Mixed Race Studies

Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States

Michigan Journal of Race & Law
Volume 14, Issue 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 143-195

D. Wendy Greene, Assistant Professor of Law
Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

Recently, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education. These states have established admissions quotas in public universities for Afro-Brazilians or afrodescendentes. As a result, determining “who is Black” has become a complex yet important undertaking in Brazil. Contrary to many scholars’ advancements race in Brazil is skin color or physical appearance, whereas in the United States race is based on ancestry, this Article advances the notion that in both American countries one’s physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness. Furthermore, when U.S. courts have been charged with determining Blackness, racial constructs based on physical appearance—not the rule of hypodescent—have steered their legal pronouncement of race. This Article first offers a necessary survey of African slavery in Brazil and the United States. This Article demonstrates that despite the contrasts in demography, slave law, and ensuing racial ideology—“racial democracy” in Brazil and “racial purity” in the United States—the enslavement and subordination of Africans and their descendants spawned a common racial hierarchy and assembly of phenotypes designating Blackness and whiteness. Moreover, this Article surveys historical and contemporary racial determination cases which demonstrate the salience of physical appearance in determining race in the United States and debunks the notion that the hypodescent rule is applied to determine “Blackness”. These cases additionally illuminate the paradoxical nature of race—specifically Blackness and whiteness—in the Americas; race is contextual, subjective, and malleable yet simultaneously fixed, as physical constructs of Blackness and whiteness have transcended geography, time, ideology, and demography. Ultimately, this exploration of racial determination cases imparts insight and guidance to Brazilian arbiters currently determining who is Afro-Brazilian for affirmative action purposes.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. Slavery, Race, and Racial Ideology in Brazil and the United States Settlement, Slavery, and Demography
  • A. Race, Racial Ideology, and Racial Hierarchy
  • B. Brazil: A “Racial Democracy”
  • C. The United States: A “Racially Pure” Nation
  • D. Brazil and the United States: A Transnational Concept of Race and Racial Hierarchy
• II. Constructing Race: The Role of U.S. Courts
  • A. Race as Physical Appearance and Beyond in the Nineteenth Century: Hudgins v. Wright and White v. Tax Collector
  • B. Racial Determination in the Early Twentieth Century: In Re Cruz
  • C. Moving Toward a New Millennium Yet Mired in the Past: The Malone and Perkins Cases
• III. The Application of U.S. Racial Determination Methods to the Brazilian Case
• CONCLUSION

On January 20, 2009 Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Throughout President Obama’s candidacy and after his victory, one of the primary queries raised by the media revolved around his race: is America “ready” for a Black president? Even though it is publicly known that Obama’s mother is a white American from the Midwest and his father is a native of Kenya, the press as well as most Americans would describe Senator Obama as the first Black president of the United States, rather than the first mixed-race president. The general depiction and acceptance of Senator Obama as Black rather than multiracial generates important questions related to America’s common understanding of race. In the United States, is Obama deemed Black because he has self-identified as Black? Is Obama defined as Black due to his known African ancestry? Or is Obama generally regarded as Black in the United States, despite his known white parentage, because of his physical appearance—one which conforms to a socially constructed image of Blackness?

Since the era of Jim Crow, the rule of hypodescent—the presence of one ancestor of African descent makes an individual’s race Black—has been articulated as the guiding principle for determining one’s “Blackness” and “whiteness” in the United States. Accordingly, ancestry allegedly determines Blackness in the United States dissimilarly to Brazil, where one’s physical appearance is determinative. In Brazil it is widely acknowledged that most Brazilians are descendants of Africans in light of the pervasive miscegenation that occurred during and after the Portuguese and Brazilian enslavement of Africans. Therefore, one’s physical appearance—hair texture, skin color, nose size, eye shape, etc.—determines one’s race in Brazil. Contrary to scholarly opinion “[u]nlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry” and public adherence to this idea, one’s physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness in both American countries. Indeed, an individual’s ancestry is necessarily implicated in determining race based on his or her physical appearance, as this method of classifying race is grounded in socially mediated presumptions concerning how an individual’s physical appearance denotes his or her genetic makeup…

…This Article examines the alleged complexity of determining who is Black or Afro-Brazilian for affirmative action purposes in higher education while surveying United States racial determination jurisprudence. This Article is not intended to serve as a dissertation on the legality of race-conscious affirmative action or the efficacy of these programs in the United States and Brazil. Since the United States is considered a global forerunner in the implementation of race-conscious affirmative action in higher education and employment, numerous scholars have debated the validity, constitutionality, and utility of race-conscious affirmative action in Brazil through a U.S./Brazil comparative lens. However, there is a paucity of literature exploring fundamental issues in facilitating race-conscious programs: specifically, who is the proper beneficiary; how should this determination be made; and can Brazilian arbiters adopt U.S. judicial modes of determining race to effectuate their raceconscious affirmative action programs? The objective of this Article is to mitigate this void in comparative scholarship by demonstrating the universality of race and the law’s role in constructing race, racial ideology, and racial hierarchy.

First, this Article discusses African slavery in Brazil and the United States, which is crucial to the understanding of race, racial ideology, and racial hierarchy in the two nations. Part I explores the differences and similarities between the conception of race in Brazil and the United States, specifically focusing on the construction of Black, white, and multi-racial classifications. Part I also considers the influence of slavery and settlement patterns on the contrasting racial ideologies in both American nations—“racial democracy” in Brazil and “racial purity” in the United States. Additionally, this section illustrates that a mutual racial hierarchy constructed around physical appearance developed and endures despite the divergent racial ideologies, settlement patterns and slavery law in Brazil and the United States.

Next, Part II examines a series of racial determination cases decided by American courts historically and contemporarily and the various methods these courts appropriated to determine an individual’s race. This survey of racial determination cases illuminates the salience of physical appearance in determining race as well as the paradoxical nature of race—specifically Blackness and whiteness—in the Americas; race is contextual, subjective, and malleable yet simultaneously fixed, as physical constructs of Blackness and whiteness have transcended geography, time, ideology, and demography. Part III concludes with a consideration of Brazilian arbiters adopting American judicial modes of determining race and the potential consequences of doing so…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Georgetown Law Review
Volume 77, Number 6 (August 1989)
pages 1967-2029

A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Judge (1928-1998)
United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit)

Barbara K. Kopytoff, Professor of Law (1938-1999)
University of Pennsylvania

I. Introduction

There is probably no better place than Virginia to examine the origins of the American doctrine of racial purity and the related prohibitions on interracial sex and interracial marriage. Many people applaud Virginia as the “mother of Presidents” (four of the first five Presidents were Virginians) and the “mother of revolutionaries,” such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry. Yet few stress that colonial Virginia was also the “mother” of American slavery and a leader in the gradual debasement of blacks through its institution of slavery. Virginia was also one of the first colonies to formulate a legal definition of race and to enact prohibitions against interracial marriage and interracial sex. For more than three centuries, the Virginia courts and legislatures advocated and endorsed concepts of racial purity that we would call racist.

While Virginia was a pioneer in these areas of law both before and after the Civil War, the pre-Civil War law was significantly different from that of the early twentieth century. The law of racial purity in the eighteenth century defined “white” as a less exclusive term than did the law of the twentieth century: people some of whose ancestors were known to be African could be legally white. The laws banning interracial sex and marriage were less harsh on blacks before the Civil War than they were afterwards: they did not punish blacks at all for marriage or for voluntary sexual relations with whites…

Read or purchase the article here.

Miscegenation and competing definitions of race in twentieth-century Louisiana

Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 621-659

Michelle Brattain, Associate Professor of History
Georgia State University

MARCUS BRUCE CHRISTIAN, AN AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR AT DILLARD University, observed in the mid-nineteen-fifties that while New Orleans might be known for “gumbo, jambalaya, lagniappe, poor boy sandwiches, pralines, Mardi Gras and Creoles,” it also has “another claim to distinction which has not been bruited about very loudly. ” New Orleans is a place, he wrote, where family lines “waver back and forth across color-lines like wet wash in a high March wind.” The city has given to America “more ‘passer pour blanches’ [people who pass for white] than any other city in our country.” A poet and scholar of black history, Christian anticipated much of the current academic interest in race as a social construction. (1) His meticulous histories of eighteenth—and nineteenth-century families recreated an era when racial lines were more fluid and southern society accepted—or at least expected—interracial sex. In the latter half of Christian’s career, as a civil rights struggle charged with anxieties about interracial contact swirled around him, his interests broadened to include the progeny of those early families. Among thousands of newspaper clippings that Christian saved over his lifetime—documenting New Orleans history from the protracted fight over school desegregation to the debate over stereotypical and degrading representations of Africans in Mardi Gras–one finds dozens of society photographs, wedding announcements, and obituaries that he compiled, seemingly in an attempt to discover a similar secret interracial history of the twentieth century. In the margins, he sometimes annotated genealogies, alternate spellings, or anecdotes about similar names encountered on the other side of the color line. In 1959, for example, he noted, and documented, the strange coincidence of a death notice for a man he thought was a “Negro,” who had died at an “all white” hospital, and speculated on the dead man’s familial relationship to a realtor listing a “colored” apartment a couple of weeks later. Of the family name in question, he later wrote to himself, “Joubert? What about the white family that says it spells its name ‘Jau’ and not ‘Jou’ [?]” Christian often wrote simply, as he did on a 1960 photograph of a couple cutting their fiftieth-anniversary cake, the word miscegenation. (2) The basis for such judgments was rarely explained. Perhaps it was a distant memory, a rumor, or merely Christian asserting his ability as a black man to spot passer pour blanches. Unfortunately he never published his side of these stories…

…Two striking conclusions emerge from an analysis of these records. First, Louisianans held much more complicated and historically contingent views of race than the statutes and court decisions alone would suggest. The legal adjudication of race in the twentieth century, as Pascoe has argued, historically had a complex, interdependent relationship with popular and scientific beliefs about race. This essay examines one aspect of that tension. By necessity, politics and the courts represented abstract law that could recognize only black and white, but the people who entered the courts worked with a more practical understanding that was also born of necessity. Most noteworthy about the testimony of people brought into Louisiana courts by miscegenation law is the fluidity and contextual nuance with which many people viewed race. In spite of the mid-twentieth century’s increasingly rigid lines of demarcation with regard to race, many ordinary Louisiana citizens instinctively understood and accepted the essentially social nature of racial definitions, and they worked with these definitions in the most private areas of their lives…

…Second, though miscegenation law frequently failed to prevent sex across the race line, it served another equally significant function in the twentieth century: a tool to monitor racial boundaries. Louisiana state law had often been able to tame and contain the contradictions of black and white, but by the mid-twentieth century, the demands of massive resistance increasingly brought about more ideological and less practical applications of jurisprudence. Official public records associated with essentially private and gendered actions such as birth and marriage became a gatekeeping mechanism for maintaining segregation in Louisiana schools, sports, and public conveyances. Government-employed bureaucrats carried out increasingly stringent investigations of once-routine applications for marriage licenses, death certificates, and birth certificates in order to police the boundaries of race and expose those who in the past might have “passed” as white or married across race lines. These private points of individual connection with the state, therefore, took on a substantial burden in the maintenance of racial boundaries, the punishment of miscegenation, and the defense of whiteness. The objective of anti-miscegenation law was ostensibly to discourage and punish sex across the race line, but it also permitted the state to use gender and private life to control the same boundary. In doing so, it made significant contributions to the redefinition of miscegenation and race itself.

Incidents of “race mixture” and white attempts to control such encounters have a long and infamous history in the South. Although prohibition of interracial sex was typically legislators’ stated objective, recent scholarship also underscores the deeply contextual nature of the statutes’ various incarnations. In colonial Virginia, where the earliest legislation on interracial liaisons appeared in 1662, the law reflected first the English conception of broadly defined racial hierarchy and later the social and economic dominance of explicitly racial slavery. At all times, colonial law addressed the reality of ongoing racial mixing, even as it represented what A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff have aptly described as “attempts to patch holes in the fabric of the system.” (10)

The solution, as Peter W. Bardaglio puts it, was a legal attempt “not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them” in directions that bolstered the slave system and existing racial and gender hierarchies. (11) While the specific definitions of the crime and punishment varied, as Charles Robinson notes, “In each colony a violation of the law required some party, man, woman, and/or child, to make restitution by sacrificing freedom.” Doubling the fine for interracial fornication, Virginia’s assembly, for example, declared in 1662 that an interracial child’s status would follow that of the mother. This ruling insured that the most common transgression of the color line–between black women and white men–would not undermine a social system increasingly based on a dichotomy between black slaves and free white persons. Maryland’s 1664 anti-miscegenation law did not proscribe marriage, but it declared that a white woman who married a slave would serve that slave’s master for the remainder of the husband’s life and that any offspring would be required to labor for the parish for thirty-one years. After 1692 in Maryland and 1725 in Pennsylvania, free black men who married white women were sentenced to a lifetime of slavery. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia enacted provisions similar to those of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (12) Colonial officials also singled out white women who had sex with black men for special punishment, a double standard that reflected, among other concerns, a perceived need both to control white female sexuality and to eliminate the threat that interracial offspring posed to the institution of slavery…

…In the early nineteenth century, as moral reformers encouraged the spread of anti-miscegenation laws throughout the United States, Louisiana law continued to reflect a greater preoccupation with racial hierarchy and property than with sex. In 1825, for example, the legislature revised the civil code to outlaw the legitimization of biracial children by white fathers, prohibit children of color from claiming paternity from white fathers, and make it more difficult for biracial children to receive an inheritance by disallowing all but formal legal acknowledgement as a basis for establishing paternity. Through such measures Louisianans eliminated the old French laws governing support of children born within placage and protected the interests of white heirs from siblings of color. Interracial marriage remained illegal in the sense that it was legally invalid, but the law did not prescribe punishment for violators…

Read the entire article here or here.

Race in American Science Fiction

Indiana University Press
2011-01-06
paper 286 pages, 6 x 9
paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22259-6
cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35553-9

Isiah Lavender, III, Assistant Professor of English
University of Central Arkansas

Blackness in a white genre

Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre’s narrative strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic classification of ways that race appears and how it is silenced in science fiction, while developing a critical vocabulary designed to focus attention on often-overlooked racial implications. These focused readings of science fiction contextualize race within the genre’s better-known master narratives and agendas. Authors discussed include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Mapping the Blackground
1. Racing Science Fiction
2. Meta-slavery
3. Jim Crow Extrapolations
4. Ailments of Race [Read a description below.]
5. Ethnoscapes
6. Technologically Derived Ethnicities
Epilogue: Science Fictioning Race

Notes
Bibliography
Index

…Chapter 4 investigates ailments of race linked to the notion contagion as a race metaphor in science fiction. This chapter explores the idea of the one-drop rule and miscegenation. Sf [Science Fiction] narratives built around the threat or devastation of some form of contagion frequently manifest racial fears and assumptions. Whether the product of nature or technology, accident or design, contagion narratives depict change so swift and so drastic that it can underscore or undermine a wide range of cultural assumptions, including those about race. In every case, however, these narratives derive their power from fear of the ready and rapid transmission of a harmful disease or idea from person to person. And this fear shares many characteristics with the fear of race mixing. Consequently, many sf contagion narratives manifest protocols of racial discrimination and sometimes challenge racist assumptions. Discussion centers on texts by Creg Bear, Butler, John W. Campbell Jr., Tananarive Due, Walter Miller, and [Walter] Mosely….

From page 123

…Ailments or race exist in st to expose societal discomfort with racial difference in terms of social relations between blacks and whites. However, racism is made visible in contagion narratives involving the offense of miscegenation—race mixing—as a biological phenomenon as opposed to asocial one and the violent measures taken against such commingling. By constructing miscegenation as a biological phenomenon, sf writers question the one-drop rule as a social idea based on the racist belief that one drop of black blood in a family’s heritage marks them as forever black, granting them invisible membership in an oppressed race.  People of this mixed-race heritage may choose to identify with a different race, if they are light-skinned enough, as they pass from black to white and disappear across the color line to avoid discrimination and to seek a life without persecution. With contagion as a race metaphor, fear is imposed on such racial contacts, and the violent consequences of these inevitable encounters are envisioned through the lens of otherhood…

Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers

The New York Times
2009-02-11

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

Race Remixed: The Pigeonhole Problem. Articles in this series explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans.

The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins—a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent—as “Hispanic.” But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her “Asian.” And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks “other” on surveys these days, but when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American and white.

The chameleon-like quality of Ms. López-Mullins’s racial and ethnic identification might seem trivial except that statistics on ethnicity and race are used for many important purposes. These include assessing disparities in health, education, employment and housing, enforcing civil rights protections, and deciding who might qualify for special consideration as members of underrepresented minority groups.

But when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand. Changes in how Americans are counted by race and ethnicity are meant to improve the precision with which the nation’s growing diversity is gauged: the number of mixed-race Americans, for example, is rising rapidly, largely because of increases in immigration and intermarriage in the past two decades. (One in seven new marriages is now interracial or interethnic.)…

…Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student like Ms. López-Mullins who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students of non-Hispanic mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category, a catchall that detractors describe as inadequately detailed. A child of black and American Indian parents, for example, would be in the same category as, say, a child of white and Asian parents.

The new standards for kindergarten through 12th grades and higher education will probably increase the nationwide student population of Hispanics, and could erase some “black” students who will now be counted as Hispanic or as multiracial (in the “two or more races category”). And reclassifying large numbers of white Hispanic students as simply Hispanic has the potential to mask the difference between minority and white students’ test scores, grades and graduation rates—the so-called achievement gap, a target of federal reform efforts that has plagued schools for decades.

“They’re all lumped together—blacks, Asians and Latinos—and they all look the same from the data perspective,” said Daniel J. Losen, a policy expert for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, referring to the Department of Education aggregation. “But the reality is much different. There are different kinds of discrimination experienced by these subgroups.”

“It’s a big problem for researchers,” Mr. Losen continued, “because it throws a monkey wrench in our efforts at accountability, student tracking and the study of trends.”…

…The Census Bureau’s solution may have added layers of complexity for demographers—creating 63 categories of possible racial combinations—but it laid to rest fears from civil rights advocates that adding a multiracial category would diminish the number of blacks, Asians or American Indians in official government counts, since multiracial people are counted in the ranks of all of the races they check. (This does not distort the total population of the United States because that number is based on how many people answer the census questionnaire, not on adding the totals from each racial column.)

Even the Census Bureau acknowledges that accurately counting the multiracial population is a challenge and says it continues to explore ways to do it better, said Nicholas A. Jones, chief of the racial statistics branch. Some people of mixed race were fickle about their racial identifications in early tests of the new, more expansive methods, changing their answers from interview to interview.

Moreover, because the census in 2000 began allowing respondents to mark as many races as they wanted, today’s numbers are not directly comparable with those before 2000…

Read the entire article here.

Halle Berry and Nahla: Not So Mixed, Not So Happy

The Huffington Post
2011-02-09

Marcia Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

As we await the results of the 2010 Census it’s tempting to think that our growing comfort with categorizing people as multiracial has erased racism and the fear of interracial relations. But in a recent interview with Ebony Magazine, Halle Berry says that we’re neither as mixed nor as happy as we’d like to think.

In the interview Berry addressed her ugly custody battle with Gabriel Aubry over their 2-year-old daughter, Nahla. Allegations are circulating about the couple’s different racial philosophies, including the use of racial slurs, and their anxiety over Nahla’s racial categorization in the press. Berry told Ebony that “I feel like [Nahla is] black” because of the one drop rule. In other words, Berry sees herself and her daughter as black because they are of partial African American ancestry. Other sources say that Aubry sees Nahla as white and that he thinks Berry should demand a retraction whenever Nahla is identified otherwise…

…Note the word “naturally.” If we take a step back in time we will find that many, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, used the word “naturally” to justify and promote racial segregation and inequality. Now, many are using this same terminology to suggest that mixed race people are, by nature, non-racist and capable of promoting large-scaled racial healing. Some even suggest that multiracial families can promote the end of race and racism because of their biological backgrounds. The beauty of thinking this way is that it allows culture to masquerade as human nature without any justification.

This popular-but-flawed way of thinking equates racial progress with racial mixing and ignores the fact that interracial romantic relationships still experience higher rates of failure and different kinds of challenges than same-race relationships. That’s why we can have multiracial families selling car insurance, pasta, and video games on one hand and, on the other, have Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry’s rancorous custody battle…

Read the entire article here.

Where the interracials may take us

Los Angeles Times
2010-09-21

Eli Steele

Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end identity politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.

We may be in the midst of an interracial baby boom. A recent Pew Research Center study reported that interracial marriages rose from 6.7% in 1980 to a record 14.6% in 2008. If these marriages produce children at the national average, one out of seven Americans could claim two or more races. In Western states where interracial marriage is more common, the ratio rises to nearly one out of four.

The day will arrive when this interracial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America’s divisive identity politics. Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end these politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism…

…Will such identity politics survive the interracial baby boom? Will new categories arise for the African German American or Chinese Latino American? Will a critical mass of interracials become an eclectic race in their own right? Or will they bypass the labels and embrace individualism?…

Read the entire article here.

Johanna Workman 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 and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #192-Johanna Workman
When: Wednesday, 2011-02-09, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Johanna Workman

Dr. Johanna Workman recently received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Alliant International University, San Diego. She has worked in the mental health field for 20 years in a variety of treatment settings and modalities, including: outpatient psychotherapy, school counseling, inpatient psychiatric hospitalization, and residential substance abuse treatment. Her dissertation study investigated biracial daughter’s perceptions of self-mother relationships and body image. With a Black Caribbean mother, and a White British father, Dr. Workman was born in England and spent her early childhood years there before immigrating to the United States with her family.

This is who I am: Defining mixed-race identity

The Seattle Times
2008-09-28

Lornet Turnbull, Seattle Times staff

The story of race in the U.S. is changing, and so is the way many of us identify ourselves. That’s especially true in the Seattle area, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people than any other metro area in the country.

Rachel Clad’s parents are a black woman from Detroit and a white man from California who met in the Peace Corps in Africa.

Clad, 26, was born in New Zealand and spent her early years in far-flung parts of the world before her family settled into a middle-class lifestyle in Washington, D.C.

She’ll tell you she’s multiracial.

“People look at me and see African American,” she said. “In my mind, that’s not who I am. I’m both and I’d like to be seen as both.”.

Aaron Hazard’s mother was a French-Canadian white woman who met his African-American father at a dance in Boston in the 1930s, at a time when such unions were forbidden.

When he signed up for service during the Vietnam era, the Army listed him as white, although Hazard has never referred to himself as anything other than black.

“It’s what my father was and that’s what I am,” the 62-year-old South Seattle resident said. “Back then there were too many white people to remind me of it.”

Barack Obama’s rise to prominence has broadened the dialogue around race in a country that has always done a poor job talking about it. And this new attention is prompting some people of mixed race to more closely examine how they define themselves.

That’s especially so in Greater Seattle, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people — nearly 4 percent of the area’s population — than any other large metropolitan area in the country.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make in this discussion is assuming there’s only one correct way to be biracial,” said author Elliott Lewis, who grew up in Eastern Washington and has written about the biracial experience…

…”There were historical rules … that if you were mixed and had a parent who wasn’t white, then you checked the census box of the parent who wasn’t white,” said Maria P. P. Root, a Seattle clinical psychologist who has written extensively on mixed race in America.

“There was this gate-keeping around whiteness. The public still hasn’t gotten around to the fact that you can be blended.”…

Read the entire article here.

US, MSU see increase in multiracial students

The State News
East Lansing, Michigan
2011-02-02

Emily Wilkins

They call her “blackbean” – half black, half Mexican.

It’s a nickname embraced by Lynette Davidson, a political theory and constitutional democracy and communication sophomore and one of the 710 students at MSU who identifies with two or more races. Davidson’s mother is Mexican, her father is black.

Davidson is part of a growing number of college students who identify as biracial or multiracial.

MSU [Michigan State University] did not offer two or more races as a choice for students on university documents until fall 2010, so it is unknown how this number has changed during the past several years. However, the number of people in the U.S. who identify with two or more races is growing. Data from the U.S. Census shows between 2004-09, 838,000 babies were born with two or more races, an increase of more than 100,000 from the number born between 2000-04, which also increased from the five-year period prior.

Davidson said she does not fully feel like she belongs in black or Mexican student organizations.

“I never really identify with either of them,” Davidson said. “I grew up in a predominately white area.”

Students such as Davidson are not alone, but they do not represent the feeling of all multiracial students…

…Kristen Renn is an associate professor of higher, adult and lifelong education who has written a book about multiracial college students. Renn said not all racial groups are open to multiracial members, and a person’s acceptance and comfort level within a group is based on multiple things.

“Sometimes it has to do (with) a way a student looks,” Renn said. “(For example) it looks to the outside world that they are Asian, but they might have grown up in a household that didn’t celebrate a lot of Asian holidays or have a lot of Asian food. (They) come to campus and find themselves outside (Asian) student culture.”…

Read the entire article here.