Mixed Race Studies

Postracial Possibilities? Deconstructing Contemporary Discourse on Multiraciality

American College Personnel Association
ACPA 2012 Annual Convention
Louisville, Kentucky
2012-03-24 through 2012-03-28

Session Information:
Monday, 2012-03-26
16:15-17:15 EDT (Local Time)
Kentucky International Convention Center, 107

Marc Johnston
University of California, Los Angeles

Prema Chaudhari
Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund (APIASF)

Although multiracial individuals have been positioned as harbingers of a postracial era (especially after President Obama’s election) others critique the multiracial movement, with its large college student base, for reinforcing racial hierarchies (Spencer, 2011). This contradictory discourse, coupled with increasing suspicion of mixed heritage students doing “the race hustle” when seeking college admission/scholarships, presents challenges for addressing the needs of an increasingly diverse multiracial student population. By deconstructing this discourse we offer clarity and recommendations for future practice.

For more information, click here.

An Odd Sense of Color

Toulouse Street: Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans
2012-03-24

Mark Folse

OK, I just have to say it: it was Odd that three of the four panelists on the Tennessee Williams Festival panel New Orleans Free People of Color were white. The garrulous playwright John Guare tried to steal the show and not in a good way, and managed to annoy mystery writer Barbara Hambly when she disagreed with him but wouldn’t stop talking long enough to let her say her piece. Guare put his hand on the back of her chair at some point and it was funny to see Hambly leaning away from him to the point of tipping over.

Guare is the author of a successful Broadway play A Free Man of Color, Hanbly has penned a dozen mysteries featuring the Creole private detective Benjamin January, and the panel was rounded out by Daniel Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America and Gregory Osborne, a child of the Creole diaspora to Los Angeles in the post-World War II period and an expert on the subject who manages the archives at the New Orleans public library.

Sharfstein and Osborne thankfully stole the show away from Guare. Sharfstein’s book drew out of a a stint of volunteer work in South Africa where he met a Black woman who had been registered as Colored (of mixed race) by a census taken who was a friend of the woman’s father. He recounted a fascinating tale of a couple prosecuted f under South Carolina’s miscegenation laws, a charge from which they were exonerated after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that it was impossible to determine if the woman’s grandfather had himself been pure Black, which would have made her an octaroon and invalidated the marriage…

Read the entire article here.

S.66, the Native Hawaiian Health Care Improvement bill in the 112th Congress — Reauthorizing an ineffective but socially dangerous pork-barrel waste of taxpayer dollars

Hawaii Reporter
2011-03-07

Kenneth R. Conklin, Ph.D.

S.66 is a bill in the 112th Congress entitled “The Native Hawaiian Health Care Improvement Act,” introduced by Senator Dan Inouye on January 15, 2011. At the end of February the bill had no cosponsors—not even the figurehead champion of ethnic Hawaiians, Senator Dan Akaka.
 
The bill’s stated purpose is to re-authorize and expand previous legislation going back to 1988 which established Papa Ola Lokahi, the federally-funded ethnic Hawaiian healthcare system—one of the largest racially exclusionary programs for the benefit of ethnic Hawaiians. (There are more than a thousand Hawaiians-only programs; see “references”).
 
A hidden purpose of S.66 is to restate and enshrine language from the apology resolution of 1993 and the failed Akaka bill of 2000 to 2010. S.66 would thereby bolster the claim that the federal government already recognizes ethnic Hawaiians as an Indian tribe, thus strengthening legal defenses against 14th Amendment challenges to Hawaii’s plethora of racial entitlement programs…

…Some defenders of race-based medicine assert that ethnic Hawaiians are a unique people with unique social customs requiring a culture-based medical delivery system. But nearly all ethnic Hawaiians are of mixed race. They live, work, play, and pray right next to people of other races in Hawaii’s fully integrated multicultural society. Assimilated people don’t have unique social needs as a group, and should not be racially profiled or stereotyped that way. Hawaii has many first, second, or third generation U.S. citizens from countries which do indeed have very different cultures; but there are no demands for federally funded race-based or culture-based healthcare systems to serve them…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Grassroots Marketing in a Global Era: More Lessons from BiDil

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Volume 39, Issue 1, Spring 2011
pages 79–90
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2011.00552.x

Britt M. Rusert, External Humanities Fellow
Center for the Humanities
Temple University

Charmaine D. M. Royal, Associate Research Professor
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy; Department of African and African American Studies
Duke University

BiDil, a heart failure drug for African Americans, emerged five years ago as the first FDA approved drug targeted at a specific racial group. While critical scholarship and the popular media have meticulously detailed the history of BiDil from its inauspicious beginnings as a generic combination drug for the general population to its dramatic resuscitation as a racial medicine, the enthusiastic support shown by some African American interest groups has been too little understood, as has their argument that BiDil was an important response to race-based health disparities. In this essay, we show how the drugmaker, NitroMed, used the support it had solicited from black advocacy groups and community members to market BiDil as a unique “grassroots” pharmaceutical to the African American community. We go on to situate BiDil, which relied on a domestic, U.S.-centered conception of race, within the context of the global nature of both race and health disparities. Ironically, the grassroots angle of the BiDil case ultimately obscured the global crisis in health disparities. Furthermore, we argue that the grassroots model initiated by NitroMed should be taken note of, as it marks a potential avenue for the marketing of other drugs in the future.

Read the entire article here.

Is Race-Based Medicine Good for Us?: African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2008
pages 537–545
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2008.302.x

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

This article presents a preliminary framework for exploring the intersection of science and racial politics in the public debate about race-based pharmaceuticals, especially among African Americans. It examines the influence of three political approaches to race consciousness on evaluations of racial medicine and offers an alternative critique.

Read or purchase the article here.

Who is George Zimmerman?

The Washington Post
2012-03-23

Manuel Roig-Franzia

Tom Jackman

Darryl Fears

The shooter was once a Catholic altar boy — with a surname that could have been Jewish.

His father is white, neighbors say. His mother is Latina. And his family is eager to point out that some of his relatives are black.

There may be no box to check for George Zimmerman, no tidy way to categorize, define and sort the 28-year-old man whose pull of a trigger on a darkened Florida street is forcing America to once again confront its fraught relationship with race and identity. The victim, we know, was named Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in a hoodie. The rest becomes a matter for interpretation.

The drama in Florida takes on a kind of modern complexity. Its nuances show America for what it is steadily becoming, a realm in which identity is understood as something that cannot be summed up in a single word.

The images of Zimmerman — not just his face, but the words used to describe him — can confound and confuse. Why are they calling him white, wondered Paul Ebert, the Prince William County commonwealth’s attorney who knew Zimmerman’s mother, Gladys, from her days as an interpreter at the county courthouse. Zimmerman’s mother, Ebert knew, was Peruvian, and he thought of her as Hispanic…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

Sociology Compass
Volume 6, Issue 4, April 2012
pages 316–331
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00454.x

Nikki Khanna, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

In 2010, approximately nine million Americans self-identified with more than one race on the U.S. Census – a 32 percent increase since 2000. In this paper, I review the growing body of research on this population, with a particular focus on identifying and describing factors important in shaping their racial identities. Factors explored include: social norms regarding racial classification, socioeconomic status, racial composition of one’s neighborhood and community, region, socialization by family, age, cohort, genealogical locus of multiracial ancestry, nativity, and phenotype. I discuss the broader implications of findings to-date, with a particular focus on the ongoing scholarly discourse regarding the collection of race data in the United States.

See the teaching guide to this paper here.

Read or purchase the article here.

Morgan Goode: On Board with the Future of the Movement

The Bilerico Project
2012-03-21

Amy Andre, Project Contributor

If you haven’t heard of her already, BiNet USA board member Morgan Goode is a name for you to remember. At this year’s Creating Change conference, she co-led a workshop about mixed race issues that brought a crowd that was literally spilling out of the doors. I was in that room, and I saw the current and future leadership of the bi movement—and of the LGBT movement as a whole—sitting in there with me. Specifically, I saw it at the front of the room.

Morgan is a writer and photographer living in Brooklyn. She is a profo-queer and is affiliated with many different LGBT organizations, but her opinions are her own. She tells me that one day she is going to make good on her threat to do a photo project on white tourists photographing homeless people of color. In the meantime, she is an editor-at-large at prettyqueer.com and is also organizing the 6th Annual Amazingly Queer Race for Economic Justice. Her favorite pastimes include subverting the gaze, making people uncomfortably aware of their privilege and petting kitties.

I recently caught up with Morgan to learn more about where she’s going, where the movement is going, and how we can all get on board. Here’s what she had to say.

Amy: What inspired your workshop at Creating Change for mixed race attendees? How did it go for you? Do you plan to do more in the future?

Morgan: Mixed race issues have been on my mind since I can remember but that workshop actually came out of meeting fellow activist Ryan Li Dahlstrom at the 2010 BECAUSE Conference. The conference and the panel obviously focused on bi/pan/fluid issues, but Ryan Li and I really connected around our shared identities as mixed race queers. It wasn’t long before we knew we had to do a workshop that would give mixed race queer and trans folks the opportunity to come together and support each other as activists and allies. I think mixed race queer and trans folks are really hungry for that space to share our experiences and be heard…

Read the entire article here.

2010 Census Shows Asians are Fastest-Growing Race Group

United States Census Bureau
2012-03-21

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a 2010 Census brief, The Asian Population: 2010 [PDF], that shows the Asian population grew faster than any other race group over the last decade. The population that identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races, grew by 45.6 percent from 2000 to 2010, while those who identified as Asian alone grew by 43.3 percent. Both populations grew at a faster rate than the total U.S. population, which increased by 9.7 percent from 2000 to 2010.

Out of the total U.S. population, 14.7 million people, or 4.8 percent, were Asian alone. In addition, 2.6 million people, or another 0.9 percent, reported Asian in combination with one or more other races. Together, these two groups totaled 17.3 million people. Thus, 5.6 percent of all people in the United States identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races…

Read the entire press release here.

Family Tree’s Startling Roots

The New York Times
2012-03-19

Felicia Lee

Thirty-nine lashes “well laid” on her bare back and an extension of her indentured servitude was Elizabeth Banks’s punishment for “fornication & Bastardy with a negroe slave,” according to a stark June 20, 1683, court document from York County, Va. Through the alchemy of celebrity and genealogy, that record and others led to the recent discovery that Banks, a free white woman despite her servitude, was the paternal ninth great-grandmother of Wanda Sykes, the ribald comedian and actress.

More than an intriguing boldface-name connection, it is a rare find even in a genealogy-crazed era in which Internet sites like ancestry.com, with more than 14 million users, and the popular NBC program “Who Do You Think You Are?” play on that fascination. Because slavery meant that their black ancestors were considered property and not people, most African-Americans are able to trace their roots in this country only back to the first quarter of the 19th century.

“This is an extraordinary case and the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present,” said the historian Ira Berlin, a professor at the University of Maryland known for his work on slavery and African-American history.

Mary Banks, the biracial child born to Elizabeth Banks around 1683, inherited her mother’s free status, although she too was indentured. Mary appeared to have four children. There are many other unanswered questions, but the family grew, often as free people of color married or paired off with other free people of color.

Ms. Sykes’s family history was professionally researched for a segment of “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a new series that has its debut Sunday on PBS.

“The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched, ” said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. He was referring to the dozens of genealogies his researchers have unearthed for his television roots franchise, which began in 2006 with the PBS series “African-American Lives” and includes three other genealogy-inspired shows. Mr. Gates said he also checked Ms. Sykes’s family tree with historians, including Mr. Berlin…

…Johni Cerny, who is the chief genealogist for Mr. Gates’s television programs, noted that many African-Americans with white ancestry could trace their heritage beyond the 1600s to European ancestors. She said 85 percent of African-Americans have some European ancestry.

“The unique thing about Wanda is that she descends from 10 generations of free Virginia mulattos, which is more rare than descendants of mixed-race African-Americans who descend from English royalty,” Ms. Cerny wrote in an e-mail message.

More than 1,000 mixed-race children were born to white women in colonial Virginia and Maryland, but their existence has been erased from oral and written history, said Paul Heinegg, a respected lay genealogist and historian. Mr. Heinegg’s Web site, freeafricanamericans.com, features books and documents like tax lists that provide information about those families…

Read the entire article here.