Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation Ball

The Atlantic
2011-02-01

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

Reporters should stop writing these beiging of America stories, and listen to Jamelle Boiue:

The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants.

Of course, the American racial landscape goes beyond white/black/Latino/Asian. Which is why it’s important to understand the significance of a black/non-black divide. On nearly every measure—from income and education to housing and health—the distance between blacks and everyone else is large and enduring. Upwardly mobile immigrant groups have always counterpoised themselves against the descendants of slaves in an effort to attain the privileges of whiteness. This is a simplified analysis, but my guess is that the dynamic will remain, with a few alternations. Some ethnic immigrants may never “become” white, but since blackness retains this social stigma, it’s very likely we’ll understand them as non-black, which in practice, is the same.

This is a depressing perspective. But it’s not only the likely truth about our future, it’s the truth about our past. The first thing to understand is that race, as we know it, is an invention and a re-invention. You need not go back but a century to see people referring to the “Irish Race”  or the “Italian Race.”  or the “Hebrew Race.” Indeed, by the standards of the 19th century racialism, today’s “white people” are an unholy, mongrel mix.

And so it has long been with “blacks,” an ethnic group whose members range in appearance from Beyoncé and Charlie Rangel to Yaphet Kotto and India Arie. I love my family. But the photos from our Christmas Eve dinners immediately reveal that the notion that we’re all of the same “race” is not so much a statement of phenotype, but of culture and sociology. It should not be forgotten that both America’s president and First Lady have “white” ancestry.

Well-meaning neophytes often suggest that if people of different “races” screwed each other, we’d all look the same, and our problems would disappear. Unfortunately, such magical thinking underestimates the abiding complexity of human thought.In fact people of different “races,” have been screwing for over two millenia. Our response—over the past 500 years—has been to invent more races…

Read the entire article here.

Art Review: A Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)

The New York Times
2012-01-26

Martha Schwendener

What’s the difference between a political activist and a political hero? It’s often a matter of intention versus accident. Within the civil rights movement Rosa Parks is seen as an activist: She trained at the Highlander Folk School for social justice in Tennessee, and her refusal to give up her seat on a crowded bus was the catalyst for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed in “The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet” as heroes who fell into history by accident.

he Loving story is well known in the annals of American civil rights history. It began on July 11, 1958, when a Virginia county sheriff and two deputies entered the Lovings’ bedroom at 2 a.m. and arrested them for violating the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage. (Or you might say it began several years earlier, when Richard Loving, a white teenager, met Mildred Jeter, a girl of African-American and American Indian descent, six years his junior.)

When, at 18, Mildred became pregnant, the couple decided to marry in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal. They were arrested five weeks later when they returned to Virginia and tried to live as husband and wife, kicking off a nine-year legal odyssey…

Read the entire article here.

Race Remixed?

Living Anthropologically
2011-03-28

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

The 2000 U.S. Census was the first in modern times allowing respondents to check off more than one box for the mandatory race question. In 2010, the number of people checking more than one box grew enormously. At the New York Times, Susan Saulny investigates “the growing number of mixed-race Americans” in a series called “Race Remixed.”

This post uses Saulny’s numbers to do a reality check. There may be some interesting things going on with regard to personal attitudes about racial identification, but in terms of how race really matters–economic and political inequalities, or structural racism–the trends look more like retrenchment.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is best seen through economic and political inequalities. The average white household holds ten to twenty times the wealth of the average black household. This gap is growing, as reported in “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold” (2010). And despite Barack Obama, black political power is extremely limited:…

…Given these present inequalities–which by some measures are increasing, not decreasing–I don’t find it very interesting that “many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity,” the subject of Saulny’s first article “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above.” Personal feelings about race and identity could influence economic-political inequality, but it will not be automatic. There are already a lot of white people who say “race doesn’t matter anymore.” They are often the same people who ask “why do all the black people sit together?” or complain about affirmative action and “reverse racism.” Statements of “race doesn’t matter anymore” or rejecting color lines often are claims to a more enlightened-progressive state, better than benighted previous generations, or people of color, who are tagged as “more racist.” Saulny does briefly mention the “pessimists” who think the emphasis on mixing might “lead to more stratification.” She also writes “it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.” Still, the vast bulk of the article is about new multiracial college students celebrating mixture.

Saulny’s second article, “Black and White and Married in the Deep South” is more interesting. It is certainly worth investigating the rise of black-white marriages in places like Mississippi, where such unions were illegal 50 years ago, and where “a black man could face mortal danger just being seen with a woman of another race.” This is not to say southern states are “more racist” than northern states, which still boast the most segregated cities in the United States. Northern states have usually been able to get by on economic-geographic segregation instead of explicit legal sanction or lethal violence, although there has been plenty of legal sanction and lethal violence in northern states (see “A Dream Still Deferred” on Detroit). In any case, it is actually difficult to tell what is going on in Mississippi–is there really an increase, or are people just checking off different boxes in 2010 than they did in 2000?

The question remains as to whether inter-racial marriages can alter the structure of economic and political inequality. On this question, the graphic of “Who is Marrying Whom” is very enlightening. The numbers hint at three points I elaborate below: first, white people and the white-black household wealth gap are not going away; second, the “Hispanic” category shows signs of bifurcating into white and black; third, Asian-Americans have more securely become “probationary whites”:

What matters here is how the changing construction of whiteness intersects with the maintenance of a white/black divide that structures all race relations in the United States. Whether significant numbers of the people now called Latinos or Asian Americans–or the significant numbers of their known “mixed” offspring with whites–will become probationary whites and thus reinforce the structure is an important indicator of the future of race relations in the United States. (Trouillot 2003:151, Global Transformations)

White people are not going away

In 2009, approximately 95% of white people married each other, a figure that rises to 97% if “Hispanic (white)” is included. About five whites out of every thousand married a black person, or about 0.5%. That’s not going to change the wealth gap. Indeed, I suspect the numbers of white-black intermarriages decrease as one moves up the class ladder, but the overall number is so miniscule that further tracking is unnecessary.

There is certainly more white-black intermixture than registered by official marriage numbers. As “Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths” reveals, the most common multi-racial combination chosen is white-and-black. This may simply be recognizing a long history of intermixture: “America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew” (Brent Staples, 1999, “The Real American Love Story“). However, mixing has not altered overall white-black disparities. White people, white privilege, white-black wealth gap: no reason from the 2010 numbers to believe there will be much change….

Read the entire article here.

African and American

Science Magazine
Volume 17, Number 418 (1891-02-06)
page 78
DOI: 10.1126/science.ns-17.418.78

At a meeting of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, Jan. 24, Mr. D. R. Keys, M.A., read on behalf of Mr. A. F. Chamberlain, M.A., fellow in Clark University, Worcester, Mass., a valuable and interesting paper entitled “African and American: the Contact of the Negro and the Indian.” He said that the history of the negro on the continent of America has been studied from various points of view, but in every case with regard to his contact with the white race. It must therefore be a new as well as an interesting inquiry, when we endeavor to find out what has been the effect, of the contact of the foreign African with the native American stocks. Such an investigation must extend its lines of research into questions of physiology, psychology, philology, sociology, and mythology.

The writer took up the history of the African negro in America in connection with the various Indian tribes with whom he has come into contact. He referred to the baseless theories of pre-Columbian negro races in America, citing several of these in illustration. He then took up the question ethnographically, beginning with Canada. The. chief contact between African and American in Canada appears to have taken place on one of the Iroquois reservations near Brantford. A few instances have been noticed elsewhere in the various provinces, but they do not appear to have been very numerous. In New England, especially in Massachusetts, considerable miscegenation appears to have taken place, and in some instances it would appear that the Indians were bettered by the admixture of negro blood which they received. The law which held that children of Indian women were born free appears to have favored the taking of Indian wives by negroes.

On Long Island the Montauk and Shinnacook Indians have a large infusion of African blood, dating from the times of slavery in the Northern States. The discovery made by Dr. Brinton, that certain words (numerals) stated by the missionary Pyrlaeus to be Nanticoke Indian were really African (probably obtained from some runaway slave or half-breed), was referred to. In Virginia some little contact of the two races has occurred, and some of the free negroes on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake peninsula show evident traces of Indian blood. The State of Florida was for a long t1ime the home of the Seminoles, who, like the Cherokees, held negroes in slavery, One of their chiefs was said, in 1835, to have had no fewer than one hundred negroes. Here considerable miscegenation has taken place, although the authorities on the subject seem to differ considerably on questions of fact. In the Indian Territory, to which Cherokees, Seminoles, and other Indian tribes of the Atlantic region have been removed, further contact has occurred, and the study of the relations of the Indian and negro in the Indian Territory, when viewed from at sociological standpoint, are of great interest, to the student of history and ethnography. The negro is regarded in a different light by different tribes of American aborigines. After mnentioning a few isolated instances of cointact in other parts of the United States, the writer proceeded to discuss the relations of African and Indian mythology, coming to about the same conclusion as Professor T. Crane, that the Indian bas probably borrowed more from the negro than has the negro from the Indian. The paper concluded with calling the attention of the members of the institute to the necessity of obtaining with all possible speed information regarding (1) the result of intermarriage of Indian an negro, the physiology of the offspring of such unions; (2) the social .status of the negro among the various Indian tribes, the Indian as a slaveholder; (3) the influence of Indian upon negro and of negro upon Indian mythology.

Read the entire article here.

Normal Families Facing Unique Challenges: The Psychosocial Functioning of Multiracial Couples, Parents and Children

The New School Psychology Bulletin
Volume 9, Number 1 (2011)
Print ISSN: 1931-793X; Online ISSN: 1931-7948

Joshua Wilt
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University

The number of interracial couples in the United States has increased rapidly since anti-miscegenation laws were repealed in 1967. Early stereotypes conceptualized interracial couples as pathological, highlighting the importance of research addressing the psychosocial functioning of these couples and multiracial families. This article provides a summary of research on the psychosocial functioning of interracial couples, multiracial children, and parent-child relationships in multiracial families. Results across these domains suggest that multiracial families are not pathological but rather that they are normal families faced with unique challenges. Counseling options to support multiracial families navigate such challenges are discussed. Themes emerging from research on the psychosocial functioning of multiracial families are identified and avenues for future research are suggested.

Read the entire article here.

Lecture Series. Multiculturalism and Miscegenation in the Construction of Latin America’s Cultural Identity
 
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
101 International Studies Building
910 S. Fifth Street, Champaign, Illinois
2012-02-23, 12:00 CST (Local Time)

Eduardo Coutihno, Distinguished Lemann Visiting Professor of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Professor of Comparative Literature,  Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

For more information, click here.

AP Exclusive: Many resist census race labels

Miami Herald
2012-01-31

Hope Yen, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — When the 2010 census asked people to classify themselves by race, more than 21.7 million – at least 1 in 14 – went beyond the standard labels and wrote in such terms as “Arab,” “Haitian,” “Mexican” and “multiracial.”

The unpublished data, the broadest tally to date of such write-in responses, are a sign of a diversifying America that’s wrestling with changing notions of race.

The figures show most of the write-in respondents are multiracial Americans or Hispanics, many of whom don’t believe they fit within the four government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaska Native. Because Hispanic is defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos used the “some other race” category to establish a Hispanic racial identity.

“I have my Mexican experience, my white experience but I also have a third identity if you will that transcends the two, a mixed experience,” said Thomas Lopez, 39, a write-in respondent from Los Angeles. “For some multiracial Americans, it is not simply being two things, but an understanding and appreciation of what it means to be mixed.”

Lopez, 39, the son of a Mexican-American father and a German-Polish mother, has been checking multiple race boxes since the Census Bureau first offered the option in 2000. Marking off the categories of Hispanic-Mexican ethnicity, “other” Hispanic ethnicity and a non-Hispanic white race, Lopez opted in 2010 to go even further. He checked “some other race” and scribbled in a response: “multiracial.”…

…Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, predicted a wider range of responses and blurring of racial categories over the next 50 years as interracial marriage becomes increasingly common. Still, he said racial categories will continue to be relevant so long as racial gaps persist in educational attainment, income, jobs and housing.

“These histories of exclusion, discrimination, and racism are central to the identities of several minority populations,” he said.

Read the entire artice here.

Passing: How posing as white became a choice for many black Americans

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
2003-10-26

Monica L. Haynes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The young unkempt woman still in her pajamas shuffled into her 8 a.m. college psychology class and sat down next to Barbara Douglass.

“I’m sure glad there are no niggers in this class ’cause I can smell them a mile away,” the young woman declared.

But Douglass, who lives in Wilkinsburg, is a 53-year-old black woman. She could pass for white but she has never tried, she said.

“Growing up, I knew of people who did, and I was even instructed not to say, at that time, that they were colored. In order to get their jobs, they had to say they were white.”

The new film “The Human Stain,” based on a novel of the same name by Philip Roth, provides a glimpse into the world of blacks so fair they can live undetected among whites.

Thelma Marshall knows that routine.

During the 1950s and early ’60s, she did what her mother before her had done. What her grandmother and aunts had done.

She passed for white.

“One time I told a woman I was black, colored in those days,” Marshall recalled. “She said, ‘You won’t get the job unless you pass for white.’ ”

So that’s what Marshall did.

“I passed for white on lots of jobs,” she said. “I had to be white to get the jobs.” …

…”We are a child of God first. We are human beings first,” Douglass remembered her mother saying.

In fifth grade, she learned that the United States is a melting pot, and she declared to her mother that she would be a melting pot.

Her mother decided it was the perfect definition, seeing as how her ancestors were Cherokee, black, Dutch, German and Irish.

Maybe all blacks would have defined themselves that way given the chance. Since black people first came to the New World in 1619, they’ve mingled and mixed with every race and ethnic group here.

It is not just the fair-skinned blacks who can lay claim to that melting pot definition. Those blacks who have the mark of Africa in their features and skin tone also have multicultural ancestry. They just can’t pass.

Most blacks were never afforded the luxury of defining themselves. After the Civil War, Southern whites, not wanting this swirling of races to get out of hand and seeking to keep the white race as pure and powerful as possible, instituted a rule that anyone with “one drop” of black blood was black.

That spurred even more fair-skinned blacks to cross over and escape Jim Crow laws that kept blacks in the shackles of second-class citizenship…

Read the entire article here.

Has ‘whiteness studies’ run its course at colleges?

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-30

Alex P. Kellogg, Special to CNN

Among university departments that study African-American history, Latin American or Chicano cultures and all varieties of ethnicities and nationalities, there’s a relatively obscure field of academic inquiry: whiteness studies.

While there are no standalone departments dedicated to the field, interdisciplinary courses on the subject quietly gained traction on college and university campuses nationwide in the 1990s. Today, there are dozens of colleges and universities, including American University in Washington, D.C., and University of Texas at Arlington, that have a smattering of courses on the interdisciplinary subject of whiteness studies.

The field argues that white privilege still exists, thanks largely to structural and institutional racism, and that the playing field isn’t level, and whites benefit from it. Using examples such as how white Americans tend not to be pulled over by the police as often as blacks and Latinos, or how lenders targeted blacks and Latinos for more expensive, subprime loans during the recent U.S. housing crisis, educators teach how people of different races and ethnicities often live very different lives.

Most of the instructors specialize in sociology, philosophy, political science and history, most of them are liberal or progressive, and most of them are, in fact, white. Books frequently used as textbooks in these courses include “How the Irish Became White” by Noel Ignatiev, an American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of American history at Princeton; but the field has its roots in the writings of black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and author James Baldwin.

In the past, detractors have said the field itself demonizes people who identify as white.

But today, academics who teach the classes say they face a fresh hurdle, one that has its roots on the left instead of the right: the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president.

“Having Obama is, in a curious way, putting us behind,” says Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania…

…These academics generally agree that the end of slavery, the dismantling of Jim Crow and the election of a black president are all clear signs that things are getting better.

But that progress has slanted the mainstream narrative too far into positive terrain, they argue, leaving many to think that racial equality has arrived. Even some young students of color are more skeptical than ever before.

That’s dangerous, they argue.

“The typical college student will always say ‘What racial inequality? Look at the White House,’” says Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology department at La Salle University in Philadelphia. “I have to first convince them that inequality exists.”…

…Charles Mills says he, too, has a fresh sense that many faculty and students are more skeptical of his work since Obama’s election. Mills is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His first book, “The Racial Contract,” is widely taught in courses on U.S. college campuses.

Mills, like other scholars who study whiteness, argues in his courses that whites in particular have a self-interest in seeing the world as post-racial. In that world, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. The advantage of this perspective, he says, is that it allows your success in life not to be determined by race, but by how hard you work.

“Obama’s election meant to many white Americans that we’re in a post-racial epoch,” says Mills, even if most indicators show that we’re not…

Read the entire article here.

The Loving Story – HBO Screening Event

Multiracial Network Blog
2012-01-24

It is a rare occasion for Marc Johnston, MRN Chair, and Heather Lou, MRN Incoming Chair, to find themselves in the same city outside of the annual ACPA Convention. So what do these two fun-loving higher education and student affairs administrators choose to do when they are reunited in the City of Angels? They attend the amazing HBO Screening of Nancy Buirski’s The Loving Story (2011) at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, of course!

On a recent evening in LA, Marc and Heather settled into their seats to view the story of Richard and Mildred Loving—an interracial couple arrested and exiled from Virginia in 1958 for violating anti-miscegenation laws. The documentary captured footage of the couple’s relationship, family, challenges, and triumphs—including the monumental 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws in the 15 states that still had them, legalizing interracial marriage across all of the United States.

After viewing The Loving Story, Marc and Heather wanted to share their personal thoughts on the documentary, along with potential implications for higher education…

Read the entire article here.