Mixed Race Studies

“I Thought He was White You Know a Regular American”: The Boston Marathon Bombing Shows Us How White Privilege Hurts White People… Again

We Are Respectable Negroes
2013-04-19

Chauncey DeVega

Race is a social construction. There is only one race, the human race. But, race has historically been something negotiated by the courts, has legal standing, and has impacted people’s life chances across the color line.

As Cheryl Harris and Ian Haney Lopez have detailed, to be “white” is to have a type of property in America. Because “Whiteness” is property it can be inherited, passed down from one person to another as an inheritance, and has value–both symbolic and monetary–under the law, and in the broader society.

European immigrants understood (and continue to understand in the present) the value of Whiteness. In the most stark example, they knew to distance themselves from black folks as a way of become fully “white” and a “real American.”

In addition, the United States government helped to create race and reinforce the value of Whiteness when it passed immigration laws that privileged “desirable” races from Europe over those “less desirable” from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world.

And of course, the racist implementation of the G.I. Bill and FHA Housing Programs after World War 2 helped to create Whiteness again by creating a segregated place called “suburbia,” and creating a stark divide in the racial wealth and income gap that is still with us today.

Race works through a type of “common sense” that is based on individual experiences, cultural norms, (misunderstandings of) history, the law, politics, as well as psychological motivations and decision-making that operate on both a conscious and subconscious level. In total, the race business is a type of magic and pseudo-science. This makes it no less real or important.

Whiteness is synonymous with “American” for those who have socialized into what sociologists such as Joe Feagin have termed “the white racial frame.” Here, common sense dictates that “those people” look “American” and those “other people” do not…

Read the entire article here.

Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama’s Inauguration

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Volume 98, Issue 2, 2012
pages 178-202
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2012.663499

Kristen Hoerl, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Butler University,  Indianapolis, Indiana

The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama the first African American US President as the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama’s election functions as a site for the production of selective amnesia, a form of remembrance that routinely negates and silences those who would contest hegemonic narratives of national progress and unity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial students discover identities in college

USA Today
2013-04-04

Taylor Lewis, USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent

College offers multiracial students the chance to have open conversations about race, allowing them to embark on a quest that is crucial in developing their identities.

When Sam Ho receives a form where he must select his race, he has a decision to make: Will he choose “white,” or will he check “Asian”? The trick, he has found, is to alternate.

Raised by a Caucasian mother and a first-generation Chinese immigrant father, Ho, a junior at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, grew up in a multiracial household. Although he lived in predominately white Topeka, Kan., he was frequently exposed to his Chinese heritage. But because of his physical appearance, Ho finds himself identifying more strongly as a white man.

“My outward features aren’t particularly Asian, and living in a majority white society, that’s culturally just what has been around me for the most part,” Ho says. “I think most people assume I’m 100% Caucasian, so I think the treatment I get from others is with that assumption.”…

…”Your identity is not only impacted by how your racial group might perceive you, but how the dominant culture perceives you as a member of a different racial group,” says Belinda Biscoe, associate vice president for University Outreach at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and an coordinator of The National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE). “Regardless of how we may see ourselves, part of our identity is also inextricably woven with how others see us.”…

…Take the “one drop” rule, for example, which suggests that if you have “one drop” of African-American blood, you must identify as black. So for multiracial students who grew up in two or more cultural worlds, they had to learn to define themselves in a society that was frequently asking “What are you?”.

“A lot of the biracial students would hear, ‘I’m not black enough to be black, and I’m also not white enough to be white, so where does that leave me?'” says Willie L. Banks Jr., associate dean of students at Cleveland State University in Cleveland and author of the study “Biracial Student Voices: Experiences at Predominantly White Institutions.” “So that’s always the conundrum. That’s the question that’s always addressed to these students: Where do you fit in?”…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation: Wedded Bliss Denied to Jap.

Los Angeles Daily Mirror
1910-03-16/1910-03-17

Seeks to Marry Los Angeles Woman in Nevada.

Gets License, But Finally Surrenders It.

Couple Get Cold Shoulders in Two Cities.

(By Direct Wire to the Times)

GOLDFIELD (Nev.) March 16.—[Exclusive Dispatch.] George Masaki, describing himself as a Japanese gardener, accompanied by Juliette Schwan. who admitted to 36 years, both from Los Angeles, appeared at the Courthouse this afternoon and applied to the Sheriff for permission to be married. That worthy referred them to the County Clerk for a license, which was issued after a short pause, and then the candidates for matrimonial chains made a tour of the building in an attempt to induce some of the judges to pronounce them man and wife.

Judge Stevens, who performed the first and only Asiatic marriage in Goldfield, said he would not repeat the experiment, as the feeling over his former action was so intense that he thought it would imperil his chances in the fall election when he will be a candidate for the bench.

The Sheriff sent out for the Justice of the Peace, who refused to be inveigled into the former marriage, but that officer, when he learned the object of the visit, told the waiting couple that they would have to go elsewhere.

By this time a large crowd had gathered at the Courthouse, and it began to look unpleasant for the prospective bridegroom.

Finally the under sheriff spoke to Masaki and told him it was against the law to perform marriages between whites and Japanese. Masaki was induced to surrender his license, the money was refunded and the pair were rushed into a closed carriage and taken to the depot where a Tonopah suburban train was about to pull out. They were shoved aboard as the whistle blew, and the telephone was used to advise Tonopah of the coming

Tonopah gave the couple a chilly reception as an advance canvass had been made of the town and every judicial officer and clergyman was pledged not to officiate. Masaki on his arrival trudged up town with his bride-elect a hundred paces in the rear.

The first stop was at a Chinese restaurant, where the pair took their supper, and then they adjourned to a cheap lodging-house where they rented rooms for the night.

Afro-Chinese Wedding

San Francisco Call
Volume 78, Number 147 (1895-10-25)
page 4, column 2
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

STOCKTON, Cal., Oct. 24.—Chu Gun, a local Chinese sport, was to-day married to Irene Wilson, a dashing octoroon girl. The entire population of Chinatown celebrated the affair this evening.

The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn

McClure, Phillips & Co.
1905
261 pages
ISBN 10: 0837113962
Open Library ID: OL7174992M

William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934), Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy
Tulane University

Contents

• Chapter One: The Individual? or the Race?
• Chapter Two: Is the Negro Inferior?
• Chapter Three: Nurture? or Nature?
• Chapter Four: Plea and Counterplea
• Chapter Five: A Dip Into the Future
• Chapter Six: The Argument from Numbers

Read the entire book here or here.

Transracial mothering and maltreatment: are black/white biracial children at higher risk?

Child Welfare
Volume 91, Number 1 (January-February 2012)
pages 55-77

Mary E. Rauktis, Research Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

Rachel A. Fusco, Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh

The number of people identifying as biracial is rapidly growing, though little is known about the experiences of interracial families. Previous work indicates that biracial children may be at elevated risk of entering the child welfare system. This could underscore additional risks faced by these families. This document includes data from the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN), a project funded by the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and distributed by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. LONGSCAN data were used to examine familial risks associated with child maltreatment. White mothers of white children were compared to white mothers of biracial children with the hypothesis that interracial families would have less social and community support. Results showed that the women were similar in terms of mental health and parenting behaviors. There were no differences in maternal age, employment status, or presence of a partner. However, mothers of biracial children were poorer, had more alcohol use, and decreased social support. They experienced more intimate partner violence and lower neighborhood satisfaction. Findings have implications for intervention programs focused on reducing social isolation within interracial families.

Racial and Ethnic Identity Development in White Mothers of Biracial, Black-White Children

Affilia
Volume 19, Number 1 (February 2004)
pages 68-84
DOI: 10.1177/0886109903260795

Margaret O’Donoghue, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Work
New York University

This article reports on a qualitative research study of the racial and ethnic identity of 11 White mothers who were married to Black (specifically African American) men and were raising biracial children. The uniqueness of these women’s lives, as Whites with an intimate knowledge of the Black experience, makes it difficult to place them within the levels described by current models of racial identity. Through their parenting of biracial children, the mothers had come to a greater sense of their own racial identity and to recognize White privilege and their own White identity. Their specific ethnic identity, as ethnic Whites, has not been passed on to their children.

…Most of the women revealed that in raising their children, they focused on a Black identity, with a somewhat unconscious understanding that the traditions that they, the mothers, could provide were either “just American” or not something their children needed to incorporate into their identities.   Essential to this process of White mothers fostering Black culture in their  biracial children was the presence of Black husbands. All the women were in  long-term marriages with Black men. Their husbands had educated them about Black culture and fostered their knowledge of this ethnicity. Without their husbands’ presence, the women may have found it difficult to impart this sense of ethnic identity to their children….

…In general, the women did not think that their identity had essentially changed since they married, nor did they feel they had somehow “crossed over” and become Black. Many noted, however, that they had become more aware of their own identity as a racial being, as a White person. As was noted in the previous section, before their relationships with their husbands, they had never been placed in a situation of having to consider themselves as having a race. White privilege had previously enabled them to move through social situations without having to consider the impact of their racial identification….

Read the entire here.

Are the Tsarnaevs White?

The Daily Beast
2013-04-24

Peter Beinart, Senior Political Writer and Associate Professor of Journalism
City University of New York

also Editor-in-chief
Open Zion

In a word, yes. But why is this so hard for Americans to grasp? Peter Beinart on our country’s long track record of conflating religion and race.

The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the Tsarnaev brothers, they were triumphant. “Sorry, David Sirota, Looks Like Boston Bombing Suspects Not White Americans,” snickered a headline in Newsbusters. “Despite the most fervent hopes of some writers over at Salon.com,” added a blogger at Commentary, “the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing are not ‘white Americans’.”

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

So why did conservatives mock Sirota for being wrong? Because in public conversation in America today, “Islam” is a racial term. Being Muslim doesn’t just mean not being Christian or Jewish. It means not being white…

Read the entire article here.

Status Boundary Enforcement and the Categorization of Black-White Biracials

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Available online 2013-04-23

Arnold K. Ho, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Colgate University, Hamilton, New York

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Amy J. C. Cuddy, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Hellman Faculty Fellow
Harvard University

Mahzarin R. Banaj, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
Harvard University

Highlights

• This paper demonstrates that individual differences and social context interact to influence how we categorize biracials.
• We show that the rule of hypodescent is used to enforce group boundaries.
• Anti-egalitarians are shown to strategically engage in hierarchy maintenance.

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in more than one racial group are not judged as belonging equally to both of their parent groups, but instead are seen as belonging more to their lower status parent group. Why? The present paper begins to establish the role of individual differences and social context in hypodescent, the process of assigning multiracials the status of their relatively disadvantaged parent group. Specifically, in two experiments, we found that individual differences in social dominance orientation—a preference for group-based hierarchy and inequality—interacts with perceptions of socioeconomic threat to influence the use of hypodescent in categorizing half-Black, half-White biracial targets. Importantly, this paper begins to establish hypodescent as a “hierarchy-enhancing” social categorization.

Read or purchase the article here.