Mixed Race Studies

Opinion: Why Future Politicians Must Embrace Our Composite Nation

The Next America: How Demography Shapes the National Agenda
National Journal
2012-11-14

Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

America is becoming browner—and the ability to harness the changing electorate has become the gold standard for any aspiring politician.

As Republican nominee Mitt Romney thanked his supporters last week in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he was speaking to a mostly white nationwide audience–nearly nine out of 10, according to exit polling from Edison Research. Over in Chicago, President Obama was preparing to give his victory speech to a multiracial coalition that offered a glimpse of what America may look like in the coming years: 56 percent white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 2 percent other races.

This election confirmed a trend that many have suspected but some have chosen to ignore at their peril. Obama won a second term because he maintained or increased his share of racial and ethnic minority votes in swing states, particularly the black vote. The NAACP recently commissioned a swing-state poll of black voters that shows how both parties can connect with this rising electorate…

…In an 1869 speech called “Our Composite Nationality,” Frederick Douglass wrote that America’s unique geography and government destined us to be “the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.” Since then, our great national experiment has thrived when we chose to embrace our diverse talents and perspectives, and it has failed when we chose to build walls between each other…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls

The Feminist Wire
2013-04-03

Safy-Hallan Farah, Guest Contributor

I am an East African Girl. A couple years ago, one of my friends told me that being an East African meant I’m not really black. A visibly mixed-race girl with a “high yellow” complexion and sandy brown hair telling me I’m not black didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to tell the girl, in the words of CB4, I’m black y’all. I’m black like the back of Forrest Whitaker’s neck. I’m black like Snoop Dogg’s lungs. I’m black like some Helvetica font against a white backdrop trying to sell you stuff.

I’m a black woman. But my nose, my loosely coiled curls and my fivehead make me black in a way that extends the colorism debate, creating this hierarchy of aesthetic value where I’m not just black, I’m also acceptably black.

Back in the day, white people went to East Africa to find Iman, their acceptable black girl. When white people did this, former Essence Editor-in-Chief Marcia Gillespie called East African model Iman Abdulmajid “a white woman dipped in chocolate,”  highlighting Iman’s acceptable blackness while also lamenting the fact that black women’s beauty is often measured in their proximity to whiteness…

…In “Poetic Justice” by Kendrick Lamar ft. Drake, Drake does it again: “I was trying to put you on game, put you on a plane/Take you and your mama to the motherland/I could do it, maybe one day/When you figure out you’re gonna need someone/When you figure out it’s all right here in the city/And you don’t run from where we come from.” But couched between another lazy description of a faceless, nameless East African Girl, and Drake’s assertion that that East African Girl is busy ignoring him for another man, is a story of afrodiasporic identity, which is what sets Drake apart, narratively, from other rappers.

While Drake’s definition of black beauty may seem limited, his definition of black identity is what Touré would call “post-black,” and Michelle Wright would call “postwar diasporic black.” Drake’s flow in “Poetic Justice” facilitates a broader discussion of black identity and black authenticity, a discussion that implicitly critiques Marcia Gillespie’s “white woman dipped in chocolate” statement, positing that East African Girls “come from” the same city Drake does, Toronto. The underlying message is that Drake considers us black like him. Drake, as a black Jewish man whose Degrassi character Jimmy Brooks dated a fake East African Girl, occupies a similarly hybrid space like East African Girls. For many East African Girls, that feels like poetic justice because the definition of ‘authentically black’— descendants of Africans brought here as slaves— is a limited definition that doesn’t even include Barack Obama, much less East African Girls…

…East African girls are generally not mixed race, yet this idea that we are is deeply embedded in the minds of white racialists, leading some to believe we’re an entirely different, special, exotic breed of people. This goes back to the pseudoscience of Carleton S. Coon’s “The Races of Europe.” Anthropologists and white racialists, which are often one in the same, have been claiming we are of majority Arab or white or “Afro-Asiatic” descent for years. And while that isn’t the sentiment of Drake or Nas’s lyrics, our alleged mixedness underpins their lyrics by virtue of the sheer selectiveness of the East African Girls shouted out in hip-hop lyrics. When Drake or Nas reference East African Girls, it can be easily inferred that they mean Cushites representing the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia). “Cushite,” a term derived from “Cush” of the Hebrew Bible and Quran, is in reference to our shared “Afro-Asiatic” language classification, which is often mistakenly typified as a shared racial identity. This little mistake triggers a big mistake: the conflation of biology and genetics with race and ethnicity as a social fact, which reifies the racial categories…

Read the entire article here.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

Sociology Compass
Volume 6, Issue 6 (June 2012)
pages 519–525
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2012.00463.x

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

This guide accompanies the following article: Nikki Khanna, ‘Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data’, Sociology Compass 6/4 (2012): 316–331, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00454.x.

Author’s introduction

In 2010, approximately nine million Americans self-identified with two or more races on the United States Census – a 32 percent increase in the last decade. President Barack Obama, the son of a white Kansas-born mother and Kenyan father, was not one of these self-identified multiracial Americans. In fact, Obama chose only to check the ‘black’ box, illustrating that multiracial ancestry does not always translate to multiracial identity. Since the 1990s, there has been a growing body of research examining the multiracial population and key questions have included: How do multiracial Americans identify themselves? And why? This paper reviews this research, with a focus on the factors shaping racial identity and the implications regarding the collection of race data in the US Census.

Author recommends

Khanna, Nikki. 2011. Biracial in America: Forming and Performing Race. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Looking at black-white biracial Americans, this book examines the influencing factors and underlying social psychological processes shaping their multidimensional racial identities. This book also investigates the ways in which biracial Americans perform race in their day-to-day lives…

Online materials

Race: Are We So Different?

http://understandingrace.org/

This website explores the common misconceptions about race through several interactive activities.

Race: The Power of an Illusion

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm

This website explores the question ‘What is Race?’ through several interactive activities.

Mixed-Race Studies

http://www.mixedracestudies.org/

This website is a useful resource for anyone interested in mixed-race studies. Included here is information about articles, books, dissertations, videos, multimedia, and other resources related to multiracial people…

Read the (entire?) guide here.

A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of nineteenth-century visual culture
Volume 8, Issue 2 (Autumn 2009)

Will South, Chief Curator
Dayton Art Institute

Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1907

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Oil on canvas, 49″ × 35½”. Hampton University Museum.

This article examines Henry Ossawa Tanner’s complex sense of his own racial identity. Tanner’s conflict was born of the fact that in his personal adult life he walked a fragile line between his whiteness and his blackness; in France, he systematically worked to remove race from the equation of his life. The author also identifies for the first time the source of his best-known painting, The Banjo Lesson.

Race remains at the heart of Henry Ossawa Tanner studies. Though he would have wished it not to be so, the issue of Tanner’s African American identity defined him in the late nineteenth century and continues to be the criterion by which twenty-first-century audiences appraise his legacy. Tanner struggled and sacrificed to become a recognized and accomplished painter of spiritual narratives, while we would have him also be a reluctant hero—the artist who against all odds overcame social barriers to shine at the Paris Salons, see his work purchased by the Musée du Luxembourg, and be compared critically with James McNeill Whistler. Tanner’s path to artistic success was indeed marked by instances of insult and injustice, and his career ascendancy was a remarkable feat. He lived his life, however, one that was driven by a commitment to the creation of art, in conflict with the hopeful expectations of many of his contemporaries. Tanner’s conflict, one of enormous pain and complexity, was born of the fact that in his personal adult life he walked a fragile line between his whiteness and his blackness; in France, he systematically worked to remove race from the equation of his life.

In 1914 the poet and art critic Eunice Tietjens wrote an article provisionally titled “H. O. Tanner” that she had hoped to publish in the International Studio.[1] She sent Tanner a draft of the article along with a letter, which read in part:

If there is anything in the article that you don’t like or don’t think is true I’m afraid you’ll have to expostulate to the editor, if he accepts it [the article]. The “if” seems large to me tonight, but then I’m tired . . .

Do write to me what you think of it. Here’s luck to us![2]

Tanner, in his rely to that letter, stated that the one problem he had with her article was contained in its last paragraph which reads:

In his personal life Mr. Tanner has had many things to contend with. Ill-health, poverty and race prejudice, always strong against a negro, have made the way hard for him. But he has come unspoiled alike through these early struggles and through his later successes. Simple and sincere like his canvases he has quietly followed his own instinct for beauty and has already given to the world many unforgettable paintings, while there are yet many years of work before him.[3]

Tanner’s objection was to the inference that he is a Negro. In the most comprehensive study done to date on the artist, the 1991 Philadelphia Museum of Art catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dewey Mosby characterizes Tanner’s response to Tietjens’s article as being revelatory of “the complicated nature of Tanner’s own thinking about race.”[4] Tanner’s reply begins:

May 25—1914
Dear Mrs. Tietjens—

Your good note & very appreciative article to hand I have read it & except it is more than I deserve, it is exceptionally good. What you say, is what I am trying to do, and in a smaller way am doing it (I hope).

The only thing I take exception to is the inference in your last paragraph—& while I know it is the dictum in the States, it is not any more true for that reason—

You say “in his personal life, Mr. T. has had many things to contend with. Ill-health, poverty, and race prejudice, always strong against a negro”—Now am I a Negro? Does not the 3/4 of English blood in my veins, which when it flowed in “pure” Anglo-Saxon men & which has done in the past, effective & distinguished work in the U.S.—does this not count for anything? Does the 1/4 or 1/8 of “pure” Negro blood in my veins count for all? I believe it (the Negro blood) counts & counts to my advantage—though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliations & sorrow—unlimited “kicks” & “cuffs” but that it is the source of all my talents (if I have any) I do not believe, any more than I believe it all comes from my English ancestors.

I suppose according to the distorted way things are seen in the States my curly blond curly-headed little boy would be a “negro.”[5]

Tanner’s statement “I believe it (the Negro blood) counts & counts to my advantage” has been interpreted as “clear confirmation of his [Tanner’s] pride in his own roots.”[6] When this letter was cited in the Philadelphia catalogue, however, the transcription contained a significant mistake. Instead of a period—”Now am I a Negro.”—Tanner actually placed a question mark at the end of that sentence: “Now am I a Negro?” This one mark completely changes the meaning of Tanner’s reply. Whereas he did not discount his African American blood, he emphasized that he is more white than black: three-quarters white, perhaps as little as one-eighth “pure” Negro. Furthermore, according to Tanner, neither his whiteness nor his blackness accounted for his talent.

The phrase “Now am I a Negro?” is profound evidence that Tanner understood himself to be, by virtue of genealogy and self-definition and not according to the “distorted way things are seen in the States,” not black. It was, he had come to conclude, a matter open to discussion. Yes, his African American blood counted, but again in his words, did the three-quarters of his English blood “not count for anything?”…

Read the entire article here.

Generation Mixed and the One Love Club

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-06-03

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

The popular media and specifically the Race Remixed series in the New York Times propagate the myth of multiracialism. According to this social myth, the increasing number of interracial families and multiracial children in America is transforming race and paving the way for a post-racial future. This myth assumes the existence of a growing mass of mixed youth who both identify with their multiracial heritage and who have a clear conception of its significance and transformative potential. At best, writers and audiences (popular and academic) who believe in this myth are engaged in wishful thinking. From my experience and observation, they confuse a few individuals for the many.

For instance, I remember that Timesia is colorful. She wears yellow, purple, red, and taupe colored tops with brown, indigo and maroon pants. She is awkward and sweet, sixteen or seventeen. She’s from the neighborhood and probably poor. She is brown, black, copper, beige, and she wants to start a club for mixed kids like her.

Or at least this is what she initially tells me when she asks me to be the faculty sponsor for her club. The year is 2006, and I am working as an English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Van Nuys High School. I recall that it’s my future wife, her counselor, who suggests to her that I might be the right teacher to sponsor her club.

I am more than happy to sponsor her club, but there’s a hitch. She has to complete an application: Describe the club. Explain its purpose. Give it a name…

Read the entire essay here.

“Multiracial” Today, but “What” Tomorrow? The Malleability of Racial Identification Over Time

Paper presented at the Population Association of America 2005 Annual Meeting
2005-03-31 through 2005-04-02
Philladelphia, Pennsylvania
27 pages

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the change in racial identification among Multiracial Adolescents and Monoracial Adolescents as they make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In general, we find that Multiracial youth exhibit more volatile racial identities than Monoracial youth. Youth who reported Native-American & White in Wave I were the least likely to maintain this identity (22%), while about 50% of Asian-white and black-white youth maintained their identities. In empirical analyses, we find that youth with more highly educated mothers have more stable racial identities between two waves of the survey. Physical appearance, as described by the interviewer at Wave I, is an important predictor of change between Wave I and Wave III responses. Our results suggest that while racial identity is malleable, it is still conditioned on variation in physical appearances.

Read the entire paper here.

Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix

Lynne Rienner Publishers
October 2010
325 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58826-751-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58826-776-4

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Is postraciality just around the corner? How realistic are the often-heard pronouncements that mixed-race identity is leading the United States to its postracial future? In his provocative analysis, Rainier Spencer illuminates the assumptions that multiracial ideology in fact shares with concepts of both white supremacy and antiblackness.

Spencer links the mulatto past with the mulatto present in order to plumb the contours of the nation’s mulatto future. He argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• THE MULATTO PAST
  • The Mixed-Race Background
  • Of Tragic Mulattoes and Marginal Men
  • Mulatto Writers on Marginality
  • Imitations of Life
  • Rejecting a Shared Past
• THE MULATTO PRESENT
  • Postraciality, Multiraciality, and Antiblackness
  • Resurrecting Old Myths of Mulatto Marginality
  • The False Promise of Racial Bridging
  • Assessing the New Millennium Marginal Man
• THE MULATTO FUTURE
  • Whither Multiracial Militancy? Conserving the Racial Order
  • Mulatto (and White) Writers on Deconstructing Race
  • Beyond Generation Mix

The Mixed-Blood Racial Strain of Carmel, Ohio and Magoffin County, Kentucky

Ohio Journal of Science
Volume 50, Number 6 (November 1950)
pages 281-290

Edward T. Price, Professor Emeritus of Geography
University of Oregon

A number of population groups of dark-skinned peoples, recognized as socially distinct in rural localities of eastern United States, are commonly assumed to be tri-racial, mixed from white, Negro, and Indian ancestors. A small example of such a group is mentioned by The Ohio Guide (1) as living in the vicinity of Carmel in Highland County. Aside from another small mixed-blood settlement of very different circumstances in Darke County, this group near Carmel is probably the only one to be found rooted in Ohio.

Carmel is a cross-roads hamlet based on a school, a church, and a country store. Its location on the margin of the Till Plains, half surrounded by the wooded hills which mark the western edge of the Appalachian Plateau, is probably significant for the phenomenon which brings it this notice (figs. 1 and 2).

The “half-breeds” or “Carmel Indians,” as they are locally identified, are well known to the farmers of the vicinity, who, on the surface at least, accept good-naturedly the claim of the former to Indian ancestry. Privately the question of Negro blood also may be raised. Most of the older residents think that both are present and can name families or individuals who they think illustrated each type in the days before the mixing was so thorough. The group look mixed; a few of them are nearly white, but most are identifiable by their brown or tan skin; many of them have curly black hair, and many have straight black hair. Few, if any, really look like Indians, but identifying negroid features are not usual. I consider it likely that Indian and Negro mixtures are both present on the basis that the degree of pigmentation in most of the people otherwise seems inconsistent with their general lack of negroid features (figs. 3, 4, and 5).

The surnames of the members of this group are, with few exceptions, Gibson (Gipson), Nichols, and Perkins. One or two other names have recently been added to the group by marriage. Some of the Gipsons aver that the Gibsons have a trace of Negro blood. In the summer of 1947 their number was determined to be at least 150; the population is said to have been somewhat larger in times past…

Read the entire article here.

Don Lemon: It only takes one drop

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-15

Don Lemon, Anchor
CNN Newsroom

This piece is part of a three-part series tied to the (1)ne Drop Project.

(CNN) – For years, the woman on the left in the photograph below could not be friendly to her own husband in public. She would pretend she didn’t know him or tell people he was her driver. She didn’t want him to be beaten in public as he had many times before.

She learned that particular survival technique from the woman in the photograph on the right, her mother and my grandmother, who had to use it from the 1930s until my grandfather died in the 1960s. Both women were often mistaken for white. And for whatever privileges my aunt and grandmother might have received for their light skin, their husbands paid for it by beatings or threats from white men. One handed-down family story that sticks with me is how my uncle was lucky to have survived a savage throttling in the 1950s after exiting a ferry crossing the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to Port Allen. Apparently, he and my aunt had let down their guard. They never did it again.

Heck, as a child, I wasn’t even sure about my grandmother or my aunt. “Is Aunt-ee Lacy white?” I’d ask. “Lacy’s black,” an adult would say. Of course the reply was followed by a big laugh and a phrase I’d never forget: “It only takes one drop.” Meaning it only takes one drop of “Negro” blood to make you black…

Read the entire article here and watch a interview with (1)ne Drop Project author Dr. Yaba Blay here.

Passing as Black? Some Initial Thoughts…

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2010-12-17

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Thomas Chatterton Williams has written an intriguing article highlighting recent trends of multiracial children “passing as black.” If I let myself go I will write a short book on this before I finish, so I will refrain and simply offer a few thoughts and questions and invite your comments and thoughts as well.

Mongrel and biracial are not the same thing…. First, I think Williams is concerned that blackness is often construed so narrowly it creates a necessity to “pass.” He wants to point to biracial as more naturally a category within black existence and thus free biracial people to live into being black while also expanding what it means to be black.

I am deeply sympathetic to this project, but I wonder if it doesn’t collapse racial modalities of an earlier American era with our contemporary reality. That is, the biracial child of slavery was a child of rape or illicit love, but in either case their birth could be monetarily quantified. They were still a slave…

…The reason for this brief historical context is to highlight an important difference in the experience of biracial people today. Many of us remain with our parents or live in households where racial difference exists together. While Williams wants to expand the tent of blackness, I worry this expansion simplifies a reality that can only be repeatedly and necessarily complicated. That is, part of the tension felt by biracial people today is the remaining structure of racial certainty that presses upon us. And yet,  radically near or domestic realities render such formulations of certainty, and their cultural practices, unstable at best.

To simply say everyone is black is to ignore the important tensions that exist inside of households and yet are so often resisted or separated in a biracial person’s daily life. This is very different from a genealogical claim that “we all have mixture.” Of course, there are no “pure” people, but that is hardly evident from the structural and cultural realities of our daily life (as Williams himself suggests in his important book Losing My Cool.)…

…First, while the idea of passing as black is a fascinating trend, mixed marriages of black and (anything) remain the lowest of all mixed marriages in the United States and marriages of black women to anyone else remain the lowest of all mixed marriages. There is something going on here. While many who pass as black are definitely embracing something of themselves and seeking to live into a difference that is both perceived and real, there remain real problems of representation, standards of beauty and desire that we need to account for.

Second, I can’t help but think there is an element of class here that is going without analysis. Who are those who have the freedom to choose? What are the economic and social realities that permit mixed marriages in the first place? How will the re-segregation of schools shift this trend in twenty years? Could this phenomenon be one of the first (and last) fruit of school desegregation? Obviously, Williams does not have the space to address such questions, but these are things that are rattling around nonetheless…

Read the entire article here.