Mixed Race Studies

Students more likely to identify as multiracial

The Stanford Daily: Breaking News from the Farm Since 1892
Stanford University
2012-10-24

Taylor Chambers

Erika Roach ’13 identifies herself as “Blasian,” while Marcus Montanez-Leaks ’13 says he’s “Blexican.”

These terms and others used to describe mixed race individuals are becoming more common in conversation and student groups focused on mixed race issues have begun popping up on campus, a trend mirroring the rise in applications.

Mixed race applicants to Stanford are “one of the fastest growing groups,” according to Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw.

During the 2011-12 academic year, 11.6 percent of undergraduates identified their racial/ethnic category as “two or more races,” up from 8.4 percent the previous year. 2010-11 was the first year the University began collecting data on mixed race individuals.

In 2011, the Department of Education started requiring universities to collect more information about applicants’ race and ethnicity. Many college applications, including the Common Application that Stanford uses, now allow students to check multiple boxes when it comes to describing their racial and ethnic identities.

“Students [telling] us exactly what their racial background is … not a mandatory request. It is optional,” Shaw said. He added that the ability to self-identify accurately is a crucial part of the college admissions process.

For students who identify with more than one heritage, the ability to check all that apply on the racial background section of college admissions proves crucial to establishing their identity…

…Michele Elam, English professor and author of a 2011 book on mixed race, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, argues that diversity remains an important consideration among many others in college admissions, but does not believe that students are simply “cynically trying to game the system by checking as many boxes as possible.”
 
“A lot of young high school students when doing college admissions are just coming of age politically and racially,” Elam said. “Some may not have thought of themselves as having a distinct mixed identity before being asked to check multiple boxes.”…

Read the entire article here.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Whiteness: A Revolution of Identity Politics in America

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 2, Issue 1 (2012)
pages 149-166

Andrés Acebo

An enduring motif in American political history reflects the nation’s slow progression towards inclusion of a once disenfranchised populace. In the annals of its jurisprudence, the nation recalls a time when citizenship was linked to race: a time when the racial perquisites for naturalization were not challenged based on its constitutionality, but on who could be professedly “white.” President Obama’s election ushered in a new chapter to this American narrative. His election and the response to it reveal how far we have come and how far we have left to travel on the path towards equality in citizenship.
 
This Article frames a longstanding debate concerning race consciousness in the political sphere and how it consequently influences an ever-changing electorate. It explores the impact that our courts and our policymakers have had on shaping what it means to be white in America, and accordingly to possess a majority voice in society. The Article further seeks to explicate how politicized social institutions are sustained from generation to generation by way of an unabashed preservation of the status quo. Those who come to power do so by protracting nostalgic yearnings, summoning persistent lore and mythos about a way of life that has not always benefited an entire electorate, and not threatening or offending the mainstay of the American political complex. Obama’s election revealed a model, embossed by a romanticized collective national history and a steadfast commitment to the ideals of American Exceptionalism, for transforming a minority candidate’s use of identity politics to garner support, influence and ultimately the ability to govern.

CONTENTS

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. WHITENESS SOUGHT AND DEFINED IN AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE
  • A. Contemporary Whiteness through Biology and Demographics
• III. 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION REVEALS NEW FORM OF RACISM
  • A. The Pursuit of the White Vote159
  • B. A Message of Change and the Opposition that Fears It
• IV. “REAL AMERICANS” INCITE RACISM WITH DIVISIVE RHETORIC
  • A. 2010 Candidates Followed Obama’s Example to Distinguish Themselves From Him
• V. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM STIFLED BY NOSTALGIA FOR A MORE DIVISIVE ERA

I. INTRODUCTION

April 12, 2011, marked one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War’s first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The war pinned brother against brother and forced an infant republic to confront its original sin of slavery. The sesquicentennial of that defining struggle provides this generation of Americans with the opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and how much further we must travel on the curving path toward our more perfect union. Despite undeniable progress, the nation’s wounds of bigoted conflict have not completely healed. Racism, albeit publicly renounced, has persisted and remained the scar that fervently reminds people of a much more divided time. In the twenty-first century, racism can no longer be classified as a social ill that plagues the ignorant and indifferent. Racism has transmuted from a “creature of habit” that sought to justify the subordination of some to a more nuanced political calculation for preserving the current racial political establishment. This phenomenon did not occur overnight, but it certainly did find the election of the nation’s first non-white president as the opportune moment to emerge. This new racism has been coupled with centuries-old nativism3 and has disguised itself under the banner of American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism finds its roots in the romanticized emergence of the American democracy. Horatio Alger provided this narrative in parables about the American Dream, while John Winthrop’s famous speech painted America as the shining “city upon a hill.” What is so perplexing is that this idea, which helped form the tide that ushered Barack Obama to the presidency, has become the one that seeks to wash him out. The attack on the president has been one in which the racial epithets of yesteryear have been drowned out by the spewing of political rhetoric that claims to try to “take America back” for its rightful keepers. A growing sentiment in our political debate is that those who do not blindly accept America as the greatest civilization in history and those who admonish the present conditions as defiling the egalitarian principles enshrined in the Constitution are not true or real Americans. The emergent consequence is that race consciousness and, more specifically, what it means to be white in America is qualified by more politically conservative circles in terms of whether an individual subscribes to notions of American Exceptionalism. Groups enter the fold if they do not condemn, criticize, complain about, or campaign for any sort of fundamental change to the existing order. Essentially, for those once excluded, to now be white in America, they must not offend the structures that perpetuate white majoritarian influence.

The history of what is determinably white in the United States has been dictated by a fluid metric. It is not at all unusual that this redefinition has appeared at a time where Census projections reveal the rapid decline of the white majority in America. The U.S. Census Bureau has reported that, by 2050, minorities will be the majority in America. Minorities currently constitute one-third of the population in the United States, but according to census figures, they are projected to become the majority population by 2042. By 2050, minorities will constitute fifty-four percent of the population. The implications of what will come when these projections become reality are grave. With no majority white race, what will become of racialized existence in pluralist America? The prosperity and equality once drawn from the well of acculturation will be dried up. What will emerge in its place? Will a new dominant racial majority emerge or will accepted citizenship occur through enculturation? The answer is up for debate. However, history and judicial opinions alike reflect the absolute discriminatory intent behind separating citizens into groups of those deemed to belong and those who do not.

This Article proceeds in four parts. Part II explores and discusses the interplay of race and American jurisprudence. The privileges of American citizenship since the nation’s founding have been inextricably linked to racial classification. What it means to be white and who is white in America is constantly changing. Accordingly, the acquisition of rights has often been forged by racial reclamation. This section examines the decisions of the United States Supreme Court in Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Thind, where the nation’s highest court swiftly legitimized the practice of making whiteness more exclusive, harder to attain, and consequently more desirable. The Article postulates what will become of the remnants of the legacy of racial supremacy when the nation is redefined as a majority-minority electorate.

Part III evaluates President Obama’s 2008 election and examines how his pluralistic campaign revealed not just the progress that has been made in America’s journey toward racial equality, but also the new affronts to social harmonization. The 2008 presidential election, a transformative moment in American history, was not the watershed moment of racial reconciliation that it has been portrayed to be. This section offers that the election of the nation’s first non-white president established a new paradigm for identity politics in the United States. President Obama’s successful campaign revealed that America’s racial cacophony had not yet been keyed into melody. At the onset of a new century, with demographic trends envisaging a new racial electoral composition, the pursuit of whiteness has been relegated to romantic notions of American Exceptionalism. An uncertain future has birthed a movement emboldened by nostalgia that threatens that the ushering in of change will threaten the pillars of the republic.

Part IV analyzes the 2010 elections and considers how the Obama model for identity politics was galvanized and successfully used by some of his staunchest detractors. Leading candidates attached their personal narratives to the republic’s chronicles. In doing so, acquiescence to the establishment’s will promulgated a new sentiment, which reaffirmed the racialized social order. By not simply subscribing to the existence of American Exceptionalism, but instead expressing anguish and disdain for those who not only deny its veracity but seek to weaken its condition, minority candidates have found a way to appeal beyond their immediate base of supporters.

In concluding, Part V of this Article observes that America’s demographic shift towards a majority-minority citizenry will make little difference if its politics remain unshaken. In the end, elections will amount to nothing more than isolated victories rather than breakthroughs until the legacy of racial supremacy is eradicated. The law’s memorialization of an ethereal demonstration of racial privilege and a modern electorate’s hope to garner a pluralist society in which all persons are treated equal are once more pitted against each other at the highest levels of our public discourse. Amidst the demagoguery and rhetoric is the often-overlooked axiom that America’s “Exceptionalism” lies in the nation’s ability to confront its inequality and maintain that a government of the people, by the people, shall always be for all the people. Elections that usher in both the face of groups long removed from influence and, more importantly, their voice are only the first step on a long road to redemption.

Read the entire article here.

Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the “Almost Human”

Social Text
Volume 30, Number 3 112
pages 97-121
DOI: 10.1215/01642472-1597350

Megan H. Glick, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies
Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

From the moment Charles Darwin proposed Africa as the site of human origins, scientists and the lay public alike labored to reconcile contemporary racial hierarchies with the possibility of a universal African birthplace. Previous historical treatments of this phenomenon have focused on the search for the “missing link” in Asia and Europe, an investigation that, if successful, would have effectively established a separate ancestry for the white races. This essay identifies a new component of this history: the racialization of higher-order primates within the nascent discipline of primatology and within US popular culture between the 1910s and 1930s. Departing from Donna Haraway’s originary work on the field, this essay argues that primatology was in fact built upon preexisting scientific racial ideologies, such that the animals themselves became parsed according to racial categorizations. In particular, the anthropomorphization and “whitening” of the chimpanzee on the one hand, and the bestialization and “blackening” of the gorilla on the other, provided a forum for ideas about biological essentialism, evolutionary capabilities, and racial difference. This alternative history is revealed through an examination of the photographic archives and written work of longtime eugenicist and founding primatologist Robert Mearns Yerkes, and through a contextualization of these documents within contemporary scientific and popular cultures. By tracing the lineage of American primatology to the closing arc of eugenic science, this essay seeks to enrich and reimagine the relationship between practices of racialization and speciation within the larger histories of evolutionary thought and racial formation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Biracial identity: trying to fit in

The Daily Tar Heel
University of North Carolina
2012-10-22

Averi Harper, Columnist

You’re Hispanic, right?

No? Well, are you Middle Eastern?

No? Then what are you?

Oh, that’s so interesting!

The above is just a sample of the prodding questions that sometimes come with biracial or multiracial identity.

Biracial identity has been catapulted to the forefront of American culture with the political rise of Barack Obama to president of the United States.

The president was born to a Kenyan father and an American mother and considers himself African-American. He has acknowledged the difficulties of growing up biracial. He was often teased and, to make matters worse, he had a distanced relationship with his father.

The issues that existed for the president pertaining to racial identity and social acceptance exist for many Americans.

There are more than 7 million people in the United States who identify as two or more races, with more than 180,000 of those are right here in North Carolina, and those numbers are on the rise. There are about 850 students at UNC who identify as more than one race…

Read the entire article here.

Glenn Robinson—Dedicated to Erasing Hate & Mixing Cultures

Mixed Race Radio
Wednesday, 2012-10-24, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT, 17:00 BST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Glenn Robinson, Creator/Owner
Community Village Activist

Glenn Robinson is an Irish, German, Dutch, English & Austrian American married to a Spanish & Indigenous Mexican American. They have two children and encourage them to identify however they want. Glenn is interested in progressive immigration reform, universal health care and desegregation within schools and communities. He is a life long learner with interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and politics.

Glenn created Mixed American Life and spends much of his time curating and sharing articles and videos, as well as recruiting bloggers who are seeking a wider reach for their audience.

This site, Mixed American Life has two main focuses:

1. Share experiences and stories around the mixing of cultures and blending of heritages; weather it’s by proximity, by relationships, or by adoption.
2. Promote desegregation in schools and communities.

This interest blends directly with Glenn’s other mission which is to reduce xenophobia and racism. That blog is entitled, Community Village Activist and this is the site where Glenn exposes the hate that is opposing the multicultural movement.

To see all of Glenn’s projects (and promoted sites) visit CommunityVillage.us.

Letter, W. A. Plecker to A. T. Shields. 9 May 1925. Typescript.

Commonwealth of Virginia, Bureau of Vital Statistics
Richmond, Virginia
1925-05-09

Source: Rockbridge County (Va.) Clerk’s Correspondence [Walter A. Plecker to A.T. Shields], 1912-1943. Local Government Records Collection, Rockbridge County Court Records. The Library of Virginia. 10-0477-003.

In a letter to A.T. Shields, Walter Plecker asserted that Judge Holt’s decision to categorize Atha Sorrells as white despite her Indian heritage had “emboldened” the Rockbridge tribe. Nonetheless, he advised against appealing the Sorrells case to the Supreme Court because the court might rule in her favor.

Walter A. Plecker, Registrar

Hon. A. T. Shields,
Rockbridge County Clerk’s Office
Lexington, Virginia

Dear Sir:

In reply to your letter of May 4th, which came during my absence from the, office, I beg to advise that the matter in reference to an appeal in the Atha Sorrells case was left to the Attorney General and the lawyer, Mr. Shewmake, employed by the Anglo Saxon Clubs. After going over carefully the evidence, in view of the fact that nothing new could be introduced,  they decided that it was unwise to appeal the case as the only evidence upon which we absolutely relied,  that of our records was set aside by Judge Holt, and we would not care to take the risk of having the Supreme Court render a similar decision.   Our hope is to drift along until the next legislature, and have them pass a bill prevent ing the marriage of the Indians with the whites.   In my judgement there are no native Indians in Virginia unmixed with negro blood…

Read the entire letter here.

The Choice

The New Yorker
2012-10-22

The Editors

The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s, read a benediction that began with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the segregation-era lamentation of American realities and celebration of American ideals. On that day in Washington—Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009—the blustery chill penetrated every coat, yet the discomfort was no impediment to joy. The police estimated that more than a million and a half people had crowded onto the Mall, making this the largest public gathering in the history of the capital. Very few could see the speakers. It didn’t matter. People had come to be with other people, to mark an unusual thing: a historical event that was elective, not befallen.

Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage…

….Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

“Maneuvers of Silence and the Task of ‘New Negro’ Womanhood”

Journal of Narrative Theory
Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2012
pages 46-68
DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2012.0006

Emily M. Hinnov, Assistant Dean of Curriculum & Lecturer of English
Granite State College, Concord, New Hampshire

Yes, she has arrived. Like her white sister, she is the product of profound and vital changes in our economic mechanism, wrought mainly by the World War and its aftermath. Along the entire gamut of social, economic and political attitudes, the New Negro Woman, with her head erect and spirit undaunted is resolutely marching toward the liberation of her people in particular and the human race in general.

— Editorial, The Messenger’s “New Negro Woman” issue (1923)
But I have no civilized articulation for the things I hate. I proudly love being a Negro woman; [it’s] so involved and interesting. We are the PROBLEM—the great national game of TABOO.

— Anne Spencer, qtd. in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927)
Here is a woman who tried to be decisive in extremis. She “spoke,” but women did not, do not, “hear” her. Thus she can be defined as a “subaltern”—a person without lines of social mobility.

— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Given the primitivist stereotypes projected upon African American women as oversexed, exotic creatures during the Harlem Renaissance era, contemporaneous poet Anne Spencer’s statement suggests that women writers’ doubly conscious performance of self must have been challenging (to say the least). With her comment about the state of “New Negro Womanhood” in mind, we might ask: to what extent were women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance successful in critiquing representations of race or gender within the context of that male-dominated literary and cultural movement? Forthright literary depictions of race, gender, and mobility in now canonical Harlem Renaissance works by Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston allow expression of varied facets of the African American woman’s experience during the early part of the twentieth century. Hurston’s women (and Hurston herself) refuse to be “tragically colored” and instead embrace the power inherent in their female sexuality—even using it, in part, remain perpetually mobile. For Larsen, however, the triple bind of double-consciousness, female sexuality, and white supremacy eventually disallows any true mobility for her fictional characters. When Larsen was accused of plagiarism in 1930, there were no legal charges, but her career never recovered from this blow. It seemed that “in America, whites might borrow from blacks with impunity, but Negro use of white materials is always suspect” (Douglas 105). As Ann Douglas writes, “The New Negro was a figure with few claims on mainline America’s attention, interest, or sympathy. If he insulted or displeased, he could be cut off, erased, without thought or regret” (106). It is difficult to determine how much mutuality between black and white artists and audiences could have existed in light of Larsen’s fate. She was “cut off” from what has developed into the African American literary canon essentially because she was a black female artist working within the confines of a racist and sexist culture. Thankfully, Larsen’s rediscovery in the 1980s, and the subsequent inclusion of her work in high school, college, and graduate school classrooms, enabled Larsen’s legacy to resist such erasure. Larsen and Hurston’s work has triumphantly evaded the threat of removal from the literary canon thanks to the gynocritical efforts of many feminist scholars, while other writers of the era still languish on the critical precipice of silence.

In this essay, I am especially interested in the ways in which two still largely ignored Harlem Renaissance women writers, Elise Johnson McDougald, in her more straightforward essay “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” and Marita O. Bonner, in her multigenred, haltingly-titled “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” use silence as a means to maneuver among the various identity positions that comprise the interstices of “New Negro Womanhood.” Placing them within the context of more widely known writers of their era such as Hurston and Larsen is edifying,…

The Crime of Being Married

Life Magazine
1966-03-18
pages 85-
Source: Library of Virginia

Photographs by Grey Villet

A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation

She is Negro, he is white, and they are married. This puts them in a kind of legal purgatory in their home state of Virginia, which specifically forbids interracial marriage.

Last week Mildred and Richard Loving lost one more round in a seven-year legal battle, when the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation law. Once again they and their three children were faced with the loss of home and livelihood…

Read the article here.

The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity

Virginia Health Bulletin
Virginia Department of Health
Volume XVI, Extra Number 2 (March 1924)
pages 1-4
Source: Pamphlet: Rockbridge County Clerk’s Correspondence, 1912–1943. Local Government Records Collection. The Library of Virginia, (Racial Integrity Act Documents) 12-1245-005

W. A. Plecker, M. D.
State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia

Senate Bill 219, To preserve racial integrity, passed the House March 8, 1924, and is now a law of the State.

This bill aims at correcting a condition which only the more thoughtful people of Virginia know the existence of.

It is estimated that there are in the State from 10,000 to 20,000, possibly more, near white people, who are known to possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.

In the past it has been possible for these people to declare themselves as white, or even to have the Court so declare them. Then they have demanded tho admittance of their children into the white schools, and in not a few cases have intermarried with white people.

In many counties they exist as distinct colonies holding themselves aloof from negroes, but not being admitted by the white people as of their race.

In any large gathering or school of colored people, especially in the cities, many will be observed who are scarcely distinguishable as colored.

These persons, however, are not white in reality, nor by the new definition of this law, that a white person is one with no trace of the blood of another race, except that a person with one-sixteenth of the American Indian, if there is no other race mixture, may be classed as white.

Their children are likely to revert to the distinctly negro type even when all apparent evidence of mixture has disappeared.

The Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics has been called upon within one month for evidence by two lawyers employed to assist people of this type to force their children into the white public schools, and by another employed by the school trustees of a district to prevent this action.

In each case evidence was found to show that either the people themselves or their connect ions were reported to our office to be of mixed blood.

Our Bureau has kept a watchful eye upon the situation, and has guarded the welfare of the State as far as possible with inadequate law and power. The condition has gone on, however, and is rapidly increasing in importance.

Unless radical measures are used to prevent it, Virginia and other parts of the Nation must surely in time go the way of all other countries in which people of two or more races have lived in close contact. With the exception of the Hebrew race, complete intermixture or amalgamation has been the inevitable result.

To succeed, the intermarriage of the white race with mixed stock must be made impossible. But that is not sufficient, public sentiment must be so aroused that intermixture out of wedlock will cease.

The public must be led to look with scorn and contempt upon the man who will degrade himself and do harm to society by such abhorrent deeds.

The Bureau of Vital Statistics, Clerks who issue marriage licenses, and the school authorities are the barriers placed by this law between the danger and the safety of the Commonwealth…

Read the entire article here.