Mixed Race Studies

Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination

Northwestern University Law Review
Number 97, Number 4 (2003)
Pages 1701-1768

Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center

This Article is concerned with the constitutive power of the census with respect to race. It is an examination of the U.S. Census as an aspect of what Angela Harris calls race law, “law pertaining to the formation, recognition, and maintenance of racial groups, as well as the law regulating the relationships among these groups.” While others have noted and explored the epistemological and constitutive functions of the census race categories, my aim is to unpack this insight in the context of two specific examples of categorical change and contest: the addition of a Chinese racial category in 1870 and the debate over a multiracial category in 2000. In addition, I analyze the differing sites of categorical reimagining in each instance, further exploring how the census has been deeply influential in two different directions: informing, defining and naming the racial identity of specific groups, and informing an imagined racial identity of “the nation.” The census is a kind of mass public performance of nationality; it is both a legal and cultural mechanism for imagining the American nation, a nation that has always represented itself with racial specificity. Over 200 years the content and significance of its racial categories have varied considerably, but the census appears to consistently play a crucial role in both constructing and reinventing a national identity and influencing the self-definition and identity of a number of subnational groups. In short, this paper is about how census classifications have contributed to our understanding of race, to the grammar and logic of identity discourse, and to a particular way of imagining the nation. Its primary aim is to explore some of the dynamics between official racial counting, popular conceptions of race, and racialized views of the nation. In doing so, it will address a series of questions. When do census or other legal categories seem to drive popular notions of race? When do popular understandings of race seem to drive official categorization? When and how are the politics of racial classification mobilized toward national inclusion or exclusion? A secondary aim of this Article is to aid in enlarging our sense of what “law” is by investigating alternate legal forms; in this case, by pursuing how a state apparatus like the census is not just legal by virtue of its constitutional and statutory origins, but in the way it generates and enforces cultural norms, race-based rights and disabilities, and the boundaries of identity.

Table of Contents

I.     INTRODUCTION
II.   NATION, NUMBERS, AND POWER
III. ENUMERATION AS DISCIPLINE: COUNTING THE CHINESE
IV.  ENUMERATION AS ASPIRATION: THE DEBATE OVER A MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY
V.   CONCLUSION

…2. Policing Racial Identity.

Embedded in the congressional testimony on census categories is another debate about the role of the census in the production of identity: it is a debate about what race is, how we confer and “administer” it, and who gets to define its contested contours. And the answers to those questions matter to how we imagine ourselves as a nation.  It is in this sense that the battle over a multiracial census category participates in the larger politics of “racial formation,” and control over racial identity. This debate has serious implications for our national imagination at a time when there is deep ambivalence about the racial choices available to us.

In policing the boundaries of their different racial identities, the civil rights groups seek to protect a particular vision of the group against attack from both within and without. From within, they have to confront the dissent or exit of those likely to identify as multiracial, and from without they have to fight against deracialization by those who see a multiracial category as a step toward colorblindness. The danger in both cases is the ease with which such maneuvers end up essentializing race. For example, evident in arguments against census recognition of a separate multiracial category by various opponents are implicit claims that multiracial advocates are betraying their (minority) race. While arguments by opponents of a multiracial category take a number of forms, almost all of them are at heart claims that ”you are really one of us,” and to the extent that multiracial people reject that appeal, they are serving the interests of racial subordination. Such moves are emblematic of the tendency of all cultural and racial groups to discipline from within and to use law to protect themselves from redefinition and “cultural dissent.” What opponents fail to appreciate is that their attempts to police the borders of group identity are partly responsible for the multiracial movement. As Maria Root notes, “multiracial people experience a ‘squeeze’ of oppression as people of color and by people of color.”

The problem, of course, is that the opponents of a multiracial category are also right; the dissent they are trying to suppress is potentially dangerous to efforts aimed at ameliorating discrimination on the basis of race. Internal resistance has been used in the service of external attack. For example, opponents worry about how attractive the multiracial movement has been to some alarming bedfellows on the right (and left, it should be admitted) who seek to destabilize racial categories altogether.” This is not an inconsequential concern. Newt Gingrich endorsed adding a multiracial category not only as a step toward overcoming racial division but also as an effort to get rid of race categories altogether. Gingrich’s push toward ultimate color blindness has gained many allies in the 1980s and 1990s who have wanted to deracialize American law and culture. john powell has pointed out that this position is not necessarily benign. “The language used by the new right of a raceless, colorblind society is viewed by some not simply as an error, but as a strategy or racial project to maintain white supremacy and racial hierarchy.” Yet it is not clear that those who advocate dismantling racial hierarchies should embrace our current and increasingly incoherent race categories. As Angela Harris has observed, “the notion of race is problematic for anti-racists because at the most subtle, seldom examined level, ‘race’ entrances us in a familiar but dangerous metaphysics: a representational economy in which bodies stand in both for power and history…

…What is particularly interesting about the high percentage of multiracial children is that children do not fill out census forms. Children are being identified as multiracial by their parents, or by the parent who fills out the census form as the head of the household. This tends to corroborate the claim that the multiracial movement has been fueled by parents of multiracial children.  But it also underlines the instability of this category, not to mention the other categories as well. We do not know, for example, if these children will continue to identify as multiracial when it is their turn to fill out the census form. Lee suggests that the “number of people who identify with more than one race is likely to increase as interracial marriages increase.” This may be so, but we also know that many people who could report themselves as multiracial choose not to. We also know that how people report their identity depends on the prevailing discourse of race and the options available at any given time. Current multiracial children, and multiracial adults for that matter, may in the future decide not to identity themselves as multiracial. They may decide to identify with a single minority race, or they may decide to identify themselves as white. When these multiracial children are grown, the categories will undoubtedly have changed, just as they have every year since 1790, and with them, the debate about race and identity. What is clear is that “the parameters of self-definition have never been open-ended, for the state has always furnished the range of available, credible, and reliable-that is, of licensed and so permissible-categories in which self-definition could occur.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s census mark reveals race views

The Washington Times
2010-04-30

Joseph Curl

America’s first black president has deliberately shied away from spurring a national discussion on race, most recently by checking only “African-American” on his U.S. census form without offering a word of explanation about his choice.

The studied silence from the bully pulpit held by President Obama has frustrated multiracial organizations, giving rise to questions about whether the president acted out of political consideration and why the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas would not acknowledge his mother’s heritage.

“It’s frustrating from a point that there’s a lot of multiracial people out there who see Obama doing that, knowing that he is multiracial, and they think that maybe that’s the right choice,” said Ryan Graham, the product of a mixed-race marriage whose mother founded Project Race in 1991 to push for a multiracial classification on the census form.

“But there’s a lot of people saying maybe it’s the wrong choice,” he said…

…There is no question that Mr. Obama’s decision complies with the goals of U.S. census officials; the answer to Question 9 about race is exclusively about “self-identification in which respondents choose the race or races with which they most closely identify.”

“The racial categories included in the census form generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country, and are not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically or genetically,” the Census Bureau says in its “2010 Census Constituent FAQs.”…

…But the president’s decision to check only “black” on his census form makes complete sense to Charles W. Mills, a researcher on race and a professor at Northwestern University.

“Race is a social convention. For him to claim whiteness would be rejected by the social convention of the country. The way I see it, his decision was a perfectly reasonable one, given that this is how the American rules have been,” Mr. Mills said…

Read the entire article here.

Stop the finger-wagging about Obama’s Census form

The Washington Post
2010-04-29

Kevin Huffman

It’s tough being president. In the last year, pretty much every constituency has expressed disappointment in some facet of Barack Obama’s work or play.

Now, apparently, the president is even letting down biracial children with his choice of Census categories. Elizabeth Chang writes in a Post op-ed that the president shouldn’t have identified as “black” on the Census given that he is mixed race. She even goes so far as to say that it is “disingenuous” and that “there is an important consequence when our president does not acknowledge half of his heritage, or, more basically, the mother and grandparents who raised him, or even his commonality with his sister, who is also biracial, though with a different mix.”

Let me start by suggesting this may slightly over-value the deep personal meaning of the Census form. I viewed the form as a seven-minute exercise in ensuring that the District of Columbia gets to count my whole family as residents. Maybe we can even get enough funding to fix the Metro escalators. I hadn’t realized the need to express solidarity with my relatives and ancestors, living and dead…

Anyway, like Chang, my kids are half Asian and half white, which led me to identify them on the Census as… Asian. My brother is half black and half white. He went with biracial. Somehow neither of these decisions has resulted in meaningfully different personal connections for my family.

Read the entire op-ed here.

Why Obama should not have checked ‘black’ on his census form

The Washington Post
2010-04-29

Elizabeth Chang, Sunday Magazine Editor

I have always considered Barack Obama to be biracial, and I had hoped that his election would help our country move beyond the tired concept of race. Unfortunately, the president is not getting with my program.

Although I knew Obama self-identifies as African American, I was disappointed when I read that that’s what he checked on his census form. The federal government, finally heeding the desires of multiracial people to be able to accurately define themselves, had changed the rules in 2000, so he could have also checked white. Or he could have checked “some other race.” Instead, Obama went with black alone…

…I am the mother of biracial children (Asian/Caucasian) and believe that multiracial people need to be accepted and acknowledged — even celebrated. The president’s choice disappoints me, and it seems somewhat disingenuous. Obama, who has also referred to himself as a “mutt,” made a big deal during the 2008 campaign of being able to relate to Hawaiians and Midwesterners, Harvard grads and salespeople, blacks, whites, Latinos, whatever — precisely because of his “unconventional” background and multicultural exposure. On the census, however, he has effectively said that when it counts, he is black…

Read the entire article here.

Professor Nikki Khanna to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #151 – Professor Nikki Khanna
When: Wednesday, 2010-05-05 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Dr. Khanna’s primary areas of specialization include race/ethnic relations and social psychology. Her current research draws from both areas and she is particularly interested in studying biracial and multiracial identity. She studies how people racially identify and how identity is shaped and negotiated through social interactions with others in their day-to-day lives.

Most Recent Publications:

• “’If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black’: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule”. Sociological Quarterly. Volume 51, Number 1 (Winter 2010).
• “Country Clubs and Hip-Hop Thugs: Examining the Role of Social Class and Culture in Shaping Racial Identity.” In Kathleen Korgen‘s (Ed.). Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity. Routledge.

Download the podcast here.

Does ‘race’ matter? A study of ‘mixed race’ siblings’ identifications

Sociological Review
Volume 58, Issue 2 (May 2010)
Pages 265 – 285
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2010.01903.x

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

‘Mixed’ people comprise one of the fastest growing populations in Britain today, and their growth refutes the idea that there exist distinct, ‘natural’ races among people in multiethnic societies, such as Britain. In recent years, a large body of scholarship, both in the US and Britain, has begun to investigate the diverse social experiences and racial identifications of mixed people. In this article, I investigate the ways in which mixed siblings perceive and think about race and differences in racial, ethnic, and religious identification within their families. What role do race and the recognition of difference play in sibling relationships and in family life more generally? I draw upon a small number of cases to illustrate the diverse ways in which understandings of race, ethnicity, and religion are (or are not) regarded as important in these families. I also consider whether there are group differences in terms of how disparate types of mixed siblings may perceive pressures to identify in particular ways.

Read or purchase the article here.

Spaces of Multiraciality: Critical Mixed Race Theory

University of Toronto
Geography  (B.A.) Program
2010-2011
Course Number: GGRD19H3
 
From Tiger Woods to Mariah Carey, the popular mixed race phenomenon has captured the popular imagination and revealed the contradictory logic of categorization underpinning racial divisions. We will explore the complexities of racial identity formation to illuminate the experiences of those who fall outside the prevailing definitions of racial identities.

For more information, click here.

Choosing Racial Sides: Part Two… A Different Perspective

USARiseUp.com
2010-02-20

Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa

Contrary to popular opinion, the way mixed-race people look is not the primary influence that determines what part of their heritage they identify with, according to Seattle clinical psychologist and independent scholar Dr. Maria P. P. Root. She says a host of other factors comes into play.

“I consider the generation people were born into, the geographical region they came from, the community where they grew up, language, religion, parents’ identity, home values, and even the names they were given,” says Root, who is Filipino and white. “I also look at such things as individual traits. Someone who is very socially skilled and multitalented at a high level—a musician, an athlete, or a scholar, for example—has more identity options.

Race or gender often become secondary to the part of identity associated with the area of talent. It is almost as though people loosen the rules around race and bigotry if an individual has an exceptional skill that society values and gives the OK to look at a person more as an individual. All of these are very critical influences in how someone is going to identify.”

Root’s theory about why multiracial people tend to choose one part of their heritage over another began evolving in the 1980s when she discovered that the available literature on mixed-race people was dated. “With few exceptions, it was very pejorative,” she says. “A lot of it reflected the politics of the time, which was against race mixing, and it just did not match the experiences of the multiracial people who were writing doctoral dissertations.”

That gap led to Root publishing the award-winning book, Racially Mixed People in America, published in 1992. Many consider this highly acclaimed research-based book the definitive contemporary study on the subject, and the first major step in establishing Root as the premiere expert on mixed-race issues.

“Racial identity starts with family and community,” Root says. “People then begin to negotiate their identity for themselves once they go out on their own.”…

Read the entire article here.

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.

Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity

Routledge
2010-04-21
256 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-48397-1
Papeback ISBN: 978-0-415-48399-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-203-88373-0

Edited by

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market.

In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans in highly readable essays from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: What is the connection between class and race? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an ‘honorary white’? What is the connection between social class and culture? Do you need to ‘look’ White or just ‘act’ White in order to be treated as an ‘honorary white’? Can social class influence racial identity? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds?

Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of Sociology, Race and Ethnic Studies, Race Relations, and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Who are Multiracial Americans?

• 1. Multiracial Americans and Social Class, Kathleen Odell Korgen
• 2. In-Between Racial Status, Mobility and Promise of Assimilation: Irish, Italians Yesterday, Latinos and Asians Today, Charles Gallagher
• 3. ‘What’s Class Got to Do with It?’: Images and Discourses on Race and Class in Interracial Relationships, Erica Chito Childs
• 4. Social Class: Racial/Ethnic Identity, and the Psychology of Choice, Peony Fhagen-Smith
• 5. Stability and Change in Racial Identities of Multiracial Adolescents, Ruth Burke and Grace Kao

Part 2: Culture, Class, Racial Identity, and Blame

• 6. Country Clubs and Hip-Hop Thugs: Examining the Role of Social Class and Culture in Shaping Racial Identity, Nikki Khanna
• 7. Language, Power, and the Performance of Race and Class, Benjamin Bailey
• 8. Black and White Movies: Crash between Class and Biracial Identity Portrayals of Black/White Biracial Individuals in Movies, Alicia Edison and George Yancey
• 9. ‘Who is Really to Blame?’ Biracial Perspectives on Inequality in America, Monique E. Marsh

Part 3: Social Class, Demographic, and Cultural Characteristics

• 10. ‘Multiracial Asian Americans’, C. N. Le
• 11. A Group in Flux: Multiracial American Indians and the Social Construction of Race, Carolyn Liebler
• 12. Socioeconomic Status and Hispanic Identification in Part-Hispanic Multiracial Adolescents, Maria L. Castilla and Melissa R. Herman

Part 4: Social Class, Racial Identities, and Racial Hierarchies

• 13. Social Class and Multiracial Groups: What Can We Learn from Large Surveys? Mary E. Campbell
• 14. The One-Drop Rule through a Multiracial Lens: Examining the Roles of Race and Class in Racial Classification of Children of Partially Black Parents, Jenifer Bratter
• 15. It’s Not That Simple: Multiraciality, Models, and Social Hierarchy, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and Paul Spickard

Contributors

Benjamin Bailey is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research on the interactional negotiation of ethnic and racial identity in US contexts has appeared in Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and International Migration Review.

Jenifer L. Bratter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of racial intermarriage, marriage and multiracial populations, and has recently been published in Social Forces, Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Forum and Family Relations.

David L. Brunsma is Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the University of Missouri. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, and Identity.

Ruth H. Burke is a Graduate Student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on racial inequality in the United States and racial identification.

Mary E. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Science Quarterly and Social Science Research.

Maria Castilla earned her BA in 2009 from Dartmouth College, with high honors in sociology. She currently attends Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

Erica Chito Childs is an Associate Professor at Hunter College. Her research interests focus on issues of race, black/white couples, gender and sexuality in relationships, families, communities and media/popular culture. Her publications include Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (2005) and Fade to Black and White (2009).

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly is a historian and lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, whose forth-coming book, By the Least Bit of Blood, examines the uplift potential a vocal Black identity provided mixed-raced leaders during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her analysis extends beyond the U.S. to include the function of race in the process of Latin-American nation-making.

Alicia L. Edison is a Graduate Student at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, biracial identity formation, and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes within the media.

Peony Fhagen-Smith is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Her research centers on racial/ethnic identity development across the life-span and has published in Journal of Black Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, and The Counseling Psychologist.

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth, studies how identity affects developmental outcomes among multiracial adolescents. Her current research projects examine perceptions of multiracial people and interracial relationships. Her recent work appears in Child Development, Sociology of Education, and Social Psychology Quarterly.

Charles A. Gallagher is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at La Salle University in Philadelphia. In addition to numerous book chapters, his research on how the media, popular culture and political ideology shapes perceptions of racial and social inequality has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Forces and Race, Gender and Class.

Grace Kao is Professor of Sociology and Education at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race and immigrant differences in educational outcomes. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Social Science Research, Social Psychology Quarterly and Social Science Quarterly.

Nikki Khanna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. Her research on racial identity negotiation and gender in group processes has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Advances in Group Processes, and The Sociological Quarterly.

C. N. Le is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He focuses on racial/ethnic relations, immigration, institutional assimilation among Asian Americans, and public sociology through his Asian-Nation.org website.

Carolyn A. Liebler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research on indigenous populations, racial identity and the measurement of race has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, and Social Science Quarterly.

Monique E. Marsh is a Graduate Student of Sociology at Temple University. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Conference and at the National Science Foundation’s GLASS AGEP Research Conference.

Paul Spickard teaches history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. The author of fourteen books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. He is currently studying race in Hawaii and in Germany.

George A. Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His work has focused on interracial families and multiracial churches. His latest book is Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies.