Mixed Race Studies

‘Dear White People’: A Mixed-Race Perspective

Pacific Citizen: Then National Newspaper of the JACL
Los Angeles, California
2014-11-19

Christine Munteanu, Assistant Program Director
Japanese American Citizens League (JACL)

Last week, I watched a film called “Dear White People,” which follows the experiences of four black students at a predominately white, fictional Ivy League university. It was refreshing to see a movie that focused on the experiences of people of color, rather than the mainstream movies I usually watch that are almost exclusively about white people. Even though I know very little about black identity struggles specifically, as a person of color, there were many moments that I found relatable, familiar and funny.

I enjoyed the film overall, but as a mixed-race Japanese American, I was bothered by the portrayal of a biracial black character named Samantha White. Sam is the outspoken, radical leader of the Black Student Union’s protests against discriminatory university policies. She hosts a controversial campus radio show that speaks to the black experience, is well-versed in the history of civil rights and is the new head of an all-black residence hall.

The film follows Sam’s struggle with her identity as a biracial black woman. The fact that she is half-white is highlighted throughout the film as the reason she feels the need to “overcompensate” through her activism as a way to prove her blackness. Sam’s white boyfriend, Gabe, whom Sam repeatedly pushes away as she organizes protests and implements new policies in her residence hall, tells Sam that she is denying her true self by being so militant — after all, he knows she secretly listens to Taylor Swift. Meanwhile, Sam’s white father (literally, Mr. White) is suffering from health issues, adding a sense of urgency to Sam’s feeling that she must “choose a side.”…

Read the entire review here.

Going to College and Learning You’re Black: The Moving Story of Little White Lie

Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood
2014-11-25

Chase Quinn

“You boys are black, and don’t you forget that.”

From an early age I was taught that both my black identity and my white-Irish identity were important, and that I was never to relinquish either from my understanding of who I was. Watching Lacey Schwartz’s thought-provoking documentary Little White Lie— now in limited release and airing on PBS March 23—I was reminded of this formative experience, the wisdom of these seemingly competing messages and the diverse range of biracial narratives out there.

Little White Lie traces the story of Schwartz’s discovery of her mixed-race heritage after 18 years believing she was the product of two white, Jewish parents. After submitting a photo of herself with her undergraduate application to Georgetown and being contacted by their black student alliance, she begins to question the story she’s been told about who she is and that of her parents’ picture-perfect marriage. Ultimately she’s forced to confront her mother about a secret affair with Schwartz’s biological father, a black man and longtime family friend, and reexamine who she is as person…

Read the entire review here.

The corporate institution of mixed race: Indigeneity, discourse, and Orientalism in Aboriginal policy

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Volume 10, Number 1, 2014
17 pages

Camie Augustus
Department of History
University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Contradiction in Aboriginal policy, especially the oscillation between assimilation and segregation, is often viewed as inconsequential. The suggestion has been that inconsistency is typical of governments and even expected of administrations that have little time, money, or motivation to be overly concerned with Aboriginal matters. However, I posit that ambiguity has meaning. I propose that utilizing Said’s concept of the corporate institution of Orientalism reveals a ‘mixed-race’ discourse in government records during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that in fact gives meaning to this contradictory nature. I examine the ways in which the texts of Aboriginal law and policy in Canada, the US, and Australia constitute a specific mixed-race discourse of ambivalence and ambiguity, in contrast to a racial discourse of certainty. Based on a discourse analysis of key policy texts, I conclude that ambiguity and ambivalence constitute part of a colonial structure based on racial binarisms where an absence of space for ‘those in between’ reflected the perceived transitional and transient nature of ‘mixed-race’ as a temporary category, and the impetus to eliminate it. This discourse is surprisingly similar and persistent across a broad span of time and space, suggesting that questions about racial mixing and the presence of mixed-ancestry Natives constituted a major determining factor in the shaping of Aboriginal law and policy in these three countries between 1850 and 1950.

Read the entire article here.

The new threat: ‘Racism without racists’

Cable News Network (CNN)
2014-11-27

John Blake

They showed people a photograph of two white men fighting, one unarmed and another holding a knife. Then they showed another photograph, this one of a white man with a knife fighting an unarmed African-American man.

When they asked people to identify the man who was armed in the first picture, most people picked the right one. Yet when they were asked the same question about the second photo, most people — black and white — incorrectly said the black man had the knife.

Even before the Ferguson grand jury’s decision was announced, leaders were calling once again for a “national conversation on race.” But here’s why such conversations rarely go anywhere: Whites and racial minorities speak a different language when they talk about racism, scholars and psychologists say.

The knife fight experiment hints at the language gap. Some whites confine racism to intentional displays of racial hostility. It’s the Ku Klux Klan, racial slurs in public, something “bad” that people do.

But for many racial minorities, that type of racism doesn’t matter as much anymore, some scholars say. They talk more about the racism uncovered in the knife fight photos — it doesn’t wear a hood, but it causes unsuspecting people to see the world through a racially biased lens.

It’s what one Duke University sociologist calls “racism without racists.” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, who’s written a book by that title, says it’s a new way of maintaining white domination in places like Ferguson.

“The main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits,” says Bonilla-Silva…

…’I don’t see color’

It’s a phrase some white people invoke when a conversation turns to race. Some apply it to Ferguson. They’re not particularly troubled by the grand jury’s decision to not issue an indictment. The racial identities of Darren Wilson, the white police officer, and Michael Brown, the black man he killed, shouldn’t matter, they say. Let the legal system handle the decision without race-baiting. Justice should be colorblind.

Science has bad news, though, for anyone who claims to not see race: They’re deluding themselves, say several bias experts. A body of scientific research over the past 50 years shows that people notice not only race but gender, wealth, even weight.

When babies are as young as 3 months old, research shows they start preferring to be around people of their own race, says Howard J. Ross, author of “Everyday Bias,” which includes the story of the knife fight experiment…

…Another famous experiment shows how racial bias can shape a person’s economic prospects.

Professors at the University of Chicago and MIT sent 5,000 fictitious resumes in response to 1,300 help wanted ads. Each resume listed identical qualifications except for one variation — some applicants had Anglo-sounding names such as “Brendan,” while others had black-sounding names such as “Jamal.” Applicants with Anglo-sounding names were 50% more likely to get calls for interviews than their black-sounding counterparts.

Most of the people who didn’t call “Jamal” were probably unaware that their decision was motivated by racial bias, says Daniel L. Ames, a UCLA researcher who has studied and written about bias.

“If you ask someone on the hiring committee, none of them are going to say they’re racially biased,” Ames says. “They’re not lying. They’re just wrong.”

Ames says such biases are dangerous because they’re often unseen.

“Racial biases can in some ways be more destructive than overt racism because they’re harder to spot, and therefore harder to combat,” he says…

…’But I have black friends’

In the movie “The Godfather,” the character of Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, hatches an audacious plan to kill a mobster and a crooked cop who tried to kill his father.

Michael’s elders scoff at his plans because they believe his judgment is clouded by anger. But in a line that would define his ruthless approach to wielding power, Michael tells them:

“It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”When some whites talk about racism, they think it’s only personal — what one person says or does to another. But many minorities and people who study race say racism can be impersonal, calculating, devoid of malice — such as Michael Corleone’s approach to power.

“The first thing we must stop doing is making racism a personal thing and understand that it is a system of advantage based on race,” says Doreen E. Loury, director of the Pan African Studies program at Arcadia University, near Philadelphia.

Loury says racism “permeates every facet of our societal pores.”…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid

The Atlantic
2014-11-26

Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Correspondent

Violence works. Nonviolence does too.

In a recent dispatch from Ferguson, Missouri, Jelani Cobb noted that President Obama’s responses to “unpunished racial injustices” constitute “a genre unto themselves.” Monday night, when Barack Obama stood before the nation to interpret the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, he offered a particularly tame specimen. The elements of “the genre” were all on display—an unmitigated optimism, an urge for calm, a fantastic faith in American institutions, an even-handedness exercised to a fault. But if all the limbs of the construct were accounted for, the soul of the thing was not.

There was none of the spontaneous annoyance at the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and little of the sheer pain exhibited in the line, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” The deft hand Obama employed in explaining to Americans why the acquittal of George Zimmerman so rankled had gone arthritic. This was a perfunctory execution of “the genre,” offered with all the energy of a man ticking items off a to-do list.

Barack Obama is an earnest moderate. His instincts seem to lead him to the middle ground. For instance, he genuinely believes that there is more overlap between liberals and conservatives than generally admitted. On Monday he nodded toward the “deep distrust” that divides black and brown people from the police, and then pointed out that this was tragic because these are the communities most in need of “good policing.” Whatever one makes of this pat framing, it is not a cynical centrism—he believes in the old wisdom of traditional America. This is his strength. This is his weakness. But Obama’s moderation is as sincere and real as his blackness, and the latter almost certainly has granted him more knowledge of his country than he generally chooses to share.

In the case of Michael Brown, this is more disappointing than enraging. The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers…

Read the entire article here.

Fake Diversity and Racial Capitalism

Medium
2014-11-23

Nancy Leong, Professor of Law
Sturm College of Law
University of Denver

For decades now, it’s been fashionable for institutions of all kinds to showcase their racially diverse constituencies. This is true even when the institution in question has been sued for discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other protected categories:…

…But behind the smiling, diverse faces, many institutions also share a dirty little secret. A lot of the diversity is the result not of the institution’s inclusive practices when it comes to recruiting, hiring, admitting or whatever other word is appropriate. Rather, it’s the result of Photoshop…

…How can we explain this impulse to overstate diversity, either through Photoshop or through aggressive presentation of diversity? I examined this phenomenon in a 2013 article in the Harvard Law Review called “Racial Capitalism.” What I call racial capitalism is the process of an individual or group deriving value from the racial identity of another person. While in theory any group might derive value from the racial identity of another, in practice, since white people are historically and presently a majority in America, racial capitalism most often involves a white person or a predominantly white institution extracting value from non-white racial identity.

Racial capitalism explains why white people are so keen to tell you about their black friends. It explains why white people are so anxious to tell you about the diverse neighborhood they live in. And, more generally, it explains why people have a powerful incentive to display their affiliation with non-white people…

Read the entire article here.

Glenn Chavis: Inquiry helps shed light on mixed-race heritage

The News & Record
Greensboro, North Carolina
2014-11-25

Glenn Chavis, Community Columnist

I recently received a call from a professor emeritus at Jackson State University who is working on a project dealing with a Tri-Racial Isolate group called Turks, who once made Sumter County, S.C., their home.

One day these Turks just disappeared from Sumter, he said, and he is trying to find out if any were buried in a graveyard at Bethesda Baptist Church in Sumter.

Even though I had nothing to offer, he did share plenty of information with me regarding Tri-Racial Isolates, which include Chavises.

This topic has always been of interest to me because the Shepherd/Chavis family started with black blood, then mixed with white blood and, after that, Indian blood. They were located mainly in the Franklin area.

Like most Tri-Isolates, some looked white, some black and others Indian. As a youngster visiting family in Franklin, I recall my ancestors living in their own little community. Denied by the Indian side, they were recognized by the white Shepherds…

…After visiting numerous websites dealing with Tri-Isolates, I found many definitions, interpretations and histories of these people. Regardless of slight differences, Tri-Isolates and Biracials existed hundreds of years ago, as well as today.

They usually stayed among themselves and worked the land as farmers.

Suddenly, I remembered that more than 30 years ago, a friend sent me a paper done by Edward Price of Los Angeles State College titled “A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in Eastern United States.” It was published in the June 1953 edition of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers…

Read the entire article here.

Grad student Alex Finley found her roots — and more

William & Mary News and Events
The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
2014-11-24

Jim Ducibella, Communications Specialist

This is part one of a two-story series. Check back Nov. 26 for the second part. – Ed.

As a child, Alex Finley remembers going through three phases of intense interest: One was genealogy. Another was the Civil War. The third was American Girls dolls.

“So I guess I was always destined to be a historian,” she said with a chuckle.

Finley, a Ph.D. candidate in history at William & Mary who is studying the domestic slave trade and the finance and business practices of slave traders in the antebellum period, combined two of those three passions to uncover a little known, controversial community in West Virginia.

It’s a discovery that has drawn the attention of television producers from the PBS program Finding Your Roots and ushered in a fascinating chapter in her life.

She began by researching her mother’s family history while she was in high school in southern Ohio, and continued her research as an undergraduate at Ohio State, completing an honors thesis on that particular branch of the family.

The Male family – or Mayle, as it’s also known – came to the United States from Dover, England, and eventually settled in Hampshire County, located in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle and Potomac Highlands regions.

Wilmore Male and his wife, Mary, had several children, including Wilmore, Jr., who fought in the Revolutionary War and came back to West Virginia to start a farm.

While there, he began a relationship with a slave he owned named Nancy.

“The proof we have of this is an extraordinary emancipation document from 1826,” Finley said. “(Male) emancipates Nancy and says that she is forever set free from this point – on the condition that she remain living with him as his wife.

“That’s extraordinary for the time period, for several reasons: One, he’s coming out publicly and saying this. Two, interracial marriage is illegal at this time and here he is in a courthouse saying he intends to live with this woman. They end up living together, with no evidence they were ever harassed or bothered by anyone for their relationship.”

How could that be? Finley’s research showed that the man at the courthouse who recorded the document – John White — was the son of Male’s captain in the Revolutionary War…

Read the entire article here.

Obama failed Ferguson. The prosecutor is pathetic. Between the split-screen, the protesters get it

The Guardian
London, United Kingdom
2014-11-25

Steven W. Thrasher, Columnist for Guardian US

Politicians have found themselves on the wrong side of the gap between the fantasy of what the law does and the reality that people live

There we had Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, finally admitting on one side of the television that structural racism is real. There we finally had him saying that when it comes to police terrorizing black folks, “communities of color aren’t just making these problems up”. But, in nearly the same breath on Monday night after the grand-jury decision in Ferguson, as the people were taking to the streets in cities across the nation, the president also said he doesn’t believe unequal enforcement of the law is “the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials.”

It wasn’t just surreal, then, to witness Obama’s anti-Trayvon Martin moment at the very same time a split-screen on the other side of the TV showed police launching smoke bombs at protesters in Ferguson. It was heartbreaking. Because if that was reality rising up through the gap on Monday night, the reality is that legal discrimination is the norm – and our law enforcement officials refuse to acknowledge reality…

…So it was nothing short of a gut punch to see our African American president on the wrong side of the gap between the fantasy of what the law does and the reality that people live. Obama, in that moment, gave credence to the fiction that if citizens just faithfully adhere to being “a nation built on the rule of law”, the result will be justice. Perhaps he will finally go to Ferguson tomorrow, but today, we are a nation looking upon a pile of ashes, death and broken dreams…

Read the entire article here.

Undoing Race? Reconciling Multiracial Identity with Equal Protection

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Assistant Professor of Law
Georgia State University College of Law

California Law Review
Volume 102, Number 5 (October 2014)
pages 1243-1302

The number of multiracial individuals in America, many of whom define their racial identity in different ways, has grown dramatically in recent years and continues to increase. From this demographic shift a movement seeking unique racial status for multiracial individuals has emerged. The multiracial movement is distinguishable from other race-based movements in that it is primarily driven by identity rather than the quest for political, social, or economic equality. It is not clear how equal protection doctrine, which is concerned primarily with state-created racial classifications, will or should accommodate multiracialism. Nor is it clear how to best reconcile the recognition of individual identity with the continuing need to address group-based racial discrimination and subordination. In this Essay, I explore the potential impact of multiracialism-and multiracial identity in particular-on the future of racial classifications under equal protection doctrine.

As a framework for its analysis, the Essay invokes two theories used to interpret the meaning of equal protection: antisubordination and anticlassification. Viewed solely through the lens of multiracial identity, the common normative understanding of these two approaches contorts. While antisubordination is often perceived as more beneficial for groups battling entrenched racial hierarchy, it may facilitate unique harms for multiracial individuals seeking to carve out a racial identity distinct from traditionally defined racial categories. And although anticlassification is often viewed by progressives as detrimental to the pursuit of true racial equality, it may lend more support to policies of racial self-identification and the recognition of a unique multiracial identity. A looming danger, therefore, is that anticlassification advocates wishing to dismantle frameworks rooted in traditional notions of race may exploit multiracialism to “undo” race and to undermine the use of racial classifications altogether.

In response to that possibility, this Essay argues that although law and identity inevitably inform and impact one another, they also serve distinct purposes that should not be improperly conflated in the context of multiracialism. The construction of identity is ultimately a very personal endeavor, and although legal recognition may be one aspect of identity, in the area of race, the law has a more powerful function to play in preventing racial subordination. Where possible, the law should accommodate multiracial individuals who wish to define their own racial identity, but as long as it remains more aspirational than realistic, the individual’s perception of race should not be used or manipulated to undermine the use of racial classifications to counter societal race discrimination.

• Introduction
  • I. Multiracialism and Multiracial Identity
    • A. Historical Treatment of Multiracialism
    • B. The Emergence of Multiracial Identity
      • 1. The Numbers: Measuring Multiracials
      • 2. The Multiracial Movement
    • C. The Nature of Multiracial Identity
    • D. Consequences of Identity
  • II. Equal Protection and Multiracial Identity
    • A. The Meaning of Equal Protection: Anticlassification and Antisubordination
    • B. Viewing Equal Protection Through the Multiracial Identity Lens
  • III. Reconciliation: Undoing Race?
    • A. The Temptation Toward Anticlassification
    • B. Untangling Identity from Doctrine
• Conclusion

Read the entire article here.