"I Am Not Tragic": Biracial Women Interpreting Educational Experiences and Influences

• In Event: 31.062 - Exploring Counternarratives of Women of Color: Uncovering Silences in Educational Contexts

Abstract

In the final presentation, “‘I Am Not Tragic’: Biracial Women Interpreting Educational Experiences and Influences,” the third presenter will consider how a variety of autobiographical pieces by biracial women serve as counter-narratives to the dominant “tragic mulatto/a” narrative. This narrative, as has been documented (REF), influences educators’ perceptions of biracial students and, as a result, the experiences of biracial people in education. This presentation, then, offers a perspective that can serve to reshape educators’ perceptions and actions born out of those viewpoints that limit the opportunities of biracial individuals to experience comfort and acceptance in educational spaces. Paris’ (2012) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) serves as a theoretical frame for this work. Building upon Ladson-Billings’ (1995) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), a CSP approach supports understandings that allow both educators and students to come to better know themselves and each other as they interrogate and act to change pervasive and harmful social inequities. Wijeyesinghe’s (2012) Intersectional Model of Multiracial Identity, a framework that considers racially mixed people from an intersectional perspective by positioning race as one of many identity markers that affect how one sees self and the world, also serves to frame this research.
The data sources for this research include various mediums of first-person accounts of biracial women including published memoirs and publicly available blog (web log) and vlog (video log) entries. Autobiographical pieces were chosen because these data provide a window into personal reflections of biracial women recounting racialized experiences in educational spaces. A Thematic Analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) will be utilized to draw conclusions about the data. The data sources will be read and re-read and initial ideas will be noted before the collation of data into potential themes. These initial themes will then be reconsidered in relation to the entire dataset and a “thematic map” will be generated to represent the analysis and to assist in refining the definitions of each theme. The specific objectives of this presentation derive from a larger research study whose themes reveal the ways in which personal accounts serve as counter-narratives to the “tragic mulatto/a” narrative within educational spaces.
Considering biraciality from the perspective of women who have chosen to publicly share their thoughts and feelings on the topic is of timely significance. The 2000 United States Census marked the first time that Americans were able to identify themselves as belonging to more than one race. Between 2000 and 2010, the group of persons identifying their two races as White and Black grew by over a million to 1.8 million at a rate of 137 percent. This growth constitutes the largest and fastest growing disaggregated group within the two or more races category (Jones & Bullock, 2012). In spite of the rising trends in young Americans racially identifying in this way, however, there remains little educationally-based academic work focused around issues pertaining to this population in particular.

Author

• Ashley N. Patterson, The Pennsylvania State University