Mixed Race Studies

We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, “The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’,” (interview with Jenée Desmond-Harris), The Root, June 6, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/views/browner-america-marcia-dawkins-qa.

The first black president has made it harder to talk about race in America

The Washington Post
2012-03-23

Reniqua Allen, Freelance Journalist and Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow
New America Foundation

A few weeks ago, I was standing outside a posh bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with my friends of almost two decades. I made an offhanded comment about the ratio of blonde-haired-blue-eyed chicks to brown girls like me. It seemed like a zillion to one.

My pals, who are white, didn’t get why I was bringing this up. “No one cares about race except you,” one said.

I tried to explain my frustration with having to always choose between an all-black experience or being the “only one,” whether at work, in grad school or even out for a night in New York. I waited for a nod of sympathy; instead, my best friend threw her hands up and said: “How can we all be racist? Look at who is president!”

I didn’t have a response.

Right now the nation has embarked on a massive conversation about race surrounding the tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. On Friday, President Obama weighed in. “I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out: How does something like this happen?” he said.

It’s an important conversation to have — but I fear it won’t lead anywhere…

Read the entire article here.

He Checked That Box, But How Black is Obama?

Politic365: From Your Point of View
2013-07-12

William Reed, Head
The Business Exchange Network

“If you had a choice of color, which one would you choose, my brother?”

– Curtis Mayfield, 1969

In the official U.S. 2010 head count, President Barack Obama provided one answer to the question about his ethnic background: African American. Since the option was introduced in 2000, the census figures indicate that the country has 5.2 million multiracial individuals. Americans who check more than one box for race now make up 5 percent of the minority population. It’s of note that Obama didn’t check multiple boxes that were available on the form, or choose the option that allowed him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He simply ticked the box that said “Black, African American, or Negro.”

Though he checked the census “Black” box, is Obama “Black” like you and me? To date, he has paid no attention to Blacks and their economic challenges. African-American voters are rooted in the belief that Obama’s platform and persona represent “real Black Americans.” They both may have run the streets of Chicago; however, it’s doubtful Obama knows about the late Curtis Mayfield and what he represented. An American singer, songwriter and record producer best known for his anthem-like music, Mayfield recorded and produced “message music” during the 1960s and 1970s. “Choice of Colors” hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s R&B chart and reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. Neither did Obama grow up under the influence of a weekly Jet and or Ebony magazine adorning the family living room coffee table. As opaque as Obama is to Blacks, a fellow Chicago businessman, the late John H. Johnson, made his fortune catering to us.

Obama has yet to show up in the East Room in a dashiki, but his being “Black” and being “there” has spawned “Obamania” among African Americans. Black voters love the fact that Obama checked the “Black” box, even though his mother was a white woman from Kansas. His father was a Black Kenyan. Obama’s biracial identity helped him build a sizable middle-class American following; it’s also opened up questions as to his authenticity as a Black man. “Obama and the Biracial Factor,” edited by Andrew J. Jolivette, is a book that explores the role of Obama’s mixed-race identity in his path to the presidency. It offers a broad and penetrating view of the importance of race in the ongoing development of American politics. It demonstrates how mixed-race identity reinforces rather than challenges white supremacy within popular discourse…

Read the entire article here.

This study adds to the growing body of literature on multiracial identity by illustrating the importance of reflected appraisals in shaping racial identity. Importantly, these findings also show how reflected appraisals are fundamentally shaped by the one-drop rule (for black-white Americans in particular). Few studies examine reflected appraisals as a determinant of racial identity (Khanna 2004), and I find that biracial respondents frequently explain their black identities as due, in part, to how they believe they are viewed by “others” and by “larger society.” As suggested by Brunsma and Rockquemore (2001), however, who argue that how biracial people think others view them is moderated by social context, many respondents draw distinctions between how they believe they are perceived depending upon whether the observers are white or black. Other white people, they argue, see them as black, while other black people are more likely to recognize their multiracial backgrounds. These conflicting perceptions have the potential to shape different “racial reflections” (e.g., as black or multiracial), yet I find that the one-drop rule affects the entire reflected appraisal process, subsequently shaping “internalized” black identities for the majority of respondents.

Nikki Khanna, “‘If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black’: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule,” Sociological Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 1 (Winter 2010). 113-114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01162.x.

Racism, White Supremacy and Biracial/Multiraciality (2011)

Tim Wise, Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator
September 2011

Tim Wise

From my September 2011 talk at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. In this snippet, I respond to a question about how we should understand or think about biracial and multiracial folks’ experiences in a system of racism/white supremacy.

[Transcribed by Steven F. Riley]

I think it would be wise for people who are biracial and multiracial to never forget that this is a system of formal historical and institutional white supremacy. And I’m afraid sometimes, there are a lot incentives that the culture puts out there to biracial and multiracial people to forget that. Right. Because they’re not quite as Black or they’re not quite as Brown. And so there is a tendency for people to think that they really escape that system. Right. That they’re not really in that system. And look, and I think that every person ought to be able to claim whatever parts of and all parts of their identity. So if… look, if you’re Tiger Woods and you want to call yourself “Cablinasian,” which is what he did back in the early part of his career. He called himself Cablinasian because he wanted to honor Caucasian part, the Asian part, the Black part, the Native American part. Okay, here’s the deal… He was Cablinasian. He instited on that. He was not Black!

Okay. And then… when Tiger Woods did what Tiger Woods did… repeatedly, apparently, I went on the chat boards—sports chat boards, not political chat boards–sports chat boards. [Be]cause you can tell a lot about the culture based on the annonymous comments that folks post on sports boards. Forget politics, just read any post after a NBA game, after a NFL game, hell, read the comments after a storm goes through your community. Any story at all, folks will bring up race… with an “Anonymous,” just “Anonymous.” They never put their name and they have no avatar, it’s just that shadow-head and “Anonymous” and they put some nonsense. And so, I went on the chatboard after this Tiger Woods thing broke. And it was funny, everyone who had stuff to say about him, none of them said, “You know, this is just what Cablinasian men do.” [laughter] “What do you expect from a Cablinasian.” [laughter].

That’s not what they said, he was Black… as midnight, as soon as he did something that reminded the dominate group of the stereotype they had come to believe. So, multiracial, biracial folks: claim all of, claim every piece of it. Do not forget where one still sits on the trajectory of white supremacy. Because when once you forget that, there is real danger, real danger.

Listen to the clip here (00:02:14). Download the clip here (395 KB).

Steve Scher: “What is President Obama?”

Ralina Joseph: “Well, if you were to ask him. President Obama is black. He is African-American.”

Steve Scher: “Yeah. When President Obama came out after the Trayvon Martin killing and he said, ‘My kids would have looked like Trayvon Martin if they had been boys.’… Let’s unpack all of the things that were being said there. What was he saying about his identity?”

Ralina Joseph: “So, this is a really interesting question. I think that he is identifying as black and in the way which we have seen President Obama identify publically it has been as black. He has also talked about his white family. He’s also famously referenced his mother from Kansas and his father from Kenya. But that has not precluded his identifying as African-American. I think that in real life that these identities are always together. They’re very much a part of each other. They’re fluidly understood. They’re simultaneous. And yet, when we understand race, we think about them in these really separate binaristic manners. So it makes sense to me that he identifies very much with Trayvon Martin’s family and also can talk about his white and Asian-American family, for example.”

Steve Scher, “Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” Weekday with Steve Scher, KUOW.org Seattle, 94.9 FM. (April 15, 2013). http://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2013/04/WeekdayA20130415.mp3 (00:18:50-00:20:07).

Exhibit A is President Barack Obama. He declined to check the box for “white” on his census form, despite his mother’s well-known whiteness.

Obama offered no explanation, but Leila McDowell has an idea.

“Put a hoodie on him and have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then,” said McDowell, vice president of communications for the NAACP.

Jesse Washington, “Black or biracial? Census forces a choice for some,” The Associated Press, April 14, 2010. http://www.jessewashington.com/im-not-biracial.html.

What remains perplexing is that given the history of racial mixing, the Census Bureau estimates that about 75-90% of Black Americans are ancestrally multiracial, yet even today, only 7% choose to identify as such (Davis, 2001; Lee and Bean, 2010). Clearly, genealogy alone does not dictate racial identification. Given that the “one-drop rule” of hypodescent is no longer legally codified, why does the rate of multiracial reporting among Blacks remain relatively low?…

Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean, “A Postracial Society or A Diversity Paradox? Race, Immigration, and Multiraciality in the Twenty-First Century,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Volume 9, Issue 2, (Fall 2012). 423. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X12000161.

I propose that the one drop rule no longer trumps physical appearance, but nonetheless it continues to influence racial identity today. In particular, the one drop rule affects how black-white biracials’ physical appearances are perceived by others. Despite the range in their physical appearances (e.g., some have dark and others light skin), black-white biracial Americans are frequently raced as black. This is because the legacy of the one drop rule has shaped how Americans (of all racial and ethnic backgrounds) perceive normative “black” phenotypes. According to Russell, Wilson, and Hall (1992), black Americans show a “kaleidoscope of skin tones” (9), due both to the long history of interracial mixing between blacks and whites and to the broad definition of “blackness.” Under the one drop rule, individuals with any degree of black ancestry were classified as black; thus, the normative phenotypic image of a “black” person became broad, and we can see today that black phenotypes vary widely in skin tone and other physical characteristics (e.g., nose shape, hair texture). Even today, having some “white” phenotypic characteristics—such as light skin, blue eyes, and straight hair—does not necessarily conflict with Americans’ image of blackness. For example, actress Vanessa Williams and recording artist Beyoncé Knowles are both “black” with some degree of white ancestry and “white” features. While Williams and Knowles do not outwardly appear white (i.e., they could not pass as white), they do have some physical features that reflect their white ancestry; Vanessa Williams has light skin and blue eyes, and Beyonce Knowles has light skin and long, straight hair. Having these “white” normative physical characteristics, however, does not necessarily conflict with Americans’ image of what it looks like to be black.

This broad image of blackness not only influences how Americans view blacks, but also how they view biracial black-white Americans. Regardless of any “white” physical characteristics biracial individuals may have, others tend simply to classify them as black because their perceptions of what a “black” person looks like do not preclude normative “white” physical characteristics. For instance, a biracial person may have straight, long hair, but so do many black Americans (either because of white ancestry or because of hair straightening/“relaxing” techniques common among black women today). As a consequence, many Americans are unable to distinguish between black and biracial phenotypes. Thus, appraisals of these phenotypes (both real and reflected) are influenced by the historical legacy of the one drop rule, which continues to shape black identities even today.

Nikki Khanna, Biracial in America: Forming and Performing Racial Identity, (Lahnam, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2011), 47.

Trayvon Martin, my son, and the Black Male Code

The Associated Press
2012-03-24

Jesse Washington, National Writer/Race and Ethnicity

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — I thought my son would be much older before I had to tell him about the Black Male Code. He’s only 12, still sleeping with stuffed animals, still afraid of the dark. But after the Trayvon Martin tragedy, I needed to explain to my child that soon people might be afraid of him.

We were in the car on the way to school when a story about Martin came on the radio. “The guy who killed him should get arrested. The dead guy was unarmed!” my son said after hearing that neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman had claimed self-defense in the shooting in Sanford, Fla.

We listened to the rest of the story, describing how Zimmerman had spotted Martin, who was 17, walking home from the store on a rainy night, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head. When it was over, I turned off the radio and told my son about the rules he needs to follow to avoid becoming another Trayvon Martin – a black male who Zimmerman assumed was “suspicious” and “up to no good.”…

Read the entire article here.