Mixed Race Studies

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Johnson]

American Anthropologist
Volume 110, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pp. 79–80
ISSN 0002-7294; online ISSN 1548-1433
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00013.x

Amanda Walker Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? G. Reginald Daniel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 365 pp.

Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 407 pp.

These two books discuss the racial formations of blackness from the foundations of early capitalism and modernist nation-state formation through contemporary transformations. Both caution against the silencing of race, particularly the dangers of “colorblindness” in political engagement and in theorizations of globalization, but both books also forge critiques of race essentialism. Whereas Globalization and Race explores geopolitics and notions of “diaspora,” Race and Multiraciality explores lineage and multiraciality. The methodological and theoretical approaches are what most separate these texts, as Globalization and Race centers on ethnographies and anthropological theories whereas Race and Multiraciality combines analysis of secondary historical and demographic data and sociological theories…

…Race and Multiraciality compares racial formations in the United States and Brazil, particularly the dimensions of blackness and multiraciality. Daniel argues that the ending of legal segregation in the United States—coupled with challenges to the “binary racial project” or white–black paradigm by multiracial movements—and the disruption of the notion of “racial democracy” and the “ternary racial project” (or white–multiracial–black paradigm) in Brazil by the movements for African Brazilian recognition and racial equality have sent the United States and Brazil on converging paths. Daniel juxtaposes the “Latin Americanization” (p. 259) of U.S. racial politics in the context of emerging recognition of multiraciality and desires for colorblind “racial democracy” with the “Anglo Americanization” (p. 285) of Brazilian racial politics. This is done in the context of increasing dichotomization of negro–branco (black–white) and the interpellation of multiracial people into a unified and “race-d”—versus “colored” as in the colonial and census terms pretos and pardo—African Brazilian identity. Daniel seeks to disrupt the notion that multiraciality is inherently problematic as well as to expose the untenability of colorblindness, particularly in its neoliberal form.

Daniel’s historicization of trajectories of Eurocentrism that underline both “whitening” in Brazil and antimiscegenation in the United States—including the “paranoia about invisible blackness” (p. 37) and the granting of privilege in terms of behavioral and phenotypic proximity to Europeanness that pervaded both nation’s racial projects—seems to suggest that the processes of racial formation in the two nations have converged, or at least intersected, at prior historical moments to the contemporary era. Although he explores the complexity of “Latin” American colonization models in Louisiana and the Southwest as they confront the “Anglo” models of the “North and Upper South,” he overlooks the mythification of the U.S. post–Civil War “North” as itself a variant of a “racial democracy.” In my view, the linearity of his model or metaphor of “converging paths” undermines his attempts to problematize U.S. and Brazilian racial projects. Additionally, although Daniel critiques the “binary racial project” in the United States, he also tends to reify it, at times conflating multiraciality with black and white biraciality (see pp. 173, 295). The racialization of Asian Americans in the United States and Brazil disappears in both his theorization of the “binary” and “ternary” models of race and also his discussions of multiracial movements…

Read or purchase the review here.

Truthdig Radio with Marcia Dawkins

Truthdig Radio
KPFK 90.7 FM (Los Angeles); 98.7 FM (Santa Barbara); 99.5 FM (China Lake); 93.7 North San Diego
Wednesday, 2011-04-20, 21:00Z (14:00 PDT, 17:00 EDT)

Kasia Anderson, Host and Associate Editor

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dr. Dawkins discusses mixed race identities, press (including the 2011-04-18 CNN article, “Neither black nor white: Three multiracial generations, one family” by Thom Patterson) and the census.

List to the interview here (Ends at 00:10:57).

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? [Review: Bailey]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 36, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 535-536
DOI: 10.1177/009430610703600609

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?, by G. Reginald Daniel. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 360pp. cloth. ISBN: 0271028835.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s adoption of the mark “one or more races” format in 2000 is viewed by some scholars as a racial revolution of sorts. It may signal a changing tide from monoracial understandings of population diversity (i.e., recognizing only single racial heritages) to the interpellation of a more complex phenomenon of multiraciality. Framing this shift as from a binary (black vs. white) to a ternary racial project (white, multiracial, black), sociologist G. Reginald Daniel contributes significantly to our understanding of the contentious issues surrounding this development. Importantly, he does so as an insider, having been active in social movements promoting the recent Census recognition of multiracial identities (p. 5).

In his latest book, Daniel juxtaposes the shifting U.S. dynamic with changes underway in Brazil. Interestingly, that context appears to be moving in the opposite direction, from ternary (white, brown/multiracial, black) to binary (white vs. negro) racial understandings. Hence, he subtitles his book “Converging Paths,” situating it as a must-read for students of comparative racial dynamics. There has yet to be a census adoption of the binary project in Brazil, but it may only be a matter of time.

Framed, then, as a push and pull between binary and ternary racial projects, Daniel’s goal is to understand similarities and differences in these countries’ racial formations and their consequences for both the production of inequality and for the possibility of overcoming it. To do so, he offers an extensive exploration of the existing literature on to media (print, television, and internet) and census bureau/governmental sources, social movement activists, and observations of public behavior in Brazil and the United States. Although the exposition of this extensive material in this comparative fashion constitutes the contribution of this book, much of the material is drawn from his previously published work, as the author points out (pp. 5–6)…

Read or purchase the review here.

Qualitative Interviews of Racial Fluctuations: The “How” of Latina/o-White Hybrid Identity

Communication Theory
Volume 21, Issue 2 (May 2011)
pages 197–216
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01382.x

Shane T. Moreman, Associate Professor of Communications
California State University, Fresno

Using qualitiative interviewing, this article exposes the performative moments of the Latina/o-White hybrid social actor (i.e., individuals born of one White parent and one Latina/o parent). This study draws on performance studies theories and concepts to demonstrate how these individuals work within and outside the limitations of today’s U.S. discourse on race and ethnicity. Finding four major themes (i.e., ritual disciplines, body as text, language as text, and institutes of identity), this article provides the tensions of the participants’ mixed positionality yet also points to the imaginative possibilities that can come through communicating such an identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in Eastern United States

Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Volume 43, Number 2 (June 1953)
pages 138-155

Edward T. Price
Los Angeles State College

A Strange product of the mingling of races which followed the British entry into North America survives in the presence of a number of localized strains of peoples of mixed ancestry. Presumed to be part white with varying proportions of Indian and Negro blood,** they are recognized as of intermediate social status, sharing lot with neither white nor colored, and enjoying neither the governmental protection nor the tribal tie of the typical Indian descendants. A high degree of endogamy results from this special status, and their recognition is crystallized in the unusual group names applied to them by the country people.

The chief populations of this type are located and identified in Figure 1, which expresses their recurrence as a pattern of distribution. Yet each is essentially a local phenomenon, a unique demographic body, defined only in its own terms and only by its own neighbors. A name applied to one group in one area would have no meaning relative to similar people elsewhere. This association of mixed-blood and particular place piques the geographic curiosity about a subject which, were it ubiquitous, might well be abandoned to the sociologist and social historian. What accounts for these cases of social endemism in the racially mixed population?

The total number of these mixed-bloods is probably between 50,000 and 100,000 persons. Individually recognized groups may run from fewer than 100 to as many as 18,000 persons in the case of the Croatans of North Carolina. The available records, the most useful being old census schedules,’ indicate that the present numbers of mixed-bloods have sprung from the great reproductive increase of small initial populations; the prevalence in each group of a small number of oft-repeated surnames is in accord with such a conclusion.   The ancestors of the mixed-bloods…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial populations of U.S. cities

CNN
April 2011

The number of people who say they belong to at least two races increased by 32% between 2000 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Search the table below to see how the population has changed in cities and towns [3,876] with more than 10,000 people.

To view the interactive table, click here.

Problems with Plaçage: Historical Imagination and Femmes de couleurs libres in Colonial and Antebellum New Orleans

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research
Coastal Carolina University
Issue 3 (Winter 2009)

Philip Whalen, Associate Professor of History
Coastal Carolina University

This essay compares two approaches to understanding the condition of free women of color who struggled to maximize their autonomy and sustain social relations within the repressive environment of colonial and antebellum New Orleans. While recent scholarship squarely addresses how free women of color constructed and sustained a viable Creole heritage, it must reckon with a tradition of primary sources written by moralists, and itinerant observers—ranging from Fanny Trollope and Gustave de Beaumont to Amos Stoddard and Grace King—whose analysis of the daily lives of Creole women was suspect in that it drew disproportionate attentions to the sexual activities of free women of color with white men.

In Louisiana the highest position that can be held by a free woman of color is that of a prostitute… She raises herself by prostituting herself to the white man.
—Gustav de Beaumont, Marie (1835)

Free women of color, or filles de couleurs, occupied a unique and precarious social position in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Louisiana. Legally defined as being of no more than ¼ African ancestry but commonly identified as belonging to a class of free persons exhibiting some degree of color (Garrigus, 1988, p. vii and Berlin, 1998), they rejected identification with black slaves and free whites in order to construct distinct identities for themselves in a racially oppressive and sexually exploitive environment (Gould, 1996, p. 193). The strategies they employed to advance and protect their interests illustrate how they tackled the circumstances and conditions that defined their struggle. These ranged from taking advantage of their slim but not inconsequential legal rights, to educating themselves, to holding and transmitting property, to developing exclusive community networks, to cornering various market activities, and engaging in a variety of legal and extra-legal personal unions.

From the first introduction of slaves to the early twentieth century, Louisiana’s efforts to legally establish a hierarchy of racial identification—especially where Creoles and “mixed bloods” were concerned—were bedeviled by competing identity claims, a disorderly population (Spear, 1999, p. 155), and an environment in which “antimiscegenation measures were flagrantly disregarded” (Lachance, 1994, p. 214). In fact, Doris Garraway notes, “the class of free people of color was quite diverse in gender, color, and circumstance. Referred to variously… the free people of color included former slaves and the descendants of all skin tones” (2005, p. 211). It should also be remembered that early nineteenth-century accounts described white creoles in terms of ethnicity and heritage rather than skin color. Amos Stoddard, for example, described the “Creoles, or native inhabitants” in his Sketches Historical and Descriptive of Louisiana as partly the descendants of the French Canadians and partly of those who migrated “intermixed with some natives of France, Spain, Germany, and the United States, and in many instances the Aborigines” (1973, p. 323). Despite contradictory evidence provided in the narratives of novelists, historians, moralists, and other chroniclers of life in New Orleans who frequently observed that Creole women resembled “the women of Cadiz and Naples and Marseilles; with a self possession, ease, and elegance which the Americans seldom possess” (King, 1920, p. 273), considerations of ethnicity, lineage or linguistic (especially French, German, Caribbean) identity rarely, in the final analysis, inhibited them from using the preferred racial schemas to taxonomize Louisiana’s gens de couleurs. The gens de couleurs, wrote Grace King:

were a class apart, separated from and superior to the negroes, ennobled, were it by only one drop of white blood in their veins…. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleurs. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely guarded distinctions; mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, griffes, each term meaning one more generation’s elevation, one degree’s further transfiguration in the standard of racial perfection; white blood. (1920, p. 333)

This inferior racial identity projected onto gens de couleurs was compounded by moral and social prejudices. Assumptions hardened into received opinion—easily detected in contemporary literature, memoirs, and histories—as racial prejudices were translated into laws designed to increase the legal distinctions between different racial groups were legislated when Louisiana became part of the Unites States (including the reestablishment, by the Louisiana Legislature of the French Code Noir of 1724 as the Black Code in 1806), and New Orleans Creoles evolved into a separate and more self-conscious ethnic caste with fewer exogamous marriages by the mid nineteenth century (Spear, 1999, pp. 101-153 and Lachance, 1994, p. 213, p. 229 and pp. 233-35)…

Read the entire article here.

More Minnesotans say they’re multiracial in 2010 Census

TwinCities.com: Pioneer Press
2011-04-17

Richard Chin and MaryJo Webster

Maybe it’s hip to be mixed.

That could be one explanation for Minnesota’s 51 percent increase over the past decade in the number of people who say they are multiracial, substantially higher than the national increase.

According to the recent U.S. census, about 125,000 people in Minnesota identified themselves as being of two or more races, up from about 83,000 in the previous census.

Almost all of that increase took place in the metro-area suburbs and outstate, where the number of multiracial people jumped more than 75 percent.

About 2.4 percent of Minnesota’s population is multiracial, about the same as the nation as a whole.

But multiracial people represent a larger part of the state’s minority population than of the U.S. population. Almost one of six nonwhite people in the state are multiracial, compared with about one in 10 nationwide.

University of Minnesota sociologist Carolyn Liebler, an expert in racial identity, said she thinks three things are driving the increase:

• More children are from interracial marriages, with parents in those marriages increasingly likely to identify their offspring as multiracial.
• Immigration has increased, with people born in another country who have a mixed background more likely to say they come from two or more races.
• More people are deciding to label themselves multiracial because they face increasing acceptance and opportunity to make that choice.

Mixed-race people are nothing new. Most American blacks, for example, have some white ancestry.

But throughout much of American history, mixed-race people were forced legally and socially to identify with just one race…

Read the entire article here.

When Social Inequality Maps to Demographic Diversity, What Then for Liberal Democracies?

Social Research: An International Quarterly
Volume 77, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
pages 1-20
ISBN: 978-1-933481-20-3

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University in the City of New York

If social inequality results from discriminatory behaviors or policies based on membership in a race and ethnicity, as it certainly has in the U. S., should policy in a liberal society offer group-based benefits? The civil rights era answered positively. Identity politics, diversity rationales, and pressures for color-blind policy are challenging that answer. What and how we measure is in the middle of the argument.

Framing the Issue

Nations vary in the diversity of their population—here using “diversity” to reference some or all of the following: ethnicity, religion, language, race, ancestry, tribe, and caste. The U.S., Canada and Australia are generally cited as more “diverse” than other OECD countries. There is a large literature indicating that governing demographically diverse populations challenges statecraft in ways not experienced in nations with more homogeneous populations. Diverse populations, for example, are generally assumed to be more prone to internal conflict than more homogenous societies, giving rise to research on how to manage conflict rooted in cultural differences. The conflict may pit group against group. Under some conditions, the conflict expresses itself as a demand for more autonomy, even separation, by the aggrieved group—especially where political power is monopolized by a religion or ethnicity that does not adequately serve or protect the aggrieved group. Where separation is impractical or fiercely resisted—apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland are examples—armed uprising can occur.

Nations vary in the magnitude and patterns of their social inequality—which does bring us nearer to our topic. The U.S. and Europe are, of course, often contrasted in how much inequality they tolerate—more in the U.S., less in Europe.

Here I start with the observation that demographic diversity and social inequalities have to be jointly examined. What policy responses are appropriate in liberal democracies when social inequalities map to demographic diversity? More specifically—how far should the liberal state go in remediation of inequality by providing group rights or group-targeted benefits? My comments offer the U.S. as a case in point…

…Racial Classification in the United States

In the U.S., more than three centuries of racist doctrine planted racially inscribed inequalities deep into the society, polity, and economy. The civil rights movement in the 1960s attempted to end this history through a policy regime that used race to undo racism. Making policy distinctions based on race came to be accepted as the only way to overcome the legacies of a racist history.

Now, nearly a half-century into that policy regime, strong reservations are being voiced. Political arguments echo the “dilemma of recognition”—do race-based policies not defeat their own purpose?…

…More than a century and a half of discriminatory social policy designed to protect the numerical and political supremacy of Americans of European ancestry needed a classification system that assigned everyone to a discrete racial group. Census categories provided this classification, as did vital statistics and, eventually, all administrative records. This measurement system is the basis for presuming that separate and distinct races constitute the true condition of the American population, and can thereby provide the basis for law and public policy. Because there are measurable groups, there are traits that are differently distributed across these groups–including, of course, traits such as intelligence, social worth, moral habits. On this foundation was constructed a race-based legal code and social and economic practices that haunts American history. Ironically, the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s gave fresh momentum to racial measurement. Laws and policies were still to be based on racial classification, but in a 180-degree policy reversal the task became to ensure civil rights that prior uses of racial classification had denied…

…The classification adopted in 1977 and used in the 1980 and 1990 censuses seemed secure and capable of discharging its civil rights purposes in policy arenas. But by the middle of the 1990s, the political landscape was transformed by demographic changes, by the rise of multiculturalism and by the multiracial movement. New political demands called into question the existing racial and ethnic categories–and also the public purposes they were thought to serve.

The OMB again took up the task of reviewing the nation’s official racial classification system, and adopted two changes. The most commented upon change was to allow census respondents to mark one or more to the race question, finally putting to rest the one-drop rule that had worked so hard to preserve the myth of racial purity. This multirace option expresses the obvious—laws against miscegenation notwithstanding, reproduction across racial lines has been a constant in American history for four centuries.

There was a second change. The prior OMB standard had placed Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders within the more general Asian race. Advocates argued that the census should recognize Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders as a separate racial category. The OMB held public hearings and examined research showing that Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders did differ from Asians more generally; it agreed to the separate category. In the mid-1990s the official primary race groups of the United States went from four to five, unwittingly reproducing the Blumenbachian pentagon from two centuries earlier…

…Classification as the Site of Identity Politics: Multiracial rhetoric came to the fore in the 1990s, when advocates insisted on explicit recognition of multiracialism in federal statistics. What was striking about the debate that erupted is what the advocates wanted—not civil rights, but demands for recognition, choice, and identity. In congressional testimony, the Association of MultiEthnic Americans, though recognizing that the multiple-race option would make it harder to enforce civil rights law, nevertheless insisted on “choice in the matter of who we are, just like any other community.” This testimony found it ironic that “our people are being asked to correct by virtue of how we define ourselves all of the past injustices of other groups of people.”

Of course, correcting past injustices was what the traditional civil rights organizations were all about. Their cause was thus threatened by talk of choice and identity. Self expression, they insisted, was not a good reason to revise the government’s scheme of racial and ethnic categories. In its testimony, the NAACP pointed out that the current racial classification was fashioned “to enhance the enforcement of anti-discrimination and civil rights law,” and warned that “the creation of a multiracial classification might disaggregate the apparent numbers of members of discrete minority groups, diluting benefits to which they are entitled as a protected class under civil rights laws and under the Constitution itself.”…

Read the entire article here.

In Their Own Words with Michele Elam

The Human Experience: inside the humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-15

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

 In this installment of “In Their Own Words” English professor Michele Elam discusses her latest research, which explores how representations of mixed race in literature and the arts are redefining new millennial aesthetics and politics.

Elam’s latest publication is entitled, “The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium.”