Abstract

Public housing residents have long experienced stigma as members of an urban “underclass.” One policy response is the creation of mixed-income developments; by deconcentrating poverty and integrating residents into communities in which their residences are indistinguishable from neighbors, such efforts might reduce stigma associated with residency in traditional public housing. Stigma associated with living in public housing is ameliorated, yet residents report that their experience of stigma has intensified in other ways. The negative response of higher-income residents, along with stringent screening and rule enforcement, amplifies the sense of difference many residents feel in these contexts.

Mixed Race and Social Stigma

Introduction

Residents of public housing have long been stigmatized for their reliance on government subsidies, perceived self-destructive and nonmainstream behavior, and the crime and gang culture entrenched in and around public housing developments. Indeed, Xavier de Souza Briggs and his colleagues have suggested that in the aftermath of welfare reform in the 1990s, public housing residents have replaced welfare recipients as the primary focus of the general public's resentment of the “undeserving poor” (Wilson, 38).

Census data reveals that the U.S. multiracial population has approached more than nine million individuals, the vast majority of whom are actually biracial individuals of minority/White descent. Indeed, the minority/White biracial population is the largest and fastest growing segment of the multiracial population and one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the US population overall. Beyond the growing visibility of the biracial population, many researchers have noted that biracial populations challenge the ideas that race is rooted in a valid biological or genetic reality, and that racial identification processes are static, unidimensional and unaffected by situational factors. Consequently, research examining the causes and meanings of racial identification in biracial populations (especially biracial individuals who experience their multiple racial identities as valued or devalued depending on the social context), may advance social scientific thinking to more complex and dynamic ideas about race that better accommodate America's growing racial diversity. Thus, there is a great need for multiracial research in general, and for work that examines the contextbased factors that affect identity shifting in biracial populations in particular.

Thesis Statement

The enduring stigma of public housing residents is exacerbated, if not generated, by their segregation from “mainstream” society.

Discussion and Analysis

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." (Lincoln, Pp. 1) The racial categorization of biracial (and multiracial) individuals, by self and other, reveals much about the social construction of race and the formation of racial categories. Although scientists once believed, as some lay people still do, that racial categories reflect true biological or genetic differences between racial groups, scholars now construe race as socially constructed according to social, economic, political, historical, and national frameworks. Biracial populations confounded biological and genetic perspectives on race, which view racial categories as singular, impermeable, and natural, as well as racial models and classification systems that were are built on such assumptions, because they traverse racial boundaries. There is “overemphasis in stigma research on microinteractions” and a lack of investigation into the broader implications of ...