Mixed People Monday – Tahj Mowry

The actor has a black Bahamian mother and a white British father.

Conservatives See Mixed People Differently

Your ideology may determine what you see in her.

Now why am I not surprised by this?

Disturbing new research suggests the answer to that question may depend on your political ideology.

In three experiments, “we found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black than white,” a research team led by New York University psychologist Amy Krosch writes in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology…

…Specifically, “conservatism was associated with a lower threshold for categorizing racially ambiguous faces as black,” the researchers report.

The third experiment, featuring 62 participants (all white), was identical to the first two, except that half the faces were identified as “Canadian.” They were presented against a red background, while “Americans” were seen against a blue background.

The results: “Political conservatism was associated with a lower threshold for categorizing racially ambiguous faces as black when it came to American, but not Canadian, faces.” Whatever impulse that led conservatives to think “black” was negated when they were told they were dealing with residents of a different country.

“There are several possible explanations” for these findings, the researchers write. “Conservatives exhibit stronger preferences for order, structure, and closure, and greater intolerance of ambiguity in comparison with liberals.” Thus they “might be more motivated to resolve racial ambiguity, and to resolve it in the most common or culturally accessible manner.”

Beyond that, Krosch and her colleagues suspect this reflects a phenomenon coined by New York University psychologist John Jost (a co-author of the paper): system justification theory. The term refers to the tendency, which is particularly pronounced among conservatives, to rationalize the sociopolitical system one inhabits as inherently fair and just.

In that context, these results “may reflect, among other things, the motivation to defend and uphold traditional racial divisions that are part of the historical legacy of the United States,” writes the research team, which also included Leslie Berntsen, David Amodio and Jay Van Bavel.

In other words, sometimes conservative people see what they want to see. Read more of this interesting article and study here.

Mixed People Monday – Lou Diamond Phillips

Often assumed to be Mexican.

The actor and director was born in the Philippines and is multiethnic. Phillips father was of Scottish, Irish, and Cherokee heritage. His mother was of Filipino, Hawaiian, and Chinese heritage.

Mixed Couples In TV Commercials Go Beyond Cheerios

Can’t stop love.

Yesterday I posted about the ugliness surrounding the wonderful Cheerios commercial featuring the mixed couple. Today I have to follow that post up with this great piece I saw in The Huffington Post yesterday. It is another jab in the side of those who just can’t stand the march of progress and features several commercials and ads that dare to feature love between cultures and ethnicities.

See the excellent commercials here.

Cheerios Ad With Mixed Couple Brings Out The Best and Worst Among Us

I always give major kudos to TV shows and commercials that have the guts to depict mixed relationships and people in ways that show them as normal everyday people. This time Kudos go to Cheerios for this wonderful  commercial.

The bad news is there was such ugly racism posted in the comments section on You Tube for the spot that General Mills had to disable the comments section. Such stupidity among the racists out there. They are just upset that they can’t change what is already a done deal. People do mix. Get over yourselves idiots.

Here is a link to an article on the racist posts that accompanied the commercial. By the way, please note that General Mills said by something like 3 to 1 there were more positive comments. The ugly ones were just so distasteful they didn’t want to leave them apparently. But General Mills promises to not pull the spot over that ugliness. Good for them. Think I better go have some Cheerios.

Mixed People Monday – Shannyn Sossamon

The actress, who has appeared in A Knight’s Tale, 40 Days and 40 Nights,  Road to Nowhere and had a starring role on the CBS supernatural drama, Moonlight, is very mixed. She is French, Hawaiian, Dutch, Irish, German and Filipino.

Zoe Saldana Takes On Our Need To Label Everybody

Who cares what she is. Simply beautiful.

What an interesting interview. I knew I liked Zoe Saldana.

Zoe Saldana has an issue with labels — of any kind.

During a recent interview with BET, the actress discussed her role in the recently released “Star Trek: Into Darkness” film, being a black and Latina actress and the comments she made in Allure Magazine regarding her androgyny and the possibility of her raising children with a woman.

BET’s Smriti Mundhra informed Saldana that the comments made in Allure were being interpreted as her having come out as lesbian or bisexual.

Saldana responded by saying that she encourages every human being to try not to categorize or stereotype anything.

“It’s the saddest situation… It is almost impossible for us to get through one conversation with somebody at a cashier without having to go, ‘Oh is she Mexican? Oh is she gay? Or what kind of car does she drive? Or is she illegal or something?” she said.

“There are so much more things that are important besides stereotyping ourselves and limiting ourselves just by putting ourselves in little boxes.”

Watch the excerpt of the interview here. Worth watching, well because it’s Zoe, and because of what she says in her unique way.

Mixed People Monday – Kid Cudi

Rapper Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Ramon Seguro Mescudi, has a Mexican father and an African-American mother.

Mixed Relationships and People On The Rise

The changing concept of “race.”

Saw this article on the blog Mixed American Life. America, and the world, is indeed changing when it comes to seeing more and more mixed relationships and kids. Glad to see it. Love does’t know color or ethnicity. Here is an excerpt:

President Obama is biracial, and in media, multiracials are everywhere. More than ever, they’re touting their mixed heritage.

Comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are biracial, half-black and half-white. They made their names playing black characters on MADtv. But last year, they premiered their own show, where they take on multiracial issues with glee.

But taking on such issues doesn’t always go smoothly, as music diva Beyonce discovered in a commercial for L’Oreal. In it, she declared the secret to her skin was a “mosaic of all the faces before it.” The screen flashed the phrases: “African-American. Native American. French.”

The backlash was immediate. The singer was criticized for abandoning her black identity. But the multiracial community embraced her.

It’s not just that there are more multiracial and biracial people. The government is now counting the group differently. For the first time in modern history, the 2000 Census allowed us to check off more than one box for race.

The last Census showed 9 million people, about 3 percent of the population, reporting more than one race. That’s an increase of one-third from the decade before.

“The youngest age group, kids under 5 [years old], 7 percent are identified as having more than one race group,” says Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “If we look at the elderly, over 65, it’s only 1 percent.”

That means more people are choosing spouses outside their own race. The change, Passel says, comes from evolving attitudes. Over the past few decades, he says more people have simply come to view intermarriage as no big deal.

“More than two-thirds of people in our surveys, when asked how they’d feel about someone in their own family marrying someone of a different background, said they’d be fine with it,” he says.

Ask young people — those under 40 — and the number rises to more than 80 percent.

To read the full article go here.

Mixed Couples – Lewis Hamilton & Nicole Sherzinger

Formula 1 driver, Lewis Hamilton (Mclaren Mercedes team, ok I am a huge F1 fan and Hamilton is my favorite) has been romantically linked to singer Nicole Sherzinger for some time now. Both are actually mixed. The British Hamilton’s Mom is white and father is black and Sherzinger has a Filipino father and a mother who is half Hawai’in and half Russian.