Mixed Race Studies

The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez

Boston College Third World Law Journal
Volume 20, Number 2 (Spring 2000)
pages 231-290

Reginald L. Robinson, Professor of Law
Howard University

In this article, the author posits that race as an idea begins with consciousness that reinforces that race is real and immutable. The Multiracial Category Movement can shift our race consciousness away from traditional ways of thinking, talking, and using race. The Movement moves us beyond binary race thinking, and this new thinking shifts the extant race consciousness matrix. It also frees our consciousness so that we can personally and politically acknowledge our biracial and multiracial identities, and it perforce alters the traditional political meaning of race. Legal scholars like Professor Tanya Hernandez argue for the political meaning of race against a remediating balm against the color-blind jurisprudence, weakening of civil right protections, and pigmentocracy. While these new identities can promote color-blind jurisprudence by conservatives and pigmentocracy by those fleeing the oppressive constraints of traditional racial categories, the author argues against Hernandez and for the Movement’s paradigm shifting possibilities.

Introduction

Although we socially, historically, and psychologically co-create racism and white supremacy, race is not biologically factual. It is not real. As such, race does not have any meaning that survives its social and historical context. Race exists, if ever, in our individual and cultural consciousness. If we do not constantly and consciously meditate on it, race cannot exist. Unfortunately, we fuel this social construct with our mental kindling and intellectual logs. Race, racism, and white supremacy exist because we—individually and collectively—create it, enforce it, and sustain it. Thus, it is our race consciousness and its attendant behavior that remain the apt locus for racism and white supremacy. We consciously create race by externalizing what we think about, for example, blacks. This race-thinking—or externalizing—constructs our liberal world, and this world in turn constructs us. As Jerome Bruner would perhaps argue, race for all of us is the “out there” that first exists “in here.” In this way, race is not only constructed but is also a consciousness matrix.

Basically, if race arises from a consciousness matrix, does race necessarily have an essential meaning outside of how we think, use and talk about race? I think not! Thinking, talking, and using give race its life force, content, and meaning (e.g., racism). Without our thinking, talking, and using, race loses its practical, social function, and we need never experience the individual and collective pain that follows consciously or otherwise when we force people to separate unnaturally from each other. Unfortunately, if we continue to think, talk, and use race, we—blacks, whites, and others—co-create these venal experiences. And then we become drunk and sickened by the nasty mead we have created, and in this drunken stupor, we forget that we originated race and racism, proclaiming instead that race and racism not only reside in a great unreachable beyond but also remain external, objective, and real.

We rarely ask if race’s meaning exists beyond our consciousness, and we rarely ponder how absolutely central our role is in race’s oppressive meaning. Ultimately, then, it is as if we—blacks, whites, and others—walk into a well-lit room, turn out the lights, forget about the light switch, and then curse the darkness. Because we turned out the light, the idea of darkness must already have existed within our consciousness. By dimming the light, we sought the dark. After we create darkness, then we alienate ourselves from each other by becoming vested in our racialized roles, all the while blaming the liberal state for solely creating race and for deliberately giving race its particularly venal content. Hardly! For dark, fearful reasons, blacks and whites prefer a race consciousness. Why? I think blacks and whites prefer thinking, talking, and using race and race consciousness because each group seeks power, innocence, control, irresponsibility, etc. Worst of all, we foolishly believe that “blackness” or “whiteness” represents our true, spiritual identity and our true beingness.

What nonsense! Again, blacks and whites act as if they cannot respond to how they have allowed themselves to think, talk, and use race. In the end, we become the “blackness” or “whiteness” and its venal content. If we account for a given culture’s collective consciousness, no great, oppressive force exists beyond our own consciousness. Perhaps Pogo was right: we have met the racists, bigots, and fools, and they are us. In this way, race’s meaning is always first “in here” (i.e., matrix consciousness).25

This matrix of race consciousness—race thinking and its meaning—comes under direct attack from the Multiracial Category Movement (MCM). With this MCM, we can weaken our narrow fixation on a singular racial identity, and by broadening our racial lenses, we can achieve at least five goals. First, we can shift our race consciousness. Second, we can destabilize racial categories completely. Third, we can think, talk, and use “race” categories toward a higher, Spiritual end. Fourth, we can eradicate all racial categories. Fifth, we can begin to relate to each other as Spirit beings, despite the different “color” garb we may choose in a given lifetime. In this critical essay, I evaluate Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández’s article, “Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence, and I proceed in the following way. First, I briefly flesh out the problem of a race-consciousness matrix. Then, I argue that the MCM does not in and of itself privilege white over black. Third, the MCM creates a challenge and an opportunity for perhaps yet unimagined social liberty and legal equality. Fourth, the MCM does not perforce invigorate color-blind jurisprudence and thus white supremacy…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Patterns in the United States By State

Public Research Report No. 2001-02
Race Contours 2000 Study: A University of Southern California and University of Michigan Collaborative Project
Released: 2001-04-13

Noel Hacegaba, Adjunct Instructor of Public Administration
University of La Verne, La Verne, California

Dowell Myer, Professor of Public Policy
University of Southern California

• The size of the multiracial population in the United States (2.4%) is roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts.
• The highest prevalence of multiracial residents in a particular race group is generally found in states that have smaller concentrations of that group.
• California departs from the rest of the country in both population size and multiracial prevalence.

INTRODUCTION

In 2000, the Census Bureau allowed multi-racial respondents to identify themselves as such, enabling them to select more than one racial category. This has amplified the opportunities for further research on race.

The number of multiracial persons in the United States amounts to 2.4% of the total population, roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts. Within the different race groups, this prevalence varies considerably. Exhibit 1 is a table showing what percentage of the U.S. population in each racial group is monoracial or multiracial. For this analysis, we define racial groups as all those who selected that race alone or in combination with other races.

The percent of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders that identify themselves as multiracial, for example, is 54.4%. The same number is 39.9% for American Indians and Alaska Natives and 13.9% for Asians. Blacks and whites show a lower multiracial prevalence with 4.8% and 2.5%, respectively.

Among whites, 97.5% identify themselves only as white. Similarly, 95.2% of blacks identify themselves as strictly monoracial. As expected, the number of monoracial respondents is relatively lower across all other race groups with the exception of the Other category, which is largely comprised of Latinos…

Read the entire report here.

DNA Is Only One Way to Spell Identity

The Washington Post
2006-01-01

W. Ralph Eubanks

Every year,” I once overheard my father say jokingly to a friend, “thousands of Negroes disappear.” I remember my 8-year-old imagination going into overdrive, picturing people zapped from their homes in the middle of the night. It was only as I grew older that I realized that the people my father was talking about were choosing to disappear, running away from their families, not being taken from them. They were light-skinned blacks who could move into the white world undetected, denying their blackness and the exclusion they suffered in a white-dominated America.

I’ve been thinking of my father’s joke a lot recently. It came back to me last month when scientists reported the discovery of a genetic mutation that led to the first appearance of white skin in humans. Reading about it, I wondered how it is that a minor mutation—just one letter of DNA code out of 3.1 billion letters in the human genome—is so highly prized that it has led scores of people to turn their backs on their families and has served to divide people for generations. Discovery of this mutation, combined with recent findings that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical, has reinforced my belief that race is almost entirely a social demarcation, not a biological one…

…Although my ethnic identity is strongly African American, I’ve always had an awareness of my mixed racial heritage. I learned as a teenager that my maternal grandfather was white. To build a life with my grandmother, who was black, my grandfather, Jim Richardson, cast his whiteness aside and lived in Prestwick, Ala., an African American community near Mobile, from around 1920 through the 1950s. Even after my grandmother died in 1936, he continued to raise his children with a strong black identity and to live among the black people who accepted him as one of their own. During her short life, my grandmother, Edna Howell Richardson, accepted Jim completely as he was, faults and all. Perhaps that’s why she never even pointed out his whiteness to his children. It wasn’t until my grandfather was hurt in a logging accident and someone called him a white man in the presence of my mother, who was then 6 years old, that she realized he wasn’t black…

Read the entire article here.

In the Eye of the Beholder: Observed Race and Observer Characteristics

PSC Research Report
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michgan
Report No. 02-522
August 2002
36 pages

David R. Harris, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Deputy Provost and Vice Provost for Social Sciences
Cornell University

Over the past decade there has been intense debate about racial categories, but surprisingly little discussion of racial categorization. Specifically, there has been little attention devoted to if, and how, characteristics of observers affect observed race. This is troubling because racial classification data are the foundation upon which scholarly studies of race, and policy initiatives to fight discrimination. In this paper I present findings from a web-based survey that was designed to address gaps in our understanding of racial categorization. As part of the Study of Observed Race, 1,672 college freshmen were presented with photographs of individuals, and asked to identify each person’s race. Results indicate that observers’ race, sex, and familiarity with racial groups each influence how they classify by race, and that there are important interactions between observers’ characteristics. I close by discussing the implications of my findings for the 2000 census.

On April 1, 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau did something that was both revolutionary and controversial. Rather than ask individuals to identify with a single racial group, the 2000 Census allowed people to identify with as many as six racial groups. Even casual observers of American racial classification realized that this was revolutionary, as it directly challenged the precedent that individuals identify with one, and only one, racial group. What was less obvious was just how controversial this change in racial classification procedures would be. When the race counts were released in early 2001, few were sure how to interpret these new data. Many wondered what it meant that people had identified with multiple racial groups? For others, there were very real concerns about how to use the data. Should those who identified with more than one racial group be reassigned to a single-race group? If so, how?

In order to make sense of the new census race data, it is imperative that one first understand that these data implicitly assume that the race people select for themselves, or that is selected for them by someone in their household, is the same race that would have been selected by any other observer in any other context. Previous work has challenged this assumption by arguing that self-identified race can vary by context (Harris and Sim 2002), and that self-identified and observer-identified race need not agree (Hahn, Mulinare, and Teutsch 1992; Harris and Sim 2000). In this paper I pursue a further challenge to the assumption of fixed racial classifications by examining if, and how, observed race varies by observer characteristics. If it is true that an individual’s race can be adequately described through self-reports, then observed race should not vary by observer. If observed race does vary by observer, and especially if it does so systematically, then there may be further reasons to question the census race counts.

This work is important for at least three reasons. First, it provides basic information about processes of racial classification. Second, the new census race question is part of a major change in how the federal government measures race. By 2003, all federal race data will be collected using the “one or more races” approach (Office of Management and Budget 1997). Furthermore, because organizations outside the federal government are also likely to adopt this new racial classification scheme, work that affects our understanding of the new census race data will have a broad impact. Third, because a central impetus for collecting race data is to enforce civil rights laws (Office of Management and Budget 1997), and much discrimination is based on observed race (e.g., racial profiling), it is imperative that we understand if, and how, race varies by observer. Failing to do so will limit our ability to effectively enforce civil rights laws…

Read the entire report here.

Chinese America and the Multiracial Family

Chinese American Forum
Special Edition (June 2004)
pages 15-19

Amy Klazkin

This week my husband and I sold our second car. We live in the city, and we don’t need two, so we listed the car on an internet forum and got lots of responses. The first and most enthusiastic was from a young woman named Meilin Gee. She said she would come over at 2:00 on Sunday to see the car and give it a test drive. Without even thinking about it, we had constructed a mental picture of what someone named Meilin Gee would look like, when, at two sharp, the doorbell rang. We opened the door and saw a young, attractive, intelligent, and friendly African American woman: Meilin Gee. She doesn’t look it, but her dad’s Chinese.

This is the changing face of America. Where I live, we use the Hawaiian term hapa for mixed-race people. When I walk down the street with my Chinese daughter, who does not look even a tiny bit like me, people in San Francisco usually assume that my husband is Asian and she is hapa. She attends the Chinese American International School, where a third of the kids are hapa. Contrary to the stereotype that only Chinese American women marry whites, about half of the biracial kids at her school have white moms and Chinese dads. Some mixed-race kids look Caucasian, others look Asian, others look mixed. But what all the children learned way back in preschool is that kids and parents don’t have to match visually. And that’s been a wonderful thing for my daughter, because it normalizes multiracial families and creates an environment of acceptance for difference within a family as well as within a community…

Read the entire article here.

Making Sense of New Census Classifications for Race

UCLA School of Public Health Magazine
June 2007
page 31

STARTING WITH THE 2000 CENSUS, the federal government revised how it collects data on race and ethnicity—respondents were allowed to identify themselves as a member of more than one category (which 7 million opted to do), whereas in prior censuses they were forced to choose one. The revision was made in recognition of the nation’s growing number of interracial couples, who in turn are producing children whose diverse lineage defies a single classification. But the change also creates potential nightmares for researchers and policymakers who rely on the data from these and other surveys to understand racial and ethnic disparities in health: When you consider all of the possible combinations, including “other,” there are now 63 multiple-race categories along with the six single-race categories.

Tommi Gaines, a UCLA School of Public Health doctoral student in biostatistics [Currently biostatistician at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine], is tackling the challenges arising from the new collection method. “There have been goals that have been set around understanding why differences exist between races and how we can develop policies to try to eliminate or reduce these differences,” Gaines notes. “If there are disparities found between multiracial populations and a single-race category, how do we accurately reflect what’s going on with the multiracial populations, which capture a broad range of people? It becomes harder to tease out the potential problems that are causing these health differences.”…

…“As long as there continue to be differences between races in regard to health conditions, we need to continue to collect and find ways to make sense of the data so that we better understand why these disparities exist.”

Read the entire article here.

Classification of Race and Ethnicity: Implications for Public Health

Annual Review of Public Health
Volume 24 (May 2003)
pages 83-110
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.publhealth.24.100901.140927

Vickie M. Mays, Professor of Psychology and Professor of Health Services
University of California, Los Angeles

Ninez A. Ponce, Associate Professor of Public Heath
University of California, Los Angeles

Donna L. Washington, M.D.
Department of Medicine, Veterans Affairs
Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System

Susan D. Cochran, Professor of Epidemiology
University of California, Los Angeles

Emerging methods in the measurement of race and ethnicity have important implications for the field of public health. Traditionally, information on race and/or ethnicity has been integral to our understanding of the health issues affecting the U.S. population. We review some of the complexities created by new classification approaches made possible by the inclusion of multiple-race assessment in the U.S. Census and large health surveys. We discuss the importance of these classification decisions in understanding racial/ethnic health and health care access disparities. The trend toward increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the United States will put further pressure on the public health industry to develop consistent and useful approaches to racial/ethnic classifications.

Read or purchase the article here.

Ties on the fringes of identity

Social Science Research
Volume 33, Issue 4 (December 2004)
Pages 702-723
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2003.10.002

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

I use data on part-American Indian children in the 1990 Census 5% PUMS to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. American Indians present an interesting case study because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by the data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family.

Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. Identity and thickness of ties
3. Hypotheses
4. Data and sample selection
5. Dependent variables
6. Focal independent variables
7. Control variables
8. Drawbacks to using census data to study identity
9. Results
10. Discussion
11. Conclusion
Appendix A. Descriptive statistics for entire sample
References

Read or purchase the article here.

Where Black-White Couples Live

Urban Geography
Volume 32, Number 1 (2011-01-01 through 2011-02-14)
pages 1-22
DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.1.1

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Steven Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

This study analyzes where households headed by Black-White, mixed-race couples live in cities. Using 2000 confidential U.S. Census data, we investigate whether Black-White households in 12 large U.S. metropolitan areas are more likely to be found in racially diverse neighborhoods than households headed by White or Black couples. Map analysis shows that concentrations of Black-White headed households are most often found in moderately diverse White neighborhoods. This relationship, however, varies by metropolitan context. Controlling for socioeconomic conditions reveals that Black-White couples are drawn to diversity no matter which racial group forms the neighborhood majority. In contrast, neighborhood racial diversity matters for households headed by Black couples only when they enter spaces containing many Whites or Asians; it matters for households headed by White couples only when they enter neighborhoods with a large number of Blacks or Latinos.

Read or purchase the article here.  Also, see Mixed Metro US.

The Law of the Census: How to Count, What to Count, Whom to Count, and Where to Count Them

Cardozo Law Review
Volume 32, Number 3 (2011)
pages 756-791

Nathaniel Persily, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science
Columbia Law School

The 2010 Census, like its predecessors, represented a momentous logistical and technological undertaking with far reaching consequences for political representation and allocation of public resources. It also promised to spawn a series of legal controversies over how to count people, what information the government should gather, which individuals truly “count” for purposes of the census, and where they should be counted. This Article explores these present and past controversies surrounding the census. The issues of “sampling” and “statistical adjustment” pervaded much of the legal commentary and case law concerning the census for the past twenty years. The undercount will continue to be a common theme, although given new found ideological opposition to filling out the census form, it is unclear at this stage who is less likely to be counted. The 2010 Census raises new issues of relevance to redistricting claims under the Voting Rights Act, concerning the counting and distribution of data on both the non-citizen and prisoner population. At the same time, recent developments in voting rights law, which place a premium on the size of a minority community, have raised the legal stakes for this census. Despite the technical nature of many census related controversies, one’s position on how, what, whom, and where to count cannot be separated from the larger questions of how easy or difficult it should be for plaintiffs to bring and win civil rights claims, particularly with respect to the redistricting process.

The Framers of the American Constitution viewed the decennial census as providing a certain rhythm to American politics. Every ten years a state’s tax burdens and representation in the House of Representatives would change to reflect its share of the national population as revealed in the “actual enumeration,” the manner of which Congress “shall by law direct.” Much has changed since the first census, but the rhythm still remains. Perhaps unintended and unimagined by the Framers, however, is the rhythmic and ritualistic dance to the courtroom every ten years to argue over the census numbers themselves and the methods used to construct apportionment totals.

Just as its rhythm has remained true to the Framers’ intent, so too the controversies surrounding the census have remained linked to the unique place of the census in the constitutional design. In the Constitution itself, the census is “about” representation, money, and race, so we should not be surprised to learn that courtroom controversies over the census have persisted with respect to these three themes. By tying both representation in the House and taxation to the census, the Constitution provided cross-incentives and an internal political check that might guard against manipulation of the census to overrepresent a state’s population. Today, dickering over the census numbers represents a critical stage in arguments states and localities make for more representation (concerning either apportionment among states of seats in the House of Representatives or within states with respect to redistricting) or for more money (given that funding for many federal and state programs is tied to the census). In addition, just as the first census necessarily had to categorize the population according to race in order to determine which people were “Indians not taxed” or “other persons” subject to the three-fifths rule, so too today the racial categories of the census and the racial implications of census counts become fodder for litigation over representation and funding.

This Article examines the law of the census: specifically, how to count, what to count, whom to count, and where to count them. For the most part this Article draws on my experience and research concerning the use of census data in the redistricting process; however, many of the topics discussed apply to federal funding decisions as well. The Article begins by describing the most recent legal controversies involving census methods, particularly imputation and statistical adjustment. When one thinks of the “law of the census,” these high-profile disputes probably come first to mind. In cases that have arrived at the Supreme Court at the beginning of each of the last three census cycles, undercounted cities and states have argued that census methods were deficient in that the procedures missed some people, double-counted others, or counted people that did not exist.

Second, this Article explores the legal implications of the decisions concerning what to include on the census form, paying particular attention to the topics of race and citizenship. For the second time, the 2010 Census allows respondents to check off more than one race, raising a host of interesting questions concerning the legal implications of alternative methods for categorizing the multiracial population. More significantly for the 2010 Census, the long form, which was previously asked of one sixth of the population, has been replaced by the yearly American Community Survey (ACS), distributed to 2.5% of households. The ACS is the only source for citizenship data from the census, raising questions about the reliability of citizenship estimates for purposes of VRA litigation.

Finally, this Article examines the related issues of who should be included in the census and where they should be counted. The section deals with special populations such as soldiers and other Americans living abroad, college students, the homeless, and prisoners. Prisoners, in particular, present an important case, as some have argued that the wholesale involuntary transfer of convicted criminals away from their communities toward more rural and often whiter areas has allowed for the padding of legislative districts in one part of a state at the expense of districts in other parts of a state. For the first time in 2011, the census will make data available in time for redistricting about the number of prisoners in each census block. Jurisdictions will now be able to subtract out prisoners from the census redistricting data file. Some states have even gone further and have reallocated prisoners to their pre-incarceration address for purposes of redistricting…

…The race question on the 2000 Census was the first to allow respondents to check off more than one race. In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued “Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity,” a directive that changed the way federal agencies, including the Census Bureau, would categorize people according to race. By moving to a format that allowed respondents to check off any and all of the six principal racial groups on the census, the form effectively created one hundred and twenty six possible combinations of racial and ethnic categories. Although many social scientists worried about the policy implications at the time the OMB and the Census made these decisions, the actual political and legal effects of this change have been minimal. Even so, with each census, the share of the population identifying with more than one racial group will undoubtedly increase. At some point, the confusion caused by the data format, let alone the actual politics of multiracial identity, will present real political and legal challenges.

The first problem to recognize is a logistical one: How does one use the data with its 126 combinations in the process of redistricting? The short answer is that it is not easy unless one reaggregates the data into some more usable format. The OMB therefore promulgated a directive to do just that in the context of civil rights enforcement. The OMB issued Bulletin No. 00-02, which provides the following rules of aggregation:

“Federal agencies will use the following rules to allocate multiple race responses for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement.

• Responses in the five single race categories are not allocated.
• Responses that combine one minority race and white are allocated to the minority race.
• Response that include two or more minority races are allocated as follows:
  • If the enforcement action is in response to a complaint, allocate to the race that the complainant alleges the discrimination was based on.
  • If the enforcement action requires assessing disparate impact or discriminatory patterns, analyze the patterns based on alternative allocations to each of the minority groups.”

The OMB approach maximizes the numbers for racial minority groups by recategorizing some multiracial respondents as some category other than white. Critics of the OMB guidelines have therefore described them as a modern version of the “One Drop Rule”—the Jim Crow-era law where one drop of black blood made someone black. Defenders, however, would point out that the reaggregation rules merely create a presumption for purposes of civil rights enforcement. That presumption places the data in the light most favorable for the civil rights plaintiff (usually non-white). The reaggregation rules, while smacking of the same racial essentialism that often follows from any categorization scheme, simply try to provide rules of thumb that prevent such plaintiffs from being disadvantaged by the new census format…

Read the entire article here.