Jayden Yoppolo English 101 5/31/20 4:44 PM Introduction – Research Proposal- I will be studying the effects of being mixed race and different comments generated from the community with explanation to why they think that. I will post a survey on my social media. As well as what it truly means to be racially ambiguous and not belong to either part of your identity(s). For my research paper I decided to focus on the complexity of being interracial or racially ambiguous to broaden the perspective of what others in the same boat as I thought about this idea. I started my project with one idea in mind and that was that I wanted completely unfiltered data, and for the most part that is what I got. I wasn’t able to get 100% of my data unfiltered because I did have a line of questioning and warned people of what material lied ahead for the questions. Another feature I added was a google spreadsheet that actually catalogs all of the responses and adds new ones as they come in and I have pasted that at the bottom of the data part of my paper. To interpret the data, I took I am going to analyze the messages left by people in the google form I submitted to my Instagram and Facebook. There are 44 responses, so I won’t respond to them all, but I am going to give access to screenshots for the professor and whoever else wants to see the results of some of the more pressing questions from the google form. DataThe first question I wanted to analyze was the very first one in the series of questions from the survey. “Have you ever been treated differently because of your race? (give examples if you feel comfortable, real-life stories the better research I can do) *whenever there is an option for Other that is where you type the response for the question*” Here are the densest responses (best for analyzing). 1. I got caught smoking weed in a park as a teen and I had a bunch of paraphernalia with me and the cops were super nice, and I didn’t get in any trouble because they said they didn’t want to ruin my future. I think it went down like this because the friend I was caught with and I are white. 2. I am a white person and my sister is a person of color. When we were children (in the early 1970's) we were removed from our home and put in foster care. Our first foster parents couldn't hide their disdain for her and would punish me for playing with or talking to her. After that we were separated, and I didn’t see her again for over a year. I can't help but wonder if unofficially black children went only with black foster parents. 3. Went searching for parties in high school and me and my friends got told to leave and that we didn’t belong in the neighborhood and that the cops were called. My car was full of African American and Asian kids, while the other car near us was full of white kids not getting yelled at. 1 Jayden Yoppolo English 101 5/31/20 4:44 PM 4. Myself and my children are often followed in retail stores when we are shopping 5. I’m white (1/4 Latina) and when traveling where white is not the dominant race I’m treated differently - sometimes as “other”, sometimes special treatment, sometimes as a novelty. The next question I am going to analyze is more about physical appearance which my first question and the responses, helped me come up with. I wondered that if so many people where coming out and saying off the bat how they’ve been treated differently about their race, I wanted to know what in specific people are noticing to label and identify other people and how they relate a certain feature back to one specific race. Data“What do you think, out of physical features, do people point out as being part of a race? (ie. "your hair is curly you are obviously black")” 1. I am an eighth Shoshone Indian and once went to an Indian celebration my friend invited me to. I have very pale skin and blue eyes. I didn't feel welcome at all and realized that if you were to glance at me and make a quick judgment of my ethnicity based on the way I look you would probably be way off. 2. Facial structure (people always point out my higher cheekbones when they find out I'm partially of native descent), lips, body and facial hair/ or lack thereof (the space between my mouth and noise is hairier than most women's; people point this out as a distinctively Latina / Mexican feature) 3. my eyes ! people always look to the shape of my eyes to point out that I’m (Half) Asian 4. Color of people’s skin, the shape or size of their eyes, lips, or nose 5. I can tell your Filipino because your nose is flat 6. Your arms are hairy, so you are Mexican When reading a lot of the responses I noticed that these things are written in a way that if they were said outload they could be determined as offensive. In my opinion I think a lot of them are arbitrary and demeaning in a way. It also depends on context and who said it to them, which 2 Jayden Yoppolo English 101 5/31/20 4:44 PM sadly I do not know the answer to either but still makes listening to these perspectives meaningful. So many people are completely undedicated on what it the biracial experience is, and frankly It is REALLY confusing. One thing that I struggle with a lot is when people ask me because I'm half black, if I use the N word. My answer is always No. I don’t possess the rights to. What I'm studying is important because being mixed race I'm left only being able to physically define myself as white, and that’s what other black people think I am. They don’t know that I am mixed, I care to know what people in similar situations who don’t fit into either category or one or the other. Maybe try to find some justification for all of these assumptions about what someone is. I think that there are a lot of written articles about this showing that there is discourse on the topic, but you aren’t hearing the voices of people who are sharing personal things. I really value the Impact that radio and broadcast or podcasts can make an accurate account and have a free and open discussion about something. This doesn’t include disagreeing; I appreciate good riff between when I'm talking about something “controversial”. I’ve already gotten comments from my poll by putting it on social media, that are just completely absurd and flat out ignorant. Such comments have been recorded as well to make sure that I am engaging ALL people. The point of this is to be completely unbiased, which I know can be hard especially when focusing in on a group of people especially when it is about race. Through reading these responses I have found a lot of people fit into boxes, all made by society. Even though bad constructs come from our past in America they help to identify and reunite people, the public have taken the word racially ambiguous and made it into something positive. We as an outlier still matter, we can still be a part of something. And I think that is the message I want this paper to reflect. 3 Jayden Yoppolo English 101 5/31/20 4:44 PM 1 4 Jayden Yoppolo English 101 5/31/20 4:44 PM . 1 Excel spreadsheet of responses with the questions to the pages listed in foot note 2. 5 Jayden Yoppolo English 101 5/31/20 4:44 PM 2 BibliographyRuebeck, Christopher, et al. “Acting White or Acting Black: Mixed-Race Adolescents Identity and Behavior.” 2008, doi:10.3386/w13793. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13793.pdf Note to ProfessorBecause of such high tensions in the world right now a lot of people I had interviewed asked that I not publish our interviews out of respect and solidarity with George Floyd and use my platform in this paper to talk about that instead of what I originally was going to talk about. However, I still need a grade and to observe some continuity from my original plan was, so that’s what I will do but I have redacted the personal testimonies and am going solely off of the anonymous data I had previously acquired. 2 These are the pages that I see when reviewing the material submitted online, as an example for what someone filling out the form would see. 6
