Mixed Race Studies

Race, color, and income inequality across the Americas

Demographic Research
Volume 31
Article 24 (2014-09-19)
pages 735-756
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2014.31.24

Stanley Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Background: Racial inequality in the U.S. is typically described in terms of stark categorical difference, as compared to the more gradational stratification based on skin color often said to prevail in parts of Latin America. However, nationally representative data with both types of measures have not been available to explicitly test this contrast.

Objective: We use novel, recently released data from the U.S. and 18 Latin American countries to describe household income inequality across the region by perceived skin color and racial self-identification, and examine which measure better captures racial disparities in each national context.

Results: We document color and racial hierarchies across the Americas, revealing some unexpected patterns. White advantage and indigenous disadvantage are fairly consistent features, whereas blacks at times have higher mean incomes than other racial populations. Income inequality can best be understood in some countries using racial categories alone, in others using skin color; in a few countries, including the U.S., a combination of skin color and self-identified race best explains income variation.

Conclusions: These results complicate theoretical debates about U.S. racial exceptionalism and methodological debates about how best to measure race. Rather than supporting one measure over another, our cross-national analysis underscores race‟s multidimensionality. The variation in patterns of inequality also defies common comparisons between the U.S. on the one hand and a singular Latin America on the other.

Read the entire article here.

The Cost of Color: Skin Color, Discrimination, and Health among African-Americans

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 121, Number 2 (September 2015)
pages 396-444
DOI: 10.1086/682162

Ellis P. Monk Jr., Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor of multiple forms of perceived discrimination (including perceived skin color discrimination from whites and blacks) and, in turn, these forms of perceived discrimination are significant predictors of key health outcomes, such as depression and self-rated mental and physical health. Intraracial health differences related to skin tone (and discrimination) often rival or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole. The author also finds that self-reported skin tone, conceptualized as a form of embodied social status, is a stronger predictor of perceived discrimination than interviewer-rated skin tone. He discusses the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial health disparities and highlights the utility of cognitive and multidimensional approaches to ethnoracial and social inequality.

Read or purchase the article here.

Light in the Shadows: Staying at the Table When the Conversation about Race Gets Hard

World Trust Films
2010
DVD, 00:45:00
United States

Shakti Butler, Director and Producer

Light in the Shadows: Staying at the Table When the Conversation about Race Gets Hard records a frank dialogue among two white women and several women of color. The film uses their conflict as a learning tool to illumine how conversations on race often break down along lines of race and power.

When the cross-racial conversation gets hard during diversity initiatives & equity efforts, emotions can arise and people may walk away discouraged. This film & its conversation guide are designed to support inquiry:

• How can we recognize the patterns and obstacles that cause people, who are committed to working together, to leave the table?
• How can white activists stay at the table when confronted with the pain caused by privilege?
• How can people of color be empowered in cross-cultural relationships?

This film is challenging. As such, it is designed for those who are ready to take another step in learning, or wish to develop facilitation skills that invite deeper listening and truth-telling. ”The conversation in this film takes place around a metaphorical round table at which everyone has an equal seat. This challenges the power dynamics of white culture,” says the filmmaker, Shakti Butler.

Light in the Shadows is a frank conversation about race among ten women who participated in the ground-breaking film The Way Home. These American women of Indigenous, African, Arab/Middle Eastern, European, Jewish, Asian, Latina and Mixed Race descent, use authentic dialogue to crack open a critical door of consciousness.

What lies behind it is a perspective on race that is often unseen/ unnoticed within the dominant culture. With clear language, open hearts and a willingness to engage – even when it gets hard – these women travel over roads that demonstrate why valuable discourse on race is so laden with emotion, distrust and misunderstanding. Light in the Shadows is a springboard for critical self-inquiry and inter-ethnic dialogue.

Read the conversation guide here.

The Persistent Problem of Colorism: Skin Tone, Status, and Inequality

Sociology Compass
Volume 1, Issue 1 (September 2007)
pages 237-254
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00006.x

Margaret Hunter, Mary S. Metz Professorship for Excellence and Creativity in Teaching Professor of Sociology
Mills College, Oakland, California

Colorism is a persistent problem for people of color in the USA. Colorism, or skin color stratification, is a process that privileges light-skinned people of color over dark in areas such as income, education, housing, and the marriage market. This essay describes the experiences of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans with regard to skin color. Research demonstrates that light-skinned people have clear advantages in these areas, even when controlling for other background variables. However, dark-skinned people of color are typically regarded as more ethnically authentic or legitimate than light-skinned people. Colorism is directly related to the larger system of racism in the USA and around the world. The color complex is also exported around the globe, in part through US media images, and helps to sustain the multibillion-dollar skin bleaching and cosmetic surgery industries.

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Asian

The New York Times
2015-10-07

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

David Haekwon Kim, Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of San Francisco

This is the latest in a series of interviews about philosophy of race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with David Haekwon Kim, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Global Humanities initiative at the University of San Francisco and the author of several essays on Asian-American identity. — George Yancy

George Yancy: A great deal of philosophical work on race begins with the white/black binary. As a Korean-American, in what ways does race mediate or impact your philosophical identity?

David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency. I think these sensibilities are due in large part to my experience of growing up bicultural, raced, and gendered in the U.S., a country that has never really faced up to its exclusionary and often violent anti-Asian practices. In fact, I am sometimes amazed that I have left so many tense racialized encounters with both my life and all my teeth. In other contexts, life and limb were not at issue, but I did not emerge with my self-respect intact.

These sensibilities have also been formed by learning a history of Asian-Americans that is more complex than the conventional watered-down immigrant narrative. This more discerning, haunting, and occasionally beautiful history includes reference to institutional anti-Asian racism, a cultural legacy of sexualized racism, a colonial U.S. presence in East Asia and the Pacific Islands, and some truly inspiring social struggles by Asians, Asian-Americans, and other communities of color…

Read the entire interview here.

No, Native Americans aren’t genetically more susceptible to alcoholism

The Verge
2015-10-02

Maia Szalavitz

Time to retire the ‘firewater‘ fairytale

When Jessica Elm, a citizen of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin, was studying for her master’s degree in social work, she frequently heard about how genes were responsible for the high risk of alcoholism among American Indians. But her own family’s experience — and the research, she discovered — tells a very different story.

The “firewater” fairytale that Elm came to know all too well goes like this: Europeans introduced Native Americans to alcohol, which they were genetically unprepared to handle. That happenstance led to alcoholism rates that are around twice as high as those seen in whites — and alcohol-related death rates, which are at least tripled. In this view, colonization didn’t make conquered people susceptible to heavy drinking — genes did…

…In fact, there’s no evidence that Native Americans are more biologically susceptible to substance use disorders than any other group, says Joseph Gone, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. American Indians don’t metabolize or react to alcohol differently than whites do, and they don’t have higher prevalence of any known risk genes…

Read the entire article here.

Grace Lee Boggs, Human Rights Advocate for 7 Decades, Dies at 100

The New York Times
2015-10-05

Robert D. McFadden

Ms. Boggs and her husband, James. Credit LeeLee Films, Inc.

Grace Lee Boggs, one of the nation’s oldest human rights activists, who waged a war of inspiration for civil rights, labor, feminism, the environment and other causes for seven decades with an unflagging faith that revolutionary justice was just around the corner, died on Monday at her home in Detroit. She was 100.

Her death was confirmed by Alice Jennings, her friend and legal trustee.

Born to Chinese immigrants, Ms. Boggs was an author and philosopher who planted gardens on vacant lots, founded community organizations and political movements, marched against racism, lectured widely on human rights and wrote books on her evolving vision of a revolution in America.

Her odyssey took her from the streets of Chicago as a tenant organizer in the 1940s to arcane academic debates about the nature of communism, from the confrontational tactics of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement to the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to her own manifesto for change — based not on political and economic upheavals but on community organizing and resurgent moral values…

…In 1953, she moved to Detroit and married James Boggs, a black autoworker, writer and radical activist. The city, with its large black population, racial inequalities and auto industry in its postwar heyday, seemed poised for changes, and the couple focused on African-Americans, women and young people as vanguards of a social movement…

Read the entire obituary here.

Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist

University of Oklahoma Press
September 2015
304 pages
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806149165

Amina Hassan, Consultant & Researcher
The Azara Group, New York, New York

Loren Miller was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960s, particularly in the fields of housing and education. With co-counsel Thurgood Marshall, he argued two landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decisions effectively abolished racially restrictive housing covenants. One of these cases, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), is taught in nearly every American law school today. Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and for the first time fully reveals his life for what it was: an extraordinary American story and a critical chapter in the annals of racial justice.

Born the son of a former slave and a white midwesterner in 1903, Loren Miller lived the quintessential American success story, both by rising from rural poverty to a position of power and influence and by blazing his own path. Author Amina Hassan reveals Miller as a fearless critic of the powerful and an ardent debater whose acid wit was known to burn “holes in the toughest skin and eat right through double-talk, hypocrisy, and posturing.”

As a freshly minted member of the bar who preferred political activism and writing to the law, Miller set out for Los Angeles from Kansas in 1929. Hassan describes his early career as a fiery radical journalist, as well as his ownership of the California Eagle, one of the longest-running African American newspapers in the West. In his work with the California branch of the ACLU, Miller sought to halt the internment of West Coast Japanese citizens, helped integrate the U.S. military and the L.A. Fire Department, and defended Black Muslims arrested in a deadly street battle with the LAPD. Hassan charts Miller’s ceaseless commitment to improving the lives of Americans regardless of their race or ethnicity. In 1964, Governor Edmund G. Brown appointed Miller as a Municipal Court justice for Los Angeles County.

The story told here in full for the first time is of a true American original who defied societal limitations to reshape the racial and political landscape of twentieth-century America.

AfroLatin@s in Action: Making a Difference through Research, Education & the Arts

Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
New York, New York 10012
Thursday, 2015-10-15, 18:30-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

Join us for a discussion led by AfroCuban author, bibliographer, and activist Tomás Fernandez Robaína on the crucial role of books in the advancement of Black advocacy movements throughout the Americas.

Learn about the Forum’s new projects aimed at increasing AfroLatin@ visibility and representation. These initiatives include raising the AfroLatin@ count in the 2020 census; developing a national network to promote and support AfroLatin@ Studies; and preparing a retrospective exhibition on the work of photographer Tony Gleaton. Find out how you can play a role in making a positive change. Come ready to take action!

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, both at NYU.

For more information, click here.

My First Event at the Schomburg – “Resisting Limitations: AfroLatinos and Radical Identity”

the colored boy
2015-10-01

Alexander Hardy

So, I’m doing a thing at the Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture for Hispanic Heritage Month. But unlike the majority of the celebrations, lists of notable Latinos and mainstream media representations of people in and from Latin America, this will be a thoroughly Blackety Black affair.

Shoutout to melanin.

Here’s the what/why/who/when/how:

The history of America cannot be appropriately surveyed without considering the presence, influence, hardships, victories and contributions of people of African descent. Our bodies, our lives and our genius reflect and inspire greatness, yet textbooks, media depictions and cultural celebrations routinely minimize and erase our integral role in both society and art.

To commemorate National Hispanic Heritage Month, AfroPanamanian writer and educator Alexander Hardy of TheColoredBoy.com has invited a diverse cast of AfroLatino storytellers to share stories of struggles, tragedies and progress towards/while affirming, celebrating, exploring, representing and growing to love and accept our wonderful Black and Brown selves in a world (and media environment) that studies and exploits our cultures and essence while ignoring and minimizing our presence and influence.

Resisting Limitation: AfroLatin@s and Radical Identities will showcase transformative, hilarious, tragic and insight-filled tales from powerful voices of the diaspora expressed through prose, poetry, song and art. This event aims to center and share Black and Brown narratives in a climate where such stories aren’t prominent or valued. Join us for a night of celebration, affirmation and exploration of the many iterations of AfroLatin@ identity and pride…

For more information, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.