Mixed Race Studies

Toward building a conceptual framework on intermarriage

Ethnicities
Volume 16, Number 4, August 2016
pages 497-520
DOI: 10.1177/1468796816638402

Sayaka Osanami Törngren
Malmö University, Sweden; Sophia University, Japan

Nahikari Irastorza, Marie Curie Research Fellow
Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare
Malmö University, Sweden

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Increasing migration worldwide and the cultural diversity generated as a consequence of international migration has facilitated the unions of people from different countries, religions, races, and ethnicities. Such unions are often celebrated as a sign of integration; however, at the same time as they challenge people’s idea of us and them, intermarriages in fact still remain controversial, and even to some extent, taboo in many societies. Research and theorizing on intermarriage is conducted predominantly in the English-speaking North American and British contexts. This special issue includes empirical studies from not only the English-speaking countries such as the U.S., Canada, and the UK, but also from Japan, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Spain and demonstrate the increasingly diverse directions taken in the study of intermarriage in regards to the patterns, experiences, and social implications of intermarriages. Moreover, the articles address the assumed link between intermarriage and “integration.”

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How To Identify With Your People When Your People Won’t Let You

Swirl Nation Blog
2016-03-30

Amal Gonzalez

This is very hard for me to write because I don’t know how to begin.

I’ve written about being racially ambiguous. Growing up in a predominantly white environment without real examples of people who are mixed-raced in the media made me “other”, but definitely not white, or at least not 100% white. I’ve written about my parents both being mixed-race, but because of the one-drop-rule, they were black and never were allowed, or even compelled to identify as anything other than black. My dad definitely “looks” like he has African blood flowing through his veins – full lips, coarse, kinky hair, and a slightly broader nose. My mother, on the other hand, has been identified as Latina, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Jewish. She has naturally soft hair, an angular nose, fairer skin, not pale. However, my mother grew up with 6 black sisters in a white rural town in California. Everyone knew her family and she was reminded she was black every day.

So you can only imagine, when it came to raising me and my sisters, we were told about our white relatives. We were told about our family members we will probably never meet because they decided to “pass” during a time when being white was truly a privilege. BUT we never identified with being white or bi-racial. It was always people around me that pointed out my differences, the “other”. It was society that pointed out that I didn’t necessarily fit in one category based on my physical appearance…

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Meet Yosif Stalin, The Soviet-Born Black American From Kremlin, Virginia

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
2016-04-08

Carl Schrek

KREMLIN, Virginia — Yosif Stalin stood before his Kremlin home on a windswept afternoon this spring, his weathered hands gripping his walker. “I still own it,” he said of the white, two-story house off a lonely country road.

It’s no coincidence that this octogenarian was named after one of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictators, but it’s just half of his name. His full name is Yosif Stalin Kim Roane, and he was the first child of African-American parents ever born in the Soviet Union.

“Didn’t nobody pay that no mind,” Roane said of his notorious namesake in a recent interview with RFE/RL. “They mostly called me Joe.”

Roane, 84, is among the few living offspring of African-Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s to seek a better life in the nascent communist state.

Most of these voyagers were driven by political convictions or economic hardship amid the Great Depression and pernicious racism in the United States, including the segregationist Jim Crow laws of the American South.

That Roane was born in an empire run from the Kremlin and grew up in this tiny Virginia hamlet of the same name is a coincidence that inspired the title of a recent documentary, Kremlin To Kremlin, aimed at preserving the record of his family’s remarkable journey for future generations…

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The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed

The Guardian
2016-04-04

Paul Mason

Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies … a scene from the film Kes. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Thatcherism didn’t just crush the unions, it crushed a story – as the report that says working-class white children go backwards at school proves

The report came couched in the usual language of inclusion, technocracy and “what works”. Disadvantaged children are doing so badly at school that only one in five hits an international benchmark designed by the authors.

But the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids…

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Of association, assimilation and mixed-race marriages

Oman Daily Observer
2016-03-21

Ali Ahmed Al Riyami

It is said that ‘love knows no bounds’ and, as such, when two people meet and fall in love there is little that can stop there union and all that it entails; especially the expected outcome, which is in fact the main reason that a man and a woman conjoin in the first place — whether consciously or unconsciously — of producing offspring and securing their gene pools. In a world that has seen the mass movement and migrations of people, across boarders and continents, it is not surprising, then, that the incidence of mixed marriages between people of different national and cultural origins, faiths and creeds takes place.

In Britain, it is reported that one in ten marriages is by a mixed race couple; something almost unimaginable and very rare just a few decades ago and yet, as the figures show, is becoming quite commonplace…

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Hapas Soon to Be the Majority in the Japanese American Community

AsAmNews: Where the conversation about Asian America Begins
2016-04-16

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

The future is now in the Japanese American community.

By 2020, just four years away, demographers says the majority of Japanese Americans will be multiracial/multiethnic.

A new exhibition now at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose in California runs through the end of the year. It is curated by Fred Liang and Cindy Nakashima who also co-curated an earlier version of the exhibition in 2013 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

“My parents married in 1965, when it was still illegal in sixteen states, but they married in Ohio, where there were no anti-miscegenation laws,” Nakashima told AsAmNews. My dad is a Nisei, my mom is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP). They met in graduate school.”

The interracial marriage rate in the Japanese American community is estimated at 66 percent. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967, (Loving v. Virginia) that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional, each state had control over who could and could not get legally married…

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How Soccer Helped Brazil Embrace Its Racial Diversity

Zócalo Public Square
KCRW
Santa Monica, California
2016-04-06

Joshua Nadel, Associate Professor of History
North Carolina Central University

Brazil—as two recent book titles point out, and almost any kid kicking a ball anywhere in the world can tell you—is the country of soccer. While the modern sport’s actual birthplace is England, Brazil is the spiritual center of the sport. Brazil, whose beloved canarinho team is the only one to play in all World Cups and to have won five, perfected the English invention, inspiring a more poetic, fluid version of the game. And while Brazil made modern soccer, the extent to which soccer made modern Brazil is often underappreciated.

The sport landed in Brazil (and throughout Latin America) at the moment of the creation of the modern nation state, in the late 19th century. As a result it tied into the historical narratives—the stories that Brazilians crafted about themselves—that underpinned the nascent nation. Soccer helped to knit Brazil together into one country in the early 20th century and played a key role in incorporating people of African descent into the polity.

Soccer arrived in Brazil in the 1890s, brought by British workers and Anglo-Brazilian youth who were returning from school in England. At first played in elite social clubs like the São Paulo Athletic Club, the sport soon diffused downwards to the masses, and by the first decades of the 20th century was already the most popular sport in the country. Most soccer histories in Latin America suggest two separate “births”—the foreign birth marked by arrival of sport and the dominance of expatriate teams; and the national birth, when the local youth began to beat the Europeans at their game. In Brazil a third birth exists: when Afro-Brazilians enter the field in large numbers…

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Exploring Whiteness in a Black-Indian Village on Mexico’s Costa Chica

The Latin American Diaries
Institute of Latin American Studies
2015-06-29

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Latin American Anthropology
University of Southampton

During the early colonial period, Mexico had one of the largest African slave populations in Latin America. Today, there are numerous historically black communities along the coast of the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca – a region known as the Costa Chica. Towards the end of the 16th century, the Spanish Crown granted tracts of land in the region to several conquistadors who had quelled local Indian resistance. These conquistadors brought to the coast cattle for ranching, and – in the colonial vernacular – blacks and mulattoes, both free and enslaved, to work as cowboys, in agriculture, and as overseers, including of Indian labor.

As time went on, two ethnic zones developed: the foothills and highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range at the Costa Chica’s northern edge held Indian communities, while the zone closest to the coast became an ethnic mix that included Indians drawn willingly or unwillingly into the colonial ambit. On the coast, blacks, mulattoes and Indians worked together for Spaniards. Indians also taught blacks and mulattoes native healing, agricultural techniques and local building styles. Because demographics tilted towards African-descent males, informal and formal unions between them and Indian women were common. By the middle of the 17th century, many coastal belt villages were Afro-Indigenous…

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Revealing the Race-Based Realities of Workforce Exclusion

NACLA Report on the Americas
Volume 47, Number 4 (Winter 2014)
pages 26-29

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

Advocates in the fight against poverty in Latin America often center class above race as the factor that most determines Afro-descendants’ life-chances. But a growing movement is setting the record straight.

Believing that the black population will be able to reach basic equality independently from what happens with the rest of poor Colombians, within general social policy, or economic growth…is dreaming in a vacuum,” said sociologist Daniel Mera Villamizar in a 2009 El Tiempo column on the Colombian government’s workplace affirmative action measures. Mera continues: “To resolve the historic ambiguity between racism and classism…by saying that race is the determining factor, is to buy a ticket to a conflict we don’t even know.” As critics of the column noted at the time, Mera’s words were at odds with many of the demands of the growing movements for racial justice across Latin America that have proliferated over the past 15 years. These groups are engaged in the fight to raise awareness of the ways race-based discrimination in Latin America cannot be sufficiently explained by the analyses—touted by many advocates and organizations engaged in anti-poverty struggles—that class is the determining mechanism of social and economic marginalization.

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America, representing just over 30% of the total population and more than 40% of the poor. Advocates for racial equality in Latin America testify statistically and anecdotally to the fact that Afro-descendants face the frequent perception that they are undesirable elements of society, and are marginalized in politics, media, public life, the job market, and education systems. Mera’s call to avoid conflict by holding up class above race as the most salient factor in determining the life-chances of Afro-descendants echoes the notion—still widely held in much of Latin America—of the “myth of racial democracy.”

Increasingly critiqued over the past 20 years, the myth holds that Latin America’s racial mixture (mestizaje/mestiçagem) creates racial harmony and inherently guards against racial discord and inequality. This denial of racism is often rooted in a belief system that contrasts itself to the history of Jim Crow legislation in the United States. There is no more important place to understand the persistence of race-based marginalization in Latin America than in the increasingly well documented practices of labor market discrimination…

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The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perception

Social Problems
Volume 57, Issue 1 (February 2010)
pages 92-113
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.92

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

In the United States, racial disparities in incarceration and their consequences are widely discussed and debated. Previous research suggests that perceptions of crime and the operations of the criminal justice system play an important role in shaping how Americans think about race. This study extends the conversation by exploring whether being incarcerated affects how individuals perceive their own race as well as how they are perceived by others, using unique longitudinal data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Results show that respondents who have been incarcerated are more likely to identify and be seen as black, and less likely to identify and be seen as white, regardless of how they were perceived or identified previously. This suggests that race is not a fixed characteristic of individuals but is flexible and continually negotiated in everyday interactions.

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