Mixed Race Studies

Containing Multitudes

Mixed Dreams: towards a radical multiracial/ethnic movement
2011-02-21

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

“Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men– and in the civil rights movement those dreams had seemed large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned–because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.”

Barack Obama from Dreams From My Father

Alright, I know, I know, talking about Obama and multiraciality is like beating a dead horse. But, I swear, I have a really good point (or two) to make!

Point 1: NO IDENTITY IS MONOLITHIC

It sounds simple enough: Race is not biological, it’s a social construct. Identities are fluid, they change and even expand over time. But most of U.S. society hasn’t caught on yet. And ultimately we need to ask, who gains from keeping these strict boundaries around identities?

In the U.S. we’ve gotten pretty good at essentializing identities into strictly defined, carefully bound, digestible boxes. The black American community, in particular, has long been seen as a monolith—a static and unassimilable one at that—and yet nothing could be further from the truth. I recently watched the Kobina Aidoo documentary film The Neo African-Americans.  The film aims to explore issues facing Caribbean and continental African immigrant communities and their descendants in the U.S. Though, it was at best an introduction to some very deeply rooted issues concerning black people in the Diaspora, the film definitely brings up some provocative points around identity, authenticity and community. The film got me thinking about the (often invisible) multitudes racial and ethnic identities contain and how crucial and yet limiting the process of “self-naming” can be for historically marginalized groups. As people of color, many of us live on the “hyphen”—as hyphen “Americans” in a way that members of white ethnic groups do not.

Indeed, many of the issues faced by mixed people, mirror those faced by many “monoracial” people of color, especially as our society becomes increasingly defined by it’s heterogeneity while migration, gender, socioeconomic class and sexuality further shape and shift our identities over time. We’re all struggling to define and (re)define who we are as individuals and as collectives. Thus, crises of authenticity, legitimacy, community, progress and belonging are not the sole domain of one particular ethnic or racial group. In significant ways, we can say that they have become woven into the very fabric of our racial inheritance in this country and as such we are all implicated:  black, brown and (perhaps especially) white in tackling these issues head on…

Read the entire essay here.

Columns: Racial lines no longer just black and white

The Minnesota Daily
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul
2011-02-21

Lolla Mohammed Nur

Clear-cut racial categories restrict how multiracial Americans identify themselves.

Based on her appearance, you wouldn’t easily be able to guess University of Minnesota sophomore Mary Taylor‘s racial or ethnic heritage. But if you ask the communications studies major what her ethnicity is, she’d tell you she is three-quarters white, 12.5 percent black and 12.5 percent Native American—a heritage she makes sure to represent when filling out surveys.

The current generation of college students encompasses the largest group of mixed-race people to come of age in the U.S., according to a recent New York Times series on multiracial identity.

Although young Americans increasingly identify themselves as multiracial, they often feel that their fluid identities are restricted when asked to self-identify on paper.

Under new requirements set by the U.S. Department of Education, which will take effect this year, multiracial non-Hispanic students who choose multiple races on surveys will be placed in a “two or more races” category. The justification for this is to offer students of mixed heritage more options to self-identify, and some say it demonstrates the U.S.’s greater appreciation of the fluidity of racial identity.

However, many sociologists fear it will lump all multiracial groups into one category, ignoring the different life experiences and the varying levels of discrimination that members of various multiracial subgroups face.

“It’s like the ‘other’ category or the ‘multiracial’ category because everyone get’s glommed together and you can’t even interpret it,” said sociology faculty member Carolyn Liebler. “It’s a battle whenever you’re trying to compile information about people’s race. On the one hand, institutions want to know who you are, they want you to self-identify … but on the other hand, the entities that want to create statistics would really prefer if you could give a simple answer.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Race Classification Gap

The Huffington Post
2011-02-17

Daniel Arrigg Koh, MBA Student
Harvard Business School

Growing up as a person of Korean and Lebanese descent, I was proud of my heritage and enjoyed discussing it with my peers. While few had ever met anyone with such an ethnic background before, people were always eager to learn more. I always felt that it was a valued part of my identity—something that could happen in few other places but the United States. However, when it came time to apply to colleges, I quickly realized that conveying who I was would not be so easy.

On many of the applications I read, the choices were limited to “Caucasian,” “Black or African-American,” “Asian,” “Native American,” and “Other.” Some offered the opportunity to “write-in” specific races. On the whole, a significant portion of colleges did not allow me to represent myself accurately on the application. This issue symbolizes a significant problem with race identification in America, one that, with the increasing diversity in this country, deserves to be addressed with all possible expediency.

University admissions often state that their reasons for asking demographic information are legal and informational only. From a research and sociological perspective, it is understandable. However, the current system falls far short of the detail that educational institutions could and should collect. For example, many schools prohibit “ticking” more than one race category, or instead provide a category entitled “multiracial.” This forces someone like me to either “choose” a race to be represented as or indicate “multiracial,” which on its own means very little—nearly every person in America is “multiracial” by some standard…

…This “classification gap” has other serious implications. For example, a 2007 study by Princeton and University of Pennsylvania researchers revealed that black students from immigrant families (defined as those who have emigrated from the West Indies or Africa) represented 41% of the black population of Ivy League schools vs. 13% of the black population of 18-19 year-olds in the United States. This information is striking and important in our nation’s focus on closing the achievement gap; however, the status quo of race classification leaves us unable to track such statistics on a uniform, nationwide level…

Read the entire article here.

“Two or More Races” or Just Another Category?

Open Salon
2011-02-20

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.

The Department of Education’s “two or more races” category may appeal to some people but this is a slippery slope towards ignoring race altogether. Race still matters. Combating racism still matters. Acknowledging multiracial identities or agreeing to be placed in a “two or more races” category does not remove our responsibility to fight against the ways race—and racism—have impacted our lives in many, and sometimes violent, ways.

The recent debate about the Department of Education’s “two or more races” category demonstrates both the importance of race today and the absurdity of racial categories. As Rainier Spencer rightly reminds us, racism is alive and well in the 21st century. The only way we have found to combat institutional racism is through the accurate reporting of racial data and our ability to make connections between race, class, gender and other factors such as employment and housing. Without this information we will not be able to measure discrimination or make policies that help create equality for all Americans…

Read the entire article here.

The President, the Census and the Multiracial “Community”

Open Salon
2011-02-20

Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.

What is the connection between Obama, the 2010 U.S. Census and multiracials?  Not as much as some may think. While it is tempting to look to Obama as a mixed race icon and to see the Census as publicly acknowledging a multiracial “community,” we may need to rethink these ideas. 

The 2010 Census data is being released a few states at a time but already the data suggests a large increase in those identifying as “more than one race.”… …What does this data tell us? First, all states that have been released so far have shown an increase in those who identify as more than one race. Second, even with this increase, the actual percentage of people who identify as more than one race is still a relatively small percentage of the population.

Yet, multiracials are a growing and highly visible population. Multiracials, specifically the mixed race Millennials, are everywhere asserting their right to check more than one box and have all their heritages respected, counted and acknowledged.  Public discussions of multiracial identity demonstrate  the importance of this group to current debates about race in the United States.  Whether in popular culture such as Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry’s daughter or in the world of academia such as the recent New York Times article exploring multiracial students, we seem determined to understand multiracial identities and what they mean about race relations in the United States. In these debates, President Obama is frequently evoked as an icon of multiraciality.  However, on the 2010 Census, he chose to identify as “Black” and only “Black.” Multiracial discomfort with Obama’s choice seems to speak less about Obama and his views of race (either public or private) and more about multiracials’ desire for public acknowledgement of private identities. Is this how we should develop and create our identities?  Is self-affirmation driven by external forces or internal comfort and wholeness?…

Read the entire article here.

Race Crossing in Man (Eugenics Lab. Mem. XXXVI) [Review]

American Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 6, Number 1 (March 1954)
pages 195–196

Kenneth S. Brown
University of Chicago

By J. C. Trevor, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1953, Pp. 45

This brief monograph is a mixed blessing. On one hand it demonstrates what a wealth of metrical material has been collected on human hybrid populations, while on the other it presents methods of analysis which are both inefficient and ineptly applied.

In his preferatory note, Dr. L. S. Penrose points out that this work was done prior to the start of hostilities in 1939, but that the value of the data presented is timeless. This is very true, however the analysis made of the data is rapidly showing signs of age. The data are a compilation of published records of nine outstanding cases of biracial crossing; Hybrid American Negroes, Jamaican ‘Browns’, Half-Blood Sioux, Ojibwa-Whites, Yucatecans, Rehoboth Bastaards, Kisar Mestizos, Norfolk Islanders, and Anglo-Indians. The mean and standard error are recorded for stature and seven cranial measures for most of these populations. Additional measurements are noted for many. In each population studied the sample includes 25 or more adult (20 years or over) individuals of each sex. The values for each sex are recorded separately.

The mean of the hybrid population is compared with that of each of its propositus population groups by the use of Student’s t test. Unfortunately this test requires the assumption that the variances of the populations being compared be the same. Nowhere in the presentation is this recognized. It would have been eminently desirable to determine the significance of the variance ratio for each parameter for each pair of populations compared before the t test was applied. For cases of significant difference in variance between the populations the Fisher-Behrens method for the use of t with samples of unequal variance would be applicable.

The variability of the propositus and hybrid populations is considered separately by the method of Mourant in which the variance ratio of each character for each population pair is found and then the mean variance ratio for each pair determined. This analysis indicated that the variance of the hybrid population is greater, but was found, by a t test, to be significantly greater in only two cases. Here it would have seemed desirable to look up the values in a table of F to get a more powerful estimate of the difference between these populations.

The material presented in this monograph provides a good addition to the blood group, dermatoglyphic, and taster frequency data which are currently used in the analysis of population dynamics, and should serve to attract the attention of interested workers to this relatively undeveloped body of information.

(1) Man and His Forerunners (2) The Origin and Antiquity of Man (3) L’Uomo Attuale una Specie Collettiva (4) Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen

Nature
Volume 92, Number 2293 (1913-10-09)
pages 160-162
DOI: 10.1038/092160a0

(1) Man and His Forerunners. By Prof. H. v. Buttel-Reepen. Incorporating Accounts of Recent Discoveries in Suffolk and Sussex. Authorised Translation by A. G. Thacker. Pp. 96. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913.) Price 2s. 6d. net.

(2) The Origins and Antiquity of Man. By Dr. G. Frederick Wright. Pp. xx + 547. (London: John Murray, 1913.) Price 8s. net.

(3) L’Uomo Attuale una Specie Collettiva. By V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri. Pp. viiii + 192 + xiii plates. (Milano: Albright, Segati e C., 1913.) Price 6 lire.

(4) Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen. Dr. Eugen Fischer. Pp. vii + 327 + 19 plates. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913.) Price 16 marks.

(1) In this excellent translation of Prof. Buttel-Reepen’s little book, with the German title altered to “Man and His Forerunners,” the statement occurs that “general treatises on Pleistocene man published before 1908 are now almost valueless.” Such a statement implies that our knowledge regarding the ancestry and evolution of man has been revolutionised in the last five years–a statement which no one familiar with the subject could support for a moment. Yet in that space of time certain events have occurred which do materially alter our conception of how and when mankind came by its present estate…

…(4) We have kept the most important of the four books here reviewed to the last–for there can be no doubt, from every point of view, that Prof. Eugen Fischer’s book merits such commendation. What happens when two diverse races of mankind interbreed throughout a long series of generations? Is a new race of mankind thus produced—a race which will continue to reproduce characters intermediate to those of the parent stocks? At the present time such an opinion is tacitly accepted by most anthropologists. It was to test the truth of such an opinion that Dr. Eugen Fischer, professor of anthropology at Freiburg, with financial assistance from the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, set out to investigate the Bastard people in the Rehoboth district of German South-West Africa. The Rehoboth Bastards form a community of 2500-3000 souls, and are the result of intermarriage between early Boer farmers and Hottentot women–an intermixture which began more than a century ago.

This book contains the results of Prof. Fischer’s investigations and is a model for those who will follow in his footsteps. His observations have convinced him that a new and permanent human race cannot be formed by the amalgamation of two diverse forms of man–not from any want of fertility—for amongst the Bastards there is an average of 7.4 children to each family—but because certain characters are recessive, others are dominant, and the original types tend to re-assert themselves in the course of generations, according to Mendel’s law. Although the mean head-form of the Bastards is intermediate to those of the two parent races—Hottentot and Boer—yet in each generation a definite number of the Bastards tend to assume the head-form of the one or of the other of the parent races. There are certain facts relating to head-form known to English anthropologists which can be explained only on a Mendelian basis and are in harmony with Dr. Fischer’s observations. Between three and four thousand years ago England was invaded by a race with peculiarly formed, short and high heads. During those thousands of years the Bronze age invaders have been mingling their blood with that of the older and newer residents of England. Yet in every gathering of modern Englishmen—especially of the middle classes—one can see a number of pure examples of the Bronze age head-form. On the Mendelian hypothesis the persistence of such a head-form is explicable.

Dr. Eugen Fischer’s study of the Rehoboth Bastards will be welcomed by all students of heredity. No race has so many peculiar human traits as the Hottentots, and hence the laws of human inheritance—as Prof. Fischer was the first to recognise—can be advantageously studied in their hybrid progeny.

Read the entire article here.

Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones’s Production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto

Theatre Survey
Number 36, Issue 1 (1995)
pages 5-19
DOI: 10.1017/S0040557400006451

Jay Plum, Ph.D.

Although Langston Hughes’s Mulatto holds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play’s meaning. In the case of Mulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert’s “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto is melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying that Mulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

Read the entire article here.

Liminality and Transgression in Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto”

Cuadernos de investigación filológica (C.I.F.)
Number 26 (2000)
pages 263-271
ISSN: 0211-0547

Isabel Soto
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

This essay explores societal fear of the mulatto as charted by Langston Hughes’ play “Mulatto” (1931).  “Mulatto” dramatizes the demand for social incorporation by a mixed-race young man, Robert Norwood, who suffers a double exclusion: from a white body politic, and from the black community, by virtue of his claim to a white heritage.  I make extensive use of the terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ (taken from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner) to refer to Robert’s status, his attempts to redraw that status, and the representation of space in the play.  I argue that white characters’, and hence white society’s, refusal to grant Robert access their power structures reveals a complex anxiety or fear of the borderland or liminal creature that is the mulatto, born of transgression (and, in Robert’s case, ultimately a transgressor himself).  I will argue that the play is as much about female agency as it about the danger attendant on the (non-white) exercise of power.

Read the entire article here.

“Race Crossing in Man: The Analysis of Metrical Characters” [Review by L. C. Dunn]

Race Crossing in Man: The Analysis of Metrical Characters. J. C. Trevor (“Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs,” XXXVI.) London: Cambridge University Press, 1953. 45 pp., 1 plate.

American Anthropologist
Volume 56, Issue 5 (October 1954)
pages 923-924
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1954.56.5.02a00490

L. C. Dunn
Columbia University

This is a review and analysis of nine selected sets of data published before 1938. Those cases were chosen in which anthropological measurements of living “hybrid” subjects were available, together with measurements of known or assumed parent racial groups. All involved marriage between European and non-European parents. Trevor’s chief interest was to test by existing data two opinions frequently held by anthropologists: first, that the average values of physical characters of hybrid groups are intermediate between those of the parent races; and second, that populations derived from crosses of distinct races are highly variable and often show bimodal or multimodal frequency distributions. By use of adequate biometrical methods the first opinion is sustained; the second clearly is not. The absence of the anticipated high variability of hybrids was a surprise to the author, who asks whether variability might have been reduced by the tendency of hybrid groups to be inbred. He considers this possible. The reviewer would suggest that inbreeding has two effects relevant to this question: first, reduction of heterozygosity within each related group; second, a tendency toward divergence between different family or clan groups leading toward increased variance of the total population which is so divided. Much would depend on whether the hybrid population was dispersed as in the case of American Negroes, or concentrated and localized as in the case of the Norfolk Islanders. It is doubtful whether any data now exist by which such questions can be adequately tested for human groups. The variability of mensurable traits in all human populations may be such as to render imperceptible the differences due to differing degrees of “hybridity” within and between races. Trevor’s paper is a contribution to the methodology of analysis of such difficult questions as those mentioned, and a challenge to anthropologists to produce more and better data to which the methods can be applied.