Mixed Race Studies

For black Britons, this is not the 80s revisited. It’s worse

The Guardian
2011-08-11

Joseph Harker, Assistant Comment Editor

Our MPs are ‘on message’, our media in decline and the Commission for Racial Equality abolished. Who speaks for us?

This is not 1981. Nor 1985. As has been pointed out over the past few days, things have changed a lot since the “inner-city unrest”—as it was quaintly named back then—erupted in Brixton, Tottenham, Toxteth, Handsworth and other parts of Britain.

But with each passing day, the old maxim, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”, has increasing relevance. In the 80s, as now, rioting was sparked by a confrontation between black people and the police and spread to the rest of the country, including to “white” areas. In 1981, the Conservative prime minister dismissed suggestions that the Brixton riot was due to unemployment and racism. Time proved that she was badly wrong. But fast forward three decades, and David Cameron tells the House of Commons that this week’s rioting was “criminality, pure and simple”.

In the years up to 1981, tension had been building between black people and the police over the “sus” laws, which gave officers powers to arrest anyone they suspected may be intending to steal. For them, a black youngster glancing at a handbag was enough. After Brixton, this law was repealed. Today, however, black people are seven times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched. And under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act—which allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion—the racial discrepancy rises to 26 times. This is symptomatic of the many ways in which, for black Britons, life seemingly improved but has steadily descended again…

…Over the last three decades we’ve allowed ourselves to be fooled that, with greater integration, plus a few black faces in sport and entertainment, things have improved. People gush about the growing mixed-race population, supposedly Britain’s “beautiful” future. Well, Mark Duggan had a white parent but it didn’t make much difference to his prospects…

Read the entire article here.

Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific Between the Wars

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 40, Issue 2, 2009
pages 143-160
DOI: 10.1080/10314610902849302

Warwick Anderson, Professor of History
University of Sydney

The attitudes of Australian biologists, anthropologists, and historians toward race mixing in the early-twentieth century should be viewed in relation to the investigations of Indigenous depopulation and miscegenation taking place in the Pacific. Those Australian scientists committed to national or continental racial ideals–Cecil Cook and Norman B. Tindale among them–remained resistant to the lessons of the Pacific, favouring ‘half-caste’ absorption. Other scholars such as Stephen Roberts and A. P. Elkin took the oceanic approach, coming to value and harness racial hybridity. This essay shows how much of Australian racial thought drifted in from the Pacific.

In 1925, as he shuttled between Townsville and Rabaul, Raphael Cilento wrote to extol the new tropical white man evolving in North Queensland. A fierce advocate of white racial purity, the director of the Townsville Institute of Tropical Medicine was convinced the peculiar Australian combination of selected European stock, restriction of intercourse with other races, a tropical environment and modern preventive medicine was producing a more virile white man north of Capricorn, not another degenerate type. ‘He is tall and rangy, with somewhat sharp features, and long legs and arms’, Cilento wrote. ‘Inclined to be sparely built, he is not, however, lacking in muscular strength, while his endurance is equal in his own circumstances to that of the temperate dweller in his. This North Queenslander moves slowly, and conserves muscular heat-producing energy in every possible way’. It was as though the Townsville racial visionary was channelling Marcus Clarke, only the Melbourne novelist’s sardonic 1877 prophecy of the coming man now spawned rhapsodies in the tropical heat. The race is in a transition stage’, Cilento continued, ‘and it is very apparent that there is being evolved precisely what one would hope for, namely a distinctive tropical type, adapted to life in the tropical environment in which it
is set’. Cilento was certainly not crying in the wilderness. Ronald Hamlyn-Harris, director of the Queensland Museum and scourge of the mosquito, joined him in trying to cultivate ‘in the rising generation year after year a vision of…

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Skin Colour: Does it Matter in New Zealand?

Policy Quarterly (Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington)
Volume 4, Number 1 (2008)
pages 18-25

Paul Callister, Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Policy Studies
Victoria University of Wellington

Introduction

Pick up any official New Zealand publication which includes photographs representing the population and it is highly likely that the people featured will have visible characteristics, including skin colour, that are stereotypically associated with the main ethnic groups living in this country. Equally, examine official reports which consider differences in outcomes between groups of people, such as in health and education, and it is very likely that ethnicity will be a key variable in the analysis. But it is extremely unlikely that skin colour will be explicitly mentioned in either type of report.

This article explores three areas where skin colour might matter. First, with reference primarily to US literature, the question of the role of skin colour in discrimination and, ultimately, economic and health outcomes is examined. Then, turning to New Zealand, there is a discussion of whether skin colour is a factor in why those responding to official surveys who identify themselves as ‘Māori only’ have, on average, worse outcomes than those reporting Māori plus other ethnicities. Finally, two connected health issues are looked at. One is skin colour and the risk of skin cancer; and the second is the hypothesised, but still controversial, links between skin colour, sun exposure, vitamin D production and an inverse risk of developing colorectal cancer. Two main questions are asked in this article. First, in contrast with many other countries, why in recent years have researchers and policy makers in New Zealand been averse to discussing and researching skin colour? Second, is there a case to be made for the use of measures other than self-identified ethnicity – such as skin colour – in official statistics and other large surveys, including health-related surveys?…

…Single and multiple ethnicity and outcomes

Moving back to the American context, two hypotheses have been put forward to explain the effect of mixed race on a variety of outcomes, including health status. One is that mixed-race individuals will be at greater risk of poor outcomes than those who affiliate with a single race because of stresses associated with a mixed identity. The other theory is that outcomes will lie between those of the two single groups. Many factors are likely to be influencing these outcomes, but variations in skin colour could be important, either directly or indirectly.

In New Zealand there has been relatively limited use made to date of single versus dual and multi-ethnic responses when analysing advantage and disadvantage. However, early work by Gould (1996, 2000) suggested a gradient of disadvantage in relation to degree of ‘Māori-ness’. In his 1996 paper Gould associated Ngāi Tahu’s integration into European society with their relative success when compared with other iwi. However, while other people have talked about Ngāi Tahu as being the ‘white tribe’, skin colour was not discussed by Gould in any of his papers.

In a number of papers, Chapple (e.g. 2000) divided the Māori ethnic group into two groups, ‘sole Māori’ and ‘mixed Māori’, and found better outcomes for ‘mixed Māori’. Chapple raised the idea that the disadvantage amongst Māori is concentrated in a particular subset: those who identify only as Māori, who have no educational qualifications, and who live outside major urban centres. Again, skin colour was not a feature of these studies.

However, Kukutai (2003) suggests that social policy makers should not put much weight on categories such as ‘Māori only’ and ‘Māori plus other ethnic group(s)’. Using survey data and a system of self-prioritisation, Kukutai showed that those individuals who identified as both Māori and non-Māori, but more strongly with the latter, tended to be socially and economically much better off than all other Māori. In contrast, those who identified more strongly as Māori had socio-economic and demographic attributes that were similar to those who recorded only Māori as their ethnic group. Kukutai’s work shows that some people recording multiple ethnic responses feel a strong sense of belonging in more than one ethnic group. For others, however, a stronger affiliation is felt with one particular ethnic group. While not discussed directly in the study, factors such as visible difference, including skin colour, may influence such decisions.

What is causing different outcomes between those recording only Māori ethnicity and those recording Māori and European responses? We do not know. No one single factor is likely to be a driver, but skin colour, in a variety of ways, may exert some influence. For example, it may be that those who ‘look more Māori’ (or look more ‘Pacific’) are more likely to record only Māori (or Pacific) ethnicity in official surveys. If this is correct, and if discrimination is common in New Zealand, the Māori-only (or Pacific peoples) group would be more likely to suffer discrimination from police, landlords and healthcare providers…

Read the entire article here.

Prayer, and Bug Juice, at a Summer Camp for Jews of Color

The New York Times
2011-08-12

Samuel G. Freedman, Professor of Journalism
Columbia University

PETALUMA, Calif. — On Sabbath morning, as fog still hung over the valley, the campers walked past the Torrey pines and blackberry bushes toward the garden. There, several rows of chairs had been arranged in front of an altar fashioned from a folding table covered with Senegalese cloth and a Torah scroll on loan from an Orthodox synagogue.

About 15 minutes into the service, two girls rose to lead the congregation in a series of prayers. “Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu, melech ha-olam, she’asani Yisrael,” they said. Then they switched to the English translation: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has made me a Jew.”

In all its ordinariness, as a standard part of liturgy, the assertion could hardly have been bolder, coming as it did from Amalia Cymrot-Wu and her camp buddy Maya Campbell. Maya is the daughter of an interracial black-white marriage, Amalia the product of Brazilian and Chinese bloodlines, and they were matter-of-factly proclaiming their place among the Jewish people…

Read the entire article here. View the slide show here.

San Francisco State Journalism Professor Yumi Wilson’s Multicultural Heritage Helps Connect People

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-08-11

Lydia Lum

San Francisco State Journalism Professor Yumi Wilson’s Multicultural Heritage Helps Connect People

Yumi Wilson teaches news writing, opinion and literary journalism at San Francisco State University where she’s an associate professor of journalism. Formerly a reporter for The Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle, Wilson covered hundreds of major stories. They included the 1992 Los Angeles race riots after the acquittal of White police officers in the beating of Black motorist Rodney King and the controversial, voter-approved Proposition 209, which banned California’s public universities and agencies from considering race in admissions, contracting and employment. A Fulbright scholarship enabled Wilson to travel to Japan in 2001 and research military marriages, conduct interviews about interracial identities there and, with the help of translators, ask her relatives about her mother’s early life. Wilson holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of San Francisco.

DI: What are your observations about diversity in the news industry today?

YW: I’m really worried. Fewer people of color are choosing journalism careers. Entry-level jobs are scarce. The pay is often so low that it seems only people whose families can afford a financial hit can get into journalism. Internships are excellent to gain experience, but nowadays they seem to last much longer than a summer and, at some point, a paying job really should kick in. I would not have been able to get into journalism if these cutbacks had occurred when I was in college. It’s disappointing that young minorities studying journalism are choosing other careers or going to graduate school without working in the field because even if they work in journalism for only five years, they would still make an impact with their energy and ideas. We’re fast losing an important voice of conscience…

…DI: As the daughter of a Black U.S. Army soldier and a woman from northern Japan, what have you written connected to your heritage?

YW: I wrote an essay exploring the shifting meaning of multiracial identity, which was published in a Loyola Marymount University literary journal a few years ago. And this year, I presented a paper about Black Amerasians at the Association for Asian American Studies conference. It’s reassuring to know it connects with people helping to spread knowledge.

Read the entire article here.

Texas bucks U.S. trend on standardized scoring

Houston Chronicle
2011-07-25

Jennifer Radcliffe
 
It will tally multiracial students but not report their scores separately

Multiracial students are being tallied for the first time in Texas history, but their standardized test scores won’t appear as a separate group when accountability ratings are released Friday.

As it grapples with increasing diversity, Texas has opted not to measure the scores of the state’s 78,419 multiracial, non-Hispanic students as an ethnic subgroup whose performance matters in determining whether a school made “adequate yearly progress.”
 
Instead, they’ll join the ranks of the 180,000 Asian students lumped in with their schools’ entire student body for accountability purposes…

…Some scores moved
 
As Texas transitions to the new categories this year, state officials have opted to return some multiracial students’ scores to their previous category, if records indicate that the student was originally listed as white or African American. Their scores will only count in that previous category if they improve the school’s rating…

Read the entire article here.

Racial attitudes and the Anglo‐Indians perceptions of a community before and after independence

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Volume 6, Issue 2 (1983)
pages 34-45
DOI: 10.1080/00856408308723045

Coralie Younger
University of Sydney

The question of racial attitudes between the rulers and the ruled, and whites and non-whites has evoked attention from numerous authors. E. Said maintains that ‘the White man was always on the alert to keep the coloured at bay’ while Northrop Frye notes a “garrison mentality” whereby,

‘there is a need for the projection of an unbroken surface, an apparently flawless morale, to be presented not merely to the outside world where the subject races crowd but also to one’s companions’

As Ballhatchet has argued in Race, Sex and Classunder the Rajt ‘the preservation of social distance seemed essential to the maintenance of structures of power and authority.’ Given such attitudes, what was the place of those who were neither black nor white? What, in other words, were attitudes towards Anglo-Indians? British ideas of racial supremacy evolved during the nineteenth century and reached their apotheosis during the imperial heyday of the Victorian age with a belief in white superiority over the inferior coloured races. The British rigidly maintained a distance between themselves and those over whom they ruled. They frowned upon anyone who attempted to bridge the gap.

Anglo-Indians are a minority community in India of mixed European and Indian blood, claiming European descent through the male line. They are legally defined in the Indian Constitution and have concomitant educational and political rights. Economically they are a depressed community, placing little emphasis upon education. Their traditional neglect of education was a result of the paternalistic practice of the British, who gave them preference in upper-subordinate positions in government service regardless of educational attainments. However the reforms that followed the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1919 saw the end of reserved positions for Anglo-Indians and led to the Indianisation of all government departments.

Did the British maintain their distance from Anglo-Indians in quite the same way as they did in regard to Indians? In general it would seem that the British response was complex. Racial attitudes had sexual and class overtones. They were contemptuous of Anglo-Indians because of their “native’* blood. The British felt ashamed of Anglo-Indians because they were the products of sexual relations between themselves and Indian women…

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From Invisible Man to “New People”: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 46, Number 2 (2nd Quarter, 1985)
pages 106-122

Patricia Morton

It might well seem obvious what the following persons have in common: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Horace Mann Bond, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, and Langston Hughes.

Although such a list could be expanded indefinitely, the point is that most of these are familiar enough names that they will readily be identified as Afro-Americans who have acted in some capacity as spokespeople for black Americans. Therefore, the obvious answer to the question suggested above is that these persons share their racial identity, as black American people. It might also be recognized, however, that this answer is based upon a distinctive North American perspective. In Latin American societies, for example, they would be identified instead as “mulattoes,” and in several cases, on the basis of physical appearance and status, as “white.”

It is essentially only during the last decade that this kind of distinction has been explicitly recognized in the publication of a number of studies which explore the historical experience of Americans of mixed black and white ancestry. It was observed recently that “As a field of enquiry with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, Afro-American history came of age during the past two decades.” In one sense these mulatto studies might be seen as part of that coming of age; however, in another sense they hearken back to what Black History has attempted to do for black Americans until recently, namely, to write the mulatto into American history. What does seem clear is that such studies represent a new direction in American historiography, and that the scholars engaged in this field are far from arriving at any consensus regarding their conceptual and methodological concerns. Indeed, they have remained largely unaware of one another’s work, and have arrived largely independently at conclusions which are sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to compare and contrast their accounts, to offer some tentative suggestions as to their strengths and weaknesses, and where possible, to integrate their conclusions. In addition, this recent upsurge of scholarly interest in Americans of mixed black and white ancestry is a striking phenomenon in itself, which deserves some comment in the context of modern North American attitudes to race and race relations…

…Both miscegenation and mulatto are emotion-charged and value-laden terms, and both have been employed by North American whites in a variety of ways in accordance with their views on race. However, the mulatto figure has also been employed by Afro-Americans as a defense against white racism. Certainly Berzon demonstrates that during the Jim Crow era, Afro-American writers revived the “superior mulatto” for this purpose, consistently and repeatedly portraying the respectable and virtuous character of the person of mixed ancestry to counter the image of Negro degradation. These novels depict exemplary “Victorian” mulatto women, and equally bourgeois mulatto men who are also educated, refined, patriarchal, self-reliant, and devoted to acquiring all the marks of middle-class status. They are race leaders and role models who are both distinct from and an inspiration to the black masses, and particularly during the turn-of-the-century years, Afro-Americans themselves emphasized mulatto distinctiveness, John Mencke’s thesis notwithstanding….

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Latinos are “Mixed,” Too

News Taco: The Latino Daily
2011-07-14

Chantilly Patiño, blogger
Bicultural Mom

Most times, Americans don’t think of Latinos as being mixed or multicultural, but in reality Latinos are leaders of multiculturalism and mixed families.  Start off with the fact that most Latinos come from a combination of European and Native ancestry, a mixing that began with the colonization of the Americas.

But beyond that there are other historical mixings, including African ancestry, Latinos in the U.S. are also in the unique position of straddling the borders of two dominating cultures, popular American culture and that of their own Latino heritage.  This puts Latinos in an excellent position to understand a variety of perspectives and address multiculturalism with ease…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Season

BBC Press Office
BBC Two Summer & Autumn 2011
Diverse, stimulating and rewarding television on BBC Two
2011-06-22

Mixed-race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn in a collection of revealing new programmes. With a mix of drama and documentaries, the season provides a window into the varied lives of mixed-race people living in the UK and helps us understand what the increase in mixed-race people means for the way we live in Britain today.

Mixed Britannia

George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community in a new three-part series uncovering a tale of illicit love, tragedy and triumph.

With previously unseen material and unheard testimony, charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George examines the social factors that have influenced the shape of today’s mixed-race Britain. He discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making it one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK…

…Mixed Race

This documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing. From the strict application of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the USA and South Africa to the emergence of Mestizo cultures in the colonies of South America, the programme examines the complex history of interracial relationships around the world…

For more information, click here.