Mixed Race Studies

Mixed: A Mixed Heritage

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2010-11-09

Nicholas Greitzer

America has always been considered a melting pot – a melting pot of ideas, of ethnicities, of religions, of experiences and of people.

In the 2000 census, for example, this miscegenation resulted in more than 6.8 million Americans self-identifying as multiracial. While there may not be any similar statistics for UCLA, a look at the enrollment figures for 2009 lists 4.4 percent of students as having an ethnicity of unstated, unknown or other, close to the national percentage in 2000 of 2.4 of those who identify themselves as multiracial.

Second-year international development studies and Chicana/Chicano studies student Camila Lacques falls into that group that cannot be adequately fit into the racial options provided by the U.S. Census Bureau or the University of California undergraduate application.

“People want to put you in a box, but mixed people don’t fit into a box,” said Lacques, who identifies herself as half Mexican, a quarter Irish and a quarter eastern European Jewish.

Lacques’ cultural makeup is not limited to those backgrounds found within her blood, as she was raised in a predominantly black neighborhood and attended an elementary and middle school that was comprised primarily of Korean students…

…In a similar vein, for second-year sociology student Ay’Anna Moody, being multiracial revolves around teaching others that they need to be intellectually curious.

“I needed to know who I was in order for me to move forward, culturally and socially,” said Moody, whose dad is black Creole and whose mom is Scott-Irish, German and black.

While Moody said that Irish traditions such as St. Patrick’s Day held a prominent place in her family, it was the black cultural influence that dominated her household, which she shared with her mother and stepfather…

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Race remains hot topic despite Obama presidency

USA Today
2010-10-17

Shannon Mullen, Asbury Press

The election of the first black president in U.S. history was supposed to usher in a post-racial era in America.

But a series of controversies since then, from the White House “Beer Summit” to the conflicts between the tea party and NAACP, shows that race is still a hot-button issue.

“As a society, clearly we’re not over race,” said Hettie V. Williams, lecturer in the African American History Department at Monmouth University…

…But Williams, of Monmouth University, and others still see reason for optimism. Mixed marriages are on the rise, she noted, and more Americans of mixed parentage feel comfortable identifying themselves as multiracial.

In New Jersey, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country, nearly 2 of 3 residents say it is important for people of different races and ethnic groups to live, go to school and work closely together, according to the latest Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Press Media poll. Forty percent say blacks and whites are now treated equally..

…But Deepa Kumar, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, sees disturbing parallels between the rise of right-wing, “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim” groups across Europe and the rhetoric of the tea party and Pamela Geller’s Stop Islamization of America group, which has led the fight against the ground zero mosque…

…Tukufu Zuberi, a sociologist and professor of race relations at the University of Pennsylvania, says the media presents a superficial view of the role of race in America.

“There is a tremendous disconnect between what we see and hear and read in the media and the racial realities that people are experiencing in society,” Zuberi said…

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Cast From Their Ancestral Home, Creoles Worry About Culture’s Future

New York Times
2005-10-11

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

NATCHITOCHES PARISH, La., Oct. 9 – It is peaceful here on the Cane River, beyond the fluffy tops of high cotton and towering magnolia trees, but it is not home. For the New Orleans Creoles living in exodus here and elsewhere around Louisiana, their city was far more than home – it was homeland, the capital of an ethnic nation unique in this country.

“New Orleans was our womb and for most of us, it was going to be our grave,” said Timothy Bordenave, who is living in a cottage here, a five-hour drive away from the city, describing the deep sense of lifelong connection felt to New Orleans by many of the city’s Creoles, the population of mixed-race families who trace their roots to the city’s French and Spanish colonial era…

…Many Creoles trace their roots to immigrants and slaves from the former French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba and what is now Haiti. Historians say it was New Orleans’s position as a crossroads and port town that allowed for the easy mingling of races and nationalities that in turn gave birth, in the 18th century, to a part-European, part-Afro-Caribbean society that grew to an estimated 20,000 people in Louisiana by the mid-1800’s.

The Creole culture that developed over generations—known for a distinctive cuisine, language and music—contributed to New Orleans’s singular identity and helped define Louisiana to the world. Before Hurricane Katrina, experts estimated that 10 to 20 percent of black people in New Orleans—30,000 to 60,000 people—considered themselves Creole by way of ancestry, but even more lived lives influenced by the culture because of their proximity to it…

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Because the Numbers Matter: Transforming Postsecondary Education Data on Student Race and Ethnicity to Meet the Challenges of a Changing Nation

Educational Policy
Volume 18, Number 5 (November 2004)
pages 752-783
DOI: 10.1177/0895904804269941

Kristen A. Renn, Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Christina J. Lunceford, Professor of Education
California State University, Fullerton

In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget revised guidelines for treatment of racial and ethnic data, adding a requirement to allow respondents to indicate more than one race and mandating a change in all federal data collection and reporting by January 1, 2003. Nearly 2 years after the deadline for implementation, however, higher education institutions had not yet been required by the National Center for Education Statistics to make the change. This article discusses the policy context for collecting and reporting data on student race and ethnicity in higher education and challenges created by the addition of the multiple race option. This article describes the current status of postsecondary racial/ethnic data collection, predicts challenges in aggregating and bridging data, and makes recommendations for policy and practice.

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Profiles: Samuel Hickson – The Change Agent

State University of New York, Brockport
2010-10-28

BS in Sociology, ’10

“My understanding of what is important in life began with my family, who taught me about cultural diversity and having respect for people who are different from me.”

Samuel Hickson, a former McNair student, studied the processes of racial identification in multiracial students in modern America and the benefits and consequences of that racial choice. Through his study, “Silent but Real: The Struggle for Racial Identification for Multiracial Students in Modern America,” Samuel sought to understand how student’s racial classification changes as their education increases. In addition, Samuel worked on a senior project , which tells the story of social conditions of the world through photos. “One Voice, One Sound; Ghostly Voices, Stories Untold,” considers social conditions in five countries: Ghana, Uganda, Jamaica, Mexico, and the US. His project revealed that education comes in many forms—academic, physical, art, music, and others—and that by incorporating the physical aspects of education with the arts, the possibility for affecting positive change multiplies many times over. And that’s what Samuel’s life is all about—effecting positive change in the lives of people around him…

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Hybrids and History. The Role of Race and Ethnic Crossing in Individual and National Achievement

The Quarterly Review of Biology
Volume 26, Number 4 (December, 1951)
pages 331-347

George D. Snell (1903-1996)
Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine

It is curious to reflect that almost the requisite three or four hundred years have passed since the intercrossing began in America; and it is possible that the United States of America may be quite near to a brilliant efflorescence of genius in thought and art, and perhaps even nore in the scientific organization of natural resources for the good of its own life and for the life of mankind” (Murphy, 1941), This quotation from a British author is based on phenomenon often noted by anthropologists and historians. Sir Flinders Petrie (1911) and numerous writers after him have remarked that the rise of great civilizations, usually and perhaps invariably, is preceded by a mixing of races, and that an incubation period of several centuries follows the first invasion of alien groups before the civilization comes to full flower.

Toynbee (1935) has attached less significance to the crossing than most writers, and his discussion of the subject may be taken as conservative. He distinguishes twenty-one civilizations, and finds clear evidence of crossing in eleven of these. Moreover, most of the remaining ten can also be said to involve crossing if some additional permissible divisions are made in the races of man. The ten civilizations in which the evidence of crossing is least clear are the Babylonic, Syriac, Arabic, Hindu, Sinic (yellow), Far Eastern (yellow), Andean, Mayan, Yucatec, and Mexican. Nine of the great white civilizations including the Hellenic, Western and Egyptic are known beyond question to be the product of hybrid peoples with the Alpine race being one of the components of the mixture and the Nordic and/or Mediterranean the other. Toynbee concludes that “the number of civilizations created by the unaided endeavours of a single race in each case would present themselves as exceptions to a prevalent law—a law to the effect that the geneses of civilizations require creative contributions from more races than one.”

There has been little agreement among those who have discussed the subject as to reason for this relation between race crossing and the progress of civilizations. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the possibility that race crossing, even between subgroups of the white race, produces individuals of exceptional vitality and vigor (hybrid vigor), and that its role in the development of civilizations lies largely or in significant part in the unusual contributions which these individuals, both as leaders and as laborers, are able to make. Few writers seem to have considered this possibility. Hooton (1926) has recognized the probable occurrence of heterosis within the white race, and Hankins (1926) has proposed heterosis as an explanation of the role of race mixture in the genesis of civilizations. Other writers have looked elsewhere in seeking to explain the phenomenon…

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‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day

Visual Studies
Volume 21, Issue 2 (October 2006)
pages 106-132
DOI: 10.1080/14725860600944971

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

This article examines a collection of family photographs published in an unusual 1932 anthropological study of ‘Negro-White families’. In the 1920s Caroline Bond Day, a woman of mixed ancestry herself, gathered family histories and photographs of over 300 ‘Negro-White families’ for her graduate work at Harvard University under eugenicist Ernest Hooton. Day’s subjects, recruited from her circles of friends and acquaintances, shared her goals of African American equality and uplift but were often suspicious of her chosen field. Anthropology has often been referred to as the handmaiden of colonialism and racism, and physical anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not generally supportive of African American civil rights movements prior to World War II. Nevertheless, about 350 families submitted family histories and photographs and filled out surveys. Some also allowed themselves to be measured with calipers. The published study included over four hundred photographs, which collectively provide a visual mediation between Day’s political goals, her exclusive focus on mixed-race families and her use of physical anthropology and blood-quantum language. Day’s work remains controversial, but continues to be used by scholars, activists and artists in part because of its unique focus and methods.

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“Death by Misadventure”: Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen’s “Passing”

College Literature
Volume 37, Number 4, Fall 2010
pages 120-144
E-ISSN: 1542-4286 Print ISSN: 0093-3139
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2010.0013

Jessica Labbé, Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum
Greensboro College, Greensboro, North Carolina

This article provides college literature teachers with a detailed historical, theoretical, and critical analysis of Larsen’s popular novel. Using bell hooks’ groundbreaking approach to “transgressive” education, as described in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, the article illustrates the means by which Passing can help teachers achieve hooks’ radical vision of learning. To this end, the author situates Larsen and her novel within an inclusive, kaleidoscopic vision of modernism and folds into this discussion Larsen’s modernist stylistic strategies. Related to these subversive strategies are the critical debates surrounding Larsen’s use/interrogation of “passing,” tragic mulatto, and (potentially) lesbian narratives. In addition to these “transgressive” interpretations of the text, the author reads Clare Kendry as a New Woman anthropologist figure and illustrates how our inability to decipher the cause of her demise is a testament to Larsen’s success as a “transgressive” modernist author.

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“Slippin’ Into Darkness”: The (Re)Biologization of Race

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 13, Number 3 (October 2010)
pages 343-358
E-ISSN: 1096-8598 Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

While the dominant mantra in humanities and the social sciences is that “race is a social construction, not a biological one,” in the wake of the Human Genome Project, a vigorous debate has emerged about whether race is indeed a meaningful and useful genetic concept. This essays argues that debates about the very concept of race—the system of classification we employ, the meanings we ascribe to racial categories, and their use in social analysis and policy formation—are rendered more complex, indeterminate, and muddy with the increasing re-biologization of race.

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Beyond Color-blind Universalism: Asians in a “Postracial America”

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 13, Number 3 (October 2010)
pages 327-342
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Linda Trinh Võ, Associate Professor
Department of Asian American Studies School of Humanities
University of California, Irvine

Beyond the symbolism of President Barack Hussein Obama’s election is the unseen ways in which it is transforming the racial discourse in this country; however, whether it means a substantial transformation of structural inequities is more elusive. Does Obama’s election mean that the United States has moved beyond its historical legacy of slavery and institutionalized segregation? Are racial groups interchangeable in this colorblind universalism, so that one group can be merely substituted for another? We are in the process of digesting what his presidency means for Asian Americans on both a superficial or symbolic level, but also on the tangibles, namely the implementation of the campaign slogan “change we can believe in.” Recognizing that much remains uncertain for Asian Americans, I critique the connections, real and imagined, they have to the presidential election, provide cautionary notes on the post-racial narrative, and comment on the ongoing process and impact of racialization.

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