Mixed Race Studies

Census Bureau’s Own Expert Panel Rebukes Decision to Add Citizenship Question

The New York Times
2018-03-30

Michael Wines, National Correspondent

A Census Bureau panel denounced the decision this week to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, saying it would depress the response. Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

The Trump administration’s decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, already the target of lawsuits and broad criticism by statistics authorities, drew a new opponent on Friday: the experts who advise the Census Bureau itself.

Those experts — prominent demographers, economists, engineers and others who make up the Census Scientific Advisory Committee — said in a statement that the decision was based on “flawed logic,” could threaten the accuracy and confidentiality of the head count and likely would make it more expensive to conduct.

In the statement, addressed to the acting Census Bureau director, Ron Jarmin, the committee also said it worried about the “implications for attitudes about the Census Bureau,” an allusion to fears that the latest move jeopardized the bureau’s nonpartisan reputation…

Read the entire article here.

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count

Sunday Review
The New York Times
2018-03-30

Alex Wagner, Contributing Editor
The Atlantic

Monica Ramos

Racially speaking, the United States is zero percent Hispanic. This is confusing — especially for America’s nearly 58 million Hispanics.

The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics.

Equally obscured are America’s estimated 3.7 million residents of Arab descent. With neither a racial nor an ethnic category to call their own, they most often opt for a racial designation of “White.” But to count Yemenis and Syrians as generically white is a complicated proposition these days, when whiteness confers power, and men and women from the Arab world are instead the subjects of travel bans and national security debates.

Nearly four years ago, the Census Bureau began researching how to more accurately represent these populations and decided to combine the race and ethnicity questions into one, and to add two new categories: one for residents of Middle Eastern/North African origin and one for those of Hispanic origin. Many advocates within those groups celebrated the reforms, and the broad expectation was that the next census, in 2020, would incorporate these changes. After all, the bureau itself concluded that they were necessary to “produce the highest quality statistics about our nation’s diverse population.”…

Read the entire article here.

How to see race

Aeon
2018-03-26

Gregory Smithsimon, Professor of Sociology
Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Edited by Sally Davies

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation…

Read the entire article here.

The Rise of the Afro-descendent Identity in Latin America

teleSUR
2018-03-04

For Black History Month, Catherine Walsh, professor of Afro-Andean Studies at the University Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador, shares with teleSUR her views about the achievements and challenges for the construction of an Afro-descendent consciousness in Latin America.

What in recent history would you say has contributed to the rise of a Black and Afro-descendent identity, with Black communities now embracing more than ever their culture across the continent?

Yes, this has changed radically. Several moments in recent history are important to highlight: in the 1990s, with the rise of Indigenous movements, alliances were built between Indigenous and Black people like in Ecuador.

But Black communities also began to organize by themselves, involving the construction of a notion of a Black territory, sometimes referred to as the “Gran Comarca” from the South of Panama to the North of Ecuador, where national identity does not matter. Black people living in the region often come from the same families, they have similar last names, and for many years have moved freely over the borders identifying as Afro-descendent and regardless of the national borders…

Read the entire interview here.

Kevin Sharkey wants to become Ireland’s first black president

Extra.ie
2018-03-26

Alison O’Reilly
DMG Media Ireland

Artist and former RTÉ star Kevin Sharkey has laid out his stall for his presidential election bid as he hopes to be Ireland’s first black president.

Sharkey, 56, who in recent years fell on hard times and was homeless for a period, said he intends to speak to county councils and TDs across the country in the coming months to seek their support for his nomination.

The painter recently revealed he would like to be an independent candidate in the next general election, but he is also assembling a team to help him get nominated to run for the áras…

Read the entire article here.

What It Really Feels Like To Be Asked “What Are You?”

Refinery29
2018-02-28

Khalea Underwood

Nali Henry, 19, Artist Photographed by Myles Loftin.

Where are you from?”

“Florida.”

“Where are your parents from?”

“My mom’s from Ohio and my dad’s from Florida.”

“But, you know what I mean: What are you?”

This is the way most conversations with Tasha Gear, a 25-year-old photographer based in New York City, start. Tasha, who’s half Black and half white, has been fielding questions about her background since she could talk. “People barely say two words to me and then ask what I am,” she says. And hers is not an isolated experience.

Since interracial marriage was legalized in 1967, the percentage of interracial couples in the U.S. has grown from three percent to 17 percent. As a result, a new generation of ethnically ambiguous young people has formed; nearly one in seven infants born is considered “multi-racial,” according to a recent Pew Research Center study…

These young men and women — and the love they were born out of — should be cause for celebration. But in more cases, their experience is fetishism (every rapper on the top 40 list talks about bagging a “foreign” chick), speculation (“but what are you, really?”), or even a dismissal of identity within their own cultures.

In their own words, five multi-ethnic young people — who all identify as Black in some way — explain why they’re rejecting the “what are you?” question to explain who they really are…

Read the entire article here.

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

Sunday Review
Gray Matter
The New York Times
2018-03-23

David Reich, Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
also, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Angie Wang

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view…

Read the entire article here.

National Geographic Replaces Racist Fictions With Post-racial Fantasies

New York Magazine
2018-03-16

Lauren Michele Jackson

Photo: Courtesy of National Geographic. Photograph by Robin Hammond

In her honest but odd memoir that it seems, thankfully, few besides me have read, National Geographic emerges as a crucial touchstone to Rachel Dolezal’s supposed racial awakening. Isolated regionally and culturally by Christian-fundamentalist parents, copies of the magazine were one of the few tokens from 1980s and ’90s American culture allowed to Dolezal in a home that forbade television and processed food. And while her older brother scrounged pages for photos of topless women, NatGeo begat Rachel’s earliest racial fantasies. Coating herself in mud from head to feet, she “would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo,” images conjured exclusively by the monthly magazine. “I would stay in this fantasy world as long as I possibly could,” Dolezal writes. “It was never long enough.”

Over the last century, National Geographic has used the guise of ethnographic research to stoke the racial imaginations of curious white people. Investigating peoples and cultures like flora, splaying their images upon glossy pages with unchecked fascination, the magazine does not have a great track record when it comes to stories about people of color. And yet, these are the stories NatGeo is most famous for, training generation after generation to gawk at peoples other than themselves through telephoto lenses. Founded in 1888 to document the interests of affluent explorers, the name alone evokes a colonial impulse — the National Geographic Society started as a private club dedicated to worldly, exotic travel. The publication has long been an unrepentant descendant of those beginnings — until now, allegedly…

Read the entire article here.

Walter Tull should get Military Cross, says Tottenham MP David Lammy

BBC News
2018-03-23

Richard Conway, BBC Radio 5 live sports news correspondent

Walter Tull died on the battlefields of northern France in 1918

Walter Tull – one of England’s first black professional footballers – should be awarded a Military Cross 100 years after his death, says Tottenham MP David Lammy.

Tull, who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, died aged 29 when he was shot on the battlefields of France during World War One.

He was Britain’s first black Army officer to command white troops.

“His service on behalf of this country was immense,” Lammy said…

Read the entire article here.

My Transracial Testimony

Chicago Now
2017-11-05

Doriana Markovitz

Bio: I am a biracial woman, but I identify as Black. My birthmother is what Puerto Ricans call Spanish. I was adopted by two white women when I was a week old. They later divorced. My Jewish mama, who gave me my last name Markovitz, remarried and adopted 2 more baby girls, later on, giving me siblings and ending my own unique child experience at 14. During that time, I swallowed a white liberal education for 9 years, until I was forced to puke it back up in the later years of my high school experience. This is my testimony, my hymnal, my stories, my life as a transracial adoptee.

I have been raised by many mothers; many women have poured themselves into me. I am the product of the multi-dimensionality of womanhood. I have only ever known that experience, the struggle, and hardship, while also the joy and the power that women can offer to one another and their children.

Three women have raised me — the mothers who adopted me, but also the woman who took me in when those two women fell out of love.

Motherhood lives inside my skin, but I am also motherless because there is a woman out there who I do not know, but whose body was my first home. I knew this from the time I could understand that the women who chose me did not look like me.

Their skin did not look like mine, their hair did not feel like mine, and their bodies were not shaped like mine. Even though I knew this, I felt safe inside that truth. I felt loved inside that truth until I couldn’t any longer…

Read the entire article here.