Mixed Race Studies

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

W. W. Norton and Company
April 2010
590 pages
6.2 × 9.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-93070-2

Hazel Rose Markus (Editor)
Stanford University

Paula M. L. Moya (Editor)
Stanford University

A collection of new essays, written by a team of interdisciplinary authors, that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity.

In Doing Race, scholars from across the disciplines have written original essays on race and ethnicity aimed at an undergraduate audience. The book provides a practical response to the view, common in American debates, that race and ethnicity no longer matter, or that race and ethnicity should not be taken into account when deciding how to structure society and formulate public policy. It also answers the question of why race and ethnicity play such a large role in fueling violence around the globe.

Doing Race shows that race and ethnicity matter because they are important resources in answering the fundamental, even universal “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” questions. It demonstrates how understanding how identities are shaped by race and ethnicity is central to understanding individual and collective behavior in the United States and throughout the world.

Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, these original essays provide undergraduates with an effective framework for understanding the persistence of racial inequalities and problems in the 21st century.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Doing Race

Hazel Rose Markus

and

Paula M. L. Moya

Part I: Inventing Race and Ethnicity

• Defining Race and Ethnicity: The Constitution, the Court, and the Census, C. Matthew Snipp, Sociology
• Models of American Ethnic Relations: Hierarchy, Assimilation, and Pluralism, George Fredrickson, History
• The Biology of Ancestry: DNA, Genomic Variation, and Race, Marcus W. Feldman, Biology
• Which Differences Make a Difference? Race, Health, and DNA, Barbara Koenig, Medical Anthropology

Part II: Racing Difference

• The Jew as the Original ‘Other’: Difference, Antisemitism, and Race, Aron Rodrigue, History
• Knowing the ‘Other’: Arabs, Islam, and the West, Joel Beinin, History
• Eternally Foreign: Asian Americans, History, and Race, Gordon H. Chang, History
• A Thoroughly Modern Concept: Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and the State, Norman M. Naimark, History

Part III: Institutionalizing Difference

• Race in the News: Stereotypes, Political Campaigns, and Market-Based Journalism, Shanto Iyengar, Communication and Political Science
• Going Back to Compton: Real Estate, Racial Politics, and Black-Brown Relations, Albert M. Camarillo, History
• Structured for Failure: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement, Linda Darling-Hammond, Education
• Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment, Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, Sociology

Part IV: Racing Identity

• Who Am I? Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, Hazel Rose Markus, Psychology
• In the Air Between Us: Stereotypes, Identity, and Achievement, Claude M. Steele, Psychology
• Ways of Being White: Privilege, Stigma, and Transcendence, Monica McDermott, Sociology
• Blacks as Criminal, Blacks as Apes: Race, Representation, and Social Justice, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Psychology
• We’re Honoring You Dude: Myths, Mascots, and American Indians, Stephanie Fryberg and Alisha Watts, Psychology

Part V: Re-presenting Reality

• Another Way to Be: Women of Color, Literature, and Myth, Paula M. L. Moya, English
• Hiphop and Race: Blackness, Language, and Creativity, Marcyliena Morgan and Dawn-Elissa Fischer, African and African American Studies and Africana Studies
• The ‘Ethno-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome’: Mixed-Race, Identity, and Popular Culture, Michele Elam, English
• ‘We wear the mask’: Performance, Social Dramas, and Race, Harry Elam, Drama

2010 Hurst Prize Winner: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally

Legal History Blog
2010-06-03

Mary L. Dudziak, Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science
University of Southern California

Peggy Pascoe, University of Oregon, Department of History, has won the Willard Hurst Prize for 2010 from the Law and Society Association for her new book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press). Here’s the Prize Committee’s citation:

What Comes Naturally is a comprehensive, interesting, and important sociolegal history that takes us through the history of miscegenation law beyond its commonly accepted geography. It analyzes how by “naturalizing” miscegenation law, politics, religious beliefs and scientific knowledge came together to sustain a set of legal parameters that eventually became policy in the post Civil War world throughout the United States, enhancing and expanding the Black/White race dichotomy, while complicating it in gendered terms. The book is an outstanding contribution richly nuanced and insightful. It expands our understanding of conceptions of race, not only in the South, but elsewhere. It contains as well a superb elucidation of the role that gender played in the process of defining and elaborating on miscegenation…

Read the entire article here.

The Law: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes: Repugnant Indeed

Time Magazine
1967-06-23

Judge Leon Bazile looked down at Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving as they stood before him in 1959 in the Caroline County, Va. courtroom. “Almighty God,” he intoned, “created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” With that, Judge Bazile sentenced the newlywed Lovings to one year in jail. Their crime: Mildred is part Negro, part Indian, and Richard is white.

In Virginia, as in 15 other states (the number was once as high as 30), there is a law barring white and colored persons from intermarrying. The Lovings could have avoided the sentence simply by leaving the state, but they eventually decided to fight the Virginia antimiscegenation law “on the ground that it was repugnant to the 14th Amendment.” In rare unanimity, all nine Supreme Court Justices agreed last week that it was repugnant indeed.

Read the entire article here.

“A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man”: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036
Print ISSN: 1042-7961
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0140

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Associate Professor of African History
University of California, Davis

This article reviews representations and lived experiences of interracial sex and métissage in twentieth-century colonial Gabon to argue that African communities and colonial societies debated over “the métis problem” as question of how to demarcate African women’s sexuality, and socioeconomic and political power in the urban locale. These discourses and social realities reflected ambiguous and contradictory colonial discourses and polyvalent struggles among Gabonese populations to recast gender and respectability in the colonial capital city. Mpongwé women’s participation in interracial relationships, frequently brokered by male kin, had unintended consequences that threatened colonial order and reordered gender hierarchies within Mpongwé communities. Following World War I through the 1950s, shifting coalitions of elite African men, colonial officials, and private French citizens—anxious of the social mobility black and mixed race women achieved and sought to maintain—frowned upon and sought to restrict interracial liasons. Mpongwé women, both black and métis, involved in interracial relationships struggled to maintain control over their property, their labor, and insist upon their respectability in the precarious urban milieu. Using oral and written sources, this article addresses a gap in the scholarship on gender, sexuality, and colonialism by foregrounding how African women and men engaged in and reflected on miscegenation at the center of analysis. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the colonial encounter as a dialectic in which the actions of African women shaped colonial perceptions and policies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race in an Era of Change: A Reader

Oxford University Press
September 2010
544 pages
ISBN13: 9780199752102
ISBN10: 0199752109

Edited By:

Heather Dalmage, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mansfield Institute
Roosevelt University

Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology
Baruch College of the City Univerity of New York

Featuring a wide range of classic and contemporary selections, Race in an Era of Change: A Reader is an affordable and timely collection of articles on race and ethnicity in the United States today. Opening with coverage of racial formation theory, it goes on to cover “racial thinking” (including the challenging and compelling concept of “whiteness”) and the idea of “assigned and claimed” racial identities. The book also discusses the relationships between race and a variety of institutions—including healthcare, economy and work, housing and environment, education, policing and prison, the media, and the family—and concludes with a section on issues of globalization, immigration, and citizenship.

Editors Heather Dalmage and Barbara Katz Rothman have carefully edited the selections so that they will be easily accessible to students. A detailed introduction to each article contains questions designed to help students focus as they begin reading. In addition, each article is followed by a “journaling question” that encourages students to share their responses to the piece. Offering instructors great flexibility for course use—the selections can be used in any combination and in any order—Race in an Era of Change: A Reader is ideal for any undergraduate course on race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

PART I: RACIAL FORMATION THEORY

1. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, from Racial Formation in the United States
2. Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Racial Formation of American Indians”
3. Nicholas DeGenova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, “Latino Racial Formations in the United States: An Introduction”

PART II: RACIAL THINKING

Essentialism

4. Joanne Nagel, “Sex and Conquest: Domination and Desire on Ethnosexual Frontiers”
5. Janell Hobson, “The “Batty” Politics: Towards an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body”
6. Barbara Katz-Rothman, from The Book of Life: A Personal Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Genome Project
A Voice from the Past: Franz Boas, “Race and Progress”

The Social Construction of Race

7. Eduardo Bonilla Silva, David Embrick, Amanda Lewis, “‘I did not get that job because of a Black man…’ The storylines and testimonies of color-blind racism”
8. Margaret Hunter, “The Beauty Queue: Advantages of Light Skin”
9. Heather Dalmage, “Discovering Racial Borders”
A Voice from the Past: W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of the Races”

Outing Whiteness

A Special Introduction by the Editors
10. France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, “Introduction: The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the ‘Third Wave'”
11. Troy Duster, “The Morphing Properties of Whiteness”
12. Jennifer L. Eichstedt, “Problematic Identities and a Search for Racial Justice”
A Voice from the Past: Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line”

PART III: RACIAL IDENTITIES

A Special Introduction by the Editors
13. Joy L. Lei, “(Un) Necessary Toughness?: ‘Those Loud Black Girls’ and Those ‘Quiet Asian Boys'”
14. Nada Elia, “Islamophobia and the ‘Privileging’ of Arab American Women”
15. Nina Asher, “Checking the Box: The Label of ‘Model Minority'”
16. Patty Talahongva, “Identity Crisis: Indian Identity in a Changing World”
17. Juan Flores, “Nueva York – Diaspora City: U.S. Latinos Between and Beyond”
18. Nancy Foner, “The Social Construction of Race in Two Immigrant Eras”

PART IV: RACIALIZED AND RACIALIZING INSTITUTIONS

Economy and Work

19. Sherry Cable and Tamara L. Mix, “Economic Imperatives and Race Relations: The Rise and Fall of the American Apartheid System”
20. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination”

Housing & Environment

21. Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination”
22. Mary Patillo, “Black Middle Class-Class Neighborhoods”
23. Kari Marie Norgaard, “Denied Access to Traditional Foods Including the Material Dimension to Institutional and Environmental Racism”

Education

24. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Race, Inequality, and Educational Accountability: The Irony of ‘No Child Left Behind'”
25. Amanda E. Lewis, Mark Chesler, and Tyrone Forman, “The Impact of ‘Colorblind’ Ideologies on Students of Color: Intergroup Relations at a Predominantly White University”

Policing and Prison

26. Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh”
27. David Harris, “U.S. Experiences with Racial and Ethnic Profiling: History, Current Issues, and the Future”

Media

28. Jose Antonio Padin, “The Normative Mulattoes: The Press Latinos. And the Racial Climate on the Moving Immigration Frontier”
29. Jonathan Markovitz, “Anatomy of a Spectacle: Race, Gender, and Memory in the Kobe Bryant Rape Case”

Family

30. Dorothy Roberts, from Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
31. Krista M Perreira, Mimi V Chapman, and Gabriela L Stein, “Becoming an American Parent: Overcoming Challenges and Finding Strength in a New Immigrant Latino Community”

Healthcare

32. Mathew R. Anderson, Susan Moscou, Celestine Fulchon and Daniel R. Neuspiel, “The Role of Race in the Clinical Presentation”
33. Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, “Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity”

PART V: GLOBALIZATION, IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

34. Anupam Chander, “Flying the Mexican Flag in Los Angeles”
35. Patricia Hill Collins, “New Commoditites, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”
36. William I. Robinson, “‘Aqui estamos y no nos vamos!’: Global capital and immigrant rights”

Real Americans [Book Review]

The Virginia Quarterly Review
Spring 2009
pages 206-210

Oscar Villalon

What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, by Ariela J. Gross. Harvard University Press, October 2008.

As a child, there were the Americans, and then there was us.

Americans weren’t that plentiful in my grandmother’s neighborhood. The next-door neighbor to the right, he was an American. He was an older man, and he had a big grey dog chained up in his backyard. On New Year’s Eve, two of his sons got into an argument, so one of them went into a room and came back with a pistol and shot his brother dead, right there in the hallway. My grandmother’s other neighbors, two doors down, used to shoot off guns all the time too. They weren’t Americans. My uncle was roller-skating up and down the street once, when a car pulled up in front of the neighbor’s home. Just as my uncle skated by the car, the rear window lowered, and a shotgun slid out. He screamed. The window sucked back the shotgun and the car tore off. The guys in the car weren’t American, either…

Much wrangling—legal and intellectual—has gone into delineating which Americans are really Americans and which are not fully Americans: black, Indian, Latino, or Asian. How that was reckoned in our country’s history is at the heart of Ariela J. Gross’s book, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. A professor of law and history at the University of Southern California, Gross examines various court transcripts and federal rulings, stretching back to the years just before the Civil War and going well into the twentieth century, to make sense of how Americans—white Americans—decided whether a person (or an entire group of people) was just like them and so should be afforded all the rights guaranteed under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Gross supplies a specific accounting of the contortions into which communities and the courts tangled themselves while trying to figure out who was really white or black, or something else. And she looks at the consequences of this thinking, how it divided a nation into black, “non-white” (Native Americans and immigrant groups that didn’t come from Europe), and white—the people my grandmother and so many others refer to as, simply, Americans.

The necessity for classification, Gross writes, stems from “the peculiar institution.” In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, slavery had to be justified by the ideal that one group of people was intrinsically suited to be chattel and another group of people was meant to wield the whip. Slavery depended on a lot of people buying into “a powerful ideology,” the notion of race. “Fundamental to race is a hierarchy of power . . . a human Chain of Being, with white at the top and black at the bottom.” For the institution to survive, a slave’s “blackness”—those qualities identifying him as being descended from the tribe of Ham—had to be indisputable. The trouble was, if a slave didn’t have, say, dark brown skin and kinky hair, it sometimes wasn’t clear how to categorize him. This uncertainty would prove to be a persistent problem, which, Gross shows, isn’t surprising. The need to separate people was working against an unacknowledged truth about the roots of the country. Namely, there was never a time when people of different skin colors and cultures didn’t mix with each other, whether by their own volition or against their will.

Colonial America, Gross writes, was a rather mixed society. Not only were there communities of African Americans, some of whom were never slaves, but there were robust Indian nations, too, throughout the Eastern seaboard. And into these nations African Americans were often welcomed, as were some European Americans. Some were free blacks, some were former slaves; they took Indian spouses, had children, and conformed to their adopted culture. Some Indian groups, such as the Five Civilized Nations, held black slaves. They even fought on the side of the Confederacy. There was, of course, some integration between slave and master in these groups, just as there was in the white antebellum South. In early America, with each wave of births, and with the country’s ever-expanding territorial domain (meaning new towns were constantly forming where people showed up with little or no documentation of their past), the only way to know for sure if somebody was black or white was to find out whether or not he or she had a master.

This was especially the case in the South, but even there, presumably irrefutable proof wasn’t enough. Take the case of Alexina Morrison, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Louisiana woman who claimed she was not a born slave but rather a kidnapped white woman. Gross offers her case as an exemplar of how the first racial-identity trials worked: they were decided at the local level, settled by juries of white men who were ultimately more interested in how the plaintiff acted rather than how she appeared. Though Morrison “was undoubtedly a slave, and almost certainly had some African ancestry,” and despite the testimony of doctors that she was biologically black, and despite an examination of her body in court, where parts of her were poked and prodded for the “hidden marks of race,” Morrison was granted her freedom because, to use a sociological term, she “performed” white. Performing as a white woman, Gross writes, meant displaying unimpeachable moral virtue and chasteness. That, and already being accepted as white by the local community, took precedence, not only in Morrison’s case, but in so many others. Gross cites how “[d]espite the visual power of exhibition, not all candidates for whiteness were paraded before the jury, and even when they were, jurors were given many reasons not to believe their own eyes. Only 20 of 68 case records from the 19th Century South referred explicitly to inspections.” What’s more, “[o]nly 2 of 20 relied solely on physical appearance, and only one case relied on physical appearance plus a single type of evidence,” such as the plaintiff not having the “hollow arches” of a biologically white woman. In another case, Hudgins v. Wright, the plaintiff, Hannah, won her freedom by convincing the court she was Indian and not black. She claimed that her mother, a slave, was Indian. Her “red complexion” and straight hair, as well as what was described as a noble character, were proof she couldn’t possibly be black. The court’s ruling confirmed, Gross writes, that “Indians were by default citizens of a free nation; Africans were by default members of an enslaved race.”…

Read the entire review here.

The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice

Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review
Volume 29 (1993)
62 pages

Ian F. Haney Lopez, John H. Boalt Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member for The Center for Social Justice
Berkeley Law School
University of California, Berkeley

Under the jurisprudence of slavery as it stood in 1806, one’s status followed the maternal line. A person born to a slave woman was a slave, and a person born to a free woman was free. In that year, three generations of enslaved women sued for freedom in Virginia on the ground that they descended from a free maternal ancestor. Yet, on the all-important issue of their descent, their faces and bodies provided the only evidence they or the owner who resisted their claims could bring before the court.

The appellees… asserted this right [to be free] as having been descended, in the maternal line, from a free Indian woman; but their genealogy was very imperfectly stated …. [T]he youngest… [had] the characteristic features, the complexion, the hair and eyes … the same with those of whites …. Hannah, [the mother] had long black hair, was of the right Indian copper colour, and was generally called an Indian by the neighbours…

Because grandmother, mother, and daughter could not prove they had a free maternal ancestor, nor could Hudgins show their descent from a female slave, the side charged with the burden of proof would lose.

Allocating that burden required the court to assign the plaintiffs a race. Under Virginia law, Blacks were presumably slaves and thus bore the burden of proving a free ancestor; Whites and Indians were presumably free and thus the burden of proving their descent fell on those alleging slave status. In order to determine whether the Wrights were Black and presumptively slaves or Indian and presumptively free, the court, in the person of Judge Tucker, devised a racial test:

Nature has stampt upon the African and his descendants two characteristic marks, besides the difference of complexion, which often remain visible long after the characteristic distinction of colour either disappears or becomes doubtful; a flat nose and woolly head of hair. The latter of these disappears the last of all; and so strong an ingredient in the African constitution is this latter character, that it predominates uniformly where the party is in equal degree descended from parents of different complexions, whether white or Indians…. So pointed is this distinction between the natives of Africa and the aborigines of America, that a man might as easily mistake the glossy, jetty clothing of an American bear for the wool of a black sheep, as the hair of an American Indian for that of an African, or the descendant of an African. Upon these distinctions as connected with our laws, the burden of proof depends.

The fate of the women rode upon the complexion of their face, the texture of their hair, and the width of their nose. Each of these characteristics served to mark their race, and their race in the end determined whether they were free or enslaved. The court decided for freedom:

[T]he witnesses concur in assigning to the hair of Hannah… the long, straight, black hair of the native aborigines of this country….

[Verdict] pronouncing the appellees absolutely free…

After unknown lives lost in slavery, Judge Tucker freed three generations of women because Hannah’s hair was long and straight.

I. Introduction: The Confounding Problem of Race

I begin this Article with Hudgins v. Wright in part to emphasize the power of race in our society.  Human fate still rides upon ancestry and appearance. The characteristics of our hair, complexion, and facial features still influence whether we are figuratively free or enslaved. Race dominates our personal lives. It manifests itself in our speech, dance, neighbors, and friends-“our very ways of talkdng, walking, eating and dreaming are ineluctably shaped by notions of race.” Race determines our economic prospects. The race-conscious market screens and selects us for manual jobs and professional careers, red-lines financing for real estate, green-lines our access to insurance, and even raises the price of that car we need to buy. Race permeates our politics. It alters electoral boundaries, shapes the disbursement of local, state, and federal funds, fuels the creation and collapse of political alliances, and twists the conduct of law enforcement. In short, race mediates every aspect of our lives.

I also begin with Hudgins v. Wright in order to emphasize the role of law in reifying racial identities. By embalming in the form of legal presumptions and evidentiary burdens the prejudices society attached to vestiges of African ancestry, Hudgins demonstrates that the law serves not only to reflect but to solidify social prejudice, making law a prime instrument in the construction and reinforcement of racial subordination. Judges and legislators, in their role as arbiters and violent creators of the social order, continue to concentrate and magnify the power of race in the field of law. Race suffuses all bodies of law, not only obvious ones like civil rights, immigration law, and federal Indian law, but also property law, contracts law, criminal law, federal courts, family law, and even “the purest of corporate law questions within the most unquestionably Anglo scholarly paradigm.” I assert that no body of law exists untainted by the powerful astringent of race in our society.

In largest part, however, I begin with Hudgins v. Wright because the case provides an empirical definition of race. Hudgins tells us one is Black if one has a single African antecedent, or if one has a “flat nose” or a “woolly head of hair.” I begin here because in the last two centuries our conception of race has not progressed much beyond the primitive view advanced by Judge Tucker.

Despite the pervasive influence of race in our lives and in U.S. law, a review of opinions and articles by judges and legal academics reveals a startling fact: few seem to know what race is and is not. Today most judges and scholars accept the common wisdom concerning race, without pausing to examine the fallacies and fictions on which ideas of race depend. In U.S. society, “a kind of ‘racial etiquette’ exists, a set of interpretive codes and racial meanings which operate in the interactions of daily life…. Race becomes ‘common sense’—a way of comprehending, explainiug and acting in the world.” This social etiquette of common ignorance is readily apparent in the legal discourse of race.

Rehnquist-Court Justices take this approach, speaking disingenuously of the peril posed by racial remediation to “a society where race is irrelevant: while nevertheless failing to offer an account of race that would bear the weight of their cynical assertions. Arguably, critical race theorists, those legal scholars whose work seems most closely bound together by their emphasis on the centrality of race, follow the same approach when they powerfully decry the permanence of racism and persuasively argue for race consciousness, yet do so without explicitly suggesting what race might be. Race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding problem of race is that few people seem to know what race is.

Adopting an interdisciplinary/dedisciplinizing approach, the first half of this essay critiques existing theories of race from venues into which legal scholars rarely venture, namely biology, sociology, and literature. The last half of this essay advances a new theory of race as a social complex of meanings we continually replicate in our daily lives. Part II of this Article considers and rejects the most widely accepted understanding of race, which I term “biological race.” By “biological race,” I mean the view of race espoused by Judge Tucker, and still popular today, that there exist natural, physical divisions among humans that are hereditary, reflected in morphology, and roughly but correctly captured by terms like Black, White, and Asian (or Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid). Under this view, one’s ancestors and epidermis ineluctably determine membership in a genetically defined racial group. The connection between human physiognomy and racial status is concrete; in Judge Tucker’s words, every individual’s race has been “stampt” by nature. Part II explains that despite the prevalent belief in biological races, overwhelming evidence proves that race is not biological. Biological races like Negroid and Caucasoid simply do not exist. Finally, Part II introduces the argument, newly popular among several scholars, that races are wholly illusory, whether as a biological or social concept. Under this thinking, if there is no natural link between faces and races, then no connection exists.

Under the rubric of “social race,” Part III criticizes the ethnicity, nationalist, and colonialist theories of race. All three theories repudiate the idea that race is a fixed essence and instead locate races within the cartography of other social constructions. These theories fall short of providing a comprehensive or sophisticated understanding of race because they each treat race as a facet of some larger social phenomenon whether that be ethnic identity, cultural struggle, or the dynamics of colonialist conquest and resistance. This section critiques these theories in order to elaborate on a theory of racial formation or, as I call it, racial fabrication. “Racial formation” refers to the process by which the social systems of meaning we know as race accrue to features and ancestry.

In this Article, I define a “race” as a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology andlor ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a sui generis social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, races, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions. As used in this Article, the referents of terms like Black, White, Asian, and Latino are social groups, not genetically distinct branches of humankind.

In Part IV, I expand upon the proffered definition of race by examining the deployment of race in our daily lives. Despite the role of history—that is, despite the actions and reactions of the preceding generations—race remains common sense today only to the extent we continue to invest our morphology with racial meaning. The divisions we commonly discuss as Black, White, and so forth are relatively recent inventions, dating back in their current incarnations no more than a couple of hundred years. These divisions remain subject to constant contestation and revision, with their continued existence dependent on our acquiescence and participation today and tomorrow. This section deconstructs the micromechanics of race, the way race shapes and is in turn shaped by individual lives. It does so in terms of chance, context, and choice, or roughly, appearance and ancestry, social setting, and personal action. I argue that to a limited but largely unrecognized extent we as individuals and communities choose our races.

Part V brings this Article full circle by examining the connection between race and personal identity. Racial groupings in our society have been built upon and in turn have built up the edifices of cultural groups, establishing a close, even inseverable, relationship between races and communities. As collections of individuals who share a common culture and a similar world-view, these communities provide the crucial bridge between race and identity. In contact across the medium of communities, race and identity overlap and influence each other; each is both product and producer of the other. This last section completes the racial fabrication thesis by arguing for a connection not only between our face and our race, but for a link, however tenuous and at times obliterated, between our race and our soul…

Read the entire article here.

Never a Neutral State: American Race Relations and Government Power

Cato Journal
Volume 29, Number 3 (Fall 2009)
Pages 417-453

Jason Kuznicki, Research Fellow and Managing Editor, Cato Unbound
Cato Institute

Economics tells us that racial discrimination is expensive. Yet social psychology suggests that humans nonetheless tend to mistrust those whom they identify as outsiders. As a result, governments can exacerbate this mistrust and thereby encourage costly discrimination by creating or maintaining official race-based definitions of outgroups and differential outcomes based on race.

This article reviews evidence from economic and legal history to argue that not only did U.S. governments incentivize and even mandate racial discrimination, but these acts tended to reinforce racial mistrust as time went by. Segregation became more strict, not less, from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-20th century, largely because of growing and self-perpetuating state action. Discrimination created its own constituency.

Some skeptics of the civil rights movement have viewed racial discrimination as an essentially private matter that did not warrant the extensive state intervention. This view is untenable. Although certain measures passed in the name of black civil rights still raise serious legal issues in light of strict constitutional construction, the civil rights movement also dismantled a wide variety of even more troubling measures. Most of these can be characterized as straightforward impediments to the freedoms of movement, trade, and association.

Although, if given a free market and a neutral state, economic incentives will tend to work against racial discrimination, American history has never witnessed a neutral state. Instead, and until the mid-20th century, the market incentives that might have worked against discrimination were repeatedly frustrated. Recent historical scholarship, notably from left-leaning scholars, has done much to
show the depth and surprising recentness of state support for discrimination…

…Consider the American experience with legal definitions of race. From the earliest English settlements to the present, governments have worked to establish and refine definitions of race, almost always for invidious purposes, and frequently with tighter and tighter standards as to who received racial privileges and who did not. This behavior is indeed similar to that observed in guilds, occupational licensure, and professional organizations, in which membership requirements tend to grow more stringent over time and new areas are brought under the restrictive umbrella (Gelhorn 1976, Young 1991, Dorsey 1983).

Legal definitions based on genealogy arrived very early. Although mixed-race individuals were born shortly after the first importation of African slaves, 17th century legislatures nonetheless criminalized sex between Africans and Europeans (Jordan 1968: 139–44). These punishments did little to stop interracial sex, however, as both demographics and ever-stricter laws would seem to demonstrate. A 1705 statute from Virginia declared that the “child, grand child or great grand child of a negro”—that is, anyone of one-eighth or more African descent—would also be classified as black. Colonial North Carolina went further, to one sixteenth (Jordan 1968: 168).

In general, the legal scrutiny applied to one’s ancestors tended to increase rather than decrease over time. By the 1830s, U.S. courts were occasionally encountering the argument that, regardless of what the law said, a person with any degree of racial mixing would have to be considered black, and these arguments gradually spread through the 19th century legal system. Yet it may surprise today’s readers that the first legislated statewide “one-drop” policy only arrived in 1910, following a series of court cases in the late 19th century that had adopted this rule either out of a perceived necessity or, sometimes, at the requests of black litigants. Prior to 1910, and as recently as the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895, whites had generally rejected the one-drop rule for fear that their own mixed-race ancestries—and liaisons—would be called into question (Sweet 2005: 299–316).

The year 1910 saw the heyday of both Jim Crow and the eugenics movement. Many state legislators were eager to preserve white racial purity, then understood as a scientifically validated goal, and interested parties in the white population increasingly viewed “racial hygiene” as a legitimate state aim (Cynkar 1981). The creators and defenders of anti-miscegenation and one-drop laws believed that their efforts went hand in hand with forced sterilization and the eugenics movement more generally; all were seen as prudent measures to prevent degradation of white America’s genetic stock. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which both established the one-drop rule and reiterated the state’s longstanding ban on miscegenation, was signed into law on March 20, 1924, the same day as its sterilization act. Both were understood at the time to be part of a coherent agenda (Sherman 1988: 69).

There is little evidence, however, that this law initially enjoyed significant popular support. On the contrary, outside the legislature and the few interested parties that lobbied for it, the populace appears to have been well aware of (though certainly uncomfortable with) its racially mixed ancestry. As historian Richard B. Sherman writes, “The campaign for racial integrity in Virginia was not the product of a great popular ground swell. Rather, it was primarily the work of [a] dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites” (Sherman 1988: 71–72). Sherman argues for the crucial importance of a small and not very well-attended group of “Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America” in drafting and lobbying for Virginia’s one-drop statute. Although the phrase had not yet been made infamous, these clubs called for a “final solution” to “the Negro problem,” terms that even stripped of their Nazi associations are still deeply disturbing (Sherman 1988: 74–75).

Virginia newspapers were among the proposed law’s early supporters, perhaps because they recognized the shock value of a moral panic that combined sex, secrecy, and many readers’ private anxieties. Predictably, another supporter was the director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, who would see a significant increase in his own power and prestige as the bill became a law. His bureau was charged with classifying the race of all births in the state and with certifying the racial purity of every marriage between Virginia residents, an extraordinary new addition to government power (Sherman 1988: 75–77)…

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Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country

Duke University Press
2006
392 pages
7 illustrations, 1 table

Edited by:

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

Sharon Patricia Holland, Associate Professor of English; African & African American Studies
Duke University

Contributors: Joy Harjo, Tiya Miles, Eugene B. Redmond, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sharon Patricia Holland, Tiffany M. McKinney, David A. Y. O. Chang, Barbara Krauthamer, Melinda Micco, Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe, Deborah E. Kanter, Robert Warrior, Virginia Kennedy, Tamara Buffalo, Wendy S. Walters, Robert Keith Collins, Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui, Roberta J. Hill

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds explores the critically neglected intersection of Native and African American cultures. This interdisciplinary collection combines historical studies of the complex relations between blacks and Indians in Native communities with considerations and examples of various forms of cultural expression that have emerged from their intertwined histories. The contributors include scholars of African American and Native American studies, English, history, anthropology, law, and performance studies, as well as fiction writers, poets, and a visual artist.

Essays range from a close reading of the 1838 memoirs of a black and Native freewoman to an analysis of how Afro-Native intermarriage has impacted the identities and federal government classifications of certain New England Indian tribes. One contributor explores the aftermath of black slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, highlighting issues of culture and citizenship. Another scrutinizes the controversy that followed the 1998 selection of a Miss Navajo Nation who had an African American father. A historian examines the status of Afro-Indians in colonial Mexico, and an ethnographer reflects on oral histories gathered from Afro-Choctaws. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds includes evocative readings of several of Toni Morrison’s novels, interpretations of plays by African American and First Nations playwrights, an original short story by Roberta J. Hill, and an interview with the Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo. The Native American scholar Robert Warrior develops a theoretical model for comparative work through an analysis of black and Native intellectual production. In his afterword, he reflects on the importance of the critical project advanced by this volume.

Table of Contents

• Foreword: “Not Recognized by the Tribe” / Sharon P. Holland
• Preface: Eating out of the Same Pot? / Tiya Miles
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds / Tiya Miles and Sharon Patricia Holland
  1. A Harbor of Sense: An Interview with Joy Harjo / Eugene B. Redmond
  2. An/Other Case of New England Underwriting: Negotiating Race and Property in Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge / Jennifer D. Brody and Sharon P. Holland
  3. Race and Federal Recognition in Native New England / Tiffany M. McKinney
  4. Where Will the Nation Be at Home? Race, Nationalisms, and Emigration Movements in the Creek Nation / David A. Y. O. Chang
  5. In Their “Native Country”: Freedpeople’s Understandings of Culture and Citizenship in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations / Barbara Krauthamer
  6. “Blood and Money”: The Case of Seminole Freedmen and Seminole Indians in Oklahoma / Melinda Micco
  7. “Playing Indian”? The Selection of Radmilla Cody as Miss Navajo Nation, 1997-1998 / Celia E. Naylor
  8. “Their Hair was Curly”: Afro-Mexicans in Indian Villages, Central Mexico, 1700-1820 / Deborah E. Kanter
  9. Lone Wolf and DuBois for a New Century: Intersections of Native American and African American Literatures / Robert Warrior
  10. Native Americans, African Americans, and the Space That Is America: Indian Presence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison / Virginia Kennedy
  11. Knowing All of My Names / Tamara Buffalo
  12. After the Death of the Last: Performance as History in Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots / Wendy S. Walter
  13. Katimih o Sa Chata Kiyou (Why Am I Not Choctaw)? Race in the Lived Experiences of Two Black Choctaw Mixed-Bloods / Robert Keith Collins
  14. From Ocean to o-Shen: Reggae Rap, and Hip Hop in Hawai’i / Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui
  15. Heartbreak / Roberta J. Hill
• Afterword / Robert Warrior
• References
• Contributors
• Index

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.”…

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