Mixed Race Studies

University of Cincinnati president has a unique perspective on his life as a black man

Cleveland Plain Dealer
2011-09-11

Karen Farkas

CLEVELAND, Ohio—Gregory Williams says that in the five decades since he learned he was black and moved into a tarpaper shack with his black grandmother instead of a middle-class home with his white grandmother, the nation has made great progress in inclusion and diversity.

But much still needs to be done, the University of Cincinnati president told the audience at the City Club of Cleveland on Friday.

“Certainly there is less rigidity in America’s color line today than there was in the 1960s,” he said. “We live in a time, thankfully, where the ‘multiracial’ population is growing and barely raises an eyebrow these days. Yet all of us can be yanked back across the line by a look, a so-called ‘joke’ or a tense reception in the so-called ‘wrong’ neighborhood.”

Williams, who has been at UC for two years, spoke of his life as a black man who looks white and his views on race and several times asked “Why is it taking so long?” to speed racial healing in the nation…

…Williams, who said he came to view himself as African-American, eventually wrote an award-winning and best-selling memoir, “Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black.” He also earned numerous degrees, leading to a career in academia…

…Following his speech, a man in the audience asked why Williams didn’t try to live as a white man after he got older.

“In Indiana I was ostracized for being black, and if I abandoned those who were willing to stand by me, I’d have no principles at all,” Williams responded…

Read the entire article here.

The Mixed-Race Experience: Treatment of Racially Miscategorized Individuals under Title VII

Asian American Law Review
University of California
Volume 12 (2005)

Ken Nakasu Davison

This article argues that the static legal construction of race has the dangerous potential to permit cases of racially-based discrimination, thus circumventing its prohibition in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The author challenges the classification of race as an “immutable characteristic,” demonstrating how some physical characteristic by which employers are legally allowed to discriminate are actually grounded in individuals’ racial backgrounds. Lastly, the author uses the miscategorization of mixed-race individuals as a case study of the dangers and limitations of race as an immutable characteristic, instead arguing for a comprehensive understanding of race as a social construct.

I. Introduction
 
 One observer writes, “Race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding problem about race is that few people seem to know what race is.”  This remark poignantly captures the irony of race – that is, race still remains an enigma even though we live in a society in which race determines so much of our lives. Indeed, notions of race, to a large extent, govern our public and private identities by associating certain characteristics with socially constructed racial classes. Some characteristics that identify and associate a person with a racial group are susceptible to change and are viewed by the law as the result of mutable social forces. Under Title VII, some courts have adopted a mutability requirement under which employers may permissibly discriminate based upon “socially-driven” characteristics, even if they are a part of a person’s racial, sexual or ethnic identity. Social characteristics such as one’s language, manner of speech, style of hair, attire and choice of friends are all factors that are commonly viewed as indicators of a person’s racial ancestry, but remain unprotected under a mutability analysis.

Foremost amongst indicators of race is phenotype, which is defined as the interaction of an individual’s gene structure with his or her surroundings to create physical appearance.  Phenotype indicators, such as hair texture, facial features, and skin color, are assumed to be based on biology and to provide an accurate indication of a person’s racial ancestry…

Read or purchase the article here.

Choosing to be Multiracial in America: The Sociopolitical Implications of the “Check All That Apply” Approach to Race in the 2000 U.S. Census

Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
Volume 21 (2011)

Alaina R. Walker

I. INTRODUCTION

Race in America has long been a contentious subject, especially when the government has been involved. Race can mean something different to everyone, and yet, it is widely understood as having real implications and consequences. Many scholars understand that race is “a social construct[:] a social artifact, which results from a process through which social significance is attributed to some contingent attributes like skin color, and whose emergence, salience and influence can be studied and analyzed.” The government’s use of race has ranged from the horrific to the admirable, but has always been controversial. Analyzing the U.S. Census provides an interesting opportunity to discuss some of the significant roles race has played and continues to play in America. Racial data collected from the U.S. Census is currently used for the controversial purpose of furthering civil rights objectives, but some people worry that these objectives are now in danger. Due to the implementation of the “check all that apply” approach to the U.S. Census (the ability to select all races with which one identifies), critics are concerned that racial data will become convoluted and that civil rights objectives will be hindered. What is lacking from the conversation and arguably the civil rights agenda is the importance of the official recognition of multiracial identity, which the “check all that apply” approach acknowledges.

Although multiracial identity should be recognized on the U.S. Census, it is necessary to analyze how its recognition in the form of the “check all that apply”…

Read the entire article here.

Family Histories of ‘Passing’ from Black to White Documented in Book

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-09-06

Katti Gray

In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any other Black. This, she told then college student Sharfstein, despite her family’s decades-old designation as Coloured, a mixed-race label that elevated her clan above Blacks in the old White-run government’s hierarchy of peoples.
 
Though being Coloured insulated her from brutalities apartheid reserved for the so-called purely Black, she was, physically, hard to distinguish from the Black activists who had dominated the anti-apartheid movement, said Dr. Sharfstein, now 38 and a Vanderbilt University law professor. She was dark-skinned, and wore her hair Afrocentrically-braided.
 
That her family would choose to be misclassified racially was both fascinating and bewildering, Sharfstein said. “I came home and was immediately interested in the question of whether the same thing had happened here,” said Sharfstein, who holds a law degree from Yale, and a degree in history, literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard.
 
His book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, is the outgrowth of parallels Sharfstein drew between apartheid’s racial distortions and those of his own native land.
 
With this nation’s state-by-state variations on how many drops of Black blood legally made a person Black as both a backdrop and core of the 395-page tome, Sharfstein explores the human, financial and ephemeral costs of morphing from an imposed Blackness—notwithstanding one’s light skin, aquiline facial features and straight hair—to live as White…

…Cape Cod, Mass., is where Isabel Wall Whittemore’s forebears ended up.
 
“Until I read [Sharfstein’s] book, I didn’t realize that, in my mom’s day, 1/16 [of Black blood] was considered Colored,” said Whittemore, 74, now residing in Hickory Flat, Miss., with her oldest daughter Lisa Colby. “To tell you the truth… I’ve always gone as Caucasian. I had no reason not to. I’d love to know what I should be calling myself now, but it doesn’t matter to me either way… Race isn’t important.”
 
Roughly a decade before the February 2011 release of Sharfstein’s book, a homework assignment for Colby’s daughter revealed their place on the branches of O.S.B. Wall’s family tree. “I’ve met a lot of cousins who I didn’t know,” Colby said. “I, myself, think this is great … in terms of the history. My great, great-grandfather was able to come up from being a slave to being a lawyer.”
 
Not everyone who’s learned of their ties to Wall has been so effusive. One informed Sharfstein that “he’d become more racist since learning about his descent than ever before,” Sharfstein said. “Initially, he was so intent on maintaining his White identity—and nothing makes you more ‘White’ than hating Black people. That’s my inference.”…

Read the entire article here.

Culture: The face in the mirror is mestizo

San Antonio Current
San Antonia, Texas
2006-02-22

Elaine Wolff, Current Editor
Plaza de Armas

A two-day roundtable takes a big eraser to identity lines

“I’m looking for the mestizo eye, the mestizo subjunctive, the mestizo soul,” says author John Phillip Santos as we wander through Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin-American Portraiture at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He pauses before “Retrato de un Matrimonio,” by 19th-century painter Hermenegildo Bustos. Husband and wife have light brown eyes and dark brown hair, but where she is decidedly European in appearance, with pale skin and delicate features, his ancestry seems more indigenous: broad cheekbones and a chiseled nose. The work reflects “mestizo compassion,” suggests Santos.
 
“Compassion” is not a concept frequently associated with “mestizo,” a word that has spent much of its 600-odd-year history wielded as either a derogatory description for the children of European and Native American unions, or as a battle cry in the Chicano identity movement.

Circa 1523, in a creation myth that is equal parts fact and mystery, La Malinche—the mysterious Mexican Pocahontas—and Hernán Cortés founded the mestizo race with their first-born son, Martin Cortés, who would return to Spain with his father to further serve the aims of colonial-era Europe. Mexican and Chicano ambivalence over the legacy of La Malinche illustrates the problem with fully embracing mestizo identity: It means embracing the white conqueror father as well as the subjugated, but re-ascendant, indigenous mother. While La Malinche is celebrated by some as the mother of the Mexican people, she is alternatively known as La Chingada—the fucked.

In a sense, embracing the Virgen de Guadalupe—a mestiza Virgin Mary—is embracing an alternative mestizo birth, a virgin who conceived a new race without being defiled by the “other.”
 
But for Santos and an increasing number of Latino scholars, mestizo is the face of an optimistic future. “We are all mestizo. Our heritage is global. It quarrels with borders; it quarrels with demarcations,” he says, echoing his mentor, Virgilio Elizondo, the San Antonio priest who wrote The Future is Mestizo in 1986. Elizondo and Santos are two members of the organizing committee for the “Revealing Retratos,” Taller Popular, a private, two-day conference that will be held this weekend at SAMA and Trinity University, and includes such participants as Henry Estrada of the Smithsonian Latino Center, author and artist Ito Romo, Sandra Cisneros, and Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. A public conference will follow April 22 at SAMA…

Read the entire article here.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities [Review: DaCosta]

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
Volume 40, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 571-572
DOI: 10.1177/0094306111419111i

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities, by Sultana Choudhry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 219 pp. cloth. ISBN: 9780754678601.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities is a study of identity choices among South Asian/white individuals in the United Kingdom. The term “South Asian” refers here to peoples with ancestry from the Indian subcontinent, including India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Sultana Choudhry situates her study primarily in the social psychology literature and in the growing body of social science literature on mixed race or, to use the author’s preferred term, “interethnic” people in the Anglophone world. In focusing on South Asian/white interethnics, the author begins to fill a gap in both literatures. She rightly points out that there is a relative dearth of research on South Asian/white interethnics in Britain, despite the fact that they comprise a substantial proportion of interethnics in a society in which interethnic births are on the rise.

This is a multi-method study, incorporating semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, retrospective diary accounts of factors that influenced respondents’ ethnic identity choices and a survey of 87 interethnics of a variety of ethnoracial combinations. While the majority of respondents were interethnic, some phases of the study include monoethnic respondents, including some parents of the interethnic respondents.

While I applaud this use…

Purchase or purchase the review here.

Whoa, We Have a Black President

Zócalo: Public Square
2011-09-08

Randall Kennedy Assesses Obama’s Triumphs—and Shortcomings—In Erasing the Color Line

Randall Kennedy, Harvard professor of law and author of The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, had an assignment: to answer whether or not Obama has been erasing the color line. “By color line,” explained Kennedy, “I mean all of the sentiments, instincts, habits of mind, structures that wrongly stymie people because of race. Is Obama erasing that baleful aspect of political culture?”
 
In a word, said Kennedy, yes. But there was a caveat: the “Obama way” is to avoiding talking about race at every turn.
 
According to Kennedy, Obama’s most impressive feat was to treat making it to the White House as a realistic, tenable option. His legacy, Kennedy believes, will be the alteration of public psychology to a place of normalizing a black presidency. After four years, people will have accepted seeing a black man enter and exit Air Force One.
 
“It was so audacious because of the history of the U.S.,” he said.
 
As Kennedy reminded the audience, a crowd of a few hundred gathered in an auditorium in the Hammer Museum, African-Americans were largely excluded from politics until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Blacks were excluded by dint of terror throughout the deep South, excluded by dint of various legal shenanigans,” Kennedy said….

…Kennedy’s own criticisms of Obama only came up in the question-and-answer portion of the evening. Kennedy said he believes that Obama didn’t actively do enough to change the ideological landscape of the country and that he was sheepish about outwardly supporting liberal judges. Kennedy was most critical of Obama’s stances surrounding gay rights, finding it ironic that when Obama’s parents married across racial boundaries it was considered a felony in many places. Now Obama is pushing a “separate but equal” equivalent in the gay community…

Read the entire article here.
Watch the video and/or listen to the audio here.

The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions

Dædalus
Volume 140, Issue 1 (Winter 2011 – Race in the Age of Obama, volume 1)
pages 174–182
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00069

Getting Back to Basics: Re-Reading NYT’s “Race Remixed”

Nuñez Daughter
2011-02-15

Kismet Nuñez

A few weeks ago, @TrickAmaka sent me a New York Times piece by Susan Saulny on the high numbers of adults who identify as mixed-race as of the 2010 census.  In what was apparently the first in a series titled “Race Remixed,” the article focuses on a group of students at the University of Maryland as part of “the crop of students moving through college right now” who make up “the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”  Apparently, inquiring minds expect to latest census to reflect the changing dynamics of race in America:

One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. And experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.

I’m glad I waited until after V-Day to even click the link.  Turns out the second article basically redacted the first (it is, *gasp* a “complex” matter, quantifying and analyzing the mixed-race population), and the third (well, what do you, our ever so intelligent and enraged readers, think?) threw the topic to the wolves of the blogosphere for further discussion…

The piece is mostly NYT playing Columbus and re-discovering race (mixture) in this country.  Again.  After all, what do you with bleached out phrases like these:

“Some proportion of the country’s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans.”

 A bit of rape with your legacy of colonialism?  A dollop of indentured servitude and forced labor on the side?  How Disney of you…

…And I affirm Ms. Wood, Ms. López-Mullins, and all of the other students who were brave enough to talk to a reporter about what is going on in their hearts and in their heads.  Figuring out who you are is no easy feat, regardless of your race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, etc., etc., etc.
 
But there is a legacy of violence that underlies all of these identity claims and we need to make that central to the discussion.   Once upon a time a black man boy was lynched for whistling at a white woman.  Once upon a time a black woman was raped for walking down the wrong road.  Once upon a time a white woman was enslaved for not being white enough (or was she?).
 
And because we should never speak of these relations as though they were simply a matter of romance, a rainbow conflagration of resistance that just happened to occur between the legs of women of color, I will also never advocate for “mixed-race” as a corporate identity…

Read the entire article here.

Race Card: The New York Times Realizes Mixed People Exist

Bitch Media
2011-01-31

Nadra Kareem Nittle

Breaking news: the New York Times has discovered mixed people. Did you know that the number of racially mixed families in the US is growing? Or how about that some mixed kids feel pressured to choose one race? And get this—multiracial people find it annoying to be asked, “What are you?”
 
Yeah, that’s about as deep as the Times Jan. 29 piece on multiracial youth got. The paper evidently rolled out the article because the Census Bureau will soon unveil data about racial groups in the U.S., including how many people identified as more than one race—a move the government first allowed on the 2000 census.

…As required by law after Election Day 2008, all articles about multiracial people must make note of President Obama. And this piece follows suit. Why did Obama just check black on his census form? Isn’t he white, too? Should we call him the first black president or the first multiracial president?…

Read the entire article here.