Mixed Race Studies

Review of Fatal Invention, by Professor Dorothy Roberts

Race and the Law: A Critical Examination of Science, Law and the Construction of Race
2011-12-07

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

Professor Dorothy Roberts has recently released a vitally important book on issues of race and genetics, entitled Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Professor Roberts thoughtfully engages the modern legal and scientific preoccupation with genetic theories of race. Examining the “new racial science” in a variety of contexts, including pharmacology, biomedical research, immigration screening, criminal justice, ancestry testing, and genetic surveillance, Professor Roberts deconstructs the myth of intrinsic racial difference through a lively use of historical and scientific sources. While the entire book is a massive achievement in the burgeoning field of genetics and race, a few insights stand out as particularly compelling. First, Professor Roberts makes a convincing argument that it is problematic to label the racial science of yore “pseudoscience.” It is quite tempting to ridicule both the old and new forms of racial science as ignorant and biased attempts to valorize racial hierarchy. Professor Roberts notes, however, that doing so allows modern scientists to distinguish their “objective” study of biological racial difference from the ridiculous “pseudoscience” of the past. Professor Roberts observes that “what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced.” (27-28). In other words, we must be careful to briskly dismiss the “racial science” of the 19^th Century as pseudoscience, lest we fall into the trap (comforting to some) of believing that current genetic examinations of racial difference are somehow distinctly free from unsound empirical assumptions and implicit bias. As Professor Roberts argues, “[t]he burning scientific questions of each period have been framed and answered in terms of race not because rational scientific inquiry compelled it, but because race was presumed to be an essential biological category.” (28)…

Read the entire review here.

The Future Is Now: What PR Pros and Marketers Need to Know About the “Mixed Mindset”

The Huffington Post
2012-10-17

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Don’t believe the hype! Multiracials are not new. They are the products of racial blending of various groups—beginning with Native Americans and European settlers–throughout US history. Multiracial identities have been leveraged for social and anti-social purposes since the dawn of print media. Even in today’s networked world we are still figuring out how this “full color” demographic fits into a historically black-and-white racial context.

Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century and to the era of the “Mixed Mindset,” which is highly mediated, intensely personal, and increasingly political. On one hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step backward – into the history of mixing that predates a black-white only mentality. On the other hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step forward—it’s about everyday contact and practical encounters that acknowledge racial categories, disturb racial common sense, and create a mindset within which it is okay to name and question racial meanings. The logical end of the mixed mindset is a space where many racial categories and meanings can exist simultaneously, even if they’re contradictory, making it more difficult to maintain neat and independent groupings.

Here’s how that works. The Mixed Mindset is about answering questions like “who are you?” and “what do you need?” Here are a few facts about who today’s multiracials are based on how they answered the 2010 US Census.

But to keep things moving, let’s turn our attention to what today’s multiracials are saying they need. I call these needs the three As: Adaptation, Acknowledgment and Affection…

Read the entire article here.

Millionaire to Use Money Against Racial Inetermingling

The Natchez News and Courier
Natchez, Mississippi
1949-11-13

James McLean

NATCHEZ. Miss, Nov. 12. Bald, rugged George W. Armstrong is determined to make his money talk loud and long against “racial mongrelization”.

That’s a term the 84-year-old millionaire uses often in voicing opposition to intermingling of Jews, Gentiles and negroes In the same schools.

Armstrong, who says he isn’t sure how much money he has, splashed into headlines when money-poor Jefferson Military College spurned his $50,000,000 endowment offer (in mineral land rights) to teach “superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American races”.

Later he dismissed the furore his offer created as a “tempest in a teapot”, said the value of his holdings had been exaggerated, and that although he approves the doctrine of white supremacy, he had not made a formal request that the college teach it…

…Governor J. Strom Thurmond, the states rights candidate, repudiated his support, he explained. “I’m not anti-Semitic,” Armstrong said, in his slow, lip-pursing way of talking. “We’ve got some awfully good Jews here in Natchez and I like them.” But he assails Jews, whites and negroes going to school together because it “mongrelizes the American race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Afraid of the Dark

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-10-15

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

Reports of rapid demographic change in favor of people of color in the U.S. seem to have caused a reaction among many whites bordering on panic. Explosive increases in participation in white nationalist groups, the proliferation of vigilante border patrols, and the return of overt racism in mainstream politics all smell like fear to me. This reaction got me to thinking, why? Why are they so afraid of the possibility of becoming a minority?
 
Here’s my take. But first, a reality check. White fears are of becoming a minority are over-blown. As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, whiteness has shifted to envelope those formerly deemed non-white many times throughout history. The Irish weren’t always considered white, nor were Jews. They were included among whites in order to maintain white advantage.
 
As racial demographics shift, so-called white Hispanics and certain Asian American ethnic minorities are likely to be enveloped by whiteness. Whether we think of ourselves as white or not, accepting the privileges already being extended to us—being cast as the “good immigrants” or buying into the idea that Asians are a “model minority” relative to so-called “problem minorities,” for instance—will put us on the wrong side of the color line. And when the stakes are so high, we can hope folks won’t take the bribe, but I wouldn’t advise betting on it.
 
So white folks can rest easy. Armageddon is probably still a way off…

Read the entire article here.

Three Winton Triangle Presentations at Greensboro conference.

Chowan Discovery Group
2012-10-15

Marvin T. Jones

The Chowan Discovery presentations about the Winton Triangle, its Civil War history and Chowan Discovery historical markers attracted many enthusiastic attendees at the annual conference of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society (AAGHS) in Greensboro. Included in the audiences were history professionals and authors.
 
One of the joys of having three presentations at the conference was that the reputation of each lecture fed the attendance of the next.  This also gave more people the opportunity to hear about our work.  And then there are those increased sales of Carolina Genesis and the CDG mugs.  Hawking those mugs are fun, whether they sell or not – and they sold.  I enjoyed all of questions and comments.

Among the participants, I saw growing awareness about tri-racial people and free people of color in North Carolina at the conference.  This is an important trend for our mission…

Read the entire article here.

In the future, we will be…: Priyank Shah at TEDx Columbus

TEDx Columbus
2012-10-14

Priyank Shah, Demographer, Futurist, Teacher

Dr. Shah is a demographer and a very enthusiastic one. He’ll begin our day with baseline picture of where we are headed as a population so we will better understand ourselves as a society. But no worries, you’ll be entertained with his take on these trends, as he himself is a living example of one of the most prolific ones.

Census Bureau Establishes National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations

United States Census Bureau
News Release
CB12-195
2012-10-12

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the establishment of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations. The Census Bureau has also named the committee’s members and leadership.

The National Advisory Committee will advise the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau’s programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, will advise the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race and ethnicity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other populations.

“We expect that the expertise of this committee will help us meet emerging challenges the Census Bureau faces in producing statistics about our diverse nation,” said Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau’s acting director. “By helping us better understand a variety of issues that affect statistical measurement, this committee will help ensure that the Census Bureau continues to provide relevant and timely statistics used by federal, state and local governments as well as business and industry in an increasingly technologically oriented society.”

The [32] members are:…

Read the entire press release here.

Under the skin

Havard University Gazette
2012-10-12

Aaron Lester, Harvard Correspondent

Deep experience informs panelists’ views on mixed-race life in U.S.

When Carmen Fields’ future husband asked her to meet his mother, Fields refused. “No way. I didn’t want to be the reason she opened up the front door and dropped the Easter ham,” she told a Harvard audience on Wednesday.
 
An African-American whose spouse is white, Fields knows from experience that life in the United States holds unique challenges for mixed-race couples and their children.
 
Fields and fellow panel members — among them College junior Eliza Nguyen —addressed some of those issues during a discussion called “American Masala: Race Mixing, the Spice of Life or Watering Down Cultures?” at the Student Organization Center at Hilles.

Nguyen, president of the Harvard Half Asian People’s Association (HAPA), distinctly remembers the moment it dawned on her that she was neither white, like her mother, nor Vietnamese, like her father. “I was in the fourth grade, taking a standardized test. And they had that box you were supposed to check off.” There was no box for biracial, and she was instructed to check only one. Nguyen, perplexed, asked her teacher which box to check. She was the only nonwhite student in her school. “Asian, of course,” her teacher told her. “I was confused,” said Nguyen. “Who am I?”…

Read the entire article here.

Student-Organized Conference To Focus on ‘Mixed-Race Experience’

Havard University Gazette
2000-04-13

Ken Gewertz, Gazette Staff

For many of us, food can be a powerful reminder of who we are and where we come from.

But the foods that Rebecca Weisinger ’02 remembers from her family dinner table were a little different from most.

“Sometimes my mom would make Chinese dishes and then add potatoes to them, or she would serve sauerkraut on the side,” Weisinger said

This combination of cuisines seemed natural in Weisinger’s family because her mother is a Chinese-American from Hawaii and her father a German-American from Wisconsin. The two met when they were students at M.I.T.

This makes Weisinger a mixed-race American, one of a rapidly expanding group that has been receiving considerable attention of late. According to one estimate, mixed-race births are increasing at a rate 260 times as fast as all births combined. In some urban centers, one in every six babies is multiracial. Census experts estimate that by 2050, there will be over 27 million biracial and multiracial Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Black Pride, Democratic Politics: Can They Be Separated in Blacks’ Support of Obama?

The Associated Press
2012-10-13

Jesse Washington, National Writer, Race and Ethnicity

Surviving slavery, segregation and discrimination has forged a special pride in African-Americans. Now some are saying this hard-earned pride has become prejudice in the form of blind loyalty to President Barack Obama.

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he’s black? If race is just one factor in blacks’ support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks’ support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he’s white?…

Read the entire article here.