Race and Gender Ideologies at HBCUs: Implications for Biracial Students’ Identity Work

• In Event: 322 - Regular Session. Multiracial Identity, Beauty, and Dating

Abstract

This article draws upon interviews with 36 black-white biracial students attending historically black colleges/universities (HBCUs) to examine the content of race and gender ideologies within black communities and the ways that biracial members of these communities actively invoked these ideologies in order to negotiate their own identities and status. My findings suggest that dominant ideologies of race and femininity which associate lightness with femininity and darkness with masculinity are salient in black communities. Biracial women’s distance from the image of the prototypical black woman served to align them with femininity and grant them increased status within black communities. Dominant ideologies of masculinity that associate darkness with negative hyper-masculinity coexisted with ideologies that feminized white men and privileged black masculinity. As a result, biracial men’s distance from the image of the prototypical black man threatened their status within some black communities by distancing them from perceptions of ideal masculinity. Biracial men and women actively invoked and sometimes contested these ideologies in order to present certain racial and gendered identities, obtain status, and/or distance themselves from accusations of privilege and elitism.

Author

• Kristen Annette Clayton, University of Georgia