Mixed Race Studies

Obama and the Politics of blackness: Antiracism in the “post-black” Conjuncture

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 313-322
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526046

Ben Pitcher, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Westminster, London

This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack Obama’s presidency. It begins by examining the relationship Obama negotiates with notions of blackness in his autobiographical writings, and it considers how this exemplifies what has been described as a “post-black” politics. It proceeds to discuss the insufficiency of critiques of “post-black” as having sold out a black political tradition, but it notes that these critiques reveal something of the changing significance of blackness as a form of antiracist practice. Considering how Obama represents a move in black politics from the margins to the mainstream, I argue that the President’s symbolic centrality undermines a conception of critical oppositionality hitherto implicit to the antiracist imaginary. Exploring how this challenges longstanding ideas about who “owns” or controls the antiracist struggle, I suggest that antiracism will need to move beyond accusations of betrayal if it is to account for and understand the profound ways in which Obama has transformed the entire field of U.S. race discourse.

To think about what Barack Obama’s presidency means for U.S. racial politics invariably involves considering his relationship to a politics of blackness. For some, Obama’s mixed-race transnational heritage means that he is grounded in ‘‘the multicultural and global reality of today’s world.’’ For others, Obama’s claim on blackness is delimited by his not having been born to the descendents of slaves. The complex and subtle criteria of identity claims made of Obama reveal something of the complexity of race in twenty-first-century America and exemplify Gary Younge’s observation that however marginal race might be to Obama’s message, it is nevertheless central to his meaning.

While of course Obama’s autobiographical writings cannot exhaust or provide a definitive answer to this meaning, it is notable that they reveal a distantiated relationship to the politics of blackness. The first paragraph to the 2004 preface of Dreams from My Father describes its author’s intention to communicate ‘‘the fluid state of identity’’ that characterizes the politics of race in contemporary America. Obama’s passage into a performative black male adolescence is archly self-conscious, the result of a ‘‘decision’’ rather than a question of necessity. Though he rightly acknowledges the inescapably determining power of race, Obama retains an ironic distance that resists an understanding of this determination as absolute. Even the final section of Dreams, which stages a trip to Kenya as a key biographical moment in Obama’s self-understanding, is undercut by an epilogue on cultural hybridity that refuses as a romantic illusion the search for an African authenticity…

…So what does Obama’s skillful negotiation of the politics of blackness mean for antiracism? Does Obama’s status as ‘‘a black man who doesn’t conform to the normal scripts for African-American identity’’ jeopardize his progressive potential, or is it a precondition of his success? Does Obama’s victory signal ‘‘the end of black politics,’’ or its radical reinvention?…

…For one thing, the immediate symbolic potency of the black president simply invalidates claims predicated on the explicit and straightforward marginalization of black people in America. Obama stands for the move of blackness from the margins to the mainstream. Obama was by no means the first black person to obtain access to a position of power, but his presidency represents a qualitatively new dimension; most important, it records a moment in U.S. racial politics when a critical mass of whites were prepared to cast their vote for a black person…

Read the entire article here.

New Book Explores Georgetown Inside and Out

Georgetown Alumni Online
Georgetown University
2010-11-2010

Historian R. Emmett Curran discusses his recently published book, a three-volume history of Georgetown that uncovers little known facts about the university.

True or false?

1. In Georgetown’s first decade of existence, nearly 20 percent of its students came from outside the United States.

2. Georgetown was not actually founded in 1789.

A History of Georgetown University: The Complete Three-Volume Set, 1789-1989, released this month, sheds new light on these and other little known facts about Georgetown, as well as offers a broad perspective on the university’s identity and place in American culture.

Here, author R. Emmett Curran, a historian and member of the Georgetown community for more than three decades, talks about the book’s evolution and surprising discoveries he made during its research. Copies of the three-volume set are available in the Georgetown University bookstore.

(The answer to both of the above questions is “true.”)…

…Q: What is your favorite story from Georgetown’s past that people might not have heard?

Curran: The manner by which Patrick Healy became president of Georgetown is a good story. In 1870 the Jesuits were struggling to come up with a suitable candidate for the presidency of Georgetown. After Rome rejected the first slate of candidates that the Jesuits in the United States sent them, Jesuit officials in the Maryland Province (then encompassing most of the eastern United States) sent a new slate that listed Patrick Healy as the preferred candidate.

“Clearly Healy is the best qualified,” the regional superior stated, “despite the difficulty that perhaps can be brought up about him.” That ambiguous reference concerned either Healy’s illegitimate background (as the son of parents [Irish planter and mixed-race slave] who, by Georgia law, could not marry) or his biracial identity.

Rome ended up choosing no one on the list and reappointed John Early, who had earlier held the office. When Early’s latest term came to an end in 1873, the regional superior proposed an interesting deal. He suggested to the superior general in Rome that John Bapst, then president of Boston College, be made president of Georgetown and Patrick Healy replace Bapst in Boston. That suggests that the “difficulty” had actually been Healy’s biracial background and so-called slave status. The regional superior was calculating that mixed race would not have the potential for problems in New England (where Patrick Healy’s two brothers had important positions among the clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston) that it might well pose in Washington.

Before Rome could respond, John Early died suddenly in May 1873. The regional superior immediately appointed Healy as acting rector, and the following day the directors of the university chose him as president. Rome, obviously unhappy about developments, took more than a year to confirm his appointment as rector.

Read the entire article here.

Note from Steven F. Riley: For more information on the Healy brothers, read James M. O’Toole’s book, Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920.

2010 Census Shows Black Population has Highest Concentration in the South

United States Census Bureau
CB11-CN.185
2011-09-29

People Who Reported as Both Black and White More than Doubled

The U.S. Census Bureau released today a 2010 Census brief, The Black Population: 2010, that shows 14 percent of all people in the United States identified as black, either alone or in combination with one or more other races. In 2010, 55 percent of the black population lived in the South, and 105 Southern counties had a black population of 50 percent or higher.

Of the total U.S. population of 308.7 million on April 1, 2010, 38.9 million people, or 13 percent, identified as black alone. In addition, 3.1 million people, or 1 percent, reported as black in combination with one or more other races. Together, these two groups comprise the black alone-or-in-combination population and totaled 42.0 million.

The black alone-or-in-combination population grew by 15 percent from 2000 to 2010, while the black alone population grew by 12 percent compared with a 9.7 percent growth rate for the total U.S. population.

Black and White Multiple-Race Population More Than Doubled

People who reported their race as both black and white more than doubled from about 785,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2010. This group’s share of the multiple-race black population increased from 45 percent in 2000 to 59 percent in 2010…

Read the entire brief here.

Regulating Race: Interracial Relationships, Community, and Law in Jim Crow Alabama

University of Georgia
2008
96 pages

L. Kathryn Tucker

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

This thesis, based largely on legal cases concerning miscegenation in Alabama, argues that legal efforts to impose social control by prohibiting interracial marriages and relationships proved ineffective due to the efforts of defendants to find legal loopholes, the racial ambiguity of a tri-racial society, and the reluctance of many communities to prosecute offenders. Nationwide interest in matters of race fueled the passage of one-drop laws in the 1920s, but also provided defendants with ways to claim racial backgrounds that fell outside the scope of the laws. Concurrently, local communities proved disinclined to prosecute interracial relationships unless individuals felt personally involved through desires for revenge or monetary gain. This often long-term toleration of interracial relationships, along with interracial couples’ own efforts to escape prosecution, proves that southern race relations were often more flexible and accommodating than harsh laws and the attitudes behind them would suggest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER
  • 1. Miscegenation and the Law
  • 2. Patterns of Defense
  • 3. Defining Race
  • 4. Community Toleration
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
  • A. Map of Alabama Counties
  • B. Alabama Miscegenation Cases, 1883-1938
  • C. Alabama Appellate Miscegenation Cases 1865-1970
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

…Much of the difficulties that the courts faced in determining race, even by physical means, stemmed from the defendants’ own attempts at muddling the issues. By the 1920s, most blacks came from families that at some point had experienced racial mixture—whether by choice or by force—and many white families, contrary to their fervent beliefs, also had racially mixed forebears. Savvy defendants in miscegenation cases used this fact to their benefit, claiming ancestors who variously possessed Spanish, Indian, or the ambiguous “Creole” or “Cajun” blood in order to explain dark skin tones. This defense proved particularly valuable in states such as Alabama, where the legislatures never outlawed marriage between Indians and whites. Closely linked to attempts to define race based on physical characteristics of both defendants and families, attempts to explain away ambiguous features based on Indian heritage often proved successful….

Read the entire thesis here.

Biracial Student Voices

University of Georgia
2008
140 pages

Willie L. Banks Jr., Associate Dean of Student Life
Cleveland State University

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILISOPHY

The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of biracial students with one parent of African American heritage attending Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) in the South. This study utilized a basic qualitative research design and was comprised of three phases: semi-structured individual interviews, responses to written prompts and a photo elicitation project. Twelve participants from two southern institutions participated in this study.

Through an analysis of data four themes emerged that encapsulated the experiences of the students in this study: 1) The Search – the pre-collegiate experience, 2) Finding a Voice – the collegiate experience, 3) Breaking Free – dealing with labels from society, and 4) Here’s Where I am for Now – the evolving identity of biracial students. These themes illustrated how complex and personal biracial student development can be. The biracial students in this study used their experiences with family and friends to define their identity. Once they reached college, their circle of friends, involvement in student organizations, and finding safe spaces on campus all contributed to the students defining and redefining their biracial identity. These experiences all contributed to a generally positive experience for students in this study. Additionally, participants in this study were able to define their place in society as a biracial individual and what role society should or should not play in their identity choices. Results from this study showed that biracial identity was a complex process that started before college and that continued through college.

The findings in this study have implications for student affairs professionals. The implications include: understanding that biracial identity is complex and situational, programs and services for students of color are needed and can be beneficial for biracial students, spaces on campus need to be welcoming to all students and student affairs professionals need to structure and provide spaces that welcome and support all students, student affairs professionals need to be cognizant of the different experiences biracial students have from other students of color and will need to ensure that biracial students are provided with the options and choices provided to all students.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• CHAPTER
  • 1. INTRODUCTION
    • Statement of the Problem
    • Theoretical Framework
    • Research Questions and Methodology
    • Limitations of the Study
    • Significance of the Study
    • Definition of Terms
    • Summary
  • 2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
    • Race
    • Biracial Identity Development
    • Bases, Borders, Identities, Patterns and Quadrants
    • Factors Influencing Racial Identity Choices
    • Multiracial Students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs)
    • Recommendations from the Research
    • Summary
  • 3. METHODOLOGY
    • Design
    • Sample Selection
    • Site Selections
    • Ethical Considerations
    • Data Collection
    • Data Analysis
    • Validity and Reliability
    • Researcher Bias and Assumptions
    • Summary
  • 4. SEARCHING, FINDING A VOICE, BREAKING FREE AND HERE’S WHERE I AM FOR NOW
    • Participants
    • Presentation of Data
    • The Search
    • Finding a Voice
    • Breaking Free
    • Here’s Where I am for Now
    • Summary
  • 5. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
    • Analysis of Findings
    • Implications for Practice
    • Limitations of the Study
    • Recommendations for Future Research
    • Conclusion
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
  • A. Student Solicitation Email
  • B. Consent Form
  • C. Participation Information
  • D. Individual Interview Protocol
  • E. Directions for Written Prompt
  • F. Directions for Photo Elicitation

LIST OF TABLES

1. Five Patterns of Multiracial Identity
2. Placement of Participants in the Five Patterns of Multiracial Identity
3. Detailed Participant Information

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Representation of my Parents
2. Basil
3. My bedroom
4. BAM
5. The Black Hole
6. UoS Hall
7. Theater
8. UoS Stadium
9. Holding Hands
10. An Unquiet Mind
11. Camouflage

Read the entire dissertation here.

Towards a Dialogic Understanding of Print Media Stories About Black/White Interracial Families

University of Georgia
2003
160 pages

Victor Kulkosky

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

This thesis examines print media news stories about Black/White interracial families from 1990-2003. Using the concept of dialogism, I conduct a textual analysis of selected newspaper and news magazine stories to examine the dialogic interaction between dominant and resistant discourses of racial identity. My findings suggest that a multiracial identity project can be seen emerging in print media stories about interracial families, but the degree to which this project is visible depends on each journalist’s placement of individual voices and discourses within the narrative of each story. I find some evidence of a move from placing interracial families within narratives of conflict toward a more optimistic view of such families’ position in society.

Multiracial People’s Quest for Voice

People in interracial/multiracial families are engaged in a struggle to find their voice. More accurately, they are trying to establish both an inner voice, to talk about themselves to themselves; and a public voice, to tell their stories to anyone who will listen. Dalmage (2000, p. 20) describes the search for the inner multiracial voice: “Because they do not quite fit into the historically created, officially named, and socially recognized categories, members of multiracial families are constantly fighting to identify themselves for themselves. A difficulty they face is the lack of language available to address their experiences.” This story is my story. I am White (Lithuanian, German, Irish, born in New Jersey, raised in New York City) and married to a Black woman (African, English, Cherokee, born and raised in Georgia). We have a son (born and raised in other parts of Georgia). My wife has a “white looking” half sister, who has seven nieces and nephews, some of whom add Dutch to the family tree. Finding answers to the question, “What are we?” is a family affair. Answering the question “What are you?” is a public matter…

Read the entire thesis here.

“A new American comes ‘home’”: Race, nation, and the immigration of Korean War adoptees, “GI babies,” and brides

Yale University
May 2010
355 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3395980
ISBN: 9781109588873

Susie Woo

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Between 1950 and 1965, an estimated 2000 Korean children, 3500 mixed-race “GI babies,” and 7700 military brides entered the United States as the sons, daughters and wives of predominantly white, middle-class families. Together, they signaled the corporeal return of U.S. neocolonial endeavors in South Korea stateside, and embodied the possibilities and limits of Cold War liberalism. Through analysis of U.S. and South Korean government records, archival documents, mainstream and minority press, and interviews with Korean wartime orphanage employees, this dissertation focuses on the living legacies of a “forgotten war.” It traces the roots and routes of Korean and mixed-race adoptee and war bride immigration that were intimately shaped by ordinary Americans at work in South Korea between 1950 and 1965, and the complex political, social, and legal effects that this gendered and raced immigrant group had upon both countries.

This dissertation argues that the U.S. servicemen, missionaries, social workers, and voluntary aid workers, the latter three that flooded South Korea to spearhead the postwar recovery campaign, advocated for the legal and binding formation of mixed Korean/American families and brought empire home. Ironically, by adhering to its government’s cultural policy of integration intended to bolster U.S. expansionist and Cold War efforts, enthusiastic internationalist citizens tethered Americans at home to South Koreans in sentimental, material, and, eventually, familial ways that unraveled the government’s ability to contain its neocolonial objectives “over there.” Thus, by being American, U.S. citizens profoundly affected both sides of the Pacific—they forever changed the lives of thousands of Korean women and children, permanently shaped South Korea’s child welfare system, and unexpectedly forced openings in U.S. national and familial borders subsequently challenging Americans at home to broaden their conceptions of race, kinship, gender, sexuality, and national belonging during the tumultuous Cold War/civil rights era.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: On Being American
• CHAPTER ONE: Wartime Sentiment: American GI’s and the Militarization of Korean Women and Children
• CHAPTER TWO: Picturing the Korean “Waif: American Campaigns of Rescue
• CHAPTER THREE: Private Matters of Public Concern: U.S. Social and Legal Management of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
• CHAPTER FOUR: A “Pre”-History of Korean War Adoptions: Racial and Institutional Legacies of Neocolonial Care in South Korea
• CHAPTER FIVE: Model Minority or Miscegenation Threat?: The Cultural Domestication of Korean War Immigrants
• CONCLUSION: Mixed Kin: U.S. Neocolonial Legacies at Home and Abroad
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

Professor Michelle Elam to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #227 – Professor Michele Elam
When: Wednesday, 2011-09-28, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Mixed Chicks Chat will be talking with Michele Elam about her work on mixed-race identity and her new book, The Souls of Mixed Folks: Race, Aesthetics & Politics in the New Millenium which examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works—novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations—as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social justice for the “mulatto millennium.”

Listen to the episode here.  Download the episode here.

Brown Bag: Mixed-race tension in early America

The Daily Campus: The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915
Dallas, Texas
2011-09-21

Logan May

The struggle of mixed race families in Southwest America was a daunting issue in the early 19th century.

As part of the Brown Bag Lecture Series of the Southwest, SMU Director of Southwest Studies Andrew Graybill shared a detailed account of a mixed White-Native American family from Montana who faced an exponential amount of racial discrimination.

In the Texana Room of DeGolyer Library Wednesday afternoon, listeners gathered and silently snacked on their lunches as Graybill spoke of the Clarke family.

“To walk in two worlds was impossible,” Graybill said, “whites looked at mixed blood with repulsion.”

His book, entitled A Mixture of So Many Bloods, recalled the life of Helen Clarke and the backlash she received for being the daughter of a white man and a Native American woman. At this time in the early 1800s, marriage within the two races was common, and children served as brokers between the two groups. Helen’s father had a prominent role as a fur trader; therefore, the family was often the talk of the town…

Read the entire article here.

Genetic Counseling: For children of mixed racial ancestry

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 8, Issue 3, 1961
pages 157-163
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1961.9987478

Sheldon C. Reed, Director
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Esther B. Nordlie
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

INTRODUCTION

The editors of this journal have been interested in genetic counseling because it is a major practical application of the results of research in human genetics. It is reasonable to assume that genetic counseling may also have some relationship to eugenics, though there is nothing known as to exactly what this relationship may be.

Genetic counseling should be helpful to those who ask for it. The understanding of any problem is the first step toward its solution. Understanding of the problem removes some of the attendant anxiety, even if the solution is unpleasant. There should be less anxiety after genetic counseling than before it has occurred, and the clients indicate in many ways that it is useful to them. The relationship between genetic counseling and eugenics is certainly ambiguous. It is my impression that the relief of anxiety concerning the likelihood of a repetition of an abnormality results in increased reproduction of the parents of the affected children. If this is true, the frequency of any genes responsible for the abnormality would be increased, though slightly, in the population, which would be a dysgenic process. The increased reproduction of the parents of the anomalous children should also increase the frequency of any genes related to the attributes of responsible parenthood which should have positive eugenic benefits. It is not clear to me whether the net result of these opposing tendencies is eugenic or dysgenic. The dysgenic effect is to increase slightly the pool of rare genes for abnormalities which are infrequent, while the slight increase in the supply of genes related to responsible parenthood would be less significant percentage-wise because such genes arc presumed to be more frequent in the population. If genes related to responsible parenthood do not exist, one can only conclude that genetic counseling may well be dysgenic Genetic counseling at present would seem to be liable to the suspicion that it is dysgenic. This effect may be too trivial to warrant consideration. Hopefully, the obvious benefits to the parents who come for counseling outweigh the possible dysgenic costs to society as a whole. The only alternative to genetic counseling is the refusal to impart whatever information research in human genetics has discovered; such a philosophy would be deplorable. Genetic counseling has a function and is here to stay. It is the intention of the editors to present articles by other genetic counselors from time to time. Presumably these articles will cover particular areas of counseling with which they have had extensive experience.

BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Wc have had considerable experience at the Dight Institute in working with adoption agencies in the placement of children of mixed racial ancestry. Mrs. Esther Nordlie (1961) and I have just completed a follow-up of the results of the placement of such children and will summarize the results here, as this is the first study of its kind. It is probable that genetic counselors will be increasingly occupied with this topic as interracial unions are likely to continue in the United States. The casual unions often result in children who become available for adoption. . . .

The problem of placing “pure” Negro, Indian or Mexican children is difficult only because few families of these minority groups request children for adoption. Ordinarily, no attempt would be made to place these babies in Caucasian families as the child or the adoptive parents would probably find social adjustment too difficult. However, children of mixed racial origin may “pass for white” or resemble the Caucasian adoptive parents sufficiently so that placement in a white family is feasible. Such placement is desirable for the child as the socioeconomic environment is assumed to be more favorable there. This would be true only if the racial appearance of the child would permit acceptance in the white community. Many white couples are desperately anxious to adopt children. Some are sufficiently free from racial prejudices to be able to adopt children of mixed racial ancestry, if a reasonable “match” between child and adoptive parents can be made. The critical prediction rests with the geneticist (or anthropologist) who must project the appearance of a small baby ahead to the child of five or six when entering school…

One would suppose that predicting the chances for a child to “pass for white” would be quite simple. Such, however, is not the case. The main difficulty is that these traits, when present in the racial hybrid, may not be apparent in an infant but develop over the years. Hair texture and skin color are the most important traits and at the same time the most difficult to predict. The baby may have no hair; it is well known that babies with considerable Negro ancestry may look quite light at birth and darken considerably during childhood. The geneticist is thus vulnerable to mistakes in his predictions as to the future appearance of the baby. One could take the attitude that unless the geneticist can make his prediction with certainty he should not enter the picture at all. Such reasoning is absurd. The baby is in the custody of the adoption agency and the agency must make some provision for this child.

Read or purchase the article here.