul- turated, of mixed ancestry, and successful at adopting white economic and political prac­ tices. Young challenged the underlying dis­ paragement of these characteristics: "Chero­ kee people today still have a tribal identity, a living language, and at least two government

bodies.... That's more than one can say of the Yamasee" (p. 81).

It is instructive to keep this comparison in mind as we contemplate the future demo­ graphic shape of Native America. As we saw in Table 9.1, the 1980 census reported a 72 percent increase in the number of Americans who identified their race as "American In­ dian." The question has arisen: Are the roughly one half million new Indians in the 1980 census (not to mention the 6 million re­ spondents who reported some degree of In­ dian ancestry; Snipp 1989) really Indians? Thornton et al. (1990) asked a similar ques­ tion about the contemporary Cherokee pop­ ulation—a group whose numbers have in­ creased dramatically in recent years (more than 300 percent from 1970 to 1980), in­ creases that account for a good deal of the growth in the total Indian population.21 His answer fits our question as well:

Common to all the Cherokees is an identity as Cherokee. All of the 232,344 individuals de­ scribed here—fully 17 percent of all American Indians in the United States in 1980, according to the census definition and resulting enumera­ tion—identified themselves as Cherokee. So they are. (Thornton et al. 1990:175)

This answer will not be satisfying to those concerned with Indian racial purity and the potential cultural change that many fear will result from the growth and racial mixing of the Indian population (Deloria 1986:3—4, 7-8). There is no doubt that native popula­ tion growth has mixed consequences for American Indian ethnic and cultural survival and change. On the one hand, Indian popula­ tion increases guarantee the demographic survival of Native American communities and ethnicity.22 On the other hand are those pitfalls identified by Ron Andrade (1980), a former head of the National Congress of American Indians, who defended tribal mem­ bership restrictions (mainly involving degree of Indian ancestry) to avoid a loss of tribal re-

120 Multiculturalism in the United States

sources to individuals living off-reservation and to protect against what he viewed as the dilution of tribal cultures and traditions (Andrade 1980:13).23 Yet, as the comparison of the Yamasees and Cherokees suggests, al­ though there may be social, economic, politi­ cal, and cultural changes caused by Indian population growth and a relaxation of ethnic boundaries, the costs these changes incur may be considerably less than the price of fail­ ing to make them.

Notes 1. Estimates of the number of North Ameri­

can Indians at the time of European contact range from 18 million (Henry Dobyns 1983) to fewer than 1 million (Alfred Kroeber 1939).C.Matthew Snipp (1989) reported that most estimates range between 2 million and 5 million (p. 10).

2. For two reasons, this is a conservative esti­ mate of the number of precontact tribes in the lower 48 states. First, the figure is based on coding procedures that included only separate linguistic groups and their major dialectic and/or regional subdivisions. Villages or bands often were quite autonomous (Driver 1961; Dobyns 1983), but they were not included as separate tribes in the coding. Second, Swanton (1952) used the early 1600s (more than a century after first contact) as his starting point. Many researchers believe that the first century following contact dramatically al­ tered traditional Indian lifestyles and affected the viability of many tribes due to the virulence of Old World diseases that swept across the continent ahead of the waves of European settlers (Dobyns 1983).

3. In 1988, the U.S. Department of the Inte­ rior listed 309 recognized tribes in the lower 48 states ("Indian Tribal Entities Recognized" 1988). In 1992, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Division of Tribal Government Services, identified another 9 recently recognized tribes not appearing on the 1988 list: the Coquille Tribe of Oregon; Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas; San Juan Paiute Tribe of Arizona; Ponca Tribe of Nebraska; Scotts Valley

Band of Porno Indians, California; Lytton Rancheria of California; Guidiville Rancheria of California; Aroostook Band of Micmac Indians of Maine; and Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria, California (personal correspondence, August 3,1992, from Bureau of Indian Affairs).

4. See Snipp (1989) for a survey of rural/ur­ ban, metropolitan/nonmetropolitan, and reser- vation/nonreservation characteristics in the Amer­ ican Indian population; for a case study of one ur­ ban Indian community, see also Weibel-Orlando (1991).

5. In addition to the 318 federally recognized tribes in the lower 48 states, more than a dozen tribes are recognized by individual states (e.g., the Shinnecocks of New York and the Schaghticokes of Connecticut).

6. In an interesting twist in this case, Samish leaders discovered that Judge Boldt died from Alz­ heimer's disease in 1984. They believe he was suf­ fering from the disease in 1978, a year before he declared their tribe to be legally extinct. Other rec­ ognized tribes fear that if the Samish pursue this issue in court, the important (and unpopular with non-Indian fishermen) 1974 Boldt decision guar­ anteeing native tribes' fishing rights also might be thrown into question. See also Miller 1993).

7. I use the terms "American Indian," "Native American," "Indian," and "native" interchange­ ably in this chapter. This varying usage is consis­ tent with formal and informal designations of Americans of indigenous ancestry by themselves and others, and these terms are used widely and interchangeably by both native and non-native re­ searchers and writers (see, e.g., Snipp 1993, foot­ note 1).

8. For instance, see the introduction and first chapter of James Clifton's edited work The In­ vented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies (1990), as well as the chapters by some of his contributors (especially David Henige and Stephen Feraca) for a particularly virulent chal­ lenge to the ethnic authenticity of a variety of American Indian individuals and groups; his ear­ lier Being and Becoming Indian (1989) is a some­ what less acrid inquiry into Indian identity using biographical sketches.

Representations of Race and the Politics of Identity 121

9. Ironically, even the Cherokee Nation itself has been challenged on occasion because of the patterns of intermarriage and cultural blending practiced by many members (see Baird 1990).

10. An interesting exception to this is reflected in the enthusiasm of Mashantucket Pequot tribal member Joseph J. Carter's response to tribal growth following casino gambling successes. "He savors the flood of would-be Indians— 'Hey, ev­ erybody wants to be a Mashantucket"' (Clines 1993, p. A18).

11. For an interesting discussion of the emer­ gence of deaf culture and "ethnicity," with its own language, culture, outlook, and boundary dis­ putes, see Dolnick (1993).

12. In addition, questions of upbringing, membership in an Indian community, lifestyle, and outlook also can arise.

13. The notion of ethnic fraud appears to be gaining some attention. In an October 1993 con­ ference sponsored by the American Council on Education in Houston, Jim Larimore (Assistant Dean and Director of the American Indian Pro­ gram at Stanford University) and Rick Waters (As­ sistant Director of Admissions at the University of Colorado, Boulder) presented a session titled "American Indians Speak Out Against Ethnic Fraud in College Admissions."The session was de­ signed to "identify the problem and its impact on the American Indian community... [and to] dis­ cuss effective institutional practices for docu­ menting and monitoring tribal affiliations" (American Council on Education 1993).

14. These concerns about ethnic fraud parallel a wider skepticism about ethnic claims in general (not just those of Native Americans) when rights, jobs, and resources are at stake. In discussing the minority status of a particular individual, a fellow academic once told me, "I don't know if s/he's re­ ally a(n) , or has just found a horse to ride to tenure."

15. The Indian Health Service conducted a survey of federally recognized tribes to obtain tribal enrollment figures in 1986 and counted 746,175 enrolled members in 213 tribes in the lower 48 states (see Lister 1987). This is a signifi­

cant undercount, because there are more than 350 recognized tribes. However, most of the more siz­ able tribes (e.g., the Navajos and Cherokees of Oklahoma) were included in the survey. The 1980 and 1990 census figures for American Indians were 1,364,033 and 1,873,536, respectively (see U.S. Census Bureau 1992b).

16. Churchill has been singled out for particu­ larly virulent attacks on his ethnic authenticity (see the series of articles, columns, and letters in Indian Country Today beginning with the Sep­ tember 8,1993 issue). Partly to defuse the issue of his ethnicity, in spring 1994, Churchill became an officially enrolled member of the Keetoowah Cherokee Tribe (personal communication, Ward Churchill, May 1994).

17. The proportion of Oklahomans who are Indian was 12.9 percent in 1990 (U.S. Census Bu­ reau 1991).

18. For instance, in 1986, the Reagan adminis­ tration put forth a proposal to adopt an official one quarter blood quantum definition of "In­ dian" for the purpose of receiving services from the Indian Health Service. Tribal organizations, led by the National Congress of American Indi­ ans, protested and lobbied effectively to stop the effort. There is no reason to believe that will be the last such attempt (see Jaimes 1992, p. 133).

19. Despite a growth in the number of Na­ tive Americans of less than one half or one quarter Indian ancestry, estimates of the total American Indian population over the next century predict increases among those whose ancestry is more than 50 percent native (U.S. OTA 1986).

20. For example, in both published and un­ published lists of tribal affiliations coded from the 1980 census, there were no Yamasees, although I have seen some native scholars report their ances­ try as Yamasee.

21. The number of Cherokees increased from 1970 to 1980 by 166,194. Although this number is considerably less than the 571,000 increase in the total Indian population during the 1970-1980 pe­ riod, Cherokee population growth represents 29.1 percent of the total increase (Thornton, Snipp, and Breen 1990, appendix).

122 Multiculturalism in the United States

22. Even without massive ethnic conversions from non-Indian to Indian, Snipp (1989) re­ ported that the OTA's projections of the American Indian population from 1980 to 2080 show con­ tinued growth in the Indian population: Those with 50 percent or more Indian ancestry ("blood") are projected to grow slightly during the century (an increase of about 170,000); those with one quarter to one half Indian ancestry, to increase from 123,000 in 1980 to 5.2 million in 2080; those with less than one quarter Indian ancestry, to in­ crease from 47,000 to 9.3 million; and a total American Indian population growth from 1.3 million in 1980 to 15.7 million in 2080 is projected (Snipp 1989, p. 167).

23. Andrade referred to individuals seeking to profit financially from Indian tribal membership but not willing to participate in tribal life and res­ ervation development as "Indians of conve­ nience." In contrast, critics of restrictive tribal en­ rollment criteria point out that tribal councils and enrolled tribal members also can be seen to profit personally from their participation in tribal life and reservation development (M. Annette Jaimes, personal communication, April 1994).

References American Council on Education. 1993. Educating

One-Third of a Nation FV: Making Our Reality Match Our Rhetoric. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Andrade, Ron. 1980. "Are Tribes Too Exclusive?" Ameri­ can Indian Journal IV: 13.

Association of American Indian and Alaskan Native Professors. 1993. "AANIAP Statement on Ethnic Fraud." Press release, June 28, Washington, DC.

Baird, David. 1990. "Are There 'Real' Indians in Oklahoma: Historical Perceptions of the Five Civi­ lized Tribes." Chronicles of Oklahoma 6:4-23.

Blu, Karen L. 1980. The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People. Cambridge, UK: Cam­ bridge University Press.

Chavers, Dean. 1993. "So Who Really Represents Indian Tribes?" Indian Country Today, May 19, p. A5.

Clifton, James. 1989. Being and Becoming Indian. Belmont, CA: Dorsey.

,ed. 1990. The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing.

Clines, Francis X. 1993. "With Casino Profits, Indian Tribes Thrive." New York Times, January 31, p. A18.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1986. "The New Indian Recruits: The Popularity of Being Indian." Americans Before Co­ lumbus 14:3-8.

Dobyns, Henry. 1983. Their Number Become Thinned. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Dolnick, Edward. 1993. "Deafness as Culture." Atlantic, September, pp. 37-53.

Driver, Harold E. 1961. Indians of North America. Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press.

Egan, Timothy. 1992. "Indians Become Foes in Bid for Tribal Rights." New York Times, September 6, p. 8.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1991. "'Authenticity,' or the Les­ son of Little Tree." New York Times Book Review, November 24, pp. 1,26-28.

Giago, Tim. 1991. "Big Increases in 1990 Census Not Necessarily Good for Tribes." Lakota Times, March 12, p. 3.

"Indian Tribal Entities Recognized and Eligible to Re­ ceive Services from the United States Bureau of In­ dian Affairs." Fed. Reg. 52829-52834 (1988).

Jaimes, M. Annette. 1992. "Federal Indian Identifica­ tion Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sover­ eignty in North America." Pp. 123-138 in TheState of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Re­ sistance, edited by M. Annette Jaimes. Boston: South End.

Kroeber, Alfred. 1939. "Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America." American Archaeology and Ethnology. No. 38. Berkeley: University of Califor­ nia Press.

Lister, Edgar. 1987. "Tribal Membership Rates and Re­ quirements." Washington, DC: U.S. Indian Health Service. Unpublished table.

Mankiller, Wilma. 1993. "An Open Letter to the Gover­ nor of Georgia." Indian Country Today, May 26, p. A4.

Miller, Bruce G. 1993. "The Press, the Boldt Decision, and Indian-White Relations." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17:75-97.

Nagel, Joane. 1996. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Culture and Iden­ tity. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Representations of Race and the Politics of Identity 123

Reynolds, Jerry. 1993. "Indian Writers: Real or Imag­ ined." Indian Country Today, September 8, p. Al.

Sandefur, Gary D. and Trudy McKinnell. 1986. "Ameri­ can Indian Intermarriage." Social Science Research 15:347-71.

Snipp, C. Matthew. 1989. American Indians: The First of This Land. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

. 1993. "Some Observations about the Racial Boundaries and the Experiences of American Indi­ ans." Paper presented at the University of Washing­ ton, Seattle, April.

Sorkin, Alan. 1978. The Urban American Indian. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Stiffarm, Lenore A. and Phil Lane, Jr. 1992. "The De­ mography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival." Pp. 23-53 in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Re- sistance, edited by M. A. Jaimes. Boston: South End.

Swanton, John. 1952. The Indian Tribes of North Amer­ ica. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Thornton, Russell. 1987. "Tribal History, Tribal Popula­ tion, and Tribal Membership Requirements." (Newberry Library Research Conference Report No. 8: "Towards a Quantitative Approach to Ameri­ can Indian History"). Chicago: Newberry Library.

Thornton, Russell, Gary D. Sandefur, and C. Matthew Snipp. 1991. "American Indian Fertility Patterns: 1910 and 1940 to 1980." American Indian Quarterly 15:359-67.

Thornton, Russell, C. Matthew Snipp, and Nancy Breen. 1990. "Appendix: Cherokees in the 1980 Census." Pp. 178-203 in The Cherokees: A Population History, edited by Russell Thornton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Trosper, Ronald. 1976. "Native American Boundary Maintenance: The Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana, 1860-1970." ErAinicily 3:256-74.

U.S. Census Bureau. 1989. Census of the Population, Subject Reports, Characteristics of American Indians by Tribes and Selected Areas: 1980, Vol. 2, Section 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

. 1991. "Census Bureau Completes Distribution of 1990 Redisricting Tabulations to States." Press Release CB91-100, March 11.

. 1992a. "Census Bureau Releases 1990 Census Counts on Specific Racial Groups." Press Release CB91-215, June 12.

. 1992b. Census of the Population, General Popu­ lation Characteristics: United States, 1990, PC-1-1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. 1986. Indian Health Care. Washington, DC: Government Print­ ing Office.

Weibel-Orlando, Joan. 1991. Indian Country, L.A.: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Complex Society. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Young, Mary. 1987. "Pagans, Converts, and Backsliders, All: A Secular View of the Metaphysics of In­ dian-White Relations." Pp. 75-83 in The American Indian and the Problem of History, edited by C. Mar­ tin. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nagel:

1. Why is there a controversy over who is authen­ tically Native American?

2. Discuss the significance of being defined as a "true Indian." What are the benefits and disad­ vantages of doing this successfully? What are some of the political reasons for altering defi­ nitions of Native-Americanness?

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