Mixed Race Studies

Redefining Race and Ethnicity in the US

Voice of America
2011-03-14

Todd Grosshans

The number of young Americans with mixed race and ethnicity is rising real fast in the United States. Many are going to college helping to bridge racial and ethnic divides on campuses nationwide. VOA’s Todd Grosshans takes a closer look on the campus of the University of Maryland just outside Washington DC.

Race and Mixed Race (LS 355)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2011

Explores the history of racial classification in the U.S. with special attention to the census and the role of the state more generally in defining race. Emphasis on how race-mixing has been understood in American culture, and on the current literature on “multiracials” and the future of “race” in the U.S. Readings are drawn from interdisciplinary sources, but examined from a sociological perspective. Same as AAS 355 and SOC 355.

The Invisible Line: American families’ journeys from black to white

Research news@Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt University
2011-02-17

Amy Wolf

The idea of someone transitioning from black to white, without science or surgery, seems hard to grasp on the surface. Yet Vanderbilt Law School professor Daniel J. Sharfstein finds that African Americans have continually crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities from 17th century America through today. This actual journey has little to do with one’s skin color and more to do with a society’s willingness to look beyond race.

“We talk about the great migration north of African Americans in the 20th century, but this mass migration across the color line impacted millions of people and was hundreds of years in the making,” said Sharfstein. “It’s very easy to forget this history. This process of migrating across the color line is something that falls outside of what we think of as African American history because it’s a history that people were trying to cover up and forget as it was happening.”…

…Self definition, not color, was key

Sharfstein spent almost a decade researching dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their race and create new lives. Sharfstein found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans.

While previous records of “passing” have focused on individuals’ struggles to redefine themselves, often by leaving their homes and fabricating new identities, Sharfstein found large numbers of people who managed to defy the legal definitions of race right within their own communities. Sharfstein found that what mattered most was not the color of their skin, but how they defined themselves and related to their neighbors.

“What this research tells us is that the categories of black and white have never been about blood. There were plenty of people throughout American history who were not just white, but quintessentially white, powerfully white, and had African American ancestors,” said Sharfstein. “Then we’re left thinking, ‘What is black and what is white then if it’s not about blood and biology?’ And what we wind up with is just the fact of separation and hierarchy.”

Three families’s stories

Sharfstein focused much of his research on three families whom he chronicled in a new book titled “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Line: Three American families and the secret journey from black to white [Live Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein]

Minnesota Public Radio News
Midmorning Broadcast: 2011-03-15 15:06Z (10:06 CDT, 11:06 EDT, 08:06 PDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

For much of American history, racial identity has been defined in terms of black and white. But because of their heritage and physical appearance, some families walk the line between cultures.

A new book chronicles three mixed-race families whose identities were called into question at various periods in history – with surprising consequences.

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)  [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 90, Number 3 (December 2003)
page 1107
DOI: 10.2307/3661030

David Rich Lewis, Professor of History
Utah State University, Logan

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)

In the 1950s the federal government reversed its pluralistic policies for revitalizing tribal governments and began terminating its trust responsibility under the guise of “freeing” American Indians from federal control. Termination policies flowed out of the conservative, budget-cutting, consensus rhetoric of Cold War America. As R. Warren Metcalf points out, its implementation varied, informed by the ideology of its practitioners and the circumstances of its subjects—specifically the Mormon cultural background of Arthur V. Watkins, Republican senator from Utah and chief advocate of termination in Congress, and the numerically small, powerless, and divided Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute Indians of Utah. Metcalf details the process whereby federal officials, Mormon politicians and lawyers, and Utes themselves accomplished the termination of mixed-blood members of the Northern Ute tribe despite the letter of the law and the bonds of racial identity. It is the story of identity politics that left individuals as “discarded” Indians…

Read the entire review here.

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah

University of Nebraska Press
2002
311 pages
Illus., maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-3201-3; Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2251-9

R. Warren Metcalf, Associate Professor of United States History
University of Oklahoma

Termination’s Legacy describes how the federal policy of termination irrevocably affected the lives of a group of mixed-blood Ute Indians who made their home on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah. Following World War II many Native American communities were strongly encouraged to terminate their status as wards of the federal government and develop greater economic and political power for themselves. During this era, the rights of many Native communities came under siege, and the tribal status of some was terminated. Most of the terminated communities eventually regained tribal status and federal recognition in subsequent decades. But not all did.

The mixed-blood Utes fell outside the formal categories of classification by the federal government, they did not meet the essentialist expectations of some officials of the Mormon Church, and their regaining of tribal status potentially would have threatened those Utes already classified as tribal members on the reservation. Skillfully weaving together interviews and extensive archival research, R. Warren Metcalf traces the steps that led to the termination of the mixed-blood Utes’ tribal status and shows how and why this particular group of Native Americans was never formally recognized as “Indian” again. Their repeated failure to regain their tribal status throws into relief the volatile key issue of identity then and today for full- and mixed-blood Native Americans, the federal government, and the powerful Mormon Church in Utah.

Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas (Eds.), Mixed Race Hollywood, New York University Press, 2008, 325 pp. [Review]

International Journal of Communication
Issue 4 (2010)
pages 139-141

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

In the wake of “Obama-mania,” conventional wisdom about racial identity is facing a set of new and unique challenges. It is therefore imperative for scholars and industry professionals to reflect on multiracial identification, representation, history and post-racial politics as they pertain to art and to life. This is exactly what Mixed Race Hollywood, four parts, the book examines representations of multiracial people as integral yet often silenced parts of our real and imagined communities. A truly interdisciplinary study, the essays explore a wide range of topics—from early mixed race film characters to Blaxploitation and “multiracial chic” to children’s television programming, same-sex romance and the “outing” of mixed race stars online. Both provocative and timely, the collection helps its readers better understand the evolving conceptions of what race actually is and can be—mixed. The threads running through each essay are these two questions: How are mixed race people deployed as subjects and/or objects in Hollywood? And, when it comes to issues of mixed race, does art imitate life or does life imitate art?…

Read the entire review here.

What is ‘post-racial’?

The Spectator
Seattle University
2011-02-16

Frances Dinger

Since Barack Obama became the first black president in 2008, the word “post-racial” has been liberally used by some media groups. We are, according to some, at a point in our country’s history when we can be past race but minorities are still incarcerated at a disproportionate rate to whites and are more often living below the poverty line, especially in urban areas (whites outnumber minorities in the case of poverty in rural areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). So, what does it mean to say we are a post-racial nation when the numbers suggest otherwise?

“We’re not post-racial,” said sociology professor Gary Perry. “We’re post-talking about race.”

With the rise of the multi-racial and multi-cultural movement, some ethnic groups are becoming less visible. And the issue is complicated further considering races are not measured uniformly across government agencies. A 20-year-old student named Michelle López-Mullins who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent is counted as “Hispanic” by the Board of Education but the National Center for Health statistics would count her both as “Asian” and “Hispanic,” according to a Feb. 9 New York Times article by Susan Saulny.

During the 2010 census, individuals had the option of checking a box marked “mixed race,” making counting all the more complicated.

While trivial to some, racial statistics help government agencies consider disparities in health, education, employment and housing, among other protections. So, where are we in the race discussion when even government agencies are sometimes unsure how to group individuals? Does a movement for “mixed race” mean we are moving toward greater equality or acceptance?

“Symbolically, there’s this idea that we’ve arrived at a place absent of race,” Perry said. “[…] It’s not that we’re post-racial, but the mixing we’re seeing indicates race doesn’t matter.”

Perry emphasized that what we see in the media from minority celebrities is not the reality faced by many Americans of color…

Read the entire article here.

So… What Are You, Anyway?

Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2011-03-25 through 2011-03-26

The Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association will host its third annual conference on mixed-race politics and identity issues, “So…What Are You, Anyway?” (SWAYA) on Friday, March 25 and Saturday, March 26, 2011 on the Harvard University campus. The event is open to the public and will feature an array of exciting guest lecturers who will speak on issues involving multiracial identity.

The conference will include lectures given by the Dean of Harvard College and other Harvard College professors, as well as student panels and discussion groups. Last year, the event drew over one hundred students and other guests from colleges and cities around the Boston area.

SWAYA will culminate in a special gala dinner* in honor of the 2010 recipient of the Cultural Pioneer Award, celebrity mixed-race artist Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the award-winning documentary “One Big Hapa Family”. An international spokesperson on mixed-race identity, Stearns’ short films exploring multiethnic issues have been screened in hundreds of film festivals around the world and have garnered over 33 awards.

For more information, click here.

Adults’ Attitudes Toward Multiracial Children

Journal of Black Psychology
Volume 29, Number 4 (November 2003)
pages 463-480
DOI: 10.1177/0095798403256888

Gayle L. Chesley
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

William G. Wagner

A between-groups experimental design was used to examine adults’ attitudes toward multiracial children of African descent. The purpose was to determine if the races of the respondent,the child, and the child’ s friends are related to adults’ ratings of children’s self-perception and depressive symptoms. A total of 156 undergraduate students (African American = 78, European American = 78) read a vignette in which the race of the target child (European American, African American, or multiracial) and the child’s friends (European American or African American) were experimentally controlled. Participants assessed the child using a revision of Harter’s Self-Perception Profile for Children and a revised version of Kovacs’s Children’s Depression Inventory—Short Form. Ratings of the child’s global self-worth and depressive symptoms were negatively correlated. The results of a 2 × 2 × 3 MANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction for the races of the child,the respondent, and the child’s friends on adults’ ratings of the child’s peer acceptance. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Read the entire article here.