Mixed Race Studies

The Racial Paradox of Tribal Citizenship

American Studies
Volume 46, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall-Winter 2005)
pages 163-185
Indigenous Studies Today
Volume 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)

Steve Russell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Indiana University

As I begin to write this my tribal election season is at hand. As usual, all the candidates claim to be “traditional.” This is a claim easy to make and hard to disprove. What is traditional? We are now over half Christian, and more of us speak English than speak Cherokee. Many of the accoutrements of contemporary identity have roots in recent times: frybread, ribbon shirts, jingle dresses, powwows. On the other hand, some items of earlier provenance, such as blowguns and turbans, surprise some modern Cherokees. We date our first written laws from 1808. We have lived under a series of written constitutions, the longest lasting those of 1839 and 1975. Is written law traditional? More to the point of this article, is the current Cherokee law of citizenship, a race-based law like that of most American Indian tribes, traditional?

I hope to show that the idea of “race” is, in Partha Chatterjee’s phrase describing nationalism, “a derivative discourse.” It is not only derived from European colonial discourse, but it has done and continues to do harm to Indian nations on a scale similar to that of smallpox and measles. Pathogens are typically ranked by body count, and so my task here will be to demonstrate that race theory is an Old World pathogen that diminishes the numbers of American Indians on a scale that invites comparison to “guns, germs, and steel.” It is perhaps instructive to read Chatterjee’s words and substitute “race” for “nationalism”:

Nationalism as an ideology is irrational, narrow, hateful and destructive. It is not an authentic product of any of the non-European civilizations which, in each particular case, it claims as its classical heritage. It is wholly a European export to the rest of the world. It is also one of Europe’s most pernicious exports, for it is not a child of reason or liberty, but of their opposite: of fervent romanticism, of political messianism whose inevitable consequence is the annihilation of  freedom.

Can “race” properly be considered, like nationalism, an ideology? According to the American Anthropological Association:

. . . physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor. . . . As they were constructing U.S. society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each “race,” linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians…. Ultimately, “race” as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere.

The AAA Statement refers in a part not quoted above to the “Great Chain of Being” theory as the philosophical basis for ranking people by race, a religious theory that looked to early anthropology for scientific support. Cultural anthropology was in turn supported in its endorsement of racial hierarchy by disciplines thought to be more empirical in content: archaeology and physical anthropology. Outside of Indian law, the primary postbellum legal expression of the “Great Chain of Being” was anti-miscegenation law, representing a legal endorsement of racist ideology that was not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967…

Read the entire article here.

Bearing the burden of whiteness: the implications of racial self-identification for multiracial adolescents’ school belonging and academic achievement

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 747-773
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.628998

Ruth Burke
Department of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

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

Previous literature on racial self-identification among multiracials demonstrates that self-identification differs by context. Moreover, among multiracial adolescents, identity, usually measured in school, is correlated with achievement. In addition, a few studies have indicated that for half-white, half-minority adolescents, school achievement falls in between the achievements of their monoracial counterparts. Using the in-school and in-home components of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the relationship between racial self-identification and school belonging and achievement. We find that among black/white and Asian/white adolescents, adolescents who self-identify as white are particularly disadvantaged in school, reporting lower grade point averages (GPA) than their multiracial counterparts. Our conclusions suggest that multiple contextual measures of self-identification better capture the relationship between racial identification and academic achievement among multiracial adolescents.

Read or purchase the article here.

Resistance, Silence, and Placées: Charles Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet

American Literature
Volume 79, Number 1 (March 2007)
pages 85-112
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2006-072

Stephanie Li, Assistant Professor of English
University of Rochester

In 1850, Mary Walker, a free woman of color, filed a petition in the Fourth District Court of New Orleans to enslave herself and her nine-year-old daughter to George Whittaker. Commenting on a similar case involving the voluntary enslavement of another free woman of color, the New Orleans Daily Picayune asserted that Amelia Stone “preferred” the liberty, security, and protection of slavery here, to the degradation of free niggerdom among the Abolitionists at the North, with whom she would be obliged to dwell, and in preference to which, she has sought the ‘chains’ of slavery.” With only this specious rationale, a political barb aimed at antislavery Northerners, there exists no historical record to explain Stone’s and Walker’s drastic choice. Nevertheless, we can offer some conjectures concerning the motives of women of color who sought enslavement. Throughout the nineteenth century, free people of color living in New Orleans were subjected to waves of discrimination that culminated in the ratification of laws restricting their mobility and basic liberties. They were required to carry proof of their freedom at all times, and their right of assembly was severely limited. An 1842 law required recently arrived free blacks to leave Louisiana. Had Walker been new to the state, enslavement would have been the only way for her to remain. Even if she had been born in Louisiana, she might have preferred the stability of enslavement to the troubles and insecurities of freedom.

In giving up her liberty, Walker made one final independent choice; she chose George Whitaker as her master. Perhaps she had some knowledge of his character and social position that led her to entrust her life and that of her daughter to him. He may have been her former…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Value of Intersectional Comparative Analysis to the “Post-Racial” Future of Critical Race Theory: A Brazil-U.S. Comparative Case Study

Connecticut Law Review
Volume 43, Issue 5 (July 2011)
pages 1407-1437

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

This Commentary Article aims to illustrate the value of comparative law to the jurisprudence of Critical Race Theory (CRT), particularly with reference to the CRT project of deconstructing the mystique of “postracialism.” The central thesis of the Article is that the dangerous seductions of a U.S. ideology of “post-racialism” are more clearly identified when subject to the comparative law lens. In particular, a comparison to the Brazilian racial democracy version of “post-racialism” is an instructive platform from which to assess the advisability of promoting post-racial analyses of U.S. racial inequality. In Part I the Article introduces the value of comparative law to the future development of CRT. Part II provides an overview of Brazilian “post-racial” discourse. Part III then details the quantitative and qualitative indicators of racial discrimination and intersectional race and gender discrimination in Brazil. Part IV focuses upon the Brazilian legal opposition to post-racialism as evidenced by a recent intersectional anti-discrimination case. The Article then concludes that the critical comparative examination of the Brazilian version of “post-racialism” assists in elucidating the concrete counterintuitive harms of a “post-racial” perspective in the United States.

ARTICLE CONTENTS

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. BRAZILIAN “POST-RACIAL” RACIAL DISCOURSE
• III. QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE INDICATORS OF DISCRIMINATION IN BRAZIL
• IV. THE INTERSECTIONAL POSITION OF AFRO-BRAZILIAN WOMEN
• V. THE INTERSECTIONAL CASE OF TIRIRICA

I. INTRODUCTION

In her article in this volume, Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw turns her attention to considering the “contemporary significance of CRT’s trajectory in light of today’s ‘post-racial’ milieu.” Post-racialism is characterized by a public policy agenda of colorblind universalism rooted in the assertion that society has transcended racism. Post-racialism incorporates colorblindness but is distinct in extending beyond the colorblindness retreat from race as primarily an aspiration for eliminating racism. In contrast, the rhetoric of post-racialism contends that racism has already been largely transcended.

In Crenshaw’s consideration of post-racialism she notes that the present challenge to Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to preclude an “overinvestment in the symbolic significance” of post-racialism as a racial frame that disregards manifestations of racial inequality in its celebration of formal equality and a colorblindness that equates the articulation of racial concerns with an act of racism. Crenshaw convincingly demonstrates the fallacy of post-racialism and the simultaneous difficulty in dispelling it, given the contemporary racial fatigue and public desire to foreclose any discussions of race. To combat the Obama mania that Crenshaw notes sanctions all talk of racism as a racial grievance itself, Crenshaw urges CRT to develop a broader project “to remap the racial contours in the way that people see the world that we live in—then in so doing . . . create a new set of possibilities for racial-justice advocates.” Crenshaw urges that the “next turn in CRT should be decidedly interdisciplinary, intersectional and cross-institutional.” In this Commentary Article, I would like to suggest that the next turn in CRT also focus more deeply on comparative law.

Because the post-racialism racial frame casts a veil which hinders the ability to see racial disparities and understand them as connected to various forms of racial discrimination, what is needed is a mechanism for refocusing the U.S. racial lens. Comparative law can make a useful contribution in the effort to refocus the racial lens. A key insight from comparative law is its “potential for sharpening, deepening and expanding the lenses through which one perceives law,” because of its ability to “challenge entrenched categorizations and fundamental assumptions in one’s own and others’ legal cultures.” Indeed, anthropologists have long noted that we cannot fully see and appreciate our own “culture” until we have compared it to that of another. A number of CRT scholars and related LatCrit [Latino Critical Race Studies] scholars have started the project of incorporating a comparative law component into CRT and the associated endeavor of applying CRT to non-U.S. legal jurisdictions. What I am underscoring in this Article is the particular usefulness that comparative law presents for the specific project of combating the post-racialism racial frame. This is because contemporary U.S. CRT scholars can only set forth conjectures about the future long-term dangers of post-racial rhetoric (such as hindering the pursuit of racial equality by shutting down any discussion of race in favor of equating racial disparities with cultural deficiencies and socio-economic disadvantages). In contrast, a comparative consideration of another region in which a form of post-racialism has long existed provides the opportunity to examine the actual adverse consequences of post-racial rhetoric.

As a vehicle for illustrating the value of comparative law to the CRT project of dismantling the post-racialism racial frame, I shall provide a comparative analysis of an instructive Brazilian intersectionality case. Because Brazil is a country that has long claimed that all racial distinctions were abandoned with the abolition of slavery, it is an instructive platform from which to assess the viability of contemporary assertions of postracialism in the United States. Yet, as shall be discussed below, growing discrimination jurisprudence in Brazil shows the longstanding post-racial assertion to be false. To the extent that a century-old claim to a form of post-racialism in Brazil is shown to be a fallacy, the many parallels that exist between Brazil and the United States enable a salient critique of U.S. post-racialism. In particular, because of their objectified and denigrated status, examining the treatment of Black women as an intersectional matter, helps to demystify the barriers to productive transnational comparisons of racial ideologies between the United States and Latin America. In order to be concrete, I shall focus on a recent intersectional discrimination case that was litigated in Brazil. But before discussing the case, it will be helpful to first explain the contours of the “post-racial” Brazilian racial ideology.

II. BRAZILIAN “POST-RACIAL” RACIAL DISCOURSE

Like the United States, Brazil is a racially diverse nation with a significant number of persons of African descent stemming from the country’s history of slavery. Yet Brazil’s involvement in the African slave trade was even longer and more intense than that of the United States. This accounts for the fact that, aside from Nigeria, Brazil is the nation with the largest number of people of African descent in the world. After emancipation, Brazil continued to be a racially divided nation, but occasionally provided social mobility for a few light-skinned mixed-race individuals. This social mobility was directly tied to the racist nationbuilding concepts of branqueamento (whitening) and mestiçagem (racial mixing/miscegenation), which can best be described as campaigns to whiten the population through a combination of European immigration incentives and the encouraging of racial mixture in order to diminish over time the visible number of persons of African decent. Indeed, the social recognition of the racially-mixed racial identity of mulato/pardo was a mechanism for buffering the numerical minority of white-identified elite Brazilians from the discontent of the vast majority of persons of African descent. Greater symbolic social status and occasional economic privilege were accorded based on one’s light skin color and approximation of a European phenotype, which simultaneously denigrated Blackness and encouraged individuals to disassociate from their African ancestry. It should be noted that in terms of concrete economic benefits, few mulattoes radically superseded the status of those Afro-descendants viewed as “Black.” Rather, the recognition of mulattoes as racially distinctive from Blacks served primarily as a kind of “psychological wage” associated with the prestige of approximating whiteness without any significant groupwide monetary benefit for such status. As a result, Brazil was able to maintain a rigid racial hierarchy that served white supremacy in a demographically-patterned society where people of African descent approximated and sometimes even outnumbered the white elite. This is in marked contrast to the demographic pattern in the United States, where, with just a few exceptions, Blacks have always been a numerical minority and have thus been more vulnerable to the white majority’s enforcement of Jim Crow racial segregation after emancipation from slavery. In Brazil, with its greater population of people of African descent, the ideological use of the “mulatto escape hatch” was such an effective tool of racial subordination that Jim Crow legal segregation was never needed and all racial justice movements were efficiently hindered. But it was the absence of Jim Crow in Brazil that later enabled the nation to promote itself as a country in which racial mixture had created a racially harmonious society. In fact, until recently, it has been a firmly entrenched notion that Brazil was a model of race relations that could be described as a “racial democracy” exemplified by racial fluidity in its racial classification practices. Hence, post-racialism in Brazil, and much of Latin America is characterized by a negation that racism exists after the abolition of slavery. The denial of racism is justified by the racial mixture of the population which has presumably “transcended” racism. Existing racial disparities are instead attributed to the cultural deficiencies and socio-economic disadvantages of Afro-Brazilians. As a result, those who raise the issue of racial discrimination are viewed as racist themselves. These facets of Brazilian post-racialism closely parallel the rhetoric of post-racialism in the United States and the related fascination with racial mixture as emblematic of racial harmony…

Read the entire article here.

Intimate encounters, Racial Frontiers: Stateless GI babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965

University of Minnesota
June 2010
239 pages

Bongsoo Park

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the policy implications of statelessness by examining G.I. babies, born of non-marital sexual relations between U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Korean women between 1953 and 1965. Using English and Korean language documents about adoption and immigration of stateless GI babies, my work shows that statelessness reveals a racially exclusionary vision of national belonging that shaped citizenship policies of both nations. The GI babies’ presence challenged the myth of racial purity and confounded racial categories in both nations. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some limits of Cold War racial liberalism informed by humanitarian concerns for abandoned Korean war orphans but helped maintain racially exclusionary strategies on citizenship conferral that made the children stateless.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ties That Bind: Making of the Origin of Korean Race
• 2. Technologies of Imperial Rule: The Nationality Act of 1940 in the Age of American Expansionism
• 3. Pitied But Not Entitled: Redemptive Adoption and Limits of Cold War Liberalism
• 4. Making of a National Hero: Alchemy of Race, Blood, and Memory
• Epilogue
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Understanding Racial-ethnic Disparities in Health: Sociological Contributions

Journal of Health and Social Behavior
Volume 51, Number 1 Supplement (November, 2010)
pages S15-S27
DOI: 10.1177/0022146510383838

David R. Williams
Harvard University

Michelle Sternthal
Harvard University

This article provides an overview of the contribution of sociologists to the study of racial and ethnic inequalities in health in the United States. It argues that sociologists have made four principal contributions. First, they have challenged and problematized the biological understanding of race. Second, they have emphasized the primacy of social structure and context as determinants of racial differences in disease. Third, they have contributed to our understanding of the multiple ways in which racism affects health. Finally, sociologists have enhanced our understanding of the ways in which migration history and status can affect health. Sociological insights on racial disparities in health have important implications for the development of effective approaches to improve health and reduce health inequities.

Read the entire article here.

Self-Reported Race and Genetic Admixture

The New England Journal of Medicine
Number 354, Number 4 (2006-01-26)
pages 431-422
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc052515

Moumita Sinha, M.Stat.
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

Emma K. Larkin, M.H.S.
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

Robert C. Elston, Ph.D.
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

Susan Redline, M.D., M.P.H.
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

To the Editor:

The use of data on self-reported race in health research has been highly debated. For example, Burchard et al. recently argued that important information on disease susceptibility may be derived from the use of data on self-reported race, whereas Cooper et al. cited Wilson et al., who argued that ethnic labels “are inaccurate representations of the inferred genetic clusters.” Cooper et al., however, ignored later work that identified limitations in the analyses of Wilson et al. — specifically, inappropriate classification of groups, the use of a suboptimal model for cluster identification, and reliance on only 39 microsatellite markers for cluster analyses. With larger numbers of markers, it was shown that genetically distinct groups can be almost completely inferred from self-reported race…

…With support from a U.S. Public Health Service grant, we applied an admixture analysis to a sample population in Cleveland. Participants were clearly separated into unique groups with the use of this genetic approach. Whereas 93 percent of self-reported whites were classified as having predominantly European ancestry, less than 2 percent of blacks were so classified. Only 4 percent who reported their race as black had predominantly African ancestry; yet, the admixture proportions of this group made it possible to separate the population into two groups, in which 94 percent of self-reported blacks and 7 percent of self-reported whites were classified as being of mixed race (Figure 1: Frequency Histogram Showing the Percentage of African Ancestry in a Population Living in Cleveland). The sharp peak at the left in Figure 1 indicates that there are many persons who have no African ancestry (i.e., the values correspond to those of self-reported whites), and the broad peak at the right indicates that most blacks are of mixed race and do not originate from any single population. Thus, self-reported race and genetic ethnic ancestry appear to be highly correlated as a dichotomy, with those who self-report as being black comprising, as expected from historical and cultural practices in the United States, a broad range of African ancestry…

Read the entire letter here.

Comparing Genetic Ancestry and Self-Described Race in African Americans Born in the United States and in Africa

Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
Volume 17, Issue 6 (June 2008)
pages 1329-1338
DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-07-2505

Rona Yaeger
Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center

Alexa Avila-Bront
Department of Medicine
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University

Kazeem Abdul
Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center

Patricia C. Nolan
Department of Medicine
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University

Victor R. Grann
Department of Medicine
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University

Mark G. Birchette
Department of Biology
Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York

Shweta Choudhry
Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences and Medicine
University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, California

Esteban G. Burchard
Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences and Medicine
University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, California
 
Kenneth B. Beckman
Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Oakland, California

Prakash Gorroochurn
Department of Biostatistics
Columbia University Medical Center, New York, New York

Elad Ziv
Division of General Internal Medicine
University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, California

Nathan S. Consedine
Department of Psychology
Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York

Andrew K. Joe
Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center

Genetic association studies can be used to identify factors that may contribute to disparities in disease evident across different racial and ethnic populations. However, such studies may not account for potential confounding if study populations are genetically heterogeneous. Racial and ethnic classifications have been used as proxies for genetic relatedness. We investigated genetic admixture and developed a questionnaire to explore variables used in constructing racial identity in two cohorts: 50 African Americans and 40 Nigerians. Genetic ancestry was determined by genotyping 107 ancestry informative markers. Ancestry estimates calculated with maximum likelihood estimation were compared with population stratification detected with principal components analysis. Ancestry was approximately 95% west African, 4% European, and 1% Native American in the Nigerian cohort and 83% west African, 15% European, and 2% Native American in the African American cohort. Therefore, self-identification as African American agreed well with inferred west African ancestry. However, the cohorts differed significantly in mean percentage west African and European ancestries (P < 0.0001) and in the variance for individual ancestry (P ≤ 0.01). Among African Americans, no set of questionnaire items effectively estimated degree of west African ancestry, and self-report of a high degree of African ancestry in a three-generation family tree did not accurately predict degree of African ancestry. Our findings suggest that self-reported race and ancestry can predict ancestral clusters but do not reveal the extent of admixture. Genetic classifications of ancestry may provide a more objective and accurate method of defining homogenous populations for the investigation of specific population-disease associations.

Introduction

Genome-wide case-control association studies provide a powerful tool for investigating possible genetic factors that may contribute to the health disparities observed among different racial and ethnic populations. Populations with different ancestral backgrounds may carry different genetic variants, and these may contribute to the variations in disease incidence and outcomes seen in specific racial and ethnic groups (1). Association studies can most easily identify disease-associated alleles when study groups are genetically similar, sharing a similar ancestral background (2). However, individual ancestry is not an easily assayed, simple category; consequently, race continues to be used as a proxy for genetic relatedness in clinical and other biological studies (3-6). There is currently no consensus on how best to examine or characterize different racial or ethnic groups when designing and conducting such studies.

Two main approaches have been used to approximate individual ancestry in biological studies: (a) using self identified race and ethnicity, which may capture common environmental influences as well as ancestral background, and (b) genotyping a panel of markers that show large frequency differentials between major geographic ancestral groupings (7, 8). Both approaches have limitations. Self-identified racial categories may not always consistently predict ancestral population clusters, and evidence suggests that it may take large sample sizes and numerous markers to describe genetic clusters that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity groupings (9-11). Racial categories are also imprecise and inconsistent, because they may potentially vary within the same individual over time (12, 13). Furthermore, their use risks reinforcing racial divisions in society. On the other hand, more objective analyses that genotype markers that are highly informative for ancestry may not be economically practical and are limited by the requirement of serum or fresh tissue for DNA extraction. Genetically determined ancestry may not capture unmeasured social factors that may affect differences in health outcomes. There are also unique ethical challenges when linking biological phenotypes with genetic markers for specific racial groups, and caution must always be used when attributing biological differences (e.g., disease risk and treatment response) to different populations.

Understanding the ancestral background of study subjects is most important in genetic studies of admixed populations, such as African Americans, who represent an admixture of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans (14). Genetic studies have shown that African Americans form a diverse group with percent European admixture estimated to range between 7% and 23% (14-16). Genotyping of self-identified African Americans participating in the Cardiovascular Health Study revealed that among self-reported Africans there are differences in genetic ancestry that are correlated with some clinically important endpoints (15).

…Discussion…

The African American cohort in our study had a mean of 15% European admixture, which is consistent with previous reports of a range of 7% to 23% European admixture among U.S. African Americans (14-16). Of note, the estimates of 4% European and 1% Native American ancestry in the Nigerian population is likely due to bias in MLE due to the limited number of markers. We found that among participants there was a significantly higher proportion of admixture and higher variability in admixture proportions in the U.S.-born African American cohort compared with a population that emigrated from Africa (that is, Nigerians; Table 3). The significant variation in individual ancestry estimates among the African American cohort suggests that this group, like the Cardiovascular Health Study African American cohort (15), represents a diverse population consisting of several subpopulations. For participation in the African American cohort, subjects identified both parents as African Americans who were born in the United States. Although data regarding grandparental race were not used to screen study participation, these data were collected through a three-generation family tree during administration of the questionnaire. In this study population, all African American subjects described that the race of at least three of their four grandparents was consistent with African ancestry. Individuals and society have historically classified children of mixed-race ancestry as African American, even when one parent is Caucasian, Asian, or Native American. For African Americans, this is a remnant of the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ laws and the ‘‘One Drop’’ rule or ‘‘Rule of Hypodescent.’’ Thus, identification as African American would still occur in cases where the parents and grandparents were of mixed-race ancestry. This could also contribute to the greater European admixture and greater admixture variability seen in the African American cohort…

Read the entire article here.

Lansing has highest percentage of people who identify as multiple-race black

Lansing State Journal
2011-11-18

Matthew Miller

Gianni Risper has a black mother, a white biological father (as opposed to the father who raised him, his mother’s husband) and a way of describing himself that isn’t found on any Census form: Italian-Caribbean-American.

“Race is becoming more muddled,” he said, and, at 19, he is part of a generation that is muddling it, more likely to be mixed race than their elders, more likely to reject the rigidity of prevailing racial categories in favor of more fluid identities.

“I try not to put myself into a category of being either black or white or just one thing,” Risper said, “because I’m not.”

And, living in Lansing, he has plenty of company.

Lansing has the highest percentage of people who identify as black and some other race of any place in the country, at least any place with a population of 100,000 or more.

According to the 2010 Census, it’s 4.1 percent, more than one out of every 25 people in the city…

…Kristen Renn, a professor of education at Michigan State University who has studied mixed-race identity in college students, said space began to open up for more complicated racial identities in the latter part of the 1990s.

“Part of this is liberal baby boomers marrying outside their race or having kids with people of other races and liberal baby boomers being very vested in raising happy children,” she said.

But the shift also coincided with the growth of the Internet, which made it easier to create communities around mixed-race identities or even specific racial combinations.

It coincided with celebrities – Renn mentioned Tiger Woods – beginning to speak publicly about their blended ancestries.

As a result, among the younger generation in particular, “it has become more OK,” she said. “There is a youth movement around mixed race.”

And if that’s more true in Lansing than other places, she sees it as a good sign.

“When people are less comfortable, they have to draw the boundaries much more clearly, ‘You’re one of them. You’re one of us. You’ve got to be one or the other,’ ” she said.

“People in more cosmopolitan areas are just used to a more diverse, global kind of population.”…

…Self-definition

Nikki O’Brien was raised by her white mother. She didn’t know her black father until she was an adult. She identifies herself as black.

“You’d think I would be more malleable in my racial identity,” she said, “but really the experience of being other or different was enough that I constantly knew that I was black and the strength and community that I pulled from that identity just pushed me.”

But O’Brien, a program adviser at MSU who spent years working with minority students, sees the conversation about mixed-race identity more as one about self-definition, including the right to identify as one race or another…

Read the entire article here.

The Measurement of Negro “Passing”

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 52, Number 1 (July, 1946)
pages 18-22

John H. Burma

Older and popular methods of estimating the number of Negroes who pass over into the white group are no longer to be credited. Considerable misconception exists concerning passing itself, which is more frequently temporary and opportunistic than permanent and complete. In the absence of scientifically accurate counts, the lower estimates of passing are probably more reliable.

Whenever a minority group is oppressed or is the subject of discrimination, some individual members attempt to escape by losing their identity with the minority and becoming absorbed into the majority. In the United States the Negro is such a minority group. In many cases a foreigner may become indistinguishable in a country by adopting the language, customs, and dress of that country. This technique, of

TABLE 1: native whites of native parentage, by Age Groups, for 1900 and 1910

Ages		Populations		Increase or Descrease
1900	1910	1900	1910
0-4…	10-14	5,464,881	5,324,283	-140,589
5-9…	15-19	5,174,220	5,089,055	-85,165
10-14…	20-24	4,660,390	4,682,922	+22,532
15-19…	25-29	4,234,953	4,049,074	-185,879
20-24…	30-34	3,805,609	3,401,601	-404,008

course, avails the Negro little because of his high visibility.

Being a Negro in America is not just a biological matter, it is a legal and social matter as well. It has been declared, by law, how much Negro heredity makes one a Negro; and because of the determination to prevent the infusion of Negro blood into the white group, the law frequently decreed that a person of one thirty-second, one sixty-fourth, or “any discernible amount” of Negro blood was a Negro. This meant that many persons who were legally Negro had so much white blood that they were, biologically, indistinguishable from whites. This, in turn, led to a considerable number of “white Negroes” being mistaken for legal whites and being treated as such. Some of this group, we have long been aware, simply went where they were not personally known and became a permanent part of the white group.

This passing of the legal Negro for white has been well known for over one hundred and fifty years. What we have not been able to ascertain accurately was the number of these legal Negroes who passed as white. This lack of concrete knowledge did not, of course, prevent considerable speculation and opinionated estimates. By the very secrecy which must involve passing, its investigation is almost insuperably hindered, and seldom, if ever, have estimates agreed.

The first, and by far the most widely known, effort to arrive at an unbiased estimate of the number of legal Negroes who have more or less permanently passed into the white group was made by Hornell Hart rather incidentally to a study of migration. His method of analysis was a breakdown of the census returns for native whites of native parentage, by age groups. The reasoning involved hinges on the fact that this group cannot increase. Emigration might logically decrease it, as would deaths, but there should be no increases. Yet, as is seen by Table 1, Hart found a marked increase. In fact, the group who had been between…

Read or purchase the article here.