Mixed Race Studies

To Measure More Diverse America, Solution May Be in Census Questions

The New York Times
2014-07-01

Tanzina Vega

When Alexa Aviles received her census form in 2010, she was frustrated by the choices. Like all Hispanics, Ms. Aviles, a Puerto Rican who lives in Brooklyn, was first asked to identify her ethnicity and then to answer a question about her race. Ms. Aviles, 41, who works for a nonprofit, thought, “I’m all of these!” In annoyance, she checked Hispanic, and then identified herself as white, black and “some other race.”

Mustafa Asmar, a Palestinian-American waiter in Paterson, N.J., does not like his options either. Arab-Americans are broadly classified as white in the census. “When you fill out white or other, it doesn’t really represent the Middle Eastern population,” said Mr. Asmar, 25. “I don’t feel like I’m white. I don’t know what else to put.”

As the United States becomes more diverse, the Census Bureau is grappling with how to accurately classify race and ethnicity in its next decennial count in 2020. It is an issue that plays out in divergent ways for different groups. Many Hispanics, like Ms. Aviles, are frustrated that they are prompted to select from racial categories that they believe do not represent their identity.

Many Arabs have the opposite concern: They are not asked a separate ethnicity question and are typically categorized as white, a label that many feel does not apply…

Read the entire article here.

Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

University of North Carolina Press
May 2009
328 pages
36 illus., 5 tables, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5934-6

Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Associate Professor of History; Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Columbia University, New York

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions—black and white, public and private—responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society.

Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted “racial hygiene” and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease—as its victims or as family and neighbors—made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the “white plague.”

Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States’ health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

How Race-Studies Scholars Can Respond to Their Haters

Vitae
A service of The Chronicle of Higher Education
2014-06-27

Stacey Patton, Senior Enterprise Reporter

Graduate school prepares students for a range of intellectual and professional endeavors. Unfortunately, responding to scholarly insults and academic shade-throwing isn’t one of them.

But for scholars in the fields of race and ethnic studies—including those who work outside the ivory tower—dealing with snide questions, nasty comments, and occasional name-calling is just part of the job description. Over the years, these academics have repeatedly told me that their work is uniquely misunderstood and dismissed by students, fellow faculty, and the general public. The election of Barack Obama, some say, has only made it tougher to defend ethnic studies: Amid declarations of a “post-racial” America, how do you explain why you study and write about racism?

Nearly every race-studies scholar—white professors included—can identify a phrase that drives them uniquely nuts: “Stop playing the race card.” “What about white studies?” “Racism is no longer an issue. Why are you beating a dead horse?”…

…“We were hoping for a black candidate.” —Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana studies and American studies,  Brown University…

…“Ethnic studies isn’t a real discipline.” —David J. Leonard, Associate professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies, Washington State University at Pullman…

…“Do you have a Ph.D.?”  —Kerry Ann Rockquemore, CEO and president, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity…

Read the entire article here.

‘Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families’?: Slate’s Human Zoo of Race Mongrelization

We Are Respectable Negroes: Happy Non-Threatening Coloured Folks, Even in the Age of Obama
Wednesday, 2014-06-25

Chauncey DeVega, Editor and Founder

Am I the only person who found Slate.com’s photo essay “Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families” to be very problematic?

To my eyes, it contains and channels the echoes of race science and eugenics wrapped in a veneer of praise and curiosity for “unusual” and “fascinating” bodies.

Questions of race and representation were and remain central to the dynamics of the global color line. The ways in which certain types of people and bodies are visually represented through film, photographs, paintings, and other mediums reflect the dynamics of power.

Whose eyes are “we” seeing through? What assumptions are driving the Gaze? How are the bodies and people in visual images posed and positioned relative to one another? Who is included? What types of people and bodies are excluded?…

…The contemporary American fascination with “mixed race” and “biracial” identity is a reflection of changing demographics and globalization; it is also a surrender to and performance of a shallow type of faux cosmopolitanism.

Ironically, the race scientists of Nazi Germany and the United States, as well as the photographer Cyjo (whose work was featured in Slate’s essay) who fetishize and find something “stunning” or “interesting” about “mixed race” and/or “biracial” people (what are fictive identities, social constructs, as there is only one race, the human race) share some common assumptions.

One, that those types of “racial” identities are somehow new or novel. In fact, human history is a story of “miscegenation” and “interracial” intimacy. Two, that those types of bodies and individuals merit study and analysis because there is some connection, either implied or explicitly stated, between genes, color, culture, destiny, and personal, as well as national “character”…

Read the entire article here.

UCLA Mixed Heritage Conference 2014 – Mixed Stories

Team Mixed Show
University of California, Los Angeles Mixed Heritage Conference 2014
2014-06-18

Recorded at the Mixed Student Union at UCLA’s Mixed Heritage Conference, April 2014. Participants at the conference share their stories.

*Our apologies to the people who we filmed but did not make it into the video. Our second data card malfunctioned and we lost quite a bit of footage, unfortunately this was the footage of the mixed Black participants.

Thank you to all who participated on and off camera and to the Mixed Student Union for inviting us.

Bill de Blasio and the Art of Political Image at… the Mermaid Parade

The New York Times
2014-06-23

Vanessa Friedman, Chief Fashion Critic

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York with, from left, his son, Dante; his wife, Chirlane McCray; and his daughter, Chiara, at the Coney Island Mermaid Parade on Saturday. [Tina Fineberg/Associated Press]

Mayor Bill de Blasio and his family had kind of an interesting fashion moment over the weekend. In case you missed it, I offer the above photo of Mr. de Blasio in pirate kit; his wife, Chirlane McCray, in full Ariel getup and their two children both body-painted blue — all for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. In fact, Dante and Chiara were king and queen of the parade, a kitsch classic that takes place on the first official day of summer (i.e. Saturday).

Why does this matter beyond the obvious comedic value? Strategy and image spin, my dear Watson. Strategy and image spin…

Read the entire article here.

An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate, Rosa Clemente

Yemaya Pictures
California State University, Los Angeles
2014-05-08, 20:00 PDT
5151 State University Drive
Annenberg Science Building 132 (Science Building Wing B, Lecture Hall)
Los Angeles, California 90032

From May 8, 2014. The Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles presents An Evening with Hip Hop Scholar/Activist Rosa Clemente. Rosa speaks about Afro-Latin@ Identity and Critical Approaches to Blackness.

Stunning Portraits of Mixed-Race Families

Slate
2014-06-24

David Rosenberg, Editor of Slate’s Behold blog

Fascinated by the evolution of identity, the photographer Cyjo, who styles her name CYJO, has created a series of portraits that examines how race, ethnicity, and heritage contextualize a person as an individual, and how they coexist within the framework of a family.

Cyjo identifies herself as a Westerner of Korean ethnicity (she was born in South Korea and raised in the United States) and photographed the series “Mixed Blood” from 2010–13 in both New York and Beijing. She has explored the dynamic between individual and collective identities in her previous work via a more abstract approach, but, with “Mixed Blood,” she uses the more literal approach of portraiture.

Over time, as humans migrate and change environments, the definition of identity has evolved to adjust to a broader definition of race and ethnicity. Cyjo pointed out that, in 2000, the United States Census for the first time allowed people to choose more than one identifier when noting their race. Almost 7 million people chose to count themselves as mixed race, a number that has continued to grow over the past decade and a half…

Read the article and view the photo essay here.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection by Nadine Ehlers [review]

International Social Science Review
Volume 88, Issue 3 (2014)

Matt Campbell
Doctoral Student of History
University of Houston, Houston, Texas

Ehlers, Nadine. Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2012. x + 184 pages. Paper, $25.00.

Race theory is a discipline that has become increasingly useful in the social sciences in the past few decades. In Racial Imperatives, Nadine Ehlers, a scholar of women’s and gender studies, provides a welcome view of the often forgotten question of how whiteness and blackness are formed and how individuals “pass” as one or the other. Her work is brimming with interdisciplinary content, including philosophy, critical theory, race and gender studies, and history. In contrast to earlier works that have taken only a historical approach or only a philosophical approach to race, Ehlers builds on a broad range of scholarship, including such well known titles as the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Figure in Black (1987), the philosopher George Yancy’s Black Bodies, White Gazes (2008), performance studies specialist E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness (2003), as well as a host of other works from scholars of slavery, post-Civil War racism, and African American studies. Ehlers also blends the work of French theorist Michel Foucault and the gender studies of Judith Butler to exhibit the “discipline” that exists in race and how through performativity, race is ultimately a game of passing…

Read the entire review  here.

Latinos and Whiteness: On Being Sold An Empty White Privilege Knapsack

Race-work, Race-love
2014-06-13

Blanca E. Vega (@BlancaVNYC), writer, educator, and race-worker

Sophia (@sophiagurule) on May 30th replied to my tweet about White Supremacy and Latinidad:

“‪@BlancaVNYC : and yep ‪#nuncamas. this [choosing White on the Census] has haunted/shaped my life, and used against me, and I’m just done with it.”

To read more of the conversation, click here.

For many Latinos in the U.S., race is still an elusive and misunderstood concept. This is due to many reasons but primarily for this one: Latinos have been taught that we are not a race, that instead, we are an ethnicity, and therefore have the ability/privilege to dodge the race question altogether.

The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line – W.E.B. Du Bois

For Latinos, the race question on a Census is confused for the color question. For the 2000 Census, even Latinos who were unmistakably White, Black, Native, or Asian, could pick “Other”. In 2010, “Other” was no longer available for Latinos, thus, forcing them to choose (what many confuse) “Color” for “Race” – and there is a difference, one that is often never unpacked for Latinos.

So, if the problem is the color line, then where do Latinos, who are taught “they have no race” fit in this now 21st century problem?…

…Latinos should remember that while some of us have privileges associated with Whiteness, this is not White Privilege. However, the only way we can understand our own racialization is to identify those areas in which some of us benefit from White Supremacy and where we don’t – a category Eduardo Bonilla Silva calls “honorary white” – and attack those areas if we are truly in the business of killing White Supremacy. This provides a more nuanced understanding of Latinidad, Latinization of race, and the racialization of Latinos, more so than the frames we inherited….

Read the entire article here.