Navigating Racial Boundaries: The One-Drop Rule and Mixed-Race Jamaicans in South Florida

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Dissertations, History, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-01 05:08Z by Steven

Navigating Racial Boundaries: The One-Drop Rule and Mixed-Race Jamaicans in South Florida

Florida International University
2010
343 pages

Sharon E. Placide

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparitive Sociology

Like many West Indians, mixed-race Jamaican immigrants enter the United States with fluid notions about race and racial identifications that reflect socio-political events in their home country and that conflict with the more rigid constructions of race they encounter in the U.S. This dissertation explores the experiences of racially mixed Jamaicans in South Florida and the impact of those experiences on their racial self-characterizations through the boundary-work theoretical framework. Specifically, the study examines the impact of participants’ exposure to the one-drop rule in the U.S., by which racial identification has been historically determined by the existence or non-existence of black forebears. Employing qualitative data collected through both focus group and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes mixed-race Jamaicans’ encounters in the U.S. with racial boundaries, and the boundary-work that reinforces them, as well their response to these encounters. Through their stories, the dissertation examines participants’ efforts to navigate racial boundaries through choices of various racial identifications. Further, it discusses the ways in which structural forces and individual agency have interacted in the formation of these identifications. The study finds that in spite of participants’ expressed preference for non-racialism, and despite their objections to rigid racial categories, in seeking to carve out alternative identities, they are participating in the boundary-making of which they are so critical.

Table of Contents

  • I. INTRODUCTION
    • Theoretical Framework
    • Rationale for Population and Location of Study
    • Research Methodology and Data Analysis
    • Defining Terms
    • Challenges and Limitations
    • Chapter Descriptions
  • II. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A RACIAL DICHOTOMY IN THE U.S
    • Race as a Social Construction
    • Section 1 Race and Mixed-Race During Slavery: The Social Construction of the One-Drop Rule
      • The Construction of Race During Slavery
      • Miscegenation and the Emergence of the One-Drop Rule
    • Section 2 The Rise and Crystallization of Bright Boundaries
      • Contesting Racial Boundaries: Abolitionists, Free Negroes and Slaves Oppose Slavery
      • White Response: Entrenchment of Racist Ideology
      • Emancipation and Reconstruction Blur Boundaries
      • Southern Whites Defend their Status, Strengthening Racial Divides
      • Crystallization of the Bright Boundary: The One-Drop Rule
      • Mulattoes, Blacks, and Boundary-Work
      • Science Supports the One-Drop Rule
    • Section 3 Blurring Racial Boundaries
      • The Civil Rights Movement and its Impact
      • The Multi-Racial Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
      • Why the One-Drop Rule Persists
      • Chapter Conclusion
  • III. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A COLOR HIERARCHY IN JAMAICA
    • Clarification of Terms: Color and Race
    • Section 1 Construction of Bright Boundaries: Formation of a Tripartite Color Hierarchy During Slavery (1655 to 1834)
      • African Slavery and the Beginnings of Race Ideology
      • The Impact of Demography
      • Miscegenation, Free Browns, and the Status Mixed Progeny (Slave and Free)
      • Free Browns Become Buffer
    • Section 2 Boundary Blurring: Color and Social Status from Abolition to the Independence (1834 to 1962)
      • Loss of Labor and Decline of the White Planting Class
      • Boundary-Blurring Continues: Rise of the Brown Class And Black Social Mobility
      • Complicating the Color Hierarchy: East Indians, Chinese, “Syrian” Immigrants
      • Creole Multiracialism Versus Black Nationalism
      • Persistence of a Color Hierarchy
    • Section 3 Boundary-Shifting: Race, Color and Social Status after Independence (1962 to present)
      • Boundary-Blurring: Race, Color, and Social Location
      • Color as Symbolic and Social Boundary
      • Chapter Conclusion
  • IV. OUT OF MANY, ONE PEOPLE: RACE AND COLOR IN JAMAICA
    • Race is Not Important
    • Intersectionality: Class Plus Race
    • Color Draws Boundaries in Jamaica
    • Chapter Conclusion
  • V. ENCOUNTERING BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY-WORK IN THE U.S
    • Race Draws Bright Boundaries in the U.S.: The Centrality of Race Boundary Maintenance: Two Worlds
    • South Florida: Three Worlds?
    • Theoretical Discussion
    • Chapter Conclusion
  • VI. NAVIGATING RACIAL BOUNDARIES IN THE U.S.
    • I am Jamaican – Ethnic (Post-Racial) Identification
    • Racial Identification Choices
    • Factors Affecting Jamaicans’ Immigrants Racial Identifications
    • Choice or No Choice? The Impact of Structure on Agency and Vice Versa
    • Mixed-Race Jamaicans Doing Boundary-Work
    • Chapter Conclusion
  • VII. CONCLUSION
    • Findings
    • Limitations and Directions for Future Research
    • REFERENCES
    • APPENDICES
    • VITA

Read the entire dissertation here.

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SOC 139C. Betwixt and Between: Multiracial Identity in the United States

Posted in Course Offerings, New Media, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-01 02:36Z by Steven

SOC 139C. Betwixt and Between: Multiracial Identity in the United States

University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Note from Steven F. Riley [I believe this is the longest actively running university course on multiracial identity in the United States.]

An examination of the factors that have influenced the social location of racially mixed individuals of African and European descent in the United States, in order to provide a context for understanding the complexities surrounding the newly emerging multiracial conciousness.

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Thinking outside the box: Racial self-identification choice among mixed heritage adolescents

Posted in Dissertations, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2010-08-31 20:08Z by Steven

Thinking outside the box: Racial self-identification choice among mixed heritage adolescents

University of Pennsylvania
2009
234 pages
ISBN: 9781109236088

Michele Munoz-Miller

A Dissertation in Education Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to explore how and why adolescents of mixed racial heritage racially self-identify the way they do. Identification choice was defined using an adult-based identity typology (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 2001): (a) consistently monoracial (singular), (b) consistently multiracial (border), or (c) inconsistent (protean). Three sub-groups of multiracial adolescents were analyzed separately, based on their self-reported racial parentage: non-Blacks, Black/non-American Indians, and Black/American Indians. Using an identity-focused cultural ecological model (Spencer, 2006), adolescents’ perceptions of their risks and protective factors (sociodemographics), as well as their beliefs about the oppression of non-Black minorities in the United States, were investigated in terms of how well (and in what combination) they predicted self-identification choice, both across race question formats and over time.

Findings suggested that there were different personal and contextual factors implicated in self-identification choice for each sub-group of adolescents. For non-Blacks, generational proximity to racial mixture, the percentage of Blacks in one’s neighborhood, and attitudes about racial oppression in the United States were strong predictors of racial self-identification choice. Among Black/non-American Indians, these characteristics were joined by self-perceived skin tone, academic achievement level, and age in their predictive effects. Among Black/American Indians, age, self-perceived skin tone, and attitudes about racial oppression exhibited strong main effects. There was an additional interaction effect found within this group between neighborhood diversity, skin tone, and the perception of the oppression of non- black minorities in the U.S.

This work suggests that self-identification choice is linked to adolescents’ perceptions of their risks and protective factors as well as their attitudes regarding the racial climate of the United States. Providing additional nuance to the literature are the differences found across racial parentage groups. By engaging a phenomenologically focused cultural ecological framework, both self-appraisal and reactive coping processes are revealed as central to racial identity development for this understudied population. Representing a mere slice of a broader research agenda, this project contributes a unique and important perspective to the emergent body of research on the rapidly growing population of multiracial Americans.

Table of Contents

  • List of Tables viii
  • List of Figures x
  • Chapters
    • I. Introduction
      • Racial self-identification
      • Complications of race research
      • Race versus ethnicity
      • Methodological qualifications of the present study
    • II. Literature review
      • The United States multiracial population
      • Multiracial identity research
      • Methodology: How multiracial individuals racially self-identify
      • Process: Why multiracial individuals racially self-identify the way they do
      • Identity Typology
      • Factors that influence racial self-identification choice
      • The special case of Black/American Indians
      • Symbolic ethnicity 82
      • Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
      • The Present Study
        • Component 1: Net vulnerability level
        • Component 2/3: Primary reactive coping processes
        • Component 3: Reactive coping response
      • Strengths of the present study
    • III. Method
      • Study background
      • Procedure
      • Sample
    • IV. Results
      • Preliminary Analyses
      • Research questions and hypothesis testing
    • V. Discussion
      • Overview of findings
      • Population breakdowns
      • Incidence and proportion of identity types
      • Predictive effects of independent variables
        • Component 1: Net vulnerability variables
        • Component 2/3: Primary reactive coping process variable
      • Limitations of the study
      • Implications for future research
      • Conclusion
  • References

List of Tables

  1. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Age, gender, academic achievement, and city
  2. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Generational proximity to racial mixture
  3. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Skin tone
  4. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Neighborhood diversity
  5. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Racial combination group
  6. Rotated factor pattern for entire sample
  7. Oppression perception mean scores
  8. Multiracial populations by question format
  9. Incidence and proportion of identity types across all datasets and racial combinations
  10. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Format variability
  11. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Format variability
  12. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Format variability
  13. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Format variability
  14. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Format variability
  15. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Format variability
  16. Log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Temporal variability
  17. Log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Temporal variability
  18. Log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Temporal variability
  19. Summary of findings for non-Blacks across variability types
  20. Summary of findings for Black/non-American Indians across variability types
  21. Summary of findings for Black/American Indians across variability types

List of Figures

  1. Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
  2. Engaged components of PVEST

Purchase the dissertation here.

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The physical and mental health of multiracial adolescents in the United States

Posted in Dissertations, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Identity Development/Psychology, United States on 2010-08-31 19:13Z by Steven

The physical and mental health of multiracial adolescents in the United States

University of Pennsylvania
2007
101 pages
ISBN: 9780549117445

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

A dissertation in Demographic Presented to Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in partial fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Healthy People 2010 objectives cite the need to eliminate racial disparities in health by the year 2050. However, with increases in intermarriage and migration, a growing number of individuals are self-identifying with more than one race. It is unclear whether they constitute a growing, at-risk population that policy interventions currently overlook. This analysis evaluates the physical and mental health status of multiracial adolescents, particularly in comparison to single race groups. The data are from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of approximately 20,000 youth ages 12-18 interviewed in 1995 and re-interviewed 6 years later. The main outcome measures for physical health include weight status (Body Mass Index) and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). For mental health, the measures include depression (CES-D) and self-esteem (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale). Sexual debut was also examined. Generalized Estimating Equations are used for all analyses using logistic regression and Generalized Linear Mixed Models are used for continuous dependent variables to correct for the Add Health study design. Overall, findings from this dissertation demonstrate that socioeconomic privilege does not necessarily confer positive physical and/or mental health. Interracial families have a mid- to high-socioeconomic profile; yet Asian-White multiracials exhibit a poor mental health profile and Black-White multiracials exhibit the highest risk of having STDs as adults. Moreover, most multiracial subgroups resemble their single-race minority counterparts on most outcomes considered. In terms of physical health, Asian-White and Black-White mutltiracials are not at a disproportionately high risk of being obese as young adults, irrespective of how races are categorized. This thesis has uncovered several mediated mechanisms for these patterns–yet this diverse area of research on multiracials is still in infancy. The role of peer networks, culture, and school contexts in shaping the physical and mental health of multiracials are all interesting avenues for a future researcher to pursue.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Abstract
  • List of Tables
  • Chapter 1: Depression, Self-esteem, and Multiracial Adolescents: The role of Socioeconomic Status and Family Structure
  • Chapter 2: Multiracials and Sexual Debut: Explanations and Consequences
  • Chapter 3: The Weight Status of Multiracials in the U.S.: Disparities and Issues of Racial Classification
  • Appendices
  • References
  • Purchase the dissertation here.

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    Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

    Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2010-08-30 22:00Z by Steven

    Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

    Duke University Press
    August 2010
    264 pages
    21 illustrations
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4591-6
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4609-8

    Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies
    Tufts University

    Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African Diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester and Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora and a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slave-holder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the Khoi San woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representations of slavery, display, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of the black and white silhouettes created by Kara Walker and the subtexts of the critiques leveled against the silhouettes and the artist.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom
    • 1. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Reading the “Days That Were Pages of Hysteria”
    • 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation
    • 3. Isaac Julien’s The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life
    • 4. Kara Walker’s Monstrous Intimacies
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index
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    Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

    Posted in Books, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Novels, Passing, United States, Women on 2010-08-30 22:00Z by Steven

    Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

    Beacon Press
    Published in 1929
    408 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 978-080700919-2
    Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches

    Jessie Redmon Fauset

    Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

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    The Tapestry of Walter White’s Contradictions [Book Review]

    Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2010-08-30 21:11Z by Steven

    The Tapestry of Walter White’s Contradictions [Book Review]

    Sewanee Review
    Volume 118, Number 3, Summer 2010
    pages lxxxii-lxxxiv
    E-ISSN: 1934-421X
    Print ISSN: 0037-3052

    Sanford Pinsker, Emeritus Professor of English
    Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

    Tom Dyja. “Walter White: The Dilemma of Black identity in America”.  The Library of African American Biography.  Lanham, Maryland: Ivan R. Dee Publishsers, 2008.  224 pp.. (hardcover).  ISBN1-56663-766-X / 978-1-56663-766-4.

    In the early stages of his campaign for the presidency, many blacks regarded Barack Obama as too “white”; later many whites regarded him as too “black.” To his credit the biracial Obama presented himself as a mainstream American—and, more than that, as an exemplar of the postracial age. He did not play the race card although others, alas, did. No doubt there are still many folks, most of them over sixty, who are as ignorant, as mean-spirited, and as prejudiced as were their forefathers. Racial identity, always complicated, always contentious, is a current that alternates between how people are defined by others and how they define themselves.

    The now nearly forgotten Walter White (1893–1955) belongs to an earlier time when lynching was commonplace in the Jim Crow South, and when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People spent much of its time trying to get federal antilynching laws passed. Because White was fair-skinned—and had blond hair and blue eyes to boot—he could not only “pass” for white, but also play the trickster in the bargain: White would amble into a small southern town, posing as an insurance salesman (which he had, in fact, been for the black-owned Standard Life Insurance Company) and engage the locals in conversation about a recent local lynching. For their part the rednecks were happy to oblige, often bragging about what had occurred in bloodcurdling…

    Read or purchase the review here.

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    Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America

    Posted in Biography, Books, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2010-08-30 19:49Z by Steven

    Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America

    Ivan R. Dee
    October 2008
    224 pages
    Electronic ISBN: 1-56663-815-1 / 978-1-56663-815-9
    Cloth ISBN: 1-56663-766-X / 978-1-56663-766-4
    Paper ISBN: 1-56663-865-8 / 978-1-56663-865-4

    Thomas Dyja

    The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation’s most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education, and initiated the campaign demanding that Hollywood give better roles to black actors. Driven by ambitions for himself and his people, he offered his entire life to the advancement of civil rights in America.

    Table of Contents

    • A World of His Own
    • The Life Insurance Temperament
    • Undercover Against Lynching
    • At the Center of the Harlem Renaissance
    • Conflict, Control, and the Making of Mr. NAACP
    • Fighting on All Fronts
    • “I am white and I am black”
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    Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective

    Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom, United States on 2010-08-28 19:50Z by Steven

    Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective

    Annual Review of Sociology
    August 2009
    Volume 35
    pages 129-146
    DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134657
    First published online as a Review in Advance on 2009-04-02

    Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
    Princeton University

    Christina A. Sue, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    University of Colorado, Boulder

    In this article, we examine a large, interdisciplinary, and somewhat scattered literature, all of which falls under the umbrella term race mixture. We highlight important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related, but separate, social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. In doing so, we stress a social constructivist approach to race mixture with a focus on boundary crossing. Finally, we also demonstrate how ideologies and practices of race mixture play out quite differently in contexts outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. Race-mixture ideologies and practices in Latin America have been used to maintain racial inequality in the region, thus challenging recent arguments by U.S. scholars that greater racial mixture leads to a decline in racism, discrimination, and inequality.

    INTRODUCTION

    We define race mixture as intimate social interaction across racial boundaries, a phenomenon that has generally been analyzed under the rubric of intermarriage or miscegenation. A sociology of race mixture also involves the racial categorization, identity, politics, and social movements surrounding the progeny of race mixture, much of which falls under the subject of multiracialism. A more comprehensive analysis of race mixture also includes an examination of the national ideologies related to the idea of race mixture and the putative consequences that race mixture will destabilize and eventually erase racial boundaries. These topics are often studied as separate processes, but in this article we seek to bring some unity to an area in which these distinct areas of research overlap.

    Sociologists often focus on intermarriage, which has been classically seen as indicating a final stage in the assimilation of racial and ethnic groups in that it presumably represents deep erosion of social boundaries (MM Gordon 1964, Lieberson & Waters 1988, Park 1950). Relatedly, multiracialism has become a rapidly growing topic and refers to the children of parents who self-identify in separate racial categories or to individuals who self-identify as multiracial. Some sociological attention has also been paid to miscegenation, which we define as illegitimate or informal sexual unions, although the term has often been used more broadly to include intermarriage as well. Historically, miscegenation involved highly unequal or even forced relationships; thus they were of a nearly opposite character to those involving intermarriage. Anti-miscegenation laws were able to prevent intermarriage in the United States for 300 years, but they generally were unsuccessful in preventing informal black-white sexual unions and the consequent births that followed (Davis 1991, Sollors 2000). Such unions would merely evade the strict racial boundaries of the United States but did little to challenge or erode them and therefore represent a very different social phenomenon than intermarriage.

    Informal sexual unions, like intermarriages, produced so-called mixed-race individuals, who themselves have more recently become subjects of much sociological research. Analysts have examined different paths the progeny of these interracial unions have attempted to take or successfully taken; the paths range from willingly or unwillingly accepting placement in their socially assigned category, seeking a particular status without contesting the boundaries themselves, individually skirting the boundaries, or collectively redefining them (Daniel 2002, Nakashima 1992). Scholarly work has also been done on the placement of these mixed-race individuals in the social structure (Davis 1991, Degler 1971, Mörner 1967, Telles 2004).

    Before proceeding, we would like to make an important note regarding terminology used in this paper. The term race mixture implies that one is combining two or more substances with distinct and generally fixed properties. In regard to race, this may seem to be especially essentialistic and biological. The very idea of race mixture or multiracialism is premised on the idea that discrete (or even pure) races exist (Goldberg 1997, Nobles 2002). On the other hand, the sociological study of race mixture refers to behaviors that involve crossing racial boundaries (Bost 2003). Our interpretation is socially constructivist and assumes that there is no biological or essentialist basis for race, but rather, race is a concept involving perceptions of reality. Race is of sociological importance because humans are categorized by race, hierarchized according to these categories, and treated accordingly. As a result, humans often create racial boundaries as a form of social closure and erect obstacles to interaction across these boundaries. At other times, they seek to diminish or otherwise change them.We are interested in how race mixture may construct or reconstruct racial boundaries. Although we recognize the conceptual problems implicit in the term race mixture, for lack of a better term and to be consistent with the literature, we continue to use it, along with related terms such as multiracialism. The concept of ethnicity is related to and sometimes overlaps with the concept of race, but the distinctions are often unclear, context-specific, and highly debatable (Cornell & Hartman 2006, Jenkins 1997, Wimmer 2008). Therefore, the extent to which our discussion is applicable to ethnic as well as race mixture would depend on how one distinguishes race from ethnicity…

    Read the entire article here.

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    Crossing Race and Nationality: The Racial Formation of Asian Americans 1852-1965

    Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-08-28 17:44Z by Steven

    Crossing Race and Nationality: The Racial Formation of Asian Americans 1852-1965

    Monthly Review
    December 2005

    Bob Wing

    Bob Wing was part of the first wave of Asian-American activists in the late 1960s. He was founding editor of the antiwar newspaper, War Times,and of the racial justice magazine, ColorLines, and is one of the national leaders of United for Peace and Justice, a nationwide antiwar coalition of more than 1,200 organizations. This article was edited and slightly updated from a longer essay written in 1995.

    The U.S. immigration reform of 1965 produced a tremendous influx of immigrants and refugees from Asia and Latin America that has dramatically altered U.S. race relations. Latinos now outnumber African Americans. It is clearer than ever that race relations in the United States are not limited to the central black/white axis. In fact this has always been true: Indian wars were central to the history of this country since its origins and race relations in the West have always centered on the interactions between whites and natives, Mexicans, and Asians. The “new thinking” about race relations as multipolar is overdue.

    However, one cannot simply replace the black/white model with one that merely adds other groups. The reason is that other groups of color have faced discrimination that is quite different both in form and content than that which has characterized black/white relations. The history of many peoples and regions, as well as distinct issues of nationality oppression—U.S. settler colonialism, Indian wars, U.S. foreign relations and foreign policy, immigration, citizenship, the U.S.-Mexico War, language, reservations, treaties, sovereignty issues, etc.—must be analyzed and woven into a considerably more complicated new framework.

    In this light, Asian-American history is important because it was precedent-setting in the racialization of nationality and the incorporation of nationality into U.S. race relations. The racial formation of Asian Americans was a key moment in defining the color line among immigrants, extending whiteness to European immigrants, and targeting non-white immigrants for racial oppression. Thus nativism was largely overshadowed by white nativism, and it became an important new form of racism…

    …In recent years it has become a progressive mantra that racial categories are “socially constructed,” but it is often forgotten that they only achieve full structural and systemic power when they are legally defined and enforced by state power. In what became the United States, the plethora of both European and African nationalities very early on was subsumed by a legally defined and state sanctioned system of racial categories.

    In this unprecedented new system, famously hostile European nationalities (e.g., English, Irish, Germans, and French) were united as whites, and the numerous African nationalities, together with all those who seemed to exhibit the slightest perceptible trace of African ancestry, were categorized as Negro, thus with “no rights that the white man is bound to respect.” This hypodescent (or “one drop”) rule, firmly codified in statute by 1705, was meant to provide crystal clarity to the social status of the numerous racially mixed offspring sired by white planters. This was crucial since unlike other slave societies, the Southern planters depended primarily upon slave reproduction (rather than the African slave trade) to fill its slave supply and were also bound and determined to prevent a substantial free group of mulattos to blur the color line…

    Read the entire article here.

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