Mixed Race Studies

What is ‘post-racial’?

The Spectator
Seattle University
2011-02-16

Frances Dinger

Since Barack Obama became the first black president in 2008, the word “post-racial” has been liberally used by some media groups. We are, according to some, at a point in our country’s history when we can be past race but minorities are still incarcerated at a disproportionate rate to whites and are more often living below the poverty line, especially in urban areas (whites outnumber minorities in the case of poverty in rural areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). So, what does it mean to say we are a post-racial nation when the numbers suggest otherwise?

“We’re not post-racial,” said sociology professor Gary Perry. “We’re post-talking about race.”

With the rise of the multi-racial and multi-cultural movement, some ethnic groups are becoming less visible. And the issue is complicated further considering races are not measured uniformly across government agencies. A 20-year-old student named Michelle López-Mullins who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent is counted as “Hispanic” by the Board of Education but the National Center for Health statistics would count her both as “Asian” and “Hispanic,” according to a Feb. 9 New York Times article by Susan Saulny.

During the 2010 census, individuals had the option of checking a box marked “mixed race,” making counting all the more complicated.

While trivial to some, racial statistics help government agencies consider disparities in health, education, employment and housing, among other protections. So, where are we in the race discussion when even government agencies are sometimes unsure how to group individuals? Does a movement for “mixed race” mean we are moving toward greater equality or acceptance?

“Symbolically, there’s this idea that we’ve arrived at a place absent of race,” Perry said. “[…] It’s not that we’re post-racial, but the mixing we’re seeing indicates race doesn’t matter.”

Perry emphasized that what we see in the media from minority celebrities is not the reality faced by many Americans of color…

Read the entire article here.

Adults’ Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children

Journal of Black Psychology
Volume 29, Number 4 (November 2003)
pages 463-480
DOI: 10.1177/0095798403256888

Gayle L. Chesley
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

William G. Wagner

A between-groups experimental design was used to examine adults’ attitudes toward multiracial children of African descent. The purpose was to determine if the races of the respondent,the child, and the child’ s friends are related to adults’ ratings of children’s self-perception and depressive symptoms. A total of 156 undergraduate students (African American = 78, European American = 78) read a vignette in which the race of the target child (European American, African American, or multiracial) and the child’s friends (European American or African American) were experimentally controlled. Participants assessed the child using a revision of Harter’s Self-Perception Profile for Children and a revised version of Kovacs’s Children’s Depression Inventory—Short Form. Ratings of the child’s global self-worth and depressive symptoms were negatively correlated. The results of a 2 × 2 × 3 MANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction for the races of the child,the respondent, and the child’s friends on adults’ ratings of the child’s peer acceptance. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Read the entire article here.

Communicating With Children of Interracial/Interethnic Parentage

IUC Journal of Social Work Theory & Practice
Issue 4 (2001/2002)

Toyin Okitikpi

Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity. Children of interracial/interethnic parentage are increasing in number throughout Europe yet there has been a wall of silence about how to work with such children. In this discussion the aim is not only to encourage a dialogue about children of interracial/interethnic relationships but also to urge a development of a better understanding of the inner and outer world of such children. The aim is also to highlight and analyse the different issues that welfare professionals need to take into consideration when working with the children. I shall suggest that there is a need to give greater credence to the way people communicate with the children because what is communicated and how it is communicated could affect how the children relate to others, how they develop intellectually, emotionally and psychologically and how they develop their sense of identity.

Read the entire article here.

Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of “The Invisible Line”

The Christian Science Monitor
2011-02-23

Stacie Williams, Monitor Contributor

In “The Invisible Line,” law professor Daniel J. Sharfstein uses the stories of three families to explore the fluid nature of racial identity in America.

Race has never been an easy concept in this country; the rigid constructs by which people judge black and white have always left room for individuals who could move across either side of the line. Today, more Americans are choosing to identify as multiracial; that segment of the population has grown 35% since the 2000 Census.

Exhibit A: The president of the United States, who has a white mother, but chooses to identify himself as African American.

Vanderbilt University Associate Law Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein analyzes the constantly evolving perceptions and experience of race in his new book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Sharfstein uses his legal background to fill in the shades of gray and highlight an American experience, which for many changed with the stroke of a pen, or with hair dye.

I recently had a chance to talk with Professor Sharfstein about his book and questions of racial identity in America….

…How key is the role of the Census in gauging how many more people are keeping their racial identities fluid?

As a country, we’re committed to principles of equality. The Census has an important function in figuring out how things are going—how well we’re living up to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination. On one level, how people self-identify is an interesting measure of how far we’ve come. On another level, it’s not completely related to larger societal issues we’ve made a commitment to overcome.

Have your opinions on racial constructs changed with Obama in the White House?

I think this country has changed a lot in the past couple decades and the way in which we understand the color line has been changed. As people have embraced multiracialism, its raised interesting questions about people who have been able to discover they have African Americans in their family history. I think these new ways of understanding identity are playing a role in how people are understanding their heritage. But I do think the election of Barack Obama is a major moment in the history of race. Race has never been about biology and blood. Plenty of white people have African blood. I’m looking at this history of migration across the color line and what do categories of black and white mean? These categories have been proxies for hierarchies and discrimination… for having a full set of rights as citizens.

Read the entire interview here.

A creolising South Africa? Mixing, hybridity, and creolisation: (re)imagining the South African experience

International Social Science Journal
Volume 58, Issue 187 (March 2006)
pages 165–176
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2451.2006.00600.x

Denis-Constant Martin [in French], Senior Research Fellow
Centre for International Research and Studies (CERI) of the National Foundation for Political Science (Paris)

The present state of South Africa’s society is the outcome of protracted processes of contacts and mixing, in the course of which people coming from different cultural areas blended and produced an original culture. More than three centuries of racism and apartheid have bequeathed representations in which South Africa is construed as an addition of different people, each with its own culture and language. Such representations do not take into account the interactions between them that produced what is today a mix that is impossible to disentangle. This article attempts to look at theories of métissage and creolisation that have been devised to analyse societies in South America and the West Indies and check whether they could contribute to producing a better understanding of the history of South Africa. Édouard Glissant’s [(1928-2011)] theories of métissage and creolisation, because they stress processes and relations, because they consider that creolisation is a continuous process, could be relevant to South Africa. However, the example of Brazil shows that re-imagining the past does not suffice to pacify memories of violence and segregation; it remains ineffective if it is not accompanied by economic and social policies aiming at redressing the inequalities inherited from this very past.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed-Race Americans Are on the Rise: Will It Change Communications?

New York Women in Communications
February 2011

In a new series by The New York Times, titled Race Remixed [Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above], reporter Susan Saulny looks at the impact of one of our country’s fastest-growing demographic groups, multiracial and multiethnic Americans, usually grouped together as “mixed race.” Driven by Latino and Asian immigration and intermarriage, this demographic shift has resulted in the largest group of mixed-race college students ever to come of age in the United States…

..Not everyone sees this trend as positive. In the series’ second segment “Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers,” published on Thursday, February 9, experts countered that this can dilute important statistical information for minority groups. These statistics are used to assess disparities in health, education, and employment and housing, as well as to enforce civil rights protections.

But what does the growing number of mixed-race Americans mean for communication professionals? Will it lead to changes in reporting on race issues and less focus on race overall? Will publications and websites devoted to individual ethnic groups such as Ebony see declining readership and be forced to retool their approach – or even go out of business? Will the demographic shift finally result in a true multicultural approach with all ethnic groups fully represented in communications?…

Read the entire article here.

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses]

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-06

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University, Washington, D. C.

To the Editor:

Congratulations to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. for concluding that Jean Toomer was a Negro who decided to pass for white—the same conclusion I made in my biography of Toomer, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, published in 1993. Nothing like reinventing the wheel.

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Kimberly A. Barrett, Vice President for Student Affairs
University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama

To the Editor:

Despite the interesting investigative work of its authors, the recent Chronicle article on Jean Toomer was troubling to me because it served as another apparent grain of truth that sustains two deeply entrenched stereotypes. One of these is the myth of the confused mulatto who is disabled by incessant struggles with his or her racial identity. The other is the “one-drop rule“—the idea that anyone with an identifiable black person in his or her lineage is assumed black. I think it’s time we acknowledge the reality of the existence of the well-adjusted multiethnic/biracial white person. As the self-identifying African-American mother of a young man who fit that description while growing up, I’d like to share part of our story in the spirit of balance.

“Your mom is black?” was a frequent refrain and innocent nod to the notion of the one-drop rule when my son’s acquaintances met me for the first time. I must admit that I, too, did not escape the influence of this perennial rule. On those dreamy weekend mornings when my husband and I lay awake pondering who our child would look like, I smugly argued that of course our child would be black because one parent was black. My husband, on the other hand, who is white (of Irish and Danish descent) and a card-carrying member of a Native American tribe, asked with dismay, “Where am I in this equation?”…

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Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

To the Editor:

In their article on Jean Toomer, the authors Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. claim that Toomer suffered from a case of “conflicted racial identity” (“Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity,” The Chronicle Review, February 11). Toomer, one of the first proponents of thinking about race in multiracial “American” terms, is now said to have been passing as white. The authors justify this assertion by presenting new evidence that Toomer identified himself differently based on location and situation.

It is true that Toomer most likely self-identified as “Negro” when he registered for the draft. It is also true that in Toomer’s era, and the eras in which his ancestors were identified, census takers were allowed to list racial designation as they perceived it. So, whether Toomer is listed as white or black on the census may say little about his own thoughts on racial identity. It may, however, say much about how he was perceived by the person taking the census and/or responding on his behalf. A similar case can be made for the marriage licenses. In the absence of a handwriting expert, eyewitness, or recorded conversation, it is not verifiable that Toomer self-identified as white or whether he was designated as white by the licensor.

Nevertheless, Byrd and Gates maintain that Toomer had to be passing—and therefore engaging in racial deception—because it is not documented that any of his “direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.”

Flying in the face of decades’ worth of scholarship that builds on Toomer’s work, Byrd and Gates ignore Maria Root’s “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” In it, Root states that multiracial people may identify differently over time, may identify differently than their parents or siblings, and that doing so is totally acceptable. As my colleague Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University put it, “It feels like Byrd and Gates have made a conflict where, in fact, there isn’t one.”…

Read the entire responses here.

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-02-06

Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
Emory University

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

On August 4, 1922, about a year before he published his first book, Cane, Jean Toomer, age 27, wrote to his first love, a black teenager named Mae Wright, confessing his ambivalence about the dogged pursuit by African-Americans of Anglo-American cultural ideals: “We who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters.” That would be one of the last times he admitted his own Negro ancestry, either publicly or privately. Six years later, Georgia O’Keeffe—Toomer’s friend and later lover—wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, describing the way Toomer, then living in Chicago, was identifying himself: “It seems that in Chicago they do not know that he has Negro blood—he seems to claim French extraction.”

When we were working on a new Norton critical edition of Cane, a masterpiece of modernism composed of fiction, poetry, and drama, we confronted the question of Toomer’s race. Literary critics and biographers have long speculated about how he identified himself, but too often they have chosen not to conduct research into public documents about the topic. Was Toomer—a central figure in two faces of American modernism, the New Negro (or Harlem Renaissance) Movement and the Lost Generation—a Negro who, following the publication of Cane, passed for white?

Toomer is known for proclaiming a new, mixed racial identity, which he called “American.” In an era of de jure segregation, such a claim was defiantly transgressive. But he may have been far more conflicted about his identity than his noble attempt to question American received categories of “race” might suggest…

…In the course of the 25 years between his 1917 and 1942 draft registrations, it seems that Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry. During his childhood and adolescence in Washington, as a member of the mulatto elite, he lived in both the white and the black worlds. At times he resided in white neighborhoods, but he was educated in all-black schools. Toomer would write that it was his experience in that special world, “midway between the white and Negro worlds,” that led him to develop his novel “racial position” as early as 1914, at the age of 20, when he defined himself as an “American, neither white nor black.”…

…Why is it so important, as we read Cane, to understand Toomer’s conflicts over his racial identity? What light does it shine on scholarship about his work, about African-American literature, and the way our society has dealt with race? The first reason is the simple, or rather complicated, fact that Toomer himself thought it was important. Important? Toomer obsessed over it, endlessly circling back upon it in the comfortable isolation of his upper-middle-class home in Bucks County, Pa...

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Beauty Gets a Mainstream Makeover

TruthDig
2011-03-07

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Are mixed race faces considered the most beautiful? A recent report from Allure magazine says yes. Results of a survey conducted by Allure reveal that 64 percent of its readers thought mixed race was the most attractive. The editors attribute the results to the growing population of mixed race youth. As much as I’d like to agree it appears that this is just another case of wishful racial thinking.

Here are a few reasons why. We need to remember that beauty and race are both social constructions—concepts societies create that may not actually exist in nature. As a result, beauty and race are associated with and impacted by class, immigration, gender, sexuality and marketing. Case in point: Since the Time magazine cover in the late 1990s, multiracials are more and more said to be the face of 21st century America. But what’s less known is that even this image was altered to look less “Hispanic/Latino” and more “European.”…

…With that in mind, we also need to think very carefully about what the rise in the mixed race population means. Despite interpretations of the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the idea that the Two or More Races (TOMR) population is somehow seeing a surge in the U.S. because of 1967’s Loving v. Virginia case is false.  Multiracial populations have been in existence since the days of exploration, colonialism and enslavement. The rise that statistics are tracking now reflects people’s ability, willingness, perceived advantages and comfort in describing themselves as multiracial. This growing trend is certainly laudable and may even be a sign of personal progress, but it definitely does not reflect a change in standards of beauty. It might be more accurate to say that the surge in TOMR identification is a sign that we are moving away from the old tragic mulatta stereotype. This stereotype—applied mostly to women—says that multiracials desire to be white and that they loathe the nonwhite part(s) of themselves. Note that what’s still missing from the conversation is how even this unfortunate stereotype privileges mixes that include whiteness and marginalizes others (i.e., Asian-Black)…

Read the entire article here.

Black ‘Like Me’: (Mis)Recognition, the Racial Gothic, and the Post-1967 Mixed-Race Movement in Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic

African American Review
Number 42 (Summer 2008)
pages 287-305

Hershini Bhana Young, Associate Professor of English
State University of New York, Buffalo

Symptomatic, Danzy Senna’s second novel, is a dense and disturbing satire of the post-1967 mixed-race movement. Tersely written, “hard-edged and kind of minimalist,” as Senna describes it in an interview with Rebecca Weber, it invokes the thrillers and film noir of Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma, and Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female), to name a few. The novel’s style pays overt homage to Ralph Ellison’s brooding Invisible Man, even as it also gestures toward W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nella Larsen. Symptomatic describes the life of an unnamed woman who has just moved to New York on a writing fellowship. After a short-lived and disastrous relationship with Andrew, who is white, the protagonist sublets an apartment that she learns about from an older colleague named Greta Hicks, who befriends her. Their tense relationship, based on their “shared” mixed-race identity, rapidly disintegrates when the protagonist starts dating a black artist named Ivers. Greta, who eventually reveals herself as the original occupant of the apartment that the protagonist is subletting, stalks the protagonist and eventually attempts to kill her. Both main characters are tragic, confused, and inseparable until one of them dies…

…Symptomatic, in contrast, is dark and troubling, using imagery, metaphor and a strained plot to tackle romantic ideas about community formation and race. I feel that most readers’ discomfort with the novel revolves around what Senna’s experiments in form hope to accomplish: an imminent warning about the danger of racialized communities that counters popular belief about the glamorous, though ordinary and well adjusted mixed-race community member. Senna launches a devastating critique of models of community based on collective political action. She shows how community comes to stand in for a “passive, static, conservative [timeless and naturalized]… network of people who inevitably know your name and your business because you interact with them every day, rather than those you have sought out as allies”; they are not driven by shared political purposes but rather by a simplistic recognition of inherent similarity (Joseph 10). Senna accomplishes her warning about this type of community through several means, most importantly through her 1) deployment of the African American gothic to create a disturbing and implausible plot with stock characters and 2) her historicization of contemporary mixed-race community formations based on phenotypic sameness, specifically those that resulted from the post-1967 mixed-race movement. Symptomatic begins where Caucasia ostensibly ends, with the protagonist Birdie’s poignant recognition of another girl who is “black like her” in the San Francisco Bay area. But it then asks us what implications there are of this moment of racial (mis)recognition on a personal, cultural and national level. What specifically does Senna hope to articulate about sameness, difference and community that demonstrate the promise of a mixed-race utopia gone tragically awry? Symptomatic, through a careful and strategic deployment of African American gothic conventions, critiques overly optimistic cultural understandings of hybridity both as the source of community formation and as racial (non) identity. It articulates the need for new models of community based on noncompulsory politicized identifications and strategies for redressing historical injustice.

The “Bi-Racial Baby Boom”: Which Mixed-Race Movement?

Racial mixing in this country is certainly nothing new, nor are the various esponses by mixed-race people to the violent implementation of the one-drop rule that has historically characterized black-white interrelations. (2) But Senna’s novel does not target the entire history of mixed-race people in the United States. While thoroughly grounded in this history, the novel focuses on the contemporary mixed-race movement enabled by the successes and failures of the civil rights movement. Kim Williams argues that while historically racial designations have been used to distinguish and disenfranchise those who were not deemed white, the political leadership of the civil rights campaign saw the opportunity to use those same racial classifications to end racism and ensure equality. An example of this would be the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required statistics on race to ensure equality of access to voting. In the 1970s, multiracial activists, using the language of civil rights, argued that “the official recognition of multiracialism” was a civil right “By arguing that the recognition of multiracial people was the ‘next logical step in civil rights,’ multiracial activists drew shrewdly on the symbolism of the civil rights movement, yet in the process cast themselves as more progressive than the so-called progressives (i.e., the civil rights lobby)” (K. Williams 87). (3) To the civil rights movement’s linking of rights and identity, the mixed-race movement added an appeal to the state for official endorsement of their particular identity with the understanding that “[n]onrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm; can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Charles Taylor qtd. in K. Williams 89). Thus, not being seen as mixed-race, but as only black or white by others and by the state constitutes a psychological form of injury supposedly equal to centuries of material oppression with psychological effects. This problematic idea of recognition as ensuring equality is at the heart of Symptomatic. Senna relies on the gothic imagery of doubles and mirroring to critique the notion that racial recognition is an adequate basis for community formation, as I develop later…

…Contrary to Time magazine, mixed-race people have not become more common during the last two decades. The misperception stems from the foundational status of legalized interracial marriage as the only legitimate site of the production of hybrid offspring. What gets silenced, in the case of African Americans, is the hybridity of Africans themselves and the long legacy of sexual abuse that reproduced racialized categories of property. The children of white planters, for example, were first and foremost slaves due to the condition of blackness inherited from their mothers. Hypodescent was not a choice but a pseudoscientific term brutally enacted on the bodies of Africans and their New World descendants. (6) The mixed-race movement is fraught with such misunderstandings and contradictions, another of these being that most of the organizations within it are not constituted by people of mixed race. Rather, the mixed-race movement’s membership consists largely of monoracially identified parents, almost always white, who claim to act on their children’s behalf. One could argue, then, that the mixed-race movement attempts to extend the hitherto denied privileges of whiteness to children who historically would be black. Indeed, this “new” multiracial national imaginary “has worked to reconfigure the popular discourse on race and sexuality, forging [instead] … an increasingly sentimentalized white [power] that rewrites its centrality to the nation by embracing new modes of cross-racial feeling” (Wiegman 872). While these senti-mental modes may appear to differ from earlier dominant forms of white supremacy, such as during Reconstruction, wherein interracial sex was violently disavowed and policed in order to preserve the unpreservable purity of race, the effect of maintaining white power is the same. Contemporary liberal whiteness in the age of global capital assimilates interracial desire, and under the guise of recognizing a common humanity, perpetuates the same racialized injustices that have become all too familiar. The recognition of humanity comes at the expense of not recognizing a history…

…Senna states repeatedly in interviews that she is “wary of the way multiraciality has become fetishized in the media and in the popular discussion on race…. I’m suspicious of adding a new category to the Census for a lot of reasons …” (qtd. in Arias 448). (13) She insists that given the complex histories around “mulattos” (the word Senna prefers to use for its historicity), the mixed-race movement has been seen as an unequivocal solution for those people marginalized by racial binary thinking that has them occupying the interstitial spaces of neither/nor. Symptomatic fully articulates what Caucasia hints at during its final pages: that the warm embrace of coercive sameness, while seeming to provide salve for the wounds of racist exclusion repeats the violence of racial binarisms. A community of people who are “biologically” alike results, not in the transcendence of racial hierarchical categories, but rather in their perpetuation. Senna urges us to interrogate the role of prescriptive sameness in the construction of identity by her use of the gothic, no matter how much this sameness is viewed as deconstructing the larger structures of racism in the United States. She does not depict the racially ambiguous character as essentially threatening to dialectical formations of black and white. Part of Symtomatic’s “dark” vision is how the racially ambiguous character can reinforce racial categorizations and misrecognitions, leading to a deepening of the racial chasms that haunt the American landscape and the revocation of civil rights gains. Senna thinks through race, moving away from prescriptive physical sameness (even multiracial sameness) towards an understanding of racial community as constituted via engaged, deliberate historical interactions grounded in material realities. She uses the gothic to defamiliarize the specter of sameness and expose its dangerous logic, no matter in what context that sameness appears. I wish to be clear: the compulsion to seek out those who think and act like you is the essence of community formation. Sameness is essential in the formation of common political agendas, in the organizations of communities with common historical memories. What happens, however, when this compulsion moves from one of voluntarism to another of phenotypic coercion? The novel uses the racial gothic to explore the tensions between compulsory unions (biologically determined via the logic of sameness) and other more deliberate, engaged interactions based on common agendas and concerns. (14)…

Read the entire review here.