Mixed Race Studies

Latino Racial Reporting in the US: To Be or Not To Be

Sociology Compass
Volume 7, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 390-403
DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12032

Clara E. Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology
Fordham University

Michael H. Miyawaki
Fordham University

Grigoris Argeros, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Mississippi State University

This review focuses on how Latinos report their race. This is an area that has recently experienced a major surge of interest in both government and academic circles. This review of the literature examines how and why Latinos report their race on the census, in surveys and in more qualitative studies. It reviews the vibrant and growing scholarly literature relevant to the questions of the placement—by self or others—of Latinos along the US color line, what determines it and how the Census has coped and is coping with it. We begin with a brief review of the history of Latino classification in the census and then discuss the factors influencing racial reporting. These include national origin and skin color, acculturation and generational status, socioeconomic status, perceived discrimination and identification with others who have experienced actual discrimination, location, and question format. We end with a discussion of the implications of the recent 2010 Alternative Questionnaire Experiment conducted by the census, and conclude with suggestions for future research.

Read or purchase the article here.

White ancestry in perceptions of Black/White biracial individuals: implications for affirmative-action contexts

Journal of Applied Social Psychology
Published online: 2013-05-09
DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12020

Jessica J. Good, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University

George F. Chavez
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University

The present studies examine how White ancestry influences perceivers’ minority categorization of Black/White biracial individuals, as well as the implications of minority categorization for distribution of minority resources and stereotype use. Study 1 suggests that people are less likely to categorize those of Black/White biracial descent as minority and thus are less likely to view them as appropriate recipients of affirmative action than those of Black monoracial or Black/Native American descent. Study 2 tests a model in which Black/White biracial individuals with a greater amount of White ancestry are perceived as experiencing less discrimination and are less likely to be categorized as minority; therefore, they are judged as less appropriate for minority resources.

Read or purchase the article here.

Are You Ready for the Census?

Sacramento Daily Union
Volume 19, Number 2862 (1860-05-29)
page 1, column 4
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

On the first of June, Friday next, the various Deputy Marshals in the different portions of the State will commence their labors in taking the census of the United States, which mast be completed by the first of November.   The Marshals are required by the Act of Congress to separate their districts into subdivisions containing not over 21,000 persons, unless inconvenient boundaries are made by so doing. Each Assistant must make a personal visit to each dwelling house and each family in his subdivision, make monthly returns to the U.S. Marshal, and within one month after the time specified for the completion of the enumeration, furnish the census returns to the County Clerk. For the purpose of giving information to the public, we publish the following list of questions which it will be necessary to answer. This list can be cut out and the answers prepared in anticipation of the call of the taker:

The age of each, sex and color, whether white, black or mulatto.

Profession, occupation or trade of each male person over fifteen years of age.

Value of real estate owned.

Place of birth, naming the state, Territory or country.

Married within the year.

Attend school within the year.

Persons over twenty years of age who cannot read or write.

Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic, pauper or convict.

Name of owner, agent or manager of the farm.

Number of improved acres.

Number of unimproved acres.

Cash value of farm.

Value of farming implements and machinery.

Live stock on hand June 1st, 1860, viz.: Number of horses, mules and asses, working oxen milch cows and other cattle, swine and sheep.

Value of live stock.

Value of animal slaughtered during the year.

Produce during the year ending June 1st, 1860, viz: Number bushels wheat, rye, Indian corn, oats, beans and peas, buckwheat, barley, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, pounds of wool and pounds of tobacco.

Value ore land products in dollars.

Gallons of wine, value of produce of market garden, pounds of butter, pounds of cheese, tons of hay, bushels of clover seed, pounds of hops, pounds of flax, bushels of flaxseed, pounds of maple sugar, gallons of molasses, pounds of honey and beeswax, value of home made manufactures.

Name of corporation, company or individual producing articles to the annual value of $500.

Name of business, manufacture or product.

Capital invested in real estate and personal estate in the business.

Raw material used, including fuel, viz : Quantities, kinds, value, kind of motive power, machinery, structure or resource.

Average number of hands employed, viz : Male, female, average monthly cost of male labor, average monthly cost of female labor. Annual product, viz: Quantities, kinds, values.

Name of every person who died during the year ending June 1st, 1860, whose usual place of abode was in the family, the age, sex and color, whether white, black or mulatto, married or widowed, places of birth, naming the State, Territory or country, the month in which the person died, profession, occupation or trade, disease or cause of death.

In connection with the subject of taking the census in this State; the San Francisco Herald says:

The compensation fixed by the Act is two cents for each person enumerated, ten cents a mile for necessary travel—to be ascertained by multiplying the square root of the number of dwelling houses in the division by the square root of the number of square miles—ten cents for each farm fully returned, fifteen cents for each establishment of protective industry, two percent, for social statistics, upon the amount allowed for the enumeration of population, and two cents for the name of each deceased person enumerated.  The United Stales Marshals are allowed to employ superintendent clerks, and such other clerks, with the consent of the Secretary of the Interior, as they may deem necessary. In regard to compensation for all these officers, the Act of Congress has been amended so far as it applies to California, Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico, and it may be increased according to the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior, Indeed he has already expressed the opinion that the remuneration is inadequate, and has given assurances that so far as the law applies to California the rates named above shall be quadrupled.

It is estimated that our population at this time exceeds 700,000, and it Would not surprise us if the census should exhibit a still larger number. With a representation in Congress under this enumeration, the influence of California will be so vastly increased we may no longer be compelled to listen to complaints of inattention and neglect. It may occur that we shall have an equal representation with Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois.

It has been estimated that the census of 1860 will exhibit a total population in the United States of 81,500,000 souls, of whom 27,000,000 are whites. “To be apportioned on this population,” writes a statistician, “are two hundred and thirty-three representatives. Of this number, it is estimated, the Southern States will have eighty-two, being a decrease of seven; the Middle States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware will have fifty-nine, being a decrease of five; New England will have twenty-five, being a decrease of four; while the Western States will have sixty-seven. being an increase of fourteen.”

‘The River Between Us’: A story of survival and transformation

The Kansas City Star
2013-04-12

Edward M. Eveld

It’s the eve of the Civil War in Richard Peck’s novel “The River Between Us,” and the country is rearranging itself for the coming conflict.

A prelude to the convulsion plays even in the tiny river-landing town of Grand Tower, Ill. That’s where 15-year-old Tilly Pruitt notices that the boys her age are taking sides and itching to fight, including her twin brother, Noah.

A riverboat heading north stops in their town, likely the last one on the Mississippi before the war, and deposits the elaborately adorned Delphine Duval and her mysterious companion, Calinda.

Peck’s book, a challenging historical novel for young adult readers, is the current selection of the FYI Book Club.

The Pruitt family takes in the newcomers, although it is barely surviving a hardscrabble life with no help from an absent father. From there the tale provides portals into multiracial politics and culture, the brutal reach of war and the confluence of family secrets and identity.

The multiple-award-winning Peck has written dozens of books for young readers. He will visit Kansas City May 3 for a Kansas City Public Library event with several other noted authors.

Here are edited excerpts of our conversation with Peck.

 Q. Why a Civil War story?

A. It’s a story that found me. I was trolling for whatever I might find in New Orleans historical museums, and I began to read about the real estate of the French Quarter. I learned that a majority of it before the Civil War was owned by women of mixed race who were called quadroons. They were the mistresses of white men, given homes and livings, and they were very fashionable and proud. They knew that if the South lost the war, they would lose their status. So they sent their daughters away. Those who were light enough to “pass” were sent north.

And you wondered what happened to them.

Yes, I chose a girl who could pass for white, particularly if she were among unsophisticated people who wouldn’t know. The story became about a girl who has to reinvent herself in an “alien” country. And, of course, it’s a love story. When she comes down the gangplank on the last riverboat to stop in Grand Tower before the war, Noah is there to see her. He’s lost in a dream of love, but he also wants to fight. He wants to be a Yankee soldier…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Yokohama Yankee’: a family’s lineage in both Japan and America

The Seattle Times Books
2013-04-01

David Takami, Special to The Seattle Times

‘Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan’ by Leslie Helm Chin Music Press, 360 pp.

Leslie Helm’s remarkable family memoir begins at a point of personal distress. At a memorial for his father in 1991, he feels conflicted about his relationship with his father and memories of his childhood. A few weeks later, Helm and his wife decide to adopt a Japanese child. This momentous prospect triggers unease about his lifelong ambivalence toward Japan and prompts him to explore his family’s long history in the country.

Now a Seattle resident and editor of Seattle Business magazine, Leslie Helm is bilingual in Japanese and has worked as a journalist in Japan for Business Week and the Los Angeles Times.

Helm’s great grandfather, Julius Helm, traveled from his native Germany to Japan in 1869 near the start of the Meiji Restoration when the country was emerging from 200 years of feudalism and self-imposed isolation. Reformers were eager to modernize Japan and looked to Western Europe and America for guidance. Helm helped upgrade the Japanese military and subsequently built a successful stevedoring business that thrived for more than half a century in the port city of Yokohama…

Read the entire review here.

Principled Expediency: Eugenics, Naim v. Naim, and the Supreme Court

The American Journal of Legal History
Volume 42, Number 2 (April, 1998)
pages 119-159

Gregory Michael Dorr, Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
Amherst College

In March 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear Naim v. Naim, a suit contesting the constitutionality of Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The Court’s two per curiam decisions in this case sparked a debate surrounding Supreme Court adjudication. Did the Court act on legal “principle,” or in response to political “expediency,” in refusing to find a properly presented federal question in Naim? Examination of the available evidence shows that the court was not unanimous in avoiding Naim. Ultimately, Felix Frankfurter’s intra-court politicking preventing the Court from deciding Naim. Frankfurter convinced the brethren that avoiding Naim was possible, despite the fact that its appellate status tapped the Court’s “obligatory jurisdiction.” To understand the “principle” that undergirded Frankfurter’s “expedient” action, one must consider the background of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Eugenical theory provided the state with a colorably rational basis for racial restrictions in Virginia’s marriage law. As counsel never directly challenged the reasonableness of the racial classifications—never challenged the eugenical precepts supporting the law—Frankfurter was able to convince his colleagues that the Court could not consider the constitutional issue in “clean cut and concrete form unclouded.” Then, following the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeal’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s remand order, Frankfurter urged that the Court could defer the case for lack of “a properly presented federal question.” In so doing, Frankfurter extended the life of miscegenation statutes eleven years—until the Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia.

It is unlikely that Chinese sailor Ham Say Naim ever heard the word miscegenation before he jumped ship in 1942. Eleven years later Naim, still a Chinese national, sat in Judge Floyd E. Kellam’s Portsmouth, Virginia Circuit Courtroom. His wife of twenty months, Ruby Elaine Naim, a white woman, sought a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Choosing not to rule on the divorce action, Kellam granted Ruby Elaine Naim an annulment under part of the Virginia Code entitled, “An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.” These statutes decreed interracial marriage—because of its result, miscegenation or racial intermixture—illegal and “void without decree” in Virginia. Ham Say Naim’s counsel appealed the case, through the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, to the United States Supreme Court in the October Term of 1955. In a surprising series of events, the case bounced between the Supreme Court and Virginia’s highest court. The case ended in March 1956 when the Supreme Court, in a cryptic memorandum decision, ruled, ‘The decision of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia [reaffirming their support of Judge Kellam’s decision] leaves the case devoid of a properly presented federal question.” With this action, the United States Supreme Court effectively upheld a state’s right to restrict marriage between the races. A decade passed before the Court again considered racial classifications in marriage law. In Loving v. Virginia, another challenge to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, the Court struck down antimiscegenation statutes, removing the last legally-enforced barrier facing Americans of color.

June 12, 1997 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Loving. As scholars commemorate Loving, it seems appropriate to reconsider Naim to understand the longevity of antimiscegenation statutes. Naim v. Naim represents more than a historical footnote to Loving: Naim reveals the complex interplay of eugenical ideology, constitutional jurisprudence, the internal politics of the Supreme Court, and the Court’s relationship to American society. Indeed, Naim illustrates that the line between “principle and expediency” in Supreme Court adjudication was less sharply defined and more hotly contested than many commentators have imagined. Both contemporary and subsequent historical treatments ascribe particular importance to Naim only in so far as its disposition appeared to reflect the Justices’ concern that any action on interracial marriage would exacerbate tensions created by the Brown decisions.

This paper, however, argues for a reassessment of Naim v. Naim‘s significance on two grounds. First, digging beneath surface impressions one sees that Naim, while sharing a kinship with other antimiscegenation cases, belongs also within the rarefied family of eugenics case law that began with Buck v. Bell and appeared to end with Skinner v. Oklahoma. Earlier antimiscegenation laws in Virginia, like many that persisted in other states, based their strictures not upon a “science” of racial improvement, but on the splenetic racism and negrophobia of the Redemption Era. Virginia eugenicists, however, promoted the Racial Integrity Act in the name of scientifically-validated social engineering. The Racial Integrity Act’s enactment as a scientific measure to preserve the state’s “health” supplied the legal justifications that upheld the statute in Naim. Eugenics provided the state with a “rational basis” for the exercise of its police power in restricting interracial marriage. Ultimately, eugenical social policy used science to garner legal imprimatur for the deep-seated southern cultural taboo against interracial sexuality.  This certification formed a bond between statutory social control and the law that proved difficult to break.

Legal debates concerning the confluence of judicial review and social policy suggest a second reason Naim should be reconsidered. Probing the records of various Supreme Court justices, it becomes apparent that their actions in disposing of Naim did not represent simply a collective dodge. Behind closed doors, the justices waged a pitched battle. Ultimately the issue was resolved not only in light of political considerations, but also as a result of the swirling jurisprudential debate over what Morton J. Horwitz terms “the central ideological question before the Supreme Court” in the twenty years after World War II: the debate between judicial activism and judicial restraint. In this intra-court battle, the personality and beliefs of Justice Felix Frankfurter take center stage. Examining the synergy between the Racial Integrity Act’s eugenical rationale and jurisprudential debates trammeling the Supreme Court helps explain why it took another eleven years to strike down antimiscegenation statutes.

This reconsideration of Naim v. Naim proceeds in four parts. First, a brief history of eugenics and the elite Virginians who integrated eugenical precepts into the legal, medical, and educational infrastructures of Virginia provides Naim‘s background. Parts II and III focus on the progress of Naim through the Portsmouth Circuit Court and the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, respectively. These sections develop the social and cultural history of Naim v. Naim, elucidating the ways in which southern sentiment regarding issues of class, race, and gender aligned with thirty year-old eugenical precepts and the law to determine the case. Special attention is given to how eugenical arguments cropped up explicitly in the statements of counsel, the state attorney general, and the opinion of the courts. Part IV takes up the battle over Naim within the United States Supreme Court, revealing the intra-court politics that decided the case. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of Naim v. Naim‘s role as precedent for the lower court decisions in Loving v. Virginia. The conclusion assesses how the Racial Integrity Act failed only when two conditions were met: 1) counsel directly challenged the “rational basis” of the eugenical underpinnings of the Racial Integrity Act; and, 2) the doctrinal/theoretical debate among the Supreme Court justices was resolved, in part as a result of Felix Frankfurter’s retirement, in favor of judicial activism for civil rights. The fulfillment of these two conditions set the stage for the recalibration of legal and cultural scales…

Read the entire article here.

Alien Citizen: Review

www.ReviewPlays.com
ALIEN CITIZEN
Asylum Lab
2013-05-13

Jose Ruiz

Elizabeth Liang steps on the solo stage to tell the world what it’s like to be a TCK (Third Culture Kid).  These are people who, as children, traveled the globe intermittently because their parents were sent to diplomatic, business or military assignments and the family had to constantly adjust to new schools, new friends, new customs and new languages.  Her father worked for a multi-national company and was sent to several different countries during her formative years.

That in itself is fodder for a fascinating story of growing up with indeterminate roots.  When the story comes from Elizabeth Liang, whose ethnic heritage spans three continents, from her paternal roots in China, to her birth roots in Central America, to her mother’s varied European background, it becomes more than just a story…

Read the entire review here.

‘War Baby’ is something to see, if you can let go

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-08

Lori Waxman, Instructor of Art History, Theory and Criticism
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

It was the Hello Kitty tepee that did it for me.

Some exhibitions can be so challenging that it takes a particularly unexpected artwork for the viewer to finally let go and get into the swing of things. “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” currently up at the DePaul Art Museum and featuring work by a dozen-and-a-half artists, is one such show. A riotously colored digital print by Debra Yepa-Pappan featuring a purple-haired Native American woman, lifted from an iconic Edward S. Curtis photograph and set against a background of space-age tepees, one of them marked with the equally iconic and silent face of everybody’s favorite Japanese cat, is one such artwork.

Hilarious and weird and crazily of its time — i.e., now — Yepa-Pappan’s collage lifted my thoughts up and over the various stumbling blocks that “War Baby/Love Child” presents. Curated by Laura Kina, an artist and DePaul professor, and Wei Ming Dariotis, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, the cogitative but overdetermined exhibition sets up a Catch-22. It wants to recognize the complex realities of a fast-growing segment of the American population — the 2.6 million who identify as Asian plus one or more other races — and to prove how far beyond stereotype those people go. And yet, two gargantuan cliches give their name to the exhibition itself.

The term “war babies” generally refers to the children of Asian or Pacific Islander women and the U.S. soldiers who were stationed in their home countries during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. “Love children” were born of the free love of a post-civil rights and flower-child era, and, as listed in the extensive exhibition catalog, their makeup includes Eurasians and Hapas (Mixed White Asians), Mixed Bloods (Mixed Asian Native Americans), Blasians (Mixed Black Asians) and Mestizaje (Mixed Latino Asians).

“War Baby/Love Child” thus finds itself in the counterintuitive position of wanting to replace its own title with a dozen less-loaded ones. Wall labels are one tool, and the ones here list an astonishing array of mixed identities as well as direct quotes from most of the artists, many of whom speak about personal experiences growing up amid racial presumption…

Read the entire article here.

The future of Hispanic identity

Reuters
2013-05-06

Reihan Salam, Policy Analyst

In an interview with ABC News this past weekend, Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico and a veteran of the Clinton White House, shared his thoughts on Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas who has been gaining prominence as a staunch, and sometimes strident, conservative voice. Though Richardson acknowledged that Cruz is “articulate,” he accused the Texas senator of having introduced “a measure of incivility in the political process.” When asked if Cruz “represents most Hispanics with his politics,” Richardson replied that because Cruz is anti-immigration, “I don’t think he should be defined as a Hispanic.”

Regardless of Richardson’s true meaning, he hit a nerve. Bill Richardson and Ted Cruz are both entitled to define themselves as Hispanics, as both have roots in Spanish-speaking countries. Yet both men, like a large and growing number of Hispanics, are of mixed parentage. Richardson is the son of a father who was half-Anglo-American and half-Mexican and a Mexican mother. Ted Cruz is the son of an Irish-American mother and a Cuban immigrant father. And so the Richardson-Cruz kerfuffle gives us an opportunity to think about the future of Hispanic identity.

As of the 2010 Census, Hispanics represented 16.3 percent of the total U.S. population. And in the decades to come, the Census Bureau projects that the Hispanic share of the U.S. population will increase dramatically, from just under one American in six to just under one in three.

But there is a small complication with these numbers. The Census Bureau relies on individuals to self-identify with a given ethnic category. We now know, however, that many individuals who could identify as Hispanic, by virtue of a parent or grandparent born in a Spanish-speaking country, choose not to do so. In recent years, Brian Duncan, an economist at the University of Colorado Denver, and Stephen Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, have been studying this “ethnic attrition rate” among U.S. immigrants and their descendants. And their findings suggest that while a given generation of Americans might identify as Hispanic, there is a decent chance that their children will not…

Read the entire article here.

Community Profiles – Melissa Nobles

MIT School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences
Great Ideas Change the World
2013-04-21

Leda Zimmerman

“All societies periodically have to do soul-searching,” says Melissa Nobles, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. With research that illuminates historic episodes of racial and ethnic injustice, Nobles has developed a deep understanding of how different nations go about the process of self-examination and attempt to right the wrongs of the past. Such efforts, believes Nobles, require rigorous honesty and “making sure all voices are heard.”

Budding Political Aspirations

A self-described “political person,” Nobles learned early on about speaking up in the public arena. She was class president during most of her high school years in New Rochelle, NY and remembers attending forums in city hall to protest the school board “taking our school’s money away.” The daughter of parents born and raised in the American South, Nobles grew up during a racially fraught era, and was riveted by news accounts of the civil rights movement, as well as profoundly interested in the political struggles and history of black Americans.
 
Politics and Race
 
This passion to understand politics and its relation to race found an outlet during Nobles’ undergraduate years at Brown University in the early 1980s. Through courses on Latin America, she became fascinated with Brazil, a slave-holding country like the U.S. well into the 19th century. The prevailing academic wisdom was that post-slavery, Brazil evolved into a racial democracy with “no sharp lines of racial demarcation,” while the U.S. saw reconstruction, Jim Crow, racial violence and socioeconomic inequities.
 
But as scholars scrutinized the lives of contemporary Brazilians of color, the disparity (between U.S. and Brazilian national stories) began to crumble. According to Nobles, who eagerly absorbed the new findings, “all socioeconomic indicators that make democracy meaningful didn’t look so good for them, and in a further irony, things looked better for black Americans.” She recalls thinking, “If I’d been born in Brazil, looking the way I do, I wonder what my life outcomes would have been.”…

Read the entire article here.