Mixed Race Studies

Why I Cut My Racist In-Laws Out Of My Life

The Establishment
2016-08-02

TaLynn Kel

I won’t lie and say that I never had issues with the demographics of my mixed-race marriage. I definitely did. I worried about what my mom would think, and what my dad would say were he alive. I worried about what his parents thought. I worried about how the world would treat us.

I still worry.

After all, 2016 has all the hallmarks of an impending racial schism, and interracial couples are straddling a fence that may not be tenable.

When I entered my own relationship, I told myself that my significant other (S.O.) was different. That he wasn’t with me because of some fetish. That he loved me, all of me. That my brown skin didn’t matter to him. Over time came the revelations of his racism. I shouldn’t actually call them revelations, as they were more a matter of me acknowledging the truth. I repeatedly pulled the veil over my eyes and told myself that love was enough. Over and over again, I’d feel this buildup of dread as time would reveal some other facet of his racism. Then we’d talk. Then we’d fight. Then we’d talk some more. It is painful and confusing to have someone love you, cherish you, support you, and then wound you with their inability to accept the whole of you. But how our love and communication about racism evolved is another story…

Read the entire article here.

The Leopard Boy, A Novel

University of Virginia Press
January 2016 (Originally published in 1999 as L’Enfant Léopard)
304 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780813937908
Cloth ISBN: 9780813937892
Ebook ISBN: 9780813937915

Daniel Picouly

Translated and Afterword by:

Jeanne M. Garane, Professor of French and Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina

October 15, 1793: the eve of Marie-Antoinette’s execution. The Reign of Terror has descended upon revolutionary France, and thousands are beheaded daily under the guillotine. Edmond Coffin and Jonathan Gravedigger, two former soldiers now employed in disposing of the dead, are hired to search the Parisian neighborhood of Haarlem for a mysterious mixed-race “leopard boy,” whose nickname derives from his mottled black-and-white skin. Some would like to see the elusive leopard boy dead, while others wish to save him. Why so much interest in this child? He is rumored to be the son of Marie-Antoinette and a man of color–the Chevalier de Saint-George, perhaps, or possibly Zamor, the slave of Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV.

This wildly imaginative and culturally resonant tale by Daniel Picouly audaciously places black and mixed-race characters–including King Mac, creator of the first hamburger, who hands out figures of Voltaire and Rousseau with his happy meals, and the megalomaniac Black Delorme, creator of a slavery theme park–at the forefront of its Revolution-era story. Winner of the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, this book envisions a “Black France” two hundred years before the term came to describe a nation transformed through its postcolonial immigrant population.

Science and miscegenation in the early twentieth century: Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s debates and controversies with US physical anthropology

História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos
Published online ahead of print on 2016-07-18
17 pages
DOI: 10.1590/S0104-59702016005000014

Vanderlei Sebastião de Souza, Professor
Department of History
Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste, Brazil

Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

The article analyzes Brazilian anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s participation in the international debate that involved the field of physical anthropology and discussions on miscegenation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Special focus is on his readings and interpretations of a group of US anthropologists and eugenicists and his controversies with them, including Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and Franz Boas. The article explores the various ways in which Roquette-Pinto interpreted and incorporated their ideas and how his anthropological interpretations took on new meanings when they moved beyond Brazil’s borders.

Read the entire article here.

How White Parents of Black and Multiracial Transracially Adopted Children Approach Racial Exposure and Neighborhood Choice

Sociology of Race & Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-08-02
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216661851

Kathryn A. Sweeney, Associate Professor of Sociology
Purdue University Northwest, Hammond, Indiana

Although past research on racial socialization tends to concentrate on providing cultural knowledge and pride, this paper focuses on exposure to environments as a means of understanding preparation for racial discrimination, specifically in regard to transracial adoption. This article looks at how 19 white adoptive parents of black and multiracial adopted children perceive their neighborhood choice and decisions of where to send their kids to school and whom to befriend in order to understand how they approach racial socialization. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews illustrates how those who adopted transracially both domestically and internationally stressed that they did not want their children to be in environments where they would be the only person of color because they were concerned about their child experiencing racism and feeling isolated. Even so, they tended to live in white neighborhoods and send their children to predominantly white schools. Parents expressed being conflicted by what they saw as opposing measures and perceptions of school quality and racial-ethnic diversity. The parents in this study said that they sought out social support through organizations and friendships to expand their social networks for themselves and their children. Findings are not meant to challenge or support transracial adoption but rather to gain insight into perceptions of racial diversity, neighborhood and school choices, and friendship networks as a way to understand aspects of racial socialization associated with environmental exposure and preparation for racism.

Read or purchase the article here.

White KC mom of mixed family on why she constantly checks white privilege

The Kansas City Star
2016-07-24

Aaron Randle, Culture Writer

• Amanda and Kenton Campbell have a mixed daughter and adopted son from Haiti
• “I’m so past the warm and fuzzy point,” the 36-year-old mom says

Amanda Campbell is ready when you are.

Ready to get uncomfortable. Ready to share that article on your Facebook feed about why “Black Lives Matter” is necessary. Ready to explain to you why “All Lives Matter” is not. Ready to check you on your white privilege.

“I’m so past the warm and fuzzy point,” the 36-year-old mom says, exasperated, as she leans back in the sofa in her Brookside living room. Her husband, Kenton Campbell, 33, who is black, lounges his 6-foot-3 frame on a chaise to her right.

Their mixed-race daughter, Jocelyn, 5, with cocoa butter skin and a head full of curls, lies across her lap fiddling with a baby doll. Isaac, 8, their dark-skinned, Haitian-born, adopted son, is in the sunroom around the corner toying with a video game.

“When people are like, ‘I don’t want to see (race), I don’t want to hear about it,’ that doesn’t exist for me,” Amanda says.

“Post-racial America” can try to be as blithely colorblind as it’d like. That isn’t an option in the Campbell household. Race permeates the fabric of their existence.

Amanda recalls the time her aunt, who’s also white, told her “she doesn’t see color.” Amanda began to tell her that was a load of crap. “Well actually, Aunty, being colorblind is …”

That’s when Kenton, feeling his wife about to enter “White Ally” mode, tugged at her arm to reel her back in.

“He was like, ‘Don’t go there!’ ” she says with a laugh. “But it’s like, if I don’t go there …”

The sentiment is understood: If Amanda or any other white person who gets the complexities and struggles of black America doesn’t take the opportunity to educate other whites in casual white-privilege moments, who else will?

“I’m ready to talk about (racism). But overall I would say 90 percent of America is not open to it,” she says. “I’m not a percentage as vocal as I’d like to be, but I know that if you are too much, and some people think that I am, that there’s a wall that comes up. It’s a constant balancing act.”

For the Campbells, everyday life as an interracial couple raising both a mixed and black child requires skillful straddling. On one hand, Amanda gets weary of having to educate others. But then again, as the sole white member of the family, she feels an obligation to operate as an ally and advocate, to call out prejudice when she sees it…

Read the entire article here.

Who Gets To Be ‘Hapa’?

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-08-08

Akemi Johnson

Sunset in Waikiki: Tourists sipping mai tais crowded the beachside hotel bar. When the server spotted my friend and me, he seemed to relax. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Two hapa girls.”

He asked if we were from Hawaii. We weren’t. We both have lived in Honolulu — my friend lives there now — but hail from California. It didn’t matter. In that moment, he recognized our mixed racial backgrounds and used “hapa” like a secret handshake, suggesting we were aligned with him: insiders and not tourists.

Like many multiracial Asian-Americans, I identify as hapa, a Hawaiian word for “part” that has spread beyond the islands to describe anyone who’s part Asian or Pacific Islander. When I first learned the term in college, wearing it felt thrilling in a tempered way, like trying on a beautiful gown I couldn’t afford. Hapa seemed like the identity of lucky mixed-race people far away, people who’d grown up in Hawaii as the norm, without “Chink” taunts, mangled name pronunciations, or questions about what they were…

Read the entire article here.

Inconsistency within Expressed and Observed Racial Identifications: Implications for Mental Health Status

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 59, Number 3 (September 2016)
pages 582-603
DOI: 10.1177/0731121415602133

Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Tony N. Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

The present study extends previous work on distress that arises from discrepancy between self and interviewer racial identifications. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data, we examine mental health consequences of inconsistency over time within expressed (self) and observed (interviewer) racial identifications among American Indians. Given that phenotype signals race, we also contribute to prior research by examining whether skin color moderates inconsistency’s mental health consequences. Analyses show that observed racial inconsistency increased American Indians’ depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation. That is, when interviewers labeled a respondent “American Indian” at one wave of data but not another, there were deleterious implications for mental health status. In addition, an interaction between observed inconsistency and skin color demonstrated that observed inconsistency tended to be harmful when respondents were observed as having light skin. We argue observed inconsistency captures the distressing experience of being not readily classifiable.

Read or purchase the article here.

Othering Obama: Racial Attitudes and Dubious Beliefs about the Nation’s First Black President

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 57, Number 4 (December 2014)
pages 450-469
DOI: 10.1177/0731121414536140

Daniel Tope, Associate Professor of Sociology
Florida State University

Justin T. Pickett, Assistant Professor
School of Criminal Justice
State University of New York, Albany

Ryon J. Cobb, National Institute on Aging Postdoctoral Fellow
Davis School of Gerontology
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California

Jonathan Dirlam
Department of Sociology
Ohio State University

The literature on descriptive representation indicates that the election of black political leaders may prompt white enmity. We assess this claim by examining the relationship between whites’ racial attitudes and their likelihood of othering Barack Obama by labeling him as a Muslim and/or a noncitizen interloper. The findings reveal that both symbolic racial resentment and traditional racial attitudes are associated with othering Obama. In addition, the results reveal that the relationship between racial resentment and othering is substantially mediated by the use of seemingly nonracist frames based on emotional reactions and negative expectations about an Obama presidency. Conversely, much of the effect of belief in traditional antiblack stereotypes was transmitted directly to othering Obama without the use of justificatory frames. Despite claims of racial progress, our findings suggest that racial sentiments—both overt and symbolic—continue to play a major role in politics.

Read or purchase the article here.

Paradoxically, the same genomic arguments about the nonexistence of biologically differentiated racial categories can work in a different way to re-racialize Brazilian society. The genetic data are used to argue that everyone is more or less mixed and that Brazil is a heterogeneously mestiço nation. But this argument easily resonates, in the wider public sphere, with a racialized conception of the nation, understood as a population that has been constituted by the mixture of three original racial stocks: the concept of ‘mestiço’ has great difficulty in shaking off its racialized genealogy (Young, 1995), even if the geneticists argue that race has no biological reality in general and specifically in Brazil. Thus, the re-geneticization of the social order makes more available new types of genetic data and idioms to think about social identities: the identity of mestiço, which is deeply racialized, is validated in genetic terms, even as race itself and racial differences are denied.

Peter Wade and Michael Kent, “Genetics against race: Science, politics and affirmative action in Brazil,” Social Studies of Science, Volume 45, Number 6 (December 2015): 831. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306312715610217.

The analysis of these examples from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico reveals how crucial the nation is as a frame for understanding the way racialized concepts get reiterated and reworked in genomic science, in ways that make race both disappear and reappear. Public health, multiculturalism, and forensics are all political and policy domains that directly invoke the biopolitical nation and its people in terms of their well-being, their diversity and unity, and their biological relatedness in procreation, violence, and death. The governance of these domains is of central interest to the state. Genomics also intervenes in these domains, with the promise of better health for the nation’s people, representations of both diversity and unity, and techniques for connecting bodies in ways that, it is hoped, will lead to reconciliations and peace. The idea of race, in previous times, figured explicitly in the way all these domains were conceptualized in all three countries—los problemas de la raza, to recall the title of the 1920 Colombian book cited earlier on, concerned precisely health, progress, unity, diversity, and conflict in the nation. Race was of course not the only factor to be considered—violent conflict, for example, also followed cleavages of class, region, religion, or political faction—but it was an important way of thinking about difference and the problems it might cause within the nation. The demise of race as an explicit discourse for talking about these matters did not mean that racialized concepts disappeared. Geneticists and medics continued to be interested in the racial mixture of their national populations in relation to public health, cultural commentators continued to reflect on diversity in terms of black, indigenous, and mestizo cultural traits, and indeed forensic scientists continued to classify bodies in more or less explicitly racial terms. Genomics, characterized by its very detailed examination of the structure of DNA sequences, generally rejects a language of race, both biologically and, in Latin America, socially. Brazil, where color/race labels operate in some domains, is a partial exception, while also being the country where the most vocal rejection of race is to be found. Yet, as we have seen, racialized concepts continue to appear implicitly (and occasionally more explicitly) in genomic analysis and are frequently harnessed to the idea of the nation.

Peter Wade, Vivette García Deister, Michael Kent, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Díaz del Castillo Hernández, “Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics,” Current Anthropology, 55, no. 5 (October 2014): 506. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/677945