Mixed Race Studies

Mixing it Up

Salon
2001-03-08

Suzy Hansen

Alabama just legalized black-white marriage. An expert talks about why it took so long and the American obsession with racial purity.

In November 2000, after a statewide vote in a special election, Alabama became the last state to overturn a law that was an ugly reminder of America’s past, a ban on interracial marriage. The one-time home of George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. had held onto the provision for 33 years after the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Yet as the election revealed — 40 percent of Alabamans voted to keep the ban — many people still see the necessity for a law that prohibits blacks and whites from mixing blood.

Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1978. He has been studying and writing about the history of American interracial relationships since 1986. Sollors is the editor of the recently published “Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law,” a fascinating survey of legal decisions, literary criticism and essays by writers and scholars including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Randall Kennedy. Salon spoke with Sollors by phone from his office in Cambridge about the mixed-race origins — and multiracial future — of the nation.

What took Alabama so long to overturn its anti-miscegenation law?

In the years after the Civil War, most of the Southern states made miscegenation bans part of their constitutions. And part of the constitutional provision was that no legislation should ever change them. These were not just ordinary laws that you could modify with a simple majority; they called for very complicated processes and very large majorities to be overturned.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated these anti-miscegenation provisions with the Loving vs. Virginia case, and the Southern states began to adjust. But not right away. In the first 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a lot of activism or popular support for having the laws changed — no politician wanted to be caught trying to remove those statutes. I think Mississippi did it in 1987 or 1988 — 20 years after the Loving vs. Virginia case…

…What’s been going on with racial categories in the census is also interesting.

The census had two rules. One is the 1997 rule that permitted everyone to mark more than one box in the 2000 census. Then came the 2000 evaluation procedure, which allowed the census to classify anyone who marked more than one box as part of the “people of color” category — if there was a white and color mix indicated.

Essentially, it’s one thing to say that a person can fall into multiple racial categories, but what happens to all the people in the old categories? It can have some disastrous consequences now because in some states, apparently many white Americans found it fashionable to indicate that they were Native American. In some counties where Native Americans were a minority they may now end up as a majority. There are lots of headaches with counting and civil rights and voting rights and districting that are going to come in the next two years as a result of this census decision…

Read the entire interview here.

The cradle to the grave: Reflections on race thinking

thesis eleven: critical theory and historical sociology
Volume 115, Number 1 (April 2013)
pages 43-57
DOI: 10.1177/0725513612470533

Gerhard Maré, Professor of Sociology
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

Despite a constitutional and oft-stated political commitment to an undefined notion of non-racialism, South Africans continue to operate in formal and informal ways with ‘race’ as the common-sense organizing principle of legal systems, ways of thinking, social identities, constructing arguments or closing debate, organizational and mobilizing strategies, policy development and execution, and interaction in daily life. This state of affairs is regrettable and dangerous, often questioned and rejected, but objections are waged and alternatives suggested against the tide of societal trends. What the organizing principle of race thinking does is to close the mind to alternative possibilities – of thought, social practice and ways of living. Here I explore an overview of racialism as it permeates and shapes the life cycles of citizens from birth to death. I make an argument for a way of thinking that is necessarily utopian, as one of few options of escaping a social world made in the image of apartheid.

Read or purchase the article here.

Who will benefit from AR-TPD “cost-savings”?

Two or More: Mixed thoughts about the Census NAC
2013-03-24

Eric Hamako

Eric Hamako is one of 32 members of the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee (NAC) on Race, Ethnic, and Other Populations, 2012-2014. This blog is intended to 1) share updates and Eric’s perspectives on the NAC, 2) gather community perspectives, and 3) promote discussion about the Census Bureau as it relates to Multiracial people, the Two Or More Races (TOMR) population, and social justice.

Reflecting on the second NAC in-person meeting and a few brief discussions about the use of Administrative Records and Third Party Data (AR-TPD), I was reminded of an old saying, which I’ll paraphrase:

“There’s never been a time-saving device that’s created a minute of leisure.”**

My interpretation of that saying is this: Lots of technological advancements are advertised as doing menial work, so that we have more time for relaxing or doing more meaningful work.  But that’s rarely what actually happens.  For example, at my job, I have a computer and it’s frustratingly slow sometimes.  In those moments, I think, “Gah!  If only I had a faster computer, I could be done with this work faster!”  And that’s true.  But if I had a faster computer and finished my work faster, what would happen?  Would my boss say, “You finished that right quick, guess you’re done for the day!”

Probably not…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Religion Collide in 2012 Campaign

The Associated Press
2012-05-05

Jesse Washington, National Writer, Race and Ethnicity

Rachel Zoll, National Religion Writer

How unthinkable it was, not so long ago, that a presidential election would pit a candidate fathered by an African against another condemned as un-Christian.

And yet, here it is: Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney, an African-American and a white Mormon, representatives of two groups and that have endured oppression to carve out a place in the United States. How much progress has America made against bigotry? By November, we should have some idea.

Perhaps mindful of the lingering power of prejudice, both men soft-pedal their status as racial or religious pioneers. But these things “will be factors whether they’re explicitly stated or not, because both Obama and Romney are minorities,” said Nancy Wadsworth, co-editor of the anthology “Faith and Race in American Political Life.” Mormons are 1.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center; African-Americans are 12.6 percent

“Americans like to obsess about ways that people are different,” said Wadsworth, a political science professor at the University of Denver. Voters of all types say that a candidate’s race or religious beliefs should not be cause for bias, “but Americans are really conflicted about this, and they talk out of both sides of their mouth.”…

Read the entire article here.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on Her Entrepreneurial TV Future

Bloomberg Businessweek
2013-03-07

Soledad O’Brien as told to Diane Brady

I never really hesitated about going to Starting Point [which premiered on Jan. 2, 2012]. I thought there was an opportunity to get beyond the platitudes of “Yes, Medicare! No, Medicare!” and actually look at the Congressional Budget Office report. When I left American Morning in 2007, I’d focused on doing documentaries. But I thought Starting Point was a great opportunity to be involved in the zeitgeist.

The show was able to grow, but it takes time. I don’t know that an aggressive interview style was not good for our morning show, which is what some people said. It takes time to build an audience. When Jeff Zucker [CNN’s new president, above] started last month, he had a different vision. He was coming in to make changes across the board that, frankly, CNN really needs. Part of that vision was that I wouldn’t be on the morning show. Once I knew what he wanted, I focused on how I could do what I enjoy most.

We struck an unusual deal. I’ll get to leave CNN with my catalog and documentaries. We were able to create a brand at CNN—Black in America—that I now own. I can take that brand and extend it in any way I want. You have Netflix and all these channels that are looking for interesting and different ways to tell stories. To have ownership of Black in America and Latino in America is hugely important…

Read the entire article here.

Forecast of Miscegenation

Los Angeles Herald
1906-07-24
page 6, column 3
Source: Library of Congress: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

In the course of a sermon delivered last Sunday before n local negro audience. Bishop Hamilton of the Methodist church said: “It might create a sensation if I should say a union of the races of this world Is possible. The papers would take it up In the morning if I should tell you the blacks and whites will eventually merge into one people. This I know: all discriminations must come to an end and it is not a question which nation shall reign in this world.”

Bishop Hamilton has an unquestionable right to his views on the subject of miscegenation and likewise to the personal demonstration of them if he sees fit. It is not the purpose of The Herald to reopen an issue that was supposed to have been buried with the abolition party nearly half a century ago. Every one to his or her liking in regard to the old question whether a negro Is “a man and a brother,” and, inferentially, whether a negress is a woman and a sister.

It is the effort of such preachment to a negro congregation as Bishop Hamilton is credited with that The Herald especially criticizes. The bishop practically tells hundreds of negroes to their faces, and through them he tells the whole negro race In the United States, that miscegenation is foreordained by the almighty. Note what the bishop says following the above quotation: “It won’t matter whether a man Is white or black, if he is a son of God, he shall become an individual part of that people which shall eventually own this earth.”

The effect of such preaching to negroes cannot be otherwise than pernicious. Its tendency is to fill the negro mind with notions of social equality, going the full length to amalgamation of the white and black races. And with these notions well rooted, is it not logical to suppose that such present negro crimes as are reported almost daily, would be multiplied indefinitely?

Not one white American in a thousand will indorse the miscegenation doctrine, substantially, which Bishop Hamilton is preaching to the negroes.

For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun

The New York Times
2013-03-23

Roberto Zurbano, Editor and Publisher
Casa de las Américas Publishing House

Translated from Spanish by Kristina Cordero

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it…

…Raúl Castro has announced that he will step down from the presidency in 2018. It is my hope that by then, the antiracist movement in Cuba will have grown, both legally and logistically, so that it might bring about solutions that have for so long been promised, and awaited, by black Cubans.

An important first step would be to finally get an accurate official count of Afro-Cubans. The black population in Cuba is far larger than the spurious numbers of the most recent censuses. The number of blacks on the street undermines, in the most obvious way, the numerical fraud that puts us at less than one-fifth of the population. Many people forget that in Cuba, a drop of white blood can — if only on paper — make a mestizo, or white person, out of someone who in social reality falls into neither of those categories. Here, the nuances governing skin color are a tragicomedy that hides longstanding racial conflicts…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Can the “one-drop rule” tell us anything about racial discrimination? New evidence from the multiple race question on the 2000 Census

Labour Economics
Volume 16, Issue 4 (August 2009)
pages 451-460
DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2009.01.003

Robert W. Fairlie, Professor of Economics
University of California, Santa Cruz

The inclusion of multiple race information for the first time in the 2000 Census allows for a novel test for the presence of labor discrimination using the “one-drop rule.” Identifying discrimination is straightforward and essentially relies on the discontinuous nature of the one-drop rule, which treats biracial blacks similarly as monoracial blacks. If biracial blacks have levels of unmeasurable and measurable human capital that lie between the levels of monoracial blacks and whites then, absent discrimination, their wages should also lie between the wages of the two groups. Estimates from the Census indicate that biracial blacks have levels of education that lie almost perfectly between monoracial blacks and whites. In contrast, however, biracial blacks have wages that are roughly similar to monoracial blacks after controlling for education and potential work experience. Estimates from the 1980 Census also do not indicate that the parental characteristics and educational outcomes of biracial children differ from what would be expected by having both black and white parents. Several additional factors that potentially affect the human capital of biracial adults are explored. These findings provide some suggestive evidence on the “one drop rule” and the presence of discrimination in the labor market and provide new estimates of wages and educational levels of biracial blacks.

Read the entire article here.

Turkish descendants of African slaves begin to discover their identity

The National
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
2012-09-01

Piotr Zalewski

No one knows how many Afro-Turks there are but, in a country that’s beginning to acknowledge its great diversity, they’re beginning to unearth their forgotten history.

In 1961, Ertekin Azerturk, a Turkish businessman from Istanbul, placed a long-distance call. The voice of the switchboard operator who answered—a woman’s voice, sweet and crisp, like a singer’s—must have made his head spin. Must have, because from that day on, Azerturk insisted on speaking to the same operator each time he picked up the phone. During one call he found the gumption to ask his mystery girl out on a date. Her reply was as surprising to him as his request was to her. “No way,” Tomris, the operator, told Azerturk. “You won’t like me,” she explained, “because I’m dark.”

But Azerturk didn’t back down and Tomris eventually gave in. When they met, he was dumbstruck. He had understood Tomris was dark, but had never figured she would be black. (He had never previously met or even heard of a Turk who was.) Tomris was, like her voice, striking, and Azerturk was smitten. Over the Azerturk family’s objections, the pair married.

…As a child, Muge could not fully grasp why her skin was the colour it was—or why it should matter. She finally learnt, and understood, the truth in her teens. She and her brother were descendants, three generations removed, of black slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review: Race in a Bottle

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26 Issue 1, March 2013

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In Race in a Bottle, Jonathan Kahn tracks the contentious history of BiDil, the first drug targeted specifically to African Americans. Ironically, race-based drug treatment emerged in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, a project that theoretically promised both to scientifically refute the notion of genetically distinct racial groups and to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Though hyped by researchers, the FDA, and the press as an important first step toward personalized medicine, BiDil is a drug administered to patients based on their membership in a group…

…Critical to Kahn’s argument regarding evidence is the fact that the clinical trials on which the company based its patent application for BiDil were never designed to compare racial difference in response to the drug. Using “care of the data” as an organizing theme, Kahn highlights one of the many troubling aspects of this controversy: the extraordinarily loose, if not sloppy, construction of what passed as evidence in the patent application and FDA hearings. From the use of misleading statistics on mortality from heart failure in African Americans, to the failure to define the central variable of race, to the design of a clinical trial (A-HeFT) that included only African Americans (and therefore could not determine differential efficacy) to the lack of any mechanistic understanding for a differential effect, Kahn shows that attention to the data was consistently problematic when it came to matters of race. The chapter on the FDA hearings is particularly illuminating…

Read the entire review here.