“We Were All Just the Black Kids”: Black Mixed-Race Men and the Importance of Adolescent Peer Groups for Identity Development

Abstract

While critical Mixed-Race studies (CMRS) has paid attention to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in sampling and analysis, most studies disproportionately focus on women. This means that generalizability of findings and theories to men should not become axiomatic. Regarding black Mixed-Race people, for example, the theory that rejection from black people is influential for many black Mixed-Race individuals’ identity development is derived from interviews with mainly women. Explicitly noting that these processes are not as applicable for men, yet offering no accompanying theorizing as to the influence of gendered interactions on men’s racial identity development, appears to have become the standard. Therefore, bringing together data from two studies that explored black mixedness in the United States and the United Kingdom, this article joins a nascent literature on the gendered experiences of Mixed-Race men. Our analysis shows that, unlike black Mixed-Race women, black Mixed-Race men’s mixedness is often constructed as compatible with the heteronormative gender identities that are constituted in racialized peer groups. As such, black Mixed-Race men are able to cultivate a sense of strategic sameness with same gender black peers. This and other findings are discussed in light of their implications for CMRS’s intersectional theories of identity development.

Wrangling with the Black monster: young Black mixed‐race men and masculinities

“… It should be noted that the notions of Black authenticity that often govern Black peer groups are predicated upon a multiplicity of factors including, among other factors, class, nationality and ancestry (Harris and Khanna ); ideas around ‘purity’ and skin tone sit alongside these factors (Sims and Joseph‐Salisbury ). …”

“I Wouldn’t Trust the Parents To ‘Do No Harm’ To a Queer Kid”: Rethinking Parental Permission Requirements for Youth Participation in Social Science Research

“…For example, an established theory within CMRS for why Black mixed-race women are more likely than Black mixed-race men to identify as “mixed-race” (e.g., vs. as Black) is that conflict with Black women due to competition for men is seen as rejection from Black people (Khanna, 2011; Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2005). By contrast, Joseph-Salisbury’s work (2018; Sims & Joseph-Salisbury, 2019) has found that Black mixed-race men do not often experience conflict with Black men for women partners; instead, men more often bond over their shared masculinity and develop identities rooted in Blackness.…”

How Cross-Discipline Understanding and Communication Can Improve Research on Multiracial Populations

“…The sociological literature offers several theories as to why. One is that there are gender differences regarding identity-salient interpersonal interactions with peers and strangers (Khanna 2011;Rockquemore and Laszloffy 2005;Sims 2016;Sims and Joseph-Salisbury 2019). Men being perceived as "more rigorously racialized than women" has also been theorized (Davenport 2016;Vasquez 2010, p. 45).…”

“…"-Victoria Plaut (2010) The academic field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) stands as an explicit example of the exact type of diversity science that Plaut (2010) described above. As explained by Sims and Joseph-Salisbury (2019), CMRS has emerged over the last few decades and has "established itself as a distinct academic field" as "evidenced by the rise in academic publications that focus on mixedness, a rise in the number of academics who identify as CMRS scholars, the hosting of a regular international CMRS conference, and the establishment of a CMRS journal" (p. 51; see also Daniel et al 2014).…”