Mixed Race Studies

Chosing Racial Sides… American Society Forces Its Children To Make Tough Choices

USARiseUp.com
2010-02-20

Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa

When Jolanda Williams looks in a mirror, the image she sees is a warm peach complexion framed in dark silky hair, high cheekbones beneath almond eyes, and full lips that slip into an easy, radiant smile. She has a face that could belong almost anywhere in the world, Mexico, India, or Indonesia. Yet Williams, the daughter of a white German mother and a black American father, has spent the better part of her 35 years coming to terms with where she fits in.

“In America, it is all about your physical characteristics,” says Williams, a resident of Brooklyn, New York, who, for as long as she can remember, has identified herself on paper as African-American. “If I were to put “white” on a job application and walk into an interview, whoever was interviewing me would assume they had the wrong person. It is unrealistic for me to think I can actually walk through the world identifying as white, considering the way I look.”…

…Dr. Melissa Herman, assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, [New Hampshire], understands the reasoning behind the choices made by the more than six million multiracial people in the United States.

“A lot of our choices about identity have to do with phenotype, our physical characteristics, because it is these characteristics that determine how other people perceive us and treat us,” she says. “If you look even slightly black, there is extreme social pressure in American society to be black, which is certainly a vestige of the system of hypodescent, or the one-drop rule. Even though it is no longer legally enforced, it is very much socially enforced. It is ingrained in children from a very early age; not necessarily by their parents, who may want them to have the freedom to choose, but by our society.”..

Read the entire article here.

Mixed: Reflections on Race

Mamapedia
Mamapedia Voices
2010-03-30

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Mom Wisdom comes in many forms. Mamapedia Voices proudly showcases useful and insightful posts by selected writers, from up-and-coming mom bloggers to well-known mom experts.

I could be anywhere, picking up some innocuous bureaucratic form on a clipboard, filling in lines and checking boxes.

Name
Address
Age
Gender
And there it is, staring me in the face.
Race (check one)

I’m amazed, on a regular basis, to find this query still printed. Like some old joke that’s lost its humor and turned sour. A true anachronism, as out of place and completely out of bounds as smoking on airplanes, WMD fabrications, or actors wearing blackface. A textual solecism. A farce. Yet I constantly hear from people still confronted with it—on job questionnaires, school surveys, traffic violations, health forms, community and housing assessments. And I still come across it occasionally myself.

For millions of Americans, this question amounts to asking us to lie. It’s asking us to choose one parent over another, or one great-great-grandparent over another, or one part of ourselves over another. And despite centuries of ignoring (or denying) the idea of racial mixing, multiracial heritage and multiracial identity are core ingredients of our society. Interracial unions have been part of America’s history since its inception, yet only recently have these collective and individual histories begun to be recognized…

…And while we can rehash the fact that race doesn’t exist biologically, that the very idea of human beings being broken down into genetically discrete groups is scientifically unsound, that somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 years ago our common ancestors migrated out of what is now Africa, we must also acknowledge that, for better or worse, in the reality of our daily lives, race exists. In the broadest sense, viewing others as inherently different has allowed our species to commit some of the worst atrocities in our young history … the enslavement of western African peoples, the decimation to near extermination of Native Americans, the genocides of the Ottoman Empire, Auschwitz, Rwanda, and Nanking to name a few…

Read the entire article here.

For some, question #9 is number one

Nguoi Viet 2 Online
2010-04-02

Denise L. Poon
LASpot.Us

When she fills out her 2010 Census form, Mei-Ling Malone is looking forward to answering Question #9 “the race question.” She’s adamant about documenting her multiracial background.

Malone, who studied multiracial politics at UC Irvine and is now pursuing a doctorate at UCLA, has an African American father and a Taiwanese mother. For Malone, 26, this is her first opportunity to respond to a Census and possibly provide a different answer to the race question than what her parents may have noted for her 10 years ago.

“President Obama is called our first black president, yet his mother was white,” she said. “For a majority of people who are black and multiracial, we are physically viewed as black, and treated, or discriminated as such. I’m glad that when I indicate I’m multiracial, I’m also counted as black.”

On 2010 Census forms, respondents have the option to self-identify more than one race. Ten years ago, when, for the first time, respondents had options to self-identify as more than one race, nearly 7 million people (roughly 2.4 percent of the respondents) indicated such…

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“Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids” Exhibition in L.A.

The Huffington Post
2010-04-19

Victoria Namkung, Lifestyle Journalist

Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids from artist, slam poet, UCSB professor and filmmaker Kip Fulbeck, features over 70 framed photographic images of multiracial children along with own their statements or drawings. Also a book by the same name, Mixed has a foreward by Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng (President Obama’s sister) and afterword by Cher. The family-friendly and timely exhibition is on display at the Japanese American National Museum through September 26, 2010. I recently caught up with author and photographer Kip Fulbeck to chat about Mixed…

Read the entire article here.

Audio: History professor discusses census

The Daily Collegian
Published Independently by the students at Penn State
2010-04-09

Eddie Lau

Interview with

Grace Delgado, Assistant Professor of History
Pennsylvania State University

Associate Professor of History Grace Delgado, who specializes in Chicano history, said the U.S. census is not sensitive enough to mix-raced residents. She said having mixed-race residents to label themselves as “white,” “black, African-American or negro” or some other categories they don’t belong is not the best approach.

However, despite the fact that the wordings and categorizations in the census form are not perfect, Delgado encouraged all Penn State students to fill out the form. She said the best option right now is to check “some other race” in Question 9 and print their race in the given box.

To listen to the short interview, click here.

Reinventing the Color Line: Immigration and America’s New Racial/Ethnic Divide

Social Forces
Volume 86, Number 2 (December 2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-7605 Print ISSN: 0037-7732
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2008.0024

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Contemporary nonwhite immigration from Latin America and Asia, increasing racial/ethnic intermarriage, and the growing number of multiracial individuals has made the black-white color line now seem anachronistic in America, consequently raising the question of whether today’s color line is evolving in new directions toward either a white-nonwhite divide, a black-nonblack divide, or a new tri-racial hierarchy. In order to gauge the placement of today’s color line, we examine patterns of multiracial identification, using both quantitative data on multiracial reporting in the 2000 U.S. Census and in-depth interview data from multiracial individuals with Asian, Latino or black backgrounds. These bodies of evidence suggest that the multiracial identifications of Asians and Latinos (behaviorally and self-perceptually) show much less social distance from whites than from blacks, signaling the likely emergence of a black-nonblack divide that continues to separate blacks from other groups, including new nonwhite immigrants. However, given that the construction of whiteness as a category has been fluid in the past and appears to be stretching yet again, it is also possible that the color line will change still further to even more fully incorporate Asians and Latinos as white, which would mean that the historical black-white divide could again re-emerge.

Read or purchase the article here.

Teaching Race as a Social Construction: Two Interactive Class Exercises

Teaching Sociology
Volume 37, Number 4 (October 2009)
Pages 369-378

Nikki Khanna, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Cherise A. Harris, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Connecticut College

This paper offers two interactive exercises to teach students about race as a social construction. In the first exercise, “What’s My Race?”, we ask students to sort various celebrities and historical figures into racial categories, giving them the opportunity to see the difficulty of the task first-hand. More importantly, through the process of sorting individuals into various categories, they are introduced to flaws within the current racial classification scheme in the U.S. In the second exercise, “Black or White?”, students are asked to classify photographs of legendary celebrities and historical figures as either black or white. This exercise is used to introduce the concept of the one drop rule; the majority of individuals in the exercise appear racially ambiguous or white, yet all were historically classified as “black” based on the one drop rule. Both exercises, when used together, are designed to visually illustrate to students the ambiguity and arbitrariness of American racial classifications.

Read or purchase the article here.

A cross-cultural marriage is an adventure I’d recommend

The Observer
2009-12-27

Anushka Asthana, Education Correspondent

Mixed-race unions in this country are on the increase, a magical journey that benefits all the families involved

One visit to India and a childhood playing cricket was never going to be quite enough to prepare Toby, a white Englishman who grew up in Oxfordshire, for his marriage. After all, you don’t just marry an Indian woman—you marry her large (and often eccentric) family and all that brings with it.

The realisation began to sink in for Toby at the Hindu part of our wedding, three months ago. He got out of arriving on the back of a white horse, but we persuaded him to go along with the rest of it. That included being dressed up from head to toe, with a red turban with white tassels hanging over his face, embroidered scarf, full-length white coat with gold trimmings and his very own pair of what he called “Aladdin” shoes. He took part in the “baraat“, an Indian tradition in which the groom arrives with family and friends dancing around him.

So there they were: swinging their arms to the bhangra beat of a dhol drum with shell-shocked smiles as they were met by the cheering crowd of “aunties” and “uncles” (not real ones—that is how we address any Indian person above the age of 40) and bending down to have garlands draped around their necks and red marks smeared on their foreheads.

The image of a white British groom at the centre of a mass of ecstatic Indian aunties would once have been a rarity. But research released earlier this year found that one in 10 people in Britain with Indian heritage who is in a relationship has a partner of a different race. The study, by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, found the same was true of half of all Caribbean men, one in five black African men and two out of five Chinese women. The result so far: one in 10 children in Britain is living in a mixed-race family…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Children Learn To Self-Identify

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2010-04-20

Michel Martin, Host

Interview with:

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara
Author of: Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids

Peggy Orenstein
Author of: Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Fertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother

Heidi W. Durrow
Author of: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Co-Host of: Mixed Chicks Chat

An installment of Tell Me More‘s weekly parenting segment focuses on the new book Mixed. It’s a collection of photographs of multiracial children that includes stories celebrating their heritage. Host Michel Martin is joined by the book’s author, Kip Fulbeck, as well as authors Peggy Orenstein and Heidi Durrow, who discuss their own experiences living in multiracial families.

Read the transcript of the interview here.  Listen to the interview here.

Note by Steven F. Riley: The term “Hapa” is incorrectly spelled as “Hoppa” in the transcript.

Black by Choice

The Nation
2010-04-15

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

The first black president has created a definitional crisis for whiteness.

President Obama created a bit of a stir in early April when he completed his Census form. In response to the question about racial identity the president indicated he was “Black, African American or Negro.” Despite having been born of a white mother and raised in part by white grandparents, Obama chose to identify himself solely as black even though the Census allows people to check multiple answers for racial identity.

This choice disappointed some who have fought to ensure that multiracial people have the right to indicate their complex racial heritage. It confused some who were surprised by his choice not to officially recognize his white heritage. It led to an odd flurry of obvious political stories confirming that Obama was, indeed, the first African-American president…

Read the entire article here.